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New poem – For T.S.Eliot

Posted by on Jun 6, 2024 in Blog feature, Gallery, Recent Images, Recent Writing | 46 comments

New poem – For T.S.Eliot

For T.S. Eliot

 

Honestly,

Isn’t this every one of us,

As we so frequently are?

Somewhat lost in the landscape.

 

Seemingly little more

Than just another

Increasingly barren,

Kinetic bag of weary old skin.

Shrunken, shrivelled, afeared.

 

Though somehow,

Despite the privations

We insist heaping upon ourselves,

Still stubbornly Electric!

 

Miraculously

And spectacularly alive…

 

Though how often

Do we skulk

And hide away still?

Thereby only succeeding

In cloaking

This heavenly mechanism

Of ours

In the sticky veneer

Of day to day despond

And distraction.

Till we have lost all trace

Of valour,

Any tint of ruddy beauty

We can call our own.

 

To hell with that!

 

Better by far,

To remain exuberant,

To confront life

Head on.

And, in good faith,

Seek out still

The gentle miracles

Therein.

The Maldives

Posted by on Mar 23, 2024 in Blog feature, Gallery, Recent Images | 1 comment

The Maldives

The rather surreal and spectacular taste of Paradise that is the Maldives. An intense and wonderfully memorable experience for sure… A real tonic and a recharge of energies to celebrate fifty years together this Easter. And just what I especially needed after a draining few months at my desk this winter.

 

PALACE LIVES

Posted by on Mar 8, 2024 in Blog feature, Gallery, Recent Writing | 1 comment

PALACE LIVES

 

After a lifetime of study and enduring fascination, working more recently with the historian Michael Long, I was finally able to conceive and edit a title that told the full story extraordinary royal history of my family home village of Kings Langley and its medieval royal court. This title eventually published in the autumn of 2023 by KLLHMS, the local history society.

Palace Lives is a substantial paperback book (also available as a Amazon Kindle e book) about a remarkable medieval royal palace which no longer exists. But this is no mythical Camelot, even though you will find precious few physical remains of the Royal Palace at Langley above the ground.

Such exceptional history therefore now exists only on a few written pages and the memory and imagination of those who know its story. However, defining elements of our common heritage were seeded within its stone and flint walls. Not least, because the creators of this once magnificent Royal Palace, were the mighty Plantagenet rulers of thirteenth and fourteenth-century England, who favoured it as a royal residence for one-hundred-and-twenty-five years. The real-life Game of Thrones!

Very deliberately, each of the historical personages featured in Palace Lives had their own affinity with Langley. For some, it was home; for others, the location of their birth or death; others were laid to rest in the Church beside it.

It is a tale of enduring significance, not least the likely identity of the body of a mysterious young woman, buried in the tomb of the first Duke of York in the Parish Church of All Saints in Kings Langley. All is revealed within…

 

New poem – To know…

Posted by on Feb 29, 2024 in Blog feature, Gallery, Recent Images, Recent Writing | 54 comments

New poem – To know…

 

To know

True beauty

Is to never

Be a slave again.

 

This such

Welcome music

To my heart.

 

So, shall

I do what I can

To settle here awhile.

 

Amidst treasures

That still prevail

Somehow,

As if to appease heaven.

 

Call me the breeze then,

As I pass on through.

 

Hoping I too

Will bring the best

Of my presence

To bear.

 

Leaving behind me

At least

Some sweet song

For others to hear.