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This blog takes its title from the fact that kindness originally meant being kin, or kindred, or of the same kind – a reminder, if you like, that we are all humankind. I post regularly on Friday. Enter your email address below to Follow and receive each post direct to your inbox. A Few Kind Words is now also on Substack if you prefer to read it there: https://substack.com/@jamiejauncey.
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Tag Archives: stories
In the beginning …
A friend sent me an article from a recent edition of the Harvard Journal of Management, not my normal bedtime reading. It reports how a group of scholars and business leaders came together to consider the great challenges involved in … Continue reading →
Stories for life
If you’ve never been there, Llandudno is a charming, and at this time of year extremely bracing, Victorian seaside town on the north coast of Wales. It’s also home to Venue Cymru, the national conference centre of North Wales. We … Continue reading →
Sheep and goats
Tomorrow morning early I’m leaving for Geneva to see my 18 year-old son who’s working for the winter season at a French ski resort. I won’t pretend that I don’t envy him. Last time I flew to Geneva I was … Continue reading →
Reading for survival
Last week I learned that my young adult novel, The Reckoning, has made it onto a government-sponsored list of 250 books for teenagers. Every secondary school in England will receive their choice of 15 titles from the list, free, as … Continue reading →
Sob story
‘The sob is in the story. It mustn’t be in the voice.’ So said Antonia Fraser on Radio 4’s Front Row this week. She was speaking of her difficulty in reading aloud the love poem by her late husband, Harold … Continue reading →
An act of creation
My colleague John Simmons blogged a couple of days ago on the Writers & Artists site about the significance of the place you write being as much to do with mental as physical location. I agree with him. I’m writing … Continue reading →
Christmas shopping
I’m conscious that I ended last week’s post on a negative generalisation, making the point that in the world of business, bad writing so often puts paid to good ideas. But precisely because so much of it is so poor, … Continue reading →
Advanced magic
The visionary Arthur C Clarke once said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I spent an intriguing day this week in the presence of just such magic, at the Informatics Department of Edinburgh University. Informatics is the science … Continue reading →
Goethe got it
I sometimes work in my local library, the AK Bell in Perth. On the walls of its café are quotations about literature and writing from famous literary figures. There’s one by Goethe that often catches my eye: ‘When ideas fail, … Continue reading →
Creative constraints
I listened to an intriguing programme on Radio Four yesterday while driving south down the M6 in horizontal rain. Presented by the miscellaneous Ben Schott, it documented the Oulipo movement, one of whose members, Georges Perec, famously wrote a novel … Continue reading →
A Few Kind Words 