Author Archives: Dick Jones

My mum died ten years ago. It was the quietest of deaths – a pulse stopping at the end of years of exile in a dark, silent place so far removed from the places of laughter that she had shared … Continue reading →

St Enogat is a small, pretty town just a few miles from Dinard on Brittany’s Côte d’Émeraude. One quiet Sunday I sat in the shade of a persimmon tree and watched two elderly men preparing to play pétanque on an … Continue reading →

I have a sleep disorder that – compounded currently by the side effects of medication – ensures that each and every night is fragmented into a sort of archipelago of the  5 stages of slumber varying from just stages 1 … Continue reading →

If I have ever adhered to any kind of faith it’s been to a belief based on hope against rational expectation that the capacity for redemption and salvation is a product of obdurate human desire and will alone. Once upon … Continue reading →

  JACQUES PRÉVERT – 1900 : 1977 For a poet – for any kind of writer – English is a seductive language.  With a vocabulary that is rich in synonyms way beyond reasonable need, wrapped up in a mind-boggling and … Continue reading →

FIRST TRAIN TO SKAVILLE..! The enduring presence of old-school ska and the various revivalist outbreaks that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic alongside the ever-developing forms and sub-sets of its descendant genre reggae is a mighty tribute to the … Continue reading →

It was jazz that finally provided a soundtrack to my nascent sense of rebellion. And it was understanding jazz that finally gave me a sense of the world as a place in which I too might step outside the four-square … Continue reading →

Another attempt at disentanglement from Facebook. Tacit collusion with Zuckerberg hypocrisy and the overall cynicism at the heart of the Facebook process is the larger context and a growing disillusionment with my self-created role as the well-patronised  curator of a … Continue reading →

At age 16 I fell in love with the Beats. It was a passion that, for a while, consumed me entirely. Its heat immolated in a single brief firestorm and its light eclipsed in a single flash all that, for … Continue reading →