Category craic

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…

As a kid, I was brought up catholic. I wasn’t a particularly good catholic, but I knew the ropes, knew when to kneel and stand and say the creed in Mass, and every six months or so my mom would…

This year started with some great news. It’s taken me till now to write a blog about it because… well… because life’s been busy, because there aren’t enough hours in the day, and because the evidence shows I’m probably not…

There was good news this week, and there was bad news.  The good news is that scientists have discovered another Goldilocks planet, a planet at just the right distance from its star – not too hot, and not too cold…

I know the popular image of rock’n’roll road crew is that they’re a hard-drinking bunch of ne’er-do-wells, chock full of drugs and nonsense, which is why it may come as a surprise to hear that last night’s conversation on the…