Time flashes past so fast. What you read in these blogs is a glimmer of what I do. I wake at 5am most mornings. Since stopping smoking it’s 3am. So I drink Valerium tea and swallow Nytol to at least Read more [...]

Formal education has a lot to answer for. For example I was taught that there are only five senses (!) when in fact there’s many many more. However, for the purposes of this particular blog let’s Read more [...]

From Riverside Rooms At 6.30pm I cycle across the sparkling Thames to Pall Mall and The London Library in St James Square SW1. It’s The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international Read more [...]

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My writing is as if upon a steamed mirror. Today was the first read through of an early draft of my stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy. When the actors at West Yorkshire Playhouse Read more [...]

In childhood Alice Walker was shot in the eye by her brother “it caused a lot of suffering” she says of the accident “but it gave me a gift of seeing in a different way”. Read more [...]

But this is right up there with discovering pieces of my fathers plane in the Simeon mountains of Ethiopia at 29 or meeting my mother at 21. This is up there with walking off stage to see Paul McCartney applauding in the wings or interviewing Emperor Haile Selassie’s official photographer for The World Service. Read more [...]

It’s not unfair to say life is incredible at the moment. Why is it incredible? Not because of a major windfall, nor because of an astounding review. It’s simple. I Read more [...]

‘In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference…Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful' - Douglas Hofstaedter Read more [...]

It's national poetry day. Here's an excerpt of my article in the present issue of Poetry Review. Read more [...]