We remember Falstaff on this, Shakespeare’s putative birthday, because we relate to him as a wayward form of kin, a relative in need of reforming, a character in whom we see aspects of our own dented personalities…
Read More
If I had to vouch for the sustaining appeal of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway one hundred years on, I would emphasise its capacity to produce happiness, joy even from a set of intensely felt present tense moments…
Read More
I am interested in small things because they ask for our full attention. I am interested in small people in small towns because they seem to represent most of us going about our daily lives. George Eliot knew this…
Read More
Four girls sitting on a flint wall in winter; four girls poorly dressed beneath a grey sky. It is November and the sky is low hanging: a grey ceiling I think…
Read More
First, there is the inevitable mysterious swim through the unconscious. I think of it is as the first long dip into those images that follow you about; that sit in the centre of you somewhere around your midriff…
Read More
Walking takes you back in time, especially old walks, the ones you know off by heart. Walking old routes catches you out: nothing you said about it was quite true. Nothing was quite where you left it…
Read More
We write to know we aren’t alone. We read for the same reason: to lose ourselves in the lives of other characters; to surround ourselves with the sights and sounds of other lives; to join imagined communities we can take on as our own…
Read More
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned.
Read More