Rich Uridge

Rich Uridge

Training company boss by day. Poet and a whole heap of other things by night. Plus the son of a mother who was killed in a care home while living with dementia.

The last bedroom on the right

Exterior view of Ridgeway Lodge care home in Dunstable

There is no pastRememberedOr futureImagined.Just the present.Tense.A singularity.You live in the moment. Very on point as they say.Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cupOr shredding tissues in your lapWhile I am walking an imaginary dog (the…

Augur

Though August’s barely halfway throughThe copse is clad in autumn’s hueIts summer greens now fading fastAnd taking on a rusty cast. Embroidered by the evening sunThe trees from threads of gold were spunBut in the furnace split and crackenAnd dieback…

Where non-believers pray

Luton and Dunstable Hospital

Scene one: a cubicle in A & E For what is deathIf not escapeFrom pain in this worldAnd promise in the next? The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator.…

A Shropshire Symphony Revisited

Five years ago it felt like the world had momentarily stopped spinning. The nightly Covid bulletins aside, everything seemed preternaturally silent. Planes stayed on the ground. Traffic halted. And without the usual din of everday life (and later the weekly…

Lorca’s Pencil

Photo of Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca was one of Spain’s finest poets. Assassinated by Fascists in August 1936 soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War his death should remind us of the dangers of fascism as it rises once again, not…

Rhayader Reveille

The Castle Hotel and war memorial Rhayader

Midnight strikes on the memorial clockA flame throwing dragon is guarding the flockWhile a gunpowder fog glistens and glosses The uniform slates and the uniform mosses. For God and for Country. Lest we forget. A window on North Street turned aquarium greenWhere a…

Dick’s Out or Wretched Urine

Photo of Richard Uridge at BBC News desk

Tradition has it that when you retire from or leave the BBC your colleagues produce a light-hearted video to mark the occasion. And so it was when I left BBC Pebble Mill’s Midlands Today in 1995. Watch out for wonderful…

Swift

First south and west, then north and east, I quarter up the sky.I’m watching for your sickle wings to scythe across my eye. I look, I look, then look again and listen for your scream.But bar the clap of pigeon…