I stood, head bowed,
drenched by rain and existential angst
That cold, dark Edinburgh night.
What am I? Why is rain?
Time passed, no answers came.

Soft steps, a woman appeared
from the dappled grey mist,
from vague shape into the yellow spotlight.
Long, glistening gown twirling
In some solitary tango.

She stopped, looked at me,
long, raven black hair
framing a pale alabaster face.
Her lips delicate, slightly parted,
The merest whisper of a smile.

Her eyes, the deepest brown,
transfixed my soul;
Spun me round and pulled me in,
An eternity passed, lost
In that infinite Corryvreckan.

“Katerina!”
The…

It may be alive
Or perhaps it could be dead
Let us look and see

Alan Turing was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. In that remarkable period between the two world wars, it was as though people knew that the technology to actually build the long dreamed of machines that could think, at least in terms of computing, solving problems and proving theorems was almost available. The greatest minds bent to the task of determining just what was possible for such machines to achieve. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to develop the whole of mathematics in an automatic, rule-based way and failed. Kurt Gödel conclusively demonstrated that there would always…

I was just sitting there, at the bottom of the stairs with my old brown suitcase waiting for the taxi. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I had been there once on a visit but it was all such a blur. I didn’t know what it would be like or whether there would be anyone like you that I could talk to. Going into a home was just one step away from dying, that was all I could think of. You would have thought my boy Nick could have managed to come and get me, being…

This morning, when I woke up, I was sixteen again. I grabbed a slice of toast and my helmet, waved to my Mum, then off to school on my wonderful first motorbike. I’m in the sixth form now. When I got there I was eighteen and the final end of year service had just started. I must rush to get the train to Oxford. Wow, look at all those lights, man; Sergeant Pepper, the Floyd, can it get any better than this? Hey, off to London; my first child is about to be born. I must get a job, maybe…

Politicians say
“trust us we know what to do”,
you must be joking!

Listen can you hear,
deep in that lonely forest
a new tree grows.

Sun shines and rain falls,
noisy jets fly overhead
here in Treaddur Bay