Peter Kenny
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On being an astrologer
I taught myself how to be an astrologer in my teens. In Guernsey, with the endless summer holiday stretching ahead, I picked up a paperback about astrology. The book was, I think, my Grandmother’s. It should be noted she was not the normal sort of Grandmother, she claimed to have been a medium in her…
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Secret identity
I was among the last in my class to learn to read, and my spelling was atrocious. I liked pictures, so comics were a natural home as I made my transition to becoming a reader at around seven. My friend Ajit, who lived next door to me in Neasden, was an avid reader of Marvel…
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Orwell’s writing rules
Prompted by a discussion on Start the Week on BBC R4 I re-read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. Embedded in this essay, which you can download free here, is some thoughtful and pithy advice for writers. Well worth revisiting. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least…
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Three Worlds, M.C. Escher
While I admire M.C. Escher’s unrivalled sleight of hand with tessellated design, his depictions of impossible perspectives and so on, by far and away my favorite piece by Escher is the beautiful etching Three Worlds (above). As a boy in Guernsey I spent days fishing, waiting for the exhilarating moment when you pulled something alive and previously unseen…
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Jeff Keen, SHOOT THE WRX
I have found myself drawn back three times to The Brighton Museum and Art Gallery to look at the SHOOT THE WRX retrospective of the work of Jeff Keen (1923-2012). I hadn’t been aware of his work, before this time, despite the fact that he had lived most of his working life in Brighton. The…
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Strange Journey by Richard Fleming
Richard Fleming’s new collection Strange Journey rings true. It is the poetry of biography filtered through a charged and fiercely honest imagination. The viewpoint is often that of a person assessing their own life from a position of uneasy maturity. The skill with which this is done forces the reader into what can be an occasionally…
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How to stay sane. Part 3 – money
My relationship with money was transformed by a woman I spoke to for just five or six minutes in the early 1990s. We had attended a meditation, and we found ourselves walking to the same tube station. The woman was from India and she told me that she was fresh from a seven year stint…
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Richard Fleming’s Strange Journey on the BBC
My pal Richard Fleming reading from his new book (after a quick discussion about dogs) on the Jenny Kendall-Tobias show on BBC Guernsey. from 3:08:50. You have seven days to listen…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 