To me a dancer’s life is an amalgam of three crucial elements. The impossible and the spiritual, all wrapped up with a ribbon of passion. Gillian Lynne, A Dancer in Wartime Gillian Lynne – Dame Gillian as she latterly became – rang me up out of the blue a year or two back. Her beloved …
I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning … Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning A reprise of my poem about the blackbird and a new sonnet …
What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! Charles Dickens, Bleak House Often I find that BBC Radio 4’s early-morning offerings chime serendipitously with my present preoccupations, or connect and coincide with things …
Actor John Stride – Stoppard’s original Rosencrantz to my Guildesntern – passed away last Friday, 20th April, at the age of 81. ‘Derek Goldby’s production’, Peter Lewis announced, ‘comes out of the dark like a spotlit jewel, full of vibrations.’ ‘In their scenes together they behave as if they had been stuck beside one another throughout …
Well-apparel’d April on the heel Of limping Winter treads. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, sc.ii A slightly belated birthday tribute to the Bard.
Bad luck does not intervene By numbers and days, such as Friday, thirteen Nature overnight Bloomed this Blackthorn’s pure white Unperturbed in its blessed routine.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King Jr I took this photograph of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool while on tour in the late 90s with the RSC in Washington DC.
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse In a …
A short film inspired by a recent day out among the Sussex Downs, and with an eye to revolutions both historical and close to home. Clapham House in Litlington, mentioned at the end of the film, was also home to Charles Joseph La Trobe (1801-1875), first Lieutenant-Governor of the then colony of Victoria. He was …
The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. A. E. Housman,‘Diffugere Nives’ (Horace, Odes IV.vii) A poem to celebrate a golden harbinger of spring in Sussex: