Ken Edwards

                                    Wendy Mulford has died aged 85. This isn’t an obituary. You can check out the Wikipedia page for Wendy ; it’s reasonably correct as to the facts it states, though there is much omitted. This is a personal memoir of how Wendy, co-founder with me of Reality Street, impacted on my life.   I first caught sight of her on the ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire in April 1987. I was with old friends Allen Fisher and Paige Mitchell. Allen and I had been invited by another dear departed friend, Maurice Scully, to read at a poetry festival at the Winding Stair bookshop overlooking the Liffey in Dublin – and so had Wendy. We all got on fabulously. Fellow Brit poet Alan Halsey (now also deceased) joined us in Dublin. The hospitality shown us by Maurice and the Irish poetry crowd was brilliant. I found Wendy to be a wonderful conversationalist. She and I walked around D...

    The gorillas were the main attraction of course. Elaine and I had long been obsessed with these wonderful animals. Near where we live, at the related wildlife parks Howletts (near Canterbury) and Port Lympne (between Rye and Folkestone) several gorilla families are kept in captivity, in good conditions. We visit them regularly. They are Western Lowland Gorillas, as are the vast majority of captive gorillas. Between 100,000-300,000 remain in the wild, mostly in Congo and surrounding countries. The shaggier Mountain Gorilla is much rarer, and classified as endangered. It is estimated there are about 1,000 – up from a nadir of around 250 when poaching was taking its toll in the 1960s and 70s. You will never see them in captivity – they don’t thrive there. They inhabit two upland sites: one at the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, below the five extinct volcanoes of the Virunga Massif (the Rwanda side is now the Volcanoes National Park); and the other i...