For T.S. Eliot
Honestly,
Isn’t this every one of us,
As we so frequently are?
Somewhat lost in the landscape.
Seemingly little more
Than just another
Increasingly barren,
Kinetic bag of weary old skin.
Shrunken, shrivelled, afeared.
Though somehow,
Despite the privations
We insist heaping upon ourselves,
Still stubbornly Electric!
Miraculously
And spectacularly alive…
Though how often
Do we skulk
And hide away still?
Thereby only succeeding
In cloaking
This heavenly mechanism
Of ours
In the sticky veneer
Of day to day despond
And distraction.
Till we have lost all trace
Of valour,
Any tint of ruddy beauty
We can call our own.
To hell with that!
Better by far,
To remain exuberant,
To confront life
Head on.
And, in good faith,
Seek out still
The gentle miracles
Therein.
The rather surreal and spectacular taste of Paradise that is the Maldives. An intense and wonderfully memorable experience for sure… A real tonic and a recharge of energies to celebrate fifty years together this Easter. And just what I especially needed after a draining few months at my desk this winter.
After a lifetime of study and enduring fascination, working more recently with the historian Michael Long, I was finally able to conceive and edit a title that told the full story extraordinary royal history of my family home village of Kings Langley and its medieval royal court. This title eventually published in the autumn of 2023 by KLLHMS, the local history society.
Palace Lives is a substantial paperback book (also available as a Amazon Kindle e book) about a remarkable medieval royal palace which no longer exists. But this is no mythical Camelot, even though you will find precious few physical remains of the Royal Palace at Langley above the ground.
Such exceptional history therefore now exists only on a few written pages and the memory and imagination of those who know its story. However, defining elements of our common heritage were seeded within its stone and flint walls. Not least, because the creators of this once magnificent Royal Palace, were the mighty Plantagenet rulers of thirteenth and fourteenth-century England, who favoured it as a royal residence for one-hundred-and-twenty-five years. The real-life Game of Thrones!
Very deliberately, each of the historical personages featured in Palace Lives had their own affinity with Langley. For some, it was home; for others, the location of their birth or death; others were laid to rest in the Church beside it.
It is a tale of enduring significance, not least the likely identity of the body of a mysterious young woman, buried in the tomb of the first Duke of York in the Parish Church of All Saints in Kings Langley. All is revealed within…
To know
True beauty
Is to never
Be a slave again.
This such
Welcome music
To my heart.
So, shall
I do what I can
To settle here awhile.
Amidst treasures
That still prevail
Somehow,
As if to appease heaven.
Call me the breeze then,
As I pass on through.
Hoping I too
Will bring the best
Of my presence
To bear.
Leaving behind me
At least
Some sweet song
For others to hear.
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