Curiously, the world didn't fall apart when I failed to press 'Publish' on my Caedmon blog yesterday! Anyway, it's there now. I have to confess that my berbe...

Listening to Simon Armitage in Ilkley, talking about his recent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, made my mind flip back to my trip to Whitby a...

Yesterday evening, I went to St. John's Church in Ben Rhydding where Simon Armitage read from his latest translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armi...

Having spent comfortably over half a century studying and teaching English Literature, I was startled about two weeks ago to discover a new kind of text: a t...

On Friday evening, I went to a talk by Nick Chater about his new book, The Mind is Flat. A brief summary is tricky, to say the least, but in essence he argue...

When I was at Minsthorpe College a couple of days ago, the students wanted to know how I got the ideas for my writing. I mentioned Molly's nose (the subject ...

Ray Henshaw, a friend who is the Principal at Minsthorpe Community College, South Elmsall, kindly offered to set up some focus groups to read Metamorfishes b...

My 69th birthday today so I guess I am comfortably into the Sixth Age of Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man: The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pa...

I'm an early riser. Essentially, it's the way I'm made - normally waking between 6.00 and 6.30. These days, it's also an assisted wake-up when Molly stirs an...

Pulpits were introduced into English churches after the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, when the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic C...

In a previous post I mentioned Us, the book of poetry recently published by Zaffar Kunial. Of course, Amazon immediately recommended another two or three boo...

Ilkley's 17-day Literature Festival offers a dazzling array of speakers at more than 240 events. Yesterday, I attended three of them. Santanu Das held his au...

Several of my friends become depressed at this time of year, dread of winter denying them the joys of autumn's brilliance. By contrast, I love this season - ...

Had I not been to Whitby earlier this year, the discovery of Captain Cook's ship, H.M.S. Endeavour, would probably have been of only passing interest to me. ...

The swan has often been the symbol for a poet, as in the famous tribute to Shakespeare by Ben Jonson - here used as a title for my photograph. I read quite a...

I seem to be into connections at the moment. When my brother Rob came to visit, he kindly brought a large pot with a clump of flowers - taken from his garden...

From time to time, Luisa (my Italian friend in Brescia) and I exchange something to translate and then compare the results. For next week, we are looking at ...

Continuing from the blog about floorboards, what do you see when you look at this blurry image? As my eyes come to rest, the moon looks like the head of a sw...

I woke earlier than usual this morning and, opening my email, found a message from my brother Rob. Attached to it were newspaper cuttings showing our Dad; my...

When you look at carpets, walls, tree trunks, floorboards etc., do you see the figures there? In this picture, for example, if you look for a while at the tw...