BACKGROUND

Writing for me began in earnest a long way back, when the editor of a tiny newspaper in a remote, but extraordinarily beautiful region of Australia, asked me to contribute a weekly column. The task didn't pay anything and it often kept me awake late into the night, on the day before the due date ... but I loved it!

There was a lull of a decade or so before I grew into the area of Global Education and began to devise, write and edit, newsletters for general consumption and magazines for schools. This was in the days of the literal form of copy-paste and I recall one time when a posse of kids got high on art glue, while putting together the artwork for a national schools magazine.

Soon after the glue-sniffing incident (by strange coincidence) I began to write poems. The sniffing stopped, but the verses keep coming, until today. I liken poetry to a fine-art version of prose: so much inspiration and emotion compacted into just a few lines. 

Work led me to Asia, back to Europe and then to Africa; joining the dots, as it were, as I tried to add my tiny little bit to an understanding of different perspectives, within and between these regions. This related to social and environmental issues, and in the last decade or so, to the climate crisis.

Covid-19, for all its negatives, has given me one important positive: time alone to pull together the writing already there, whilst adding more and editing the composite whole. My main regret is that I did not make the time to do it sooner.

I hope that you as the reader can enjoy the experience with me.

And if you do feel the urge, please do respond with comments and questions.

Duncan Gregory

Mombasa, June 2020