Drive carefully
You might think you know who your family are, and where you’re from, but a few days diddling about on the internet can turn what you knew, what you thought you knew, inside out.I...
Category: England
Ras Tafari in Botolph St.Otto
Spume has just sent me this photo of His Imperial Majesty Haille Selassie visiting Botolph St Otto in 1939. Spume is on the far right, aged 16...
Mood Index album on You Tube
My lovely step-daughter, Miss Victoria Mason, has undertaken to upload the Mood Index album from 1997, ‘Lino Women and Song’ onto You Tube. This is the first track she did….
Ownership as trust
This is a policy idea; based on discussions with my friend and colleague at BCU, Gregory Leadbetter, who has done the heavy lifting. These days Greg is a fine poet and teacher of creative...
Why get your head together in the country?
My idea in renaming the blog bit of the website has root in my new (still in production) book, ‘A Hero For High Times’, and it is, at least in part, a reaction to...
How indeed…
This is a first pass in some haste to say hello to you, subscribers, regular visitors, victims of search engines (North/South divide? Tit-rub?) etc to the new look website. This is the fifth full...
A Walk to Bongville
I have been waiting to read Olivia Laing’s ‘To the River’ for a year; I couldn’t afford the hardback when I saw it in the summer in the Penrallt Gallery Bookshop in Machynlleth, but...
Us (us us us us) and Them (them them them them)
It has been a very interesting experience making the programme for Radio Four about the North/South divide. As I followed the line across England on the map drawn up by Prof. Danny Dorling of...
Spitfires on the Line.
I’m in the middle of making a short series for Radio Four with producer Mary Ward-Lowery about a series of journeys we’re taking along the line drawn by Prof. Danny Dorling of Sheffield University...
Good weekend so far, touch wood.
We drove to Cambridge yesterday to pick up some stuff, and on the way I bought the Radio Times and i, both of which had favouable things to say about the psycho-geography show on...
Secret Garden Parties
Here’s a lovely photo of the author dressed very much en trende. The autumn is going to be all about knitwear, in my view. These woollen lederhosen, or wollenhosen as I guess we should...
Dreadful inexcusable blunder.
I’m sitting at my computer holding my head in my hands, groaning, rending my garments and so on. This coming Sunday sees the broadcast of the second episode of the series I’m currently doing...
I remember Lancaster
Earlier this evening I was bimbling about looking for something I’d written a few years back. Clicking on long unopened files, I found this. It was written as a commision for a bloke who...
Music really was my first love.
And sometimes it’s the only thing that pulls you through. 25 years ago, I lived in a freezing cold artists studio up in the South Downs behind Newhaven. It was winter, and I had...
Off with their heads…
I like a nice Royal wedding, me. To be honest, I quite like weddings per se. But I’m the father of daughters, and I think I’d worry a lot if one of my girls...
Not St. George after all
I was pretty sure what I wanted to blog today, which was The English Democrats’ idea for an English Parliament. I don’t like the English Democrats, because, although they say that they’re a kind...
