The Last dinner

Gavan was dying.  We knew it, Patricia and I, and James, his brother, all three of us knew it.   He was struggling with life itself.  But Gavan, he wouldn’t accept it.  He remained confident that the experimental drugs would work, that he would recover, that he would return to college, see his friends, that this...

Homage to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Two poems from my current collection, a homage to D.H. Lawrence, which by the way, have been rejected by my publishers. Poem 1: We must go now, out in’t  ter  pouring rain Bollock naked in the wooded glade Except fer our wellies And I will hold you wet me dear And whisper into yer dampish...

How did we manage without sex education.

We didn’t know how to kiss.  No one told us how.  No one showed us what to do.  There was very little on the TV  and the kind of films we went to see on Saturday mornings didn’t have any kissing in them.  Abbott and Costello:  no kissing, Tarzan: no kissng, Dean Martin and Jerry...

School Dancing

I was taught to dance at my secondary School.  In the gymnasium.   It was during P.T. sessions, when it was too wet or too cold outside to go across to the fields. The girls would form up on one side of the gym and the boys on the other.   We would be taught how to...

A Detective story:Working at Woolies on Lister Gate

There was this huge Woolworths store on Lister gate in Nottingham, two floors, maybe three if I remember right, although the top floor was for staff. I worked there one summer, back in the seventies.  I was a student, up a Ruskin college in Oxford.   The grants were pretty decent then but I still needed...

Four Prosecution Lawyers

Four lawyers from the Roger Casement prosecution team.   In 1916 Sir Roger Casement, for his role in the Easter Rising, was prosecuted for High Treason and was found guilty and sentenced to death.   This portrait of the four lawyers is taken from the great canvas by Sir John Lavery depicting the appeal hearing of Casement...

My Nightmare Dinner Party

  I never wanted to go to this dinner party.   The thought of it appalled me. I had much more important things to do.   I could have watched telly.   I could have washed my hair.  I could have got drunk.   I really really did not want to go. But it was my fate, my punishment,...

Surviving the Lockdown(4)

So last week we broke out of lockdown, headed out in glorious summer weather driving west towards the Shannon, top-down on the car, Leonard Cohen on the radio, next to no traffic on the roads and Ireland bathed in sunlight and looking as glamorous as it could possibly be. But there is a great sadness...

Roger Casement.

This is my first attempt at making a YouTube video.   It is on a subject I know well and ofter lecture upon, but embarking on the making of a video was quite a challenge.   First I had to master Powerpoint.   I would be pretending if I was to say that I have done that. Then...

Surviving the lockdown (2)

It can get lonely during the lockdown. I was discussing this very subject with a spider that found its way into the bath. “Why,” I asked him, or possibly her – you just can’t tell, “why, of all the bathrooms in all the world have you chosen this one?” It wouldn’t answer. Just kind of...

The Potato field Icon.

It is just perfect, perfectly appropriate, that this important 12th-century reliquary, an Irish Crucifixion plaque, should have been found, in of all places, an Irish potato field. But so it was.   And according to the notes of the archaeologist who found it, it was in the year 1844. I check my notes. Yes, 1844.   Just...

Surviving the lockdown (1)

Gorgeous spring morning. Decided to take a late breakfast in the garden. Nothing special just a cup of tea, croissant, and a glass of orange juice.  Relaxing, reading the morning paper on my tablet, musing on life under lockdown. It lasted but a half hour before I was driven inside by the incessant unremitting cacophony...

Getting used to Dinning out again.

Ireland the restaurants were allowed to reopen earlier this week and last night, for the first time in months and months, I think the last time was in November, I dined out at a proper real restaurant. I had quite forgotten the delights and pleasures of dining out, of being attended by pleasant waiting staff,...

Steve Hedley needs to recant

There are few unions as powerful and effective as the National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport workers, or the RMT as it is more popularly known.   And there are few unions as radical as they are in the political world of the Labour Movement. It’s officers and its executive are all rank and file...

An Easter Poem

An Easter Poem Easter Bunnies with their chocolate ears No  resurrection will assuage  their fears Before this Easter day is past Some Christian sod Will scoff their ears and bite their arse

The Matron of Sherwood Rise

Across from the Union office, on Nottingham’s Sherwood Rise, was this nursing home for the elderly.  Privately owned it employed some twenty or so care staff in a very large old Victorian rather splendid house with extensive gardens.      The care staff were, as is nearly always the case, underpaid and called upon to work excessive...

A Lament for the 2020 Edinburgh Festival

Every year, for the god knows how many years now, we take a house, for the whole of August, in Edinburgh, for the Festivals. In recent years it has been a gorgeous eighteenth-century property on the ancient and cobbled George Square, complete with chandeliers and a vaulted basement dining room and loads of bedrooms for...

Arthur would definately say “No”

This is the view from the balcony of my Dublin apartment at Steven’s Gate, James’s Street, Dublin 8.    It’s a  stunning industrial landscape, millions of pints of Guinness in  thousands upon thousands of barrels, stacked all the way down to the quays and the river Liffey in an impressive view from the ridge that is...

The Rabbit Manifesto

There is an element of despair in remaining a member of the Labour Party.   The leadership campaign is utter vanilla, entirely without life.   The Tories always have more exciting and contested leadership battles, that’s a given, but this is tediously vanilla. I have been a party member for donkey’s years.  Always on the left.  I...

Traffic Warden Hancock – a memior

Several years ago I penned a piece about traffic warden John Hancock, a man who i thought to be, and still do, a proper Nottingham character, someone who  contributed a unique  slice of spice  to our somewhat dullish lives.   He was not well pleased with the piece, not angry, but not well pleased.    There were...