Guernsey
Posts relating to Guernsey
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Keeping Guernsey Legends vibrantly alive
Guernsey Legends by Jane Mosse & Frances Lemmon, Blue Ormer Publishing The stories in the gorgeously-produced Guernsey Legends by Jane Mosse and Frances Lemmon are not remote reconstructions from some antique past. One story, about an enormous spectre of a nanny goat, played a real part in my own island childhood. Le Coin de la Biche was a…
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Nostalgia, and other news
This time last week I was in Guernsey. I loved every moment of it. As soon as I set foot in my home parish of St Martin’s I feel surrounded by magic, and weirdly rebooted. The lanes are sedimented with decades of my memories, which provides the illusion that this is somehow my place. And I…
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Home is where the hurt is
For someone who hates flying as much as I do, I seem to travel a lot. Countries as far apart as Mexico, Chad, and Japan have seen me emerge from the plane blinking in gratitude to the sky gods for my safe arrival, and ready to explore. But when I return to Guernsey I feel I am coming home. I…
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‘Defenders of Guernsey’ now on kindle
I have revised ‘Defenders of Guernsey’. This second edition, for an 8-to-adult age is now available on Kindle. As a child my grandparents lived in a road in Guernsey called La rue des Grons. When I lived there as a child, and then stayed with my grandparents on every school holiday the few streetlights went off at…
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How not to annoy a poet
In the granite cliffs of the south coast of Guernsey is a particularly beautiful spot called Icârt Point. I proposed to Lorraine my wife there two years ago, and I have known and loved the place all my life. I have written poems about it, with two even having been set to music. When it comes my time to join…
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Seventy years of Liberation
It’s Liberation Day in Guernsey, 70 years since those aboard HMS Bulldog accepted the surrender of the Nazi occupiers, and the island’s liberators we welcomed into St Peter Port by a crowd which included my half-starved grandfather. The legacy of bunkers and fortifications built into the island is still plain to see. When I went to school I thought…
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Hear ‘A Return to Sarnia’ by Chiara Beebe
Very happy to hear from Chiara Beebe who sent me a live recording made in Guernsey last August of the Guernsey Sinfonietta’s premiere of her piece ‘Return to Sarnia’. The words of which were based on a poem I wrote about the island in my early twenties – more or less the same age Chiara was when…
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Chiara Beebe, and ‘A Return to Sarnia’
August 6th sees the premiere of a new piece by Chiara Beebe. She is a 22 year old composer, cellist and singer born on Guernsey, whose piece A Return to Sarnia, based on a poem by Peter Kenny, will be performed as part of Terra Nova, an evening of modern and new music, by The Guernsey…