Three Poems About Conkers
It is the conker season, when the young and the young hearted scour parks and woodland floors for horse chestnuts. I have met a few people under the conker tree…
Black Combe
Black Combe belongs to the Furness Peninsula. It is our fell, our connection to the Lake District.
The Seven Wonders of Barrow-in-Furness
Since Covid has made Staycations a necessity for most of us, why not visit Barrow-in-Furness. We have a unique cultural, historical, archaeological and ecological heritage. But you don’t want to…
Extreme Views: Cranes
Barrow’s cranes, like the yellow hammerhead crane, are gone. With a little imagination at least one of them could have been retained like the Titan Crane in Glasgow which is…
Hannah and the Christmas Turkeys
Chapter 1 It was nearly Christmas down on the farm. In the barn Lucky the duck was keeping one eye on the turkeys in their pen. The other eye was…
Lucky Goes To Market
My friend Anne is a farmer. One day I visited Anne on her farm and she told me about a duck called Lucky. When her mother laid some eggs, Lucky…
The Fire Fairies
Here is another story I used to tell my children. It was one of many based in the Lake District. They began when I was cook and Dee, my wife…
Then and Now
I wrote this poem for my writers group, Maggies’ Creatives, led by the excellent Clare Stuart. They meet at the Maggies Centre in Manchester every Thursday and let me join…
The Clock and the Walking Stick …
the ones I made up, featuring them as the heroes in magical tales based on their holidays with grandparents in Cleethorpes and Mablethorpe and with us in the Lake District.
Childhood, Chalk and Cheers
Childhood’s boundaries are marked in chalk on walls and pavements. They are never completely erased and once you have crossed the border you can never return. You know you’ve crossed…