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It’s been a journey. A century of blog-observations, and each typed into a laptop…

The sea of night. Night and the sea. I am blind, blind. It runs right through me…

I seem to have given up cycling. Perhaps if I live in a less crowded area I shall get back in the saddle…

I get tetchier about ads as the years go by. A crashing sea of meaningless disinformation…

It is one of the great Christian works of art. After about fifty years I have re-read…

I wonder in whose arms you are tonight
I wonder does he think he’s doing alright…

It is how women are known to men that has posed such a barrier to their freedom…

As people we make gods, and they can inform the person…

A final voice from a classroom of the past. Fifteen or sixteen years old, fifty-three years ago…

In Ashdown Forest, two days after the centenary of the first birthday of Christopher Robin Milne…

. . . of the gaping scythe of Covid . . . then Hallelujah!

They gather on my shelves like crows
in mocking, gleeful disarray…

It could go one way or the other. Now in solitary control of Afghanistan, have the Taliban an opportunity…

Since leaving India I have missed Durga. Kali is ever-present, in the perfect storm of her being…

What was it when I went to India for the first time in the summer of 1990…

there is there is
a whisper spreads to a field…

‘Lagwyne’ or ‘Low-lying Sepulchre’ survives in a number of place-names…

At the Cliftonville pub in George St., cross-wording with my son…

It doesn’t take long for the Special Weapons and Tactics unt of the Los Angeles Police Department to…

So many must have had the same thought. A frail shell, bristling with internecine rivalries…

Stephanie Martin was the same age as Paul and Adrian (see last two entries) but had been made to…

In the same class as Paul (see last entry) was a quite extraordinary young man – or at least young mind…

Coming up to O levels, in a class I taught at the outset of my career, was a lad…

Two days before the “off”, in delightful mid-July weather, it’s as if the shackles are off already…

A photo was unearthed recently by a family member that took me back to my running days…

The morning after, unremarkable, a little damp. Perhaps a tang of disappointment…

Of simple things I sing,
fresh air, a quickening breeze…

Romain Rolland, a French writer and public figure of far-reaching humanist sympathies…

On the public level Rabindranath was at the spear-tip of the force of change…

His life was pierced by a searing ray of tragedy and love…

Who he was, what he did. One is blindsided by the latter…

One day, I hope, a film will be made about the life of Rabindranath Tagore…

We spend our lives running up against a hoarding, a larger-than-life…

We got him from an animal rescue centre, a lively-looking character…

A virus seethes on Earth. Its symptom is unmistakable…

Why am I driven back a half-century, to what seem now like the first days…

I’m bushed. Boshed. Bashed. An hour’s table-tennis and I know I’ve been in a fight…

‘Midwinter spring is its own season’ begins T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’…

If you sit for a time on a seat near a colony of shaped stone…

A few years ago I received a bequest from someone I had never heard of…

In 1992 a large Hindu mob tore down the nearly 500-year-old Babri Masjid mosque…

To see a World in a Grain of Sand – And a Heaven in a Wild Flower…

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. ‘Religion has talked so many into such evil.’

Of course in the current situation money does matter and an extra fillip is needed…

I am not usually obstanat but I protest to being like a monkey in a cage…

This time, this time
let us applaud it
in spirit, too…

A dead ringer for the Mekon, Dan Dare’s arch-adversary in the Eagle comic of the ’50s…

There they go. The dilettantes underperform again. Airily passing the ball around…

Tenderly it comes to life. A seagull perches on a shop-sign to survey the scene…

Lift-off. In space. A familiar flight with familiar forces pinning one down…

Is that the open door of a pub? Is a night-reveller in there? Can I go in and get some grub?

First I must remorselessly strip any religious connotations from the…

It’s a good title for a magazine, as ‘The Observer’ is for a newspaper…

In ‘The Spectator’ each week are one or two short poems and a verse competition…

Following last week’s “Super Thursday” democratic reckoning, the air is currently supercharged…

Rushdie was in hiding for years after the fatwa was issued and received sustained protection…

A savage episode tore across the face of Western culture a generation ago. Salman Rushdie published a novel…

She is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and learning, of music and the arts, of the graces of the mind…

Christina Rossetti put me in mind of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetry at its best…

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you,’ says Christina Rossetti, and she has a point. Even in a twister…

If I were to go blind I think I’d like to pause on them, and reflect. They might be a means…

There must have been a year of lockdown days by now in England and on most of them I’ve walked…

Words are like elastic bands. With the difference that they don’t break if stretched too far…

Back in the mid-seventies I was teaching in Balham, South London, and used occasionally to go…

For a few weeks the newspaper picture’s shuffled around on my desk, on top of this book…

In July 1941 Captain Barry Custance Baker, 26 years old, set sail for Singapore…

Since Harold Wilson stepped down there have been few leaders of the Labour Party worthy…

At another school in those early days of teaching I was rocked back on my heels somewhat…

I hate Silence most of all, wherever it is I yell, scream and call. . . So wrote Chief Rabbi Kimbal…

I don’t know if he knew Norman Tebbitt. I imagine they may have met a few times…

One has a record and music shop not so far from where I live…

[continued] Shiva is one of the great triumvirate of Hindu deities…

It’s fifteen years since I returned from a long stay in India. While there I came to feel attached…

It’s been with me a fair old time now, a knowing silent companion to my competitive…

It climbs atop a precipice where lesser minds have tumbled down; it clings on to a benefice…

Sooner or later we have to stop condemning people for their thoughts…

How to describe a breath of pure pleasure, such that a sudden woodland grove…

I can’t speak for others. The altered experience of so many, across a harshly punctuated year…

Just a stone glistening in the wet. As I walk along the shore in a light afternoon mist…

[continued] The third and last poem I received from Orchyd was at the very end of term…

[continued] At some point I asked Orchyd if she would, in her own time, write a poem with no time constraint…

Back to 1967 and my first teaching appointment. I took (what would now be) a Year 10 class…

I’m naturally far less acquainted with Meghan’s story than Harry’s. Watching Suits a few months back…

For me the story’s about Harry. A bewildered boy in the nightmare of his mother’s funeral cortège…

Someone can be known by her way with words…

It was my first book and I would still say it is my favourite one. An old friend of the family gave it me…

Blimey. An unAmerican expression perhaps but after watching the full 73 episodes…

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. What are they for? A digestive process of the mind, as it seems, often including a conscious “chewing-over”…

The deep cry echoes out from the terraces. Joe Root deftly guides another four behind the wicket…

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.

Three weeks ago it was over but the memory can still flare up of a protracted, nightmarish encounter…

Socks – they come in twos, or so the story goes, but mine have different views.

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’? I saw what I believe was the first episode of ‘EastEnders’, way back in the dark ages…

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, I murmur, as I try to express the sense of oneness with atmosphere and place that seems almost…

A howl, a scream unheard, unvoiced unutterably savage singes the mind’s edge outside the sky hears nothing except…

I can’t help thinking about two worlds. One in which we take an imaginative step forward in some needy area of social life…

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…