Anne Lewis-Smith (14th April 1925 to 11th May 2011)

Anne Lewis-Smith in her garden at Peppard Common, circa 1973
© Gerald England.
I first met Anne Lewis-Smith in 1970 when she lived in Northamptonshire and was chairing World Poetry Day. She'd submitted some poems for my new magazine Headland and appropriately the first poem in the first issue was her poem First.

I was asked by other guests at the Manor House in Kingscliffe whether I was a poet or balloonist as these were Anne's two great passions in life.

She later moved, first to Peppard Common (Oxfordshire) and then to Newport (Pembrokeshire/Dyfed) and I visited her and Peter (whom she had married in 1944) at both locations.

I reviewed her last collection Red Shoes here in November 2008 and her earlier Every Seventh Wave published by Oversteps on NHI Review.

Her poem April Comet can be read on the Zimmerzine Archive.

Charlotte McEvoy 's obituary on the website of the British Balloon Museum & Library focusses on her ballooning acheivements

A celebration of Anne's life will be held at a service in Clifton College Chapel, Bristol BS8 3JH on Monday 4th July at 11am.

In lieu of flowers, donations to the Paul Sartori Foundation can be made via Just Giving.

ABC Wednesday: S is for Stop & Rest in Stalybridge

Stop and Rest is the name of a public house in Stalybridge.

I don't drink so cannot tell you what it is like inside. A lot of pubs in Stalybridge have changed their names in recent years and quite a few (as elsewhere) have closed down. There are plenty left though including both the one with the shortest name and the one the longest name. I have photographed the former but not the latter. That'll have to wait for another day.

For more S posts visit ABC Wednesday.

ABC Wednesday: R is forRealm of Telescopes

This haiga featuring my father at Jodrell Bank in 1971 is my contribution to Realm of Telescopes, an international cosmopoetic essay about telescopes centered around the SARM pilgrimage to GranTeCan.

Mike Simmons, founder/president of Astronomers Without Borders and chair of Global Astronomy Month writes

The great observatories of the world have always been places of pilgrimage for scientists and enthusiasts. They are the temples of wisdom of the modern age, where knowledge is captured in nothing less than the light of the Universe. Those who visit them are always humbled, sometimes by the technology and sheer mass of the huge instruments, other times by being in the presence of the seekers of the truths that the Universe hides. Sometimes those seekers are the "ghosts" of our history - long-gone predecessors who spent their lives building that knowledge a few photons at a time.

This is one of six webpages that have been compiled by the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy and coordinated by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe and Valentin Grigor.

• EXPEDITION TO EL GRAN TELESCOPIO CANARIAS is based on a SARM and Astro Travels expedition in October 2010, and was open to ulterior submissions from those who visited or dream to visit the biggest optical telescope in the world and the largest international concentration of telescopes in the northern hemisphere, placed in the Canary island of La Palma.


• TELESCOPES IN TIME AND SPACE is an astropoem by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe in which he visits 21 telescopes.


• THE COSMIC BEAUTY OF LA PALMA contains a wealth of photographs of their expedition to the island.


• THE REALM OF TELESCOPES is a collection of personal contributions that adds to our collective knowledge and perception of great observatories.


• HAPPY OBSERVATIONAL NIGHTS IN LA PALMA provides us with just what the title says it does.


• POST-SCRIPTUM celebrates Global Astronomy Month, April 2011.

BBC News: Jodrell Bank observatory has been responsible for some hugely important astronomical discoveries since it was established after the Second World War, but there have been doubts over its future in recent years due to constant funding worries. Now it has been selected as the headquarters for a £1.3bn project to build the world's biggest radio telescope. The new headquarters at Jodrell Bank will open in January 2012, superseding the existing project office at the University of Manchester.

For more R posts visit ABC Wednesday.

ABC Wednesday:Q is for Queensferry

The railway bridge over the River Forth taken from the foreshore at South Queensferry in 1966.

After publishing a version of this photograph under the title Forth Railway Bridge. A correspondent wrote

having worked in South Queensferry for over thirty years, I would be lynched if I had referred to the bridge as anything other than the Forth Bridge. According to locals, there is the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge. Even "South Queensferry" is a bit of a misnomer as there isn't a town by that name, only "Queensferry" but ask anyone from "the village" where they live and it's always, "South Queensferry"!

I would have thought that would be for fear of being thought of as coming from North Queensferry, but as we say down here

there's nowt so queer as folk.

For more "Q" posts visit ABC Wednesday

ABC WednesdayP is for Palechora

Paleochora is located in the Prefecture of Hania, on the south-west coast of Crete, on a small peninsula lying in between two picturesque gulfs. The waves of the Libyan Sea lap at it, and it has quite rightly been called the Bride of the Libyan Sea and the Land of the sun. It constitutes the most southerly point of Greece and the most south-easterly point of the European Union. This is where Europe ends.


We visited Crete in 2006 and took the opportunity to see the Southern Mediterranean. The busy streets of Palechora with steep pavement sides weren't designed for wheelchair users but at least no one was travelling very fast.


A poster by the pier was advertising a poetry reading in Greek and English. The white van parked on the pier was our accessible taxi.

For more about our visit to Crete see Crete 2006.

For more information on Palechora see Palechora holidays.

For more P posts visit ABC Wednesday.