Years ago, I worked for around six months in the centre of Birmingham, somewhere in the shadow of the old Nat West Tower and directly opposite the – then brand new – Copthorne Hotel.
Returning to the area a few years ago, I couldn’t find any way to reconcile my memories with the reality: – the development and construction work in the city centre has been tremendous and the landscape has changed both along the skyline and at ground level.
Continue reading “they paved paradise”
The other day – well, Christmas Day, to be more precise – I wrote a post with poems about sleeping.
That post nearly didn’t make it through to publication, though, as I realised I’d made a stupid mistake when I decided on the title: since restive was entirely the wrong word, I came close to abandoning the whole thing.
Then I considered re-thinking things and using the title cat napping to post the same poems with a different set of photos.
Continue reading “cat napping”
I suspect many people will be spending Christmas afternoon dozing on the sofa, remote control in hand, watching the TV.
So it made some kind of sense to me when I woke up this morning with the idea of using “the restive season” as a title and writing a blog post with poems about relaxation or sleep.
Then, of course, I woke up properly and remembered that “restive” has little to do with rest – rather the complete opposite: it’s fidgety, not relaxed.
Continue reading “the restive season”
the sun flowers
and sheds its petalled light
into the corners
of our unswept lives
I said this morning that yesterday was grey, with little to recommend it. Today has not been much better, although I suppose it must be slightly brighter and less grey, if only because it has been a day of domesticity: I have been washing and ironing, sweeping and dusting, scrubbing, mopping and polishing.
Continue reading “lighter, whiter, brighter”
My mother mentioned that yesterday was St Andrew’s Day, adding that this meant that there would be no more “special days” until Christmas.
Well, I may have been brought up a Protestant, but I lived in Spain long enough to know that that couldn’t be right: every day seems to be the feast day of a dozen or more saints in the Catholic calendar, so I headed off to Google to find out more about St Andrew, as well as what other dates may be coming up that I should pay attention to.
Continue reading “ordinary days”
don't confuse the narrator 