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Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
Like many journalists of my generation I’ve had a fascination with the work of the press photographer Don McCullin for my whole career. Each of his images manages to tell a story that us writers would struggle to convey in a thousand words. So I…
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 one I was convinced would…
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 tips of ash twigs blacken.Limp…
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. The curtains close to end…
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…
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 just in Spain where I’m…
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 Six Nations turf war bled…
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 performances from the late greats…
Tin hats at the ready. In this Armageddon-inspired episode our newsreader lands an an exclusive interview with Prince Andrew who claims he can’t possibly have been with the businessman-come-spy, Yang Tengbo, because he was ordering a Chinese giveaway (sorry takeaway) at Sum Phat Lie’s in…
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…
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 wings there’s nothing to be…
I’m not a big fan of anniversaries. The ones you want to forget, you remember. The ones you want to remember, you forget. And so it was I found myself wide awake early this morning exactly a year to the hour since my mum, Sheila…