JGG500

 I wrote this poem about six years ago for a National Poetry Day assembly at Repton Prep, where my wife, Sarah, was Head of English. It was designed to show an audience of 7-13 year old pupils how they might construct a poem, or rather, how I constructed a poem, from observation, memory, comparison and diction, matching words to ideas and feelings, some of which owe a debt to Seamus Heaney's 'Blackberry Picking'. Conkers Amongst September’s litmus leaves, The long, green fuse of summer Burns out in the branches Detonating green grenades, Exploding, showering earthwards. Bobbing mines in dew-fall grass Split in varnished grins. Some we’d crack and prise Hard jewels from calfskin purses, Popped knots of chestnut grain, To cram in every pocket gape. Running home, the nugget spill, Vinegar spells and oven smells, To harden into battle balls For playground champs and scalping glee Of swings and strings and broken globes      ...

  Syderstone Autumn For Sarah. Her favourite season .   The flowers are falling Like drunken diners And only the memory of swifts Persists. A slow warmth stills The shortening days, Burnishing The blackberry swagger And the glaucous baubles Of the sloes. Wind kindled Rose hip embers Singe the shivering birch And light The hawthorn lamps At dusk. Rooks rise, Crackling like bonfires From the sun-buttered stubble As the plough peels Open the earth, Laid bare To the stars.   October 2025

  Keats' Country A friend mentioned to me recently that one reason for not moving to Dubai and all its tax-free temptations, was the poor exchange rate on seasons, namely, having to swap our four for its tropical two, and even those only being distinguished from each other by a few degrees of high heat.  For the past few weeks, we have been fortunate travellers in Keats' Country, that much-loved rural landscape of 'mists and mellow fruitfulness' which carries summer's warmth into a final gilding of the green before a gentle, rusting decline into colder, darker days. On the common, the bracken has bronzed and dropped back, revealing a trove of fungi; brackets jutting out from the birch trunks, small splashes of 'witches' butter', or Yellow Brain, along rotting branches and autumn's signature scrawled in the small, red-and-white clusters of Fly Agaric. This is the iconic toadstool of fairy tales, its potentially poisonous, definitely hallucinogenic pro...

  THE FIRST GOOSE COUNT OF THE YEAR North Point, Wells-Next-The-Sea.      At 6.00am, only a few lights betray the waking villages of North Norfolk. In Wells-Next-The-Sea, a baker's van makes its delivery and further along the quay, fishermen are readying the crab boats for the morning tide. Driving east out of Wells, I pull in to the rough track which overlooks the pools of North Point to wait for first light and the pink-footed geese lifting noisily from their overnight roosts to head inland to feed.  In truth, my expectations are not high.  A few birds have been roosting here at North Point but, looking north to the sea, as Norfolk folk often seem to do, the bigger counts will be made away to my left - at  Burnham Deepdale, Burnham Norton and especially at Holkham - and to my right, at Stiffkey and the birds coming in off East Hills.  The North Norfolk coast is a nationally renowned site for thousands of migrating pink-footed geese which trade i...