Grandmaman

A few words about the piece below. I wrote the first draft of it in 1989, a year after the…

The Year of Living Deeply 19: Open letter _ A week with Mark Hollis

Dear Mark I am sorry it has taken so long to getting round to writing to you, not least because…

I was saddened to hear of the death of the Australian poet Les Murray yesterday. In the autumn of 1997,…

I have been thinking a lot about habits recently. The unconscious, unthinking ones which, as Sylvia Plath said about words,…

I have just started reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn it and use it for life. Like those other classics…

Dear John Smith I was deeply saddened to hear that you died earlier this year in March. I am told…

The main difference between weather and climate is the timescale that they each refer to. Weather describes the conditions of the…

There’s an old Mel Brooks routine where the psychiatrist tells his patient, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli…

Tonight at 9.00 pm Pooka Radio continue to assist me in fulfilling my lifelong ambition to become a DJ by…

As we get to the business end of Lent, in the week the church still names Holy, I have been…

I wrote the poem below in the summer of 2015. David Cameron had won a slim majority in the…

Well, by tomorrow night, we might be out. Crashed out with no deal or sailing into a bright future presaged…

Dear Alicia I can’t believe it is three years since I got to hang out with you at Totleigh…

Like a lot of things I am ashamed to admit discovering late in life -Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Deborah Levy,…

after Shawna Lemay Write a poem about the rain. Or the wind. Write about what you learned at university.…

Dear Ted Hughes You probably won’t remember me. I wrote to you before, in the summer of 1998. I did…

after Mark Halliday Because of the writing days. And because The discovery will not happen on its own, unprompted,…

I’ll admit it straight away: I didn’t last the whole week. Sometime on Friday evening I switched the radio…