My friend and fellow Ward Wood writer, the American but London-based Sue Guiney has just published a new novel, Out Of The Ruins. We meet pretty regularly these days at either Ward Wood events or at the monthly poetry readings…
February Fill Dyke by Benjamin Williams Leader (1881), Birmingham City Art Gallery Welcome to February everyone! Here in the England, it is a time when the weather is often at its worst but you would have to be willfully negative…
So far I have spent most of this year, so far, confined indoors with a respiratory condition not even being allowed out into my small town centre garden that is quietly reverting to the condition of an urban jungle. There…
I wouldn’t want to be a politician let alone the President of the United States of America, who is simultaneously head of the World’s most powerful nation while being leader of the developed country with the greatest economic inequality. Inequality…
I rather like the new Pope. He’s not my leader or anything like that but I’ve admired the way he appears to be turning the papacy into a power for good and a voice for the poor and the under-privileged.…
WBC heavyweight world champion Vitali Klitschko may have hung up his gloves but as the leader of one of the Ukraine’s main opposition parties, he hasn’t forgotten how to pack a punch. He has shown his courage and his mettle…
I spent last weekend in the peaceful environment of Mortlake in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames where the occasional low flying planes reminds us that we are on the edge of the great metropolitan sprawl that is London.…
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841 – 1894) After yesterday’s blog about Death In Venice with all that solemn music, I thought I’d leave you with something a bit racier for the weekend. No one, in the musical world, was racier than Frenchman,…
Dirk Bogart in the 1971 Visconti film Death In Venice I haven’t been well over the last few weeks and, without being exactly a hypochondriac, my mind does go back at these times to that great death scene in the…
I’m not that old-fashioned, honestly, smart those these Brits look there in the rain. In spite of being English, I’ve never been tempted to wear a top hat and my umbrella is positively technicoloured in comparison. I don’t think you…