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.

Nature’s fountain pen

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…

A Shropshire Symphony – winter

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…

Vespula vulgaris

Cherry blossom and Coreley church

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…

Autumn

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…

Mother’s Day

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.…

Social distancing

Sheila is 85 years old. Sheila has dementia. Shelia lives at Ridgeway Lodge care home. At night she curls herself into ball and sleeps under a single sheet. Like an ammonite in a museum cupboard. Visitors need a PIN number…

Unfinished memories

I’ve just found a notebook in which Sheila May Marshall started writing down her childhood memories. It might be written for my sister and I although not explicitly so. The first entry reads: “Your mother walked eight miles a day…