Authors Electric

Oikology - when we need to look after our home In February last year I was  preparing  to teach a poetry course to my WEA students and I wrote this introduction. The course was cancelled after two sessions and I was left with a large file of unused poems. Never one to throw anything away and looking back over an extraordinary year it seemed an  appropriate juncture for me to give the piece, if not the poems, to a wider audience. “Record heat in world’s oceans is ‘dire’ warning on climate crisis.” This was a newspaper headline recently and as I write there is a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, attended by American President, Donald Trump, and 17 year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, whose book,   No One is Too Small to Make a Difference , sits on my desk. Indeed, there is now so much information about the climate problem that it is difficult to pick out one particular aspect that should command our attention.   However, as this is a course about p...

... the more we know we don't know. You can be just lying in your bed, watching a mindless video and an epiphany finds you. You don't have to go climb mountains or anything. You don't even have to want one, or anything. For example, whilst recuperating from a nasty bug over Christmas - no way to spend the holidays - I was was half watching a You Tube video of what was supposed to be a romantic mountain train journey around Switzerland. I had the sound turned off. Watching trains lulls me to sleep somehow. It takes me back to being a little kid curled up in the swaying, top bunk of my parents' compartment on our annual winter cross-country rail journey from Los Angeles to Boston, Massachusetts back in the 1940s. The top bunks on the old Pullman cars used to have these little oval windows up where the carriage wall curved into the ceiling. I could slide a little plastic shade open and peek out onto a moonlit winter landscape with myriad stars above. It was like the t...