
With poetry per se on hold for a time, I thought I’d set a blog in motion and see what happened. 100 posts later and ‘A Word in your Shell-like’ is what’s happened – a diorama of thoughts over eight months complete with images. Some entries are less thoughtful than others, the trivial jostles with the more serious as it does with all of us: the whole is simply a varied reflection of experience I hope you’ll enjoy.
Finale
It’s been a journey. A century of blog-observations, and each typed into a laptop…
Mare noctis
The sea of night. Night and the sea. I am blind, blind. It runs right through me…
A vote of thanks
I seem to have given up cycling. Perhaps if I live in a less crowded area I shall get back in the saddle…
The ad fad
I get tetchier about ads as the years go by. A crashing sea of meaningless disinformation…
‘The Power and the Glory’
It is one of the great Christian works of art. After about fifty years I have re-read…
Chas
I wonder in whose arms you are tonight
I wonder does he think he’s doing alright…
Kali
It is how women are known to men that has posed such a barrier to their freedom…
Kali
As people we make gods, and they can inform the person…
The human dimension
A final voice from a classroom of the past. Fifteen or sixteen years old, fifty-three years ago…
In Ashdown Forest
In Ashdown Forest, two days after the centenary of the first birthday of Christopher Robin Milne…
If we are free
. . . of the gaping scythe of Covid . . . then Hallelujah!
Ballad of the Books
They gather on my shelves like crows
in mocking, gleeful disarray…
A new game
It could go one way or the other. Now in solitary control of Afghanistan, have the Taliban an opportunity…
Durga
Since leaving India I have missed Durga. Kali is ever-present, in the perfect storm of her being…
Old and new
What was it when I went to India for the first time in the summer of 1990…
At Lagwyne Cottage
there is there is
a whisper spreads to a field…
At Lagwyne Cottage
‘Lagwyne’ or ‘Low-lying Sepulchre’ survives in a number of place-names…
At the Clifto
At the Cliftonville pub in George St., cross-wording with my son…
S.W.A.T.
It doesn’t take long for the Special Weapons and Tactics unt of the Los Angeles Police Department to…
The Olympic flame
So many must have had the same thought. A frail shell, bristling with internecine rivalries…
Time
Stephanie Martin was the same age as Paul and Adrian (see last two entries) but had been made to…
Pet-Hates on Nightingales
In the same class as Paul (see last entry) was a quite extraordinary young man – or at least young mind…
A Rubbish Heap
Coming up to O levels, in a class I taught at the outset of my career, was a lad…
Freedom Day
Two days before the “off”, in delightful mid-July weather, it’s as if the shackles are off already…
On the run
A photo was unearthed recently by a family member that took me back to my running days…
It’s Italy on penalties . . .
The morning after, unremarkable, a little damp. Perhaps a tang of disappointment…
Ballad of the Tins
Of simple things I sing,
fresh air, a quickening breeze…
Tagore and Gandhi
Romain Rolland, a French writer and public figure of far-reaching humanist sympathies…
Tagore and Gandhi
On the public level Rabindranath was at the spear-tip of the force of change…
Rabindranath
His life was pierced by a searing ray of tragedy and love…
Rabindranath
Who he was, what he did. One is blindsided by the latter…
Rabindranath
One day, I hope, a film will be made about the life of Rabindranath Tagore…
The ball-game
We spend our lives running up against a hoarding, a larger-than-life…
Busker
We got him from an animal rescue centre, a lively-looking character…
Halo-virus
A virus seethes on Earth. Its symptom is unmistakable…
The first days
Why am I driven back a half-century, to what seem now like the first days…
Whiff-whaff
I’m bushed. Boshed. Bashed. An hour’s table-tennis and I know I’ve been in a fight…
Little Gidding
‘Midwinter spring is its own season’ begins T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’…
Somewhere beyond a threshold
If you sit for a time on a seat near a colony of shaped stone…
Uncle Simek
A few years ago I received a bequest from someone I had never heard of…
Unholy Places
In 1992 a large Hindu mob tore down the nearly 500-year-old Babri Masjid mosque…
A Wild Flower
To see a World in a Grain of Sand – And a Heaven in a Wild Flower…
Tantum religio…
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. ‘Religion has talked so many into such evil.’
Techers
Of course in the current situation money does matter and an extra fillip is needed…
Techers
I am not usually obstanat but I protest to being like a monkey in a cage…
Leaf burst
This time, this time
let us applaud it
in spirit, too…
The train set in the attic
A dead ringer for the Mekon, Dan Dare’s arch-adversary in the Eagle comic of the ’50s…
Manchester United
There they go. The dilettantes underperform again. Airily passing the ball around…
George Street
Tenderly it comes to life. A seagull perches on a shop-sign to survey the scene…
Those dancing chips
Lift-off. In space. A familiar flight with familiar forces pinning one down…
Ballad to the Pubs’ Re-opening
Is that the open door of a pub? Is a night-reveller in there? Can I go in and get some grub?
The living stream
First I must remorselessly strip any religious connotations from the…
The Spectator
It’s a good title for a magazine, as ‘The Observer’ is for a newspaper…
Is it even worth saying?
In ‘The Spectator’ each week are one or two short poems and a verse competition…
Election Special
Following last week’s “Super Thursday” democratic reckoning, the air is currently supercharged…
The Satanic Verses
Rushdie was in hiding for years after the fatwa was issued and received sustained protection…
The Satanic Verses
A savage episode tore across the face of Western culture a generation ago. Salman Rushdie published a novel…
Saraswati
She is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and learning, of music and the arts, of the graces of the mind…
E.B.B.
Christina Rossetti put me in mind of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetry at its best…
Winds
Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you,’ says Christina Rossetti, and she has a point. Even in a twister…
Clouds
If I were to go blind I think I’d like to pause on them, and reflect. They might be a means…
Roads
There must have been a year of lockdown days by now in England and on most of them I’ve walked…
Words
Words are like elastic bands. With the difference that they don’t break if stretched too far…
Jimmy White and world peace
Back in the mid-seventies I was teaching in Balham, South London, and used occasionally to go…
Warhol Immersive
For a few weeks the newspaper picture’s shuffled around on my desk, on top of this book…
Surviving the Death Railway
In July 1941 Captain Barry Custance Baker, 26 years old, set sail for Singapore…
Shirley Williams
Since Harold Wilson stepped down there have been few leaders of the Labour Party worthy…
War
At another school in those early days of teaching I was rocked back on my heels somewhat…
Peace
I hate Silence most of all, wherever it is I yell, scream and call. . . So wrote Chief Rabbi Kimbal…
Prince Philip
I don’t know if he knew Norman Tebbitt. I imagine they may have met a few times…
Mrs Tinckham and Mrs Canuticacq
One has a record and music shop not so far from where I live…
Shiva
[continued] Shiva is one of the great triumvirate of Hindu deities…
Shiva
It’s fifteen years since I returned from a long stay in India. While there I came to feel attached…
Let bishops fianchetto…
It’s been with me a fair old time now, a knowing silent companion to my competitive…
Dirge against the Dons
It climbs atop a precipice where lesser minds have tumbled down; it clings on to a benefice…
Sooner or later
Sooner or later we have to stop condemning people for their thoughts…
The Flower Stand
How to describe a breath of pure pleasure, such that a sudden woodland grove…
Day of Reflection
I can’t speak for others. The altered experience of so many, across a harshly punctuated year…
Just a Stone
Just a stone glistening in the wet. As I walk along the shore in a light afternoon mist…
The lights of day appeared
[continued] The third and last poem I received from Orchyd was at the very end of term…
People, people everywhere
[continued] At some point I asked Orchyd if she would, in her own time, write a poem with no time constraint…
Storm
Back to 1967 and my first teaching appointment. I took (what would now be) a Year 10 class…
Meghan
I’m naturally far less acquainted with Meghan’s story than Harry’s. Watching Suits a few months back…
Harry
For me the story’s about Harry. A bewildered boy in the nightmare of his mother’s funeral cortège…
Seasoning
Someone can be known by her way with words…
Fattypuffs and Thinifers
It was my first book and I would still say it is my favourite one. An old friend of the family gave it me…
House of Cards
Blimey. An unAmerican expression perhaps but after watching the full 73 episodes…
Forget about God
Forget about God and find a new story. A story that can appeal to the child in us, but that looks more to the future…
Dreams
Dreams. What are they for? A digestive process of the mind, as it seems, often including a conscious “chewing-over”…
ROOOT!
The deep cry echoes out from the terraces. Joe Root deftly guides another four behind the wicket…
In Time of Covid
As many millions will have done and many more will do, I need to jot down a thought or two on the bane of the time.
50 Snapping Turtles
Three weeks ago it was over but the memory can still flare up of a protracted, nightmarish encounter…
Ballad of the Socks
Socks – they come in twos, or so the story goes, but mine have different views.
Books
It’s 1967, my first teaching post. I’m covering for an absent English teacher at a girls’ comprehensive school in Islington, London…
What is it with this crazy ‘soap’?
What is it with this crazy ‘soap’? I saw what I believe was the first episode of ‘EastEnders’, way back in the dark ages…
Asphodel Long
Sixteen years ago she passed away. Just the other day I was talking to my brother on the phone, her other child.
It’s breathing
It’s breathing, I murmur, as I try to express the sense of oneness with atmosphere and place that seems almost…
Keon Lincoln
A howl, a scream unheard, unvoiced unutterably savage singes the mind’s edge outside the sky hears nothing except…
Two worlds
I can’t help thinking about two worlds. One in which we take an imaginative step forward in some needy area of social life…
What’re they doing to my tree?
Of course it’s not my tree, I half-apologise to it as I raise the blinds at an infernal noise in the street and see two men…