Where non-believers pray

Scene one: a cubicle in A & E

For what is death
If not escape
From pain in this world
And promise in the next?

The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.
A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator.

The curtains close to end the scene.
The cast, dressed in scrubs of blue and green,
Exit stage left
While the leaving lady has a costume change
The audience, not expecting this plot twist, wide-eyed, bereft

Scene two: the family room

An anteroom with a bed-come-trolley
A single moulded plastic seat
A crate of children’s toys and, legs and arms in supplication, a plastic dolly.
An Egyptian mummy (from Finchley)
Swabbed and swaddled visual sterilisation.
What you came in bagged for crime scene investigation
Or soiled clinical waste marked for incineration.
You in sweet repose
Beyond caring if you’re wearing (remember what you used to say) fresh underwear in case of hospitalisation.

Me one third of an unholy trinity
Mother, son and daughter
In communion no wine
Just bread white sheets
Dipped in blood which never looked brighter
And the powder blue lid
On a fluted plastic jug of water
Served at side room temperature
From a stack of flimsy see through cups
That don’t resist
The clench of a tight-balled fist
Because we’re holding on so tight
Under the migraine flicker of fluorescent light

(Low hum)

For fear of losing grip
And letting all this slip…

A simple wooden cross
A side table
A bible with an unsticking plaster “do not remove” label
Some leaflets about loss
And a phone connected by a tiny silver rosary chain
To a laminated card: to speak to the chaplain
Press 0 and ask reception

Go on I say
Let’s order up a resurrection
In the family chapel where even the non-believers pray
And laugh in the face of death because all tears are from the same saline dissolution

Drip, drip, drip until the end of day.  

Scene three: a hospital mortuary

The unusually dead are portered to their unmaker for dissection
Pathologists weigh your innards, slice your brain
Sluice your fluids down the drain.
Leaving you unmade. Bits worn. Bits broken. A catalogue of parts.
Coronary sclerosis stilled your no longer beating heart
That and the awful, unstoppable arc
Of an upturned walking stick
In the two handed grip
Of geometry and physics (them and Mrs Clarke)
Her unspeakable role. And your last words: I feel sick
Recorded on a high res vid on the hi viz vest
An end of life jacket. I’ve watched this bit a thousand times, know the rest…

Captains Courageous. Spencer Tracy
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry.

Back at the surface, fighting for breath
Is this what they mean by a living death?
Slabbed and gutted in a different way.
Twisting and turning from the scalpel
But no less eviscerated.

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 clap for carers) we began to notice sounds that had always been there but were drowned out by human activity.

I don’t miss the pandemic. But I do miss properly listening to nature. So it gave me great pleasure to dig out this symphony of sounds I recorded in my back garden during lockdown.

Rhayader Reveille

Midnight strikes on the memorial clock
A flame throwing dragon is guarding the flock
While 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 green
Where a Six Nations turf war bled out on the screen
And all the beers downed are now suds on the glass
As a solider called Taffy’s kicked out on his arse.

The Castle Hotel on a Saturday night.
Over the top lads. One hell of a fight.  
Jones is shot through, guts spilled at ten paces
One hundred years from the pals without faces.

Retching and heaving by the stone-carved platoon
Blood at the feet of the boys gone too soon. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

Nisha, meanwhile, she will not remember
This hen night scene from sometime in… November?
And is missing in action out in no man’s land 
Too many Jägerbombs, four in each hand. 

At the sound of a whistle, she went over the top  
And is now taking cover in Lloyd Morgan’s shop
Pinned down on East Street by the rat a tat tat
Of a security shutter and the hiss of a cat.

And sniping from windows and ricochet words
The bayonet beaks of the flesh-eating birds
A battle dress ribbon, a medal for valour
An ecstasy of fumbling*, no masks boys it’s Calor. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

By dawn the guns are silent 
And a smoke of red kites rises above the carrion
As an Ivor Williams trailer bleats past
Welsh lambs for the slaughter.


These lines were written laying in bed next to an Evans in my hotel room after watching the poet, Atilla the Stockbroker, perform in Rhayader’s wonderful Lost Arc arts venue.

*The expression “an ecastasy of fumbling” is lifted directly from the war poet Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. I thank him, Atilla and my constant muse, Dylan Thomas, for the inspiration and my poetry teacher, Pele Cox, for her gentle and expert encouragement.

The memorial clock tower Rhayader from my bedroom above Ty Morgan’s cafe. It was erected by subscription in 1924 for the men of the area who lost their lives in the Great War. The names of those who died in WW2 were added later. The Castle Hotel’s “aquarium” disco is round the corner in North Street. The Calor gas sign close to where Nisha took shelter is just to the right in East Street.

Inquest jury highlights dementia care home failings in death of elderly woman attacked by another resident as she slept

It’s more than two years since my mother, Sheila Hartman, was attacked by another resident as she lay in bed at her care home, Ridgeway Lodge in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Sheila – mum – was beaten around her head and body with the curved end of a wooden walking stick by 92 year old Eunice Clarke who was also living with dementia.

Although sometimes the wheels of justice turn frustratingly slowly I have no complaints about the thoroughness of the inquest. It examined more than a thousand pages of care records which showed care home staff knew about Eunice’s verbal and physical aggression but that managers failed to act on the information and put a proper care plan in place for her. A plan that would recognise and manage the risk she posed to herself, staff and other residents, Sheila included.

To say it was an accident waiting to happen would be wrong. It was no accident. It was the consequence of appallingly poor care and I’m now working with the care home operator, HC One, to make sure it never happens again. That would be a positive legacy for both women -victims in different ways of the horrible disease that is dementia.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the case you can listen here to an interview I gave to BBC Three Counties radio after the jury returned their verdict.

No time to spare? Want a quick read? You can see the BBC News online version of the story here.

Here’s a link to a compilation of the media coverage of the case.

Words on a line

One way or another I’ve been writing for a living for more than 40 years – first as a cub newspaper reporter on the Reading Chronicle; then as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC; and now as a budding poet taught for the past two very intense years by the poetry coach Pele Cox, a former poet in residence at the Tate and the Royal Academy.

But you can’t call yourself a proper poet until you’ve stood up and read your work in front of an audience. So I thought it was about time I did just that! And on Saturday August 5th in the intimate little space that is the Secret Garden behind Castle Bookshop in Ludlow you’ll be able to judge whether it was a sensible decision.

With readings from a small selection of my poems, anecdotes about the process of ‘becoming a poet’ and with the help of literary giants such as Dylan Thomas and Michael Donaghy, I’ll be exploring the literal landscape of the Shropshire countryside together with the emotional landscapes of memory and loss.

Tickets are available direct from the bookshop.

Not the 8.30 News: Episode 5

On the Internet’s slowest-growing satirical show this week… New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, shows British leaders the stylish way to resign.

Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon get caught in a sex change mix up.

Plus boxing promoter, Don King, signs two total lightweights for a fight he hopes will rival the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila.

And exclusive pictures of Prince Harry’s new book Remaindered with right royal revelations even more mind numbing than Spare.

Your guest newsreader is Peter Scissorhands. First screened on the Big Live Breakfast Burrito – the only way to start your business Thursdays over on LinkedIn Live from 0745 UK time most weeks.

Not the 8.30 News: episode 3.

On the Internet’s slowest-growing satirical show this week… news of new line up for The Grand Tour without Jeremy Clarkson. British politicians do a Donald in an attempt to trump Trump at cards. And how the Bank of England got the wrong King Charles on its new £20 note. Oh and a short item about briefs. Or maybe a brief item about shorts. Whatever.

Not the 8.30 News: Episode 2 – the Crap for Carers one with Sir Robin Day Job

The second episode of Not the 8.30 News – the internet’s fastest growing and not-at-all derivative satirical current affairs show. With digs this week at the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, the Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, and, for that penalty miss, Harry Kane.

Not the 8.30 News: Episode 1 – the start of something awful one

The Big Live Breakfast Burrito is perhaps the weirdest show on the Internet. Hosted on LinkedIn and restreamed live to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter plus a heap of other platforms in theory in should be unwatchable. But somehow its compelling mix of what one viewer called “unstructured nonsense” works. Or at least I think it does. Although I would say that because I’m an occasional contributor! Here I am channelling my inner newsreader and making my first attempt at satire. Let me know what you think. Even if it’s rubbish. It’s the silence that kills you.