Come on, seriously? July? Tomorrow? How did that happen? I know we all remark upon it constantly: how quickly the time goes, that it flies, disappears, but this year it really slipperdy-jippeted as the calendar dates danced away from me. I love a calendar. I love the ritual turning of twelve pages and plotting what … Continue reading Time and Tide
I live in a tenement and I am surrounded by people, often just a few feet away, but they are unseen and mostly unheard behind thick walls – so near and yet so far. They are above and below me, and on both sides of me, and I am reminded that we are all together … Continue reading So Near Yet So Far
There is no more beautiful time of year than spring, when nature is transfused, resuscitated from what, for so long, looked shrivelled and dead. And we get a shot of energy too at this time of year; we are renewed and ready to go. The turn of the year is familiar and comforting and it … Continue reading Begin Again
Micro seasons – I had never heard of such a thing until R. explained the concept to me and immediately it made sense. Four even seasons, neatly contained within three-month blocks, is far too wide a cut to allow for any of the nuance that cusps between seasons can bring. How on earth can we … Continue reading Micro Seasons
I’m reading a book on loan to me. S. brought it back from a trip to Australia earlier this year. ‘Any Ordinary Day’ is by Leigh Sales. It’s a collection of stories about the very worst things people can experience that rise up, out of the blue. The title is important; they are stories of … Continue reading Any Ordinary Day
It was either Elsa or Anna (I should know which) who implored us to, ‘Let it go’, as she belted her message out, Disney style. And why not take advice from a cartoon character when the conventional leadership and global governance of the day plays out like a poorly scripted soap opera? We may take … Continue reading The Year Is Going, Let Him Go
Choice: it is, perhaps, the single, most important determinant in how our lives turn out; in how we plough a furrow through this world. Yes, some people, often through fate of birth, are born to a life of enhanced opportunity with an array of choices before them, whilst others are born into a ready-made obstacle … Continue reading I May, I Might, I Must
‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards.’ These are the words of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, theologian and poet. I was at a conference last week where one of the speakers, from Denmark, drew extensively from the work of Kierkegaard. When he told us he was going to delve … Continue reading Young and Old
Auden, Barrett-Browning, Cope, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Gallagher, Heaney, Ibsen, Jamie, Kinnell, Larkin, Mahon, Neruda, Owen, Plath, Qabbani, Rossetti, St Vincent Millay, Thomas, Updike, Vaughan, Wordsworth, Xenokleides, Yeats, Zephaniah. Who is your favourite? Feel free to reach beyond the 26 I’ve offered you; I was just playing the alphabet game, and, in doing so, left out … Continue reading Advent
I am of the generation where we ‘backed’ our books at the start of each new school year. Dog-eared and a bit tattered from use the year before (in fact, use over multiple years), a growing pile would be distributed by the teacher in September, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, in preparation for ten … Continue reading Change
