Category craic

We live in a crazy world. Doubt it? Here’s an example. This weekend the news has been full of stories from the ‘snowmageddon’ on the east coast of the USA (because just calling it ‘very heavy snowfall’ isn’t anything like…

It’s become increasingly fashionable to sneer at art. Philistines on the right dismiss it as not being a proper job, while their counterparts on the left say how it fails to liberate the masses, and virtually all of us roll…

The ghost of the Xmas turkey* is already dead and gone, and the horror of the New Year hangover is still just a twinkle in an ill-judged cocktail’s eye, so what better time to let my fingers do the walking…

Many years ago, back when life was stretching out before me like an endless adventure, I hitched back down from Leeds to Walsall for a party. My best friend in the world was turning eighteen, and her mom and stepdad…

Summer. In the UK. Now the cynics amongst you might argue this just gives us more hours of daylight to watch the rain fall, but this year even the most hard-bitten of you would have to admit it’s also offering…

The poetry world runs on the goodwill, the endeavour, the graft and the enthusiasm of people who organise, publicise, and put on gigs knowing full well that – in pure economic terms – anyone looking at the work they put in…

Courtesy of the author John Siddique – who posted it on facebook a week or so ago, asking (as I did) what loyalty meant – one year after I wrote it the Caffè Nero letter is up and running again.…

This morning I wake in an old farmhouse in Cumbria with blue skies overhead and jackdaws cawing outside. Today is a day off, a day for striding up into the fells and looking out at the world below, hoping to…

Someone asked me recently why I write poetry, and I realised I didn’t really have an answer. I was able to tell them that my work has been described as raging, irreverent, and radical, or that I’ve been called one…

Sometimes the cut and thrust of politics goes way way beyond what it’s possible to lampoon, and – with an election coming up – it’s more true now than ever. On Sunday, David Cameron claimed in a TV interview that…

The town where I grew up is never going to win any beauty contests. It’s not chocolate-box cute, and the landscape is nothing to write home about. It’s the sort of place where – if you were driving through on…

I’ve written a lot of poems over the past eighteen months. Some of them have gone up on my website, others have been shared on facebook and Twitter, several became part of my set when I’m doing a gig, and…