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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Belgium

On Steve Harley

Steve Harley

 

"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.

Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.

His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:

 

On Exercise

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While most people start running for the physical benefits of the sport, it can also be hugely beneficial for your mental health. A study on 14,000 people undertaken by Asics(opens in new tab) during the pandemic has found that 82% of UK runners say running helps to clear their mind, and 78% feel more sane and in control as a result of running.

On Modern Art

Transporting the Sphinxes

 

To Bozar in Brussels in 2016 for the final days of the Facing the Future exhibition, which shed light on about 180 works created between 1945 and 1968 by artists from Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the tensions between Eastern and Western Europe in the years following the Second World War, artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain experimented in similar ways: from media art to action painting, conceptual art and sound art.  

See also:

 

On Waterloo

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Living, as I have done for most of the past 17 years, just 5km or so from the battlefields of Waterloo, means that I have visited the site often.

Only recently, however, following last year's commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the battle, and a visit in March 2016 to the excellent new visitor centre, did its full ongoing significance become clearer to me, not least the suffering of the wounded and dead, many of whose final resting places have never been discovered...RIP all who fought there.

See also:

On Shakespeare
Shakespeare
Halcyon In Kal… 13 May 2018

 

To The Globe to visit the exhibition and then watch Taming of the Shrew as a groundling. Great fun.

However, my relationship with the Bard's works has always been a complicated one. Over time, I will try to develop some of my thoughts, inspirations and reservations here.

For now, some others' more interesting observations:

  • According to Harold Bloom, Shakespeare invented modern humanity. If this seems to go too far, he at least captured human complexity with greater inventive skill than any English writer before him, and possibly after.

On Dawn

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If you've ever wondered why bird species sing in a particular order as the sun rises, rhe UK Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Society, which run the Big Wildlife Garden competition, explain what you might hear and when.

Up at 5am on 17th May 2012; the Belgian dawn not only full of unseasonal frost, but also alive with an almost deafening inter-bird competition to see how could rule the airwaves. Need to do that again as the longer days have arrived in Spring 2016.

 

On Biomimicry

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Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels back in 2009 served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.

Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.

A related website tried to organise all biological information by function and asked the question - what we can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, could ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")

On Singing

Singing, like dancing, seems to lift people's spirits, taking them out of their daily troubles and into a flow state. It also has strange effects on people: yes, for those that know her, that is my wife gazing lovingly at the choirmaster (who also happens to be her boss's husband!) Mind you, she's had a thing about Gareth Malone for years, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

On Detours Halcyon In Kal… 5 May 2013

"The really happy man is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour." - Anon

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On Jethro Tull

 "Spin me back down the years, and the days of my youth; draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth." To Cirque Royal in Brussels to see Jethro Tull. Another blast from my Edinburgh past (saw them at the Playhouse on my 19th birthday). Ian and the gang still in fine form; and he can still perch one leg on the other while giving it some serious welly on his flute!