Ella Fitzgerald said I am never bored because I am never boring. It isn’t the end of the world if I don’t document all the events in my life here and so I don’t. There are times that I think how boring it actually is. It is no bad thing to be boring every now and again. It was a friend of mine, a gallerist, who said of my life that it is full of over stimulation and so I find it difficult to relax in the spaces inbetween. Read more [...]

Other than unformed notes I hadn’t yet written the introduction to Benjamin Zephaniah for his appearance at The Queen Elizabeth Hall in London tonight. But the wild horses were gathering on the horizon. I arrive home un-rested and unwritten after a five thousand mile overnight flight from South Africa. I unpacked and balanced the South African Masks upon their plinths around our home and then cycled to The Southbank Centre. Read more [...]

In Kippies guns were passed under table and gold toothed smiles above. The gangster sat next to the musicians and both escorted the international model who was in town for a photoshoot and wanted some nightlife with her friends. A place for a poet. Kippies - straight out of a Walter Mosely novel. 'cept those harlem bars have long since gone. Read more [...]

The taxi journey was hair raising. At 5am it was dark and we sped with unnecessary urgency from Grahamstown to the airport in Port Elizabeth. It was one, seat gripping forehead sweating, hour of hell. We , Gill Anna and I, sat in stoney silence as the driver pursued the bumper of every car in existence upon the motorway. Read more [...]

A tall shouldered ruddy nosed gentleman selling Kudu steaks from behind the counter says in a gruff south African Settlers accent. “I came to your show yesterday” he passed me the burger with a stern twinkle in his eye “food for thought” he says. His daughter looked at me with pursed smile as if to say Read more [...]

Here in South Africa my producer tells me how Benjamin and Helen Suzman at her behest helped campaign to free South African poet Muzwhake from jail. Benjamin wrote to Nelson Mandela in which he said “you can tell how well a country is by how it treats the poets.” Read more [...]

I wrote the piece to try and show the writing fraternity that my l life as poet was beset by the greater need to piece together my story to find my family. Read more [...]

In rehearsal and in the play this evening a bat flew down from the rafters. It dived in and out of the stage lights casting shadows around me like dark ribbons . It circled me and then disappeared – a spirit chased by an invisible kite runner Read more [...]

Look at the Geese from this morning, those migrating geese. They migrate from one country to the next and each country where they alight thinks of the bird as their own and yet it is of either. Now what simple lesson can be gained from that. We were immigrants from the beginning of time... Man came from Ethiopia and travelled outwards... how have we come to this. What is the world cup except one mass movement of economic migrants. What is Nike, what is sponsorship but economic migration and globalisation. Read more [...]