As a youth, you were beautiful you didn’t need a mirror to tell you that you didn’t need to transcend I did that for you. Your earlier face, that asymmetric face was the one I knew best; with the nose offset, thanks to the playing field. Then the glass came between us between…
Am I bothered?
Does everyone else of my age repeatedly get quizzed on how it feels to grow old? That’s my experience, unless I’m imagining things. “Grandpa, what’s it like to be eighty-seven?” Some things the little darlings can perfectly well see for themselves; they know that I tend to wobble just a trifle as I walk; they…
All around the Wrekin
They used to say – and perhaps they still do – that when you tackle something in a roundabout manner you are going “all around the Wrekin.” Somehow, it seems to be happening to me all the time nowadays, in one way or another, indoors and out, talking or acting, and I simply can’t help…
Renaissance man
The Tankerton bus drew up. The passenger door opened and the bus settled down with an emphatic hiss. No one left and no one came. It was high summer. The driver shut off his engine, opened the half-door of his cab and emerged into the sunshine. Pausing in the doorway, he yawned and stretched, and…
Of words and their worth
At least seventy years have gone by since I first discovered the delight of playing with language. The place was a sandy beach in Wales where, as a schoolboy on holiday, I chanced upon an old man – a native of the place, I believe - who sat there in the August sunshine reading poems…
Don’t ask
I walk the streets most days. It’s not because I’m currently homeless (that may come). No, it’s just that I daren’t take the car to go shopping or deliver my son to school in case there’s no parking space left in my road by the time I get back. Out on the streets, I’m…
The Man From the Ministry
Graham Dukes falls back on a long-dead poet to get him out of a tight spot... Let us get this straight. I am a Doctor of Medicine, with several framed diplomas on my wall to prove it. Unlike most medical doctors however, I decided at the start that I never wanted to make diagnoses, prescribe…
The Eureka trail
Eureka? Wasn’t that Archimedes’ cry of triumph, two-and-a-half millennia ago, when he jumped out of his hot bath in Syracuse to proclaim to all around that he had hit on the principle of specific gravity? Quite. Since then, the term has been sadly devalued, having been imposed on any number of real or supposed…