Ship Burial Novel

The only way is Essex: Southend Pier  Once upon a time I witnessed a scattering of ashes at the end of Southend Pier. An elderly man dressed in the sort of tweed suit that only elderly men from a now passing generation wear unscrewed the lid of a modest burial urn and then upended the [...]

Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb (artist unknown, date unknown) She was always everybody’s favourite sinner and now it has become fashionable to appropriate her for political rather than sexual ends. It seems to me that in the attempt to ‘clear her name’ and reassert her rightful role among the ‘Followers of [...]

The earliest version of The Dream of the Rood that we have is inscribed in runes on an Anglo-Saxon cross that is now to be found in an apse of the church at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire. The fact that it should now be in lowland Scotland is testament to the argy-bargy that has been an almost continuous feature [...]

Windflower by John William Waterhouse 1903 ‘April is the cruellest month’ says T S Eliot in the opening line of The Wasteland presumably precisely because this month can be so beautiful. Those who remember the 1980s and one of the best bands of that decade Talk Talk might be reminded of the classic track April 5th [...]

So … to be Seamus Heaney about it, we continue to be snowed in or under, whichever you prefer. I, like you I’m sure, have been struggling against its annoying aspects and enjoying others. Such as a good excuse to go out and about in a woolly hat clicking away with a digital camera. This [...]

At this point the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ (if I remember my Keats correctly) is well and truly over. The evenings draw in quickly and the woodland and heaths are sodden and dismal. These days we have much to distract us but for the medieval folk of these river meadows it can be [...]

It is doubtful whether the lyre of the Anglo-Saxon scop could have competed with the Funk Brothers of Hitsville USA and it is doubtful whether he could have played it with his teeth like Jimi Hendrix but you never know. What is probable is that he would have related to the idea of some kind of soul journey which [...]