MLK

It felt like one of those days in early spring where the sun comes out from time to time, and where spring is poised and ready. Clearly not long now before everything will start to bloom...



But meanwhile, Serafina and I walked along together; dawn and dusk acting like bookends:



Time it was,

And what

We had been promised another glorious dawn and so I cycled up Shotover hill to once again experience the glorious views over Oxfordshire. But the fog would not lift and instead my old stomping grounds felt almost mysterious. So once again I relied on Serafina to lift my spirits. She rose through the

"... Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence." - Bruce Chatwin



When we woke up before dawn and walked down to the great river, Serafina immediately starting talking about the links between two great yet different

Having sung for my supper, I was free to roam Budapest. This was my first time visiting and friends spoke of months of winter greyness - but now the sun had come out and spring felt near.



Unable to fly but still perched in my backpack, Serafina could not help herself but take breathtaking footage of

Up before dawn again, Serafina perched in my coat pocket; everything still heavy but walking the dew in the quiet of the dawning and then Christina Rosetti's words came to me:

There is no time like Spring,

When life’s alive in everything,

Before new nestlings sing,

Before cleft swallows speed their

For a moment, the seemingly endless rain finally cleared, and Serafina and I wandered aimlessly into a sunken world, full of the water from the confluences of seven rivers.



The water felt like tears; with grief and sorrow once again invading our lives and everything feeling so heavy. With time, perhaps

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not

Up at dawn at the Hawkwood estate near Stroud where we were spending time as part of our ongoing art project with a world famous band. In the past, I have often cycled to this enchanted part of the country, partly inspired by the poetry of Laurie Lee who grew up in nearby Slad.



During the night, I had

... "Architecture is the arrangement of light" - Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926)



Before his tragic death on June 10 1926, Gaudí spent 43 years of his life working on La Sagrada Familia; a singular obsession which over time has come to bear extraordinary fruits as one of the masterpieces of architecture.



Throughout

Waking up to Paris in the snow felt like a rare, wonderful gift. So at dawn, we walked up to Montmartre with Serafina watching the world from my pocket.



We watched the sun rise over the blanketed white city. Mesmerised, I kept thinking about the poem "Neige sur Paris" by the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor