by Nick Tabone | Feb 9, 2020 | Non-fiction
There is an exuberance that pervades the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film ‘Stop Making Sense. Watching it there is no doubt that they were a great band but on a recent re-watch what struck me is how much everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, particularly Tina...
by Nick Tabone | Jan 31, 2020 | Non-fiction
Ghajn Tuffieha/Gnejna Hobbled by a bum knee and a six week moratorium on running, and increasingly unfulfilled by the paltry rehabilitative one minute walk/30 second run drills I’ve been prescribed – which for one used to chewing up at least 10km’s a day is the...
by Nick Tabone | Jan 17, 2020 | Non-fiction
His face was not his fortune. A small, snaggle-toothed creature with monstrous breath and lopsided bearing. He used to skulk around the film studios where I was working. Just out of range, staring sadly at people. One day I saw a construction worker throw a rock at...
by Nick Tabone | Jan 9, 2020 | Non-fiction
Sliema, Tax Biex-13km’s Once,I stood alone,atop the highest yard,in howling windswhile a wild oceanraged all about me. Of course it fell to me, as the most experienced of the deck crew, to scramble up the foremast and secure the t’gallant sail which had begun to...
by Nick Tabone | Jan 4, 2020 | Non-fiction
Sliema, Marsamxett, Valletta-13km’s It is impossible to write of Malta without acknowledging the light. Perhaps it is the limestone of which this island is made, or the blue sea that surrounds this small rocky outcrop in the middle of the Mediterranean, that makes it...
by Nick Tabone | Nov 12, 2019 | Uncategorized
Drummond Island, Michigan, 11km’s In the past few days, as though a switch has been flicked, winter has come to these upper Great Lakes. Overnight the complexion of the sea seemed to change, its pallor darkening by several shades to an ominous inky blue and the sky...
by Nick Tabone | Nov 4, 2019 | Non-fiction
Upbound, Lake Huron It is not a truth universally acknowledged that the greatest smell in the world is the pad of a Labrador’s paw, but it should be. I learned of this when I was young, on the cold winter mornings when my sister and I would tramp sleepily down the...
by Nick Tabone | Oct 29, 2019 | Non-fiction
Mount Saviour Monastery, Pine City, New York, 11km’s My father was born to the crash and clamor of airborne ordnance as the Luftwaffe commenced what remains one of the largest bombing campaigns in history on his small island. Perhaps coming into this world to such...
by Nick Tabone | Oct 24, 2019 | Non-fiction
Buck Mountain, New York, 9km’s I am driving with my father along a highway in upstate New York, to visit a Benedictine Monastery that he has been going to since 1980. This is a place of significance to him, a part of his history. I came here 15 years ago but was still...
by Nick Tabone | Oct 3, 2019 | Non-fiction
Quebec City, 15km’s “Habit is a great deadener” wrote Samuel Beckett, but there’s nothing like good landscape seen from a ship’s deck to shake a sailor out of the often-humdrum routine of shipboard life. Navigating down the St. Lawrence River in Autumn one is deluged...
by Nick Tabone | Sep 30, 2019 | Non-fiction
Fort William Native Reserve, Mount McKay-21.9km’s I must have taken a wrong turn. The mud underfoot is thickening and sucks greedily at my shoes and the undergrowth is closing in claustrophobically, with errant branches encroaching on my airspace and worrying my face...
by Nick Tabone | Sep 20, 2019 | Non-fiction
Downbound St. Lawrence Seaway-Ashtabula, Ohio to Quebec City, Quebec Though the word is not confined to the provinces of the middle-aged and the elderly, it was when my doctor said it, ‘colonoscopy’, that I believe the lid on the coffin of my youth finally slammed...
by Nick Tabone | Sep 9, 2019 | Non-fiction
Goderich, Ontario-15km’s Running on a treadmill is to jogging outside what Oasis are to the Beatles, mostly plodding, with the occasional flourish of brilliance. However, as a runner, cooped up on a laker for days at a time, I try to run a minimum of 5km’s a day, to...
by Nick Tabone | Aug 15, 2019 | Non-fiction
Toronto, 8kms Having dispensed with a cliched week of heavy drinking that is the want of many sailors returning home from a lengthy sojourn at sea, especially those without a wife, it is time to cast off the shackles that gallons of beer will so ably fasten and emerge...
by Nick Tabone | Aug 2, 2019 | Non-fiction
Thunder Bay, 9.4kms I have inherited many things from my parents. A great love of books and animals, my brisk gait, punctuality that verges on the pathological and a nose which, glimpsed in profile in the bathroom mirror or store front windows, even now, startles me....
by Nick Tabone | Jun 28, 2019 | Non-fiction
Presque Isle National Park, Marquette, Michigan A 12 hour delay, as they charge the high dock with iron ore, means I can break away from the ship and explore this national park which abuts the dock we’re moored at. Off I go running through the wet wild woods by my...
by Nick Tabone | May 1, 2000 | Poetry
Ring around the burial mound,push in the soil and tramp it down,doff your caps let bugles sound,for all of our dead grandfathers. Some have one, some have moresome were killed in a war.Can the earth take anymore?It’s full of our dead grandfathers. In life we move from...
by Nick Tabone | May 8, 1999 | Poetry
When He arose,He shrugged off that placeand all its tomb-ish gloomto walk in the days first light. On the street He met Cleophasand from the look on his faceyou’d have swornhe’d seen a ghost, but they embraced thereon the road to Emmaus,where Cleophas held his friend...
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