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The United Kingdom - Touring in Britain

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Touring in Britain

 

 

 

On this most recent trip to England and Scotland, recognising that but for its history we would not exist, we organised our itinerary around points of historical significance.  And shoe shopping.    

The sites that provided the milestones of our journey included castles, historic houses and cathedrals. In England and Scotland these are often rooted in the 12th through to the 17th centuries.  Shoe shopping took us to the Yorkshire Dales; and all the way back to the 20th century.

 

Shoe shopping
Shoe shopping in Yorkshire

 

 

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Travel

China

 

 

I first visited China in November 1986.  I was representing the New South Wales Government on a multinational mission to our Sister State Guangdong.  My photo taken for the trip is still in the State archive [click here].  The theme was regional and small business development.  The group heard presentations from Chinese bureaucrats and visited a number of factories in rural and industrial areas in Southern China.  It was clear then that China was developing at a very fast rate economically. 

Read more: China

Fiction, Recollections & News

Alan Turing and The Imitation Game

 

The movie The Imitation Game is an imaginative drama about the struggles of a gay man in an unsympathetic world. 

It's very touching and left everyone in the cinema we saw it in reaching for the tissues; and me feeling very guilty about my schoolboy homophobia. 

Benedict Cumberbatch, who we had previously seen as the modernised Sherlock Holmes, plays Alan Turing in much the same way that he played Sherlock Holmes.  And as in that series The Imitation Game differs in many ways from the original story while borrowing many of the same names and places.

Far from detracting from the drama and pathos these 'tweaks' to the actual history are the very grist of the new story.  The problem for me in this case is that the original story is not a fiction by Conan Doyle.  This 'updated' version misrepresents a man of considerable historical standing while simultaneously failing to accurately represent his considerable achievements.

Read more: Alan Turing and The Imitation Game

Opinions and Philosophy

Conspiracy

 

 

 

Social Media taps into that fundamental human need to gossip.  Indeed some anthropologists attribute the development of our large and complex brains to imagination, story telling and persuasion. Thus the 'Cloud' is a like a cumulonimbus in which a hail of imaginative nonsense, misinformation and 'false news' circulates before falling to earth to smash someone's window or dent their car: or ending in tears of another sort; or simply evaporating.

Among this nonsense are many conspiracy theories. 

 

For example, at the moment, we are told by some that the new 5G mobile network has, variously, caused the Coronavirus pandemic or is wilting trees, despite not yet being installed where the trees have allegedly wilted, presumably in anticipation. Of more concern is the claim by some that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately manufactured in a laboratory somewhere and released in China. 

Read more: Conspiracy

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