Goodbye

Dear all,
Having taken on a new role at The Reader Organisation, I will no longer have time to be your Reader-Not-Quite-In-Residence. From tomorrow, my colleague Amanda Brown will step into my slightly scuffed but sweetly smelling shoes, which is lucky for you because she’s very lovely and brilliant and will make a far better job [...]

The Persistence of Memory

I saw this last night and just had to share. It’s from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part TV series by science-writer and astronomer Carl Sagan, originally broadcast in 1980 but recently re-mastered and re-released as a gorgeous DVD box-set. I couldn’t recommend the series – or the book that accompanies it – highly enough [...]

Food for Thought…

My previous post – ‘Bitesize Read’, ‘feast your eyes’, etc. – recalled a passage from a book I read recently, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher:
You will certainly have encountered many similar images that use food terms to describe abstract ideas, thoughts, or emotions. People speak of troubles brewing, anger simmering, resentment boiling, fanaticism [...]

An apology

I am writing to apologise for any offence caused by last week’s poems. The use of these was an attempt to encourage engagement with people in the company who appreciate that style of humour and writing. Indeed, several people have been in touch to express their enjoyment of the poems. However, others have communicated their offence and/or [...]

(A previously ambivalent) Ella Jolly encounters royalty

 
Yesterday, whilst dashing from Banbury train station to Marks and Spencer to buy some delicious treats for BLG reading groups (the cakes alone are a good reason to come to a reading group!), I stumbled across the Queen.
 
The white-haired lady, immaculate in scarlet coat and hat, walked elegantly through an enthusiastic, flag-waving crowd. She [...]

On work and winter

After a considerable absence from work, I feel as if I have been in hibernation for the last two weeks. Stumbling, bleary-eyed and clumsy, onto an early (very early) morning train, I curl up with my hot chocolate and books of poems and survey the frosted landscape. This morning, 26th November, winter is here.
 
Up [...]

Poetic pyrotechnics

 
 
Tonight (or at some point over the next few days) you may be planning to wrap up warm against the bitter November chill to attend bonfire parties and firework displays. There is nothing quite like watching the flare of a stunning firework, is there? The America writer, Jack Kerouac, once wrote about ‘the fabulous yellow [...]

The times they are a-changin’

In his 1821 essay The Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ For authors such as Shelley – writing just after the French Revolution – there was very little distinction between poetry and political manifestoes. His poem Ode to the West Wind, for example, is essentially [...]

Where does all the good news go?

Yesterday, whilst on a train rolling frustratingly leisurely to Liverpool, the lady sitting opposite me discarded her newspaper with a big old sigh and offered me a warning: “The news today is particularly depressing. Don’t bother reading it!”
 
We shared the joke for a few minutes, laughing grimly about the total lack of ‘happy’ news, [...]

The Two Roberts: Dylan and Burns

Flicking through a culture magazine recently, I discovered a striking and rather brilliant printed advertisement. Emblazoned across an iconic black and white image of Bob Dylan are the opening lines of Robbie Burns’ poem A Red Red Rose.
 
Dylan selected this quotation as his ‘biggest inspiration’, as part of the ‘My Inspiration’ advertising campaign for [...]