Tag: sharing

thing 50: ‘My soul is sunk’:* St Cuthbert’s Way, part (iii)

Is a Kitkat a chocolate bar or a biscuit? This might not seem an important distinction but when you’re 7 miles in and the “chocolate bar” promised in the hotel packed lunch turns out to be a Kitkat, you can feel cruelly misled. These things matter, is all I’m saying.

Breakfast had been rather good, you see. I had Eggs Florentine and coffee, served in a grand salon with huge mirror panels with fancy glass lights on them and the kind of embossed, gold, fol-de-rol wallpaper which only makes sense in big public spaces like this. Jenny and I were tucked (more…)

oyez, oyez, oyez!

This isn’t a thing, but feels like a culmination of an awful lot of things.

It’s a quick post to unveil my new website, which is dedicated to poetry. The new site has come about because an actual press is going to be publishing two actual pamphlets of my poems, one of which will have an actual ISBN number (more…)

thing 43: ‘yourself/my own dog’: the Song of the Silent Child

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

“In a time then and now/In a place far and near/In a world of which old stories tell/A land cradled in light―/Sun by day, moon by night―/Is held safe under summer’s sweet spell”. This is Summerland, where The Song of the Silent Child is set. The eponymous Silent Child is despised in this land of perpetual happiness, and it isn’t until she meets Old Mother Love, the Crone/wise woman who is dying, that the Child learns who she is: “’You go by (more…)

thing 40: ‘skies of couple-colour’: St Hilda’s Way, part (ii)

Two moulded plastic chairs, one grey, one a sort of institution pinky orange, stood in front of Hilda’s spring; another lay on its side at a distance away, under a tree. The grey one was covered with flies. The chairs were that low budget, stacking sort: curved, with metal legs, and a cut out section at the base of the back which is, I suppose, designed to make lifting and stacking easier but which my young self, at primary school, believed to be a vent to let the farts out.

There was something oddly touching (more…)