These past few years I’ve been at the launch of Ovarian Cancer Month, which is March. It’s harrowing listening to women affected by the disease talk about their journey and the chances of survival. Only 35% have a predicted survival rate as the disease is hard to detect early. Every year I listen to a…
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It’s so easy being the scribe on a Hash Mag when David Burley is the hare. The first half writes itself. All I had to do was make notes while he briefed us before we set out. You might want to skip forward here as the “setting-out” bit will be far down the page. David…
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It’s St. Valentine’s Day on 14th February, the one day that poetry should have a place in our lives. Give a poem to your loved one. I’ve never known anyone to refuse a poem. It’s a keepsake for life. It’s also a good moment for the poet in all of us to connect with our…
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I’ve had lots of feedback from last month’s article about Carl Lewis and his poem “Builders in Winter.” Carl has been redrafting the poem and is ready to go public. We have a date. On Monday 28 January we have Open Mic at The Castle Inn in Old Town at 7:30pm. Carl will be dragged,…
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You’ll love this! Visualise our back-yard as a building site on a rainy morning before 8am. The builder, Carl Lewis, gave me the draft of a poem “The Builders in Wintertime” the previous day for feedback and now we workshop. We peel away the unnecessary, search for imagery, play with sound and words and there…
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This was a hell of a mixed-up Hash. First of all it rained, which it’s never supposed to do on a Hash. Albeit, it stopped soon after we started running and started again just as the fast runners were changing out of their wet clothes. That should have been enough to tick the box about…
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My grandfather’s older brother, Christy, served in the Great War. His eyes and lungs were destroyed by gas in the trenches. My memory is his thick glasses like the bottom of milk bottles and a hacking cough that disgusted us kids. He joined in 1914 because Lloyd George promised Home Rule after the war if…
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This was a hell of a mixed-up Hash. First of all it rained, which it’s never supposed to do on a Hash. Albeit, it stopped soon after we started running and started again just as the fast runners were changing out of wet clothes. That should have been enough to tick the box about no…
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I’d a long run yesterday. At one stage I skirted a field. A big man walked towards me with a bloody big spanner and said: “There’s no right-of-way here.” I said I’d permission from the farmer. He said that farmer didn’t own that field. Then we had a chat about weather and crop yields, as…
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I decided a few years ago to run a marathon each year in a country I’d not been to before. Last year took me to Greenland and a marathon on the Polar Ice Cap. This year in September I will run the Petra Desert Marathon in +35 degrees to a height of 1,250m which is…
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