OK This is where we are starting from.

Ever since I was a small boy I have identified very closely indeed with the young lad in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, because it has always seemed clear to me that he and I share the same open-eyed trust in own own perceptions and the same reluctance to just believe what everyone else says we should believe.

With the benefit of more experience of the world, I now believe that the ending of that story is wrong however. Such is the popularity of those who reveal the truth that everyone else has overlooked or suppressed that in reality the crowd would almost certainly turn on him, and he would be lucky not to be lynched. (The record would subsequently show that he had made a vicious assault on the life of a universally honoured Emperor, or something like that.)

In the story we are told that that lad acted out of ignorance as well as from the courage of his own convictions, and I think I often share that quality too. Often it is because no one has told me what it is that I am supposed to think or believe that I work it out for myself and reach an answer that has not been seen before. (Often, for example, when no one has told me that something was supposed to be impossible I have just got on and done it - but of course in the end I have always paid the price for such heresy!)

All that is by way of background to the sort of things I will be writing in this blog.

I have always had a knack of asking questions no one has asked before, and reaching conclusions that no one has thought of before, and the purpose of this blog is to share a few such ideas.

For the record: Most of the "craziest" ideas I have ever had have later, sometimes years later, been propounded by respected authorities on the subject in question, and later still have become so accepted that no one even remembers that there was ever a time when they seemed less than obvious. So if some of what I write on this Blog looks crazy to you now .........