Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer

Books, Poems, Thoughts

  • Celebrating City Women: The Documentary

    This is about one of the projects I’ve been working on recently, researching the hidden histories of women in the City of London, from the Norman Conquest to the mid-twentieth century.

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  • Blackbird

    Originally posted on Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer: A blackbird alone in the dying sun’s footlights sings to a backdrop of indigo blue; for the sound of its voice, for the sake of the singing, it plays out the longest day of the year. Perched on the rooftop, stop-out blackbird, late home, carousing, careless…

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  • How should people of good will live in this fractured time?

    Here are some bullet points to consider, some suggestions of how to survive with integrity in an environment which seems to have become inimical to good sense, tolerance and civilised values:   Listen to others, be polite and attentive, while holding firm to what you believe to be right. Do not provoke, or allow yourself

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  • St Bartholomew’s birds

    A congregation of cacophonous starlings chatters vivaciously in the tops of two trees only and because of the birds’ blackness against an indigo sky and because they have chosen for conversation a graveyard by an ancient priory church alongside its sister hospital their chattering seems ominous, filled with dark knowledge. Birds whose ancestors witnessed the

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  • History of a relationship

    My first visit I barely made acquaintance, dragged along by a medic and musician boyfriend in the hot summer of ’76; while he discussed diapasons in the organ loft I drooped around the pillars, glad of somewhere cool. My next encounter, more than ten years later, I was ‘depping’ for a friend who sang. Late

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  • Edward Cooke

    Doctor of Physick, philosopher, you hold a teasing pen; what wisdom would you give us if your hand could move again? Scientific formulae, concepts to explain our mind and frame? – the spread of human knowledge still your worthy aim? Or would you spell out now the name above every name? Have you entered on eternity,

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  • Three Stories from the Book of the Foundation

      GODRIC THE BUTCHER One day, as was his custom, Alfune from the Priory was visiting the butchers one by one, asking them for gifts to feed the poor; he decided to approach a man named Godric, famed as very stern and niggardly of mind. When Alfune saw that Godric would give nothing, being moved

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  • Portrait of an Old Man

    i.m. Miron Grindea A sultry afternoon; I identify the house; walk twice round Emperor’s Gate not wanting to be early … A tousled grey head from an upstairs window: – Who’s that? Are you the plumber? “I sent some poems; you called me.” – You haven’t come to mend the sink? Well, never mind… I step

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  • The Smalpaces

    Percival and Agnes stare from neighbouring frames. She outlived him thirty years, as her lined face tells. Stern in starchy Tudor collars, how remote they seem, as though their eyes would barely recognise our world. Yet underneath, their naked bodies tell another story and inform the formal faces with more sympathy, till hers seems sad,

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  • The Vision of Rahere

    At the shrine of Rahere the cowled monks read the same pages from Isaiah for eternity; little heads cluster like buds around the canopy and a winged creature with bestial but not unfriendly face recalls the monster who seized Rahere in dream before Bartholomew appeared to issue his commission. With our worldview, sophisticated – so we

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