Category: Community
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Wrestling with my Shadow
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My shadow dogs my path. It dwarfs me, this daemon, this desolate god. Could I live shadow-free ? Would I fly ? What would be left of me ? Here are some more thoughts on the shadow : First Sightings I can say this with real pride : no one but…
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I and Thou and Charlie
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In the early 1990’s, I wrote a series of poems called “I hyphen Thou”. The poems explored the image of the hyphen and were suggested by a book by the philosopher/theologian Martin Buber called “I and Thou.” The idea of the hyphen is an old favourite of mine. In fact I run a small charity…
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Let the bird of paradise speak loud from his cage
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I want to recite to camera a long poem, originally by John Skelton. And I want to do so from the top of the Tyndale Monument, a tall tower on a hill near Bristol. William Tyndale and Skelton both lived in the reign of Henry VIIIth but they have more than that in common. The…
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The sky is cloudy, the coast is nothing clear. Is there anything we should be doing ?
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I was contacted recently by a friend and colleague now retired. She was an NHS mental health worker, who gave her all for years flat out, feelingly and wisely. Now she paces and grieves. Here is a slightly abridged version of what she wrote : “I have met with several ex-colleagues recently. On Saturday I…
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I See Everywhere the False
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I see everywhere the false, the masked, the sleek and hollow, the bought and the creatured. Their words twist the wind tug at my mind and steal from me the hymns of my life the sacred. True words die the moment they pass between these creatures’ teeth. Humanity is on the…
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Our present democracies will not rescue us from ourselves.
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For the young, it will already seem a long time ago that the Soviet Communist bloc effectively closed down, its remarkable leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing “Perestroika,” its various constituent states, including Russia itself, “giving way” to democracy in remarkably quick succession. A major symbol of that dramatic and joyful time was the destruction of the…
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The Cleaning of Our Streets
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I have just signed the Hacked Off Declaration of Support for the Royal Charter for Press Self-Regulation. All three political parties are committed to this interpretation of Leveson’s recommendations. The rival version is known as “Ipso” and is favoured by most of the Press, all of whose previous systems of self-regulation have been a hollow…