Strike! Fighting for the Future of Higher Education
Solidarity with all my colleagues who stood out on picket lines today, and will do so again tomorrow and Friday, and again next year if their demands are not met. 33 universities are striking on pay and pensions; 21 on just pay and 4 on just pensions. University and College Union (UCU) has called the pay dispute ‘The Four Fights’:…
An Autastic Announcement!
To disclose or not to disclose? And if the former, when, how, and, crucially, why? These questions have nettled me since my diagnosis, on Dec 17 2020, of Autism Spectrum Disorder ‒ or, as I and many other autistic people prefer to call it, Autism Spectrum Condition. Autism might be disabling in a world designed for neurotypicals, but it…
Kill or Cure: Cancer & Coronavirus
Well, be careful what you wish for. When in my last post I asked for 2020 to be a year of healing, little did I dream that the universe would respond in epic fashion. Now it’s two weeks into the UK lockdown, and like most people, I’m still adjusting to the dystopian world we find ourselves in. An invisible…
2020: Let the Healing Begin (Please!)
What a year it’s been. Much as I believe in active hope, I found the General Election result incredibly demoralising. Not only was the Conservative majority achieved with a minority of the popular vote, and the bullying help of a billionaire media, I just can’t see how Brexit can be ‘done’ without destroying the United Kingdom. But Tory voters don’t…
ADAMANTINE Hits the UK – While There Still IS a UK!!!
What a week. As the fates of the country and the planet whirl in the balance like fragile baubles on a Christmas tree for sale out in a blizzard . . . ADAMANTINE, my third poetry collection, is published today in the UK. While the United Kingdom still exists! Facebook friends know I’ve been quite exercised about the General…
Adamantine: The Transatlantic Summer Tour!
Adamantine [adjective] 1. Made of adamant, or having the qualities of adamant; incapable of being broken, dissolved or penetrated.2. Like the diamond in hardness or lustre3. My third poetry collection! Welcome to the first round of celebrations of the publication of Adamantine (Red Hen/Pighog Press, Pasadena), which was published July 11th in the US/Canada and is forthcoming December 11th in the…
2018: The Year of Relearning How to Focus
Driven by a giddy need to make up for lost time, my first full year post-cancer treatment was full tilt with travel, art galleries, books, family and friends. I also finally learned how to use my iPhone camera – you touch the screen to focus, doh! Fizzing with this epiphany, I even signed up for a iPhone photography course, way…
Building Jerusalem . . . in Jerusalem
September sings, but the chords of summer echo on, not least of my visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in late July for readings from A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, the bilingual anthology I edited last year for Smokestack Books. Travelling with Rachel Searle, the Director of BlakeFest (Bognor Regis) – for whom I am consulting on…
Some recent events: or, l’esprit d’escalier outwitted!
I used to be a performance poet. Wearing an eyeliner moustache I’d throw myself around the stage like a deranged Russian count, or adopting an ersatz German accent I’d impersonate a formidable Frau on the warpath. I never got nervous before these appearances: it wasn’t me up there, what was there to worry about? When I began writing SFF novels…
Syria: Who to Trust?
I haven’t posted about Syria this week because I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say. In recent weeks I’ve met people who’ve told me that: 1) Assad has to stay because otherwise Syria will end up being controlled by a US-Wahhabi-Zionist alliance, and Christianity will be wiped out in the Middle East – once there is peace, though,…