Paul Tritschler

3 weeks ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Paul Tritschler

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” — Brillat-Savarin, 1825Getting back into fasting after a break is difficult. In the past I would fast for two days in every week, but occasionally challenged myself to extend that by a day or two, maybe three, until one day — evidently one day too many — I collapsed like a device unplugged and cracked my head on the sink and toilet bowl on the way down to the stone floor. Syncope is a lovely word, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience.

1 month ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Paul Tritschler

The old man tried to keep one room clear of clutter. There were tangled heaps of unrelated things behind closed doors, filling both cupboards and rooms, and there was evidence of his hoard slowly establishing itself in the hall. There was, however, one meticulously tidy room and it was a sanctuary of sorts. Order and disorder co-existed in stark contrast under his roof, but more importantly in his mind, and given their increasingly uneven distribution it appeared chaos was winning.

1 month ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Paul Tritschler

“We’ve become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.” (Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune, Christmas, 1986)On returning home to Edinburgh, after my somewhat desultory wanderings afar for some years, I found some of its districts, historic and otherwise, crammed with charity shops. Most were squeezed between struggling businesses, run-down café chains and shuttered premises bearing faded To Let signs.

1 month ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Paul Tritschler

From my kitchen window I watched the snow white cat patrol its territory, gliding gracefully between the lavender blue bed sheets flapping in the back green of this old grey Edinburgh tenement. It was observed keenly by the cat on the flat tin roof, a mackerel ginger tabby that typically hunched its back in mock readiness to jump each time snow white passed.

1 month ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Paul Tritschler

Metempsychosis is a form of madness, but one devoid of any diagnostic criteria. It is not characterised by disturbances of reasoning, dysfunctional thinking, delusions, paranoia or hallucinations. It is simply the belief in the immortality of the soul, hingeing on its transmigration into another body at time of death. Believers hope this process of rebirth will evolve through purifications to the point that corporeal life and its concupiscent appetites will eventually end.