Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
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 &
At the landward end of the bronze age site
is a six storey apartment hotel;
right a broad sandy beach with amenities,
left, behind palms, cypresses and olives,
another hotel, vast as a cruise ship,
hiding the property development signs
in Russian and Chinese on the main road.
A peloton of young German students,
when we arrive, is being lectured
at the entrance to the museum –
an architect-designed, circular space,
subtly engineered into the sandstone,
The kings were interred within the city walls.
This necropolis – lying between the sea
and the newly finished dual carriageway,
The Avenue of the Kings – is a field
full of flowers this early April morning:
curry plants, sea lavender, hibiscus.
Carved deep into the limestone – a simple niche
or a house with courtyard and doric columns –
these were courtiers’ tombs. They were looted
aeons ago. Some were quarried for dwellings,
others used by squatters, outcasts. Mimosa
bougainvillea,
HESPERIDES
OF PLUMS AND FIGS
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES