How the media loves anniversaries and now I’m at it too; it hardly seems 10 months ago let alone 10 years that war was declared on Iraq. Saddam was the excuse, war was the result, and the number of Iraqis who’ve died in consequence will be forever disputed. What PN readers may agree upon is that one death was one too many.
What the peace group here in Stroud was, and is, agreed upon was that, from the…
In 1963, what was then London Transport transported me to The Theatre Royal Stratford East and there I saw its legendary production of Oh What a Lovely War! It is an evening I will never forget; not least because I sat behind an elderly man who began to weep as the mounting casualty figures of the First World War flashed up on the illuminated screen suspended over the set.
This simple but heartrending device continued to the end of the evening and so did his weeping. His tears…
In 1970, I met, at peace activist Dennis Gould's home in Cornwall, an unassuming musician and writer of, it seemed to me, indisputable talent and originality. He'd just had his first LP Bill Fay released and I was so impressed, I wrote a piece about him in the rock magazine Zigzag.
This launched a valued friendship with Bill which was marked last month, by the release of his third commissioned studio album, Life is People, to a set of rave reviews unequalled in my…
There are not so many anarchist pacifist poets in print that we can afford to overlook any one of them. In John Rety’s case he was – what ever else – a hard man to overlook or ignore. He was by nature a (nonviolent) combatant and faced with an empty room he’d have had an argument with himself. A cliché, I know but its truth suited him to the ground. So, this posthumous collection of new and selected poems is a welcome arrival and worthy of attention.
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My headline’s a distortion; a Peace News Summer camp is nothing like Maplin’s television idyll; Maplin’s was entirely devoted to having a good time and didn’t fret about moral purpose.
Hang-on though, I’ve just come back from this summer’s PN tented rave-up and a good time is exactly what I had. Of course, there was a fair bit of fretting – and purposeful and well-aimed it was – but we all deserve a good time from time to time and it’s arguable whether shared angst is better…
Recently I was at a film show of pro-cycling films promoted by the excellent and innovative campaigning collective Bicycology.
The films were of variable quality and content and mostly strident in their opposition to car ownership and use.
Now whether such stridency is counter-productive is another debate but, as I’ve often mentioned in this column, PN’s embrace and promotion of cycling as a peaceful and healthy means of transport runs through its make-up like the…
Sometimes I try – like many PN readers I guess – to imagine myself in the position of a bereaved family in a civil war and know that revenge would be uppermost in my mind.
The intention to make somebody pay and suffer the same terrible loss and pain as yourself is near-irresistible and, maybe, even human nature.
Throughout my life, state gangsterism and political perfidy have sent me…
Small events in small towns happen everywhere in UK plc but they’re worth recounting nonetheless. At times it’s easy to believe that nobody cares about anything and nothing can be done anyway. Usually the arrival of PN is a corrective to such negative thinking on my part but occasionally there also occur what Tory prime minister Harold (Supermac) Macmillan once described as “events, dear boy, events”, and the world takes on a slightly rosier hue.
Events here in the People’s Republic…
The well-titled A Thorn in the Flesh is the latest book from the indefatigably wondrous poetry publisher Hearing Eye. It contains 37 (mostly short) poems from the equally wondrous Eddie Linden.
I've heard of Eddie, know of his place in, and impact on, the poetry scene but, prior to this book, had encountered only one poem - and that in an Hearing Eye anthology. Now Iíve made his literary (not physical) acquaintance, I understand the impact he made when he arrived from Scotland in the…
For the whole of my life so far, civil war has raged somewhere in the world and there seems no end in sight. In Spain, 75 years ago, the army led by general Franco staged a military coup against the legally-elected Republican government and the resulting civil war lasted for nearly three years. Franco’s army – boosted by the support of Hitler and Mussolini – eventually triumphed, and his dictatorship survived from 1939 until 1975. The political,social and cultural fall-out from this bitter…
It may surprise you to learn, dear readers, that I try to avoid writing too often about books here. Trouble is, kind people keep sending me them because they think they’ll interest me. Invariably they do. Take, for example, the collection of poems by John Lucas published in 2010 by the estimable Five Leaves Publications whose books often get a mention here.
Things to Say (£7.99) is a wide-ranging substantial body of work by an established poet of reputation and clout and is divided…
There has been a Saturday morning peace picket in Stroud's High Street since the build-up to the Iraq war. This is my pitch for selling PN and seasonal white poppies but I've only just discovered -- to my chagrin -- that the picket predates the arrival of our family in Stroud and has been going on since the war in Kosovo.
The picket is small but, as I've lately been made aware, admirably persistent. It has become part of the street furniture so to speak and this year our…
PHOTO: Fred Chance
I was going to belatedly write about the London demo against cuts but have been waylaid by a novel written by HG Wells in 1913. The World Set Free is one of his prophetic screeds in which – by the 1970s – everything is produced, manufactured, and propelled by nuclear power. In his preface to the 1921 edition, he claimed, with uncharacteristic modesty, “the misses in the story far outnumber the hits”. I found his novel unreadable but his preface had this to say about his…
A bit of autobiography. Bear with me, there’s reason.
While recuperating from a bicycle accident, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre – in particular those written during the immediate run-up to the German occupation of France in 1940. My mum told me of her dread when, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Libyan mothers must be in even more dread now their country has declared war on itself.
My dad, a sheet metal…
The most memorable film I saw in 2010 – at the cinema or on TV – was Julien Temple’s visionary TV documentary Requiem for Detroit.
The most memorable book I read was Richard Mabey’s Weeds. The two are linked. Both produced a surge of hope within me which ran contra to a generalised feeling of despair against which I was battling. Still am. Both works are concerned with – to put it crudely – the survival of the natural world in the teeth of our man-made conspiracy to…
