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Author: Gillian Bouras

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Age and attitude

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 July 2020
    24 Comments

    I think it is not only our duty to look after the aged, but a task that brings its own reward in the form of companionship, expressed wisdom, and guidance as to how to manage life’s testing times. I have always had friends decades older than I, and those friendships have been a privilege.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Blaming and buying

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 18 May 2020
    13 Comments

    Nothing in the world is single, as Shelley said, and we have proof of this in the general reaction to COVID-19. That spirit, however, seems to have its limitations. For some politicians are set on dividing people, rather than on uniting them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning in a time of pestilence

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 May 2020
    15 Comments

    What turned out to be extraordinary was the familiarity of the subject matter, and the routines that Camus makes the authorities of the plague-ridden Algerian town Oran put in place: the quarantine, the isolation hospitals, the attempts to develop a vaccine, the volunteer health workers, and the way in which funerals were conducted in haste.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Good news from Greece

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 April 2020
    17 Comments

    In these troubled times of COVID-19, most news bulletins concentrate on the daunting figures from Italy, Spain, Britain and the USA. Little countries don’t get much of a mention. Greece is a little country.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Language and prejudice

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 March 2020
    15 Comments

    I have been bemused to read the result of a recent poll taken in Britain. It suggests that 26 per cent of people feel ‘uncomfortable’ when hearing foreign languages spoken. Me, I feel envious, simply wishing that I was more of a linguist.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Coming soon or late

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 14 February 2020
    13 Comments

    That’s it. People in mid-life fear death for many reasons, but disappointment must be one of them, for there are always so many things to do, so much in the world to see and to experience, a whole host of people to get to know, various ambitions to be realised, a great number of projects to be finished.

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  • RELIGION

    New year epiphany in a burning world

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 January 2020
    7 Comments

    This New Year saw me becoming a Twitter tragic so that I could keep up with the news of disastrous fires in Australia, and fires of a different sort in the Middle East. It all seemed too much. On the day after Epiphany, a major feast day in the Orthodox Church, I found myself outside Kalamata's Church of the Archangels, and went in to light a candle.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dickens and Christmas as we grow older

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 13 December 2019
    5 Comments

    Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'.

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  • EDUCATION

    Teachers earn and deserve their holidays

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 December 2019
    9 Comments

    It's that time again, when exhausted teachers are wondering whether they'll make the distance and finish the school year with their sanity more or less intact. It's also the time when they have to endure snide remarks about 'a really cushy job' and 'all those holidays'. But it's not a cushy job. I know: my brother and I were third-generation teachers.

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  • RELIGION

    The light in John Henry Newman's darkness

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 November 2019
    6 Comments

    Dad is out watering the garden, but all the front windows are open, so he can hear the piano and his wife and two daughters singing. He often hums along to our repertoire, which is a mixture of Anglo-Celtic songs, Australian numbers — and, memorably, 'Lead, Kindly Light', written by the recently canonised St John Henry Newman.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nazi fable's modern resonance

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 October 2019
    9 Comments

    A major part of Martin's so-called patriotism is anti-Semitism, and Martin soon uses the well-worn trope in which the prejudiced person makes an exception of an individual. After declaring that the Jewish race is 'a sore spot', Martin tells Max he has loved him not because of his race but in spite of it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Conscientious capitalists

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 24 September 2019
    6 Comments

    Raised by Politically Pink Parents, I was in my youth rather wary and suspicious of capitalism and capitalists. Eventually I realised that the only thing wrong with money is that not everyone has enough of it. We hear too much about arch-capitalists like the Trumps and the Koch brothers.

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