Man in a Room after Interior at Paddington  - Lucian Freud. Which is the subject? Limp-leaved yucca reluctantly dying, the foreground figure in its stony pot? Or the man with a stare glassy-eyed behind spectacles, fixed into absence or challenging the viewer. He inhabits, but barely, the slovenly mackintosh, a cigarette hardly held, unlit, the only suggestion of purpose his curled fist of yellow fingers. Can this be a home, sordid, uncared for, or just a waiting room where he stands in a purgatorial present? In fear perhaps of the loiterer under a gas lamp, boy or man undefined, seeming absorbed into the street wall, looking up to the window grille- - this no protection from the imagined or real.     Sheila Saunders graduated from St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a degree in English Language and Literature, and since then worked as a reporter on local weekly and daily newspapers in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire. She has always loved...

What is holding you back from building your wormery?

You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.

…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .

Unexpectedly
 
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air

Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.