Cardboard Boxes

The blog today is being written in a house where nearly everything is packed in cardboard boxes awaiting a house move.  I’m sitting in a room that was once my ‘office’, where I got most of my writing done, surrounded by near content-less furnishings, some dismantled, and I’m feeling vaguely ghostly.  A spirit haunting premises that were once laden with the imprint of me and are now in the process of reverting to anonymity.

The circumstances are essentially happy, there are no regrets about this move, but there’s a touch of the bittersweet too.  I came to live in Shaftesbury (a small town at the northern tip of the county of Dorset, for any readers unfamiliar with the UK) just over three years ago with a very different set of expectations to those I hold now.  Some emotional twists and turns awaited me, and some of the expectations were shattered.  Yet the town itself drew me into its social life and held a welcome.  I chose to stay here.

So the move is not from Shaftesbury, but to another house within the town that’s suitable for myself and partner to share.  We haven’t found it yet but getting out of our individual houses first is a part of the process.  And this one has done me well enough and been a good home – hence the feelings of which I write.

So up in an attic bedroom whose dormer window looks out to a fairly distant view of the first hills of Cranborne Chase, the boxes are piling up.  Although it was one of the house’s most attractive features I never made much use of it until more recent times.  The rest of the house was my main domain, the work space here, a smaller first floor bedroom and the ground floor.  Being mid-terrace it was cosy and economic to keep warm in winter.  I filled the walls with psychedelic and art nouveau-ish artworks and drapes, enjoyed my books and recorded music, shunted ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ out into the world and made a start on novel.  All good stuff, and doubtless more to come in new circumstances.

But hey, you probably know what I’m saying.  End of a chapter and all that.  I’m not going to go on a my usual length.  There’s still plenty to be done before it all gets shifted on Thursday and the house will be emptied ready for some repairs to the rather crap chipboard flooring.  So this is just a wave and a hello.  Normal service to be resumed in two weeks time, more or less.

I leave you with, I hope, a video from YouTube of Loudon Wainwright III’s take on this whole moving thing.  

An Invitation

skeletal mysteries

bones on a slab

beyond pale borders

glow extends

and here

touched by symmetry

in stark divisions

the hidden denizens

wave into shape

all tendrils and twists

hold coils

that flicker

into and out of

any world

you care

to mention

any world

that offers

an invitation

A Blacksmith Courted Me

Running late again, sorry to all who read this with any regularity.  An ongoing house move situation is minimizing the time I have for this writing stuff, basically. So here's another older piece.

I've been fascinated by the folk song known as 'The Blacksmith' or 'A Blacksmith Courted Me' ever since I first heard it on an early Steeleye Span album.  Like so many ballads, it is riddled with narrative gaps and hints at most regarding what might fill them.  What interested me, apart from the beauty of the tune and the poetry of the words, was one of those hints: a suggestion that, despite the apparent betrayal or 'slighting' of the female narrator, she does not bear a grudge.  Of course the line: 'I wish them both much joy' could be taken for sarcasm in a bitter reproach.  But with my tendency to wilfully misunderstand, I imagined her taking a more philosophical point of view... perhaps.

In what follows, I tried in prose, but often quoting the song (in more than one version) to explore her mindset.  There is reference in the song to a period of nine months, an implication that her lovemaking with the blacksmith led to pregnancy and thus the stigma of an illegitimate child.  But this - it seems to me - is by no means clear, so in my piece I preferred to think that she had escaped that particular fate.  In which case, of course, forgiveness might have come a little more easily.

A Blacksmith Courted Me

Oh what’s the true meaning of all that transpires?

I look in the glass again and again, see only my own wan face, my dark ringed, uncomprehending eyes, and I shake my head once more.  And the curls and the tresses around my face do dance and waver as if there had never been strange news, as if he had never gone abroad or stooped to gather the sweet primeroses.

There are stages where these tales are forever acted out.  And there are acts, one after another, in which the stages of this tale unfold.  With what does it begin?  Ah, bliss.  It begins with faith, with hope, with love and trust.

It begins with his hammer, striking the anvil, so clever, so steady.  The sparks that flew across the smithy.  With his smile as he paused to hear my entreaty, a request from my father, shoes for the horses, equipment in need of repair.  And his tender eyes as he watched me, clutching my shawl close, a little afraid - for all the times I had walked past the smithy I had never once set foot inside.  His broad and sturdy arms.  The rosy glow in his cheeks.  Oh, I had seen him many a time before.  Ours is a small town.  But that day I saw as if for the first time.  I saw my love.

Said he: “Your father is a good man.  This work I’ll do and he’ll settle with me when he can.”

As soon as I was able, I hurried away – for I could barely remain stood fast upon my own two feet, such were the feelings that o’erwhelmed me.  Yet why should I mistake kindness for affection?  Better not to let imaginings rob me of my good senses.

The trust, it grows, as sapling does to oak, seeming sure and steady.  His ready smile and greeting whenever our paths did cross.  The light in his eyes that shone for me alone, as he played so neat and trim upon his pipes for the young girls to dance at the summer fair.  And then came his letter, the coarse paper near scorched by the ardour of which he wrote.  So mayhap the fault is mine.  I should not have lain beside him that night.  I should have listened to some better counsel.  I should not have believed him when he said he’d marry me.  When he said he’d not deny me.

And then comes the break - the call to other lands to fight for king and country.  Oh, with what concern he’d listen to my entreaties then.  “You must not go,” said I, “to where the sun will burn your beauty.”  “I cannot stay at home,” said he and spoke of duty.  Duty I know.  That cannot be denied.

The weeks of waiting.  The months.  The years.  And set to steer me through it all, my wedding plans, my hopes, my foolish dreams.  Whilst he did march to fife and drum from battlefield to battlefield.  And all would be well if only he lived, had not the call to gather primeroses come upon him.

At last came that news so strange, a whisper from lips to ears, a buzz of words that spreads through the town.  “He is married.”  How can this be?  My love is married to another and will not return to his forge, where I loved so well to watch him at swing with his hammer.  I can find no sound meaning in this.  And yet it is so.

What was there to be done?  A message, perchance?  A former claim to consider right well?  A protest to rend his heart?  Of these I thought, oft, at length, day after day, night after night.  But too well I knew what he might say.  For witness had I none of what he’d promised.  And of where he’d made that promise, I knew I dared not speak.

God may reward him well for the slighting of me.  I cannot speak for the Divine Will nor yet, like some practitioner of witchcraft or wizardry, can I seek to sway its course.

If love him still I do, and still do I, then all that’s to be achieved in this the final act is to wish him well.  Him and his new love, may they prosper and thrive, may their babies be happy and blessed with health.  May he deceive no more.

And there I am, still pale and drawn, staring at myself from out of the glass.  Trying to make sense of what I cannot know, that tidal ebb and wash of the human heart, its vagaries, its weakness.

There is but one thing that I can be sure of.


If I was with my love, I’d do my duty.

'Famous Author Tours South Wales'

Blogging late this week, having only just returned from a six day trip to South Wales, where I’ve been attempting to promote and sell copies of ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’.  The most successful of these attempts was on the last day of the trip, where I’d set myself up as guest reader at the Poems and Pints evening - held on a monthly basis for most of the year at Pontardawe Arts Centre.

On the Saturday prior to that, I’d done a ten minute spot at the Ffwrnes Theatre in Llanelli, during an afternoon event going under the title ‘Spoken Word’.  This is usually a completely ‘open mike’ session at which contributors with books to sell have an opportunity to do so during the interval.  Rather late in the proceedings I found out that, on this particular day, the session had been merged with a book launch by children’s author Wendy White.  Published under the pen-name Sara Gethin, ‘Not Tomos’ is her first book for adults.  It deals with issues around child poverty, its narrator a convincingly written five year old boy.  On the basis of what I heard in her readings from ‘Not Tomos’ and the talks given by her publisher and Welsh journalist Jon Gower, it promises to be a first rate novel, deserving of success.

Lesson for myself was – don’t try to sell your books at an event like that again.  I felt like some weird kind of gatecrasher and it came as no surprise that no one so much as came to look at my book.  Why should they?  This was, quite rightly, Wendy’s day.  Nevertheless I enjoyed the event, from the handful of local readers with which it began to the eye-opening talk regarding the well thought out, enterprising Honno publishing company and the heart-felt speech by Mr. Gower.  It was also a pleasure for me to read one of my stories, all written during my time in Wales, to a predominantly Welsh audience.

The days between were partly a holiday for me and my good partner Rachel.  A great opportunity to show her some of my old haunts in the Gower.  We even got some sunshine.  It was also an opportunity to reconnect with old friends.  Monday found us in Loughor, guests of the redoubtable Dewi ‘Mav’ Bowen, musician, writer, activist and archaeologist.  In fact I’m really keen to big him up as, sociable fellow that he is, he made/answered several phone calls over the day in which all reference to me was as a ‘famous author’ on a ‘South Wales tour’.  I think he enjoyed seeing me cringe.

Among his innumerable and utterly splendid achievements, Mav co-runs a folk club which occurs every Monday night, as far as I know without fail, at the Loughor Boat Club on the shore of the estuary.  It attracts musicians and singers of mixed ability but strong commitment, and is invariably enjoyable.  You start the evening thinking: ‘Yes, this is quite pleasant,’ and then some time after 10pm you find yourself thinking: ‘Fuck me, there are some bloody good musicians in this neck of the woods.’  And that’s nothing to do with the beer because I was on orange juice.  Monday night was no exception.  We had a fine rendition of the (I suspect quite difficult to play) Mason Williams tune ‘Classical Gas’, two lovely unaccompanied songs by a local singer named Maggie, a sensitively and well played cover of a song from Lal and Mike Waterson’s ‘Bright Phoebus’ album, and finally some shit hot ragtime guitar numbers from a former protégé of Ralph McTell.  Oh, and round about the mid point of the evening I got to read out a story, the as-yet unpublished ‘Upright and Grand’.  It’s a musical piece, without being music, if you follow me.

Though I wasn’t entirely confident he’d make it, the famous archaeologist turned up on following night as people gathered for the Poems and Pints.  As he generally does, these days, Mav was looking stylish in a loudly patterned Californian beach shirt, dark jacket and wide brimmed white hat.  It felt good to have him aboard, along with a slew of other good friends who showed up – though it was by no means just my rentacrowd who were present.  I used to attend the P&P at Ponty fairly regularly during my time in Wales, and I was well pleased to see many of the old faces there, and a good many new ones too.  Amiably MC’d by the poet Glyn Roberts, as it has been now for some years, the event still seems to be thriving.

The way it works, the guest does a twenty minute opening spot, then after the interval there’s an open-mike before the guest closes with another twenty minutes.  I kicked off with ‘Enlightenment’ from Wilful Misunderstandings and followed it with three poems, one of which appeared in the Welsh poetry magazine ‘Roundyhouse’.  For my second set I did a couple of pieces that have appeared in this blog (‘Nothing’ and ‘I Hope to Write a Garden’), ‘The Long Haul’ from the book, and a poem about a Spanish waiter (Jorge, not Manuel).  I got the feeling that I didn’t seriously disappoint anyone and sold a good few books.

Mission accomplished, but what also really stirred me was the open-mike session.  Some of my highlights follow.  An elderly gent from Bridgend named Wes whose poems I don’t always quite get, but whose passion and delivery invariably move me.  A fine and well crafted poem from another reader about a day with his young daughters in Ambleside.  Mav’s co-opted chauffeur, the writer John Jenkins reading selections from his words for the ‘Glo Coal’ word, dance, film and song event.  And another Ponty regular, the ranting Phil Knight whose quickfire ‘I love Wales’ poem had us all laughing, but contained some nicely presented ironies regarding twenty first century Wales.  This is, always has been and will be for as long as it lasts, bloody good stuff.  There is, as many have observed, a powerful literary tradition in South Wales, and I feel honoured to have had a taste of it and been allowed a little participation.

And so ended the… uhrm…’famous author’ tour.  Next day we were off back to England, visiting one final old friend en route – with whom I’d also met up for the Deke Leonard Memorial Concert in Port Talbot on the previous Saturday night (see my review of that in the next issue of online magazine ‘Gonzo Weekly).

Though I’m resident now for the second time in my life in Dorset, I often say there’s a piece of my heart that I left in South Wales.  It appears to be still beating.

Stoned Again at Stanton Drew

An inevitably wet UK bank holiday curtailed an expedition to take a look at the Maes Knoll hill and then the stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset earlier this week.  My fellow traveller and I only got to look at two out of the three circles, and missed the ‘Cove’ and the ‘Quoit’ entirely.  But hey, we’d already got soaked going up to the Knoll and we had to make a dash for the church porch to shelter from a further torrential downpour.  We hadn’t anticipated the need for total waterproofing.  Smartphone predictions let us down.  Another such expedition is called for, as and when.

So this is no neo-antiquarian well-informed write-up of serious research, nosirree.  This is a bit more personal.  I’m trying to figure out what it is that attracts me to these sites, these relics, these objects…  Am I doing it because that’s what people do?  People of certain types that is, whether Glasto-revering hippies old and young or strictly academic archaeological authorities or those who straddle the divide or just plain sightseers…  I can identify to some extent with any of them.  Am I romancing?  Am I looking for clues in the ever-elusive quest to figure out why us human beings do the things we do?  Is it some kind of compulsion to which I’ve succumbed over the years?

I guess it started for me with Stonehenge.  I still have, somewhere amongst my random archives, a 60s guide book or leaflet.  School trip or family outing, I don’t remember but - as in those days you could - I walked among those megaliths and felt something that stayed with me.  Awe?  Excitement? A sense of the mystery of pre-history – those stories that we can only speculate upon, based on fragmentary clues with multiple possible interpretations?  Some kind of link, in the presence of these objects, with ancestors who placed them in such locations?  A sense of the sheer sweat and blood involved, and the conceptual sophistication of their construction?  Not only that but the realisation that these things were built to last.  Planned obsolescence, the curse of modern times, was not part of their makers’ thinking (an observation I must accredit to my partner, by the way).

So there were values in operation here.  Were they values that I might share?  Who knows?  There are only these elusive clues.  Do they have anything in common with that which has been built within times of historical record in the way of locations for divine contemplation – cathedrals, monasteries, temples and the like?  It seems hard to deny this possibility.  Yet archaeologists joke amongst themselves that ‘ritual significance’ is a catch-all term for ‘we’re not quite sure’.

In my youth, enthralled by psychedelia, I was prepared to buy into the then current speculations about leys (or ‘ley-lines’ as I now gather we mistakenly called them) as energy channels, the earth’s meridians.  I can remember a visit to Avebury, some time in the 70s, and touching the stones there, ready to believe that something vaguely mystical would seep into my consciousness and bring me to enlightenment.  Didn’t work, I’m sorry to say.  Enlightenment requires a bit more effort than stone stroking.

With age, I read more, spoke with enthusiasts for whom a somewhat nuanced view became the norm.  And still I sought the stones.  The Rollrights, the burial chambers and megaliths and smaller circles that abound in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and – not so long ago – my first visit to Long Meg and her Daughters up near Penrith.  The folkloric tales that abound around these sites are always fun – people turned to stone for various misdemeanours or whatever, the devil hurling boulders from nearby hills.  They wind their way into my imagination and I daydream of these stones coming to life and animation when no one save the dreamer is looking.  I’m not sure Mike Parker Pearson would approve, but even he must have his more whimsical moments.

Up at the Long Meg site I tried to channel whatever it was that brought me there.  I wrote a poem that touched on some of the questions I’ve listed here.  It raised the concept that even the most solid of rock, when looked at in the longest of terms where tectonic plates cause continents to shift and reshape, is mutable.  As it will be too in about six billion years, when the sun becomes a ‘subgiant’, doubling in size.  In another couple of billion, it is estimated, our planet will melt into it.  In this light, there’s a poetic resonance I find to those tales of transformation.

No answers then, just fascination.  And the stones themselves – the sheer beauty in their shapes and surfaces.  At Stanton Drew, according to the useful write up on the stone-circles.org.uk website, the stones are a mix of limestone, sandstone and breccia – a sort of conglomerate.  They are intricately weathered, often pock-marked by erosion, and then – like any rock surface – coloured and patterned by lichens, mosses and other small growing things that lodge in cracks or on ledges.  My eye-to-brain channels are in love with the endless abstractions thus created.  Nature has been doing Jackson Pollock just about since the world began.

And a final thought.  If ever there was room for wilful misunderstandings, surely these are the places.  Archaeology constantly refines its comprehension with new equipment, new ideas and interpretations – but mostly, I think, acknowledges that there will never be enough information to give a definitive interpretation.  There will always be room for wedding guests or knight-errants turned to stone and for Satan lobbing his lumps of rock.

So maybe I’ve answered my question.  But as readers of this blog may have gathered by now, my place is permanently set amongst the bewildered, so I can never quite be sure…

________________________________________________________________________________

If you want to know more about the middle path approach of neo-antiquarianism, check out www.northernearth.co.uk/ and maybe take out a sub.  With regard to Stonehenge and the apparently
inadequate proposal to tunnel the A303 below it you might want to take a look at www.stonehengealliance.
org.uk where there's a petition you can sign if it's a concern of yours.

Comedy and Politics

I should think most of you have heard it by now, the little joke about what President Trump’s bodyguards would have to shout if he came under fire.  Yes, of course you have.  “Donald!  Duck!”  It’s actually one of those ones where, if you give it some thought, you realise they probably wouldn’t shout that at all.  It would be more like: “Lower yourself, Mr President!”  Or perhaps, given the reportedly regal nature of his audiences with the media of late, “Get down, your highness.”

But of course, Donald doesn’t duck.  He would not so much as consider lowering himself.  He’s so high he can’t get down.  And if he remains standing, bold and pugnacious, and there’s an accurate shot, perhaps his last words will be: “You’re fired!”

So there we are, at this point the joke backfires completely.

As probably - if some of the complaints I’ve heard from some comedians are to be accepted - do most jokes about the current incumbent.  “You can’t make it up,” they say.  “Reality outstrips you every time.”  Which feels about right – many of the darkest, funniest routines about Trump seem merely to involve straight description of the activities and pronouncements of the president and his cohorts.  A bit of canned laughter can be added to the soundtrack to keep us chuckling - if, at any point, we forget to think it’s funny.

I love a bit of satirical comedy as much as the next vaguely leftie old hippie, but here’s the thing.  Sometimes when I appreciate the commentary it’s making, I find myself thinking: ‘These men and women are so wise, thoughtful and observant.  They make their observations with insight, their deductions hold logic.  Why can’t they run the country instead of…?’ (conclude with an expletive of your own choice concerning politicians).  And it seems to me just about credible that they could do a better job.  And of course the media coverage would be lively and fun.  It would boost public interest no end.  In the UK we could have Jeremy Hardy and Alexi Sayle as the Corbyn and McDonnell of the labour party; Stephen Fry heading the lib dems and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown helming what’s left of UKIP into oblivion.  Though for some reason I find myself struggling to think who might do for the conservatives.  Jim Davidson?

In fact it probably wouldn’t work out.  I’ve been a great admirer of Eddie Izzard for many years (even if I don’t always get his space age approach to cross dressing) and have observed with some interest his efforts to get involved with political activism on behalf of the labour party and the ‘remain’ campaign during the run up to last year’s referendum.  But he doesn’t appear to have distinguished himself on this front or to have added a great deal of worth to the debate as yet.  Maybe the crossover requires a character with a bit more grit.  Mark Thomas springs to mind.  Or perhaps (and it has occurred to me that I’ve so far failed to include any female comedians) Josie Long.

I guess my conclusion is that it’s obviously one thing to diss the politicians, quite another to replace them.  It isn’t that difficult to take the piss or point out the flaws, especially if you ignore the fact that not all politicians are 100% venally motivated.  Pockets of integrity do crop up amongst them and sometimes even endure – providing they don’t get assassinated, as one of ours did last June.  The simple logic of my initial thought dissolves into the complexity of the world as we know it.

It helps to have a laugh, as one despairing friend of mine remarked after I’d re-posted a video clip of Mark Steele doing one of his affably scathing rants about Teresa May’s election u-turn on my Facebook page.  That inane joke around Trump’s first name with which I began this piece certainly made me laugh the first time I heard it.  And there’s not much that causes me to laugh about DT, or the power structure that now finds it advantageous to have him presiding.

Laughter does put it into a different perspective, presents another facet of reality in which foibles are made transparent.  I’m not talking about caricature so much here, which often slips too easily into insult alone.  It’s the observational comedy that works best for me, the stuff that points out the inconsistencies, contradictions, self-interest and deceits that lie behind the pompous facades.  Comedians can do that pretty well, even if they’d be no better at running human affairs than anyone else.

Of course, ‘Donald!  Duck!’ doesn’t fit into that category.  That’s just silly.

But then, I think there’s room for a bit of silliness as well.

Averse to verse? Then look elsewhere!

My Opposable Thumb

You ask what does my thumb oppose?

A set of fingers, I suppose.

It’s likely that I’d let things slip,

if I failed to get a grip.

If this digit was a critic,

would it tend to be arthritic?

If I took a strong position,

would it rise in opposition?

And should I need to offer thanks,

would it wag a stern phalanx?

Take me to task by hitching lifts,

instead of buying thank-you gifts?

Though there’s no reason why it ought

to be equipped with conscious thought,

it’s still my opposable thumb –

and I suspect it just plays dumb.

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