I’m early but the staffroom is already blue with smoke and full of strangers who know each other. A row of hard back chairs beneath the window and a long table cluttered with books and papers and ashtrays. This is the old staffroom next door to the head’s office before renovations moved the room up a floor and tripled the…
If you’ve ever been young and full of dreams …. If you ever headed to the big city with your imagination teeming with the prospect of joining the generations of those who came before you and left their mark … this is a poem for you. Think Paris, New York, London – any great and storied city that has been…
Blackbirds are notorious for being able to mimic the sounds they hear as they hop about the celestial chimney pots of suburbia. Ice cream van jingles, phone ring tones, car alarms and ambulance sirens – they can do the lot. John Drinkwater – born in Leytonstone, London – writes about the song of the blackbird in Loyalties – the anthology…
London on November 11th 1919 – a two minute silence at 11 o’clock to observe the first anniversary of the end great war. This photograph by an unknown artist conveys the collective grief of a people. To stand in that crowd in the stillness and silence for two minutes – the individual weight of personal loss and mourning magnified beyond…
I haven’t read Go Set a Watchman and I’m not sure I will. I did read the first chapter in The Guardian and was not particularly impressed. If Harper Lee did not want it published then she didn’t want it read. But read it or not, it’s hard to miss all the controversy over the publication and the revelation of…
The farmers’ market is full of strange squash and gourds and pumpkins of every color, shape, and size. Autumn – mists and melancholy, falling leaves and nostalgia – is a time for memories. Mists that burn off by mid-morning and skeins of geese and migrating birds. Dark evenings when you can still play outside exhilarated by the chill, and the smell of…