Blogs from District Two, Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast, Vietnam, Asia

Having just written about my Top 20 Movies, I am in the mood for another list, so here now are my Top 20 Paintings. I have always loved paintings. From my list, you will see that I prefer realistic to abstract art. I have no time at all for the vacuous daubs of Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock. And I hate the so-called art of Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and Jeff Koons. I prefer old-fashioned realism to modern expressionism. The only expressionist painting in my Top 20 is Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Living in Vietnam, I miss the London National Gallery, which was on my doorstep when I lived in Reading. Whenever I took the train from Reading to Paddington, I made a point of visiting the National Gallery. I went there so often it became like an ... read more

I spent the greater part of my childhood at 36 Hatherley Road, Reading, U.K. Dad bought the house – an end-of-terrace – in 1955, and I lived there continuously until leaving for university in 1970. Thereafter, until selling it in 2017, I stayed in the house at regular and frequent intervals. I wrote a long blog about 36 Hatherley after selling it (https://www.travelblog.org/Europe/United-Kingdom/blog-992855.html). Being the house where I spent my childhood, it is dear to my heart, full of memories of growing up with Mum and Dad. It now occurs to me that I have never written in detail about the back garden. The more I think about it, the more I realize how important that garden was to me. So now let me set down in print the things I remember about it. The garden ... read more

I first came across the term ‘peak experience’ from Colin Wilson. Sometime in the mid-1980s, I bought a little book entitled ‘The Essential Colin Wilson’ - a collection of essays extracted from Wilson's voluminous and eclectic output. The essays cover a wide range of subjects - psychology, philosophy, criminality, parapsychology and peak experiences. Later, in 2009, he published a full-length study of peak experiences: ‘Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience’. A ‘peak experience’ is a moment of the highest happiness and fulfilment, an altered state of consciousness characterized by euphoria. Wilson did not invent the term; it was coined by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1964 book ‘Religions Values and Peak Experiences’. Maslow is best known for his ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory, a pyramid delineating human needs from t... read more

I have just come across a table of statistics on the internet that fascinates me. In 16th- and 17th-century London, in response to recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague, the authorities published a weekly bill of mortality. The Great Plague of London, which hit the city in the summer of 1665, is estimated to have killed between 75,000 and 100,000 Londoners (out of a total population of about 460,000). The bill of mortality shown here gives the death tally of all city parishes for the week of August 15th - 22nd, 1665, when the plague had infected 96 out of 130 parishes. If medicine was still somewhat uncertain about causes of death, those in charge of totting up deaths for the bills of mortality were even more so. As the Royal Society of Medicine’s website notes, “ ... read more

I have one photo of Auntie Chrissie, my mother’s elder sister. It is Blu-tacked to the display case in my living-room, coincidentally (and ironically, as you will see) next to a bottle of Laphroaig whisky. I put it there because I like looking at it – a memory of my youth in Reading and a memory of her. Seeing that photo yesterday, I decided to write down my memories of Auntie Chrissie. Growing up in Reading, U.K., with my Irish parents, I was cut off from their families, who lived in Ireland and never ventured abroad. I never knew my grandparents, who all died young, but my father had two siblings, Tommy and Bessie, and my mother two more, Willie and Chrissie. The only time as an adult that I ever met Tommy and Bessie and ... read more