United Kingdom

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.

T.S. Eliot died over 50 years ago now, His legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquility and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

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Please see below selected recent language-related change.

See also:

• What's New? - Language

• 7,099: Distinct spoken languages in the world, as of 2017

• 63%: Share of the world’s population that natively speaks one of 12 languages: Arabic, Bengali, all dialects of Chinese, English, French, German, Hindu-Urdu, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish

December 2019

Please see below selected recent culture-related change.

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• What's New? - Culture
• What's Changing? - Culture: Arts
• What's Changing? - Culture: Design
• What's Changing? - Culture: Education
• What's Changing? - Culture: Humanism
• What's Changing? - Culture: Ideas
• What's Changing? - Culture: Religion

December 2019

We can be at our most reflective, and perhaps society could be at its most reflexive, around St John's Eve and the other, similar seven calendar points...

Goin' ridin' down by Avalon
Would you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Would you meet me?
In the Church of St. John . . .
Down by Avalon . . . .

 - from Summertime in England, by Van Morrison

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. 

However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.

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God‏ @TheTweetOfGod 8h8 hours ago

90% of My time is spent adversely affecting the fortunes of your favourite team.

I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):

2014