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Shafts of light
From the chilly, detached sadness of last week, unexpected changes – a day and a bit that were more entwined with the life, and lives, around me – Friday, an official reception – you know the drill: speeches, food, suits, paintings for sale. But this one has much more life in it than most: an LGBT History…
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Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire
If you think about it all: rot, chaos, aggression. Disintegration. But my desk remains, my job remains, my friends and colleagues remain… I buy food, talk to students, plan trips. There are no problems. To be honest, there have been some fairly disastrous periods even during my lifetime when one couldn't depend on governments for simple…
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Summa
A dramatic year… One that stank for the world, of course: major moves into aggressive idiocy. But it's not very interesting to talk about Brexit and the UK, Trump and America. Or about dead celebrities – some good people are gone, yes, but that happens always. And many of them were old enough that grieving doesn't seem…
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Sketch of a conversation
… You didn't really think you were having strokes, did you. Well, if memory – no, I suppose not; there would be other symptoms? Yes, there would. So: dissociation. But more dissociation than I should expect, yes? That sense over the last few months, from the last year – more connected, more of myself aware of…
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28 December
Shopping, shopping: but the sizes keep being wrong. A bag is missing: where did I go yesterday, where could I have left it? A shower to recover clarity, remembering the handsome young man who caught up to me in the mall yesterday to ask how was my dinner with friends last week – a sense…
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The best lines
"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it…
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Paul Attinello 