Politics – Page 2 – STUFF HAPPENS

North

Lonely on deck, the day in embers on Oslofjord I am riding the city ferry home. An islander from south of here, my temperate curiosity is catching cold in the autumn wind. And there is little drama on deck, just the lighthouse playing on wet rock, on the silos for international wheat, light play on […]

by Alex Hickman

Fifty-Nine Years Four Days published on Amazon (kindle)

My novel describes four days in the life of Simon Tindall, a British banker and MEP (he is, or rather was, a close ally of Tony Blair), who discovers he has only a few months to live. Dazed and distraught, Simon begins to evaluate his life, and weigh his successes and failures. Unable to find intimacy with his […]

by Alex Hickman

Working on Forty Three – a new collection of poetry

As a follow-up to Thirty Eight, I’m now working on a new collection called Forty Three. The idea is to publish a collection every 5 years which describes my changing perspective, what’s happening to my view, my family, my environment. I feel that my lens will widen over time. Thirty Eight was necessarily – and […]

by Alex Hickman

Notes on Oslo

Monday 6th October The back left tyre on my Land Rover Defender was flat. When I changed the front left on Saturday evening I had congratulated myself that (a) I had done it with little fuss and (b) I would not have to repeat the experience anytime soon. But on Monday morning, as I stepped […]

by Alex Hickman

Days of Fire

“I began Tuesday, January 20, 2009, the same way I had started every day for the past eight years: I read the Bible. One of the passages that final day was Psalm 18:2 – “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer: my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.” Amen. […]

by Alex Hickman

Which way? The High Line, Liberty and Britain’s road to nowhere

Last week I was working in New York and with time to kill at midday I walked the High Line, a mile-long park created along a derelict stretch of elevated railway built in the 1930s to run freight along Manhattan’s West Side. Originally the trains ran at ground level, with cow boys hired to ride […]

by Alex Hickman

Ambivalence

I am about to publish my first novel, called 59 Years 4 Days. The novel’s main character is a middle-aged man called Simon who learns that he has a fatal illness. Simon is a baby-boomer, a successful member of the Tony Blair generation (TB happens to be a political friend of Simon’s, and a character in the novel). […]

by Alex Hickman

Notes on Slovenia

The track leaves the river and climbs through beech woods to a wooden hotel. Beyond the hotel the track continues across a wide pasture, green and flat below the high wall of the mountains. Mixed forest of birch and pine grows either side of the pasture, until it is too high and the limestone shows […]