We’ll have Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island too. Rodgers and Hart As My Perfect Mind prepares to head to New York for a short summer season at 59E59 Theaters, Told by an Idiot have commissioned me to do a regular …
Later today the coffin of Richard III will reach Leicester Cathedral where it will lie in state before the king’s reinterment on Thursday. This morning I woke to Radio 4’s live broadcast of the Sunday service from Leicester Cathedral. A limerick to mark the occasion. The monarch old Richard the Third Of whom everybody has …
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture, 1995 In celebration of St Patrick’s Day, a preview of …
Our grapevine on Friday the 13th.Photo by EP A reprise of an excerpt from a little diary I kept in the first weeks of Spring 2009, just as I was finishing work on the portrait of my brother Bill outside the Bradford Alhambra. It is only Tuesday, 17 March, but already the year, or at …
What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness. George Eliot, Middlemarch Although she is not featured in the film, it is worth mentioning, by way of a postscript, the prominent socialist …
Photo by EP I walked through the alleys up to Hampstead proper this afternoon, retracing the footsteps of the old poets and painters I like to think. I took a picture of the Admiral’s House, painted at least twice by Constable, but I was wondering about abstraction and trying to compose in my head a …
A limerick to mark the fifth annual Women of the World Festival held at the Southbank Centre this past week (audio only): Coming soon: a film celebrating West Hampstead’s special contribution to women’s suffrage. The women’s advocacy paper Shafts, founded byMargaret Shurmer Sibthorp of Westbere Road, West Hampstead
It may be a task that’s humdrum This forcing the dirt to succumb Who is it deplores That I’m doing the chores? When I’ve done them, the cleaner can come. And I have to get rid of my clutter Released from its weight – oh but what a Joy it will be When of dross I …
If ever I saw blessing in the air I see it now in this still early day Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye. Laurie Lee, ‘April Rise’ A little film to celebrate …
Earth our precious planet Light as gossamer, as strong as granite Despite our violence and all our ills Faithful Spring sends budding daffodils For all our cleverness – we couldn’t plan it. Fortune Green, 1st March 2015Photo by EP A special film version, with additions, will shortly follow …