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Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
Water lily flowers. Gracing us with their presence too briefly Then sinking like drowning men And stare as we might, praying for their return, All we see is our own reflection Unruffled. A world within the compass rose of the old water butt. Do the…
Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s Odyssey is certainly a blockbuster. But, I argue with Pele Cox in the second part of our Odyssey odyssey, it’s also a flockbuster with opinion splitting into two distinct herds. In this bonus episode we also explore whether movie soundtracks can spoil…
Has Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of summer 2026 deliberately ignored the fact that The Odyssey was conceived as a poem? If so, why and does it really matter? Pele Cox and I beg to differ in purist versus pragmatist! The episode starts with a spoiler…
These: the star-crossed brothers The men who would be gods Send satellites to space To hide the track lines of their addiction In plain sight. Wrangling hidden beasts by night Taurus, Aries, Ursa Major… No consolation. No direction. No Australis or Polaris. No big bang.…
All Hermes feet they thread a pass Clean through a needle’s eye And weave their magic on the grass Opponents want to fly. The ice cool nerves of Dembélé Brain-freezing defenders. Rooney swooning on the telly France, he says, contenders. Wayne waxes his most lyrical…
I wasn’t surprised that the demise of the Major Oak in Nottinghamshire, England’s, Sherwood Forest made global headlines. It was, after all, billed as ‘the most famous tree in the world’ and undoubtedly one of Europe’s largest and oldest specimens. I first made its acquaintance…
The FIFA World Cup gives me and my co-host, Pele Cox, a golden opportunity to explore oral tradition and other strong but less obvious links between football and poetry. All in about the time it takes to get to a hydration break. The perfect warm…
Choosing John Clare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath to explore whether poetry can make you happy isn’t an obvious starting point. All four experienced the very opposite of happiness in their variously and famously tragic lives. So perhaps it’s a trick question? Or…
It’s often said that great art begets great art. And that’s certainly the case with the Greek poet, Constantine P Cavafy, whose poetry inspired a young and little known British artist back in the 1960s. The artist is now a household name. His identity? Well…
A cycle, Triumph Bonneville, Its throttle full up old Lords Hill. The rider leans with n’er a skid A dimpled grin beneath his lid. Kiwi-bred so hell to leather Clad instead in maroon sweater. Yet softly spoken, quite the catch The cutest biker on the…
Recorded on the 90th anniversary of A E Housman’s death this Shropshire Lad and my co-presenter, the Shropshire lass Pele Cox, discuss the life and works of the poet who died on April 30 2026. We agree that his poetry is every bit as relevant…
A review into the death of my elderly mother (Sheila Hartman), who regular readers will remember was brutally beaten by another resident in her Bedfordshire care home, has concluded that the attack might have been prevented if only her bedroom door had been closed at…