Outpatient at Mater Dei

Back in December, when I was in Sofia, I noticed a dark, more-or-less rectangular shape in my field of vision when I opened my right eye after sleeping but which resolved itself after a few seconds. It was obviously a symptom of something but, as it wasn't affecting my life in any way and as …

L. L. Zamenhof and Zionism

The other day, walking through a small park in the district of Pietà on my way to Valletta, I was surprised to see a bust of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of the international auxiliary language known as Esperanto. My first thought was, I didn't know he had a connection with Malta. And, as it …

Maltese culture and language

My first introduction to Malta was via my childhood stamp collection and some richly coloured, colonial-era stamps. Subsequently, as a student, I came across Samuel Taylor Coleridge's account of his sixteen-month stay in 1804-5. He was struck by how noisy the place was. There's still a lot of noise here 220 years later. Too many …

Shorelines

There is something universal about seas and oceans and even standing on the shore you can sense it. Last year on a beach on a Greek island I was vividly reminded of childhood holidays by the sea on the other side of the world. More recently I have been living in the district of Msida …

In Bulgaria

My lack of knowledge of the Bulgarian language has made it difficult for me to get beyond a superficial understanding of the country but the very fact that so many people here (including the young) are strongly committed to their language and culture is revealing. Compared to Athens, Sofia seems gentler and more congenial. Bulgaria …

Athens interlude

I spent the latter part of October and most of November in Athens. The weather was glorious. And the rocky, dry, austere landscapes of Greece have always appealed to me. But economic pressures are obviously taking their toll and the country appears to be locked into a downward spiral. Just down the street from where …

Travel-related (and other) writing

Given that we live in a world in which a relatively high proportion of the population routinely travels abroad (whether for work, leisure or other reasons) and given the ready availability of documentary and other kinds of film which highlight the natural and social landscapes of every corner of the planet, traditional travel writing has …

In the Blue Mountains

Having given up the apartment in central Melbourne which I had leased for more than a decade, I have been staying for the most part in hotels – and intend to continue to do so. The general plan is to travel in a slow and leisurely way as I consider my longer term options. One …

On current geopolitical tensions

Photo by Soly Moses on Pexels.com Current American foreign policy settings are arguably at the root of our most serious and urgent geopolitical problems. Under the influence of advisors committed to extreme forms of neoconservatism, aspects of policy have become disconnected from reality, even delusional. In fact, the Cold War period was sane by comparison. …

AI, work and human dignity

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Speculations about the impact of AI and imagined technological utopias or dystopias necessarily draw on - and reveal a lot about - our fundamental assumptions about human nature. Robert Gressis recently wrote a piece on these themes. Though his approach is open and undogmatic, his basically metaphysical (and indeed Kantian) …