Anne Frank's tree is felled

It was sad news this week about the final demise of Anne Frank's tree in Amsterdam. Ironically, where the authorities had failed, nature won. The Horse Chestnut tree, weakened by age, fungus and other disease, was hit by the very high winds that have swept through our corner of Europe - bringing to an end a very noticeable - but mini- drought.

The campaign in recent years has been fiercely fought on both sides and last year it seemed the preservationists had won. However, I take heart from the fact that the attention resulted in numerous cuttings being propagated from the dieing tree and that almost certainly a new one will be planted. This great tree had become a hugely important symbol of freedom and the fight against facism that Anne Frank has come to represent.

“23 February 1944

“The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.”

“18 April 1944

“April is glorious, not too hot and not too cold, with occasional light showers. Our chestnut tree is in leaf, and here and there you can already see a few small blossoms.

“13 May 1944

“Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.

The world must never forget the spirit of that little girl and the heroic battle that her parents and those protecting them made. It is not just an inspiring story of humanity: it is the very essence of human sacrifice in the face of human barbarity. I will certainly never forget visiting that house.

So where there are chestnut trees - let her spirit live on!

The impending austerity programme

In my search for a new Sunday paper to read, this week I tried the Independent on Sunday (the "Indie on Sunday"). Their top story focused on the proposals made by members of the public for reducing the government's deficit.

The list contained a mix of the obviously sensible and the not so - however, in all of it the thread that doesn't appear to be present is that relating to consequence.

Consumption by its very nature requires production, transportation, marketing and selling. To each of those there are jobs and additional consumption, production, etc.

By suddenly removing the consumption of the public sector - are we not in danger of creating a very painful rod for ourselves (and others) further down the line? For example: one of the ideas is "to plant more herbaceous plants and stop planting pansies". I am actually in partial favour of the idea of stopping mass plantings of annuals in municipal planting schemes - but for environmental rather than economic reasons. However, my reasons aside, what happens if every local authority stops planting annuals in its parks and town / city improvement schemes?

The seed merchants go broke first of all; followed by the nurserymen and there's the consequent unemployment of their seasonal workers (ie people at the bottom end of the skills and income scales). The truckers / delivery people are next as there is no longer anything to deliver. The councils will cut back on their gardeners / horticultural operatives (not really a big saving there as they are all on minimum wages).

The city managers / Town Clerks will of course still stay put - but instead of overseeing a pleasant town centre, will be watching the grass grow longer between cuts, the shrub beds choke on bindweed and litter. More and more people will grow more dissatisfied with venturing into the centre on account of the physical state of it, and the numbers of unemployed, semi-skilled people sitting around either begging or drinking the last drops of their unemployment benefit cheques.

I'm thinking of replacing my six-year old car. I've four years left (maybe less!) until I retire - so it makes sense to buy one now to see out my days of employment. However, the new mood sweeping the country suggests that this is not such a good idea. Despite the appalling lack of interest being paid - I am actually being encouraged to save; to stop spending; to join in the new hobby of seeing how little we can spend. 

So like a cancer, the discontent and economic decline spreads; government department savings become the necessary source, not of investment or services, but of benefit payments to those unemployed by the austerity programme.

To avert a pensions crisis, the age of retirement is being moved back steadily. The effect will be to increase the number of grey haired, slower moving / thinking people such as myself and a decrease in the snappier / sharper young people leaving schools, colleges and universities. Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues did away with the manufacturing sector in Britain, in favour of a service economy being fed, clothed, financed, and powered by cheap resources and labour abroad; we are likely to now see more and more young people queuing for fewer and fewer "service" jobs that, ironically, fewer and fewer people can afford, or will want, to spend their money on anyway. Yes we do need people with experience to run our services - but not at the cost of ensuring the generations following us are able to also gain experience of their own.

Bored, young people with limited skills and plenty of free time at their disposal are an absolute feeding ground for those already aggrieved or feeling dispossessed to proselytize their extremist, often fundamentalist, positions on the politics of the community and eventually the state. We are potentially about to unleash a dark age the likes of which our generation has never seen. It was no accident that Hitler came to power on the back of an economic recession and political disasters and discontent that arose from the treaty terms forced upon Germany at the conclusion of the First World War.

The banking sector was bailed out despite having been the major cause of the recent recession. It's future was seen as being critical to our economy. The banks have responded to their rescue by the tax payers (who are ironically about to face their own economic ruin as a consequence) by shoring up their reserves and screwing down on investment by the private sector. The ugly faces of international capitalism (bankers' bonuses and extortionate fees) are going to figure highly in my vision of the impending apocalpse.

Governments, not banks, have the ultimate control of our economies. It is time politicians sat up and took stock of the real situation. I am not proposing spending more than we have in our coffers. I am suggesting a sensible Government spending and borrowing programme that reduces excess, removes profligacy and through a programme of investment in the capital infrastructure of the country, spends its way out of recession. Adding, as at present, to a burgeoning population of young, unemployed people, will be disasterous.

An unusual request

A SHORT STORY

It had started as a normal working day with the usual traffic in telephone and email requests that passed the time, however, by lunchtime, I was filled with intrigue:

Three plain clothed police officers had arrived in my office in late morning, presented their credentials and informed that I was bound by some legal duty to keep their meeting and mission in absolute confidence.

Satisfied that I would co-operate with them, they told me that an inmate of a prison had made what appeared to be a death-bed confession and indicated that a key part of the evidence was to be found in one of the cemeteries in my care. In my experience, the police are incapable of speaking in normal English and these three were no exception. They didn't elaborate on what the evidence might be but, being a would-be Sherlock Holmes for the moment, I immediately suspected "murder most foul". What better place to conceal a corpse than a council grave yard?

They asked numerous questions about the cemetery starting with confirmation of its physical address - 174 Paxton Avenue, and then they wanted to know about the people working there and particularly if any had suddenly left (which they hadn't).  The address seemed particularly important. They wanted me to provide the grave yard's full history: how long it had been in existence and what areas had been most recently developed and opened. As it happened, we had only a couple of years before asked a member of our staff to design a new garden for the internment of ashes. But I guess, because ashes aren't corpses, they didn't seem to think that relevant. They were though, interested in an area of older memorials in a particularly quiet part of the cemetery frequented by foxes. After my explanations and some discussion between themselves, they left, leaving behind the business card of the most senior of the group "just in case you think of something else". I added it to the rest that are stacked randomly in an old cigar box on my desk .

A few weeks later a Home Office archaeologist arrived, asked me similar questions about the cemetery at 174 Paxton Avenue and in particular seemed intrigued by the quaint combination of letters and numerals that divide the cemetery burial sections into plots and individual graves. Later he walked slowly around it paying particular attention it seemed, to the old, less visited sections and then left without any further comment. Inevitably in time the story was allowed to drift into local anecdotes of the history of Paxton Cemetery. There might be the victim of a murder interred there, but where's the news in that? It's a cemetery, isn't it?

Five or so years passed when the colleague who oversaw the daily running of all the cemeteries for me and, who co-incidently, had designed the new garden for the internment of ashes at Paxton Cemetery, unexpectedly stated that he wished to leave. I asked the usual questions as to why, and, having received all the answers expected, accepted his resignation. In due course he cleared his office in Paxton Cemetery and left.

About a month ago, we received a request from him for the right to purchase an ashes plot. There is nothing unusual in that as many people buy graves and ashes plots "in readiness", and given that he had spent many years working there, it also fitted that he would probably want his own ashes interred there. I duly handed the request over to the clerk who dealt with these requests and thought nothing more of it. 

This morning, the deeds having been prepared, the paperwork was returned to my desk for authorisation. It was then that I looked at the plot number he had requested. I reached for the cigar box of business cards.

And now, from my office window overlooking it, I can see that the cemetery gates are closed. There's a police car in the drive, another by the site office and a team of people in white overalls moving back and forth between other vehicles and a tent that they've erected over the now no longer "new" Ashes Garden and, I'm guessing, looking closer at plot number 174.

Looking in the mirror

SHORT STORY:

One afternoon, some years ago, I took a stroll through the park behind us here in Chiswick. After a while it started to rain so I ducked under the trees to take shelter and let the shower blow through.

Sitting on a log near by to my left was a middle aged man with a woollen hat and spectacles, looking into what looked like a small compact mirror. I couldn't help but wonder what on earth he was doing and watched closely. As if on cue, he looked up and smiled. "Wondering what I'm doing, I expect," he stated rather than asked.

"Well, yes, I was," I replied, trying hard not be embarrassed for having obviously stared too hard.

"I'm watching the squirrels up that tree behind me," he paused. "If I stare at them  directly they become scared; but if I just sit here and pretend not to see them they approach on their own terms."

Not knowing how to respond, I just nodded.

After a few more minutes of rain and silence, he laughed. "You don't believe me do you?"

"Well .... actually I do find it a bit ...."

He laughed again. "Yes - you got me there! No actually I was sitting here wondering what I look like and thought that this was as good a spot as any to stop and look at myself."

"Of course," I responded, hoping like hell not to sound alarmed or worse still, taken-in by his ruse.  "So what do you look like?"

"Aah - now that is the question, isn't it? Well ..." he paused again, " what I see is a silly old fool who had someone he loved to bits but took for granted, a lover he didn't love but took for granted and, now what's taken me for granted is this ... " he turned towards me so that I could see the unmistakeable dark purple and red rash of a sarcoma that started across the left side of his face and disappeared down his neck behind his shirt collar.

"I'm so ..."

"Sorry? Don't be! This is the price of my thoughtless self indulgence. And now that the rain has stopped, please be off and leave me with my mirror and ....." he didn't finish, but resumed staring into the small mirror.

I stammered a quick good-bye and walked on.

It rained again today and this afternoon, caught by a passing shower, I stopped under what i think was the same tree. Whilst staring into the rain-sodden shrubbery, I could swear something like a warm hand gently touched my neck and brushed past my left cheek. I turned quickly, but all that was there was a grey squirrel blowing its cheeks and flicking its tail impatiently on the branch about three feet behind me.

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!