So there we were writers the three of us, fed up. By fed up I mean, we had just eaten! A cab was hailed, Gwenyth went to her hotel in Kings Cross while the journalist and I continued. Home draws closer under a full, full moon. The best performance of the evening goes to The Full Moon. Read more [...]

“If as Marx said ‘Religion is the opiate of the people’ then surely nationalism is the crack cocaine” – Gaim Kibreab Birkbeck College. Read more [...]

I first met Tenzin in South Africa where he read his poems on stage at The Poetry Africa Festival in Durban. He was campaigning for Tibet - by walking - long before it gained the worlds attention. He has walked around the world to raise its consciousness of Tibet. Amazingly this has happened/is happening. This is his latest post Read more [...]

In the evening I travelled to Hammersmith and the home of George Devine, the founder of the rebirth of The Royal Court Theatre. His home has a blue plaque on the wall and looks out upon the Thames. Five of us, the judging panel for The George Devine Award finally whittled down the scripts to one clear winner. The prize is £10,000, ($20,000) - it's alot of money Read more [...]

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. Read 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 Read 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. Read 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. Read 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. Read 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. Read more [...]