Blog - People In Mind
The Tennis Court
Soon tennis will start at Wimbledon, rain permitting! The world-famous championships are about to begin in the prosperous, leafy suburb of London. It’s the season of long, languid summer evenings around the midsummer day on the 21 June, the longest day in the northern...
read moreHumpty, Trumpty…
This is the start of a poem by my grandson which he waved in the air outside Buckingham Palace when Trump arrived there last Monday. Ten next month, he has started his political as well as poetical journey early! I was three times his age when I marched along...
read moreAnticipation
In a few days’ time, I shall be diving back into the mind of a seventeen-year-old face to face with an artist in a small ancient town that crouches on a hill less than an hour away from Madrid. In the 12th and 13th centuries, it sheltered dissidents and scholars. It...
read moreBlank Holidays
May is the month of bank holidays, Afer taking advantage recently of one to visit friends on the outskirts of London, we had a strangely reassuring encounter. It was a lovely spring day: clear sunlight, trees clad in fresh green leaves dappled in sunlight and...
read moreIn Miniature
An image to hold in the palm of your hand or hang in a jewelled case on a chain around your neck, just hidden under clothes but close to the heart – your symbol of deepfelt emotion. The miniature paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver in Elizabethan England...
read moreVisiting Verrocchio
500 years ago Leonardo died in France. In 1452 he was born to a peasant girl in the village of Vinci not far from Florence. His father, a Florentine lawyer, had no legitimate male heir, so decided to adopt him. He probably always felt he was an outsider, so it would...
read moreFlorentine lilies
My early enchantment with Tuscany must have been influenced by EM Forster's 'A Room with a View' which took place at this time of year. The month of May caught the last of the nightingales and the very first fireflies that dance over the meadows throughout May and...
read morePalm Sunday
Rome. Clear skies with an occasional cheeky cloud puffing its way over us. A crowd milling in the park in front of a long low building of mostly young people who are about to carry the palm fronds which are heaped against the park wall. Children are darting in and...
read moreFluidity
Like dogs snuffling for truffles, literary agents are trying to scent out the next craze in publishing – the quest for a new James Joyce, or a safer risk travelling back into the past – another Hilary Mantel. More likely another Hilary Mantel. A book with a strange...
read moreIncredulity
The British nation, once known for its common sense, has tumbled into a ditch of its own making while the rest of the world, particularly our neighbours across the English Channel, are incredulous. How could this historic bastion of strong, wise values, honed by...
read moreUnforgettable
It was a chilly five o’clock departure, well before dawn. Most of us had tried to buy tickets for London on the train leaving Hull at the same time, but none were available. Even the corridors were packed with passengers standing all the way to the capital. I handed...
read moreGuardians
What are the guardians of order thinking as they peruse the open spaces before them and the people gathering or passing by? There they are outside Buckingham Palace in their red jackets and bearskin headgear endlessly perused by the public day in, day out. I admire...
read moreSimplicity
People yearn for simplicity and clarity – it was ever thus. Now in the confusion surging round the whole question of Britain’s departure from the European trading group, many just want something clear-cut to happen and are fed up with what seem like unending quibbles...
read moreAleppo
I did not want to paint this word-picture, but Aleppo has crept into the news again, pulling a shroud in its wake. My memories; its wake. A rugged fortress with crusader connections overlooked a vast labyrinth of streets that seemed to wriggle, half-underground, in...
read moreHappenstance
Most Sundays, weather permitting, I like to explore the countryside and small towns around me, my small patch on the earth’s surface. Sea-loving friends find it strange when I tell them I would never live close to the seashore though I live on an island. Having a boat...
read moreConscience
‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all…’ Hamlet Is there a deep, unreconcilable fault line in British democracy that is snagging the conscience of many in the Westminster ‘mother of parliaments’? I did not often agree with Mrs Thatcher, but how wise she was to...
read moreHarbinger
Each year I see snowdrops not only as the harbinger of spring when the earth awakens from its winter sleep, but also of hope. The word ‘harbinger’ derives from ‘herberge’ or lodging, denoting protection, like the French inn, the ‘auberge’. The harbinger was someone...
read moreIncomers
I’m not often irritated by young children, but when my friend’s five-year-old kept on coming up close to look at my face and repeat ‘blood’, I thought he was just trying out a new word and brushed him off, a trifle impatiently. But though the tiny spot on my nose...
read moreTerezin
I have just spent an unsuccessful ten minutes searching for a page of the Sunday Observer that I cut out to keep. Strangely, it too was about loss – a long pink column to the right of the page, blank below the name of a female poet who was at Terezin. Some years ago...
read moreMaelstrom
Waterfalls unite beauty with a wondrous spectacle of sound and sight. Leaning perilously over a bridge or crag, such as the spectacular Iguaçu waterfall between Argentina and Brazil, the thrill of beauty laced with fear shivers through one - unforgettably. Below is...
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