'And they lived happily ever after ...'

Margaret Clough died this week, at the age of 90. This is my tribute to her. " What a joy to read your review of my book," she wro...

They were born into Hitler's Germany in the first years of the Second World War. They spent their early childhood being ushered into bun...

  “A mistake is an invitation to look again, more closely, at something, so you can understand better what is going on.”   – Philippa ...

Most human beings are not made, ultimately, for solitude. Yet a person's self-awareness benefits from regular retreats into solitariness...

Dearest Hugh Thank you for wanting to hear me read my poems and for introducing me to Off The Wall. Thank you for encouraging me to write a ...

Oh, my dear God, sweet Christ: who would believe this estuary of us - who is the river and who the sound of the sea? Longer than the count o...

We were getting my disabled mother dressed, or changed and ready for bed - I no longer remember which. It's an effort, for her, as much ...

The gentle memory I referred to in my last blog, so generously conveyed by my niece, is terribly unimportant. Unimportant in the sense of no...

It's a while now that I've not been attending to this blog as regularly as would fulfil me. When the blogsite was kindly set up for ...

A writer can't be squeamish when it comes to emotions. The 'bad' human emotions all have a place. I first learned the value o...

Relaxing by the hearth before a lovely blaze, my friend says,  "If you say you have a book of poems I must read, I'll tell yo...

Today, I have extracted my review of Marc Schroeder's Sleeping with Dogs from my recent newsletter, in order to give this wonderful re...