As it’s technically still summer, with the flowers in my garden still healthy shades of red and yellow and pink (those that escaped the hungry jaws of my mad Belgian Malinois dog), and the cobalt-blue sky hanging covetously over our high garden wall as though protecting this secret paradise from the autumn winds that lie [...]
This summer holiday I binged on books. I just read and read and read. And then read some more. Bingeing and gluttonising and craving for more and more and more – a heavenly addiction like an opiate of the gods. I could almost go so far as to say that reading is the cure for [...]
I was wondering whether to put ‘Cultural Differences’ instead of ‘Koreans’ in my title. Could ‘Koreans’ somehow sound a bit … I don’t know … politically incorrect, I wondered. Especially since the word is followed by ‘autism’ and ‘isolation’, neither of which has positive associations. But no, I decided to stick to ‘Koreans’. After all, [...]
It’s Sunday again, blogging day; the summer vacation is almost as over – or will be by midnight tonight – and I’ve found myself thinking, Hmm. What have I done this long hot sultry summer? In terms of targets, what have I achieved? (What have you achieved?) What grade would I get for Not Having [...]
The summer holidays are drawing to a close. A pretty banal statement, you might think? Not if you work in the field of education, as I do, or if you’re still in the process of being educated - which we all were, once upon a time, right? That is, unless you happened to be brought [...]
I had my first child and my first puppy in close proximity of each other. The puppy was a female mongrel of eight weeks, the child a female toddler of sixteen months. And the novel I was working on at the time was about twelve months old. That is, I’d been writing it for the [...]
First of all, let me emphasise that this truly is a noble book. Really, I mean it. I’m not being facetious. Even though I’m about to embark upon a few critical thoughts, I still fervently maintain that this is a noble book. And for that reason alone, I say Hats off to the author, Heather Morris. [...]
