For the second year in a row, the Poetry School has teamed up with Open Garden Squares Weekend to offer mini residencies in London parks and gardens to emerging poets. Last year, my residency never quite got off the ground, so I'm delighted that this year I've been matched up with Thrive in Battersea Park. …
Tag: Battersea
birdwatching in Battersea
The plane trees outside my window are still bare. But they are visited regularly by a pair of birds I think I have successfully identified as magpies. I've checked both my Michelin I-Spy Birds book and Hamlyn nature guides' Birds. The latter describes the magpie's call as a hard, rapid rattling 'sha-sha-sha-shak'. I've heard this …
pale green fingers
Gardens and gardening have been a bit of a them this year. There was the Poetry School's Mixed Borders scheme, which didn't quite work out for me, and my continuing involvement with my local community roof garden. That involvement always felt rather timid and tentative to me, all tied up with my own insecurities and …
this rose
This rose knows nothing about Paris, Raqqa, global pain. This rose is silent. It is a wordless song of colour and perfume. This rose is not aware of climate change. It blooms when it is ready. Mid November - why not? This rose grows on a rooftop in Battersea. When the garden is shut it …
High-flying Hilda
Yesterday morning I joined a small crowd on Vardens Road, SW11, for the unveiling of a Battersea Society plaque honouring Hilda Hewlett. Hilda who? Only the first British woman to gain a pilot's licence, back in 1911, aged 47. And an extremely enterprising woman, who opened a flying school in Weybridge with her French business …
Fourth of July vigil for Shaker Aamer
Yesterday, it was hot and sunny in London. Yesterday, millions of US citizens celebrated Independence Day. Yesterday, Shaker Aamer endured another day held without charge in Guantanamo Bay, denied his most basic human rights, shackled, force-fed, kept in solitary confinement; trapped in a grim Kafkaesque legal no-man's-land where he has been cleared for release for …
helping out on the roof
I'd normally run a mile from a 'family fun day', but last Saturday I set aside my prejudices and lent a hand at my community roof garden for their annual Chelsea Fringe event. I'm actually a keyholder for the garden now, and on the friendly-and-informal committee, but my gardening still hasn't progressed much beyond appreciating …
Friday night and Saturday morning
On Friday night I was on the bill with Joolz Sparkes at Fourth Friday at the Poetry Café, reading a bunch of poems from our London Undercurrents project. There's more about the event on our dedicated LU blog here. I'd been looking forward to this and practising for quite a while, and, as the reading …
February’s looking up
Poor old January. Too often a long dark month to get through. Now you're behind us, and February's here, the shortest month whose lengthening days speed us towards spring. So it snowed overnight on Monday, and the wind is Siberian, but there are snowdrops in the park, and buds on the magnolia trees. This bright …
Thank you, Thurgoods, and farewell
About a year ago, our local greengrocer closed temporarily for a radical refurbishment, including the addition of a flat over the shop. We resigned ourselves to several months of mildly-aggravating and bit-more-expensive fruit and vegetable shopping in the nearby supermarket, softened by the anticipation of when-Thurgoods-reopens, hoping it would be perhaps a little smarter but …
Hilaire 