How to improve royal weddings Today I recalled the wedding of Kate and William (I was there, in front of the television) and how struck I was by the awfulness of the Church of England wedding rites. Read in funereal tones by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the vows bore no[…]
Read More »Nicole Skeltys
Composing cool tunes for warm people
From the blog
Where the Streets Have No Name One of the challenges of UK ambulance Trusts trying to meet response times in rural areas is that sometimes the streets have no name. And the cottages and farmhouses don’t have numbers. In the centuries old lanes and byways of country England, some no[…]
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On waiting in an NHS cancer clinic In early October, I found myself sitting in the MacMillan and the University College London Hospitals Foundation Trust Cancer Center, not far from the toff looking streets around Warren St Tube. I was in a granite and glass reception lounge, draped with[…]
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Sleepless in Los Angeles Downtown, in the City of Angels, on the night of 14 July, I didn’t sleep that well. Again. I was only four blocks from Skid Row, but that didn’t bother me. After all, I was in a gated community, in a condo owned by Bob N,[…]
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Giving Away My Past to a Good Cause – You As 2012 (or perhaps existence as we know it) draws to a close, that magic time of year is upon us. When there is not enough time to sober up between Xmas drinks so your memory sloshes in and out[…]
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The Love In amongst the flotilla of emails that greet me every morning, today I found a particularly synchronistic email from Tom Dawkins, social entrepreneur extraordinaire and one of the most inspirational people I know. I had gone to a workshop on Friday about crowdfunding, a subject I knew something[…]
Read More »Black Dog Daze Yesterday, I received an email from a former work colleague, who I had not heard from for sometime, telling me she had recently “formed a plan to take her own life”, but had luckily been rescued by a mental health crisis team. She had stabilised, but[…]
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The Age of Biography Did you know that in Elizabethan England, most people had sex fully clothed because the Renaissance naked body was so grubby and smelly? Or that Shakespeare’s plays contain in total 1300 sexual allusions, and no less than 66 terms for a vagina? Some of my favourite[…]
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The Dust Revival Band Q: What do you get when you cross a top hat, a frockcoat, exposed underwear and bunch of leaves thrown in the air? A: The Dust Revival Band A few weeks ago, I invited my former bandmates from my old folk rock band Dust over to[…]
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The Mudskipper How does someone whose only real talent and justification for being alive is the generation of creative stuff – the puffing out of cotton seeds into the mysterious wind of life, the spinning of fairy floss onto sticks for the emotionally ravenous- wind up working on spreadsheets five,[…]
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