Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
From one of the high rise budget hotels
in Portimao we picked up a group
of six challenged men and their two minders.
(Portugal, our tour guide told us later,
was enabling those – institutionalised
since childhood for learning difficulties –
to take vacations, with supervision,
from the drab, echoing, noisome halls).
Two were remarkable: a gaunt fellow
bent permanently double, always moving,
keeping close to the other, a joker
with moustached Arabic looks and frightened eyes.
The owl we heard last night hoots near the road
and a fox barks deep among the oak trees.
Though it is moonless and the sea a sliver
of a different dark, light pollution
from the small resort to the east
means we must find the westernmost wall
to lean against and view the stars tonight.
We see them trembling and marvel, wordless,
so many more than we ever remember.
We forget they are always above us.
‘What is the sky for?’
“Do you know, Grandpa, this book has seventeen
chapters, and I’m on chapter fifteen,
‘The Forbidden Forest’?” “I didn’t,” I say,
“That’s excellent!” and this seven year old,
who has mastered the use of apostrophes,
curls up, like the proverbial worm
on the sofa, and continues to read
‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’.
I am re-reading, in English, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’.
In the garden, using extended loppers,
Grandma is cutting choice blooms from a rose
we have had some thirty years,
The when, where, why of the last of Britain
is not easy to pinpoint exactly.
Perhaps it was Dudley Moore, the comic actor
and skilful musician, drunk, approaching
Princess Margaret at some exclusive do
and slurring, “Good evening, your royal highness.
I suppose a blow job is out of the question?”
Or the woman herself choosing not to be buried
with her peers, but cremated in Slough.
Possibly it was the Queen and her consort,
…a maxim named for a Franciscan friar,
William of Ockham, from the Surrey village –
and from London, Oxford, Avignon,
Munich – Pope’s enemy, Emperor’s friend,
dying just as the Black Death was scourging.
It is a metaphor, not logic chopping –
best summarised, perhaps, as ‘less is more’,
‘don’t over-egg the pudding’, even
‘fine words butter no parsnips’. He was
the radical philosopher of his age,
a nominalist – words are words, ideas
ideas,
Sheltering from a summer shower
beneath the portico of the Tunsgate Arch,
Guildford, I looked down the steep High Street
towards the bridge over the River Wey
and saw three bespectacled Buddhist Monks
emerge from Dolland & Aitchison and,
lifting their saffron robes, run to Jigsaw.
Enjoying my pan fried sea bass and Guinness
in The Faulkner, Hoole, and watching the rain
trickle down the Walker Street Co-op’s facade,
my view was suddenly blocked by a coach
from which a party of middle aged
Japanese tourists descended and,
INSPIRATION
'ANOTHER PLACE' REVISITED AT LOW WATER
IN CAMERA
'ANOTHER PLACE' REVISITED AT LOW WATER
THE TAXIDERMY