The wind in the dark
I go to my room for an afternoon nap,
leave the curtains open
to watch the last of the day.
Thirty minutes later the lights
of the stone cottages are on.
The wind along Longframlington's
ridge is blowing hard, which
gives me comfort, wrapped in warmth
inside, even when it howls a little.
Sometimes it's a sea battle,
guns thundering. A mile or two
...Friday 30th December 2022 9:15 pm
Watching England with Carol Ann Duffy
It seems like a dream now:
the 1-4 scoreline;
Lampard’s goal that never was;
watching the game with Carol Ann Duffy.
She turned up amid the half-time gloom
in a Ludlow pub, asked if it was ok
to sit near the TV. I made some crack
about political-historical contexts
and Nazi fugitives, and why
Uruguayan officials favour Germans.
She half-smiled: that’s when I gues...
Friday 2nd December 2022 8:30 am
Lest They Forget
A village Remembrance service.
The same old hymns,
and pacifist sentiment.
Sun streams through
the memorial hall window
so that I can hardly see.
And when we come
to those words
and the bugle plays
and tears are wiped away
that same sun
has gone down, disappeared.
Why did we fight? Maybe
just to defend the British
belief in fair play, in sticking
t...
Monday 14th November 2022 9:53 am
North
The Angel almost
ambushed us.
The trees turn
more beautiful
with every mile.
Tyne at low tide.
Network of bridges,
trains crossing.
Four in the morning.
Crescent moon
in dark sky. The silence.
Churchyard gravestones
look like people
in camera's flashlight.
The blinking of the internet.
Every day,
a new start.
I...
Saturday 29th October 2022 7:32 am
The way forward
We’re not there yet
but already some details
are etched in the map:
a haunted Roman road
beyond the wall,
leading to the border,
known as
the Devil’s Causeway,
traces of old railways,
a ruined priory,
a nearby river.
Why are you going so far?
some said. Family called us.
A seed was planted.
Time to begin walking again.
Have I waited nearly
all m...
Friday 7th October 2022 11:22 am
'The Daleks take the Treasury'
Easy to spot them.
Another metallic voice in parliament.
Exterminate the economy!
Pound plunges, Britannia unhinged.
The Daleks take the Treasury.
Saturday 24th September 2022 7:59 am
The funeral
Massed ranks, protecting
phalanx. Precision.
The bagpipes, gun carriage,
martial yet mournful.
Abbey’s organ, choir.
On the streets, in crowds,
in front of TVs. Most things
stopped. Most of us were there.
Union flags along The Mall.
Whatever your colours
a moment in history.
For one day a nation
more or less in perfect step.
The Queen has died.
...Monday 19th September 2022 4:07 pm
From Reykjavik to Kyiv
Reykjavik, where Reagan
and Gorbachev almost agreed
to ban all nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev, an old man now,
maintains that this dream
is humanity’s only hope.
The shelling of civilians
is indiscriminate. The situation
has gone far beyond insults,
invective, rhetoric.
Forty years on
I’ll concede that avuncular
rightwinger Ronnie Reagan,
bete noire of...
Tuesday 30th August 2022 10:52 pm
The bard of Cymdonkin Drive
Caitlin said in a TV interview
he sometimes spent hours
in the writing shed, only
to emerge with one line
after all that work.
The radio voice portentous,
everyone’s idea of a poet.
Words that were musical, inspirational,
with no one quite sure
what exactly they meant.
A bard that pulled the birds
and drank like a fish. Why
did he get so pissed?
Wa...
Wednesday 24th August 2022 11:46 am
I wouldn't go down to the sea today
They crap on us
from a great height.
It's not symbolic
metaphorical, allegorical -
it's offishial. It's offal.
Farewell to the blue wall
along the south coast.
Hello, polio, and other diseases.
We don't have to follow
the rules any longer.
More in your face
than piled-up rubbish
in the 70s. Wake up, Britain,
and smell the ordure.
We're surr...
Friday 19th August 2022 10:59 am
Drought
On some nights
when pressure is low
we fear to revive
dying plants
lest supply runs out.
No new handouts.
We no longer know
what to do for the best.
All that still grows
are those that
strangle and exploit,
or send out thorns.
What will remain
of this garden
is brambles
and bindweed.
Even in this heat
we dread the cold to come.
...
Monday 15th August 2022 10:29 am
Homecoming
Always a song that tugged
at the heartstrings.
But over the years it took on
a melancholy, mournful note.
So many disappointments,
hands of God, penalty shoot-outs,
racist abuse on social media.
But that was then. That was the men.
Now, at the final whistle, they’re
playing our song, at Wembley!
The gods have smiled on us,
restored our faith. The longer
the...
Monday 1st August 2022 8:01 am
The road north
That tinderbox summer: underground fires’
subversive routes, breaking cover,
crackling heaths and pinewoods.
Blackened commons, smoke-cloaked motorway.
Sudden, meaningful quarrels; soon
you’d be heading north to university.
Fog-stalled autumn: drinks half-price
in freshers’ week, tempted by new flavours.
Down south I couldn’t start, awaited repairs.
Long, cross-coun...
Saturday 30th July 2022 8:25 am
Oh, Mr Porter
i.m Bernard Cribbins
That birthday scene
in The Railway Children
that always makes me cry.
Pride, dignity, modesty,
and a certain pig-headedness,
too. Cribbins embodied those
values in his portrayal of everyman
porter Perks. We should have
feared the worst news was coming
when he didn’t turn up in the sequel.
Other working-class traits?
The Hole in th...
Thursday 28th July 2022 9:56 am
Holiday jobs
Fruit picker road sweeper
Christmas mail sorter
office cleaner
road tax disc admin assistant.
I’ve listed my holiday jobs
in order of enjoyment.
Thought I’d do this because
at least one Tory PM candidate
has made hers a crucial part
of her CV, to try to persuade
us she’s an ordinary person
who once flipped burgers.
We aren’t fooled that easily!
...Tuesday 19th July 2022 8:57 am
1976!
We didn’t worry about climate change
back then. The temperature might have
hit the 90s for several days. But that
was Fahrenheit, not Centigrade.
I do remember being bitten
by swarms of maddened ladybirds.
It wasn’t the heat that bothered us,
but the lack of rain. Wildfires
smouldered for a month in woods
and on heaths on my drive to work,
traveling undergro...
Sunday 17th July 2022 8:20 am
A pride of Lionesses (and all the other teams)
Parade of the pony-tails.
No wrestling in the box;
getting up and getting on with it.
Football as it should be played.
Showing the men how to entertain,
putting them to shame.
The spirit of sport. Someone
should have a word with them.
All those young girls cheering goals,
singing Football’s Coming Home.
I’m not being leery - I hope -
but the game just go...
Saturday 16th July 2022 7:01 am
Watching England with Carol Ann Duffy
It seems like a dream now:
the 1-4 scoreline;
Lampard’s goal that never was;
watching the game with Carol Ann Duffy.
She turned up amid the half-time gloom
in a Ludlow pub, asked if it was ok
to sit near the TV. I made some crack
about political-historical contexts
and Nazi fugitives, and why
Uruguayan officials favour Germans.
She half-smiled: that’s when I gues...
Friday 15th July 2022 9:11 am
From Gorbachev to Johnson
Cornwall 2019
Church Cove. No through road.
Butterflies brush fingers along
the coastal path. Named after
Breton saint, the church of the storms
shelters in the dunes behind a rock;
the graveyard often fills with sand.
The information notes talk casually
of Arthur, Bedivere, Excalibur;
list wrecks along Gunwalloe’s coast,
not least the Portuguese t...
Sunday 10th July 2022 12:58 pm
This old heart
I Want to Hold Your Hand.
The music of our youth plays
as we 60-somethings –
and then some –
squat and lunge,
walk on the spot,
step forward, then back.
No arms above the shoulder
for the cardios.
I remember swiping
the demon fast bowler
for successive fours
before being clean-bowled.
A 400-yard relay
when no one overtook me.
The hat-trick
I s...
Wednesday 15th June 2022 8:56 am
Moments
A holly blue on holly.
The rose that rambles
through the apple tree
tries to tug me back
as I chug over the grass,
the three-wheel mower
cutting out at random
moments. Today
the estate agent's
photographer came
to take pictures.
Wednesday 4th May 2022 3:37 pm
Easter Saturday, Benahavis
A gorge of towering cliffs;
the Guadalmina unseen
below the road. We visit
a park to feed rabbits
with carrots, take our turns
with party pieces
at the open-air theatre,
while other families wait
impatiently to photograph
and film first communioners,
one young girl bedecked
like a bride.
I read a poem from my phone
about Simon Armitage,
Gillian perf...
Wednesday 27th April 2022 12:41 pm
A ticket to die
They thought they had
train tickets to safety.
Now they lie scattered
outside Kramatorsk station,
surrounded by luggage.
First you see crammed
shopping trolleys, suitcases,
a turquoise pram. Then
the bodies in between.
Has Putin poisoned
the water supply
so that ordinary Russians
believe his lies? The missile
that landed among clustered
wou...
Friday 8th April 2022 10:22 am
Dust to dust
Souvenir from the Sahara.
Terracotta sand washed down
by the rain, collected in gullies
on our bins and stepping stones.
Reminder that, isn’t nature
wonderful? And that it knows
no boundaries. Shared with
France and Spain. And yet …
what other dust might be
blown in on the wind?
The answer, my friend …
Thursday 17th March 2022 2:01 pm
The big chill
If I were still in the office
maybe all this would
affect me less.
I would be worrying about
making the headline fit,
or whether someone would
change it further up the line,
cutting the copy to fill
the space, doing it all
within the deadline.
A big political resignation?
My role to make the page work,
the pictures have impact.
Yes, I worked at a leading
...Monday 14th March 2022 12:22 am
Shortages
Ukraine is running out of fuel,
food, water, medicines,
humanitarian corridors,
safe havens. It still has
bravery and defiance,
teenage boys scared
but willing to join the fight.
Putin has long run out
of sense and humanity.
He's still pumped up by
his supply of steroids
as he reduces villages,
towns, cities to rubble,
murders fleeing civilians,
bombs...
Sunday 13th March 2022 9:23 am
From Reykjavik to Kyiv
Reykjavik, where Reagan
and Gorbachev almost agreed
to ban all nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev, an old man now,
maintains that this dream
is humanity’s only hope.
The shelling of civilians
is indiscriminate. The situation
has gone far beyond insults,
invective, rhetoric.
Forty years on
I’ll concede that avuncular
rightwinger Ronnie Reagan,
bete noire of...
Monday 7th March 2022 9:55 am
The little green man of Berlin
They were glad enough to see
so much thrown in the dustbin
when the Wall came down;
but not the Ampelmännchen
the traffic light’s little green man
with his jaunty, Erich Honecker hat.
At the threat of his deposal
by the west’s staid cousin
there was outcry. Now
Herr Everyman’s cheery gait
sets Berlin’s tone on carrier bags,
coffee mugs, T-shirts.
Besid...
Sunday 6th March 2022 9:09 am
Death among the conifers
This was once innocent,
Joan Hunter Dunn country.
Now behind the rhododendrons,
azaleas, conifers lurk foreigners
with something to hide, money,
identities. They try to conceal
themselves in woodland,
behind fairways. Occasionally
there’s a mystery.
There may have been a court case,
or strangers in the neighbourhood.
A rich but shy man
is found dead in circ...
Friday 4th March 2022 8:17 pm
The news from Ukraine
I’ll show those old ladies
mixing up Molotov cocktails,
bomb a nuclear plant
to a factor of ten Chernobyls.
These steroids pump
you up, help you
to see things
as they really are.
Never mind that bumbling
old man in the White House.
Never mind that clown we have
in place in Londongrad.
Never mind that our soldiers
don’t know why they’re there.
...Friday 4th March 2022 9:38 am
The football scores
The early April afternoon was glorious.
The daffs were out, I felt Wordsworthian.
You’d come down from York to look
at houses. We caroused that evening
with old friends in the Railway Tavern –
they used to serve a lovely drop there,
now apartments handy for the station –
talking football as usual,
about our bankrupt team’s past triumphs,
and how we’d probably never fight...
Thursday 3rd March 2022 8:05 am
The morning after
the last hope gone, we find ourselves in sunshine
with family in Marbella beside a fountain sculpture
of beauty and unity, reflecting civic pride,
what might have been, playing with our
Anglo-Spanish grandchild on the swings and slides.
She careers across the pavement on a little bike,
I struggle to keep up with her, and as I screw
my features into laughter faces, she mim...
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 9:55 am
Tallinn
Happiness is being alive is a national saying.
Suitcases sculpture outside the museum.
Estonia declared independence
for the second time in a century
when the old Soviet Union wasn’t looking.
Thirty-thousand taken from their homes,
sent to Siberia in cattle trucks
in 1941 and 1949.
One of the last heathen lands in Europe,
now one of the most secular,
beset b...
Tuesday 1st March 2022 9:39 am
Have we had our chips?
Even if this does prove
to be our last fish and chip supper,
even if it's technically
just a pub lunch,
if Vladimir the Poisoner
in a mad rage presses the button
just because we don't admire
his rippling torso, just because
we laugh at his ugly Botox features,
before I perform in the am-dram
tonight, before we even rehearse
the lines one more time, then
...Friday 25th February 2022 2:50 pm
The carriage in the forest
After three days of arguing the armistice was signed
in the French general’s private train
at a siding in the forest of Compiegne.
The Kaiser left for exile in Holland.
The military, unwilling to admit defeat,
still surrendered guns and planes.
No one told the people how bad things were.
A German corporal, recovering
after being gassed the month before,
a misfit who...
Thursday 24th February 2022 10:21 am
Rehab
First day after the cardiac class
I’m walking the canal, taking
my chance between two storms.
The water full and clear and still
after yesterday’s rain. I recall
the tape measure they put
round my waist, told me
that I was in the Red Zone.
Cyclists that sneak up on you.
Joggers, dog walkers. And then,
an omen, intimation of heaven:
bejewelled flash of blue i...
Thursday 17th February 2022 11:35 am
The land of total rhubarb
Welcome to the sunlit uplands
of total rhubarb, England's
fastest growing cash crop.
(Too bad there's no one left to pick it).
Fertilised by inverted pyramids
of piffle, or should that be
de Pfeffel? Where Afghan hounds
matter more than Afghans.
And talking of animals, did even
the Cheshire Cat wear
such a self-satisfied smirk?
As tourists flock to ...
Friday 28th January 2022 8:31 am
The end of the line
My wife returns from a funeral
and says: I know now
what we should play at yours.
The deceased arrived
to the strains
of Flanders and Swann's
Slow Train, a lament
that lists so many
mellofluous-sounding stations
bulldozed by Beeching.
The service leaflet has
a tank engine and coaches
on its cover. I find myself
composing the first line
of my o...
Tuesday 25th January 2022 6:02 pm
Drizzle
Darkness approaches early.
Grey blanket envelops the garden.
It doesn't bother the tits
that flash between the feeders;
not a nothing day to them.
Bulbs push through mulch.
Moisture makes lawn glisten,
illuminates the moss.
Magpie mops up spilt mealie worms.
Recovering fir tree's needles
gleam on the patio,
make light of the afternoon gloom.
Beneath this sh...
Tuesday 11th January 2022 4:12 pm
'Go, go, go'!
There's a break in the traffic.
My almost-two grandson,
strapped in his car seat,
urges 'Go, go, go!'
in my ear, just like
Neal Cassady
in On the Road.
Yes! Yes, yes!
Sunday 9th January 2022 10:32 am
1963
The central heating has broken down.
Covid-ridden British Gas has let us down.
The unfamiliar temperature in the house
recalls my boyhood winter of 1963.
Ice inside windows, no radiators then.
Some football teams didn't play
for many weeks. I was just a kid,
had never heard of Sylvia Plath.
The snow and ice remained, day after day,
eventually shifted by wor...
Thursday 6th January 2022 9:38 pm
There's a dinosaur in the bath
The cat bustles in for breakfast
no longer looking out
for the greyhound that visited.
All is back to normal. Or is it?
The TV’s no longer permanently
tuned to Baby Shark and Peppa Pig.
But nappies are still found
in odd waste bins.
A child’s fairground sits
on top of the cupboard.
They didn’t have room
for it in their luggage.
A plastic potty gently ...
Tuesday 4th January 2022 10:15 am
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