The Endless Chain Podcast

Click above to listen to this article as a one-act play. Babies can do as they please. They’re allowed to barf, poo, sleep and eat. And when they don’t get what they want, they cry, till they get it. Because they’re helpless and vulnerable and sweet and ours. Everything a baby does is forgiven. We protect them and secure their environment and, when they wander into places they shouldn’t be, we chi...

Plus a voice message: you can hear it up above. From the Road of the Crown to the Avenue of the Red Cross: Abs’s Taxi Service: appeal update There were donations to Go Fund Me at https://gofund.me/c2c553df . When I wrote the proposal, I had not realised that Go Fund Me would simply pass on all donations within a day or two of their being made, so they never were “accumulated”, though I accumulated...

Above is a voiceover, if you have ears to hear. It ought to be a fundamental precept. That, if an individual’s existence, life, the fact of being here, is threatened in such a measure as to induce a state of constant fear or apprehension for one’s physical safety in one’s home jurisdiction, then other jurisdictions may offer to take in those who are thus affected. Ought to be. Thanks for reading T...

There’s a strange line in the Lord’s Prayer. See if you can guess which one I mean: Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done On Earth as it is in Heaven. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, For Thine is the kingdom, The power and the glory For ever and ever. Amen. Aside from dif...

Click above to hear what’s below. Translation in transition In translation, there’s a tsunami of change underway. I’ve been talking to some colleagues and it’s a grim picture. Meanwhile, the Justice Minister resigned because his department of Justice is broken. Like my statuette of her. Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A few years a...

Click above to listen to this piece as a talking head. “It’s a first name with us.” * “Is it really? Oh, you don’t say.” “Yes, quite common in fact.” * “Right, of course … Tell me, if my first name had been Jan , do you think that upon being asked for my name, I would have said, ‘Jan’ ?” My name has been confusing Belgium for 30 years, and everyone it confuses thinks they’re the first to have poin...

This message is scheduled to go out on 27 October and the question for me, now, on 22 October is: how often in the intervening five days will I be here to edit it? What you can hear above is the text as on 22 October. What you can read below is the text as on the 27th. Does that make sense, my friends? Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my wor...

This post can be listened to as a eulogy by clicking above. When my aunt died in 2019, I felt a strong urge to be at her funeral, but funds were low and it seemed impractical. People do cross the world to attend weddings, but not many take a plane from Belgium to Toronto to be at a funeral. Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I asked m...

Image: The British in Gaza, 1917. I say nothing. Long, long ago, when geography was, for me, obligatory and carried a capital letter, I got a mark of C for effort. “There must be no ‘C’s for effort,” was the headmaster’s admonition in his report. Mother and father were concerned. I was in the dog house. The geographic dog house. Nobody ever asked me why I thought I’d been given a C . So, having ke...

Image: painted ironmongery. Left, with brushstrokes; right, without. Above the image is a button for hearing a playground tiff of this article. Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I don’t like spray painting. Well, let me qualify that: I like it on my car. But I don’t like it on the ironwork that’s dotted around my garden. What I like...

This article can be heard as a podcast by clicking above. I think I will have been in fourth, or possibly fifth, form when the boys struck. Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Image: the poster for the 1968 film if … (fair use). In the film, they teach schoolboys to be officers and gentlemen. And are surprised when the boys shoot back....

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote The Great Gatsby ) disliked exclamation marks as “laughing at your own jokes.” I sometimes wonder how Mr Fitzgerald would have felt about the plethora of emojis with which we dot our communications these days but, perhaps thankfully, he was spared that confrontation with self-humour. Especially the dog dirt one.💩 Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subs...

Here’s not a blast from the past but a piece of music I heard first back when I was not yet a teenager. It’s not a blast from the past because it doesn’t blast from the past. It blasts, very languidly, from the now. The YouTube comments are filled with praise for it and, whatever your taste is, and whether any of this coincides with your taste, one cannot deny its masterfulness. Tangerine Dream ar...

What drives progress ? When Belgian National Railways shifted its then principal Brussels terminus at Gare du Nord to a new site in the 1850s, the city laid out a new street that would bring the travelling public thronging to its portals, slicing through the lower town in a unerring plumb line, and christened the street Rue du Progrès – Progress Street. It now forms part of the great wander-trail...

In 1857, Jean-François Millet unveiled his work The Gleaners , depicting three women scavenging a wheat field for whatever was of use that the harvesters had left behind. It is bucolic, rustic, redolent of a bygone age, and it caused outrage when the upper echelons of society saw it. Thanks for viewing this salon edition of The Endless Chain. Pour disdain upon it if you’re a land-owner. Otherwise,...

Whether we admit to it or not, each one of us carries with him or her a philosophy. For some of us, it is laid down in engraved letters of iron, which may over time rust or become pitted with wear, but which are never effaced from the tablet we carry with us, as if bestowed on some Mount Sinai of yore. For others, it may be written in the reflections from a pond of water, where waterlilies poke th...

In the dictionary, I’ve no doubt they have a definition of negotiation . And I can guess what it more or less says. This week, I have been engaged in some work translating texts that analyse why ecological laws sometimes utterly and absolutely fail in achieving their aims: the conservation of wildlife. Whilst I am in no way so cynical as to assert that any environmental law has its own failure as...

No man’s land: defensible, or is it sitting on the fence? I recognise these two truths among many: one, that I am hopelessly naive; two, that I am ebulliently hopeful. I am intractably drawn to the middle ground. The middle ground is not a fence upon which to sit, a place of indecision or domain where only compromise can reign. It is a place of debate, of positions backed with reason, of appreciat...

“You dance really oddly,” the teenage daughter of a friend told me at a Brussels pub disco night some years ago. “Then don’t look, nosey,” retorted I. Let me transport you to Montparnasse, Paris, summer 1996. A long-standing friend’s getting married and, the night before the big day, is anguishing: like Genesis, he can’t dance; what would he do for the opening waltz the next evening? In the minusc...

What’s necessity? In Shakespeare’s Henry IV , there comes a scene where the king cannot sleep. He wonders that a ship’s boy posted high on a mast as look-out can sleep at his station in the wildest of seas and yet he, in all his comfort, cannot get a wink. Henry is a troubled man. His railing is interrupted by his counsellors, who advise of rebellion fermenting in the North, and the necessity of d...

You can listen to this plaint to Ukraine as a voiceover by clicking above. Please bear in mind, it dates from September 2022. Thanks for reading The Endless Chain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. First published on LinkedIn on 24 September 2022. Ladies and gentlemen, I have had an exchange concerning my latest article with a young Ukrainian gentleman, and I don’t mean...

When a country, any country, invades another country, whatever country, the country being invaded and lots of people who think like the country being invaded say things like: “That is contrary to the principle of sovereignty; the principles set down in the UN Charter, in the articles of war, in constitutions, in treaties, in agreements, in human rights, in the Geneva Conventions, the North Atlanti...