Rosita and I decided to spend the Lunar New Year holidays away in some warmer place; everyone had been expecting a cold spell. We had thought of Bali, but very few travel agents were operating tours at the time and spending a week in one hotel with no programme was not exactly an exciting proposition,…
Today, Catholics celebrated the Fourth Sunday of the Year and the Gospel reading was taken from Matthew 5:1 – 12. This is the passage which includes Matthew’s reports on the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Luke also made similar reports in his book. Almost each sentence and phrase in the passage has been…
I have been travelling again these days. By the end of the week, I would have been away for ten days, in Kobe for three and Geneva the rest, or most of the rest. I have been to most of these places before and inevitably these re-visits brought back old memories, including some rather old…
First, Christmas, then New Year, and Epiphany yesterday completed the holiday season, or as a former colleague put it, a crazy fortnight during which one could not get anyone to make any decisions of significance and even after decisions were made, they could not be kept for long. At first, I thought my colleague was…
The year began with midnight fireworks from Sydney to Hong Kong and Beijing to Singapore. Ukraine’s Chernobyl atomic power plant showed no signs that it would malfunction, while London’s Big Ben rang at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as it would for every night. There was heightened security in the United States, but no major incidents…
That is what Pope John Paul II urged the faithful around the world to take up during the homily at the Christmas Eve Mass this year inside St. Peter’s Basilica, televised live to hundreds of millions of people in 47 countries. This year’s Christmas follows conflicts between nations, terrorism and tension in the Middle East,…
Elvis is of course Elvis Presley, Ken, Ken Kesey and John and George, John Lennon and George Harrison. They have all died, some longer than others; and I have named them in the order they were born. Everyone my age and many others older or younger know Elvis. In the early Sixties in Wah Yan…
As we move towards another Christmas, marking the end of another eventful year, Rosita and I would like to thank our families and friends for the wonderful things they have done for us and to us all the time, knowingly or unknowingly, and in the manner and fashion they have done them. Our families and…
Shortly after I published my book, Letters from a Rotarian, I sent a copy to RI Past President Frank Devlyn. He sent me an email back with some encouraging words and asked me to promote his book, Frank Talk, and the avoidable blindness projects for which he started a Task Force in his year as…
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Stephanie had a very good friend who would discuss various aspects of life by email and who had read my book, Letters from a Rotarian, and so on. A very good old friend wasted no time to send me an upbeat message, thinking that this could be a…
