Picture Gallery
About …

  • Light in the darkness: Happisburgh lighthouse on a cold April Sunday

  • Boat house: Low tide at Blakeney

  • North-west Norfolk: storm approaching

  • Heading for the beach

  • Westwick Arch, now demolished

  • Inland sea at Salthouse

  • Grin Low, near Buxton, Derbyshire

  • Luskentyre beach in Harris, Outer Hebrides

  • Clouds at Harder Kulm, above Interlaken

  • The Eiger from Kleine Scheidegg

About …

I am a writer who spent most of my working life as a journalist. I used to write offbeat commentary pages for the Eastern Daily Press, based in Norwich, England, and earlier a weekly piece called Square One for the Church of England Newspaper – hence the title of this site. I am also a poet, a walker, a chess player, a driver, a husband, a father, a grandparent, a guitar player, a reader, a TV watcher, a pensioner and a Christian, among other things. I love Norfolk, Scotland, the coast, deserts, rivers, mountains and almost everywhere I find myself, though not necessarily in that order. I like to look at things sideways, wherever possible. I have published seven  poetry books: Mist and Fire (2003), Off the Map (2007), Running with Scissors (2011), Stillness lies Deep (with Joy McCall, 2014), Iona: The Road Ends (2015), Waving from a Distance (2017) and Under Cover of Day (see below). I have been a member of the poetry group Chronicle and edited a book on the Pastons in Norwich, which contains directions for a walk, a bit of history and some poems by myself and others. It’s called In the Footprints of the Pastons. Click here for more information on the Pastons.

I also enjoy photography, without being in any way an expert. Some of my pictures can be found on Flickr, and some are included in Stillness Lies Deep and Iona: The Road Ends.

Poems under cover

My most recent poetry book, Under Cover of Day, has been published by Paul Dickson Books. It is available from pauldicksonbooks.co.uk or from Amazon, priced competitively at £6.

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Latest article

Are you really sure about that?

One of the best pieces of advice given to me early in my “career” was to start what my editor at the time called a commonplace book. This was just a place to store any quotations that struck me as valuable for some reason – that reason varying from the profound to the funny, or even mysterious.

Obviously the idea was to make a note of who had originated the quote and in what context. This did not always work – as in this one, for instance. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s still memorable as far as I’m concerned:

“I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

This comes under the “funny” category, in case you were wondering. But at the same time, it always made me feel a little uneasy. How many things, especially in science, do we assume are settled?

And so I was intrigued to read the other day that gravity may not be a law or fundamental force after all, but possibly something that emerges from quantum electromagnetic interactions, potentially reshaping our view of spacetime itself. I’m sure you know what that means.

Science is a funny thing. We think it means establishing facts, but in fact it depends on doubt. The first thing a scientist should do when looking closely at a theory is try to prove it wrong. If this fails, he or she has something to work with. 

Unfortunately it seems to me that recently this truth has been forgotten. We collect data and come to conclusions, then forget that it is the data that (hopefully) are facts, and not the conclusions. Conclusions, or theories, are our attempts to knock the data into a shape that we understand. There is a huge capacity for error in there. 

People who are not scientists don’t really get this. They really want science to be the facts. Follow the science, they say. Well, that’s OK, as long as you realise that it might be leading you in the wrong direction. Test the science, or question the science, might be the more sensible option.

Unfortunately it seems to me that schools and universities look at things wrongly. They want consensus on a particular issue, but science is not democracy. They teach the consensus as if were the only option, and everything else as if it’s a conspiracy theory. 

Unfortunately, as I’ve said before – and here I delve into my commonplace collection again – the easiest and least stressful path to success is to adopt the status quo viewpoint without question. A guy called Fred Heffer wrote that five years ago.

So confusing consensus with certainty is a popular career move. It is also welcomed in the population at large, especially if you live in a democracy. And you don’t have to search far down the decades to find breakthrough theories that were resisted for years because those in charge preferred to deal with stuff they had been taught and had taught to others, whether it was right or not.

Science should be exciting, because it frequently does somersaults. But those in charge like straight lines. However, as R Buckminster Fuller pointed out, there are no straight lines in the universe. It’s a lot more interesting than that.

So maybe speed isn’t the main cause of accidents. Maybe theories of climate change are wrong. I’ll go further: they definitely are. I don’t know how, but I’d guess fundamentally. Really. That’s pretty obvious already. Take my word for it. One day everybody will say so.  

Latest poem

The crowd

I scan the crowd
the heat of its passing,
the trigonometry of its structure
and the sense of destiny in its eyes

Bits of it break away
and speak to me
Hello, mate!
Everything OK?
Lovely day

Somewhere deep in there
are slices of anger
fingers of fear
but I do not see them

I sit in the heat of the sun 
and no-one wears a mask
no-one carries a gun
or looks too sharp,
too close

The crowd goes in and out of shops
heads for another street
finds the cathedral on its phone
looks for somewhere to eat

When the sun goes down
it splits into groups
with rough edges
finds somewhere else to play
makes irregular shapes in its head

Sometimes it gets hurt:
sometimes it dies,
but not here, not now
not from where
I’m sitting

Elsewhere

  • And the Paston Letters: my other life
    I was also a trustee for many years of the Paston Heritage Society, which aims to promote knowledge of the Paston family and their achievements, with special reference to the letters they wrote, mainly in the 15th century.
  • Art and design
    Website of Norwich artist Sandra Rowney, with whom I collaborated for the groundbreaking Norwich Twenty Group exhibition, Voicing Visions.
  • Earth history ‚Äì a new approach
    Confused by the inconsistencies in the different views of how life began on Earth? Try this intelligent new approach, which contains some surprises.
  • Here are Paston Pictures
    Website of Lucy Care, founder of the Paston Heritage Society, historian, artist, poet, film-maker.
  • Lindisfarne to Lowestoft
    Website of poet, liturgist and laid-back theatre owner Ian Fosten.
  • Love Lakeland?
    A guide to walkers on the Lakeland Fells, together with some stunning photographs that make you want to get up there right now.
  • Message from God to you
    Clever use of Bible verses to get across God’s love for his children. In case you were wondering, you’re one of them.
  • Norwich Christian Meditation Centre
    The many and varied activities of St Augustine’s, Norwich: a church with a difference.
  • So how far is that?
    Want to know exactly how far it is from Kathmandu to Moscow, or Canberra to Fiji? This is the site for you. It also tells you the exact position of each place and includes a currency converter. Plus, handily, a short course in Indonesian.
  • Up in the air somewhere
    Keeping track of flights, especially those over US air space but also many others. Includes information about the flights least likely to incur delays, which might be useful.