Author: Duncan Spence

Letting go

He used to visit when my mother was alive but she shooed him away, not because she did not like cats, but because she was scared she might trip over him. After she died, every time I came to the house he would visit. By the time I moved in, he seemed to have already decided that this was where he wanted to be. I reopened the old cat flap so he could come and go as he pleased. Every time I came home from one of my adventures or from working in the city, he would be close by, waiting for my return with long stories and much purring. Continue reading “Letting go”

Always living with(out) cancer

According to the eponymous tradition of Scottish philosophy, common sense refers to an ability to perceive the properties or qualities of objects using separate sensory modalities. The classic example used to demonstrate the principle is the fact of the cubeness of a cube being both a visual and a tactile experience – we can both see and feel that it is a cube. The common sense is that which makes it thus possible for vision to confirm touch and vice versa. It is the basis of learning directly to perceive higher orders of abstraction than raw sensory experience, and of using these to navigate about complex environments. Continue reading “Always living with(out) cancer”