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Poetry, bikes, dementia...
Poetry, bikes, dementia...
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 this time round as we…
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 write anywhere anytime you have…
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 thinking there is little or…
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. Dad was in on the…
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 to get in. Just four…
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 to and from school. “Grandad…
Let’s face it cyclists aren’t a very creative bunch. Or certainly not if the names they give their rides on Strava are anything to go by. A quick and dirty tally of my activity feed over the past few days looks something like this… Morning…
Dear Bradley Like many MAMILS (middle aged men in Lycra) you are the reason I got back into cycling forty something years after hopping off my Raleigh Chopper when I gave up my paper round as a 16 year old. I loved your lamb chop…
How accurately will The Mercy portray Donald Crowhurst, the British yachtsman who disappeared while taking part in the Sunday Times Golden Globe race? By all accounts Colin Firth plays the leading role with his usual understated flair and captures the descent into madness that we can only…
He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. No time to be anywhere in particular. So he walked. Walked past the chain stores in the centre of town. Past the charity shops in the gaps. Past the empty shops on the outskirts. For rent. For…
Where were you when the child was crying, mourning a loss not yet hers, but near, an inevitability? Were you safely tucked away in a cocoon of comfort, one where ignorance could be a justifiable excuse for your indifference? Etchings of fear lashed across her…
There’s a crow sitting on the telephone wire that arcs from pole to pole from where I’m writing this at Crosshands, loops up the road to Hints and beyond to Clee Hill. The two are connected: as the crow flies our village is only 19…