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Showing posts from 2018

Love Hurts

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Whilst there's truth in it I slightly disagree with the quote attributed to Liam Neeson in the image above. Love opens you up, it opens you up to yourself and to other people. If you love someone you start to feel their pain, that's empathy. Everyone hurts. You can't love someone without feeling pain. And it opens you up to yourself. If you've been numb, dulled yourself to your own pain, then love will hurt. The difference is that it's a good hurt, it's the hurt that brings healing. Love allows you to accept and to let go of your pain. So love definitely hurts, because life hurts. It's just that there's beauty in it too and the beauty does actually make it worth the pain. A deeper secret. The healing comes not from being loved but from giving love. Often of course it's only through being loved that we're really able to feel love. Because love itself is so beautiful we can't help loving it. We respond with love and that's how we fi

Two Tales of the Ancestors: Boudica, the Glorious and Tragic Warrior Queen of the Britons

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Those who simply want to love, must in the end become warriors. This is a tale of the ancestors, or at least it's my version of a tale of my ancestors. It has some truth in it of a literal kind and truth of other sorts too. It's my version of a tale told to me by Natasha Harlow , so the good parts are hers and the misunderstandings are mine. Hopefully she'll correct the more egregious of them. It's a tale of legends and lies, of glory and tragedy. It's a tale of Europeans of old. It's two tales wrapped into one, or at least two versions of one tale. The tale is the legend of Boudica and the Roman occupation of England and Wales. Towards the end of the Bronze age, around 2450 BCE is the current best guess (the bronze age is charted as ending around 800 BCE) a people walked across Europe and then made their way into England. It seems like they entered mostly unoccupied land. The archaeological record tells a tale of a mass depopulation event, with abou

Leaving the Past Behind: Christian No Longer

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It isn't always possible to feel innocent. It's always possible to become innocent. For a couple of years I identified as a progressive Christian. Progressive Christianity is a broad church, with as many meanings as adherents, but for me the essence was the understanding of the teachings of The Christ (particularly as explained by John) that God is love. And all the rest is window dressing. The Bible is a library of books written by fallible humans over thousands of years. It is full of beauty, horror, contradictions and myths showing part of the unfolding of the relationship between humanity and the divine over the span of its authorship. Unfortunately the term Christian comes with a lot of baggage, both my own and other peoples'. To most people to tell them that you're a Christian is to tell them that you ascribe to particular patterns of behaviour and beliefs, some of them ridiculous and some of them awful. I no longer want to be associated in any way with t

Chasing the Dragon

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Your greatest work of art, of course, will be yourself. Heroin, like most of the other strong narcotics I've tried, had no effect on me the first time I've tried it. Until my naivety was crushed along with my spirit my only association with heroin was watching the Zammo from Grange Hill (a BBC TV kids program) descend into addiction, eventually caught with smack in his calculator when he wasn't even going to a maths exam! Zammo chased the dragon and got a smack on the nose was the graffiti found in Grange Hill school the next day. Like Zammo I chased the dragon, and it did nothing the first time. Chasing the dragon is vapourising the heroin by heating it on tin foil and breathing the fumes with a funnel usually also made of foil. The first time was with the friends of a girlfriend in Cambridge. She was a lovely hippy called Sharon, and as far as I know is the only woman to ever flee a city to escape me. She ran away to Manchester. True story. This was all a long time

A Collection of Short Poems: Here I Sit, The Cult of None, Just Keeping Quiet, Does Christmas Exist, A Tribute to Linux and more

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There's nothing like a cheeky grin from a child you don't know for cheering up the soul A collection of short poems from the last few months. For more of my poems give these pages a whirl: The Great I Am Fragments of a Once Broken Mind A Momentary Lapse of Reason My Son To Those Who Worry Aspects of the Divine Rage and Roar Tangle Heart Words, Fucking Words Muddy Waters Didn't There Used to be Magic Didn't there used to be magic? When you were five the world was magic. And then gradually, the magic fades. But it hasn't gone, it's still there. When you were five. A Short Poem by Irina Foord Roses are red, Violets are blue, We're weird, Just like you! Free to Fly Free to fly To soar and roam For a fire burns for me at home That I can see as far away As infinity. I know my way back For wherever my mind may go My heart stays here With you. Here I Sit Here I sit amidst the wreckage of my life. What pretty ru

Ignorance and Intuition

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"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change" -- Albert Einstein Stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing. In fact I reckon they're kind of the opposite of each other. There is an infinity of things that each of us doesn't know. So just being ignorant, not knowing things, can't possibly be the same as being stupid. No matter how clever you are, no matter how much you know, there's still an infinity of things you don't know. And a lot of what you don't know will seem blindingly obvious to other people, and they might think you're very stupid for not knowing. What's really stupid is not knowing that you're ignorant. We're all ignorant in so many ways, so I reckon the first step of being clever is acknowledging that. Know, as much as you're able, what you don't know and be willing to learn. And that makes you pretty clever. Being able to learn. If you're able to learn and to change and to grow then you&#

Anti-depressants and SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome

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The iris in your eyes is a ring muscle, a sphincter. Making the eyes the sphincter to the soul. I was on antidepressants for about six or seven weeks this year. I was on the lowest normal dose, 50mg daily, of Sertraline. It's from a class of antidepressants called SSRIs, Selective Serotonine Reuptake Inhibitors. The most effective one, normally prescribed first in the UK, is called Citalopram. This is the one most of my friends on antidepressants are on. Citalopram has a reputation for being the hardest to come off of the common SSRIs. SSRIs work by raising the base level of serotonin in the brain, by reducing the ability of the body to re-absorb serotonin. Serotonin is the hormone responsible for love, happiness, and it turns out capacity to actually feel like doing anything. Antidepressants helped me for a little, but I sort of came off them by accident. A friend of mine suggested that her experience of life was flattened by antidepressants. Another friend described it

I'm a Rambling Man

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Living in a world of weird coincidences. That's what Jung called synchronicity and Gaiman calls magic. A couple of tales from my travels. Both from flying back from the US to the UK via a layover in Iceland. Iceland Air One of the things I like to do on a transatlantic flight is make friends with the flight attendants, in lieu of sleep. They're usually bored and not many people treat them like humans, so it's a good chance to make a friend you'll never see again. All of the Iceland Air employees, all 4000 of then including 1500 flight attendants, are Icelandic. It's not a requirement, just the way it is. The whole country is only 300 000 people or so, not much more than the population of Northampton depending on how you count. I asked Selma if she was from Rekjyavik, and then suggested it was a dumb question. If you're from Iceland you're probably from Rekjyavik right? I wasn't far off, about two thirds of the country live there. Her husban

The Role of Abstractions in Software Engineering

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An abstract representation of a concrete apple This is the text of a lightning talk, a five minute presentation, given at PyCon 2018. This is an abstract talk. There isn’t time to give examples but I hope that the application to the day to day challenges of the practise of software engineering is clear. The only theory worth a damn is the theory of the practise. This is a talk about the role of abstractions in software engineering. Programming is all about the use of abstractions. We often say that the fundamental language spoken by the machine is ones and zeros. Binary. This isn’t true. Ones and zeroes are an abstract representation of the fundamental operation of computers. It’s a way of representing what central processors do in a way that can be understood by people. The actual language spoken by computers is the electromagnetic dance across wires and etched silicon, choreographed by the beating of a quartz crystal at the heart of the machine. Ones and zeroes are a repr

Prunes and Funerals

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Does your life tell a story? Tell me your life story. I was enjoying a sweet treat of prunes and dried apricots with Delia last night and she remarked that prunes reminded her of funerals. She still likes them though. Delia grew up in a medium sized town in Romania called Roman, in the North East of Romania in the poorest region of the country called Moldova and bordering the country of Moldova where they also speak Romanian.  Until Delia's mother fell into a bleak depression lasting several years both of Delia's parents worked. So Delia was a latch-key  kid even from her primary school years. Delia's father worked in the local chocolate factory under the communists. Money was tight for everyone so much of the economy ran on a barter scheme. A visit to the doctor or hospital was free, except if you actually wanted anything doing (like your sheets changing or you wanted feeding during a hospital stay) bribes were required. This minor corruption became so end

A Very Short Love Letter to Agile

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We rejoice in the ambiguity, for in it lies redemption I love the word rigour. It conveys either, or both, strict discipline or something that was really hard work. I've found the rigorous application of theoretical principles a really useful way of learning those principles. Learning what they really mean, and what those principles are good at achieving and what they're not good at achieving. I've been rigorous in my discipline in meditating. I've meditated for an hour a day, generally six days a week, for a number of years now. My trade is as a software engineer, a computer programmer. I taught myself to program by becoming really passionate about it. What you love you learn. I learned the art and craft of engineering in my first professional job, at a small startup in London called Resolver Systems. There, for the four years I worked there, we rigorously applied the principles of Extreme Programming, a strict variant and really the progenitor of the &quo

My Dragon is Growing

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Working out what the work is is the work. My dragon is growing. The consciousness of an animal is not fundamentally different from that of a human, we are after all merely a different kind of animal. So it's fun to observe and try to understand the lizard brain. Sapphira's body and brain are different, with much more behaviour "hard wired" and instinctual rather than learned, but nonetheless her conception of the world and her surroundings exist in her imagination. By watching how she sees her world and interacts with it, by becoming part of her world and interacting with her, I can start to feel how she sees her world. She is a hunter. She kills and eats her prey without compassion or mercy. It is her nature. Nature itself is red in tooth and claw, and just as we do she partakes of that nature. As I am part of her world, she is also part of mine. I live in her imagination and she in mine. Our worlds intersect. And in my imagination she breathes fire. The par

Authority and Today's Pain

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If you make decisions you can feel proud of then you're able to respect yourself. Authority I like having authority figures in my life. Not the kind of authority where people decide who is in charge and that they have the right to tell you what to do. That's delegated authority and it generally becomes awful because it's too easy for self interest to take over. I recognise that authority when its wise to do so, but I don't like it. The authority I like is to find people in my life who know more than me on a topic, and who demonstrate in practise that they do. They're not hard to find, I doubt there's a single topic where I know more than anyone else in the world. There's always someone, somewhere, who knows more. I will then consider them an authority on the topic and be more likely to believe what they say, including within the area of ethics and morality. It's very easy to hurt people and it's very nice to have people in your life, or in

The Great I Am

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We're in time and there's enough space. A short poem, "The great I Am" on the rhythm of love. The last line is from a song played whilst I was on a meditation retreat last weekend. The great I Am Your love is real. Your love is you. Everything you are is expressed in everything you do. As we love one another we are alive within each other, members one of another. If I love you then you live in me, part of your life is in me and part of my life is in you. And as you go and love, your love is in and moving and active in everyone you know and touch. And we were formed, both genetically and psychologically, from all that came before. Who we are is formed from all those around us who have loved us, and they in turn were formed from those who loved them. As we love, the love we were given is passed on and grows and changes as we and everything else grow and change. So love lives on. The stars whisper, you never die. " I dream of the armies of

Leaving the Jesus Fellowship Church

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Gloom. In the half light, where people forget themselves, you get to see who they really are. I was part of the Jesus Fellowship for more than twenty years. I arrived as a broken man on the tale end of more than a year of homelessness and psychosis. Being at New Creation Farm and part of the Jesus Fellowship saved my life. Part of the message of the church was love, commitment, the kingdom of heaven and sharing lives and possessions. Those values resonated in me as the things that I valued most in life and how I wanted to be. Over those twenty years I've been on my own journey, as everyone is. I've arrived in a very different place, with very different beliefs (although many fundamentally the same depending on how you express it) than the beliefs I took on. I've struggled with my involvement in the church for a long time. In practise a lot of it seemed so unloving and judgemental. The decision was finally made for me a few weeks ago when a preacher at the Jesus

Fundamentally Speaking

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I don't think you die if your heart breaks, I think you die if you don't let it break. I've been thinking a bit about fundamentalist Islam, coming from the context of having grown up within a culture part of which identified as fundamentalist Christian. This had both good and bad meanings. Being totally sold out to what you believe in is not itself a problem. It strikes me that fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity, certainly in the bad elements, are basically the same religion just with some of the names and details swapped around a bit. The same conviction that they are right and others are wrong, and that because you're right anything you do in the pursuit  of that right must be right. These religions, like any belief system, are a world view as well as a set of beliefs. Mostly people think they're good and not evil (except in their darkest imaginings of course, which we all have). So we rationalise our behaviour by forming a worldview in

My Second Best Story from 2017, and other tales

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The shadow self is still just you. My Second Best Story from 2017 One of the things I learned from my failed experiments in adulting at university was the value of story telling. I don't mean in any mythological sense, nor folklore nor even small tribe oral tradition (those stories your mates tell which you've heard a hundred times but are still worth listening to). All of which I value. I just mean how much fun it is to have an appropriate story for a situation when you're with people. I learned from the best, a good friend who always had a good story to hand. I was inevitably torn between enjoying the story and being jealous of how much more fun it must be to be the one telling the story. Better even than good story telling is story making. If you want to have good tales to tell you'll have to go out and make some stories. That's my one great consolation when really bad things happen, at least I'll probably get a story out of it. I think my best story