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Can you see us under all these bushels?

I always thought it was something leafy and twiggy we were hidden under but it turns out it’s a kind of bowl. Bushels (or in some translations, ‘vessels’) “And no man, when he hath lighted a lamp, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but putteth it on a stand, that…
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Women writing poetry – scary?

Ask a poet for a bit of text to for the back jacket, to encourage readers to open her book, and you get this…. Wormwood, earth and honey Selected poems by Catherine Edmunds teasel scratches, bramble catches deep inside my den of mischief mud pies splatter, cracked plates clatter if you dare to enter here…
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Transports of delight!

Oh, what an original idea! Gather up all these alarming, inconvenient people and send them to some far-flung corner of the world we have a bit of control over. It worked before, didn’t it? That’s why Australia is what it is. Come to think of it, lots of UK citizens who hadn’t been marked as…
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Give the spirit of summer – whatever the time of year!

How many years of Jack in the Green? On the back of Keith Leech’s superb and lavishly illustrated record of Hastings’ biggest annual festival, he writes “It is now 25 years since the revival of the Hastings Jack in the Green in May 1983”. My daughter was a teenager, I think, when I first took…
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Luxury beliefs versus vulnerable women

This week on the BBC, we saw a stand off by the two sides of the deepest and most harmful split I have ever seen in left politics, one that I am still waiting for many on the left to even acknowledge. I believe that the resurgence of the establishment wing of the Labour Party…
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Who is best placed to get the Tories out?

We know, we know – Jeremy Corbyn is still the most popular option among Labour voters. I do think we should all support those good people who are trying to reinstate their MP in the Labour Party, even if we have rejected and reviled the Party in its current form. His reinstatement as a Labour…



