In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: culture

  • Let the bird of paradise speak loud from his cage

    Posted:

    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…

  • I See Everywhere the False

    Posted:

      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…

  • Word Play

    Posted:

      May words work. May mine look you in the eye and having found you out work on you right there. Fraud and felon play with words, seeking only to deceive and buy and bend you to their will. I must work a cleaner way my words releasing you to where you belong. Words must…

  • The Cleaning of Our Streets

    Posted:

    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…

  • Fable 13 – Jason’s Sermon from a Ledge

    Posted:

    This short piece examines the topic of ever-accelerating change which we as a race have brought upon ourselves with our science and ingenuity, creating whole new worlds in ever quicker succession. It questions whether this acceleration we have released is manageable, even survivable. A character called Jason is the speaker. He has appeared in some…

  • Cat vies with Hard Drive for my soul

    Posted:

    A psychiatrist called Iain McGilchrist has written what in my opinion is an extraordinary and important book called “The Master and his Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.”  I feel instantly at home with, and liberated by, its central thesis. Here is a quote from the blurb on the…