October 16, 2020 Columns by John Connor Resistance May Be Futile, but the Borg Taught Me Something OK, you’re not all science fiction nuts, so I’ll explain: The Borg are a cybernetic race and the lead baddies in the “Star Trek” universe — or, the way the latest Netflix iteration is going, the multiverse. Besides trying…
October 9, 2020 Columns by John Connor Fighting the Beast It was 3 p.m. last Thursday. Things should have been good. I had filed the copy for my previous column the day before. Ultimately, some of my outrageous musings had gone, and some I considered even worse had…
October 2, 2020 Columns by John Connor Everything You Wanted to Know About Poo, but I Was Afraid to Write Eurgh! Poo is what I fear most at the moment. I thought turning this column into a diary was cool. Following the greats, such as John Diamond, who chronicled his cancer to the end, takes me into some strange…
September 25, 2020 Columns by John Connor The Terrible 62s, or the Rage of the Non-toddler Adult It’s usually best to write with time for reflection. I often feel like a foreign correspondent reporting from the front line of my own bedroom! The shells of multiple sclerosis (MS) explode within me, and I’m suddenly airlifted into…
September 18, 2020 Columns by John Connor Like Iggy Says, ‘All Aboard for Funtime’ I’ve been a moderator at MS News Today Forums for a while. One of my jobs, besides rejecting the interminable bots that try to become members, is to promote interaction. This is the hard part. The bots are…
September 11, 2020 Columns by John Connor Turn It Off, Then On Again There’s always something! As a columnist, that comes in handy, as then I don’t have to think too much. Stop snickering at the back for thinking that I never think. How very dare you? If any of my fellow…
September 4, 2020 Columns by John Connor Einstein Said Time Is Relative, but Not For This Relative Albert Einstein proved that the faster you go, the less you’ll age compared with those you left at home. This effect, however, is imperceptible unless you have the ability to approach light speed or hang out near the gravity…
August 28, 2020 Columns by John Connor There’s No Business Like Show Business — Till There’s No Business In June, I wrote a column about accepting I’d have to physically retire from directing and producing my own stand-up stage show, “The Edge.” Now, because of that which cannot be named, the show is also being…
August 21, 2020 Columns by John Connor ‘Apocalypse Now’: I Love the Smell of Hashish in the Morning Helicopters were whirling in my brain. Turns out, it was a solitary police one. Though it was another hot night, my wife closed my windows in case of a prowler. I’m on the ground floor, after all. It was…
August 14, 2020 Columns by John Connor Relapse, Relapse, Relapse, Profanity, Relapse Maybe I should have called this one “Short and Sharp 2.” Yes, I’ve had another relapse, following my last one in May. I can no longer clean my own tail, and the present regime is literally to “…
August 7, 2020 Columns by John Connor It Was a Lazy Sunday Afternoon — Not! It all started on the hottest day of the year here in the U.K. My phone said it was 99 F. An old friend was coming over, and my youngest son, Jack, had kindly cleared a route to the…
July 31, 2020 Columns by John Connor The Mouth That Roared and Roared Strap in: This is not going to be a fun one. Even less so for me — though I’m writing this under the sort of drug load that Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud of!…
July 24, 2020 Columns by John Connor The Joy of Joining the ‘Downton Abbey’ Set For an espoused leftie, you might be surprised that I’ve always had the brush of the rugged individualist about me. Not quite Bear Grylls, but grabbing a rucksack and hitching across Canada still counts as my own…
July 17, 2020 Columns by John Connor It’s a Matter of Timing and Mic Technique In the U.K., stand-up comedy is currently dead. Like Python’s parrot, it “wouldn’t move if you put 4,000 volts through it!” That’s not strictly true. Our government has just stumped up 1.57 billion pounds ($1.97 billion) to support…
July 10, 2020 Columns by John Connor Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman In this case, the woman in question was yet again my wife, Jane. The hour in question was 4 p.m. on my usual day of writing. But on this day, writing had to be forgotten until a stint later…
July 6, 2020 Columns by John Connor Here Comes the Sun, and It’s All Too Much Yup, it’s the annual whinge about what heat does to most of us, this time livened up by a headline that includes two Beatles’ song titles. (Yes, I did have to scroll through their discography to find the…
June 26, 2020 Columns by John Connor A Morning With No Opera but Enough for a Small Choir! Last Wednesday my days of rest suddenly smashed to a halt. At one point it seemed like the majority of those who work for my local council’s social services (whom I should have also thanked for their immense…
June 19, 2020 Columns by John Connor All Quiet on the MS Front It hasn’t been that quiet in my surrounding world! Last week there was a crow fight so loud in our back garden that it echoed down the chimney into the front room that now is my bedroom. It…
June 12, 2020 Columns by John Connor So, Where Do I Start? Ah, it’s not the blank page that all writers fear that I’m worried about. Those days have long left me. Now it’s applying the discipline to stop! When I first started with a professional writing commission, I sat in…
June 5, 2020 Columns by John Connor Retirement: My Very Own Blackstar “At the center of it all” is the dignity of allowing myself to retire with grace. And it only took a world-shattering event to get me to come to my senses! I’d been running, directing, producing, and sometimes…
