Category: Alternative Voice

“May you live in interesting times”, runs the apochryphal Chinese curse. Whatever the source, we all get the meaning well enough. In fact, the closest the Chinese have to this saying is “…better to live as a dog in a time of peace, than a human in time of war”. Not quite the same thing […]

It wasn’t always so but somewhere in my mid-thirties I became a felophile, if such a word exists. If that sounds depraved, it actually isn’t. I mean, I am one of those who adores cats. I don’t think I have ever come across a cat I haven’t liked, even the most psychopathically vicious, and there […]

Vegetarians & Vegans even greater risk than supposed, reports show As a vegetarian or vegan you are probably aware of the dangers of nutrient deficiency in the nutrients B12 and also ( but less well known), choline. Despite this knowledge, what you may not be aware of is the research showing vegetarians, and more particularly […]

Talking to a millennial the other day he happened to mention that he’d just finished reading “Sapiens” a book written by the young Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, which gallops through human history in  400 pages, relating how homo sapiens had come to dominate the earth. It is masterfully done in a rather hip flip  […]

In the strange combination of circumstances that at times conspire to rule, enliven or bedevil us, my wife and I found ourselves drawn back to Hong Kong, a city undergoing a long hot Summer and a protest movement turned violent that threatens to destroy it. Both my wife, who is French, and myself, a Brit, […]

Barely a year goes by without there being a supposedly independent survey, published by a supposedly reputable medical journal, to tell us that taking dietary supplements is a waste of money and they just don’t work. Of course, it has to be said that barely a week goes by without there being claims made, quoting […]

  We know that… So why is all going the wrong way? As goes America, so goes the world – or so it would seem when it comes to health trends. Current statistics in the US, alas now paralleled elsewhere in the developed and developing world, show that: 60 percent of Americans have a chronic […]

  S.E. Asian Art market pays off for mid-range Players  In 1891 French painter Paul Gauguin aged 42 scandalised large sections of French society abandoning his country, his wife and a respectable profession as a stockbroker to live and paint in Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he died in 1903. His colourful and symbolic style […]

The Bali expatriate community has a particular flavour all its own. Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta even, Bali is not a financial or commercial centre. Most foreigners who come here are tourists. Foreigners who come here to work and who have stayed for any length of time are here mostly in a travel-related capacity. In […]

I read the other day that Bali’s very own Kintamani dog has been declared a recognised breed by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), the world body that decides such things. I would imagine it now means the price of buying a Kintamani dog will go up and breeders will vie to exhibit the breed in […]