First, a few words of wisdom from some personal heroes:-

"Ireland's different from England, you see. Here the individual runs the country, not the other way round."

"Progress, that magic word which will probably lead to the downfall of our civilisation."

"If you're looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay exactly where you are because if I can lead you into the promised land someone else can just as easily lead you back out again."

"Freedom is knowledge of one's necessity"

Next: the best photograph I ever took, which I'd already started tarting up for use as the "front door" of this website before I realised it would take far too long to load.

No point wasting it, though.

From my most favourite place for carrying on this Oedipal thing I have for Mother Earth I can actually see the curvature of the planet  -  a very slight but distinct arc along the line at which the deeper hue of the ocean stands in sharp contrast against the sky.

This fascinates me, not least because our Neolithic ancestors spent a great deal of their time in the sort of places where the same phenomenon was equally visible and the evidence of Newgrange alone doesn't leave any doubt that they were crash-hot deducers-from-observeable-fact.

It's a safe bet that they were well aware that they were on a wet pebble whirling through infinity, so where did we go wrong ("we" in the sense of our much more recent, sophisticated, civilised, mediaeval ancestors)and how on earth did we come up with the notion that our world's a flat disk a person might fall off the edge of?

More importantly, what mistakes are we making, right now, of a sort by which our Neolithic ancestors wouldn't've been fooled even for one minute?