• A reading: Sonnet 18, Shakespeare

    Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? A reading.

  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci – John Keats – a Reading

    Sometimes sad and sometimes not, our stories and our poems, our Green Ladies and our Belles Dames are reflections of our desires and anxieties.

  • Isness

    Happiness is only attainable once you recognize that everything just “is”.

  • My Old Sweet Etcetera – A Reading

    For Eleanor. This anti war poem, written by American poet EE Cummings and published in 1926, is such a perfect specimen of the genre.

  • The Shameful, Avoidable Horror of Dementia and Old Age

    We would put an animal down, surely we can offer the same courtesy to a human?

  • The Little Drummer Girl

    I read the book with much enjoyment many years ago, but this lavish BBC adaptation of  John Le Carré’s 1983 novel raises the bar to very high levels indeed.

  • Why I doubt my Existence

    I believe that I am merely a “program” and that similar programs run every animal and living thing on earth.

  • Joy to the World

    I will never be able to resolve my unshakable disbelief in Christian dogma with the profound peace I find singing sacred classical music in an ancient English church with a good choir.

  • Are you what you read?

    The modern trope would have it that you are what you eat, but the metaphor needs taking further.

  • Father and Son

    There comes a time in your life when, if you are lucky enough to have a son, you recognize he has become a man. And of course to you, a very special one.