I’m pretty sure all I do is travel! To an extent, that’s a legacy from my dad: we moved 4 times before I was 7; we would often get a one-way trip out in the small company airplane my dad flew for RKO General, if he was flying out to collect Big Deal people, and then we’d drive back (from Texas to Connecticut, for example). We flew down to Florida and West Virginia once or even twice a year. This love of travel never left me, and if I am NOT planning a trip, it feels strange. But now, I …
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Religion is one of those topics best avoided… So inevitably we talk about it! It is the space between our emotional and rational selves that we cannot quite understand. It told us the whys and wherefores of the incredibly dangerous place we lived in and was a big part of keeping us safe. The world of rationality has shrunk both the unknown and the known leaving new chasms between differing faiths and the continued search for reason. This new chasm is no longer safe. The anthropologist in Rose respects every religion equally: which means, in reality, she’d rather wish they’d …
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Childhood comes in two flavours, there’s the one we actually experienced and there is the one we are expected to remember: fuelled by romantic Victorian fantasies and feel-good films at Christmas. Memory, according to ‘neurolinguistic programming’ is linked to emotion so our childhood recollections are most likely clustered around happy memories. Time seemes to (rather unfairly!) speed up as one get older, and the further away from childhood the memories one keeps are few and far between. When we look back, summers lasted forever; it was always a major holiday or birthday; and only the really big events seem to …
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Poets tend to write about things that cause strong emotion: Death does do that. Plus, in my case, I tend to be surrounded by the remnants of death, and life. My poem The Dust of the Dead is about the dustiness in museums, and the dust that is probably little bits of bone: what I tend to call “Dead-guy dust”. Alan discusses how the term ‘luxury’ didn’t always refer to the most expensive Christmas Crackers; and he talks about his dad. Charli goes right to the heart of it with Graveyard. So, we discuss death and all that, but we’re …
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We’re poets innit! We are not going to see love in quite a Valentine sort of way. Loneliness, lust, companionship and passion are all manifestations of a creature trying to reconcile the chemical bonding process with rationality, or more likely the irrationality by which we try to judge ourselves or others. Rationally we want it all to fit together, the friendship, the trust, the common purpose, the togetherness and even the forever, but as an animal that lives for 70 odd years too perfect a bond would never survive loss. The bond which religion deems indissoluble must be soluble to …
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