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My dad never really talked much about his childhood. He was the oldest of five children, and as a baby, his family had moved to the newly-established mining village of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, which is located on the edge of Sherwood Forest. I never met either of my paternal grandparents, or any of my dad’s siblings. My understanding, from the few times that my dad would open up about his early life, was that his dad had been a hard drinking womanizer, prone to bouts of the blue devils, which is a Derbyshire idiom for low spirits and depression. At…

This is another old poem, newly rediscovered and reworked. The third verse really makes me think about life’s trajectory for so many people, and how quickly you can reach that inflection point, where opportunities go from being boundless to being constrained and reduced.