Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
As we travelled back from a London weekend
in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express
three very young, head scarved mothers nursed
their newborns and chattered softly all the way.
At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.
Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,
Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,
is a three storey detached house whose ground floor
has been a synagogue for a century
and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.
Above the shul,
Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago
on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing
for history to note here – only births, deaths,
the occasional fire and break-in,
and marriages at the Methodist Church
almost opposite us. Empires collapsed
from within – Austro-Hungarian,
British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,
and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,
and bed-sits, then gentrification.
Now the St Petersburg Resurrection
A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev
to sing the liturgy in concert halls –
We flew late, on the year’s busiest Friday,
to Toulouse. As we drove in the hire car
through Haut-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées
into Gascony, its rolling hills green
with August’s growth, the sun was setting –
the burgeoning fields of sunflowers paused, bats
swooped before the car like twilit angels.
As we topped each rise we could see the glow
fade in the west above the Bay of Biscay.
We arrived in darkness at the pension.
The patronne gave us supper on the terrace –
The timetabled rumble of the Northern Line
between King’s Cross and Euston stations
moves beneath the British Library’s
‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’.
Aficionados like my granddaughter
are oblivious, focused on the wonder
of ancient texts and modern images,
the alchemy of ink, pigments, alphabets
transformed into art. Between trains there is
the clip-clopping of Centaur’s hooves.
We walk to King’s Cross to see Platform
9¾. People are queuing
to take selfies beneath the sign attached
to the wall next to The Harry Potter shop.
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.
HESPERIDES
OF PLUMS AND FIGS
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES