my writing

Category: Prehistory

  • Swans on the River

    I don’t know where they came from.I saw the last one arrive, descending with an easy parachute grace, its great wings cupping the air as its splayed feet touched the water, entered it, so that it landed with barely a splash. It folded its wings, settled with the others, afloat.There are twelve, dazzling as light,…

  • The Chauvet Cave : Into Prehistory.

    Cycling up the tree-clad Ardeche valley, as the motor-cyclists speed past around the many curves (this is a tourist road, opened in 1960), canted over, hanging their lives out over hundred-metre drops, depending on the adhesion of a few square inches of rubber, I am imagining the painters of the Chauvet Cave watching the passing…

  • Leaving Shaftesbury for Greece, 1999 : Pages from ‘Odysseos’ Island’,

    p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971…

  • Leaving Naxos, 1970. Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p379I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant…