Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
I dreamt the other night that I could copeWith knowing that my husband feels he’s lostSome round in a great fight with mortal stuff.But Orestes also knew he’d just mope,Until he acted to redeem the costHis body needs, to show it could bear enoughPain in itself, equal to that his loveFeels. So tonight’s cold dream … More Hubris Avenged in Dreams
What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can? … to sleep, / To Sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub! Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1, lines 72 – 73). [1] Iris Murdoch had long before written her wonderful novel based on the model of Hamlet, The Black Prince, … More … to sleep, / To Sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub! (‘Hamlet’, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 72 – 73) – and a prompt question!
What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)? So cool that it was mintWhen found, my hand lost warmth,Until in sharing heatThe feel of it was hot.Nothing ever will keepIts cool so long withoutSome cold sad heart to seepIts freezing thought intoMutual desire,andLeave it at last alone. The temperature of loveWill never be its … More ‘So cool that it was mint’ but you can’t EVER keep it.
A beach is but a plateau on the edgeOf mountains in the sea, whose base extendsDown falling slowly through the upward forceOf water into deep chasms of time.A poet praised raised beaches because theyStood up to mark an earlier surfaceOf time’s causation of interactiveTardy play between dry solid ground and wetFluidity of chance and Change. … More In honour of MacDiarmid’s standing on a Raised Beach on Raasay. (1)
What podcasts are you listening to? I desperately want to see this production A late evening in the future.THUS THE STAGE DIRECTION READS.To show you that the podcast to which IListen is probably that I’m making,Is probably that I hear in my playIn that future, where the true present lies. Krapp listens hard in the … More ‘Krapp’s Last Podcast’, with apologies to Samuel Beckett.
What is good about having a pet? The NIH (National Institute of Heath) USA wheel graphic on the benefits of having a pet Here I go again – harping on about the reification and commodification of everything that matters in life. Basically, I do it because the culture out of which WordPress prompts arise is … More All the benefits of Daisy, so much more than ‘a pet’, come from ‘being with’ and relating to her; not to possessing her.
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car). Now the prompts from WordPress recycle and fresh questions do not appear, I have to answer the ones I rejected answering the first time round. Times like now when I have no project blogs ready to go, I pick apart the … More Why do we define the personal by the items that you considerable yourself capable of financing? It is a pernicious way of reducing the person to the status of a commodity.
Bridging Gaps in Personal Learning No. 3: Bacon claimed that the role of art was not to create a ‘likeness’ of what meets the eye in looking at his sitter but to discover ‘a deeper sense of the reality of the image; by finding a way to ‘unlock the areas of feeling’ that lead to … More Bridging Gaps in Personal Learning No. 3: The Bacon portraits at the National Portrait Gallery as acts of love & beauty.
Though the photograph on the left in the collage above is nothing more than role play such as you might expect from two artists of the sublime camp side of art, the one on the right seems the very picture of genuine mutuality whether of lovers in fact (sexual or Platonic), or good friends. They … More “It was a tragic love due to the fact that we could not share it”, said Salvador Dalí of his love of the poet Frederico García Lorca.
Did our dog Daisy roll over leavesThat toned through every shadeOf ochre and walked us throughAutumn today? Or was it not so? For Autumn was a tunnel into wonderThat open at each bank to azureWhich by remnant greens was tinted;Of summer growth, still proudOf clinging on when time’s pastOr passing quick, as soon it does. … More Rolling through the colour tones to the end.
There is something of the apocalyptic in the image above of Trump supporters wrapped in the flag outside the Trump residendence in Florida, as if the official worship of power and the rule by the idiom of ‘might is right’ had been established, or as Gladstone said of Bourbon rule in The Two Sicilies, ‘ … More Shoulder to shoulder with the shared values of a ruling group who believe might is right. The endgame begins with a Trump of Doom.
Bridging Gaps in Personal Learning No. 2: This blog is yet again an attempt to understand my own process of learning. It is based on thinking about the debt of influence of Francis Bacon to his painting hero, Vincent Van Gogh, as a portraitist. I start with the configuration of that debt by Rosie Broadley … More Bridging Gaps in Personal Learning No. 2 : This blog is based on thinking about the debt of influence of Francis Bacon to his painting hero, Vincent Van Gogh, as a portraitist.
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