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From the Roman road on Cottam Hill, Yorkshire Wold It’s New Year’s Eve, and the hounds have had their last walk of 2025.  There is ice underfoot, but with a startlingly blue sky today fading to a soft luminosity as the moon rises, no likelihood of snow.  We actually have very little really wintry weather in this part of Yorkshire;  the last time was 5 years ago, as you see above.  Our neighbours in France messaged us to report they had woken to snow on Christmas morning as th

St James' Church, Elstead, Surrey Hills So writes Ursula Fanthorpe of her Christmas poems.  I was very fortunate in that the school where I taught invited many inspiring writers, she being one.  After her poetry reading and talk I approached her to ask if I might use her  ‘BC - AD’ poem for a Christmas card, as I had long thought this staggeringly beautiful and powerful, probably because it recounts a world-upending event in such ordinary terms… until the last couplet.   If y

This was a wonderful summer for the novels of Sebastian Barry.  How do I describe them, beyond the regret at arriving at them so late - but mercifully not too late?  The authors of the back covers’ recommendations do their best to locate the most apt, the most precise descriptions, “Luminous anecdotes, hidden truths”, “tender, acerbic, necessary and potent”, “it’s the language that seduces you - elegant, comical, tragical, musical”, and so on. but I’ll bet they were frustrate

Bridge over the Vilaine, Roche-Bernard, Loire Atlantique Let’s consider just how potent the motif of the journey is in the work of  Carl Gustav Jung, the psychologist who creatively wove mythology, religion, philosophy and spirituality into his explorations of the psyche, indeed the human soul.  He saw dream-work and the power of symbolism and archetypes as sustaining our inner lives, and his aim was to bring what is unconscious in us into consciousness. Jung’s journey of ind