The other day, I was watching Hacksaw Ridge. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must see. It stars Andrew Garfield playing Desmond T. Doss, a conscientious objector who wants to participate in the war as a medic, but who refuses to fire a single shot, partly out of religious reasons, partly because of a […]

You know, everyone likes a good zero to hero story. Take Rocky, for example. He’s down on his luck, but good fortune comes his way as he receives an invite to the biggest boxing match of his career. Rocky decides that he’s in, and that he’ll do whatever it takes. Cue the training montage. We

The other day I came across this documentary about Queen, the rock band best known for such hits as We Will Rock You, Bohemian Rhapsody – in case you haven’t been around for long enough. The documentary promised to show the connection between Christmas and the band Queen. Personally I wasn’t aware there was much

It’s Saturday morning, around 11.15 am. I’m sitting in the same barber shop I’ve been to for about fifteen years now, give or take. The barber, a red head in her late fifties (early sixties perhaps), is rinsing my hair with hot water. Meanwhile, she’s talking to the previous customer who’s still there, waiting for

The other day, I returned from my dentist appointment. It was still raining, but for a brief moment I just stood there, admiring my car. I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks, and I’m still in awe of it. It’s a dark grey sedan, and while there are plenty of more expensive, faster

Doesn’t it feel like we’re going through some kind of dystopian sci-fi novel the last few years? On that topic, let me talk about this book which I’ve just read, called Never Let Me Go. Imagine you’re eighty years old and you’re dying of organ failure. Imagine the doctors just pop in some new organs

A whole bunch of great TV series came out during my teen years. During the mid 2000s, I remember catching my first episode of House MD. It was around 11 pm and it lasted to around midnight. I was pretty tired I remember, and I would have turned it off in a heartbeat if it

Publishing’s a strange, strange business. Over here, in the Dutch-speaking countries of Belgium and The Netherlands, it’s possibly even stranger. I’ve recently read this article, discussing a publisher best known for their literary novels. Finding themselves forced to cut jobs for the second time in a year, they lament that fact that people just aren’t

For eight years of my life, I used to be in a swimming club – which makes it sound much more grandiose than it has any right to. In reality, that means I got dragged into it at age seven, kind of liked it for a few years, and grew to dislike it the last

It was late December of 2019. The school principal wanted to speak to me in his office, when I had time. The last two months, I’d been teaching at a school nearby home, filling in for a mathematics teacher who’d been hit by a burn-out. I’d done so, despite the fact that I wasn’t a