Poetry

A Blackbird’s Song

That time of year again. A blackbird sings from a vantage point in a back garden somewhere along the street. And I feel a little more alive. Someone has lit a barbecue. And I don’t mind. The sun is shining. I used to view my life with a sense of disappointment. Compare myself to others who had made a better fist of it. Who had bigger houses, better cars, more glamorous lives, more exotic holidays.…

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Random Ramblings

A Crowd of Swaying Strangers

I was pinged on Thursday. Apparently I had been in close contact with someone on Monday 29th who had tested positive for Covid. My test results were negative. It’s just a stinking cold then. I’m not surprised I was pinged – on Monday night I was at a Stereophonics concert in Portsmouth. This was, by their standards an ‘intimate’ gig, (they are due to be playing a couple of 70,000 sellout concerts in Cardiff soon).…

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Poetry Random Ramblings

The Hospital on the Hill

I keep looking back at my posts from January and February last year. Those days before Covid. How little we knew then. I’m sure many others are doing the same, whether it be on social media, or through apps like 1 second every day ( https://1se.co ) . Our lives are lived in full view. Our thoughts, however inane, are captured for future review. Whether this is a good thing or not is for a…

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Poetry

Sailing the Lockdown

It can be a real challenge to write about something such as Covid-19. By write, I mean in the context of something that is publishable. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. There are times when I think I should be writing directly about our current situation, as if I have some kind of social duty to do so. Yet most of what I have written about Covid has been pretty marginal in terms of quality (and that’s…

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