Ray Schaufeld's blog

I first went mid-December. I arrived in the farm minibus to darkness. I did not know I would be sharing a yurt. The yurt stove would not light, the matches provided were soggy. Sunday was torrential rain. After my first night I loved every second! Such a blissful getaway from all the commercial baloney of the build up to Dec 25th. I was back last weekend. It was brilliant again. The deal is you pay £26.50, help with the farm chores, taking a T-...

Disney 2014 has flown eons beyond 'everything for the mouse.' Two kingdoms, ours and the land of fairies and strange creatures. Angelina Jolie is Maleficent. How did she become a meanie? Thwarted love, wounded pride, peace becoming humungous inter kingdom warfare. Can she act? I never noticed, I was swept up in the story and the 3D. You must see it in 3D, distance, speed, flight, monsters, forests, flora and fauna that shrink and grow and dive...

Weird stuff this, legends, ballads, horrors, ghosts. Robert makes it up as he goes along. His first poems were published in 1926, his last in 1975. Darkness of title and topic, 'Warning to Children' 'One Hard Look'. 'Alice' is a crisply rhymed wonderland of kittens and queens. 'The Cool Web' illustrates how we can employ words to calm us and control our fears. Until words fly off the handle and madden us on our deathbed. Some poems rhyme some...

Twenty-five minutes of Stephen Sackur and subject. Stephen is warmly serious, confrontational when he needs to probe deeper, push harder. Yesterday he talked to Christian Purslow managing director of Liverpool FC from 2009-2010. Financial takeovers, a court case, should English football clubs be owned be foreign investors? Accountablity, do the owner give enough back to their loyal fans, do they care or is it all about money? The right questions...

We were searchers. I grew from primary playground certainties and the landmarks of World Cup victory, Buzz Aldrin first man on the moon and Sandie Shaw winning for England with Puppet on a String. Then followed the paralysis of adolescent social withdrawal. At 15 I only felt human and accepted in my Saturday job at Clark's bakery, away from pressures of home and school. Then what? Looking back the era seems rougher, more violent than today. At...

Blood, revenge, slaughter. Hack their heads off with swords, display their severed limbs as trophies. Men feasting together in the meadhall, men fighting the enemy that springs at their back when they sleep. Bards,ballads, monsters, heroes. Women, proud tribal queens who worship the courage of their men. These are no pagan barbarians, they are Christians, God is in their hearts and fights beside them as they spit the enemy on swords so much a...

'I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour. But heaven knows I'm miserable now' Morrissey song. Is it miserable drivel? I say no, The Smiths' frontman can write, we know this from the music. The first hundred pages are best, we meet the sensitive, sickly child from 'streets upon streets upon streets upon streets' (page 1) of inner city crumbling terraced Manchester. Family life is alright, there's piles of them; most of clan Morrissey moved over...

'What this country wants is nostalgia, they want to look back even if it's only as far as last week..looking to the closest thing we can find to John Wayne..show me a time when heroes weren't zeroes...selective amnesia. America, the Reagan era. Gil's smart words orchestrated to take the mood down lower jazz, his cool dude stage presence gets to the point. The point being the wholesale trickery of politicians, the way they pitch an image...

Drink addiction does the working class no good. As true now as in the 19th Century when Zola wrote his tragi-comic epic, the title has sometimes been translated as The Pub or Dram Shop. Posh folks can also sometimes suffer from liver failure and permanent damage to the brain and motor system however they may be more able to get up in the afternoon without getting sacked. At the start of the story Gervaise and Coupeau are in love and have their...

Not town, not open country, not seaside. Edgelands,we know them, we live them. Edgelands are the empty factories along the canal, sprouting with old mattresses, porn and a makeshift burnt out fire, the brief hovel of those on the road. They are the quiet walk along the canal, the trade route now a fishing, birding haunt. Edgelands are forgotten industry, retail parks at night, sites by the side of the lane for travellers, human and feral. Alive...