Bees Here are my bees, gold blurs on paper, besotted; buzzwords dancing their flawless airy maps. Been deep, my poet bees, in the parts of flowers, in daffodil, thistle,… Read More »Bees by Carol Ann Duffy in her latest collection: The Bees!
The UCAS Personal Statement is a very powerful means of revealing to the University Admissions’ Tutor just how YOU are the very student they want to see in a seminar… Read More »UCAS Personal Statement: Expert Advice and Help.
I wrote The Face in The Wall as a sketch a few years ago on the Tusitala blog, under the category Writing Demeter. This category has a whole series of fragments… Read More »Reflections on Writing The Face in the wall and Katherine Mansfield too!
A courier knocked at my door just after midday and presented me with the slim parcel that revealed itself as Carol Ann Duffy’s brand new collection-The Bees. Hurrah for ebay… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees! New book of poetry from the poet Laureate.
So Many routines and rituals bring you comfort. Yet they throw the world of others into chaos . Everything is black and white. Right or wrong. You are protected… Read More »Living with autism by Lorraine Farrimond
Father’s Bedroom In my Father’s bedroom: blue threads as thin as pen-writing on the bedspread, blue dots on the curtains, a blue kimono, Chinese sandals with blue plush straps.… Read More »OXFORD ELAT English Paper example: Robert Lowell’s ‘Father’s Bedroom’.
‘The Signalman’ – the kids at my old school enjoyed it (year 10 set 3). It’s a good story for discussion because it raises more questions than it answers. Dickens’… Read More »Dickens' The Signalman: the ambiguity of signs! by Alison Ridyard.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary… Read More »Cath Corri and Gillman's Yellow Wallpaper: A Nightmare Destined for…?
UCAS application season is upon us. I have been reading the Sunday Times’ Guide to British Universities today( more on that tomorrow) and was inspired to seek out the very… Read More »So you want to go to Oxbridge? Tell me about a banana…
The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours The love that I have Of the life that I have Is… Read More »Leo Marks-Yours
One Good Turn is the second novel in which Kate Atkinson featured her private detective, Jackson Brodie. Brodie is attractive, compassionate and flawed. Appealing of course, with the added attraction that he… Read More »One good Turn by Kate Atkinson; ‘A jolly Murder Mystery’ for Bolton, Bury and Manchester!
A NOISELESS, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament,… Read More »Soul adventures with Walt Whitman!
Yesterday I was fascinated by a pest controller telling me about cockroaches and their two brains. I do think Dr Who should maximise upon this enthralling fact! Today, I picked… Read More »Michael Morpurgo: A Elephant in the garden.
This poem, ‘You‘ begins Carol Ann Duffy’s sequence of love poems, unambiguoulsy called Rapture! Aliosn Ridyard’s commentary on this blog is excellent and discusses the techniques by which Duffy communicates… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's You from Rapture: Commentary
CAROL ANN DUFFY (1955–present) In Mrs Tilscher’s Class You could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery. Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum.… Read More »In Mrs Tilscher's Class
