Middlefocus

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey Glad I stayed with it. **** I almost gave up on this book as initially it moved too slowly for me but I'm glad that I stayed with it and almost wish it hadn't finished. The story unfolds in 15th century Oakham, a village backwater in Somerset. Its central character is a priest, John Reve who narrates the story in reverse chronological order about a wealthy parishioner, Thomas Newman, who has been swept away to his death in a nearby river. I wondered about the unusual chronological device and the reason for it becomes clear in the final chapter. I found myself going back to the beginning to try to ascertain the ending! Much of the story takes place in the village church and particularly in the new confessional booth that has been constructed there. Parishioners confess litanies of sins in the run up to Lent but will anyone confess to the killing of Newman? It becomes clear that the priest John Reve has a secret of his own, something he d...

Could not see at first Pictured where others pointed Lone tiger resting. - Ranthambore National Park, India 

Old church has been bought Now a different faith prays there. Same window, new light.

What a difference a year makes. There you go! It's been nearly a year since the last post and the intervening period has marked the end of the freelance role and launches a new chapter in which I'm constantly thinking of ways to repurpose this blog.  I've been  here before  of course with my old improvingwithage blogspot but this time the intention is to carry on with a new (middle) focus on things that catch the senior eye - old dog, new tricks comes to mind or maybe that old Yiddish expression - Too soon old, too late smart! Retirement has been gentle so far and has offered plenty of scope for reflection. Maybe some of that thinking and new/old insights will find their way into this blog, who knows? The past year has been a time of letting some things go, holding on to others and finding new things to seize upon. A friend once remarked that retirement is so good that he wished he'd done it when he left school!  Don't know about that but I can honestl...

If you are anything like me when you use social media apps like Facebook and Twitter then you know how time somehow slips by without you realising it.  On some social media, I manage different accounts within the same platform so the problem simply gets bigger. Rather than cut out social browsing and interaction completely I decided instead to take a different approach.  I grouped the various apps into a folder on my iPad and iPhone - I'm sure this is possible to do on Android devices as well.  This hides them to an extent which means that I have to go look for the folder among other groups.  I decided also, at least for the time being, to add the clock app in the folder as well.  That means that it is readily available for setting the timer to limit how long I want to spend browsing.  An advantage is that closing the Facebook app for example brings you back to the folder where others such as LinkedIn and Instagram can be readily accessed. Then when ...

You know that moment? You see something and straightaway it reminds you of something else. There I was in a little coffee shop when I spotted a clever and so simple means of showing what the day's food offerings were.  The menu was presented on a large roll of brown wrapping paper attached to one of the walls making it easily visible and yet well out of the way.  All that's needed each time the menu changes is for someone to tear off the previous choices; pull down a clean portion and add the new.    Clever and so simple. And that reminded me of a proponent of Simplicity - Dr Edward de Bono - who in 1998 provided us a book of the same name.  He gave us many other ways to think of course, including his ground-breaking Six Thinking Hats.  In a post some years back on decision-making I mentioned his PMI technique which you might like to come back to here . Why did it remind me of Dr de Bono? I had the great good fortune to be present at one of hi...

A quiet time to doodle with the Apple Pencil and the GoodNotes app brought this result. I'm happy with that; not only with the ease of writing, pen and paper styles but also the export facility. It took only a few moments to paste the finished map into this blog post.

For the past while when reading books I've been making notes and sometimes even marking the pages. The first time I did this apart from texts studied at school was on the advice of an author who said it was his habit and since I was reading his book at the time thought there was a good place to start. Reading apps on my tablet device make mark-up very straightforward and because the highlighting is easy to remove doesn't leave the physical damage that marginal notes and underlines do. From time to time I revisit books and its nice to come across hand written notecards drawing attention to interesting anecdotes or quotes.  That happened earlier today when I came across an interesting observation by acting veteran, June Brown who plays Dot Cotton in the BBC's Eastenders. June recalls in her autobiography, Before the year Dot,  advice given on acting by Sir Laurence Olivier at the New Vic. The advice which she says that she has never forgotten was:  "We must be car...