Tag: writing
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Hommes sous Hommes, II
In 2005, I went to Palestine for three weeks with my parents, my wife and our daughter, aged two. We were invited to carry out workshops with young artists and kids. A mural was painted on the wall of a playground in a camp next to Qalendia check point. We made several friends and knew…
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Dicksonia Antarctica
The Tree Fern I once had a Tree Fern (Dicksonia Antarctica) For many, many years my First view each morning From our upstairs window. Beautiful, sweeping fronds So elegant in light breeze. I took care each winter to Wrap the crown, protect From frost and bitter winds. One spring it still stood tall Yet…
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A Weekend on Mars
This Moment In Time Just when the crescent moon appeared. When the ailanthus shivered. When a heron shook its feathery crown and the little wheel turned inside the big wheel. While the palmist sighed, old and alone. At this juncture. At this moment in time, Winter putting on its walking boots, Autumn reflecting…
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A Foraged Map
Spread over my kitchen table, emptied from the various cloth bags and tubs, were the wild plants that I’d gathered that day. As I viewed them from above, deliberating as to what kind of meal I could make that would include them all, the array of textures conspired to suggest a visual record of the…
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Mapping the In-Betweens
By the time I was seven I had moved house four times in three countries on two continents. A few years later, I found myself dropped into another new place: a summer spent in Čelákovice, a small town in the Czech Republic. Culture shock, the hollowness of first-time jetlag, feeling so fragile and porous that…
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Entrained Rhythms
I: Aretha I’ve just moved to Uppsala, Sweden, where at first I knew no-one, apart from my old friend Kalle, who with characteristic kindness invited me to go see Amazing Grace with him as soon as I arrived. We packed into the smallest room of the Fyrisbiografen, a tiny cinema constructed in 1911 and now…
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Living Symphonies
Between Liverpool Street and Chingford, the heatwave had cooked the train carriage and all who rode in her to fetid ripeness. On the other side of the parting doors, the air thickened with an elegant stink. Gutsy lilies dressed in flouncy ribbon-tied bouquets languished in buckets of water just beyond the ticket barriers, insistent that…
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Editorial: Rhythm
From the impact of clocks on notions of time, to the effects of computers, trains and planes on experiences of modern life, rhythm – in various forms and ways – determines, and has always determined, how we live our lives and how we see the world. Some rhythms bring people together: listening to music can…
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A Place That Mattered
The place where my son died had horses. Only because when a dying boy asks you for a horse, you find more than one. You make your way away from the busyness of your town beside the wide river to land in the mountains that is not your own. There you watch the horses wander…
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Mapping Edge
Mapping Edge Finger touched mapped faded edge, unending ink black shaped lines, tracing hillsides I walked as a child. Black tufted strokes, old rough pastures, where curlews once rose away from me, ungrazed now, fallen into rush thistled bog. . The parish track, a dry stone wall field margin, a ridgeway in words,…
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Hommes sous Hommes, I
In 2005, I went to Palestine for three weeks with my parents, my wife and our daughter, aged two. We were invited to carry out workshops with young artists and kids. A mural was painted on the wall of a playground in a camp next to Qalendia check point. We made several friends and knew…