Category Archives: Moving on

Listen

Posted on August 28, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

Hamlet is driven by a meeting of Hamlets: the prince and his father’s ghost. The melancholy, rootless ghost of the murdered king beseeches his son to leave his companions and follow. In the slightly truncated archaic Elizabethan language, the line … Continue reading →

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Recovery

Posted on July 22, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

The word that came to mind was recover.  And I hesitated, to become sure of what it means.  Recover can be read two ways:  to heal, or to replace a protective layer.  Difficult as things are, I don’t want the … Continue reading →

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Living with yourself

Posted on June 21, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

Presently (as my son would say), I live alone.  The closest I’ve come to this before was as a fledgling undergraduate.  Term times in a small self-contained College room, home still a safe refuge.   There followed many years of shared … Continue reading →

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I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be

Posted on June 5, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

I encountered T.S. Eliot when I was about 17;  Shakespeare I’d known a little longer.   Lines like these – allusions which I could actually catch (and Eliot was hugely allusive, especially in his earlier work) – played a part in the thrill of recognition I felt on first reading him.  I still, vividly,  remember starting to read the Four Quartets for the first time – at home, in the ‘front room’ as we called it (a whole socio-economic digression possible in that term.  I will resist). Continue reading →

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This House

Posted on May 30, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

At the start of the Zeffirelli film of La Traviata, the overture plays lushly on the soundtrack, while Violetta drifts through deserted rooms like Miss Havisham. At least she does in my head – I haven’t watched the film for … Continue reading →

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Lachrymosa

Posted on May 17, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

Presently, my days are filled with tears.  As children, we cry easily.  Perhaps, as Shakespeare says, ‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’.  Babies cry from frustration, from pain, from fear, and this is largely … Continue reading →

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It goes without saying

Posted on April 15, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

I often feel that I talk too much and, indeed, I often do.  Some of this is innate, I think:  I have such an urge to try to express things, I gain such relief and pleasure in my quest to … Continue reading →

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Like Breathing Out and Breathing In

Posted on March 26, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

I have been present at first breaths, and last breaths.  Only at those most intimately connected with me: my children’s births and my mother’s death. And since, in female babies, the eggs of their potential children already nestle in their … Continue reading →

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The Habit of Love

Posted on February 18, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

Good Morrow, friends. St Valentine’s is past A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV Scene i What is love?  This huge essential word.  It motivates us so strongly, and at the same time it is ubiquitous and clichéd.  Patently, it ranges … Continue reading →

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It is time to speak of Julia

Posted on January 30, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

I am re-reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It’s a striking, indulgent, flawed novel, I think. Not entirely successful, but somehow it communicates a – to me, irresistible – sense of beauty, loss and yearning which repeatedly draws me back. … Continue reading →

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