T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece is 100 years old this year and I am preparing to read the complete poem online in the virtual world known as Secondlife to mark the centenary of its publication. Yes, virtual worlds really do support writers…
Britain votes for its next government tomorrow. It is definitely the end of an era. The polls (haha) tell us the present Conservative government is heading for a crushing defeat – maybe the worst in its nearly two hundred year…
My poem Aleppo will be on display at Pleiades Gallery, Manhattan, New York City from 11 June until 6 July where it will be displayed with Heather Stivinson’ s exhibition Borders and Boundaries. Opening reception: 13 June, 6-8pm. It will…
I live just up the street from the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, now in its 12th year, and I’m just back from the final concert of this year’s truly inspiring festival. The theme was Schoenberg and friends, and the festival…
Donald Trump found guilty on all charges in hush money case. He is guilty of so much more. A Greek tragedy in British English – Noun (ɡriːk ˈtrædʒədɪ ) (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstandingpersonal qualities,…
Ladies is an old-fashioned word in 2024, we say women, or even other less gender-specific terms, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe and the US, it was lady if you were a lady, and woman if you were…
Last Thursday (16th May 2024), I finished a three-year marathon, reading the whole of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (155 poems in English and in French) at my weekly on-line poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf which will have…
I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and…
I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since…
It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after…
It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in…