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- Quick health update- December 2014
- The BookBenches speak (parodies)
- My summer of BookBenching
- BBC National Short Story Award 2014 deep dive
- The diary of another nobody
- Just cherish it all- A small personal tribute to Graham Joyce (1954-2014)
- The view from Maslow’s peak (I) – Living through a thought experiment
- The view from Maslow’s peak (II) – Going with a different sort of flow
- The view from Maslow’s Peak (III) – In my end is my beginning (a personal history)
- And Beth shall be no more- Little Women, heroines and Nora Ephron
- The bee
- On my bookshelf (II) – The evolution of self-help
- On my bookshelf (I)- Reading habits and paper vs. e-books
- Ars vivendi
- Ars moriendi
- Cancer 101- dispelling two popular misconceptions
- The best-laid plans (and stories)
- The work of Anthony Lane – So finely written
- Parodies and Wendy Cope – Some sort of record seemed vital
- Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly – Round the bend
- The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot – The deep sea swell
- Obituaries in The Economist- Stories of somewhere else
- The National Portrait Gallery
- Things I like (an introduction)
- Not the sheep
- 3 evidence-based ideas for a thoughtful and productive life, as learned from a simple exercise routine (with a surprise cameo from Lord Krishna!)
- Jane Austen, Free-Trait-Theorist
- The universal stories of This American Life
- The isolation wall
- One half my life is not reading books
- Always look on the bright side
- The tints that glow- Cancer and the female appearance
- Books of my childhood (III) – New Yorker humour and a woman’s search for meaninglessness
- The widest prairies
- Life in a barrel
- Books of my childhood (II)- My man Wodehouse
- Books of my childhood (I) – The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes
Or grab a word you like:
- Ancient Greeks
- Andreas Kluth
- Andrew Marr
- Anne Frank
- Ann Wroe
- Anthony Lane
- Ariel Levy
- art
- BBC National Short Story Award 2014
- BBC NSS 2014
- Bhagavad Gita
- Bill Watterson
- Book Benches
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- Caitlin Moran
- Calvin and Hobbes
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- Cecil Beaton
- chemotherapy
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- Christopher Hitchens
- Clive James
- criticism
- Daniel Kahneman
- David Foster Wallace
- David Rakoff
- diaries
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- E.B. White
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- feminism
- flow
- Francesca Rhydderch
- George R. R. Martin
- Graham Joyce
- happiness
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- knitting
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- self-help
- Sherlock Holmes
- Stephen's Story
- Stephen Sutton
- stories
- Susan Cain
- Sylvia Plath
- T.S. Eliot
- technology
- Tessa Hadley
- The Diary of a Nobody
- The Economist
- the meaning of life
- The New Yorker
- This American Life
- Tim Minchin
- tsundoku
- Veronica Geng
- Virginia Woolf
- W.H. Auden
- Wendy Cope
- writing
- Zadie Smith
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Tag Archives: mortality
The view from Maslow’s peak (I) – Living through a thought experiment
A 20th-century psychologist called Abraham Maslow developed a “hierarchy of needs” which he thought human beings had to navigate in order to feel fulfilled in their lives. He depicted it as a pyramid: At the bottom are the bare necessities … Continue reading
The view from Maslow’s peak (II) – Going with a different sort of flow
Don’t agonize about success or failure. Just do what you must do as well as you possibly can. In the process you may eventually transcend triumph and disaster. That is how to meet those two impostors. Those are the last … Continue reading
And Beth shall be no more- Little Women, heroines and Nora Ephron
I’ve done the maths- for my most recent bout of treatment, which lasted 166 days, I spent 63 (in all, not consecutively) having chemotherapy. If you want to know what having chemotherapy is like, here’s how Christopher Hitchens described it in … Continue reading
Posted in Doodles, Oy vey (cancer gripes)
Tagged books, cancer, chemotherapy, Christopher Hitchens, humour, Little Women, mortality, Nora Ephron, the meaning of life
8 Comments
Cancer 101- dispelling two popular misconceptions
A lot of people seem to think that this is how cancer treatment works: You get cancer You get treated for it If you’re alive at the end of treatment it means that it worked and you’re cured. You’ve defeated … Continue reading
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