Poems.

I am not clubbable, though I used to be rather more sociable. I have never been a loner. I dislike any sort of trap, seeking aisle seats and the back row. But I have always fantasised about the satisfactions of small spaces. The problem is: how to avoid self-pity or self-aggrandisement when one is fantasising about voluntary - chosen - isolation or confinement? Read more...

My wife has been actively hoping to see a Kingfisher for even longer than the 18 years we have loved each other. Various trips on or by various likely rivers - especially the Stour at Wimborne and the Severn at Symonds Yat - didn't deliver. The much less purely rural Thames at Marlow did, though. Read more...

My wife and I have been house-sitting near Henley: the large, arty house and its absent household made a big impression. Read more...

My friend, the designer, illustrator and writer, Paul Burridge, has been restoring his Macwester 28 for a couple of years and he took a couple of us on her first voyage under his ownership on 7 July 2014. It was a great day. Read more...

Poetry

A word and a thought,
old friends,
but caught in stale marriages,
meet and fall in love.… Read more...

This poems tries to catch how scraps of childhood memory are such an important living background. Read more...

It's curious how youthful optimism hasn't dimmed: I have been around long enough to be sceptical of achieving much now, but my aspirations are neither reduced nor feverish, so far as a I can see. Read more...

Don't we all wonder how our lives will be assessed when we die? Read more...

For a couple of years I have been what's called careful about what I eat, and have taken quite a lot of exercise. I wrote this as a kind of vanitas. Read more...

Here is the first of a tranche of poems I wrote in 1996 for Valerie, who became my wife in 2013. Read more...