Full text: Continue reading “Ample evidence for licensing sporting estates”
Time to choose — Peter A Bell
Does anyone else entertain niggling doubts about their own mental state as they listen to the increasingly brazen lies and the ever more fantastical claims? Do you, betimes, catch yourself thinking, is it me?
Disappearing eagles
Why is there such a need to defend this system of land management with such ignorance and stupidity? Why the desperation to maintain this denuded, denatured topography, while presenting it as the outcome of responsible husbandry, sensible economy and dutiful custodianship of the land?
Even under the influence of testosterone suppressing medication, the disappearance of two satellite tagged eagles within a few hours of each other at the same location snaps my twig, and briefly I get the urge to hurt somebody or damage stuff. Thankfully I am aware of this, but there is evidently something quite visceral, yet cold and calculating about the reactions I observe in myself. Apart from the sheer rage associated with cruelty and killing animals for fun, there is more a general fury penetrating deep into the bit of me that identifies as Scottish. Even without the natural motivation of hormones, I want to act now, decisively, to bring an end to this wickedness, see the perpetrators punished severely.
Cycle five and the light at the end of the tunnel
Less than two weeks into the fifth cycle I felt healthy again, prepared to be infused for the last time with poison, in fact I wanted to get it over with, to bring forward my appointment a week.
Continue reading “Cycle five and the light at the end of the tunnel”
The revolution will (not) be televised
For the last four or five years great changes have been underway in this country. These began to make their presence felt at the end of 2014 in the aftermath of the Scottish independence referendum, as there arose again, especially but not exclusively in England, a familiar strain of nationalism, which confuses the meanings of the words British and English and believes it is naturally superior to others and therefore entitled to special treatment.
Cycle four and some politics
At bottom, the problem of political decision-making only redoubles and displaces to a collective scale what is already an illusion in the individual: the belief that our actions, our thoughts, our gestures, our words, and our behaviours result from decisions emanating from a central, conscious, and sovereign entity – the Self.
Being on the left or on the right is to choose among one of the countless ways afforded to humans to be imbeciles.
This is the big lie, and the great disaster of politics: to place politics on one side and life on the other, on one side what is said but isn’t real and on the other what is lived but can no longer be said. […] Hell is really the place where all speech is rendered meaningless.
What is revealed in every political eruption is the irreducible human plurality, the unsinkable heterogeneity of ways of being and doing – the impossibility of the slightest totalization.
The Invisible Committee, Now, Semiotext(e), 2017
Cycle four, week one
Day One – Tuesday May 14th
The third cycle and rewilding the Scottish killing fields
Munros since diagnosis #178 and #179
12:30 – Beinn Udlamain (M119), 3314ft, 1010m
14:30 – Sgearnaich Mhor (155), 3251ft, 991m
Continue reading “The third cycle and rewilding the Scottish killing fields”
The second cycle and the last Geal-charn
Munros since diagnosis #176 and #177
12:00 – Geal-charn (M278), 3009ft, 917m
14:15 – A’ Mharconaich (M179), 3199ft, 975m Continue reading “The second cycle and the last Geal-charn”
Living with cancer #3
It is a little more than three years since I started writing this blog.