Category Archives: font

We all of us – well, many of us – carry through from childhood certain key interests or preoccupations. Living under what was then the London Airport flightpath, I grew accustomed to seeing at comfortable height pretty much everything that … Continue reading →

                                       DREAM DAD by DICK JONES                                 … Continue reading →

LOCKDOWN Back to the beginning, then. Who lives here still? Some shepherd swain chewing on a stem, staring over the lonely treetops? Fool if you expected silence, or thought that the trees would be empty. But the contrails have gone … Continue reading →

LINGUA FRANCA Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. George Orwell Ever since the acquisition of words provided me with a receptacle for memory, I have loved language.  Its music, its power to evoke, its … Continue reading →

On a Christmas morning many years ago I was born. Mum and I were in a small maternity home in Horton Kirby, West Kent. A few miles away in my grandparents’ terraced cottage on Hockenden Lane, Swanley, Dad and Alan … Continue reading →

On July 25th 2015 my friend the poet, blogger and curator Dave Bonta was kind enough to publish on his eminent blog, Via Negativa  a first draft of French-Canadian poet Yves Préfontaine’s extraordinary poem Peuple Inhabité. Life in a time of Corona has … Continue reading →

A CLEAR BLUE SKY My dad was a man of prose – a specialist: words used like gardening tools to conjure shapes, to fashion patterns. Language mattered: correspondence ran to pages – letters to the council; ‘thank you’ cards to … Continue reading →

STAINED GLASS The quality of light: this, a piece of late evening sky. How darkness can shine: last of the sun, a first breath of stars, a waxing moon. Judas walks out of the small room while they are still … Continue reading →

IMMORTAL A summer morning. I’m 10. I’m sitting in a sandpit, back supported by a bucket upside down. The sun is brilliant, and standing high; it must be nearly noon. I tip back my head and I yawn and the … Continue reading →