Putin on Ice – what fun!
What a guy! Who could it be speeding down the mountain, on the piste? That’s the trouble with the Winter Olympics, you can never see who is doing what because they are all so well wrapped up against the cold.…
The Easter Island legend reassessed on TV and by some inspiring photographs by Cristián Moreno Pakarati
Those Easter Island statues continue to cast their spell over me. I’m not alone in my fascination with those magnificent stone carvings, known as Moai, lost, somehow, in the remotest part of the Pacific Ocean – apparently abandoned by the…
It’s Lewes Men’s Pie Night – so I go for something a little je ne sais quoi
Last Saturday it was that most traditional time here in Lewes, UK. It was time for the now legendary Lewes Men’s Pie Night. You can imagine the scene, I’m sure – all pork pies and real ale but with some…
An interview with Sue Guiney about her new Cambodian novel, Out Of The Ruins
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: be it black or white…
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…
There’s a damp but beautiful melancholy out there in my Lewes garden.
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…
The State of the Union: Are American Presidents ever allowed to help their own poor?
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…
Ruffled feathers at the Vatican
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.…
Kiev needs a champion to defends its honour against its enemies.
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…
Finding poetic inspiration in Mortlake
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.…