This is Benson my hound. The dog lovers amongst you will be able to deduce that he’s a Whippet from his photograph. You can recognise his breed by his bony shape, long legs, pointy head and beautiful curves over his back and under his flattened but enlarged chest. He's quite a goer. But what you can’t do is hear the whining he makes when he’s desperate for a walk or his "happy growl", which…
The machine wants you to think that food is a product. Something that is processed, enriched, packaged, sanitised, wrapped in plastic, sent to a shop or delivered to your door. It's all part of a difficult process. It's complicated. Too complicated for you. Too difficult. Too dangerous to contemplate less you eat a bruised fruit, or semi raw vegetable. This afternoon, I popped 15 little seeds into…
Totino gently warbled his last quiet song as he rested in my son's cupped hand. Half an hour later he would close his eyes to drift away from being that soft, warm, beautiful blue and yellow featherball, into the start of a memory. A final stretch of his wings, one last attempt at flight, a wriggle and then silence. "I think he's dead dad" Stillness followed where only seconds before the gentlest…
I was enjoying the sunshine and taking my hounds for their lunchtime walk. One of them did what all dogs (and humans) need to do, poo. Being a responsible owner I fished out a poo bag from my pocket and scooped the offending item up, tying it tightly. I carried on walking, paused and then turned around. There was a litter bin, just 20 yards behind me. Usually I just keep on going on my…
Luke chapter 1. Zecharia is in the temple and an angel appears. The angel says to him, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah! God has heard your prayer. Your wife Elizabeth will have a son, and you will name him John. He will be your pride and joy, and many people will be glad that he was born. As far as the Lord is concerned, he will be a great man... ...he will change parents’ attitudes toward…
The tarmac had been covered in a slick of aviation oil. Sitting on top of this was a thin sheen of water. My car had illegal tyres, worn down to slick smoothness. This was not going to end well. As I entered the corner too fast, the laws of physics began to play out. Momentum, mass, all of the stuff I had mostly forgotten since taking my 'O' levels. I was going too fast. I…
There's something to be said for owning a dog. The need to go out every day with your four-legged friend, come rain or shine, hot or cold and to revisit the same place on multiple occasions.. We're living in a city at present. A space full of scousers and incomers from all corners of the world. It's urban, really urban. Often challenging, dirty, noisy and boistrous. But just a short distance away…
Attached to my door was a black and white picture of a blonde woman in full song. The ragged edge down the long side betrayed the fact that it had been torn out of a book. Next to my room, on my best friend's door was an equally cool looking David Bowie. I was 18 years old. And staring me back in the face, on my study door was Stevie Nicks. Three years earlier I…
My work is made by a human for humans. Nothing on my website, none of the text or images have been created or developed using any Artificial Intelligence tools. (With the exception of this single post, where I outlined how AI could be used to clean up errors in text scanned from a handwritten document) Whilst in some of my work life, as an employee, there have been times when initial queries to…
I thought that I had missed them. For the first time in many, many years. I’d been distracted, pulled away by the human world. A world of deadlines, screens, worry, artificiality and bland, mediocre time sameness. In my early morning walks with the hounds I’d spotted modest little clumps among the park trees, hidden in small pocket glades. Behind the cast iron railings near to a disused medical…