Benefit Street, Brighton.

I went yesterday to a funeral of a woman I admire greatly. She was ninety-five years old when she died - but wow! How she'd lived those ninety-five years! Her contemporaries didn't seem to find the story of her life particularly unusual because, of course, they'd lived similarly full and exciting lives.  But the effect on the young adults present was electrifying! It was one which has led me down several different paths. And of course the one I've taken is idiosyncratic: - I've come to feel desperately sorry for them! That was a feeling I'd begun to experience when I first came across the phrase "wild swimming."  It was not, as I was imagining it, some 'Ancient Briton'  re-enactment; or people covered in mud and feathers and tribal costumes leaping off cliffs into distant pools. It was a word purely coined to refer to the act of propelling oneself through any body of water which is not the sea or a swimming pool. The idea that ...

                                                      My middle name is Arabic. In modern Britain I’m one of many millions. However in a series of convent school in Australia in my dewy days of youth,  my very name was considered an act of wilful sedition. Until Yrs. 11 & 12 I had never come across a nun who didn’t consider it rather uncouth not to have a “dacent” name like Mary, Ann, Elizabeth or, if one wanted to go foreign, then  the Italian “Maria” should satisfy all yearning for the exotic.  Opting for Arabic however, was very definitely OTT. Despite any question of the fairness of the thing, the logic involved in nuns taking against me for my parents transgression escaped me for many years. When I came across the “sins of the father’s” meme it finally became clear. The nuns, it must be said, took against m...