Category craic

If you find yourself wandering through Wolverhampton over the next couple of weeks, and have ten minutes to spare, nip into the Central Library, head upstairs, and take a look at the ‘One Ring to Bind Them’ exhibition. It’s a…

It’s been a busy old start to 2020. January was traditionally – for me, anyway – a month where nothing much happened and I lived as frugally as possible while waiting for the work to come in. Not now, I…

It had been a good few months since I found time to write a poem – lots of reasons for that, too long-winded to go into on a Sunday morning – but as I tried to make sense of the…

Sometimes – when you’re juggling the work/life balance, chasing commissions, hunting for gigs, and trying to stay on top of admin on the one hand and mushrooming slatternliness on the other – sometimes actual writing, the very thing you’re passionate…

One rainy midweek morning earlier this summer, I made my way to the Jewellery Quarter train station in Birmingham, and met up with a cameraman. We made a recording of me reading my poem Pride of Place, and I got…

It’s been over six weeks since I last posted a blog here. Yikes. Partly that’s because I’ve been slaving away with my fellow pandemonialists on the script of a show about Black Country humour – Finding Our Funny Roots is…

It seems an age ago already, but last week I was up in Edinburgh, visiting the Fringe with my fellow pandemonialists Dave Pitt and Emma Purshouse. We were there for two reasons: to do a gig for the Loud Poets,…

It’s a strange old time to be a poet. On the one hand, it’s the annual shindig which is the Edinburgh Fringe (hooray!). On the other hand, even the most cursory glance at the news headlines suggests we’re heading to…

You can generally bet your bottom dollar that the more I recognise the urgency of something that needs doing, the more I discover an overwhelming need to do something – anything – which is totally unrelated and pushes the needs-doing-this-very-minute…

It’s been a great couple of months, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog, and yes, those two things are related. Time flies when you’re having fun, you see. And I have been having fun. The last month…

We all have little rituals and habits which are woven into our lives. As midsummer approaches, it’s always a fair bet I’ll be packing the camper van and pointing it northwards to Scotland for a couple of weeks of parking…

There’s always something wonderful, as far as I’m concerned, about sitting in an audience and listening to poetry. Every voice is different. Some you may love, some may leave you cold, some will inspire you to go home and write…