Last week a poem I wrote 5 years ago popped up on twitter. It was originally posted on a now defunct blog, the forerunner to this one, and written after I had spent time on the Camino De Santiago with a mighty group of activists.

We were there as part of an extraordinary collective campaign called Justice For LB. Connor Sparrowhawk, or Laughing Boy as he was known online, was a young man who died in the most hideous of circumstances, drowning in a bath whilst in a a treatment and assessment unit. It was a shoddy place with shoddy care. The world was robbed of a wonderful dude and his family were robbed of their son.

As we walked we followed paths where for centuries before us, pilgrims had trod. Each one jostling, no doubt, with their own personal demons, their particular causes, seeking answers, seeking peace,requesting justice or simply finding space away from their ordinary existence.

Their presence hung in the air. In the monastery where we slept in dark dormitories, I was moved to sit in the cloisters under the starlit night and scream. In the morning I walked to the small chapel where the community of monks gathered to pray. The candles were lit, the psalms sung and the hoods up. The air was still and the incense hung.

It was an extraordinary few days full of laughter and tears, old ladies, wild dogs, high climbs, long views, tall stories, deep hearts and very sore feet.

When I reread that poem 5 years later I cried.

So why do I write? I write to remember. I write to hold on to what’s important. I write to capture a moment, a time, a movement. I write not to forget and I will never forget.

Here’s to you, Laughing Boy

It seems strange to say, far less think, but turning sixty has been a good thing. The age itself recedes as life comes more sharply into focus. There is an immediacy and a calling to live more fully because this really is it.

Life has become more colourful and more urgent. There is a blessing in the past, an appreciation of the lessons learnt and a sloughing off a skin that no longer serves.

The body sometimes grumbles, the aches and pains more regular, the memory a little hazier and the hair a little greyer but there is a willingness to try new things, to experiment, to take up space and to have a voice.

Maybe we know better how to look after ourselves. Perhaps we have always known but dismissed the knowledge, thinking it was not important. Heard ourselves saying, I’m fine, when for sure we knew that we were not. But now we know if we ignore that voice, our lives will be shorter, flatter and like our hair, greyer. 

I look at an industry devoted to maintaining the appearance of youth with fillers, acids, Botox and implants and think of the women I have loved and their faces complete with wrinkles, and frown lines and age spots. I think of their kindness and laughter and warmth and resilience and know that they are my idols.

At the beginning of the year I celebrated with a holiday in warmer climes where the days were filled with rain and sunshine, with  sting rays and snorkelling, with lying on the beach and swinging in hammocks, with dancing on the terrace and swimming at midnight,with sitting under waterfalls and walking barefoot, with yoga and cocktails.

I also started the year with cancelled plans and panic and stress, with hospices on standby, and palliative services alerted.

Turning sixty does not take any of this away, in fact if anything the stressful days have multiplied but as long as I can, I will hold on to this feeling that life is for living and that this decade is for celebrating.

Daybreak in an Olive Grove

“I was not looking for something. Looking doesn’t work. I drift along and see what happens. If I hadn’t stumbled across something, I would have left.”
— Jeff Wall


we sleep by
                   a plastic water bottle
                   a blackened kettle 
                   a cooking pot
                   a car fender

we sleep together but apart 

we sleep in the shadow of
                   a prison
                   a barbed wire fence 
                   a look out tower
                   a guard with a gun

fluorescent light seeps 
                    from tiny windows like stars 
                    while outside we lie 
                    on stony ground       and sleep



https://www.artsy.net/artwork/jeff-wall-daybreak-on-an-olive-farm-slash-negev-desert-slash-israel