I finished primary school half a century ago today. My memories of that last day at St Helen's are still vivid (in part) and very positive.
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July 2024
According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and 1984.
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Would you travel across the land, in the hour of the summer solstice?
- from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell
The veil is thin now.
A time for the half-remembered inner pagan to re-emerge, dancing widdershins in the pre-dawn dew around the celebrity stones, or the authentic stones, or wherever one finds oneself this solstice-time.
In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.
Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.
"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.
Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.
His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:
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March 2024
T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.
In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.
I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.
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September 2023
"I thought I saw a swallow land, upon my hand, on summer day" - Roy Harper
For the gardener, this is the peak of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and weeks following Midsummer Day are a time of quietness, of flower festivals, of fragrant old roses around mildewed old church doors and of wandering among indecipherable gravestones and of coming hollyhocks and of lemon balm and of long, long ago memories, but always of "history is now, and England".