A Society of Amateurs

When did the word amateur take on such negative connotations? We talk of an “amateur mistake” or an “amateurish performance”. What? The performance of someone who loves to perform? That sounds like a compliment. The word is derived from the Latin “amator”, simply meaning lover. Over time it has been constructed in opposition to “professional”, and the implication is that anything not pursued with money as the primary motive is second-rate, shoddy, worthless. When did money-making become a guarantee of quality? How many of our favourite albums, books, paintings, plays, films were pursued with dollar signs in the eyes of their creator? Unless your favourite film is The Hangover: Part 2 the answer is not many. In fact there’s a credible argument that anything created simply to cash in will always be tainted by this original sin. It will be soulless and trite (see The Hangover: Part 2.)

Botox on the Beach - A Poem

There's botox on the beach,
There's silicon in the sand,
Poseidon's striding out the sea with a scalpel in his hand,

Offsetting Flares

To the residents of Little Rock, Arkansas, news of Friday's earthquake near Blackpool would not come as a surprise. Shale gas extraction there was halted in March after 800 earthquakes in six months, including the strongest in 35 years, caused some bright spark to realise that perhaps forcing millions of gallons of water into the ground in order to fracture the rock might not have had the best impact on the region's seismic activity. Undeterred by this and evidence that the fracking process poisons water supplies, the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee of the House of Commons, Tim Yeo, last month declared concerns about the safety of fracking to be "hot air" and recommended that extraction proceed.