I used to love trains. When I was nine and coming home from my school for the holidays I was put into a carriage (the old carriages in the UK had six seats in them with doilies for head rests and sliding doors to the rest of the train) and I felt very grown up….
The Storm Will Pass
I am told over in the USA some States are into their season of storms and with the usual trained expectations of the populace people are preparing. Although most people will just put up the shutters and tidy the garden afterwards, around the world and through history people have faced storm, flood, eruption and plague…
Let’s All Work For The CIA
The history of spies is older than the Bible though there are a few recorded in there, because curiosity about what is going on ‘over there’ is part and parcel of being human. Of course with the development of States and countries and the natural antagonisms which exist between people, knowing what is going on…
All The Differences
I spent a happy few minutes watching Kenneth Williams interviewed by Parkinson (probably in the seventies) talking about doing a job of work because you want to do it well and not doing it just for the money involved. Parkinson argued with him that not all jobs are creative (Kenneth Williams was a famous raconteur…
The Not So Obvious
Anselm, who lived during the eleventh century, came up with one of the first Western arguments for the existence of god. Couched as a prayer he argued that nothing greater than god could exist and since a god that did not exist was not as great as a god that did exist, it stood to…
Autumn Mornings
Painters have often loved this time of year; the bright reddish-pink nights and silver moon mornings. Here in Cornwall if you go out early the air is crisp and you remember after a warm summer that your fingers have bones and your bones feel the chill. I remember my great uncle visiting from Australia in…
Farewell Books
They proclaim everywhere they sell them that e-readers are the new book and old style books are going into decline within years. Libraries are becoming virtual and existing libraries will be frequented eventually by scholars and those interested in the past. Can this be true? No more the joy of feeling a book in your…
I Am A Cloud
I am often there above you like a shield or a shadow, that presence that you scan for rain or indications of the coming weather. I can be broken like a torn photograph with gaps that show you the distances that my half-remembered form has you guessing at. I can move with a swiftness that…
Travelling Steerage
My mother spent many years travelling on P & O liners across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean. She once told me that the happiest voyage she ever had was on a one class ship. Most of the voyages were on ships that had first, second and steerage classes. True to the norm of…
Beech Tree Sonnets
In 1998 my dear fiend Annie Ovenden asked me to write a poem to go with each of twelve paintings of a Beech Tree in Rilla Mill through the months of the year. This was the first: January The atoms in the soil which grew this tree, Might once have been a Brontosaurus’ skin, An…