Solitude and loneliness: the difference

Posted by Simon Parke, 30 Mar 2020

I wrote this piece in 2011; different times indeed. But I sense it remains topical.

Lets’s see…

LADY GAGA dug deep into the basket of self-revelation recently. Speaking to Star TV, she spoke of a secret marriage. And I was not best pleased…

No Man is an Island

Posted by Simon Parke, 27 Mar 2020

Strangely, perhaps as we self-isolate, we begin to remember that we are one;

Some distant memory re-awakened, we may hear John Donne’s famous poem afresh.

No Man is an Island

No man is an island entire of itself…

A meditation for anxious times

Posted by Simon Parke, 26 Mar 2020

These are dismantling times when anxiety runs free and in terror, we have a thousand demands.

But sometimes we do body and spirit a favour by easing back from our demands become inside ourselves a pair of scales, evenly-weighted and resting…

Julian - and heroic self-isolation

Posted by Simon Parke, 23 Mar 2020

It is strange how contemporary the past can suddenly feel.

I recently wrote a novel about a woman who self-isolated…for forty years. She could scarcely have been less contemporary. Who in their right mind self-isolates?

And yet now her story is going viral…so to speak. Who’d have thought it?...

My Coronavirus survival kit

Posted by Simon Parke, 23 Mar 2020

I write about living these times.

We are all experiencing crisis in different ways. Last week, I watched my livelihood, patiently built, disappear in three days. You will have your own story and it may be much worse.

So I write this morning not to try and make sense of it…but to help myself live it…