I’ve just finished reading JBPriestley’s book of small essays published in 1951 called Delight. It is truly full of delight. In her biography of JBP, Dulcie Gray wrote: ‘…Priestley was lucky to be writing at a time when essays were popular – he was one of the last great essayists…’ I was lucky enough to […]
I sent a good friend a copy of my Room Twelve. He thanked me for it and said, ‘I already dipped in – and it is as WONDERFUL as all the others…’ He asked, ‘How do you do it?’ while suggesting that it was a silly, unworthy and unanswerable question… HOW DO I DO IT? […]
I suppose that from time to time we all wish we could be like some admired person. I’d like to be like Humphrey Bogart as he appears in, say, The Big Sleep, and as, according to Lauren Bacall, he was in real life. Wanting to be like another person whom you admire is a fairly […]
Everything that happens in life is accidental… Even the things we imagine to be deliberately planned out are the result of accidentally stimulated decision-making. I do not remember what it was prompted me to acquire (accidentally) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen somewhere around 1963 when I was accidentally mired deeply in wage slavery – […]
I’m used to quoting HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK TILL YOU SEE WHAT YOU WRITE? Variously attributed to EMForster and WHAuden. It rings true for many people. It’s probably also worth asking HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I DO WITH MY LIFE TILL I SEE WHAT I WRITE ABOUT IT? It’s useful to […]
In September 1994 I went to Romania to attend an International Haiku Conference. It was a very memorable time. wanting to pocket the sound of this Black Sea dawn I must turn my back The highlight for me was a performance of two of my musical settings of haiku by David Cobb and James Kirkup. […]
Bunter Brown At Kingston Grammar School (1949-1954) ‘Bunter’ Brown taught us Ancient Greek. You could see when he was not too sure whether he was actually succeeding in teaching us the ins and outs of irregular verbs and Xenophon’s glittering strategic excitements or Socrates’ Defence because he would start to chew the inside of his […]
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