Adding oxygen to the debate

Recently Clare Balding, a near neighbour of ours, was described maliciously by a Sunday Times journalist as a "Dyke on a Bike". She took exception (as did practically the whole lesbian and gay community). She protested to the Editor most eloquently in the same paper the following week - to no avail as the same journalist followed it a couple of weeks later with repetition of his infamous views on the Welsh.

Quite why the Sunday Times believes that it is acceptible to insult many of its readers with a type of humour that it itself finds offensive when directed against the English by Muslims, or by gay people against "the family", is beyond my comprehension. 

Sue Perkins, a comedienne of some worth, tweated on Twitter last night that she was "in Scotland eating a salad - spot the oxymoron". That sort of joke is good hearted and not malicious . . . well, certainly not to me a Scot who isn't prone to ordering salads!

So where's the humour and where's the offence? Where do we draw the line? I guess we have to look at what was the writer's intention. If it is to hold up a mirror and laugh with them - then that's fun and fine; if, however, it is to hold out a stick and point or jab: that's hurtful and puerile.

Haiku: the answer to climate change

A senior colleague recently wrote asking for help with bullet points and other information relevant to a speech on cliimate change that he was due to give  to an august gathering of local politicians.

He confessed later to having bottled using my response, a haiku:

They have chopped down

the willow tree. So

the kingfishers have also vanished.

                                                   SHIKI

                                  Photo by Rakutobi on Photoramio

The Poetry Challenge this month

Poetry in the parks is re-launched this month.

Avondale Park and Cremorne Gardens have designated seats in them (an idea brought from Gunnersbury and Battishill Parks), and other park benches will have poetry books provided by the Library Service placed on them by the park keepers.

What is poetry? For William Wordsworth it was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ... (taking) its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”; to Steven Fry it is “a primal impulse with us all”; and to most kids on the street probably just a ‘load of old bollocks!’

All of us, I suspect, have a horror story of school lessons spent trying to come up with the answer to the question: ‘So what is the poet trying to tell us?’ Despite having had apparently meaningless nursery rhymes drilled into us as babies (“Ring - a ring of roses ...” signs of the plague! ), I suspect few were ever really inspired to look further than the classroom clock and freedom into which the slowly ticking hands would eventually release us.

I thank my Mum: she used poetry to capture my imagination and encourage me to relocate myself into a world of pea green boats that put out to sea with the owl and the pussy cat, and the like.

But poetry doesn’t just stop there!

It has the power to comment on social disasters such as in Dambudzo Marechemo’s indictment upon Robert Mugabe’s “free” Zimbabwe (The Oracle of the Povo) and even to change the world for the better: Walt Whitman’s “I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth ...” must have provided inspiration for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It has within it music: “Do you remember an inn / Miranda? / Do you remember an inn? And the tedding and the spreading / Of the straw for a bedding ...” (Hilaire Belloc).

And it has the means to capture the very essence of the passage of time as in Rupert Brooke’s “Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes, / And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands ...” or Wordsworth’s “fair lady at her casement ....doth herself divest / Of all her radiant garments, and reclines / behind the sombre screen of yonder pines ...”.

Poetry has the ability to bring order to disordered thoughts through the discipline of its various meters and forms (from acatalectics to Zen haiku). It has inspired writers such as Stephen Fry to write books on the subject (‘The Ode Less Travelled’ came out of a discussion of the components of a villanelle) and, using blank verse (“playing tennis without nets” according to Auden), it has encouraged generations to try to free themselves of one set of bonds in order to just become tied up in others: “Freedom. Freedom. Prison of the free.” (L. Durrell). Poetry can inspire or it can make you just smile; it can uplift (Blake’s Jerusalem) or make us want to weep, as Keats is reputed to have done when reading Spencer’s “sea-shouldering whale”.

So here’s my challenge: using the excuse of enjoying the fresh air that our wonderful parks and gardens provide, stop at the poetry seat and, if you haven’t done so before: read a poem.

It will change your day:

“To see a World in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.” (W. Blake).

A blog about Poetry

The cat long since departed from my feet and, my god daughter not yet awake in the house next door, silence fills my home – disturbed only by the tapping of my fingers on the keys of a laptop balanced precariously on the dictionary I keep beside the bed (how else to quiet the lexical koans that intrude at 3 in the morning?). Beside me, from an assortment of books, poems stare lifelessly up at the ceiling or, if the spine not yet broken by impatient hand, gasp for breath, face down into the bedclothes. Words start their unsteady journey from my tangled thoughts across the screen that replaces “Dickensian” candle and quill.

I pause and, turning note scribbled pages (“merde”!) of Keats, dip once more into a poem of my youth:

“And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.”

It is of course impossible for a girl to sleep in the lap of a legend ... or so we like to think! But there she lies and has always lain, a pre-Raphaelite, gorgeous goddess, adored for ever in alexandrine order.

Order? But surely has not poetry always been the means of escaping the “order” of the disordered world into which I have found myself? Order requires rules, regulations, religion, templates and obedience. Order requires clothes, buildings, streets, employment. Order requires, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years - a lifetime of routine. And yet I seek a place into which I can flee and indulge in the loveliness, weep in awe of the depth of peace and spirituality, or silently cry at the high emotion or gut wrenching ghastliness of this – yes, ordered too, world.

Poetry also requires order and in it is to be found the ordered (metrical) art of all seasons, the ordered (rhythmic) craft of all races, people of all shapes, sexualities, colours, sizes and in its ordered substance, Poetry fashions and tempers through an often eloquent rhyme, a sword of thought, of spirit and truth with which to, at times and with mathematical precision, cut down the disorder of our minds and the world around us.

“Freedom, Freedom, Prison of the free!” – wails Lawrence Durrell. He could have been describing Poetry.

Blank or free verse mostly holds little for me: in its particular disorder are to be often found the un-fettered and, un-resolved, doodling of an undisciplined artist. The voice is noise rather than music and the thoughts as a consequence little more than the tenuously connected words often seen in a power-point Mind Map.

In the brevity and complexity of a haiku, the ordered repetition of a villanelle, or the questionable humour of a clerihew, rules and order dictate the form through which the poet skilfully crafts thoughts, observations, feelings and stories from words.

Ah, there’s the rub of it: words!

What would poetry be without words? Words, language, communication. The screen scribbles a green line underneath that last sentence. Intrigued, I press the computer’s Help key and the anonymous sage within Microsoft advises me: “Fragment. If the marked words are an incomplete thought, consider developing this thought into a complete sentence by adding a subject or verb or combining this text with another sentence.” He (the author has to be male, surely?) then provides the following examples: “Instead of ‘Meteors the entire night’ consider ‘We watched meteors the entire night’."

Indeed! In that fragment on meteors are the music, evocation and poetry of the universe; in that sentence, a rather dull evening spent in the company of a group of cardigans watching planets.

And so, having offended my (genuinely) very dearest friends through whose binoculars and telescopes I have gratefully watched, in absolute awe, the differently configured constellations of the Aborigines in the Australian Outback, and those of the ancient Greeks in clear skies over Palm Springs, my fingers return to the keyboard as this blog seeks conclusion. “Madeline” next door wails the new day to life, the cat returns from his dawn patrol, stares critically at the books strewn where he had lain earlier and with a deep sigh, curls up and closes his eyes. The day has begun . . .

The Icelandic Volcanic Fall-out

The Press is of course having a field day: "they took our cash and repaid us with ash," etc etc. The story's origins? The eruption of a volcano that has put paid to all air travel for the passed few days, and which looks likely to continue well into next week.

Inconvenienced, we've all forgotten the impending election, the outrage caused by the British Airways's cabin crew strikes and over-looked the appalling loss of life last week caused by an earthquake in a remote corner of China.

My partner sits in Vienna, colleagues are stranded in Portugal with their families and, in Poland, the funeral of a President has to proceed without most of the world's heads of state as none can fly to Warsaw.

In short: we are all very focussed on how we are being inconvienced by this natural event.

There is though a far greater inconvenience just waiting around the corner to blow our complacency to the four winds: man-made, man-denied, climate change.

Like the denial of the horrific events of the holocaust by people living almost on top of its ovens, we in the West are today blind to the catastrophy we are overseeing with our politics, our consumerism, our fossil carbon burning and excessive consumption. It's somebody else's fault - if it is indeed happening. We are just by-standers. What can we do? we aren't in government. Oh the list goes on.

When I was doing my apprenticeship in horticulture we didn't use peat or peat-based soil mixes; we used John Innes 1, 2 or 3 mixes that we made ourselves by hand. The compost element (aka humus and soil conditioners) were of properly made and screened compost from our own heaps of green waste. Today we have DEFRA and other government departments ringing their hands at the their failure to cut the use by the horticultural trades and public. Ban it! Ban the extraction, the sale and the importation of it and any product tainted by it (Russia is a popular alternative source it seems). Force the industry and gardeners to behave responsibly. Use the current "fad" for Grow Your Own to instill a real awareness of the value of knowing where your food comes from,  how much better it tastes if not produced in a factory, and how important it is to do things properly for the sake of our children's and our neighbour's world ...if not our own.

It won't just be a lonely Polar bear being photographed in future: it'll also be the last Inuit Indian and close behind them will be the Western photographer who set out to warn us - but was ignored.

I'm loving the plane-free skies over London: the quiet gives me a chance to hear some of the sirens so easily drowned out by our growing carbon footprint. 

A day in the life of my job

My day started with the composition of a fairly lengthy response to a petition about dangerous dogs in parks.

That done, it was a quick drive out into the parks in the north of the borough. There I encountered a number of elderly folk walking their dogs and enjoying the milder weather. London is water-logged at present and there's more rain yet to come. The parks are flooded in places.

As with dogs in parks, I'm responsible for the excessive rain water in the roads and gardens surrounding the parks and yesterday afternoon was spent carefully rebutting allegations on that front too!

   Little Wormwood Scrubs 25th February 2010 

Following the tour of some of my own parks, I travelled by bus into Westminster to look at Green Park and then Hyde Park. Both are Royal Parks Agency sites, and are faring no better than ourselves at present from what I could see.

I find the dull, weather and damp at this time of year extremely depressing ... yet bumped into a colleague standing in the light rain this afternoon - absolutely delighted and literally soaking it up. How sad he must be in a hot, dry summer!

Shadows

I am currently reading "Out of Shadows" by Jason Wallace.

We went to the same school, but he was there some years after I had finished. His book, in part in the mould of "Stalky and Co" by Rudyard Kilping, is a brave attempt at portaying a fictious series of events involving public school boys in Zimbabwe. The vast majority of his readers will not, I fear, have the slightest knowledge of his subject matter and consequently be baffled by it all.

I must confess to feeling let down by the book. In part I suspect because of the constantly injected tension between characters that just reads false, and political views that were the very antithesis of the school and the parents who chose to send their children there. There was never an admiration for Ian Smith and there always were considerably more black and brown faces amongst the pupils than is suggested by the book! The other irritation is one of style: the dramatic suspense added to the closing sentences of chapters referring to unfortunate incidents to unfold later ... after the third or fourth I started skipping over them!

However those faults aside, I have enjoyed indulging myself in the mix of Shona and Afrikaans words that I recognise from my boyhood vocabulary, the descriptions of the bush and mention of places such as Monkey Hill, where the school flag was flown. I'd forgotten about the Matebele ants and devil thorns - goodness they hurt if you trod on them!

On the bullying of "squacks" by House Prefects and others, I also have a problem: have I, in adulthood, excised painful memories? Were we bullied? I don't think so! Yes, there was the odd scrap and some boys were indeed taunted and made to feel pretty rotten at times, but generally those incidents were isolated; furthermore, if anyone in authority became aware of them, all hell let loose! This story, though suggests an endemic culture of violence which is unfortunate.

The main protagonist yearns to be in England: surely then he would have been aware of the strong links between Peterhouse's house system as well as studies (Toyes rooms) and Winchester?

Missing from the story too, are Tri-colour and Bi-colour - the unique Peterhouse (Haven School in the book) - punishment meted out for minor misdemeanors. It involved writing out a text in very faint pencil and then going over it neatly in ink using a different colour ink for each letter. It took hours!

However, besides all of that: I have started more books than I care to speak of and consequently on a purely technical level am impressed by Jason's completion and ability to have this difficult story published. For me the strength of his writing is not so much in the story but his ability to evoke very strong memories of political and social events that we both lived through.

If you know this period of history in Zimbabwe, or grew up there: you may enjoy reading this book. However, if you didn't - expect to be very confused.

The Robinsons

I give notice that I am aware that a woman whose vicious out-pourings on gay people etc is in the gutter (undergoing psychiatric help) and that her husband has been forced, temporarily at least, out of office on account of his failure to declare what he knew of her financial dealings with her (former) nineteen year old, lover. Needless to say, both are politicians. She has said she will step down within days (after negotiating her golden hand-shake and pension?) and he has taken six weeks' leave of absence.

My desire to be more compassionate in my dealings towards others prevents me venting what I really feel at present about the demise of the Robinson duo ....  I am hopeful that now that they are really down, they start to appreciate the meaning of the word.

Away from Northern Ireland and Westminster they may indeed find time enough to reflect on what led to their unplanned early departure and why so many are content to see them suffer.

Is Compassion A Good Thing? revisited

In August 2009 I wrote a short blog on my response to the Scottish Government's handling of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

Today I transcribe in full the Charter for Compassion that I have copied from the TED site:

"The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."

Wow - such a simple, unifying idea whose time must surely have come!

Communicating in 2010

A recent exchange of emails with my brother in Cairns, Australia, has brought into fairly sharp relief how communications have changed in my limited life time.

As a child on a farm in Karoi, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), I can remember the huge excitement that followed a telephone call from the local telephone exchange advising my mother to be ready, sitting beside the telephone on a particular date and at a specific time, in order to "take the call" booked in Edinburgh by her brother. The phone would ring and then, before the two could chat to each other, there would be literally minutes of different exchange operators talking to one another to set up the link: Hello Salisbury this is Karoi - I have Karoi 44126 on the line.... Hello Pretoria, this is Salisbury - I have Karoi 44126 on the line.... Hello Cape Town ... and so on."

The farm's telephone was on a party line which meant not only that we could hear every telephone being rung (each had a unique ring) but neighbours could, and sometimes did, pick up their handsets and listen in to other people's conversations. How that irritated my parents!

When I first came to the United Kingdom the first port of call was always a Post Office in order to send a telegram: arrived safely ... and then after that all communication was by letter. There's a stranger!

When I was doing my national service in the Rhodesian army as a signaller I loved to tune in late at night and listen to radio hams chatting to each other around the world: how I envied their distant, exotic sounding locations and ability to chat to each other!

Now I keep in touch by email - from a laptop using wifi, or a BlackBerry. Or even by SMS on my mobile telephone (my sister's favourite method of keeping in touch).

And it's all so incredibly fast, effectively free and not reliant upon anyone with a face - just a piece of equipment and network that is maintained probably by an army of de-humanised IT experts who have replaced the ladies in the telephone exchange (or the neighbours listening in). Progress - huh!

And then there are my Blog and Twitter sites (if you really want to know what I'm up to, you'll find me there )...