Blurring out the voter in the interest of stasis and parties who want only it. Today there are we are told local elections. I cannot remember when I was last asked to vote for local Councillors and today in Durham the only people up for election are for Mayoral candidates for the North East region … More Voting might matter if the system of ‘first past the post’ did not favour a retrograde two-party system.

Thomas Hiram Holding, supposed to be the great populariser of the activity of camping, outside his camping tent. Whether it has sufficient academic credence (by which is meant referencing to authoritative evidence) or not, the Wikipedia entry on CAMPING fits with my thoughts, memories and, possibly, biases, in understanding what camping as a term means in … More Why is ‘camping’ just not classy? Or is it? Not for my class upbringing!

We do not need a list if we consider poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This blog takes an encounter with the reading of a rather wonderful current poet, Kathleen Jamie at the Hexham literary Feastival, to try and explain what I mean, if (as is my wont) obscurely and, in another way, darkly. … More Why give a list? ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Arguing the case using Kathleen Jamie’s new work. ‘Cairn’ (2024).

This blog is in sheer joy in having heard Jackie Kay read from her new collection, May Day, at the Hexham Literary Festival in The Queens Hall, Hexham, on 26th April 2024 at 8.15 p.m. Infer the answer to the prompt from this blog! However, this blog started as a preparation to see Jackie Kay … More Infer the answer to the prompt from this blog: The blog is in sheer joy in having heard Jackie Kay read ‘May Day’, at the Hexham Literary Festival.

If we are to discuss anything at all in our networked world of codes and symbols, where meanings lie in layers and sometimes in the knotted interconnections of things, subjects, objects and commentary thereon, is there any topic that can be excluded from the picture. In modernity, we are used to thinking of the world … More Quid tum. What next? So what?

I thought with this one, I might not want to interrogate the prompt question asked but I find I cannot do so with the question: ‘Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?’ In general I hate the idea of life quotes and their command on social media – … More ‘HERE the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest lasting’:

Dedicated to Joanne When I worked as a social worker I believed in and promoted in my own practice, and in the learners I worked with at Teesside University later as Subject Leader in Social Work, a concept called ‘positive risk-taking‘. It was a concept first popularised by Steve Morgan in an important article and … More A ‘risk you took that you do not regret’ is called life. It has to be chosen by the person living that life, not be IMPOSED on them.