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…
The Art Of The Mistake
Society is a set of rules. Implicit and explicit. Dr Bruce Perry the child psychologist demonstrated in his lifetime of work how complex the rules and interactions are and how we learn so many of them before we are three years old. Simply walking through a crowd of people has a hundred signals about eye…
How Exciting Death Can Be
I remember when the Falklands War started a soldier who had gone AWOL from the British Army because it was boring came back to his unit because at last there was a war to go to, and so corrupt is the army they did not arrest him but sent him out to kill Argentinians. I…
The War Of Ages
It is the dilemma of generations. You don’t want to go to war but war is brought to your doorstep by others. And worse because politicians know people will do to war to defend their countries they can manipulate opinion to create and dress the enemy in just the right clothes to get a war…
Understanding Gracefulness
When you watch a large bird in flight almost lazily flapping a wing and gliding across the sky even with their slightly ungainly landings on tree tops you can fully understand why people have wanted wings. And even more when you see the size and noise of the machines we have built to fly in…
Sisyphus
The Greeks were great ones for summing up human existence in their myths about Hades and the punishments metered out to individuals. Tantalus who bent down to drink to find the water immediately receded and lifted his hand to grab at the grapes above him to find they pulled away. Sisyphus who had to roll…
Autumn
The colder early mornings have been here for over a week now but today the rain came. Lots of it. It can get so heavy here the hill turns into a small river and the piping which the local council religiously clean twice a year but never unblock, spills over very quickly. At the bottom…
Getting To The Top
Mountaineers say they climb mountains because they are there, and the pinnacle (literally) is to climb Everest (Mount Qomolangma). They put a lot of training and body building hours to be fit enough to ascend, they plan for years and struggle up that mountain and if they fail they go back and finally they get to…