Flying backwards to yesterday Was I flying backwards into a nostalgic and unreal fantasy about a past life? Even now Zambia feels like home to me, the place closest to my heart where I feel most deeply rooted. I lived in Zambia for 22 years and my dream had always been to have a plot of land, build […]
Issam Kourbaj, artist and mentor – “Dark Water, Burning World”
Wonderful good fortune Sometimes you know that you have been really lucky! I was when I met Issam Kourbaj, a Syrian artist in Cambridge. I can’t remember who told me about Issam’s workshops but I went along to one without a clue about what to expect. Possibly I heard about Issam from someone at Cambridge Artworks where I had a […]
Mythological me – images from a memoir of childhood
For a child, facts are fantastical and fantasy, factual Somewhere in my infancy, there is a thick green privet hedge, clipped and trimmed to right-angled perfection. It encloses a perfectly square empty space brimful of desolation. It contains no house, no people live there and it is nameless. Its eternal position is located somewhere inside the fortnight when my mythical […]
Driving back over my childhood
Going home to Zimbabwe Because of the unexpected changes in Zimbabwe last week I am posting two poems – one from 1980 when I returned to my father’s farm, and another from 1961 my last year at school. Ford Laser speeds up the dual highway. (Commercial break) Camera pans back to parents. Airport to homecoming – half an hour and […]
And still we rise…! 84%! – Tanvir Naomi Bush
Dear Readers – introducing my extraordinary novelist daughter, Tanvir Naomi Bush, who is crowdfunding through Unbound for her next novel – please read her post for a flavour of the story. If you like you can help through Unbound. CULL has hit 84% of total and is on a roll! For those of you unsure about what this is all […]