Category: musings
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My Sister & Other Phenomena
My sister breaks things. It’s a fact—a family fact. She doesn’t just break ordinary things like you or I might do; dishes, glassware, bones in our body, no. My sister breaks things like, the internet. What? Oh, okay, so maybe it wasn’t her, per se, who caused Google to have a nervous breakdown the other…
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Jelly Baby Girl
One of my all-time favourite sweets as a child were Bassetts Jelly Babies. And I mean the original flour dusted version, not the more recent Maynards version. As anyone who is a regular reader to this blog might know by now is, most of my favourite things have came to me by way of my…
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Glastonbury or Bust
This trip was memorable for so many of the wrong reasons. But let’s start at the beginning shall we. Chris, a friend of mine, was keen to go to the Glastonbury festival. Chris being Chris though talked another friend, Martin, a musician, to come along with us, as the <i>man</i> component because, you know, two…
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Rocking the 60s
Way back when, and I’m talking the mid-60s in Singapore, when my sister, who was ten years older than me, worked part time for an Army liaison officer. She was part of a team who organised rock bands tours, and, as a result, I got to meet with some of the biggest bands of the…
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Mortality
It’s not that I’ve been thinking about death, even though, last year, I had another brush with death — waving at Him on the sidelines of my own personal battlefield. But Death has a way of following us around once we reach (a) a certain age or (b) have that close encounter with Him. He’s…
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My Mother the Runaway
My mother, by all accounts, had quite the life, especially in her younger years. Though some of what I know I only know from stories my sister told me much later, after my mum passed. What I did get to hear from my mother, firsthand, was how, despite being in a loveless marriage and an…
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A Life Well Read
I learnt to read at a very early age sat on the knee of my dad as he read his newspaper of an evening. He would read different sections out loud to me and I would mimic him, till, at one point, it was me who was reading the words back to him. I skipped…
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Letting Go
I was reading friend’s post about letting go of things, yesterday, and had my own personal rush of childhood memories and a sense of loss at all things I had to let go of as a child as a member of a military family. Any kid who’s grown up in the same situation, whatever the…
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The Day it Nearly Ended
I’ve always viewed being in the military the ‘safe’ option, which, when you really stop to think about it, seems either stupid or naive given what’s required of most personnel in the military. Though it’s true, I worked on what was called a front-line base, meaning our squadrons were considered not defence but an attack…
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Meet a Royal Day
I was lucky enough or, depending on who you speak to, unlucky enough to meet a few royals during my time in the military. The first time was at RAF Mountbattan, in Plymouth, UK, when I had the chance to see and shake hands with the now Princess Royal, Princess Anne. Who, at the time,…