On reading On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester (pub 2021) – a memoir of place, protest and belonging – this poem came to me, taking her words and trying to apply them to my place, protest and belonging. I was very struck by how little of my life found echo […]
Surfacing like an anxious submarine or wide awake at the press of any of my buttons – and they are many – you could say that I’m a light sleeper Murdered regularly in a hundred ways by as many assassins – you could say that I’m a light sleeper. My […]
If you’ve got an ounce of sense, you lie low in a Children’s Home, for trouble’s never far away. So I feared the worst one morning after breakfast, when I was called out into the entrance hall. I’d seen kids come back in tears from there. That time it must […]
I’m four and a half, somehow living with Mum in a bed-sit at 21 Landsowne Road, halfway between Thora’s and her Dad’s. She has two rooms to herself with a grubby bathroom we have to share, halfway down a flight of stairs on the next landing. Here I witness the […]
Every year on the first Monday of September a grand fair takes up the whole of St Giles, which is the widest street in Oxford. It starts by the Randolph Hotel and the Ashmolean Museum, where one can still see King Alfred’s jewel, and by the time you reach the […]
Dad and David are keen fishermen but I am not. Sandford Lock is a walk away from the caravan and I hate it when we have to go fishing, for the preparation takes for ever and when we arrive we just sit. – The first thing to do is to […]
Great Aunt Ada Ada, one of my Granny Selina’s sisters, comes to stay one summer, stopping at Auntie Muriel’s in Summertown, a world away from the shadow of the power station at Knottingley. A kind woman, plain and no nonsense, I knew where I was with Aunt Ada. The splitting […]
There are many great cities on the surface of the globe. Though I speak only of Oxford I do not mean to imply that the City in which you are sat today is any the lesser. Merely that Oxford is the one of which I am qualified to talk. By dint […]