Spoke to a mother and wished her happy Mothers Day. It was Mothers Day yesterday in America, where she lives. So I called a day late, but still I called. It’s the first time in my adult life that I’ve wished a mother Happy Mothers Day.   more »

Last night I joked “I used to be angry, now I’m a rebel with a mortgage, and a nice deli round the corner – with great humus”. The humus was here and the bread and the salad and the sun and the cricket and The Journalist and the newspapers and me. I should be reading the scripts for the Royal Court. But not today. Not today. About the anger. I am no less angry than I was before, I am just more defined about where my anger should be directed - so too with love   more »

The back stage is full to bursting with people, except the poets. Paddy O'Connell the MC arrives. The audience goes quiet. The Saturday Live Theme tune plays. And the poets begin. There is a lot of hilarity in the reading and the poets are skilled and slick. They are rehearsed and refined, they are witty and full of wonder. The lighting is perfect. Paddy is wonderful and the joint is jumping. It’s a reading that I want to watch but under the circumstances I have to take part. I have an absolute feeling of not wanting to go on stage. It is less and less enticing as the evening unravels. The poets are everything that I knew they would be, which is a shame.   more »

I have never been jealous of anyone. Irritated, most definitely, but hardly envious. That the exploration of ambition is fuelled by envy is strange to me. Ambition is a wonderful thing: I don’t see why it should ever be coupled with bullying or autocratic behaviour. What I do see are ambitious people who lack the emotional resources to further their ambition and this leads them to employ there frustration as a weapon to metre out on others as they bludgeon their way forward with a trained smile.    more »

Unfortunately we at The South Bank were thrown into a situation of damage limitation and needs must. I was determined that the replacement for wonderful Fi must be someone of equal quality. For a moment I thought it was all going to become ridiculously and unneccasserily adversarial between the BBC and The South Bank, two organisations that I have the utmost respect for.   more »

The Prime Minister John Major will never know how close he came to death. I realised the man driving me to the airport was not just any driver – in fact, he wasn’t a driver at all and that it was no accident that in the forty minutes that I had been in the car I had heard so much.   more »

I was leaving the country and couldn’t practically deal with this. Rachel at the south bank immediately took up the reigns and reared up her horse and galloped onwards. Martin Colthorpe head of programming ran alongside and dived on the back. Within hours of getting the news in England as my plane skidded off the tarmac at Gatwick Paddy had said yes! We had sorted it. Go team!   more »

The evening fades and I sleep beneath the oak tree and dream of green skies and branches growing from my eyes. There's a knock at the door. There's a knock at the door. Someone is knocking on the bedroom door!!! .    more »

I’ve slipped into the soho soup of literary agencies and though I am neither waving nor drowning, I am sort of treading soup. I’ve got offers for my memoir from major publishing houses and so much more. I need to scoop myself out of the Soho soup and get some perspective. I must go now, I haven’t googled myself for at least ten minutes.   more »

“I’ll be a well dressed emperor if you say so, via my facebook, and if you say so on your facebook then you too can be a well dressed emperor on my face book”. The fact that none of the Emperors are wearing clothes is no longer the issue. A “name” can so quickly feel established through this exchange that poets feel that they have “arrived” before in fact they have left anywhere.   more »

Tonight was Patience Agbabi’s book launch of Bloodshot Monochrome at The South Bank. The event is part of my artist in residence programme. Dave Haslam was the Dj and the poets were Salena Godden Rommi Smith and Patience Agbabi in the Blue Room. John Berkavitch, Julian Daniel and David J in the Gamalan Room. The venue was The Spirit Level at The South Bank.   more »

On Sunday Riz Ahmed was on stage at The Baftas as a cast member of award winning Britz. On Monday I was giving an award meanwhile Shlomo was less than a mile away, a nominee for the prs music awards. All of these people are Southbank artists in residence. Something is happening.   more »

I got to sleep at 1am and wake at 6am. At 7.30am I am on my bike and I arrive at The South Bank at 9am for a BBC television interview on top of The Royal Festival Hall. There are magnificent blue skies stretching above the houses of parlaiment and the whole of London.   more »

It was only a matter of time that I would get myself a gun and walk out into my front garden firing it with ricocheting self made sound effects “Peeow peeow!!”. Lancashire was my grand canyon, Chief our golden Labrador my long suffering steed. I had the gun, with caps, the white vinyl holster with silver press studs and I was the fastest draw in west ashton in Makerfield.! A gun toting rootin tooting two foot tall John Wayne   more »

he most intense time was midnight outside the iconic Bush House having done the interview for The World Today with the films director Mohammed Al-Daradji, we discussed Iraq, he spoke passionately “To many it is just statistics “oh a man killed here, a suicide bomb there” I have lost five members of my close family”. Mohammed then listed each member of his family: when and how each member was murdered by suicide bombers or American bombs.   more »

On the way out of the Broadcasting House I watched Lesley Sharp politely signing autographs from the gull like autograph hunters hopping outside. She graciously stood for photographs in a picture of patience, as if she was saying to herself, if you can wait in the cold I can stand for a picture.   more »

The audience sold out The Blue Room in The Spirit Level, beneath The Royal Festival Hall. They spoke to a rapt audience and took questions. If you’d have seen how eloquently he spoke at Camden Library on a wet winter evening then you would know. You would know just as I did that the audience deserved to hear this story. This event symbolised The Southbank arts centre for me.   more »

I wake at 7.30am and by 9am I am on my bike speeding through Hackney, gliding into the Regents canal entrance near Borough market up and off the canal into Angel, zooming past Saddlers Wells Theatre then Exmouth Market, swooping to Holborn where I get a freakin’ puncture.   more »

who runs the world, governments or multinationals. Is it a side effect of globalisation, that governments become the servants of commercial companies? Can global companies effectively run governments? Are multinationals the new aristocracy aping its family structure while promoting an inherent aquisition of land and virtual ownership of the people upon it.   more »

whether surreal or naturalistic, bitter or sweet, dance or poem, artists and their creations make life better. Art of itself is a statement against globalisation. To create something original is a statement against globalisation. And to view it, to seek it out, is to be a part of that   more »

I find myself in the position of the radical deflated balloon. And we all know what the head teacher said to the radical deflated balloon. The headteacher said “you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down and you’ve let the whole school down”. All I could think was, what a title - The title of this article, of the email is be the title of the poem.   more »

As the wildlife expert said to the chameleon “you’ve changed”.   more »

This website is the best example of how poetry can be presented on the world wide webble that I have seen so far. The poets name is Kwame Dawes who spent some time in residence at a hospital in Jamaica http://www.livehopelove.com   more »

One of Massive Attacks choices for Meltdown at The South bank later this year was Gil Scot Heron.   more »

The drumming stops dramatically. Pah Pah Da Dah Pah! The police partand the torch comes through in the hands of the minute Vanessa mae. It's so close I could touch it. Just as I have that thought one of the chinese securioty guards spies me. "The torch is slightly bigger than she is " said one drummer to another.   more »

(London, April 4, 2008) – In welcoming the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay outside 10 Downing Street, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is sending the Chinese government exactly the wrong message on its ongoing crackdown in Tibet and on human rights advocates in China, Human Rights Watch said today.   more »

I wrote the lyrics to a song called “In The Name of The Torch”. On Sunday hundreds of singers will be outside of The Royal Festival Hall on the banks of the Thames River as The Olympic Torch makes its way through and onwards to 10 Downing Street.   more »

All three of these would qualify because Shakespeare, Nick Cave and Zaidi Smith all have poetry in their work. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The finance worker who writes poems, The Poetry Library which gets every copy of every book of poetry published in England, the security guard who writes poetry: all of these qualify for the long list.   more »

Saw Mr Martin Luther King Junior speak today, in the ballroom at The South bank.   more »

I arrive at the meeting, out of breath and in a flap of apology while simultaeneusly removing my scarf which gets wrapped up in my headphones which begins to choke me, giving my apology the effect of sounding like a cross between stephen hawkings and donald duck.   more »

And I was able to hear my song for the first time. It’s the first one on the set list. The band strikes up and the children, their chests full of our, sing their hearts out in a crescendo of song. Goose pimples concertina'd along the back of my neck over my shoulders and along my arms to my finger tips. This was electric.   more »

I was brought up in care. Eighteen years of it. I don't do lots of these events. They take it out of me. It's all I can do not to breakdown at the quiet break throughs that happened. But I don't break down. cause that's not what it's about.   more »

Less than one percent of children in care attend university. It is a disgusting statistic when you consider that a child in care is under the legal parentage of the government.   more »

by mid morning they're still waiting and with no A to Z my bus is whizzing along a dual carraigeway called E mail Street turning right onto commision road. I spent a long time on Things To Do Avenue which reminded me to make repeated calls on Cell Phone Street and a drive down the way called Answer Machine Avenue. In no time I'm lost.   more »

It's curious that under the present regime of maximum security anxiety, bomb scares and terorist alert that anyone is allowed to run through London brandishing fire on the end of a stick, but it's going to happen. It'll be called The Olympic Torch. I suggest it's carried aloft by a muslim geezer with a beard.    more »