RIGHT NOW the Winter Olympics are being shown wall to wall on the BBC… and  being an Olympic junkie I find myself watching events I have never shown any interest in before,  for which I do not know the rules and which I will never  participate in  for the good reason that I am not… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

IT IS A VERY ODD feeling signing a pile of one’s own books, not least because it is sometimes hard to believe you wrote it in the first place. Your name’s on it, your photograph is on an inside flap, there’s a bio somewhere which reduces your life to a few short lines, but did you write it? The… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

I ONCE FOUND myself teaching the last day of a creative writing class on St. Valentine’s Day and suggested we have a wind-down group discussion about particular issues and problems not raised during the week. One of the students asked the tongue-in-cheek question: ‘What is literary genius and how can I achieve it?’… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

The best moments in teaching

 WORLD CLASS MUSEUMS DON’T open up on one’s doorstep everyday, but it’s just happened to me.  ‘Just’ meaning towards the end of last year. But then, given that the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is the oldest public museum in the world (dating back to 1678) its astonishing refurbishment over several years  and re-opening  last November does feel like yesterday. It’s taken the… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

A REMINDER THAT I will one day die came yesterday in a spooky way. My readers may remember that in a previous post I promised to find out whose memorial in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford,  has the striking skull which stares balefully down at the congregation, sometimes including me. I popped into the cathedral yesterday…CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

YOU MIGHT EASILY imagine that the avenue  of  pollarded  and misshapen trees on the horizon in my picture are marching into battle  like the forest of ents in Lord of the Rings – and  that the huge, time-bleached,  trunk in the foreground is one of their fallen comrades.  You can find this  striking arboreal procession just south… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG

A fall of snow is a sudden hushed delight so overwhelming in its transformation of the world about us that we rush to take pictures of it, as I did in mid-January. But the sense of wonder lasts only as long as the snow is virginal, which isn’t long. Soon it becomes a freezing, inconvenient…CLICK FOR FULL BLOG