A PERSONAL JOURNEY My early inner life was a gift to myself alone – always on my own. Father off in India somehow defending the freedom of UK, as they say about foreign escapades nowadays; mother consumed by worry for my sister who was starting the awful disease from which she eventually died in 2005. […]
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature – are shot down wholesale. If, however, we were not something more than unique human beings and each man jack of us […]
I woke this morning (15th April 2022) to the sound of all the chaffinches in the world exchanging pleasantries across the dyke, over the fields and through the forest, and it occurred to me that a model I’ve used to inform my own life would work very well as a way of thinking about Jefferies, […]
The heart has a yearning for the unknown, a longing to penetrate the deep shadow and the winding glade, where, as it seems, no human foot has been. The Hills and the Vale (Marlborough Forest) Though it started other-than-consciously when I first dreamed into Lenbach’s Shepherd Boy at the age of 10, it’s no exaggeration […]
When my father died in 1971, I read The Story of My Heart for solace; I found it abundantly in its pages: ‘It is useless to fill the heart with bubbles. A loved one gone is gone…’ And I have continued to think of him since then at least once a day, using his spirit […]
Pre-amble I’ve not long finished reading Restless Human Hearts for the first time. Having only recently re-joined the Richard Jefferies Society after many years of wandering around in other things (I remember Cyril Wright very well…) it was exciting to find that the books which had only been names to me for sixty years had […]
Advocating the complete abandonment of nouns like ‘peak’ & ‘experience’ and looking very carefully at how we use other nouns of all kinds… I qualified as a Master Practitioner of NLP way back in 1993 (Yippee!). Anybody reading this essay may well ask – so what? Little ’twill matter to anybody but me really but […]
Pat Mason: The enduring and free nature of what is communicated on these pages is something that appeals to me. This open interaction has drawn me back in over the years; I prefer it as my place for expressing what I think from time to time. I value that there are others here who seem […]
I’ve just read JBPriestley’s They Walk in the City (1936) Edward Greenfield refuses to go along with the kind of life that his smug brother Herbert has designed for himself. The latter had made his great gesture when he had determined to be an analytical chemist and, in face of many obstacles, lack of money […]
“This isolation – it’s driving me up the wall…” So some seem to complain during this strange time of what’s called ‘Lockdown’ while others relish the opportunity to be free of the world and its crass stupidity. What makes the difference? Would I find myself halfway up a wall, I wonder, if I were stuck […]
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