shewhomust | Entries tagged with poems

There's nothing like the Council withdrawing support for an event to tempt me to attend: but we didn't go to Pride last Sunday, instead we went to Amble for the Puffin Festival.

A sunny (if blowy) day at the seaside, with a small, puffin-themed fetival, what could be nicer? There may have been fewer stalls in the square than in previous years, but on the other hand we made better use of our time, catching both a poetry reading and an art exhibition. I also enjoyed chatting to the landscape photographer who has one of the little tourist shops (about light, and graduated lenses, and suchlike).

The poetry came from Katrina Porteous, reading in the micro-pub on the square: I liked Coastal erosion, which begins:

First to go is the footpath, smoking fireweed, the hawthorn
Reddening along the Grassy Banks, then the railway line
The end terraces, blackened memorials -

but moves on to consider erosion in a less literal sense. The art exhibition, a single room in the local art centre at the far end of Queen Street, was 36 Views of Coquet Island, which began as a lockdown collaboration - in fact, here it is! - allowing the widest ranging interpretation of its theme: music, photography, embroidery, a recollection of 36 Years of Roseate Tern Management...

Walking the length of Queen Street twice (there and back) also gave us a chance to admire the colourful puffins in the shop windows, contributed by the local primary schools. This, though commendable, is usually a bit repetitive, each child in the entire class producing, to the best of their ability, a copy of the same model. This year, though, each window had a selection of variations on the theme, and some of them were very creatively coloured:

The message was bad news, though. We had achieved our wider exploration of the festival by skipping lunch, and now we were ready for a sandwich and a sit-down. But, festival or no festival, it was Sunday afternoon and the shops were closed. Eventually we found ourselves back at the harbour, where Lilly's Landing provided us with perfectly good coffee and a total absence of any food that wasn't cake. Which was diappointing, but I was still well pleased with my day out.

The weather, as forecast, is mixed: patches of beautiful sunshine, and sudden showers. Monday morning did not look promising, so we started with a visit to the Museum, which is in run by English Heritage as an introduction to the Priory, and has been much revamped since our last visit, three years ago. It is distinctly a museum of two halves - three, if you count the gift shop, and you probably should. You enter through the historical section: information boards about Northumbria's golden age, the kings and the saints and the coming of the Vikings.. a fine collection of carved stones, and one tiny piece of blue glass, the size of a child's thimble. When you have passed through this gallery, you find yourself in a darkened space hung with representations of Holy Island, dominated by a multimedia piece by Olivia Lomenech-Gill, whose images of wild creatures form a sort of nature trail through the museum. It's a map of the island, mashed up with drawings and collaged treasures and scraps of text from Katrina Porteous's poem The Refuge Box (extract here) which plays on a loop in the gallery. Did I like the image? I couldn't really see it as a whole. But I enjoyed getting right up close to the glass and looking at all the little details:

( Between the two... )

After the museum, a quick visit to the Priory, cut short by the rain. We took refuge in the church, and then made a dash to the Post Office and bought supplies for lunch. In the afternoon the sunshine lured me out, solo this time, and I wandered down to the harbour, where the rain caught me again, and I sat it out in the shelter of the Window on Wild Lindisfarne, watching the swallows swooping past - and under, for the one brave swallow who had nested there. By the time I got home, the sun was hot.

We had a quiet Christmas staying with D.and

valydiarosada, being waited on hand and foot, which was delightful; we had a quiet New Year with D.and

valydiarosada staying here, where the service is not in the same class, but that was fun too. Around and between both of these, there was a certain amount of smaller scale visiting. The festive season is not over: but our visitors have returned home, and I am beginning to catch up with myself.

In that spirit, I'm not even going to try to report everything that has happened. Instead, the message received in a Christmas card from the fabulous Gail-Nina, who knows what I like. Outside it's an attractive snowy street scene, in a tasteful colour scheme of monochrome enlivened by red highlights and gold stars - yopu have to look very closely to spot a brightly coloured beak poking out from behind a chimney pot. Inside, though, there is a very visible puffin, and the following poem:

The Puffins of Winter are already here
By Christmas they're quite omnipresent.
They'll roost on your buildings or perch in your square
By the light of the moon (full or crescent).
They're frankly enormous, with beaks of bright red,
They're gluttons for sand-worms or fishes;
But they do win our heartts (once they're properly fed)
By conveying the season's Best Wishes.

Though startling these spectres can certainly be
Uncanny & eerie (yet fleeting)
By dawn they'll have safely returned to the sea
Euphoniously trailing their greeting.
So welcome their presence if they should appear
Whether hovering, lurking or looming,
As "Christmas Good Wishes & a Happy New Year"
Echo back from the waves wild & foaming.

As I was saying, George Mackay Brown was born one hundred years ago today, in a little house in Stromness. I have stayed in that house (not to be confused with the house in Stromness where he was then living): it was a holiday rental, and there's a picure of it on this page (scroll down).

I shall be in Stromness again next midsummer - hooray!

Meanwhile, have Stromness poem.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/767760.html

Three deliveries yesterday: this may be a record. Coffee from Traidcraft, plus rice and dried fruit, but no toilet roll (not a big surprise); meat and some veg from Broom House Farm, but no yoghourt (a morning phome call warned me that the supplier's van had broken down); as far as I know,

durham_rambler's beer order was delivered in full. Ocado are currently playing "You just missed today's release of slots", which is annoying.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying sorting my photos from Shetland last summer. Here's one from Quendale Mill:

Another showed the inside of a cubicle door in the ladies' toilets at Lerwick's museum: a poem from the 'Bards in the Bog' project, Alison Brackenbury's Honeycomb. Explanations and more poems on the Library website.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/719595.html

The Quotation of the Day feed tells me that "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast". That sums up my view of the Today programme. Only yesterday I was earwormed, before I was even out of bed, by news items assuring me that the US was ready and willing to do trade deals with the UK, just as soon as we were free of those European restrictions:

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

How prescient of Lewis Carroll

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/690094.html

Colpitts Poetry, a long established Durham institution, emerged from a period of dormancy (which I shall be optimistic and call "hibernation") on Friday evening, for a reading by two local poets, both members of the Vane Women collective. S.J. Litherland is much respected, but I don't usually find her poetry very approachable. On this occasion she was aided and abetted by traditional musician Ian McKone - that is, there had clearly been collusion about the choice, and the timing, of his tunes and songs, and the combination worked well for me. It was pleasant to sit in the darkening room, as the candles became more visible in the dusk - a Colpitts tradition, that only the reader has electric light - and listen to the words and music.

What had drawn me to the reading, though, was the support act, Diane Cockburn, of whom - of whose work, but also in fact of whom - I am very fond. Here's Electric Mermaid, the title poem of her first and to date only collection. I could have sworn I'd posted this before, but I've spent longer than I should have poking around the internet, and found no evidence of it. I did, on the other hand, find one of the poems she read on Friday, Hocus Pocus, a cautionary tale of a sénce gone wrong. But the poem that stays with me is the one with which she ended her set, written for a project to write in the voice of a woman from an exhibition of portraits of unidentified subjects. Diane had chosen a woman in severe costume, wearing a gauntlet on which she carried a bird: but instead of producing some historically plausible monologue, she had come up with a fever dream of a poem about a dystopia beset each morning by noxious vapours, which could only be warded off by a gathering of bearers of birds and beasts. The speaker, with a linnet on her gloved fist (the part of the linnet played by an RSPB fluffy songthrush, linnets being unavailable, attached to a furry mitten) and curses the person who arrived before her and grabbed her favourite axolotl. This sounds comic - and it was funny, and we laughed - but there was something eerie about it too, especially in the final song of the false linnet.

On Saturday we went to Bishop Auckland, for the Food Fair; I had picked up a leaflet and then forgotten all about it, but J. telephoned and we agreed to meet her there. We have done this before, more than once (the first time seems to have been ten years ago) and part of the attraction has always been that the fair extends out of the Market Place into the grounds of the castle, and there's usually a chance to nose around the castle as well. Not this year, as there are extensive renovations going on at the castle. So there were fewer photo opportunities than usual:

But the nice man from Riverford gave me an apple, and I stocked up on Lacey's cheese, and J. introduced us to the free bookshop, and it was bright and warm enough - just! - to buy our lunch from the street food stalls... We took J. home, and she gave us tea and showed off the progress of her home improvements, and then we stopped at Lidl on the way home. Which is like going to another food festival, so many strange and wonderful things to tempt us:

durham_rambler considered a bargain hedge trimmer from the centre aisle (not that we have a hedge, but it was a bargain!) while I resisted the siren song of the freezer full of Polish dumplings: should I buy plum, or sour cream? No, I should not. But I did buy a jar of stuffed cabbage, and some pickled herring.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/679762.html

Today's news is that the government has set up a working group to track down that elusive solution to the Irish border problem. I think I know what their methodology will be:

[They] may seek it with thimbles - and seek it with care;
[They] may hunt it with forks and hope;
[They] may threaten its life with a railway-share;
[They] may charm it with smiles and soap -

but none of this will help them if it turns out - as I fear it may - to be a Boojum.

( There's more: )

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/672081.html

The best laid plans: home from London, a week before Christmas and no commitments until the New Year, other than pleasing ourselves. I had a fairly good idea what needed to be done in the next few days, to set us up for the holiday period. So did

durham_rambler. They were not, as it happens, the same idea: but they weren't incompatible, and over breakfast this morning we agreed a working schedule. Then he set off on the first of his errands, and I discovered that my desktop wouldn't turn on.

Ouch.

durham_rambler has now persuaded it back to life, and is running a backup; meanwhile, I am at the kitchen table with my notebook, and no access to the work tasks I meant to do. Oh, well then, time for a footnote to the previous post.

One of the things

boybear had told me about the Waterpoint sessions was that a singer called Chris had set a poem called The Stormcock's Song which he very much liked. It might or might not be by Hugh McDiamid, and the internet didn't seem to know anything about it.

This was a challenge, and I spent some time searching for poems about stormcocks - which are mistle thrushes - and finding a surprising number of them. The first thing you have to do is screen out Roy Harper (Wikipedia thinks Stormcock is his best album).

In that case, says the internet, you must mean Stormcock in Elder by Ruth Pitter, for which there are abundant study notes. No, I don't, and it doesn't do much for me as a poem (though it does offer a close-up description of the bird, which could be useful). Nor do I want Kipling's Minesweepers:

"Mines reported in the fairway,
"Warn all traffic and detain.
" 'Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."

That's an obvious red herring. But the storm-cock sings in early spring to restart the wheel of the seasons, in A Shropshire Lad:

So braver notes the storm-cock sings
To start the rusted wheel of things,
And brutes in field and brutes in pen
Leap that the world goes round again.

No? Well, Cicely Lane Fox always looks ready to be set as a song:

As I went down the Portsmouth Road, a careless, rambling fellow,
The stormcock whistled on the bough, a stave both loud and mellow;
To hear his song I paused awhile, then tossed it back with laughter,
But all along the seaward road, I heard it follow after:

"East - West - home is best - you'll wander far and lone, lad,
But of all the lands you'll find on Earth, there's none just like your own, lad."

Fortunately, Chris Tymkow was at the Waterpoint on Monday evening, and

boybear was able not only to put in a request but also to buy his CD. He's right, it's an excellent song:

Blessed are those who have songs to sing
When others are silent; poor song though it be,
Just a message to the silence that someone is still
Alive and glad, though on a naked tree.

And of course

boybear was right all along: it is by Hugh McDiarmid.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/665838.html

We did not go to Danny Boyle's Pages of the Sea last Sunday, although we could quite easily have gone to Roker, one of the participating beaches. Why did we not go? As you know, I was feeling ambivalent about all this remembering, and marked the moment of the Armistice by composing a post about it. And I was afraid the event would be horribly crowded, that too. Seeing photographs of the event, I think I was wrong on both counts: here's my favourite picture (the photographer reserves his rights, but it's worth clicking through. Also, a description of the event, and more photographs in this set.).

Why Pages of the Sea? It's a line from Carol Ann Duffy's poem, The Wound in Time, which also does a fine job of balancing solemn commemoration with actual remembering.

We did, though, watch Peter Jackson's film, They Shall Not Grow Old, though I watched a fair bit if it with my hand over my eyes. It's an astonishing piece of work, opening with the familiar jerky black and white film flickering in a small square in the middle of the screen, the men's voices telling cheerfully how they had signed up, singly and in groups (and many of them so young) and been trained for war. And as they set off for France, the image began to fill the screen, the motion became smoother and more natural, until suddenly there was colour. Like Summer Holiday, only completely different.

It was fascinating, but I wasn't as moved by it as I had anticipated. There were moments when I had to look away (not always fast enough!) but overall it left me with more questions than emotions. I'd have loved to see an accompanying 'making of', not so much for the technical 'how did they do that?' questions (some of which are answered by this Radio Times article) as the editorial questions: who filmed this in the first place? And how, and why? What choice did Jackson have from the material available to him? Likewise for the commentary, which is compiled from oral archives recorded in the 60s and 70s by the BBC and the Imperial War Museum. Jackson comments on its extraordinary stoicism, which is true, but only part of it: against the background of every idea we now have about the war, it is positively cheerful. Not just in the opening scenes, when you might expect the film-maker to select extracts which reflect the light-hearted, optimistic expectation of a war which would be over by Christmas, not just the matter-of-factness of the descriptions of life (and death) in the trenches, the cold, the mud, the rats, the man next to you falling dead from sniper fire, but at the end of the film, the men who looked back and 'wouldn't have missed it for the world'... These were, of course, by definition the survivors, and more, the survivors who were prepared to speak to authority about what they had survived.

Meanwhile, the camera reminded you all the time of what voices were not saying. Who was the intended audience of these scenes? The cheerful groups at mess tables, or marching past the camera shouting "Hello, Mum!", I can imagine these scenes being shown: but the squalor of the trenches, both in tragic mode (those youthful faces now looking up from corpses half eaten by the mud) or comic (the rows of bare bottoms strung along a pole above a latrine pit), would this ever be shown to those at home? The footage of life in the trenches was so immediate and candid, too, it was a struggle to remember that it wasn't filmed on the ubiquitous iPhone, but on heavy cameras that had to be manhandled into position.

'Manhandled'. that's another thing: this was the war as we have only recently learned not to think of it, exclusively male and white. Was it Jackson's decision to focus in this way, to exclude the women who overcame official opposition to do their bit at the front? Or are they absent from the IWM's archive, neither seen nor heard? Similarly, it's a very European view of the war to be made by a New Zealander: Jackson talks about his interest in the war beginning with stories of his grandfather, who signed up (admittedly with the South Wales Borderers) in 1910, but fought at Gallipoli as well as in the Somme.

Against all this, my last question is trivial, but I stumble across it every time I try to think or talk about the film: how did they decide on the title They Shall Not Grow Old? The phrase draws so much power from Binyon's For the Fallen, and then stumbles, because it's wrong: I keep wanting to say the familiar words, ",They shall grow not old..." Does it work with that association? Someone must have decided it does.

And that's it, a century plus a week has passed. Will World War II be commemorated in the same way? I find that unthinkable, it seems such an entirely different matter (don't ask me why).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/661167.html

Here we are at last, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the hundredth year, and I am pretty much poppied out. I have been genuinely touched by many moments of commemoration and reflection during the past four years, and some of them have involved the imagery of the poppy (I wish I had seen the Weeping Window in one of its manifestations...). But as the hour approached, and the crocheted poppies have spread across the country, and FB group for the local paper's camera club has become more and more speckled with red and the declaration "We will remember them..." is appended to every photoshopped image... I'm sure it's all very sincere (even the 'poppy run' which I initially thought was an ultimate piece of cashing in, turns out to be a British Legion fundraiser, so I guess they are entitled) but I think more and more bitterly of that 'war to end all wars', and how it didn't.

I must already have been starting to feel this way last month, at the Lakes Comics Festival launch for the Traces of the Great War anthology, because I was particular attracted by the invitation not just to "remember" but to consider what came after, what marks the war has left on us today. It opens with a challenge from Robbie Morrison and Charlie Adlard. They have written before about White Death, the use of avalanches in mountain warfare, which continues to release the bodies of its dead: how would today's teenagers react to this very material trace of war? Mary and Bryan Talbot examine the demand for Germany to make reparation for the past war, and how this helped cause the next one (reflected in Mikiko's depiction of the German side of remembrance: there are no winners in war... only hunger, suffering, death, grief...). Other contributions point out that in Russia the war is eclipsed by the revolution it surely helped to trigger; Orijit Sen, meanwhile, chooses to remind us of the pressures that sent a 'Ship of Liberty' from India to Canada, and back.

Perversely, among all this internationalism, the two pages which most move me are the double page spread in which Simon Armitage and Dave McKean consider that most parochial residue of the war, the village memorial, with its list of names:

...what better way
to monumentalise
the dead and lost

within the clockwork
of the mind

than honour them
with stone and time

As a counter to this intensely local meditation of the act of memory, and again perversely, contradicting anything I may have said about welcoming the book's emphasis of traces, residue, looking back, I am particularly grateful for the contribution of Riff Reb's, which introduced me to the haikus of Julien Vocance. I know that it's too much to ask that a book published simultaneously in English and French should also produce a bilingual edition, just for me: but here, more than with any other contribution, I wished that was possible. Three cheers for the internet: here are the original haikus, one hundred visions of war, written on the moment in the trenches, panoramas of ruined countryside and tiny close-ups, moments of horror and moments of rest. (This essay on haiku in the Great War gives some examples with English translations.)

There's only one way to conclude this incoherent collection of thoughts and emotions:

"Phil Ochs - The War is over" (Watch on YouTube)

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/659991.html

From Wood Lane's ridge, through Queen's and Highgate woods: the ups and downs
of glacier trails that melted here and left their clay and pock-marked stones,
we three - three generations - walk ...

Celia McCulloch is Diamond Twig's Poem of the Month

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/659285.html

With thanks to

radiantfracture for introducing me to this poem by Kathy Fish, whom I had not previously met:

A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: a bewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is — a band.

It gets less happy.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/620579.html

Yesterday's Poem of the Day came from an unexpected source: Countdown. The current guest in Dictionary Corner is Rufus Hound, a pleasant surprise, as I'd enjoyed his first visit, but that was so long ago that I'd tired of complaining that he hadn't been invited back. Well, evidently they were saving him up for the final. Once again, his spot consists of a poem written for the occasion. Mostly these are funny, and that's their whole point, but yesterday's had something to say. It begins:

I've a very low opinion of people at the moment
Myself included, I am not exempt
For whilst person by person we seem just fine
As a species we've earnt nothing but contempt.

The language is simple but effective, the rhymes are pointed and the scansion close enough, but what quoting a few lines can't show you is the way the argument builds, pivots, and concludes. You'll just have to read the whole thing.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/611123.html

Today is the centenary of the birth of Charles Causley. There's a festival in Launceston to mark the occasion, but it doesn't seem to have troubled the national media.

The first poetry book I ever owned was Dawn & Dusk, contemporary poetry for children edited by Charles Causley: it was published in 1962, so I think it must have been given to me when it was new. There were a couple of Penguin Comic and Curious Verse collections which I knew cover to cover and inside out, but they were household property, and Dawn & Dusk was mine. Causley had included a couple of his own poems, so that's where I first read Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience. He's often described as a children's poet, and he did write poems for children, but he also wrote poems about children, which is not the same thing at all. There's nothing in the form or the language of this poem which a child couldn't manage: he's perfectly justified in calling it a 'nursery rhyme'. But the theme of innocence and experience, the series of disquieting questions with which the poem ends - there's nothing childish about those.

Later in the 1960s (I can't find an exact date) Causley was included in the third of Penguin's 'Modern Poets' series, and that's where I first met his Ballad for Katherine of Aragon. Being a ballad, it lends itself to being sung: this isn't the setting I first learned, and I like that one better - but this is the better performance:

Watch on YouTube

The other poem from that collection of which I can still recite solid chunks is a bit of an anomaly: Betjeman, 1984 envisages an Orwellian future in which Betjeman's love for the past is applied to the disdained trivia of the writer's present. Jerome K. Jerome got there first, but Causley achieves an unexpectedly wicked pastiche:

Take your ease, pale-haired admirer,
As I, half the century saner,
Pour a vintage Mazawattee
Through the Marks & Spencer strainer
In a genuine British Railways
(Luton Made) cardboard container.

Eventually (presumably in 1997) they brought out a 'Collected Poems', a volume to get lost in> I open it now and find myself reading an old favourite, or something entirely unfamiliar. I could sit here all night. But

durham_rambler would not forgive me if I failed to mention the Ballad of Jack Cornwell, another little-more-than-a-child whose innocence was taken from him in the Battle of Jutland:

I woke up one morning
Unwound my sheet of clay,
Lifted up my tombstone lid
And asked the time of day.
I walked out one morning
When the sun was dark
Left my messmates sleeping
Deep on Manor Park...

Search the internet and you find plenty of obituaries and appreciations, not so much poetry: which is perfectly proper, as it is still in copyright. Go buy the books. But first, a few free samples:

Who?

Eden Rock

Martin Simpson again, with Jim Causley's setting of Angel Hill

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/594831.html

Each year S. spends a week in Durham at a Classics Summer School, and each year she invites us to gatecrash the evening session at which James McKay, one of the tutors and also, in his own words, a 'poet and reciter', reads poetry. This is fairly loosely connected to the themes of the summer school - one year, I recall, he simply read Sohrab and Rustum in its entirety. On Tuesday the menu was more mixed: some of his own stuff, some Byron (not for the first time) and a generous helping of 'my latest crush', James Elroy Flecker (hooray).

He began with The Old Ships (it is the obvious gateway drug) and ended with To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence ("I'm not going to do The Golden Road to Samarkand - you can look it up!") and plenty more in between. His reading was a little over-emphatic for my taste - readings almost always are, I'd rather you let the words do the work - but it was a pleasure to sit back and listen. Here's a sample:

(On Soundcloud, if that embed is not working.)

Of his own poems, I particularly enjoyed the one in which he used dactylic hexameter (not from the forthcoming collection, apparently, but the one after): I hadn't even known that was a thing in English, but yes, apparently so, and McKay recommended A. H. Clough's Amours de Voyage (article links to the Gutenberg text). But, wait! There's more, because that article also refers to Clough's The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, a phrase I know as part of my father's vocabulary - though I never knew where it came from, and couldn't have spelled it.

The evening ended with a chunk of Byron's Beppo. Which was fun, but a bit of an anticlimax.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/589797.html

That summer feeling, where doing not very much still fills the day from end to end, with plenty of breaks for reading or poking about the internet. Time slips by, yet nothing seems to have happened - or at least, nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, rounding up a few things -

Last Friday we went to a wine tasting at Majestic wines. We'd dropped in the previous day, in search of rosé, and since the tasting was of rosé, and the price of the ticket was redeemable against buying wine, and we weren't doing anything else, it seemed worth a try. We weren't sure what to expect, but we caught the bus, in the pouring rain, and were welcomed into the shop by Mike who had served us the previous day and was our 'wine guru' for the evening, busy putting out chairs for the six customers. That made it one of the smallest tastings I've ever been to, and definitely one of the least formal (we were not - quite - rowdy, but we may have come close). Mike had put together half a dozen wines from six different countries at a range of prices (and showed us, with evident regret, the Bandol which his budget wouldn't cover). The hit of the evening was a Côtes de Provence in a fancy square bottle, which I thought pretentious and not very interesting, certainly not justifying its price. I was disappointed in the Chapel Down (and I wish I'd been taking notes, because I don't remember why), intrigued by the Muga, which had the flavour of Cava but without the fizz, could have done without the Route 88 White Zinfandel (pink sugar-water) and of the six preferred the Breganze Pinot Grigio, an easy-drinking blush. But I didn't like any of them as well as the La Serrana we had bought the previous day, deep raspberry red with a surprising tannic grip, and how can they possibly sell something drinkable at that price? After which we caught the bus home to a takeaway pizza and a bottle of decent red. A fun evening, good company, I'd do it again.

We've been enjoying Doctor Who. The series began while we were away on holiday, so we've been watching on catch-up, and were following along a week behind transmission. On Saturday we watched the last two episodes back to back in one feature length extravaganza - and I'm glad we did, because I would have found the cliff-hanger irritating and the second part dragged out. As it was, I didn't feel it earned its extra lenth, but that was less obvious since we'd chosen to watch at extra-length anyway. The series as a whole has been very uneven, which I suppose is what you get if you have different authors for different stories. and there have been bits of dialogue (usually when the Doctor has to say something particularly high-minded) when I've just thought 'no!' but I tend to blame the writer rather than the actor. Overall, I've enjoyed Peter Capaldi's Doctor, and I'm sorry we have entered its end-game. Nardole was fun; Bill was fine, though the University setting was one of the more alien worlds the Doctor has visited. Initially I greeted the rehabilitation (or not) of Missy as a pretty threadbare plot device (I still don't buy the idea that the Master is the Doctor's oldest, bestest friend, he just happens to be evil) but it grew on me. She gets all the best lines...

We were at the Lit & Phil last night for the launch of Peter Mortimer's book The Chess Traveller: the proposal was that Pete would start from a randomly selected point and proceed from there by bike to a sequence of other randomly selected points, at each of which he would engage a total stranger in a game of chess. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, of course, and the sections Pete read out were very funny about what did go wrong - as always with Peter Mortimer, I'm half amazed at what he achieves and half baffled how he gets away with it. But looking forward to reading the book.

At the market this morning I bought a red hat. Nothing special, and not expensive, just a floppy sun hat with a wide brim, in a strong deep red, lined with dark green. Only later did I realise that I was already wearing purple (with which it doesn't go). No-one can say they had no warning...

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/586372.html

Gail-Nina Anderson doesn't blog, though we try to persuade her. Instead she circulates good things to those of her friends she thinks will most enjoy them. A recent highlight was a poem one of her friends had written about his cat, which I liked enough to ask if I could post it here:

Far-famed despoiler of fixtures and fittings
Lion of the settee, Lord of the blanket-cave
Slayer of Summer Pigeon, Marker of territory
Emptier of food bowls, prodigious of appetite
Generous giver of fur, unbridled in bounty
His hairs travel continents by proxy
Ravager of guests, embarrassment at mealtimes
The thunder-purrer who shakes the windows
Bearer of battle scars, sombre in his years
Grievous the lamentation and wailing
When his bowl needs filling

James Anthony Tucker

ETA: The author reports that the title came to him belatedly in a "duh" moment... Beopuss.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/574151.html

The Guardian's uplift supplement (and oh, how glad I will be when all the looking back over the past year and looking forward over the coming one is over, and we can take time at its own pace again!) included a batch of poems designed to restore positivity.

Positive, uplifting poetry: what could be less inviting? But I liked Tomas Tranströmer's Espresso, as translated by Robin Fulton:

It's carried out from the gloomy kitchen
and looks into the sun without blinking.

The Guardian's rather hit-and-miss search feature didn't make it easy to find, and while I was looking for it, I came across a different translation.

And then, to complete the caffeination process, the original Swedish.

The Queen and I appear to have reached a tacit understanding: she doesn't make a fuss about my birthday, and I don't make a fuss about hers. Shakespeare is another kettle of fish entirely, and we have been enjoying a week filled with Shakespeare-related activities, mostly but not exclusively organised by the Lit & Phil, and starring the fabulous Gail-Nina Anderson.

We started with Gail's Tuesday lunchtime lecture on Shakespeare in Art: when does a painting depict a scene from a play, when a scene from a performance and when is it just a portrait of an actor in a particular rôle? Why did the pre-Raphaelites choose the most exquisitely awkward moments from the plays, and why did the Victorians think it was acceptable to paint naked women as long as you said they were fairies? Time ran out just as we reached photography.

Wednesday early evening was Gail again, this time with portraits of Shakespeare. We got caught in traffic and roadworks and other miscalculations, so we missed the beginning, but I hadn't previously come across the Sanders portrait, so that was intriguing. I've known the Droeshout engraving as the face of Shakespeare for so long that I don't suppose I'll ever imagine him differently, however strong the proof, and it really isn't that strong. Even so... Then back in time for the pub quiz, which this week had a Shakespearean theme. This could be pretty oblique (for example, a reference to the "rude mechanicals" introduced a round of questions on mechanics). The Elm Tree had clearly not got the memo, and was festooned with Saint George's crosses.

On Friday, the Lit & Phil's contribution was a showing of Rivette's Paris nous appartient (good grief, it's available on YouTube, all two and a quarter hours of it - one of Rivette's shortest films!). As Shakespearean theming goes, this too was pretty oblique: yes, the thread which holds the film together is a doomed production of Pericles, but the film is not in any sense about Shakespeare. I don't care: screen a Rivette movie and I'm there. The film deserves a post of its own, but it would just be a series of questions - actually, that's a temptation. So much to post, so little time! I would have told you that I had at least a rough idea of the plots of all Shakespeare's plays, but Paris nous appartient revealed that I have no idea at all what happens in Pericles: so that's a bonus, of sorts.

Saturday being the actual birthday, that's when we hit peak Shakespeare, starting with the morning paper: two sonnets by Wendy Cope, and a 'commemorative' crossword to entertain us on the train (no, it wasn't about Cervantes).

Back at the Lit & Phil, Gail-Nina gave us one woman's view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, complete with monkey glove puppets, inflatable bat-wings and more paintings of nude fairies. Gail takes a strictly practical view of the duties of the jobbing playwright, and explains the origins of the Dream by a desire to get some use out of that ass's head that was hanging around in the props cupboard. Why was there an ass's head in the props cupboard? Well, says Gail, it must have been left over from Shakespeare's lost nativity play - no, think about it, it's completely plausible, a well-established dramatic genre, the virtuous couple, the ruffianly innkeeper, some comic shepherds, a dramatic wicked king (Burbage would have made a fine Herod) an ox and an ass... Lost, presumably, because it was suspected of displaying Catholic sympathies, leaving the company with an underused ass's head. Come to think of it, this is why the setting, this very English woodland, is displaced to "near Athens" - at some point there must have been a scene, which didn't make the final cut, in which Theseus relives his triumph over the Minotaur (the ox's head).

Thereafter, there was winding down in the pub across the way, with good conversation and late lunch. There was shopping at Richer Sounds, with the help of

samarcand and her magic phone (despite which we have hit a complication: more on that some other time). Then

durham_rambler and I gatecrashed a World Book Night party at the Great North Museum: we were invited, but the party was primarily organised for the reading groups and library staff who had been involved in the 'Great North Book Run', a collaboration (if I've got this right) between PanMacmillan and the Reading Agency to promote reading for pleasure. You don't often get to commune with a narwhal over a glass of wine, so that was special. We also chatted briefly with Ann Cleeves, and with Alison O'Donnell who plays Tosh in the TV Shetland series - which handed her rather a plum in the last storyline. We barely talked about that, because we were too busy talking about Fair Isle.

Back home, we half-watched the live broadcast of the RSC's Shakespeare celebration, reading the paper through the hip hop Shakespeare and the opera Shakespeare, but enjoying the chunks of the plays. I was entertained by a sketch in which a gaggle of Hamlets correct each other's reading of THAT line: "No, it's 'To be OR not to be, that is the question'" "'To be or not to BE, that is the question'". My preference goes to "'To be or not to be, THAT is the question'", but I suspect we were supposed to take "'To be or not to be, that is the QUESTION'" as definitive, since the Prince of Wales, who had been very visible in the audience, came down on stage to deliver it. I know it was a joke, but how often do you get even five minutes of textual analysis on Saturday night television? The show closed with the ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I was impressed by David Tennant as Puck.

Next weekend, something completely different: back to the Lit & Phil for Newcastle Noir!

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with poems

Pride and Puffins

Monday at the museum, mostly

Pausing to draw breath

Hamnavoe Market

Sh is for shopping and Sh is for Shetland

How doth the little crocodile...

Poetry and other nourishment

The hunting of the alternative arrangements

The stormcock's many songs

Remembrance Sunday

Poppies for oblivion

An autumn walk in London

Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild

Afternoon (television) delight.

O where is the sailor with bold red hair?

Footnotes to an evening of poetry

Busy doing nothing...

From Gail-Nina's Cabinet of Curiosities

Three cups of coffee

Brushing up my Shakespeare