“It was Christmas Eve babe In the drunk tank An old man said to me, won't see another one And then he sang a song The Rare Old Mountain Dew I turned my face away And dreamed about you” (Fairytale of New York, The Pogues) “Is anyone going to help me peel this bottomless bag … Continue reading Can’t Make It All Alone
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
The things you learn at school set hard like concrete. You don't know they’re buried deep in your brain, until something is said and all of a sudden - pow! - like cracking through the earth and tapping the well, out pour words or songs or facts; pure springs of knowledge you’d forgotten you knew. So … Continue reading Let Me Count The Ways
I’ve just come across an online reference to a conference that took place in Glasgow a few months ago. It was called ‘Everyday Compassion: Supportive responses to dying and bereavement by schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces.’ I didn’t read much more, but I was interested in the fact that there had been such a conference as … Continue reading Everyday Compassion
The desk at which W.S. Graham wrote his poems has found a home in Edinburgh’s Poetry Library. His chair too, though the seat has been put away somewhere, “for the time being,”the man told me. More suitably described, I think, as a table, it looks like something from a farmyard kitchen as opposed to a study. It’s … Continue reading Wheesht
“I just don't get it. Never did. Does nothing for me. Can’t read it, can't write it, can't understand it.” J. and I were out on the dock with his guitar, singing; exchanging songs, old and new, and in between times we’d chat about this and that. ‘This’ was why I liked to write, and … Continue reading Lyrics of Life
It’s year two of living alone, for the first time in 10 years or so. I had no nervousness about it. Not from the point of view of feeling vulnerable, or frightened by things that go bump in the night. Being on my own in a house has never bothered me. The main thing that … Continue reading Linked Together
I’m down in Bristol for the weekend, ‘the West Country’, as it is known. It’s a big region, taking in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, the city of Bristol and Gloucestershire. That area associated with farming, clotted cream teas, apple orchards, cider and slow moving men in gumboots saying, ‘Ooh arr, me lover,’ in cartoon-like, … Continue reading Pardon Me?
I like to bake. They say, nowadays, that commercial flour is so fine that there’s no longer any need to sift it like we were taught to do. Nonetheless, I sift on. I like the ritual of sifting. Watching the tiny, milled particles separate and drift, being left with a fine dusting on the work … Continue reading Sifting
My name rhymes with ‘beamer’. Sometimes they would call me that at school. They weren’t referring to a high end German make of luxury car when they used the word; no, ‘beamer’ referred to that rosy shade of blush-red one goes when embarrassed, mortified by some mild humiliation – a.k.a. ‘taking a beamer’. The funny … Continue reading Beamer
