Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
‘Memory,’ W.B. Yeats
Thomas Cubitt, London’s master builder, built
Woburn Buildings (on the Duke of Bedford’s land);
a pedestrianised street from Woburn Place
to what is now Euston Road, and abutting
St Pancras New Church with its caryatids
and ionic columns.
“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn
filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes
and exclaim,’Good God! Here I am again!’…?” Virginia Woolf
The Woolfs’ house was on the south side of the Square.
From there the couple ran the Hogarth Press.
The place was razed by a stray bomb in the Blitz –
but they had moved, the year the war started,
to their house in Sussex near the river Ouse.
Two of the rooms in the British Museum
I always visit are numbers 7
and 8, ‘Assyria: Nimrud’. Named,
in modern times, for the Biblical Nimrod
the three thousand year old city of Kalhu
is twenty miles south of Mosul. On display
from the palace of Ashurnasirpal
are gypsum panels, carved reliefs, products –
faultlessly sculpted – from a master’s workshop.
They are, for the most part, pristine, and portray
absolute kingship, its circumstance, pomp,
and prisoners’ heads severed after battle.
I have made my English journey – by rail,
Chester to Euston return – maybe,
on average, three times a year since I was four.
It is like revisiting a ragged
museum of serendipitous
keepsakes: Canada Geese on Cheshire ponds;
GEC become Alstom in Stafford:
wind turbines and mobile phone towers
jostling radio masts near Rugby;
concrete cows in Milton Keynes; Ovaltine
in Kings Langley; Watford’s mosques;
and, anywhere, marshalling yards of
derelict rolling stock,
Ascending south east from Manchester, over
Eyam, the ‘plague village’, towards the Wash;
cruising over the Channel, observing
the shipping below me with wonder like some
latter day Bleriot; then Rotterdam’s docks
and the Rhine; sun glinting momentarily
like fireflies, and I am nonchalant
as Icarus, mindful as Daedalus,
noting place names freighted with histories;
past Munich, and the bared Austrian Alps,
then due south along the Balkan Mountains,
smoke drifting north from polluting fires,
roads following the contours,
The thirteenth century’s major earthquake
resulted in a tsunami that buried
a bishop and his congregation, razed
the castle – a Byzantine fort – broke
the Roman breakwater, leaving rocks
like cracked teeth, rendered the harbour useless
for sea going vessels and reduced this once
capital city to a fishing village
which the odd traveller would visit
for the lustrous mosaics nearby.
On the corniche, watched by strolling tourists
and two armed Port &
A DEATH IN GASCONY
AT CHESTER CROSS
A NEW YORK TALE
LEVITICUS
A NEW YORK TALE