In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Europe

  • What does Great Britain Stand for, these Days ?

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    What do we Brits stand for, these days, now that we have “taken back control” ? Judging by our government’s grossly inadequate management of Corvid-19 – we stand for incompetence, incoherence and dishonesty. Judging by Mr Johnson’s recent conduct over the Brexit negotiations – we are represented by the fatuous and delusional bravado of a juvenile…

  • Gaffe Man Spans the Globe

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    Congratulations to Jacinda Ardern for winning her landslide victory in New Zealand’s recent general election. And for her earlier, highly competent management of the Covid-19 virus there, in such dramatic contrast to Mr Johnson’s pathetic and disastrous flounderings here in the UK, half a world away (“alas, alas”). Here is the message our hopeless Mr…

  • The Gaze Blank and Pitiless

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    WB Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” was written almost exactly a century ago, but if it’s possible for a poem to become truer still with age, then surely this one does. And yet…Yeats wrote his poem in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence…

  • I See Everywhere the False

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    I thought this was true in 2014, when it was written. I did not know then that the truth can become truer.… continue reading

  • Might Labour be the Force to Renew UK Politics ?

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    Our democratic politics isn’t working and, in my view, its dysfunction is one of the major causes of our present national crisis. In so many ways, our political structures and democratic processes – not just here in the UK, but manifestly in other countries too – are under attack and also in question. We have…

  • Facing West over a Small Field

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    Here is a link to a poem about the poet D.J. Enright and his French wife, the artist Madeleine Enright. (See one of her pictures, above). They belonged in worlds quite foreign to me, but in the last few months of their lives, I chanced to be their next-door neighbour. I had moved into a…

  • Anthem for a Lying Toad

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    The UK’s Brexit government have been showing us their true mettle in recent weeks. Following their disastrous response to the Covid-19 virus, they are itching to move on to enterprises more to their liking, but equally vulnerable to their incompetence. It has been said that “The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters” (it’s the title…

  • I Send Greetings from this Place

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      The place I’m thinking of this evening is called St Aldhelm’s Chapel, pictured above. It is a small and simple Norman structure built right on the edge of a Dorset cliff, facing out over the English Channel and beyond that to Europe. The chapel has no electricity and the interior is dark. It has…