Eagle is downed, but not by sexism

20 Jul

This post also features on offGuardian – a much needed antidote to the rightward drift of once liberal media. Is there a prize for the most featherheaded Guardian analysis of Labour’s crisis? In the face of fierce competition over the months … Read More »

Meanwhile on Saltburn Pier …

19 Jul

… the Yorkshire Knitters have struck again. This hiker has to be out of his woolly mind to go up on Ilkley Moor without a hat. Is he not aware of the consequential chain such folly will trigger? Decades ago, David Hockney cited a … Read More »

From bitter searching of the heart

16 Jul

A villanelle has nineteen lines and just two rhyming sounds, in this case “ain” and “art”. Frank Scott’s Villanelle for Our Time was set to music by Leonard Cohen on one of his more unusual albums, Dear Heather. Years ago I heard Cohen tell BBC Front … Read More »

Is this England? Ask Chaucer!

10 Jul

I’ve been re-watching This is England. Not the movie, set in 1983, but the Channel 4 mini-series it spawned: This is England 1986 .. 1988  .. 1990. They’re on catch up at All 4 and if you never saw them, find … Read More »

Power of the press

1 Jul

One aspect of the torpedoing of Boris by Gove and his missis, Sarah Vine, is this line in her email to hubby: Crucially, the membership will not have the necessary reassurance to back Boris, neither will Dacre/Murdoch, who instinctively dislike … Read More »

Don’t blame me …

24 Jun

Yesterday I gave my pencilled cross to a corrupt institution that only last year condemned millions of Greeks to a poverty they’d done nothing to deserve, and has plotted and connived behind our backs to subvert popular will in the … Read More »

The man who turned into a sofa

22 Jun

Today on BBC Radio 4, told from the alternating perspectives of family members where dad is laid low by clinical depression: a moving and creative exploration in prose monologue and rhyming verse. It even ends well. One of those rarities … Read More »