I never bought vegetables from his shop, I’d pass by several times a day and would always say hello, always promising myself to buy something from him one day, I never did, there were lots of similar shops and some even closer to my house. Did he mind I often wondered?

Those first days of the war in Damascus were the scariest, we knew it was coming, sometimes we were anxious, other times it seemed it could never happen on such a beautiful day, then almost overnight it arrived, all the shops closed and the streets emptied, gunfire filled the night sky and small mortar bombs landed in the narrow streets around my house, nobody came to collect the rubbish.

The shock and adjustment took a few days to sink in, the kids came out and collected the rubbish, shops were re-stocked and open again, life slowly emerged from behind…

In this guest blog post, Neil Bowen, Head of English at Wells Cathedral School in the UK, ponders the role of modern poetry in education

During my degree course, 25 years ago, the gamut of English Literature ran all the way back to Anglo-Saxon texts, such as Beowulf, and all the way up to about 1950. Literature, it appeared, stopped someplace shortly after WWII. About the most modern poets we studied were T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and perhaps a little Larkin.

During my teaching career many A-level exam specifications have featured post 1950 literary texts, especially modern novels and to a lesser extent plays. Occasionally one of the big hitters from the world of poetry sneaks on to a specification, a Heaney, or a Hughes or perhaps some Plath. But it is only recently, as far as I am aware, that exam boards have started to include…