Foz
Foz is from Somalia. She steers my mother slowly across the care home lawn. A ship of state adrift on a sea of green. “Here are my two favourite girls,” I call from the shade of the arbour. Because if…
Poetry, bikes, dementia...
Poetry, bikes, dementia...
Foz is from Somalia. She steers my mother slowly across the care home lawn. A ship of state adrift on a sea of green. “Here are my two favourite girls,” I call from the shade of the arbour. Because if…

Riding the west windHarnessed by sinking sunshineRainbows ARE the gold
Shackled by time slippers shuffledStooped to the high-backed seatQueen throned, grey crown ruffledPrince and Princess at her feet The Prince takes a marbled handBut a child’s touch cannot reach beyondTheir birth to a foreign land To retrieve lost memories fond In…
Guinness, lager, shandy, coke(You can go your own way)Wisecracks, quips and sexist jokes(Go your own way)“This chair taken? No feel free!”(You can call it another lonely day)“Your shout Dave I need a pee.” Please make your selection… Fleetwood Mac then…

For most of the year the field is like a sheet of writing paper covered with invisible ink. Words indivisible from the page. Blank every morning save for brown-blot molehills. But the overnight snow has rendered the lines for all…

Taking pictures forces you to look at the world more carefully. You see things through the viewfinder that you might miss with the naked eye. And yet more detail resolves itself in the taken image. So it is with recording…

Paper lantern queenYour subjects crawl on their kneesNo sting in the sun. For me the soundtrack of the first lockdown was the bumblebees feasting on the nectar in the blossom of our cherry trees. It’s a different kind of buzz…

Colour-eating cloudWest wind-stacked silver strataFading green to black I love the easy discipline of Haiku. Just three lines: the first of five syllables; the second of seven; and the third back to five. It’s the sort of poetry you can…

From early morning geese to late night owls via a blackbird serenading from his perch in our cherry tree, all these natural sounds were recorded over the four days of Easter in our garden near Ludlow. To my way of…
Dear Mum You didn’t like people making a fuss of you. So you weren’t a big fan of Mother’s Day. Before it all became what you disdainfully called Americanised, I do remember me and my sister bringing you breakfast in bed.…