The Primrose (Primula veris or vulgaris) is an unassuming flower that suggests yellow in its petals buoyed up by a rosette of green, crinkly leaves, and grows in hedges and woods. There used to be right up to the First World War a Primrose Day in the UK in memory of Benjamin Disareli because this…
Month: March 2011
The Art of TV Comedy
I was brought up on the second wave of black and white comedies to come over to the UK from America and thence the colour ones. Besides I Love Lucy which my mother thought hilarious (and some of the stuff Lucille did took a huge amount of practice and stage craft) I was a child…
Affirmation
It’s a strange business listening to my mother go over the same things time-and-time again in her illness. To ask the same questions during the day and across the weeks. I wonder what her mind is seeking and why her mind cannot retain the answers any more. This is not the repetition of teaching the young,…
The Right To Life
I was chatting about the ‘abortion debate’ with a friend who told me about a woman whose baby was terminally ill and in pain in her womb and how her doctors refused to abort and how the baby died within a few hours of being born. It reminded me of the essay I had to…
Its All In A Name
I read part of a conversation about pseudonyms and writers. I know many writers in the past have used different names depending upon what they are writing. Some have had reason to mask from readers the fact that they are writing romance trashy novels as a woman whilst writing serious novels as men. And vice-versa…
The Poet With No Paper
Sounds like hell doesn’t it. I am in the midst of opening every single book in the house to find those that my mother had used to put things in; such as old letters, ephemera of all kinds, anything important. I knew she had written in a few but even I am surprised at the…
Two Worlds
I was asked when I was twenty, by a don, if I felt any tension inside myself between the two nations from which my mother and father descend. At the time I said none at all, and I have to say that has been true all my life because in people of mixed blood there are…
Imposing Upon One’s Enemy
The cruel murder of five members of the same family in Israel this past week put me in mind of a similar event in the 1970s and my consequent discussion with a Palestinian in college. Then, a family were murdered and the children taken out and swung against stones until their heads were smashed to…
Japan
Like much of the world I have watched the videos of the tsunami that hit Japan with morbid curiosity. To see the wall of water and collected junk rolling across farmland and through houses was one of the most horrific things I have ever seen. But it draws me to wonder at the news people….
The Wonderful Mind
I cannot really think in three dimensions. At least I find it hard sometimes to clearly visualise something that could be placed into the real world. I know some people can and even more I know some people have such an accurate visual memory they clearly recall images in all their colour. Not me, I…