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Five Years of Flowers

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I have not felt up to much creativity of late, having lost my mother earlier this year. I have, though, found the completion of various pre-existing projects quite therapeutic, such as this video which I began making late last year and finished today. It is a celebration of five years' worth of flowers, photographed around the Calder Valley and elsewhere in the North of England, and I have dedicated it to my mum, who was a life-long lover of plants and nature, and played a big role in encouraging my own love of gardening and flowers.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-rjv-B91Ng
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Bee Keeping, my dramatic monologue

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 In November, I released my 40-minute monologue, Bee Keeping, a fictional piece told from the point of view of a somewhat mysterious man with unusual habits pertaining to bumblebees ... and possibly more.  This monologue, recorded in February 2020 at Underground Studios, Hebden Bridge, began life much earlier as a short story, until I found it taking on a life of its own as a piece of drama.  I'd planned to promote the work with a series of performances, in which I would recite or act out portions of the play with cd's of the whole work available to buy, but this endeavour was thwarted, for now at least, by the Covid-19 pandemic. I have posted a number of short excerpts onto youtube.   The monologue is available to buy on cd from me directly, on ebay and shortly via other online sellers such as Amazon, and shortly on digital platforms. I am also seeking a platform on which to make it available to hear free of charge in whole or part for a limited period. Excerpt...
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Three unpublished bird poems

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Working through some unpublished bird poems for future collections, I have chosen to share the following trio as they are quite apt for the time of year, and I happen to have a photograph appropriate for each. I hope you like them! BULLFINCH With a belly like a bottle of port this birch-basking,  blood-bibbed bird, nut-sucking connoiseur, struts poshly over hedges, plumply patrols herb gardens like a portly Justice-of-the-Peace. LONG TAILED TITS, EARLY MORNING AT THE STATION Notes of mousy music, you bounce the branches of deciduous staves, flip and float, trapezing trees in haphazard dances –   flighty types, brown clowns, impetuous imps, you jump and trick, skip twigs so quick, bob and hop and polka-dot the dawn. DUNNOCK Dusky dove, your pebbly breast a mist-bruised, ash, star-pimpled sky, you tilt a beak, as if fly-catching, slide-fly into a tunnel of tree, and merge into its woody kiss.
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