“I knew about inequality. Of course I did. As journalist and editor I read and write about people whose daily lives are very different to mine. I did not feel the difference in my guts before.”
We must pay to view the action online and onstage
Theatre and all performing arts are in crisis. We can, and must, get into the habit of paying for online culture, just as we would if we were attending the event in real life.
If you didn’t laugh
“I wanted to upset everybody, including myself. Half the problem with the world is that half the people take themselves too seriously. The other half don’t take themselves seriously enough.”
Schools ahead of their time – and ours too
What might we learn from the progressive thinking which gave power to local public health officers who understood local lives and deaths.
We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet that’s not really it. What interests Giles Perring is something simpler, but more profound than a Zoom event.
Strictly street dancing: a poem for a pandemic
Coronavirus brings powerful new poignancy to a remarkable poetry collection gathered by Edinburgh’s former Makar, Christine De Luca to celebrate “those who daily undertake some of the lesser-seen jobs in our city…night bus drivers, lollipop ladies, binmen…now on the ‘frontline’
Being 90: a poem for a pandemic
‘Perversely, in the wars evoked by politicians it was the flaming of youth untimely snuffed out. Such thoughts emerge from a new poem, written before the pandemic, the reflections of a man in his tenth decade, walking by the river near his home. And wondering…’
Rapid response: social enterprise shows the way
Government could learn from local community enterprises responding with astonishing speed and efficiency to get help and food where it is needed most – including NHS staff on the frontline
A gleam of starlight from the window: poetry for a pandemic
Poems and songs for Earth Hour on Friday March 27 (ICYMI)…”In our time of isolation, whether enforced or voluntary, there’s something comforting in that notion of stars clustering together for so very much longer than human life on earth.”
Your country needs EU – a journey led by poets
Morning. Mourning? Brexit done? ‘It’s more like getting breakfast done, it starts again the very next day.’ We take a Sceptical journey led by poets.