'Out of the mouths ...' bubble-wrap, strawberries and temptation

HAPPY NEW YEAR

When our kids were little I recorded some of their cutest sayings in a notebook. ‘How clever of clouds,’ my youngest opined on a long car journey as her sister formed ‘horses’ and patterns in the various formations, ‘To make shapes!’

I sometimes dip into the notebook to chuckle and smile.

‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength ...’ the old Authorised Version of Psalm 8:2 puts it. Despite years of involvement with church I still had a hazy idea it might have been Shakespeare. So much for my English degree ... so much for most places not using the AV these days ...

I’ve not kept the notebook up to date since the girls were in their early teens. I should have done. They still come out with wise words and things that make us laugh.

‘D’you know,’ my eldest observed the other day, ‘The guys who work in bubble-wrap factories must practice remarkable restraint.’

I found myself wondering whether the management put squares of bubble-wrap aside for them to use to relieve their frustration. I used to work on a fruit farm in the summers during university breaks and they’d tell us to eat the first strawberry and then we wouldn’t be tempted to scoff any more as we started to pick. I’m not sure it worked.

If the retail figures from this Christmas are anything to go by then people have been fairly restrained in terms of spending. What expenditure there has been is necessarily at the expense of something else.  All these downloads and apps. I must be the only person still buying CDs.

I did reasonably well last year in terms of self-employment, but we’re still being careful. We allow ourselves a decent roast on a Sunday, a bottle or two of wine each week, the occasional restaurant meal. 

‘I can resist anything except temptation,’ said Oscar Wilde, a veritable walking bubble-wrap factory of bon-mots.

Working for myself the temptation isn’t so much to go out and do some retail therapy, drink endless cups of coffee or go down the pub.  Yet it is all too tempting to mess around on Facebook or mug up on trivia on-line rather than knuckling down to chasing new business or developing relationships with existing clients.

I’ve made New Years Resolutions on that and broken them already. But there’s always a second chance.

I wish you all whatever you’d wish yourselves this New Year. For myself, enough to keep food on the table, wine in the pantry and time to write. Now about that novel ...

Bah! Hamburg!?

Merry Christmas from Phil Williams!

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year – and whatever floats your boat continues to float it ...

I don’t know if it’s just me, though, but there does seem to be a frosty sting of austerity in the air. I wandered through Birmingham’s extensive Frankfurt Christmas Market the other day (without spending a penny ... I’d already had a sandwich so couldn’t face a frankfurter or a two-pint tankard of beer). I understand it’s packed on weekends and in the evening but there were few punters around as I passed through. Impressive though, it spilled out with Hansel and Gretel style stalls almost all the way down to New Street station from Chamberlain Square. Perhaps I was being tight (bah! Humbug! Bah! Hamburg? Bah! Frankfurt?!) – but I didn’t even stop to buy some tempting wooden toads with knobbly backs that you run a stick across to play tunes. The bloke at the stall did it well, but he also appeared desperate.

What do you buy for the man/kids/wife who was everything?

A knobbly-backed toad you can play tunes on.

It’s all about choosing your pitch. Or paying for it. The stalls in the main squares seemed to be doing better than those around the edges or down the side-streets. Surely, though, there’s a limit to how many stalls there can be selling virtually the same stuff. The experts will correct me, but there are only so many sausage stalls you can cram into a single market.

It was fun, though, and cheery. I take my hat off to Birmingham City Council for keeping up the cheer despite the impending cuts.

Merry Christmas one and all. ‘God bless us every one!’

Tum te Tum Tum Tum te te Tum te Tum Tum

‘Let us make one thing clear: Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living poet in the English language.’

Nicholas Lezard in a review of Speech! Speech! in The Guardian 2001.

Michael Schmidt, Director of Carcanet Press made the same claim as he introduced Hill at the John Rylands Library, Manchester last night. It’s always intimidating to be in the presence of a Behemoth, a Leviathan. Acutely so in Hill’s Gandalfian presence with his white, Athonite beard and broad, bald dome. As the allusions and references tumble forth you realise that his wide, pink skull contains as much condensed wisdom as the hallowed shelves of the Ryland itself – a cathedral to the written word.

There were many luminaries in the audience, established poets whose works are anthologised or taught in schools. Contemporary poets who lecture, review, run workshops, present TV documentaries. Yet whose collective output Sir Geoffrey once described as so much ‘land-fill’. What acerbic comment and withering judgements would the great man deliver tonight?

We found him in more avuncular mood. The wind and rain was so atrocious outside that he deemed those who had ventured out on such a night to hear him already ‘converted.’ There were scathing comments about bankers, politicians and middle-brow Radio 4 cultural output. Earnest young people who accost him to query his emphasis on ‘form’ would be better joining the ranks of the City execs rather than pursuing the unforgiving angel of poetry ...

Geoffrey Hill lectured at Leeds in my undergraduate days in the 1980s. We were all in awe of him. I only heard him once as my module choices took me in a different direction. I only remember a single line, one he had repeated again and again. Thomas Hobbes on Sydney Godolphin, struck down by ‘an undiscerned and undiscerning hand.’

'Well done, brave Hobbit!' ... Ed Reiss.
I have a photo of myself and Ed at Bill's wedding bash but this isn't it.

Hill must have given this lecture many times. Ed Reiss, the cousin of my friend Bill, a lecturer at Bradford and a poet and reviewer in his own right, had heard it too. He completed the line for me when we discussed it at Bill’s wedding celebration in London. Ed was there last night and I was delighted to hear Geoffrey commend a review he’d written in Agenda.

I was queuing for the great man to sign my second-hand copy of his Collected Poems which I’d found already signed in a Suffolk book-shop. I’d joked with Simon Armitage beforehand (name dropper!) that it reminded me of the incident in Gig where he claims to have found a copy of an early collection he’d signed for his parents in a second-hand dump bin. Just ahead of me, Hill was commending the partner of the poet Frances Leviston for a review he’d written of his previous collection. In doing so he also cited Ed’s review as ‘exactly what a review should be.’

I called Ed over and Hill was generous with his praise. It was a solemn, almost holy moment. It was like watching Gandalf confer an honour on a valiant hobbit.

I went home content and with one abiding thought. To illustrate the English Sapphic metre of a wonderful poem by Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Geoffrey told us he would render the stressed syllable as ‘Tum’ and the unstressed as ‘te’. Imagine then, his grave and magisterial tone as he proceeded to declaim, ‘Tum – te – Tum Tum Tum   – te- te-Tum-te- Tum Tum ...’

Never have I heard a ‘Tum-te-tum-te-tum’ intoned with such Churchillian authority.
(And thanks to Ed Reiss for rendering the caesura at the heart of the dactyllic foot).

The Sidney extract came from Arcadia - 'If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand/Or mine eyes' language she do hap to judge of ...'

As Lezard put it in that Guardian review (a cutting of which lay at the back of my second hand Collected Poems), ‘One may ask oneself what the hell Hill is going on about, but just listen to the glorious way he says it.’

Sir Geoffrey signed my second-hand collected poems a second time. ‘And again’.

‘Again and again in peace, let us pray to the Lord,’ I muttered, dropping in an allusion of my own. I first read Hill at school (Genesis), heard him at university, heard him again as the 80 year old patriarch of English verse. Resurgat.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel

My wife sings in the choir at the magnificent Astbury parish church on ‘High Days and Holidays’ in exchange for practising with them on a Friday night – one of her few ‘me-times’ during a busy week.

She also sings at the occasional wedding or other service. I like going with her when it’s Candlemas, Easter or Advent – or one of the other major festivals. I love all that. Funnily enough, my wife doesn’t. She is inveterately ‘low-church’ and was perfectly happy when we attended a Baptist church. She’s very pragmatic and doesn’t like ‘fripperies’. She's not keen on wearing the very fetching red choir robes either. I think they’re cool. What she does like, though, is the music. 

They have a very competent and knowledgeable conductor up there at Astbury and they do proper anthems and the kind of traditional Anglican music that is so rarely heard these days. Where else could my wife go – other than to some kind of choral or operatic society – to sing ‘proper’ music? I mean, no disrespect to ‘happy-clappy’ or ‘contemporary’ Christian music buffs (oh, alright, I’ll come clean, with a lot of disrespect for ... ). I'm sure that contemporary worship-songs demand a level of musicianship in a different way, but let’s face it – if you want to sing something more stretching then you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Sure, I accept that these songs are intended for congregational use rather than trained choirs. That said, they so often sound as if they are intended for praise-bands on stage rather than people with a diverse range of singing abilities in the pews or the plastic bucket-seats.

The traditional Advent hymns ‘get’ me every time. Those lines in ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’ that run, ‘In ancient time didst give the Law/In cloud and majesty and awe ...’

We also had ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’ last night, which struck me as strange outside of a Eucharistic context, but still ... what a cracking hymn.

Some Christian traditions observe Advent as a kind of mini-Lent, not something I have done hitherto. But it makes a lot of sense. If Advent is the season where we remind ourselves of Christ’s first and second-comings and prepare to celebrate his Nativity, then it seems appropriate to mark it in some way. I’m going to explore ways of doing that this Advent season. I’m not quite sure how but I do consciously want to avoid the vapid commercialism that is such a feature of this time of year. Sure, I’ll enjoy my turkey and my Christmas pud’ when the time comes, but I was struck by the note of ‘repentance’ in the sermon last night. Not in any po-faced, pietistic way, but that sense of preparing our minds, adjusting our focus. The rector used a beautiful and striking analogy drawn from London tube-trains ... how we feel the wind and breeze of them before they arrive. I’ll carry that with me as I feel the soft breeze on my cheek, the wind begin to stir and ruffle my hair.

What It Says On The Tin

I sometimes wonder whether this blog is in breach of the Trades Descriptions Act. It’s billed as ‘Phil The Bard’ but there’s often very little ‘bardic’ on it – (‘I am Taliesin ...’).

Even the header photo is misleading. My daughter set it up and took it. Much as I appreciated her trouble, there are inaccuracies.

For a kick-off I never, ever, ever, ever (did I say ‘ever’?) drink beer from a can. It’d more likely to be a bottle-conditioned ale. My daughter, bless her, found an empty bottle of Stout that my wife had used in cooking. She did drink Stout from cans, my wife, when the kids were babies. It helped with the lactation. But that’s too much information. If I’m going to drink Stout I’ll have it from hand-pumps down at my local or else from a bottle. Never from a can. Same goes for other ales.

So, this is a misleading blog. A bardic blog with few poems on it. Well, I’m about to rectify that as I’ve had seven poems published in recent weeks. It’s like buses. You don’t get one for ages and then they all come at once. I’m pleased to say that I’ve had six in the latest edition of Iota (Iota 91) and one in Planet, the Welsh Internationalist Magazine. This is the first time I’ve made it into Iota and to have all six submissions accepted is very gratifying. It’s the second time I’ve been in Planet. What a great magazine it is.

What I’ll do is reproduce one of the published poems here and put it along with the rest on one of the side links should anyone be kind enough to want to read them.

Or you can read them here and here.

If you do, then pray let me know what you think. We bardic types like that. We’re all ego. We’d like to think it’s art.

The Gas Fridge

What else in 1980s bedsit land

but 1960s furniture? Earlier even.

Items I had not seen since pre-fab

parlours, great aunts' kitchens.

Then, unexpectedly,

where I prepared for finals

and for unemployment, a gas fridge.

Half the height of ours at home,

it fed, like cooker and gas fire,

on the 50p coins I pressed and turned

into the meter every second day.

It showed its life by a pilot-light,

blue and awkward behind its back.

To ignite it I would stoop and drop

match after lighted match

down its fissured tube, hope

that they would reach and catch

before they fizzled out.

I could waste half a precious box

before I found the knack.

Who would have thought

that Einstein patented the spell

that drove ammonia around

those cooling pipes without a sound?

A pity then no patent way

to keep the pilot light from going out

in Mrs Hossey's redbrick bedsits.

'No blacks, lovey, no coloureds.'

Just two pints of Stones

in The Little Park on my 21st

birthday. The Sheffield drifting

in the South Atlantic, charred

and stricken. Boys my own age

between her decks, burning.

--

If you've enjoyed that (and even if you didn't) have a look at the page on the right with the rest of the poems. Why not visit the Iota and Planet websites. Take out a subscription too, if you are so inclined. The good people there would be very grateful. These magazines deserve our support.