In A Passage to India, Forster's young Indian doctor hero...if we can call him that...goes to one particularly extraordinary length in his efforts to socialize with the British. He sets up an outing at some nearby caves, involving a short train ride. The party is to assemble at the local railway station one morning, ride to the place, see the caves, return. It couldn't be simpler. But this is India, after all, and things are not simple. The doctor arrives with his retinue of servants the evening Read more [...]

Tom the landlord will be most distressed by the morning's developments. They are spilling over, developments, leaving a trail of refuse upon the earth. Trashy, one word what's happening. Which amounts to this. Menchu, of Team Filipina, emptied my rubbish and recycling, and now one of the bins is full. More than full, actually. Overflowing. Menchu, in fact, left a bag of rubbish next to one of the bins, positively adjacent. Tom most likely will take care of it. Although not without some amusement. Read more [...]

If I can't quite believe it, that is because it's not quite believable, how Martin and I and his wife Pang could have been staring through the cold winter glass of a Brighton restaurant, discussing things like the burnt out pier...just weeks ago, weeks that number in the single digits...and now one of us is dead.  Presenting the facts, logically it is the person with the leukemia, the one with the chemotherapy tube dangling from his neck, who should be dead.  And, yes, this is the case.  Read more [...]

I am rolling through the Caltrain station at midday, the place surprisingly busy for 12 noon, which should be good news, but isn't, such is my preoccupation. Perhaps it is because I am in a rail terminal that something drifts back to me. Over brunch with my friend Phila. The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, has been reporting on the California Zephyr, the transcontinental train operated by Amtrak. The thing is falling apart, apparently. Dirty, old, broken. And now, weaving my wheelchair in between Read more [...]

What have I been going through? This bounces about my mind, particularly as my body bounces about the streets of Menlo Park, which it does a lot these days, sitting still being on my avoidance list. Sad, in a word. With no apparent cause. Which makes me think that something old is creeping to life. But in the course of the day, and it is a day full of fine things, most notably tinged with publication...my book...let us call it that...and its promotion. And even that this has come late in life, no Read more [...]

Today's question: how did people travel before they could travel? When the journey from Lark Rise to Candleford...in the historical memoir of rural Oxfordshire...seemed epic, that is to say, seven or eight miles, how was life? I think that people need to travel, at least some people. But that this really means advancing. Which to an American suggests progress and betterment, but I really mean movement. The latter being one of the scientific definitions of a life form. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta Read more [...]