Japan and Birmingham
I play a lot of music during the day as I work in my home office. It never ceases to amaze me the power of music. In particular, its power to evoke memories and trigger mood and emotional responses. If I want to meditate, I simply go to youtube these days and select a nice suitable piece of music and I am off to other spheres….. Today, I played some Japan. It has been a long time since I did and I was immediately transported back to Birmingham and 1979. My best friend at college – Steve – introduced me to Japan one afternoon at his flat. We were playing Dungeons and Dragons and he put one of their albums on. I loved the music and the deep rumbling of David Sylvian’s
Read More »A Journey to the End of the world
I remember one day deciding with a friend that we would explore the very edge of our world. We jumped on our bicycles and set off resolutely in that general direction. After about 15-minutes, we had already entered an entirely new world about which we knew only rumor. Here, there were supposed to be roaming gangs that if they caught you, would carry you off to their secret lairs in the ‘blackgang’. We felt, well, very brave to have gone so far and to be in someone else’s territory. Parking our bikes by the side of the street, we entered some gardens discovering a veritable paradise of willow trees and grass surrounding a small private pond. It was magical and it was someone else’s secret garden as we had hauled
Read More »A Yorkshire Christmas
Christmas Eve was spent collecting Ammonites on a cold, blustery but magnificently beautiful day on the Yorkshire coast. We found lots of these whirly fossils in the lower Jurassic of Ravenscar and the walk down and then back up the cliffs was refreshing and invigorating. This experience was topped off with a delicious cream tea at Raven Hall Hotel. It couldn’t have been any better. As the three of us trooped down the muddy path, I reflected on the many trips around Yorkshire fossil hunting I had done with my late Father. Not only did we hunt fossils but we explored the area in depth. Roman roads, ancient burial sites, viking villages. You name it, we did it. We even found a whole bunch of iron age pottery that we
Read More »Christmas is Just Silly!
Christmas has many facets. One of them is the never ending commercialization of what really should be a simple family Christian religious celebration. Of course, christmas has in its central theme, much for non-Christians to peruse and consider in terms of its greater spiritual meaning and in terms of other non-Christian celebrations at this time of the year. However, the endless commercialization has really spoiled for me what used to be a happy and beautiful time of the year. In the Czech Republic, christmas decorations generally still go up around the 1st December. Some of the chain stores with HQ’s overseas start earlier though. In other places like the US and the UK, christmas basically now starts in October or even earlier. It is no longer a religious holiday unless
Read More »A Meeting with God
In the run up to Halloween, here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them. A few weeks into my college days, as I made my way from the Students’ Union building to my student flat on the 19th floor of a campus building, I noticed a rather suspicious looking character who seemed to be following me around. As I entered one of the elevators in the ground-floor of the building, he followed peering sideways at me but looking away whenever I tried to catch his eye. As the elevator arrived at my floor, I was hoping it was all just my imagination and that perhaps he would continue up to the top floor above
Read More »Poltergeist
In the run up to Halloween, here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them. up in my house was on the whole, pretty good. We had great parents, almost every weekend we were gone camping somewhere, we had two proper holidays each year and I have no complaints at all. Just a bunch of heartfelt thanks to my parents and a growing sense of awe as to how they did all that with three small boys and not a lot of money. When I was eleven, we moved. It was a good move to be honest from a terraced three up, two down in west Hull to a rather nice semi-detached outside of Hull.
Read More »Life is But A Dream
I recall singing that song when I was a small child and wondering what did it mean? – Life is just a dream? Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream. But where did this come from and who wrote it? A bit of research suggests that the earliest printing of it was in 1852 but who wrote it and why seems lost in the mists of time. If anyone knows, please let me know… I thought life a dream when I was a child or rather, I thought it a game that I controlled. It was a sort of virtual reality (as it would be called now) and I was sat in a box connected to a machine that
Read More »Reminiscing About Summer
As I look out of my office window, I see a steady stream of drizzle. It is dark enough to have the lights on and if the truth be told, cold enough to put on the heating. It’s also august 27th and it has been like this for much of August. What happened to summer this year? From time to time some strange golden ball does appear in the sky emitting something that passes for heat but it is a pale washed out version of those seen in previous summers. If I hadn’t spent 12-days on Kos, I would swear summer was yet to arrive this year. I guess I shouldn’t moan too much. Maybe I simply betraying my English upbringing with my weather obsession? I remember as a small
Read More »Ghost Stories
As many of you may already know, I had a strange and psychically troubled childhood some of which is documented in my book Inner Journeys. along the way, I bumped into a few ghosts too…. We lived in a typical semi-detached house on the outskirts of Hull. So far as I know, it was built in the 1920’s and had little history that might make you think it could be haunted. I recall my first impressions of the place though as a young boy. It was cold with no central heating, felt damp and gloomy and the bare floorboards and old wallpaper added a certain creepiness to the place. Of course, my Dad was an amazingly resourceful man and very soon, the entire place was redecorated and central heating added.
Read More »Songs from Another Era
I started writing poetry or more accurately perhaps lyrics, at the age of about 12. At that time, I had just received my first acoustic guitar for Christmas and had already formed a ‘band’ with Andy Wells, my next door neighbour. Andy has, I think, played around bands ever since in the USA where he now lives and owns a huge collection of guitars. We would sit in our front rooms strumming the odd malformed chord and dreaming in the way only adolescents can dream. Of course, the early 70’s really was a great time for this with wave after wave of new bands coming through and cranking out three chord singles by the bucket load. I particularly loved T.Rex I recall and fancied myself as another Marc Bolan. In
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