Archive for the ‘My life & thoughts’ Category
The famous Darlington Christmas letter
December 11th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
Each year at this time, like most families, we send out Christmas cards to our friends at home and abroad. In many cases – especially those in other countries – we have not seen them in the course of 2011 and would like to share our experiences of the last 12 months. So we enclose […]
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Word of the day: Christingle
December 8th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
As a humanist, I don’t spend much time at religious events or ceremonies and, when I do, they are usually Jewish ones (so many of my closest friends are Jewish). But this week I accompanied my son and daughter-in-law to Southwark Cathedral in central London because they wanted their 11- month old daughter (who has […]
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Word of the day: persimmon
December 4th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
It looks like a cross between an apple and an orange and it tastes like a cross between a melon and a mango. It is a fruit which is very plentiful and popular in China but hardly known in the UK. Today Vee and I visited our Chinese ‘family’ in Abingdon and we finished out […]
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Want some Christmas gift ideas?
December 3rd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
We bought a load of Middle Eastern ceramic items at a Christmas market and you can do the same here.
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Is it Christmas already?
December 3rd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
This morning, I received my first Christmas card …
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Back 37 years to South Woodford
December 2nd, 2011 by Roger Darlington
This morning, I took the Central Line out all the way to South Woodford to see a colleague for a discussion. When I left the tube station, I realised that I had not been there for 37 years. I fought the two General Elections of 1974 as the Labour candidate for the then constituency of Wanstead […]
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Day Two with baby Catrin
November 26th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
I was awake several times in the night, wondering why I hadn’t heard Catrin – but it was because she was still asleep. In the end, she slept straight through without waking all the way to 7.30 am. Is this the perfect baby, or what? Once we were both up, I gave her another banana. […]
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Day One with baby Catrin
November 25th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
As I explained in a posting four weeks ago, my son Richard and daughter-in-law Emily wished to leave their daughter Catrin with us overnight so that they could go away and celebrate Emily’s birthday. A month ago was the trial run as I stayed with them overnight and took responsibility for Catrin. It worked out […]
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Word of the day: contestation
November 18th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
I’ve spent the day at the University of Leicester attending a seminar on digital literacy where I made a short presentation on the regulation of content with the convergence of broadcasting and the Internet [see the text on which I based my remarks here]. Now most of the participants in the seminar were academics and […]
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The Chinese are here again (2)
November 17th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
As I explained in an earlier posting, this week I was in Oxford to lecture to a group of 18 officials from the Chinese municipality of Tianjin. I wanted to stimulate them to ask questions rather than simply listen to a prepared text and they were certainly willing to engage with me. It is always […]
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