My name is Joel Lazarus. After leaving university, like so many young men and women today, I went to work in finance. After five years working on trading floors in Tokyo and London, I left to get a postgraduate education that took me first to SOAS and then on to Oxford. I completed my PhD in October 2011. Read more…
The Broken Boy is an Edinburgh based singer-songwriter, who you may have met around town busking, or heard playing in one of the city’s many music-friendly pubs. He is currently working towards the release of his debut LP, On the Mend: Ready to Fly.
His music is soulful, yet still folk-like in its composition, and the acoustic instrumentation keeps the performance connected with the listener on a personal level. It is sewn around tales of loss, hope and joy, taking you on a journey from the despair of Katie, through the hope of Home into the light of Shine.
That education is a living, not a mechanical process, is a truth as freely admitted as it is persistently ignored (lecture in Calcutta in 1936 quoted in Dutta and Robinson 1995, page 323)
The LGBT Basketball Group is so much fun. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes me feel safer, more accepted or more welcome at this group as I think a number of things contribute to it. Taking part in sport requires confidence and my confidence gets stronger the moment I turn up to this group. Whilst my sexuality is barely mentioned, I get this buzz from being around other LGBT people, like a quiet recognition that we have something in common.
As we often socialise after the session I can also chat about my girlfriend and what’s going on for me in my life, without feeling like I’m in the minority. I have years of experience of enduring ‘locker-room banter’ about boyfriends, people’s social and love lives and I can be part of that now, but being completely myself.
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Those of us who have been campaigning committedly, year in, year out over decades to end the arms trade have done so with no illusions as to the formidable nature of the task, or the very long process that will be involved. This process has to take into account the economic, social and political context, both national and global which is ever changing.
At national level there is an awareness of the extent of the entrenchment of arms dealing in a system which, irrespective of which political party is in power, represents an establishment cemented by common educational privilege, based on wealth, and tightly enclosed access to positions of power in finance, industry and politics…
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Transition is a global/local environmental movement: work in your community, but benefit from a global network of people working out of a similar model. The following is a brief outline of what Transition is, lessons I’ve learned and plans for the future. This is a movement as diverse as its network and framework for setting up groups are handy, so I must stress that my experiences are just that: my own.
So hi, I’m Sarah and I began to Transition with a capital T after answering an ad two years ago for a volunteer copywriter with a local Transition group. Currently, I’m the lead editor of the monthly Transition Edinburgh Newsletter (Plug: do subscribe if you’re interested in community and eco events in Edinburgh) and in the process of starting up a community group in Meadowbank with friends and neighbours. Read more…
The rain has gone off with unusually perfect timing for my walk. I’ve hopped on a bus and then walked along the road to where I was born and grew up. The river is behind me as I face the little flats my family once called home. To my left is a huge concrete square. The paving stones are still higgledy piggledy. We usually ignored those bits of higgledy piggledy. It didn’t stop us playing, tig, kick-the-can-run-away, two-man hunt, football, whizzing around on our bikes, or trying unsuccessfully to play tennis.
Our lines were marked out with the green paint someone had found and marked out a tennis court with. You know that council building green paint, the same paint every building seemed to have on every wall inside? That paint. We used a bit of old orange nylon rope tied between two of the trees that were meant to make it look nice. Nice. I don’t remember those little trees looking nice; they were bare twigs. Those improvised tennis court lines are long gone now. Read more…