Category: Uncategorized
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Spring, lorries, Sadlers Wells, champagne and soil
Spring came on a lorry last night Or so it felt, as we walked through balmy unbowed London to see the English National Ballet’s triple bill at Sadlers Wells. We marvelled at the blossom, we stepped across streets to walk in the sun, and listened to kids playing outside in the squares again. And then…
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Crossing the bridge at Compton Verney
When I say I love Lancelot Brown, I don’t mean it in the sense of ‘I deeply admire his work.’ No, I mean it in the same sense the teenage me wanted to faint every time I saw a photograph of Richard Gere. Yep, that bad. But perhaps it explains why I almost couldn’t cross the bridge…
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Have you seen….
I don’t want to lose you all forever, but I’m also aware I haven’t been here as much as I’d like to recently. I’ve been busy working on a novel, although I did get away recently for a writing residency at Compton Verney. More on that soon, but in the meantime, let me introduce you…
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We wrote a poem on a leaf…
I’m just back from a glorious weekend teaching creative writing with Anna Robertshaw from Freestyle Yoga Project, who was teaching the yoga. Yoga and writing proved a perfect combination, or maybe that was the group who came. Or even the venue, glorious Tilton House, just up the road from the Bloomsbury set’s famous Charleston Farmhouse on…
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Making Patterns in Vietnam – a prose poem and a song
To being with it was the uniformity that gets you. You feel as if the patterns on the hillside were reflecting and softening the patterns inside you. Like walking the labyrinth, you are being settled by the landscape. Dig your fingers in earth for five minutes has the same chemical benefits as taking a Prozac pill – you’ve…
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Listen, says the labyrinth
This is a post in which I not only review a book about labyrinths but show you how to draw one…. so I should issue a little warning – it’s completely addictive. Like counting syllables in haiku, once you’ve done one, your fingers will be constantly itching to circle round and round again. I’ve just started back working on campus…
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On a day so beautiful even the trees danced…
We had a picnic lunch on a log under this tree today, and I looked up to see the branches swaying in the wind, just as if they were dancing, lifting up their skirts like teasing can-can dancers, so lightly I could almost hear them laughing. And then when we got home, I realised I…
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Come and write with me…
Come and indulge your senses with a Herbal Infused Poetry Workshop at the beautiful Physic Garden at Westgate Gardens, Canterbury Saturday 24th September – 11-1pm Costs £4 (including tea and cake) How could such sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned, but in herbs and flowers? Andrew Marvell I’m running a workshop in Canterbury designed around…
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Stairway to heaven….
We found the real stairway to heaven recently… and then the day after we climbed it, we read about the court case Led Zeppelin were fighting over the song’s origins. So strange when that happens. And so today, as the court has decided in the band’s favour, I thought I would post about the beautiful valley in mid Wales…
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Luckily birds don’t know they are tweeting…
… because they might stop at 140 characters then. And that would be far too short. Turn your volume up and listen…. This clip above was taken yesterday at the RSPB Ynys–hir nature reserve in Wales. I was standing there trying to think how I could describe the beauty of the birdsong. And then I thought I…
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A garden girl in Paris…
(with apologies to John Denver) Three nights in Paris, bucket loads of rain, cafes, people watching, a bit of shopping, cake eating and champagne drinking too. But also galleries. Lots of them, and I got interested in the gardens attached. How artists, even in the middle of a city, need space. Here are three of them……