If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?
I returned to the fields of glory, where the green grass an' flowers grow,An' the wind softly sings the story of the braves lad of long ago.In the great glen, they lie a-sleeping, where the cool waters gently flow,An' the grey mist is sadly weeping for the brave lads of long ago.See the tall grass is there a-waving as their flags were so long ago;With their heads high, were forward braving, marching onwards to meet the foe.March no more, my soldier laddie, there is peace where there once was war.Sleep in peace, my soldier laddie. Sleep in peace now, the battle's o'er.
If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.
Annie's message is timeless, her shining spirit and healing gift from the Spiritual Universe will capture your heart. She was born with birth defects in a time when special children and their mothers were put to death or banished. But have things changed really that much? Have they changed enough? "No!" Bullying, abuse, ridicule, and inequality thrives in the lives of women and children in our global modern society, just as surely as it did in the mid-1600s Colonial America. Based on factual research.
Lydia had been fantasizing about him to the point she nearly drove him insane with it. It had taken four days for his energy to weaken inside her enough that he could go and visit her without fear she would throw him across the town in a gust of wind, and thus cause a scene. Although, getting run out of town after one day would be a new MacGregor record.
There ya are.” Erik grinned at her as he came bounding down the steps two at a time. He stepped around his statue of a sister as if such a thing were normal. Perhaps here it was. He paused, nodding at Malina. “Morning, banshee.” He gave a small brotherly laugh and poked his thumb toward her face. “She does kind of look like a banshee with her hair flying around like that and her mouth all open. Yeah, ma froze her good. See how her eyes don’t move?” Erik leaned closer to her and grinned as he looked into her mouth. “Ha, Euann put a mint in there.
I had zero idea of what I was doing.. I honestly had no idea where to start. All I knew was I had something I craved to say.. I wanted to create art that lived on longer than I do. Perseverance and teaching yourself, every day through stress and hard work proves shit really does progress without you realizing. One minute you're an amateur, knowing nothing, not even the basics. The next you can put pen to paper, write a song, and create art in such little time! It's crazy beautiful.
...but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.
If you can't tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I'm saying "hoe" or "bitch" I am actually referring to men. ...That sounded bad, in someway. But at the end of the day, I'm sick of rappers using "bitches" and "hoes" as terms towards women. Feminists are NOT a hate group. Feminists are not all female. Nor has it got an anti-male agenda. It's about equality! I've had a weird, special bond with women since I was a kid. And it's just a shame really that I'm gay.
He poured a splash of liquid into a second cup. “Come in and warm yerself by the fire.” Ariana walked deeper into the room, toward the glow of the hearth. It’s heat enveloped her skin and eased away the chill with such expediency, she almost sighed. Connor appeared beside her with a metal cup extended. “I canna sleep often myself.” She closed her fingers around the cool surface and glanced at the dark liquid within. A sharp scent hit her nostrils. “Whisky,” Connor said. He was perfection in the firelight. Shadows etched his jaw while the light softened his face, his lips. The powerful lines of his chest were visible at the neck of his leine, as well as a dark peppering of small curling black hairs. “Whisky,” Ariana said with a forced stare at the cup instead of him. “Of course. I drink this all the time.” “Aye, I knew that about ye. When I first saw ye, I thought, ‘Now there’s a lass who can handle her whisky.’” Connor winked at her with disarming playfulness. “It’ll do ye some good. Take off the chill and settle yer thoughts.” “Why do you assume my thoughts are unsettled?” she asked. He took a swallow from his cup. “Because sleep comes easily to those without weight on their minds.” Ariana took a careful sip from her own cup, the way she’d seen men at the card tables drink. The liquid burned like sin down her throat and caught in her chest. She gritted her teeth and swallowed hard several times to keep from sputtering. Though she’d hoped to keep her reaction discreet, the grin on Connor’s face told her he saw through her guise. “It’s good.” Her voice came out in a croak and Connor laughed. It was a warm, rich sound and she found it terribly pleasing. His eyes crinkled. “Now that we’ve discovered yer love of whisky, why dinna ye tell me what’s got yer thoughts heavy?
Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!'I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?"Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face.
As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.
Lachlan frowned as he misjudged the distance and his forehead hit Cormag's head with a bump. He wrapped his arms around his neck to steady himself, two big hands reaching up to hold onto his arms as if to offer extra support. “You,” he began, talking quietly into his ear, “are so beautiful,” he confessed, resting his heavy skull against Cormag's for a moment.He meant it as well. Cormag was stunning. He was taller and broader than he was, very much the fine figure of hotness. His dark hair was well kept, but a little messy, he had amazing bone structure; the type that made him look more like a model than a museum manager. A chiselled jaw, nicely defined cheekbones and a rugged quality thatmade him so appealing. He had never noticed how handsome a male face could be until those eyes drew him in.“And so are you,” his companion chuckled, “but we discussed this…I've ruined every relationship I've ever had. I get needy, possessive and my baggage gets in the way.Besides,” he lowered his voice to a whisper and brushed his hand over his upper arm, “You're not gay,” he protested, reminding him yet again that they were different.“Nope. Not gay,” he agreed with that, nodding his head as he pulled back a little to see him better. “But that doesn't make you any less beautiful. Why is it wrong that I can see how special you are?” he asked, having difficulty understanding why part of his brainwas telling him he was being a drunken idiot and that the man before him wasn'tattractive. But the rest of his brain – about ninety-eight percent of it – was telling him that he was the most attractive person he'd ever seen.“It's not, Lachlan. It really isn't.”“But it's somehow wrong for me to tell you?” Lachlan wondered, glancing across the bar to see Matteo smiling at him. He didn't know what it meant.Cormag cupped his face, capturing his undivided attention again. “No. Not thateither. But it makes it hard for me to keep my distance. You're stunning. Inside and out,” he claimed, with chocolatey eyes that said he meant every word.
Cormag caught his hand and pulled him back until they were facing each other. “I think you're amazing,” he said, blurting the words out.Lachlan smiled, completely shocked and thrilled by how captivating he found him.He had never thought this could happen to him, that he would be attracted to another boy.He thought he knew himself so well.“I think you're smart, sexy, funny as hell. You have hidden depths, Lachlan. You only need the right person to coax you out of your protective shell,” he claimed.“Are you the right person?” Lachlan wondered, as he took a half step forward.Cormag took a deep breath and brushed at a strand of hair that was sticking out at a funny angle from behind the top of his ear. He tugged at his short hair every time he talked about his recent break up. He was such a dork.
He shook his head and thought about it for a second. “Maybe I'm not straight? Can I still be straight when I'm sitting here looking into your eyes?” he asked. Maybe it was the alcohol talking or maybe he wasn't as straight as he thought he was.“Yes. Absolutely.” Cormag nodded and watched him closely.“Even when I think they're so pretty? They are, you know. So many different shades of brown…and a little green. Just a touch; not a lot. So pretty.” He sighed happily, watching those dark eyes staring back at him in surprise. He lay his head on his arms, smiling at the way Cormag flushed in embarrassment and turned his full attention onto his bottle of beer.“Wow, you are super drunk.
We took morphine, diamorphine, cyclozine, codeine, temazepam, nitrezepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal dextropropoxyphene, methadone, nalbuphine, pethidine, pentazocine, buprenorphine, dextromoramide chlormethiazole. The streets are awash with drugs that you can have for unhappiness and pain, and we took them all. Fuck it, we would have injected Vitamin C if only they'd made it illegal.
I had turned to leave and he had called after me. “Miss Maria, I kin no other woman who could be wearing men’s trousers and be dripping such as ye are and look quite so lovely. It’s a right shame your mother is marrying you off to that great sot!”I had turned to call back to him, “I doubt very much we will have to worry about that after today!
We left the nursery in silence, Ma smoking a roll-up, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week or maybe like she had slept for a whole week. When the nursery was just a grubby finger smudge behind us Ma looked down at me and said in her poshed-up telephone voice: “Will you speak to Janie about swearing? Fuckin’ busybody!”I laughed and swung our linked hands.“Aye, fuckin’ busybody.”Pleas of laughter escaped us and spiraled up into the hot, blue Scottish sky. We laughed all the way home
Though the continued march of intellect and education have nearly obliterated from the mind of the Scots a belief in the marvelous, still a love of the supernatural lingers among the more mountainous districts of the northern kingdom; for 'the Schoolmaster' finds it no easy task, even when aided by all the light of science, to uproot the prejudices of more than two thousand years. ("The Phantom Regiment")
Someday, I’ll gain telepathic powers like every other regular movie ghost and I will go all Freddie Krueger on his bony, little, rat arse!”I rolled my eyes, but kept marching down the street.“Then I’d have to go all Ghostbusters on yours.”, I tried to keep my voice low to keep from drawing attention to myself.“No, you wouldn’t. You love my arse, darling!”, he walked backwards few feet in front of me.His big smile was enough to make me grin and roll my eyes again at him.