• Harry Karasek – Nationality isn’t simple

    Putting names and a history to people who are or were; immigrants, migrants, aliens, expats, exiles, refugees, asylum seekers or emigres, I believe can go some way to fight the use of such English terms to degenerate or even de-humanise our view of people. I am an immigrant, a privileged one as I am white,… Continue Reading

  • Der Weltkrieg In Seiner Rauhen Wirklichkeit

    Looking through a box in der German house (day 23 since I moved) I came across this first edition book – ‘Der Weltkrieg In Seiner Rauhen Wirklichkeit’ or ‘The World War In Its Harsh Reality’ published in Germany in 1926. The book contains 600 black and white photographs taken by Hermann Rex for the German… Continue Reading

  • John Parr WW1 Cyclist

    A Sunday trip to visit a friend in Finchley, London saw me walk from Woodside Park Tube Station and along Lodge Lane. Although I nearly missed it, I spotted a plaque placed on the pavement in front of a modest house flagging up that the first British soldier to die in World War One spent… Continue Reading

  • Earlsfield Cemetery – let’s create the NHS

    My post about the Gottingen Stadtfriedhof in central Germany and the sense of abandonment I felt whilst there, got me thinking. It made me think closer to home and so now I stand in Earlsfield Cemetery in Wandsworth, south London. At the dawn of the 20th Century European nations were tied together by many separate treaties, which… Continue Reading

  • Gottingen StadtFriedhof – abandonment

    Separation, abandonment or ‘left behind’ are words that will scare most of us. These thoughts came into my head as I stood in a Stadtfriedhof in deepest central Germany. Before me stood two grave stones and a third not in sight but close by of three soldiers of the ‘Great War’. What sparked a reaction… Continue Reading