A Tale of Two Book Cities

George Street, Princes Street, Leith Street, Hanover Street, Canongate. Waverly, Leith Valley, Corstorphine, Carlton Hill, Mussleburgh and Portobello. Names, to steal a line from Lauris Edmond, that ‘sing softly across the water’. And what a long stretch of water it is, between Edinburgh in Scotland and its wee sister city Dunedin in the south of the south. I glimpsed the sea from cobbled High Street, and thought of the sailing barque Philip Laing setting off from nearby Greenock in November...

Church Going

  • 25 August 2023
  • /
  • York

Happy National Poetry Day from the East Riding of Yorkshire. This is St Mary’s Church in Kirkburn. Its nave and chancel were built about 1130. Inside there’s a twelfth century cylindrical Norman font made of limestone and carved with decorative patterns and a tableau of animal and human figures. It’s impossible to imagine how many babies have been carried gently to this spot over the centuries. All I know is that my mother and my uncles were cradled here and...

An accidental literary tourist

Early Sunday morning we arrived in London, disembarking at Heathrow somewhat dazed from the cocooning effect of long haul travel, blinking in the light. The best way to stave off jet lag is to get straight into local time, so we went for an amble from Kings Cross Station. The result was some accidental literary tourism in Bloomsbury. This is the terraced house at number 48 Doughty Street, Kings Cross, London, where Charles Dickens lived for two years (1837-39) and...

Capital Times

An invitation to a reception at Government House on 4 August 2023 to honour the centenary of Katherine Mansfield’s death was a particularly fine reason to visit my former home town of Pōneke Wellington. Before the evening event we enjoyed a delicious afternoon tea at the beautifully refurbished Katherine Mansfield House and Garden. Late in 2020, somewhere in those golden freedom months between lockdowns, Doug and I were passing through Wellington and decided to take the opportunity to visit the...

At last: heading to Menton soon

After being awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 2019, I had planned to travel to Menton in July 2020. However the Covid-19 pandemic has delayed my plans for 3 years. I am now scheduled to arrive in Menton in early September to finally take up the Fellowship....