And a short time was had by all…

Rather truncated evening at the ill-fated Pump and Tap in Leicester.  Present: Noel, Peter, Andy, Liz.

Apologies: Noel (for buggering off), Peter (for smoking)

Matters arising:  imminent destruction of a much-loved pub

All of this reminds me of IPAS.  What was IPAS? I hear you cry.  Well, IPAS was a loose collection of individuals led by Scoutmaster Bob.  I have written a short story about him which I am currently revising.  It all started in the pub with what I thought was a joke about setting up an India Pale Ale Society (a sort of reconstructed CAMRA) and before I knew what was going on Bob had produced an agenda, minutes and elections for officers, as well as turning up in a very nice woggle.  Bob was also very keen on buses.  I was familiar with train-spotters, but a bus-spotter (apart from one standing fed-up at a bus stop) was a new one on me.

We had a car this week, which has now gone back – consequently I was at the chalet every day.

Here’s a recent poem:

Onion

Peel placenta

nothing there

cup the stillness

fry the air

…..

Plans for the weekend:  Oh!  Don’t know if i told this joke before:

Mark was always banging on about barbers and how they used to offer all manner of dodgy surgical procedures, and how (in a much more controlled way) he would like to go back to this, and have them offer, say, vasectomies while you wait.

So I said, after the haircut the barber would turn to the customer and say:

Something for the rest of your life, sir?

You’ll probably only get that if you’re in Britain.  And maybe not even then

TTFN

Liz

Update

Hi all

Settling into a pattern of being back at weekends and in the woods Mon – Fri.  It seems to be working well.  Writing-wise, I have written a number of poems and planning for the novel is continuing.  The working title is “Knots”, which refers to a number of things, mainly the knots the characters tie themselves in and which form the pattern of their relationships.  I have done a big diagram of all the characters and how they relate to each other and it does resemble a huge knot.

At the weekends I am trying to lick Holly into some sort of shape so that she can eventually take GCSEs.

Oh!  And I’ve improved some of the songs I wrote and will probably set more to music.

And

Here’s a limerick I wrote yesterday:

Panem et Circenses*

A Big Mac and Strictly Come Dancing

that schedule’s a boil that needs lancing

It’s not nice to see ya

my burger tastes queer

Don’t tell me our culture’s advancing.

*  Bread and circuses – what, according to the Roman Emperors, is all the people needed to keep them happy;

Oh!  and I wrote a scene for a short play on BBC 7 (“chaingang”) but couldn’t find an internet cafe in Loughborough to send it from.

To Mirch Marsala tonight where we are having a meal generously provided by our friends Peter and Noel.

PS I’m writing a series of limericks on Friends, which begins like this:

It starts with a Rembrandt or two

who say that they’ll be there for you

a fountain, some jiving

a bride who is skiving

cos everyone says she’s a shoe

The idea is to write a verse for each series.  I’m really into limericks at the moment

Seven Days

OK Seven Days, if you’re interested, was my first novel.  It had seven chapters and the content went like this:

Monday

Woman finds herself in a nuclear bunker following a nuclear holocaust.  Explores bunker.  Waits for others to come.

Tuesday

Nobody comes.   To keep from going mad, she starts to write a diary.  Since she has no present and probably no future, she writes about the past.  On Tuesday she remembers her early childhood.

Wednesday

She remembers her adolescence

Thursday

First love

Friday

Crisis.  Loss of love, rejection.  Suicide attempt.  (any connection with Good Friday is entirely intentional)

Saturday

Ah!  here’s where we find out what’s really going on.  There hasn’t been a holocaust at all.  The whole thing is set in the future and here’s where the plot twist comes in that explains how she came to be there in the first place.

Sunday

Realisation.  She comes out of the bunker.

I think it’s ready for rewriting.  I can see a lot more possibilities in it now.  Maybe I’ll present the idea to a publisher.  That’s the best way to do these things, I’m told.

Going to the Martyrs today.  We think it’s probably the place to be.  I like Trinity but I think maybe the guy’s sermon last week was a sign.

Kirk out

Deep and crisp and even

.. were the chips we had last night.  Delicious food, well-presented and served with a smile.  The uncertainty we observed at the beginning turned out to be due to the proprietors having taken over only a few days before.  Fair enough, we think.  A mixed marriage, Asian and white British – an interesting combination, culinarily.  (is that the right word?)  Check it out

http://www.diningpubs.co.uk/pub_details.asp?id=294

Lovely beer garden overlooking the reservoir where we broke one of their tables (in the garden, not the reservoir!)

Thinking deeply, crisply and evenly about my writing, and especially about Seven Days, an early novel which I think I shall rewrite.  I can see a lot more possibilities in it now.

Ok that really is it for now.

Kirk out

A new poem…

I was quite pleased with this one:

Artist and Mother

A curtain waisted at the window

she draws herself

I’m a Steak…

I am a backwards Keats. A Steak…Ok I know it should be staek, but you can’t begrudge me a vowel shift, can you? Why? Because I do everything late in life. I got married at age 36, had children at 36 and 39, and now in my fifties I am discovering my vocation. A little late for me? No. That’s how it is. I am the tortoise: I am Piglet. Slow and steady wins the race. Piglet may be timid but he comes through in the end.

This is how it is. I am standing on the beach. The tide has retreated, so far out that I can hardly see it. Everyone else is surfing, sailing, paddling, splashing. They’re all having a great time – and I can’t get out there. I can’t walk that far, and I don’t have transport. There are mud-flats and rock pools and the sea is now totally inaccessible. I should have just swum out there like everyone else when I had the chance. Except that I didn’t want to. I couldn’t do the strokes. So I stand on the shore and shade my eyes against the setting sun, watch the swimmers as they wave… but are they waving? Surely the movements are wrong! They’re not waving, they’re calling. They need help. And I can’t help them – I’m stuck here. I can’t do anything – and, if I’m honest, I don’t want to do anything. They’ll be OK – they just need to tread water and let go of their windsurfers. No boats can get them back, they just need to hold on and trust the waves to bring them to shore. I stand and watch. Sooner or later the tide will turn and I will feel it at my feet. Sooner or later the tide will come in and I will float. Soon it will sweep me off my feet – and I will be swimming.

Think once, think twice…

Here’s the thing: deep in my core, down in the place where my soul would be if I had one (only joking! I’m not a vampire – or is it reflections they don’t have?) – anyway, deep in that place, I felt the earth move. You know how they say it does? Except not in that way. This was more like a landslide, or an earthquake. Scary. Well, I tracked it down to something that probably happened when I was a baby – and then I came to a stop, as you do when both parents are dead and nobody else is around to tell you what happened. Well, that was the first thing I felt on waking – and the second was this. The second was the realisation – no, the memory – of what daily life is like. Like a prisoner waking from a sweet dream and seeing the walls around her, the echo of the gibbet on the floor, all the memories of long incarceration coming back. So. The prison of my life. What’s that like? Tell the truth, I feel bad complaining: I mean, we don’t starve, we’re not homeless – nothing like that. Oh, shit – now I feel like a total wimp. It’s just that –

OK let me tell it like this. Imagine you have a problem. You spend time thinking about the problem; you come up with a solution, you spend time and energy on the solution – and there! Problem solved. And for about two seconds you sit back and relax, before the same bloody thing surfaces again, like giving you the old one-two. You duck the first, but the second hits you square in the jaw. You know? And so you deal with that and then, bugger me, something else comes along. And so it goes. It’s like a plague. Sometimes in my darker moments I think – you know these blue plaques they put up for people? Famous people, when they’re dead? Well, instead of a plaque, I’ll have a plague. Sarada Gray died here of the plague which, although she was cured seven times, never left her alone. That’s my life. Same bloody problems, over and over. Karma. I guess.

Take head lice. These tiny black hyphens in your hair that can ruin your life if you don’t get rid of them: they proliferate like plague germs and then you’re crawling and depressed and nobody will sit with you. So you get rid of them, by combing and washing and disinfecting and boiling bedclothes and then, for about two seconds, you’re free before one tiny unseen egg, nestling in a burrow so close to your scalp, breaks open and starts to lay its own eggs. And so on. There’s no solution. Except, go back in time and don’t get the bloody things in the first place. That’s it. So that’s my life. You get the picture?

I know these aren’t real problems. They aren’t real – but they are. I’ll regret saying this, but I’d swap for a real problem, like being in a war or something. No, that’s rubbish – of course I wouldn’t. That’s an idiotic thing to say – don’t write in! It’s just…

I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a sink with a huge plughole and no taps. Or a field with hungry crops where the sun never shines and the rain never rains and there’s no fertiliser. It’s like being Africa. I know, I know – it’s an insult even to think of it. But it’s how I feel. You have to express how you feel – no? Even if it’s pathetic. So every morning I go down and look at the mat where the post should be and when it eventually comes bringing us demands for bills we have already paid or else have established through phone calls and letters and visits that we don’t owe in the first place and we are starting to think about threatening them with a solicitor – when these items come in the post, the post which never brings even one letter containing the words: We are pleased to say, or We are happy to accept your story; letters which contain somewhere in them the word publication, that miraculous word not preceded by the phrase not suitable for; I leave the post undressed on the hall table and heave a sigh which is an echo of yesterday’s sigh, postponing my hopes for another twenty-four hours, climbing the stairs to work on my next story.

My manuscript sinks with a sigh

my hopes echo

That was the start of a poem I wrote about it. So that’s my life. Want to swap? Huh? Well, you can’t. You think you could step into this? Huh? You couldn’t hack this in a million years. It’s my life, baby, and I’m holding onto it! So go live your own!

Now, where’s my bike?

Limericks again

Sent a couple off to Pentatette, a limerick magazine, but heard nothing. I shall email them.

Here’s another…

Genius

Unravel

the problem

of greatness

my wiggled lines struggle with straightness

with fear to the fore

I nudge open the door

apologise

now

for my lateness

(the first and last lines are supposed to spread over the page but I can’t get them to do this – it seems to justify everything.

There’s a joke there.  But I can’t be bothered)

Mark says it’s html.  This always makes me think of “hatemail”

Desert Songs

Feeling very low, as befits the time of year. These poems say it all:

Now back from a quarter’s psychosis

I’m seeing a gloomy prognosis

On the year’s shortest day

I nocturnally pray:

Convert in the dark by osmosis

..

According to a poem by John Donne, the shortest day is called “St Lucy’s Day”.

http://www.dailypoem.co.uk/display.php?pid=2299

Soundings

Appears to be a depth in me

That no-one else can hear or see

I cry and cry, but no reply

The sun beyond the desert sky

…….

Confronting this rift in my soul

Don’t know what it is to be whole

Torn in three directions

I’m patchworked in sections

This coat, multi-coloured, this stole

………

Engagement

Engaging the whole of my brain

It’s a wonder the vessels don’t sprain

the viscera quivering

pen in hand shivering

trying to make one human stain

Engagement her is to be thought of on the French sense. The “human stain” is a reference to a novel by Philip Roth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain

which does not, however, have much to do with the poem.

Going to do a solstice ceremony later.

Here’s today’s poem

(this is not finished yet)

I Don’t Know, I’ve Never Kippled

(to my son)

It’s good to be a man, my son, but better

to realise what it is that you are not

I hope you’ll realise, having read this letter

that genius engenders tons of rot:

Ars longa, vita brevis? Don’t be daft -

It doesn’t hold a candle as a rule;

No genius without penis? How we laughed!

These guys know nothing – send them back to school!

When you can make a shopping list with one hand

and type your magnum opus with the other

Nor think youself embarrassingly unmanned

to imitate the actions of a mother

If you can change a diarrhoeic nappy

and turn to put that nappy in the bin

and turn again to find your baby crappy

and clean it up, and never lose your grin:

If toddler no: 1 is screaming murder

as you get toddler no: 2 to sleep

If you’re not thinking that your life is purdah

If thoughts of drinking beer don’t make you weep:

If you sit down a sec, put on some Dylan

and in that second, lo! the baby wakes

and you can smile and still not prove a villain

You’ll have an inkling of what it takes:

If poems wake you up at 3 am

and, scrabbling blearily for pen and pad

you poke the baby’s eyes instead of them

and still the thought of children makes you glad:

If you can be content to be a man

And say of us, “ma semblable, ma soeur“

you’ll come to understand your nature’s span

How small the difference between him and her:

Not to define yourself is very freeing

- and, what is more, you’ll be a human being.

…

This is of course a parody of the well-known poem, “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.

There are aspects of Kipling I deplore, and most of them seem to be exhibited in this poem, hence the parody. When writing the poem I became aware of wanting to present my son with a positive way of being a man, and not being quite sure how to do this. Any thoughts?

PS The title is an answer to the question, “do you like Kipling?”

PPS Not 100% sure about the word “diarrhoeic”, though if it exists, I’m sure at least I’ve spelt it correctly.