As a conservation charity declares a butterfly emergency we meet Steven McCulloch to hear how he’s creating a pollinator-friendly meadow system for managing orchards in Mid Devon.
When I turned on the radio, the news was of continuing rioting across the country. It had stretched overnight, across the South West, beyond Bristol to Plymouth.
‘In the last week of March the blackthorn flowered. Rosettes as white as snowburied fields burst from stems black with witchcraft, from between the thorns of fairy tale and folklore; thorns whose vicious stab cast Sleeping Beauty into a hundred year sleep.’
“So my mind is full of what home means, whether it’s a place, a person, or a feeling, when the train pulls into the station and I climb aboard, looking for Dad.”
“Paolo felt for each step like a child in the dark. There was a rattle coming from his insides, like a shaken bag of scrabble letters; clink, clink, clink.”
“The function of poetry is the function of being human. Of every civilisation we’ve uncovered, the earliest things we detect are not their governments or their money, it’s the things they made, and wrote.”
‘Yesterday blue fought through the cloud and the sun came out. In the walled garden, the birds sang, a hundred tiny voices making a chorus of good news.’
““I’m not a happy camper or festival goer”, I hear myself say over again in the run up to the festival. But as a kid I went to festivals and camped a lot, so maybe that’s not strictly true. Maybe I’d just forgotten how to do it.”
John McCullough is an award winning poet, writer and teacher. His poems often blend the physical with the surreal, the sublime with the everyday, never
‘One day Theo handed me a roll of electric fencing. “Hold this for a second, Nels,” he said. “You won’t connect it, will you?” I ask. “Nah, course not,” he says.’
