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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

England

On Campion

Campion

 

December 1st comes around again. Grateful to witness it once more. So many memories - the most vivid from Campion Days of old...pushing for almost glory or just plain survival through fields of mud, up frosted hills, leading or trailing friends of yore.

On Summer

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"I thought I saw a swallow land, upon my hand, on summer day" - Roy Harper

For the gardener, this is the peak of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and weeks following Midsummer Day are a time of quietness, of flower festivals, of fragrant old roses around mildewed old church doors and of wandering among indecipherable gravestones and of coming hollyhocks and of lemon balm and of long, long ago memories, but always of "history is now, and England".

On Silbury Hill

Silbury Hill

 

Way back in 1999 I registered the internet domain name silburyhill.com and paid to maintain it for several years, without ever really doing anything with it. I eventually let the registration lapse, but even now, new developments at Silbury continue to resonate with me in a way that I can't easily put into words. 

Why I felt compelled - no other word will do - to acquire silburyhill.com as my first personal URL and why I paid a not inconsiderable sum to hold onto it a few years, despite being far from ready to launch my own website back then, I'm still far from certain.

On William Blake

William Blake

 

Nearly two centuries after his death, the final resting place of William Blake (1757-1827) was finally marked with a gravestone. The remains of the poet-painter lie in a common grave under an anonymous patch of grass in Bunhill Fields cemetery, just outside the City of London.

Patti Smith would celebrate Blake as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation” — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity.

On Samhain

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"Sauin" is the name in Manx Gaelic of the festival marking the start of the year's dark half, celebrated from dusk on 31 October to dusk on 1 November. In Gaelic & Irish, "Samhain" is a liminal time, marked by fire, and the crossing of thresholds.

A beautiful seasonal quote from the inspiring Damh the Bard.

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.

EDG: Enhanced Ageing

Ageing

 

This paper is an evolving examination of issues around, and responses to, the challenge or improving the lives of and caring for elders, on the emotional, mental, physical, practical, spiritual levels.

 

Pre 2018

On Jane Austen

Jane Austen

 

Though not particularly taken by recent film adaptations of her novels, and well-used to my family calling me "Mr Bennett", I remember very much enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read it as a student in France.

Today, Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different, believes The School of Life. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.

On Ockham's Razor

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Wade Rowland, in Ockham's Razor, argued, inter alia:

  • That a 45 year old student of his who'd lost his job was afforded little dignity, because "to be a sacrifice, you have to some intrinsic value, otherwise there is no sacrifice involved, just a shifting, a removal, a replacement". In the world of..."downsizing" and "human resources" and "outplacement"...values are banished".
  • The nineteenth century British economist Alfred Marshall said: "The economist, like everyone else, must concern himself with the ultimate aims of man." The ultimate aims. He must concern himself, in other words, with values.