Cloves, Jeff

This occasional column is a continuation of the one I wrote for Nonviolent Action and it's timely to revisit an issue that arose at NvA.

I'm still smarting from the spiking of one of my columns because (as I recall) “it would cause offence to our American staff”. During the build-up to the invasion of Iraq I submitted a poem in place of prose. I hoped A hymn of hate to America might provoke a response. It did.

The poem was…

Years ago I wrote admiringly (in NvA) of Pat Arrowsmith's poems and illustrations, Drawing to Extinction (Hearing Eye 2000), but now - with too little time and too few words to do them justice here's another clutch of books from Hearing Eye (hearing_eye@torriano.org). This is recommendation in itself and I envy the poets for being so chosen.

Miroslav Jancic (1935-2004), who was born in, exiled from, and returned to die,…

I first met my dear friend Stuart “Mitch” Mitchel in 1965 when he was teaching at St Albans College of Further Education. Now, 40 years later, Mitch has died in his sleep (I'd guess he was in his early 80s but he regarded age as an irrelevance) and Beryl and their four children and seven grandchildren have lost a strikingly original, handsome and intelligent companion.

Mitch taught at the College until he retired and never ceased to be a polite, determined, constant irritant to the…

I've always liked Shelley's life: its passion, poetry and politics.

When he went to Oxford he and his friend Hogg immediately set about writing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley noted that "my mother fancies me on the High Road to Pandemonium" and she was proved right. Their pamphlet duly set the Master of their university college by his devout ears and he summarily expelled the pair of them. Thus, at age 19,Percy Bysshe Shelley's life was launched upon the…

Do you remember Mr Major's now infamous vision of British (English, surely) life? Spinsters on bicycles pedalling to evensong, warm beer and cricket matches. Claptrap of course; but if he'd gone the whole sentimental hog he'd surely have included county shows, annual carnivals and village fetes. He might even have mentioned their recruiting displays by pyramids of army dispatch riders on motorbikes or even fly-pasts by the Red Arrows. All indicators of a "nation at ease with itself".

…

The biggest bully I knew at school joined the police force. Even at age 16 I thought this entirely logical.

On the other hand, Roy, who was one of my circle of friends, joined the army as a boy entrant. I knew he was lonely and sensed he was unhappy. His mother died when he was eight and he was brought up after a fashion by a succession of “aunts” who lived with his (often absent) father. We were appalled, but the prospect of two years' National Service faced us all and his…