A Thinking Man

Yes, it’s musterbation again! No, no, no, NOT masturbation, but MUSTerbation! I’ve written about MUSTerbation before (though judging from my blog search stats, thousands of people think masturbation is spelt with a ‘must’.)
Quite simply, MUSTerbation is when human beings decide that something has to be done or stopped at all costs. It is [...]

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Suicide is a painful subject for many - especially those who have lost partners, children, siblings, and friends.  It is the final statement in a relationship - a statement made by the other person, something that you cannot argue with, but something that those who are left behind want to argue with so badly.
Whether the [...]

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Ok, ‘hunter’ is not the word I really want, but it will have to do for now, and you will have to understand that I don’t want it to carry some of the connotations that it probably does have.  ’Hunter’ implies a power imbalance and a victim that I don’t want it to have in [...]

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Dear reader, I must make a confession.  I do not make this lightly.  I have agonized for some time about whether or not to put fingers to keyboard and to own up, but some news in today’s paper seemed to compel me to come clean.
I have done it.  I too have been one of the [...]

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The Walk 
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
 
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that [...]

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As schools across most of the UK are about to start their Autumn terms, spare a brief thought for the teachers.  Although a few of them may have been swanning around for the past couple of months doing nothing but gardening, a few have been using the time to recover from the traumas of the [...]

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A 25 year old woman who was raped in the West End of London was initially told by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), which covers England, Scotland and Wales, that her £11,000 compensation award would be reduced by 25 per cent because she had been drinking.  However, that decision has been overturned as her [...]

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I hadn’t seen him for at least six years, but ‘bumped into him’ yesterday while taking my daily walk.  I used to work in the same College as he did, and then he moved away and I moved on.  I never really knew him very well, but I always thought he was a nice man [...]

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One story which has been causing a fair amount of sniggers in the press this week is a research report by the UK Health Protection Agency indicating that sexually transmitted infections have doubled in under a decade in people over 45 and are now rising faster than in the young. (The overall rate of [...]

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Some people take great pride in proclaiming that they have no difficulty in telling others exactly what they think, whereas many of the rest of us would admit that we occasionally do.  We may have a naturally reserved temperament, as children we may have been socialized in a household that trained us very well in [...]

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