It's about time ...

It's about time I started blogging again. The last time was back in March - and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. There was my Gran's funeral, for instance - bless her. She was 96 but it was still a shock.

Since the last time I posted I've taken a half-day creative writing workshop at a theological college - bunging in some material from the Psalms, hymns and bits of liturgy - a GCSE English lesson at a secondary school in Crewe (on the basis that I've met Gillian Clarke several times and heard Seamus Heaney read). I led a four-week Lent Study Group on poetry and spirituality (or 'spiridewealidy' as it'd be pronounced in California).

I also took over as 'mine host' at the bi-monthly Poems & Pints session at The Bear Town Tap in Congleton. We raised over £50 for Animals Asia's Moon Bear Rescue Project.

Now that's an applicable charity for the Tap. For those of you who aren't 'local', Congleton's known as Bear Town on account of its citizenry using money set aside to buy a new Bible to purchase a new bear instead. This was back in the early 17th century and the town bear was used for baiting, of course. The good people of Congleton have been baited with the following rhyme ever since:

Congleton rare, Congleton rare
Sold the town Bible to buy a new bear.

Of course, they didn't actually sell the Bible, but they did us the money set aside for that purpose.

Fittingly, the town has adopted the Moon Bear Rescue project as its charity for this year. Representatives came into Astbury primary school, where my wife's now teaching, and explained all about it. The poor bears are farmed for their bile to provide a completely superfluous ingredient for Chinese traditional medicine. I won't horrify you with the details, but it is truly appalling. Thank goodness someone is doing something about it and freeing the bears to enjoy some kind of quality of life in a special sanctuary.

That's outside of work - on the self-employed side of things I've also done some interim account handling for a design company and completed several market research projects.

But it's time to get back blogging.

I've not been to the Poetry Society's Stoke Stanza at The Leopard in Burslem for a wee while, but I noticed that a newcomer has mentioned it on their blog

It captures the atmosphere pretty well, I thought. I must get there next time.

Let's fly kites

Spring has sprung and now we've passed the Equinox, the nights will grow shorter and the days longer. It's a fresh spring day with a slight nip and a light breeze.

It's Lent but not the weather for kites. Now there's a strange connection. A few years ago I was surprised to read that in Greece the first day of Lent - 'Clean Monday' - was traditionally a day for families to go into the hills and fly kites. Lent starts two days earlier in the Orthodox calendar, apparently. They don't do Ash Wednesday and the ashes on the forehead thing, but their fasting regime is much stricter - although, with some casuistry, the Greeks have managed to wangle it that shrimps are classified as vegetables ...

Orthodox priest flying a kite

According to Bishop Kallistos Ware, the Orthodox are 'encouraged to associate Lent with fresh air, with the wind blowing in the hills, with the coming of spring. Lent is a time for flying kites - a time for adventure, exploration, fresh initiatives, new hope.' (Lent and the Consumer Society, in Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World ed. Andrew Walker and Costa Carras, London 1996).

I like this.


I'm in between jobs at the moment. I've just finished some freelance projects (I've had a good month) and am seeking my next. I've no idea how long that will take nor where it will come from. It's a bit like a kite, a sudden dip in the breeze and it plummets, only to rise up on the next eddy. I'm going to have to get used to this.

I wonder what new initiatives I can take, what adventures are in store?

Orthodox kite flying, Ilam, Derbyshire

I'm running a four-week Lent Study Group on poetry and creative writing - linking practical workshops with work by old and contemporary poets and aspects of the Psalms and various liturgies. It's the first time I've done something like this for a sustained period, so it's a form of kite flying. It seems to have got off to a flying start.

I could get even more corny and start tugging on the kite string metaphors for all they're worth. I've done enough of it already - but I will say this: even when the breeze has dropped, it's still worth the climb to enjoy the view.

For Realism

Who'd have thought of going to Birmingham for a day out? Well, during the February half-term I took a break from launching my glittering freelance career to do just that. We started off at the city's marvellous Art Gallery - one of the UK's great provincial collections - and its special exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite drawings.

We then went our separate ways, my wife and kids to The Bullring and yours truly down to the Jewellery Quarter to explore.



According to a trail-guide leaflet I'd picked up at the Art Gallery, Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter offers the visitor a 'unique urban landscape.' Well, it's certainly striking. I was taken with it, in fact. If you've never been it's worth a stroll around, a quirky blend of workshops and bling-merchants, Victorian cemeteries, a striking cast-iron urinal (sadly no longer in use) and the city's last remaining Georgian square. It still has a lived-in, work-a-day feel too, although you can see signs of gentrification around the edges.

My grandfather grew up near there, in a two-up/two-down Brummie back-to-back with an outside loo, no running water and 11 brothers and sisters. I'm half Brummie you see, my grandparents moved down to South Wales during the War. I looked up the length of Hockley Street towards Farm Street where he grew up, wearing a sister's cast-offs until he started school when he and his next sister received a set of 'parish' clothes which marked them out for scorn from the other kids.

Realism or Romanticism?

My granddad's old man was rather fond of the drink and would send him into the house to fetch his tea at the end of a shift (they worked in the same factory) then disappeared into the pub for the rest of the evening. I remember meeting my great-grandfather once. He was in his late 80s and  living in a high-rise as the Council had cleared the old slums. My granddad was completely teetotal on account of his dad. He wouldn't even touch trifle if it had sherry in it and once threatened to walk out when a surprise family celebration happened to be held in a pub.

It was his sisters that made the biggest impression, though. Real characters. All fiesty and five-foot nothing. There was Dot and Else, Lil and Minnie and aunt Nell who had been diagnosed as having the worst case of cerebral palsy in the Midlands. She was great. Her face would light up when we walked in and she'd call Aunt Else to fetch her purse so she could give us a tanner each. The Book of Common Prayer she gave us when we emigrated to Australia as £10 Poms in 1964 is one of my most treasured possessions. Long before my time, her mother used to wheel her right across Birmingham to the hospital where they'd twist and bend and manipulate her limbs. She was almost cork-screw shaped towards the end, her head facing back over her shoulders. The vicar who conducted her funeral said he'd learned more about faith and endurance from her than anything he'd been taught at seminary. They were the salt of the earth, all the Tonks girls.

Anyway ... a week or two later, on Radio 4's Poetry Please, I heard Roy Fisher's 'For Realism' which deals with that part of Birmingham and the slum clearances - it talks about 'the corner of Farm and Wheeler Streets', Lucas's lamp factory, 'a man in a blue suit/facing into a corner/straddling to keep his shoes dry.'

There's realism for you. That and my Granddad's mum wheeling Nellie right across town week in, week out.

'A conscience
builds, late, on the ridge. A realism
tries to record, before they've gone,
what silver filth their drains have run.'

Roy Fisher

What do you drive to?

It's Radio 4 or Radio 3 for me on long car journeys - which are quite rare when I'm driving alone. Usually if I'm driving for a few hours I've got the family with me and we're all fighting over the CD player. Thank goodness for i-pods. They keep the kids quiet.

On those rare occasions where I have the CD player all to myself I try to match the sounds to the mood. When I drove up to Manchester for a job interview recently I bobbed on a U2 CD, assuming it'd put me in an upbeat frame of mind. I didn't get the job but the CD did the trick.

Heading down through the Midlands today to see a client about some freelance work (how pretentious does that sound, 'client'?), I played Jacques Brel's Quand on n'a que l'amour. There's nothing like some Belgian/Gallic melodrama to brighten up the M6. Why doesn't someone do something about that? If this was France they'd have some sculptures along the crash-barriers, or at least painted screens so we don't actually have to see Birmingham ...


For some brain-food when I wasn't thinking about the meeting ahead, I played a CD I'd borrowed of George Szirtes reading his poems. Now I like listening to poetry in the car. I got through the whole of Paradise Lost on a series of trips to South Wales.

Coming back, it was chill-out time, so I unwound with The Unthanks - suicides, press-gangs and fatal fishing boat accidents have never sounded so harmonious.

I don't often drive down that spur of the M6. So I hadn't realised they'd turned Fort Dunlop into a Travelodge. What the ..?!

They've bolted a big blue hotel onto the back of it. At least the original building's still there, though. I always look out for it. That and the whopping big empty gasometers. I suppose those are the closest we'll get to sculpture along there.

But who cares when it's sing-a-long Jacques Brel? Well, if I knew the words I would ...

What're your driving tunes?

Or do you travel everywhere by train?

Freud would have a field day

Ok, I'm not getting all confessional here, but I do have very wierd dreams. Freud would have a field day.

This morning, for instance, I awoke from a recurring one. Unlike Gregor Samsa I had not been transformed overnight into a gigantic insect, but the Pterodactyl had been round again.

He's a bit different this one. He's a kind of 'Poetry Pterodactyl.' You've heard of Ted Hughes's 'Thought Fox'? Well, this chap runs along similar lines.

'Hi, I'm Ptery the Poetry Pterodactyl,
you got a nice pantoum for me today?

What happens in the dream is this - I'm up at one of the regular Poems and Pints sessions at The Beartown Tap in Congleton, only for some reason we're all outside in the woods. It's all a bit Wicker Man. As we're reading and declaiming our verse, there's a sudden, ominous booming and beating in the sky. A gigantic Pterodactyl-like creature appears above the trees, swooping and squawking. He's a bit like one of those giant flying lizards that the blue guys ride in Avatar.

He's the Poetry Pterodactyl and he's come for his supper. According to the dream, he lives in a cave down near Hodnet in Shropshire, where the famous Follies are. As soon as we start to read he somehow senses what we're doing and flies north to find us. He homes in on our Muse and swoops down, splintering boughs and scattering brushwood, cawing for his fix. No-one seems particularly perturbed, although we are all in awe, he is rather large and very impressive. We've seen him before, he's a regular visitor and somehow we know he's not going to gobble us all up. One of us then takes some poems and feeds them to the monster, who gulps the A4 pages down greedily, swallows them and flies off with a final swooping and cawing. I don't know whether we all chant or invoke him in some way, the dream doesn't have that much detail, but we do give him some poems to eat and off he goes.

I don't know whether he represents anything, a terrible craving that must be fed, or whether he's a form of wish fulfilment for us poetic dabblers - a rapacious audience that does not exist. Perhaps I just eat too much cheese.

I have wierd dreams. I still have the occasional one where I wander into a room where there are bosses and former colleagues who disappear when I approach them or walk past me as though I'm not there. Those are redundancy dreams and only to be expected. They're getting less frequent as I get busier.

I don't know where all that leaves me with Ptery the Poetry Pterodactyl. Perhaps if I don't feed him, he'll go away?

But I've grown quite found of the chap ...