Funfare for the Common Man

Devil, Thomas Theodor Heine When I look at the joy and delight in my daughter’s face, as she bounds around the living room like a small elephant, galloping around the house, giggling endlessly, calling me ‘daddichka’, my heart simultaneously melts and breaks. A question bounces around in my head: what on earth have I done? Why on earth did we bring a child into this world? Into such a cruel, nasty world?  Confessions, revelations and yet, perhaps, nothing new: This and my previous blog from 2009-present, in no particular order: existentialist crises…fatherhood…fatherhood in an age of anxiety…wistful peregrinations…tales of sordid shenanigans and flirting with barmaids and waitresses…students and their antics…teaching…travelling…love and romance…philosophy…reading…reading…more reading…quotations…bugbears and pet hates…Ways of Escape…the future…optimism v pessimism…sports…gambling…investing…weddings…buying flats…heartbreak…anguish…angst…technology…being a Luddite…medical experiments…...

9pm every night, after the little one is tucked in for the night With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez After last week’s heavy theme of the [potential] doom and gloom of the future, this week will be a different kind of heavy: heavy on links, light[er] on commentary.  If there’s one thing this quarantine is doing to people – me, especially, but if Twitter is anything to go by, many of us – it’s sending us down all sorts of nostalgia rabbit holes. You know, I’m not really sure if we can go down nostalgia rabbit holes, but you get the idea. I’ve been down this…road before, just a fortnight or so ago with my ‘Mixtape’ post. That, along with some comments from old friends, has really kicked the music nostalgia urge into overdrive, and I’m trying to put together a music-themed post. But I’m struggling to find the right angle. So in the interim, let’s focus on links and love.  As in, this is about the point in the quarantine, if you haven’t reached it already, where tempers are r...