welcome...

[french frank]

I am indeed who you think I am. Thanks for your kind words.

Yes, welcome, James

ff (FB friend aka as Sarah S )

[eighthobstruction]

hi PatrickMurtha

[PatrickMurtha]

hi PatrickMurtha

Thank you! I just discovered this forum today and thought I would give it a try, as I am a regular Radio 3 listener via the web. I am a retired humanities teacher (since November 2020), residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico. I rent a nice house here at a delightfully low cost. Singleton with a lot of animals (two dogs, six indoor cats). Besides taking care of the pets, I spend most of my time reading, listening to music, watching some movies and TV.

I have a blog (details in my profile). Although my experiences writing online are, well, mixed, I do like to write a few sentences here and there. Not that I sit down to write, the sentences and paragraphs just form in my head and kind of ask to be put down, and I oblige.

[pastoralguy]

Welcome, Mr. Murtha!

[richardfinegold]

Welcome, Mr. Murtha!

Ditto. We need another North American here

[french frank]

Happy to fill the bill, although kind of embarrassed to be an American lately. 🙄

Some of us here are following the news avidly!

Incidentally, on sticky topics: they don't work on the What's New? view (because they may not be new topics). They do work on the Forum view where there is a Welcome forum, as well as a Welcome topic (plus other topics). If they applied to the What's New? view the whole of the first page would be cluttered with stickies from various forums. I think that's the explanation for the software setup.

[vinteuil]

Happy to fill the bill, although kind of embarrassed to be an American lately. 🙄

... for the British, the recent 'embarrassments' of US politics have been a life-saver, as a deflection/diversion from the appalling state of UK politics in recent years!

.

[eighthobstruction]

Yes, we don't do politics anymore we just attach fat blond blaa blaa's to zip wires....and try to decypher the "Meu, Waa Chu Hrrrr Hwaa"'s as they pass by...

....Though we have moved on from that ....of course....the latest does at least speak English....but seems to think the ££ must remain down South...

[PatrickMurtha]

... for the British, the recent 'embarrassments' of US politics have been a life-saver, as a deflection/diversion from the appalling state of UK politics in recent years!

.

I can see that, yes. The state of things is just too disheartening, and since I am a traditionalist and nostalgist anyway, I just live in the past.

Politically I am a centrist, a shade center-right since I do have an elitist temperament. Burkean, perhaps. But there is nothing enticing to me on today’s Right, or Left either, so I feel unrepresented, and have learned from experience to focus more on my cultural than my political interests when writing online.

[richardfinegold]

Happy to fill the bill, although kind of embarrassed to be an American lately. 🙄

North American is not the same thing, and of course though Mexico may geographically be part of Nort America, culturally it belongs to Latin America. And no, I am not embarrassed to be American, any more than anyone else needs to be embarrassed about being from any other Western Hemisphere nation

[PatrickMurtha]

Well, I’m not Mexican, although I have permanent residency. It is surprising how little Mexico has to do with the rest of Latin America; you would think the country would take a leadership role there, but actually they disdain it. In fact, Mexico is the most inward-looking nation this side of North Korea. You can look at the history and see that they have always been isolationist. The current president, López Obrador, speaks no language other than Spanish and does not much like to leave the country; he deputizes people to attend the G20 Summits, even though he might gain something for Mexico by rubbing shoulders directly with his fellow world leaders. And although AMLO is an extreme example, the last president, Peña Nieto, was no great shakes on any of these fronts either.

The contrast with South Korea, where I have also lived and worked, is striking. That is a fully globalized nation whose educated citizens are completely up on everything going on internationally. One of my adult students told me, “We are a small country competing in a big world; we HAVE to know.” In a dozen years in Mexico, and also dealing with educated adults, I have not encountered anything like that attitude.

[HighlandDougie]

Bienvenue! Fáilte! The warmest of welcomes.

[oliver sudden]

Hello all!

If you think we might have met then we quite possibly have—I’ve used this handle on a couple of different R3-linked boards. (Including the R3 board itself back in the day, before the Beeb decided that herding all those cats was something they’d rather not continue to be involved in.)

Like a few others here I don’t use a handle to hide who I am, but just because for some reason it feels more comfortable. (If you’re curious: I’m an Australian clarinettist living in Cologne, and I play in what is probably Germany’s second-biggest new music ensemble. That should be enough in the way of clues.)

I was on R3OK quite a bit back in the day, before the rise of the social media monster led to people having those sorts of chats on Facebook and the like. But I haven’t had a Facebook account for many years now, and Twitter isn’t what it used to be, and who knows where Bluesky is going, and so on.

Of course I’ve been wondering for a while what happened to some of those people. Some I see are no longer with us. Some I still encounter in other places. But having been informed that this place is still going (for which a hearty BRAVO), I see there are some familiar names here, so… hello all! Maybe there are some nice chats to be had. I hope so!

[french frank]

Welcome (back) Mr Sudden,

I hope you'll be able to add something special to the new musiccontributions in particular

[richardfinegold]

Welcome. I'm one of the few Yanks here. I stumbled into this board in 2012 and have found it most congenial. I use my real name (when I started posting here I thought it would only be for a week when I was on Holiday in the U.K. -I was asking the members about placves to purchase CDs) and when I tried to change to an avatar it proved more bother than it was worth. I'm known as rfg.
I've only been to Koln once for a day as part of a Viking River Cruise. We had a long Germany trip planned which got nixed by the pandemic. It's still on the list