Posts that don’t fit into the main themes of this blog
I went to the Imperial War Museum a few weeks ago, to visit their revamped WW2 exhibition. I was at a concert in the evening, so thought I would pay it a visit beforehand. I didn’t get any further than the Holocaust exhibits – and couldn’t manage to get through all of these. This was partly on the grounds of time, as I was conscious I was going to start rushing through the displays, which…
I hope your weekend is going well. I’m a bit tired. Got home from a concert in London at 3 AM this morning. I went to see a band called The Heavy North, at The Old Blue Last, a pub (and former brothel apparently!) in Shoreditch But I’m OK with this kind of tiredness. I used to live my life in a perpetual state of exhaustion. I spent so many of my early years in…
Outside poetry, my day job is spent working in recruitment. I place candidates in companies around the world, primarily in tech start ups and expanding companies. In the last year I’ve filled roles in Australia, Singapore, Hungary, Poland, Germany, The Netherlands, UK and US. I’m currently working in the UK, Germany and Sweden. For anyone new to this blog, I’ve had over 120 poems appear in magazines, and a first collection of my poetry was…
A first event for you in January – I read at the Victoria Institute in November, and it was excellent, highly recommended, with a rich variety of voices and musical styles. THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE, TARRANT STREET, ARUNDEL, BN18 9DG Come along to the second Monday of each month to enjoy a heady brew of poetry, music, art and theatre. Poets headlining on January 9th 2023 at 7.30pm are Arundel artist and poet Andy Waite together…
I’ve not posted anything here since November. It’s been a pretty quiet year poetry wise – a lot of my focus has been spent on my day job in recruitment. I changed companies in October 2021, and then managed to secure a major contract recruiting technical support people for a start-up consultancy with operations in San Francisco, Singapore and Amsterdam. Lots of evening calls, early starts and work which took me away from poetry, whether…
I suppose I should write of recent events. It has been a strange couple of weeks here in the UK. As I write, we are in the last 24 hours of official mourning for HM Queen Elizabeth II. I work with clients in the US, who have asked me how we are all keeping, how we feel and how we are coping with the loss. I can only speak for myself, when I say that…
Tarnishing and Rust On empire’s home-port shore,an old strength resisting.Lucknow to Sierra Leone,yellow fever to mutiny,marble balm for victories’ loss. A row of forgotten obelisks;lists of salt-seasoned names,of letters that shined like surffused in iron and brass,to seal a collective sigh. But stone flakes into shrapnel, the once hard edges of words,soft and reddening. Metal breaks down and dissolvesinto the reckoning earth. First published in Poetry & All That Jazz (2021) Portsmouth is full of monuments to…
Or not. Penny Mordaunt, who I am lucky enough to have as my MP, has thrown her hat in the ring to be the next Prime Minister of the UK. This is someone who made the egregious claim that Turkey was about to join the EU, when less than a minute spent checking for evidence of this showed it to be completely untrue. She either knew it was a lie or couldn’t be bothered to…
Like many people I have a side hustle. Coming from a place where money was tight, (my father left home when I was quite young and I remember writing letters to charities to get funding for school equipment amongst other things), has shaped my attitude towards relying on one source of income. I’ve seen how a comfortable existence can be changed overnight. It’s shaped a lot of how I am as a person. And we…
This is a poetry blog. But poetry doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I’ve written political posts about what’s happening in the UK, and will continue to do so as our ‘great leader’ tries to hold on and extend his power for another 10-15 years by whatever method he can. It worries me that he might get away with it. And it makes me pretty angry. But I’m absolutely sickened by what is happening in the…