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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

Should I stay or should I go? All our beginnings follow something ending.  That most glorious beginning of new life, a birth, signals the loss of an old way of life. Autonomy and freedom for the parent, enclosed safety and shelter for the baby are now irrevocably gone.  A season of our lives is now completed, and we will not pass that way again.  And even when we anticipate that next phase most eagerly, it’s probably impossible not to experience some regret. I recall the wild

I’d love to introduce you to a poem by Thom Gunn,  ‘Jesus and his Mother’ .  I found it over 50 years ago in Sam Read’s bookshop in Grasmere, surely one of the most beautifully-sited in Britain!  I had no real idea what it was about, as I was only 17, but the words, the rhythms, the repetitions, the images….!  They were so compelling they have never left me, and only now am I on the way to absorbing their impact. You might like to look at the poem here…… Jesus and his Mother

Homesickness.  How would you define it?  When have you felt it? Sometimes it’s not just about feeling sad to be away from a familiar...