About

Hello

I am Alan Hutchison and I live in Lancaster.

There’s a contact form if you want to get in touch.

Matches in the dark

Although the site is currently populated with articles about Modern Monetary Theory, I didn’t want to go with a name which restricted me to MMT. That’s partly because it would be a dull and not very memorable name, and partly because I am going to start boring you with other stuff when I have exhausted the MMT angle. I apologise for this in advance.

I have lifted the phrase ‘matches in the dark’ from Virginia Woolf, writing in To the Lighthouse:

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

I hope that some of the articles here will be illuminating.

Modern Monetary Theory

My intention is to construct a useful resource for anyone wanting to learn about MMT as it pertains to the UK. To that end, I currently have a matrix of around 70 interlinked articles at various stages of completion. There should be ten of these available within the first week.

It’s going to take me a while to get them all finished. I will probably be able to manage no more than one or two each week. But I already have stamps lined up for most of them.

Stamps

I have not been a collector of stamps since I was a child, many decades ago. But when I was writing Lovers of exemption from tax I realised that they can be used to illustrate just about anything. The benefit of using stamps is that it restricts how far I have to look when searching for a suitable image — the thought of trawling through interminable image libraries fills me with dread. However, because I don’t always have a stamp in my childhood collection which fits the topic, I now find myself spending a lot of time trawling through eBay listings looking for suitable one.

The other advantage of using stamps is that it gives me an opportunity to go completely off-topic. Follow the link on the images to see what I mean.

Images

Many thanks to David Amsler for the image of the match which he has shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence.

Most of the other images, including all the stamps, are of things in my possession. Where this is not the case there will be more information with the image.

All British stamps which are not out of copyright are Copyright © Royal Mail Group Ltd. See their copyright notice for more information.

A Luta Continua

This website includes all the content which used to be at alutacontinua.uk.

A vitória é certa