Yesterday I left you with the news that I had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. The most pressing questions at that point are: how bad is it? and can it be treated or even cured? Answering the first question is called staging. In my case the initial test was a CT scan to determine whether […]
They say you should always start a story in the middle, and boy did this one start that way! I was initially diagnosed with oesophageal cancer on 14 December 2009. But it took over four months from the time I first noticed something wrong until I got the diagnosis. I’ll tell that story today, then […]
Tagged cancerThe Open Rights Group today asked me to block Phorm from my website. As I hate the intrusion into people’s privacy that the Phorm system represents, I was happy to do so. Follow the link to see how to block Phorm/Webwise from your own sites, and to find other suggestions about how you too can […]
Tagged phormAs requested, here is a picture of my porta-booth. I have been using it for most of my recordings recently, which I do in the larder. It’s not a great room for recording, as it has far too many hard, reflective surfaces in it, but the porta-booth does a good job of damping down the […]
I built a porta-booth the other day, and was agog to test it out. I made two recordings in very similar, horribly challenging, conditions. For both of the recordings I was within 10 feet of a fridge whose motor was running, and I could hear vehicles passing outside the house. Each recording has a maximum […]
I have just finished the recording of Tom Brown’s School Days that I have been doing for LibriVox. This is my first solo project, and I’m very pleased with it. Now that I’ve finished, though, perhaps it’s time to think about what the book meant to me. I remembered the book from the 1970’s BBC […]
Via Conscientious I saw this poster. I can’t imagine what good the police think it will do. The number of false positives alone is likely to use up a huge amount of time. Perhaps the perpetrator of the campaign should be indicted for wasting police time. Allow me to clarify. How many terrorists are there […]
Fanny Hill is a famous, nay notorious, novel by John Cleland, whose heroine is a self-described woman of pleasure. The edition I read was the LibriVox audio version, recorded by multiple readers in the early part of 2006. It is the story of a young girl (she is no more than 20 years old at […]
Graham Masterton’s novel Chaos Theory is a thriller whose protagonist, stunt man Noah Flynn, becomes caught up in a puzzling series of murders that appear to be related to a medallion he found while diving. With the aid of a female colleague, whose skills seem frankly improbable, and a privately funded peace envoy and her […]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight is the fortnightly poem at the moment on LibriVox. It forms a circular journey of linked thoughts, starting with the frost on the window and moving through the writer’s own thoughts, to contemplations about his baby, sleeping in his arms. Next the fluttering flame in the grate reminds […]
