Now that the issue of the legality of the Iraq invasion is back in the news big time, it still amazes me how people can contemplate with such equanamity the staggering loss of life and disruption to the infrastructure of society that the Iraqi people have suffered. I think of all the people who have lost relatives and friends, who have lived in fear all these years, who have lost their businesses, their homes, their jobs or who have had to flee to live as refugees in other countries - it is no justification to my way of thinking that under Sadam Hussein things were so bad - does that make it all right to be equally destructive? Are some people's conscience so easy over all this simply because they can't imagine such devastation happening to their own lives, or is it just that they can't think of other nationalities as deserving of compassion?

Keep Walking

"Keep Walking!", ink and wash, 2009

"Traveller, there is no path, Paths are made by walking". Antonio Machado



"Nowadays few subscribe to the silly distinction between mental activity and brain activity, as if airy-fairy thoughts were something that floated free, beamed in from Planet Zog. Everything that happens to you, everything you are thinking, has some kind of physical basis rooted in your physical brain. ... Although we are born with pretty much all the brain cells we will ever have, it is the growth of the connections after birth which accounts for the growth of our brains. Even into old age, one's brain remains 'plastic': that is to say, it is constantly dynamic, it is constantly evolving and changing, mirroring the connections that are created by your experiences and what you do." Susan Greenfield, Darwin College Lectures, 2001