Thoughts on Fashionable Illness

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If I don’t write this now, I will never get it done. If I do write it now I won’t get something else done. It’s a dilemma and it may also be a symptom of adult ADHD. However, although it’s fashionable for media personalities to have adult ADHD, it’s less fashionable for us ordinary folk, so I’m not going to worry about it. Though they idea I might be able to take a pill and become organised is attractive.

However, I have to be careful of wanting a bright and shiny (and fashionable) affliction, when I am merely lazy and disorganised (the symptoms are much the same) and am looking for a convenient excuse. It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon.

Soda bread

It used to be the same on the farm – people in baking classes claiming to be suffering from coeliac disease or gluten intolerance. When I read up on it I found that many cases were self-diagnosed and were simply Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I have IBS. It was originally caused, according to my doctor, by life as a salesman – stress, cigarettes and irregular meals. He told me that if I gave up smoking my stress levels may rise so there wasn’t much he could do for me.

So I became an antique dealer. Less stress, regular meals – it went away. It comes back from time to time if I have too much cheese but over the years even this hasn’t been a problem.

Wheatsheaf Loaf

I sympathise with anyone who has coeliac disease or gluten intolerance. I have sympathy for people who have IBS. It can be debilitating. But I have no sympathy with people who claim to have a problem with gluten, and disrupt an entire class with claims of gluten intolerance, when they don’t actually have it. If you have a problem with gluten you shouldn’t be in a room with flour in the air. Hence my reluctance to jump on a fashionable health bandwagon.

 

 

 

Several More Things . . .

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I had meant this to be a post about things I missed out of the last post. That was, itself, started to say something I’d missed out of the one before.

Optimism of a Moorhen building a nest

Thoughts can be like that. You start a new one before the old one is finished and as you finish one you forget what it was you meant to write about.

I could continue this line of thought, but if I do, I will undoubtedly start to muse on the decline of my mental capabilities, and from thoughts of low intellect, I will pass on to discussing politicians.

I don’t want to do either of those things. I may, at some point in the future, touch on the matter of Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York, and his announcement that he was going to ask King Charles for the return of the Koh-i-Noor diamond to India. At the moment I will just give him 10/10 for political grandstanding and ask if his enthusiasm for returning things to their “owners” extends to handing New York back to the British.

Mallards

Meanwhile, back in the world of poetry, I forgot to mention, regarding editors, that some of them really don’t like poets. I’d noticed this way back and then let it pass from my mind. There are one or two in Japanese-style poetry who seem a bit snippy but I got round that by ignoring them and sending my poetry elsewhere. Now I start looking at free verse again, am noticing them more and more. They seem commoner in this sector. I will just have to see what happens.

Meanwhile, my copy of Ribbons, the journal of the Tanka Society of American arrived by email.  They turned down my last tanka prose submission so I have mixed feelings about this edition, though I do have two tanka in.  Xenia Tran also has two in. I don’t see her about so much on here these days but she can be found here.

Mallard duckling – Arnot Hill Park

Of course, there is a reason for me mentioning Ribbons. They  run a Reader’s Choice Award each issue and it seems that I got an Honorable Mention for one of my poems in the last issue. There is one winner and three poems are given Honorable mentions, so it’s nice to be one. It might be nicer to be a winner, but on the other hand if you win, you have to choose the next winner and write a commentary.

This month will also see the new issue of Eucalypt and I was one of the winners in the last issue. I’ve already mentioned this, I know, and I’m not doing it to show off, just to mention that I’m going to have to choose a winner (big responsibility) and write a commentary (big danger of looking like an idiot). Not sure I’m looking forward to it . . .

Yellow Flag Irises

 

 

In Search of New Places

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As I published the last post, I realised I’d missed something out.

One of the new titles I was looking at asks for a donation to accompany the poems. It’s less than the cost of buying a coffee at a coffee shop, so I suppose it isn’t ruinous. But it seems wrong. as I discussed recently. I would link to the previous post, but I can’t remember when it was. And I’m too lazy to look.

Regretfully, I won’t be submitting. If it was a printed magazine I would probably buy a subscription, but I am in two minds with online magazines. I know there are costs involved, but I also know I have costs for WP, for newspaper archives and for other research services I use. Somewhere I have to draw a line.

The second was a magazine that doesn’t send rejections. They say if you haven’t heard after a month you can take that as a rejection. It’s one way of cutting down the workload, and avoids having to be nice to hundreds of people, no matter how bad their work is, but it’s also a bit rude. I have, in the past, submitted to magazine with this approach but never been successful. Maybe it’s because my negativity transmits itself, maybe it’s because it’s an approach favoured by young, cutting edge editors and I’m just a dull, old-fashioned poet.

I know I often say I’m looking for new places to submit but there are some lines I don’t want to cross. Paying to be published is one.

I’m not quite so sure about the other. Which is worse – a guaranteed (though impersonal) one month cut off, or an editor who waits three months to reply.  (Some, to be fair, reply in days – they are the best!)

 

Photos from May 2016

 

The Best Words in the Best Order

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‘I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; – poetry; the best words in the best order.’

S. T. Coleridge

Yesterday I read the words of an editor on the front page of their website. It seems that running a magazine is hard work and takes a lot of time. I had never imagined otherwise. I base this on the fact that I spent yesterday pushing words round paper. By the time I had finished I had taken three unpublishable poems and turned them into one possibly publishable poem and two that were better than when I started on them.

 

Poetry takes time. Lots of time.

I read some background, cogitated, deleted a few words, added a few words, deleted them, went back to the first version, and, in a flash of inspiration, deleted the first verse and the last verse and carried on messing with words.

Then I moved on to the next one . . .

The tricky thing I find, is that it’s surprisingly easy to alter something and make the poem worse.

Sometimes, when I’m in full flow, I can write a whole poem and it doesn’t need altering. I wrote one like that once and it was highly commended in a competition. I need to practice more and try to get back to that.

One of my free verse poems, when edited, turned into a haibun. Not quite sure how it happened, but it just seemed to fall into shape as I edited. It might be similar to what sports coaches call “muscle memory” – I’ve written so many haibun that I can’t write anything else. That’s unfortunate, because, as a previous editor pointed out recently, I can’t write haibun. 🙂

I’ve used pictures of Julia’s woodturning, because it’s very much like poetry. You start off with hope and a battery of skills and, if you are lucky, you end up finding something that is better than you hoped.

Thoughts of New Recipes

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We’ve not had pilaff for years and I, personally, haven’t made it for probably 40 years. It just faded out of my repertoire and never made it back. A lot of things are like that. At any one time I probably only use about half a dozen recipes, with a few variations to ensure we don’t eat the same thing too often.

We tend to eat a similar menu most weeks, with just a gradual change as the seasons move on. I have just started cooking quiches again now that summer is here, and vegetable stew has disappeared from the menu as root vegetables don’t seem so appealing in summer. We did have carrot in the coleslaw we had with the quiche earlier in the week, but that’s about it.

I’ve been looking up pilaff recipes today, as they seem to be a useful way of making a rice dish that uses stuff up. It’s a bit like Chinese rice, but over the years I’ve finally begun to get bored with it.

One of the recipes involved exotic mushrooms, dried mushrooms and mushroom powder. Another involved whatever mushrooms you had to hand and a stock cube. Guess which one we are trying next week?

Malta

Part of the problem is that every time I try something new, I fail to adopt it, even if it is nice. It’s much easier just to go into autopilot and make the same old thing, or a version of it, rather than doing something new.

Yes, I did make Chestnut and Mushroom Pie, and enjoyed it, but it involves dried mushrooms and chestnut which I don’t normally have in the cupboard. And the Woolton Pie was good, but the stew version is easier.

I really should try to do better.

But then, I should try to improve my blogging and poetry writing too.  They are both more interesting than filling quiches and steeping dried mushrooms.

Cactus hedge Malta

 

How Do I Do It?

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I missed posting today. I’m not sure how. I just got down to work and suddenly, the day was gone. Got up a bit late, correspondence, breakfast and back to work. Julia went out to take a dress for alteration for the coming wedding and I prepared lunch ready for her return.  This included the coleslaw left over from a couple of nights ago, baby tomatoes, olives and the last of Tuesday’s quiche. Back to work (if pushing words round paper can be classed as “work”) then TV quizzes. Cook tea. (Julia is suffering with her back so I am trying to be a good husband). Watched the last episode of Fringe, a sci-fi, time travel, police procedural, and I felt able to relax. Left to myself I would probably not have carried on past episode 2 or 3 but Julia liked it and it began to make more sense. Then it introduced the parallel dimension, then the time travel and at that point It stopped making sense again. I struggled to the end as Julia liked it but feel it would have been better with a run half as long.

Then we started watching The Marlow Murder Club. We’ve been waiting to start it. I look on it as a reward for sitting through Fringe. I’m much happier with this – small town in UK, murders that don’t include melting faces or alien animals, good quality detective plots and time progresses in a linear fashion.

It’s not ground-breaking or cutting edge and it merges with many similar programmes, but it’s a nice relaxing watch with a lot of good actors.

Photos are from Julia’s 2018 visit to Malta when she and No 2 Son went to visit No 1 Son, who was working there. A hand holding a small bird is an ironic image for a Mediterranean island famous for slaughtering migrating birds in great numbers.

Unseemly Seriousness

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Stained Glass Museum – Ely

Did you know that there is such a thing as Information Warfare? You probably did, but you just didn’t know it had a name.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and the subject cropped up. That’s BBC Radio 4 in case you might be under the misapprehension that any other station is worth listening to. I listen to it for the 15-30 minutes it takes me to queue in traffic jams after dropping Julia off at woodturning. Otherwise, noise does not feature greatly in my life. I don’t need it to function and if I want to listen to the inane chattering of barely evolved humanoids (sometimes called DJs, presenters or, for phone-in purposes, “listeners” I can go and listen to monkeys in a zoo).

Sometimes I listen to music on You Tube, in case you are thinking I completely lack culture, but mainly, I don’t. I also like the words more than the music. And I like them to be English so I can understand them, so that cuts out classical music and opera. I suppose that’s why I’m a poet rather than a musician. Being tone deaf also plays a part.

Anyway, I digress. I have two ways to go now. One is to carry on discussing “malign influence” and the undeclared war between Russia and Europe. The other is to discuss the picture in my head, which is J D Vance as a monkey. I don’t really know why.

I’ll go with malign influence. It’s about the propaganda war between Russia and some of its neighbours, specifically Finland and Sweden. The Finn’s developed a policy of teaching their young people to distinguish between truth and misinformation by showing them how to evaluate information. Of course, we would never do it in this country because it might teach the population to think for themselves and spot political chancers.

It was part of a group of reports about how some countries are making progress in the modern world – updating medical systems, looking after the elderly in a more cost-effective way (or simply just looking after them at all), building better social housing and (in the case of Finland and Sweden) accepting that we are at war with Russia and that young people need to be taught to resist unreliable information.

That, of course, gets me onto one of my favourite subjects. Countries with low levels of raw materials and industry (like the UK, these days) have traditionally been big on education.

I’d like to see the UK getting to grips with educating people. I’d also like to see them teaching them how to use social media properly. That’s not by banning them from using it. How will you learn if you can’t use something. All you will learn is that there are ways of getting round things and that you don’t need to obey the law.

That’s not helping build a responsible and progressive world.

Sorry, I will try to avoid unseemly seriousness in future posts.

Angel with Spear, 1860s. By N H J Westlake or J M Allen. St Michael’s and All Angels, Derby

Feeling Pleased with Myself

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I am sitting here, and I admit that I am feeling smug, I have just sent off a first free verse poem since spring 2023. In some ways it isn’t a long time, but it was long enough for me to lose the knack and it has taken a couple of months to get back into the swing of it.

I must have spent a month or so wondering if the skill was ever going to come back. But if you keep writing, even if it is rubbish, you eventually get back to something usable.

This, however, is as far as it goes for now. There is a lot more competition for space in traditional poetry magazines than there is in the word of haibun and tanka and it could be some time before I see anything in print. At least I’m pushing up my number of submissions for the year.

It’s important to submit as part of the process of learning to do better. As I have said in earlier posts, I am poor at writing haiku. I’ve always struggled and although I don’t particularly like it as a form, I feel I should practice haiku to improve myself, and to improve my haibun. You don’t improve at anything by only doing the easy bits.

This one is The Prince and the Orange Toad. I have two characters in mind. One will be a handsome Prince, willowy and thin. The other will be squatter, and with an immense self-satisfied grin. I’m not sure how it’s going to progress yet, but that doesn’t matter, because we all know I talk about more projects than I ever begin.

Finally, three views of a small bowl that Julia has done using a piece of wood that somebody gave her.  It’s her first bowl, it’s quite small and it is designed for putting rings in at night. It has turned out to have a very interesting grain pattern, and the inside reminds me of the Time Tunnel.

 

Writing and Watching the Time Pass

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Despite being very erratic over the last week or two I have mainly kept to the plan, though a post a day has actually meant “averaging” a post a day. Or nothing some days and two or three on others, if I’m honest. I’m currently on 117 posts in 117 days. It is good, but I need this one to keep up.

Stones at Carsington Water

That’s how people do the Buson 100. That’s ten haiku a day for 100 days. I’ve tried three times, completed it twice, failed once. That’s life. However, I’m driven by the hope of improvement rather than the fear of failure so, though I’m not happy to have failed, I’m not going to let it ruin my life. I achieved some improvement in my haiku, then I let it fall away again. I’m not, in truth, greatly enthused by haiku and write them bacause they are necessary if you want to write haibun. The article I first read about it indicated that you could catch up if you got behind, as long as you ended up with 1,000 haiku at the end of it. The link in the post that I have just linked to is no longer available, but this one is very good too.

Stone head – Rufford Abbey

Yosa Buson, an eighteenth century poet and artist, after whom the Buson 100 is named, tried to write ten haiku a day for a hundred days twice and as I recall he didn’t finish either one. He did, however have a lot of other things to do, and he did die in the middle of the second one. He was 68, which will be my age soon – probably an indicator that I should look after myself better and write faster.

It is tempting to set myself a poetry target, but I don’t think it would help. Keeping up with the current regime of one blog post a day and one numismatic article a week are hard enough as it is.

Detail from gravestone – Crowland

Notes from a Small City

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Blossom at Wilford

Got up, cooked breakfast, discovered I have ordered the wrong bacon this week, had coffee from the cafetiere (made by No 1 Son, who is a coffee aficionado), sat, redundant, while he and his mother muttered about wedding plans and played with their phones. Nobody holds conversations anymore.

It took 13 minutes to get to the station, as there were no hold-ups and 19 minutes to get back using a longer route as I try to relearn the geography of the area. If I’m being picky, it actually took 19 minutes to get there, but six of them were spent on the drive waiting as Julia discovered a couple of last minute jobs which, of course, took priority over punctuality.

Blossom at Wilford

There are no trains to Norwich due to work on the tracks so it is down to the good old “replacement bus service”.  Today’s “bus” is a luxury coach, so it isn’t too bad.

It is a pleasant morning, with a plentiful, and varied, supply of blossom and a variety of birds, including a pied wagtail, several lustrous blackbirds and the usual magpies and pigeons. It’s he sort of morning that makes you think you should write a poem. Later, I probably will.

I was reading some William Carlos Williams last night. They are quite short poems and I could probably write a lot of poems that length. I just need to have a range of suitable subjects and something interesting to say about them. That might be more difficult. As I’ve said before, there are plenty of words, and they aren’t the problem. Learning to put he right words in the right order is the skill, and that only be learned by laying down a lot of poorly selected words in the wrong order.

Try this for a poem about plums.

Reflected Plums – Victoria

I’d better get on with that now. Half an hour of poetry followed by getting lunch made for Julia before she goes to work in the tea room, and I will have several hours more to write before she returns home.