Anatomically the heart lies left below the breast bone beats from dark to light and light to dark again.
Soft through the nights like rain on a tent canopy that flaps stubbornly with the turning weathervane.
But there are times when the heart marches like an opera chorus rousing overtures and arias to deluge the whole platform.
Mathematically the heart has two chambers one blue and one red but it sends out longing that is not like that.
More like a river that traverses valleys and sometimes rapids sometimes the backs of city streets, coal stacks, sometimes nurturing cormorant and kingfisher, songbirds knotted reeds and secret trout.
Danielle Hope reviews Some years ago, I attended a talk at our local library given by the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. He made what I took to be an encouraging observation, which was that the British never go to any extremes, and that after roughly every 50 years or so, there is a change direction as we begin to move away from whatever the current behaviour and political thinking has been. I am almost certainly oversimplifying this, but it seems to me a comforting thought, that, angered and disillusioned as we are by the mess we’ve made in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could, as a nation, now be tiring of our deeply materialistic way of life, and may perhaps start to move towards a more spiritual dimension, realising on the way that we are all humans who belong to one Earth. There’s a long way to go, but the signs are there, with unexpected people now exploring some form of religion.