Milk straight from an old H.P. sauce bottle
I had a dreamy morning out and about yesterday with Sarah Salway, looking at the churches at Tudeley and Capel in West Kent. After twelve years living in the rocky landscape of Cornwall where there are few trees, Kent strikes me as intoxicatingly lush. There’s [...]
Sit out in the sun and listen
It’s some weeks since I blogged and ideas for posts are like planes circling over London, waiting to land. The air space is becoming a bit busy now, so time to call some in to land. Three weeks ago, I was teaching in Cornwall on [...]
The first surprise: I like it.
Thoughts of aging – and the less desirable alternative – keep cropping up this week, not least as someone I know has died suddenly, a young healthy man who spent the weekend sailing and cycling, of a heart attack, his partner thinks. That mystery of ‘ye [...]
How public, like a frog
I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us -don't tell! They'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog! This much [...]
Patterns from new disorders
photo: Ricardo Barros Yehudi Amichai’s poem The Place Where We Are Right describes certainty as a barren yard where nothing will grow. ‘Doubts and loves’ are what can turn the earth over like a mole, or a plough, and allow new things to take root. [...]
Words of the fragrant portals
The poem that is speaking to me today is Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West. I say that, but the truth is, it is whispering – or perhaps as the poem describes, a woman is singing, except I can’t quite hear her [...]
