Maybe not. Late up again, this morning. I open the curtains to let in the new daylight. Just over the road, I see a well-ordered, socially distanced, queue of masked parents, each with a toddler or two, waiting for school to begin. Those youngsters, at the start of their schooling…

Our library in Portchester is a hub for community activities. The newly dug and re-planted border (thanks to volunteers and schoolchildren) has brightened the entrance before this year’s Reading Challenge gets underway from Saturday 16th July. Aimed at schoolchildren throughout the summer holidays, this year we have a theme embracing…

Being a prisoner of war when Napoleon was rampaging through Europe cannot have been much fun. But those held in Portchester Castle back in 1810 were a resourceful lot — particularly on the home entertainment front. Many of the prisoners were sailors — this was just two years before the…

A meditation — He started his silent Monday meditation well before dawn, interrupted only by the cries of seabirds and the gentle lapping of the water — which was now almost at his waist. The lowest of low waters always occurs here around 06:00. Between the coast path and Pewit Island the ebb…

A regular complaint about politics is the lack of plain speaking. Illustration of climate activist Greta Thunberg (source: INGmedia) Even when truths are unavoidably uncomfortable, a lack of ambiguity (removing any excuse for convenient misunderstanding) will annoy some people. No matter how gently explained, the tone of the varnish can…

Straying beyond the (previously) unthinkable The consensus amongst dictionary compilers considers dystopia as ‘an imagined state or society . . .’ Writers, or maybe just their readers, imagine the locations to be strange and distant lands far removed from their comfortable normality; intolerable worlds where you’d surely dare not venture. …

There is no doubt that WMD exists. Nor can there be any debate over the fallout . . . leastways not now they’ve been deployed with such intensity and brought into sharp focus. Will the physical show of strength (or weakness) revealed these last three months by Russia’s thuggish invasion…

The UK takes time off — to say thanks Only halfway through this Platinum Jubilee weekend, I’m beginning to flag — and I don’t mean flag-waving. But clearly, there is a lot of enthusiasm (leastways in England) for a right royal celebration and, after months/years of constraints, it’s no surprise…