Once, I was a Writer . . .

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Looking back at the blog posts I wrote on this day over the last eleven years (Cracking Open the Time Capsule, as WP has it), I am struck by one thing. I have become dull in all aspects of my life. I no longer go anywhere, I don’t write about interesting things and I certainly don’t see anything in my writing that I feel pleased with. I am, at best, going through the motions. Of course, in those days I had more to write about. Life as a retired man is somewhat deficient in matters of poultry, butterflies and composting toilets. Ah, the glory days . . .

It’s a little better when I look at my poetry, but even that is suffering, and my recent attempts at expanding my horizons have been met with a range of editorial response ranging from apathy to hostility.

I am trying to work out how to move on from here.

Blackpool Tower

More sleep is one thing. I slept well last night and feel full of ideas. I had been intending to take Julia in to wood turning, but she told me to go back to sleep. I was happy to do so, and grateful to wake up well-rested.

In poetry terms, I have become a machine for writing poems. Many of them are accepted for publication, but as I have said before when discussing the numbers posted by other people – quantity is not necessarily quality. The approach has served a purpose, and I will probably carry on like this, as it is a good way to practice and to pursue the, possibly mythical, ideal of writing good poetry.

In terms of writing about numismatics, I have faded out. It’s harder than poetry and blogging and after producing two years of weekly Facebook pieces, plus all the others, it was too easy to take a break when I needed time for the wedding and the funeral. This, I must address, as I have more that I want to do.

Finally, the blog. At one time I was addicted to it and felt uncomfortable if I missed a day. These days I have become very erratic and although I am managing to average a post a day (which I set as a target at the beginning of the year) I am far from blogging on a sensible daily basis.

This is all leading to one of two conclusions. One is that I need to stop writing so much so I can be more relaxed and write things of better quality. Once a week blog posts, less poetry, written to a slower tempo, and a selection of posts on numismatics which will make me a reputation as a scholar.

I probably overdid it with the “scholar” didn’t I? This really isn’t me.

So I’m going to carry on with my frantic blogging (clinging on to my daily schedule by the tips of my fingers), and I’m going to plough ahead with the targets I have set for poetry. Writing more is good practice, and the experience of rejection is forming a nice hard shell to protect me in the future. You can tell I’m getting better, a younger me would have used the word carapace. And finally, I’m going to start back on the numismatic articles. I have a few subjects I’ve been saving until I am researched and ready, but as I may have said before, the perfect time never comes and it is better to write something imperfect than leave a pile of lovely notes.

 

Empire State Building

I am going to do this by reorganising myself. Not only will it release time for my literary projects, but it will give me time to write my memoirs. Not proper memoirs, more like family history notes. My cousins have asked me several times about family members that they vaguely remember. On that side of the family I am the oldest by a few years and am probably the last person alive who met my great-aunts Sarah and Maud. I have very few memories of them, mainly about being intimidated by the street they lived in, and by the ladies themselves. They were both in their 80s when I met them, tall, forbidding and living in a dark three story terraced house built from Accrington brick, which was equally tall and forbidding. I know very little about them, other than what I know from the family tree, but I think I ought to write down what I personally know about the family members who were still alive when I was young. They are, in a fashion, still alive while someone remembers them. Even if that person was a bewildered small boy. My great-grandmother read to me from Rupert books. Her sisters were, in contrast, distant and austere. I never knew why they never married, because they were old enough to have married before the shortage of suitable husbands caused by the Great War. Maud, as far as I can tell, worked in the cotton trade all her life, Sarah started off in domestic service. I wonder if it was something to do with their early lives. In contrast, their brother was an assistant draper in his father’s shop and my great-grandmother was a seamstress and dressmaker. She made my mother’s wedding dress. I must find a photo of that. It was an elegant dress, considering it was made of what was available after the war and before the end of rationing. I remember seeing a piece of it once, it was a rich brocade. I wonder if it is still around. It was in with some family photos. It’s strange how some thoughts on my writing skills end up as a search for memories and a scrap of dress material.

 

Accrington bricks, by the way, are used in the foundations of Blackpool Tower, the Thiepval Memorial and the Empire State Building. They were also used to build the brick sculpture of the Mallard. Hence the photos.

Mallard. It looks fast even when it’s built from bricks. Not any brick, Lancashire bricks, from Accrington.

 

 

The Things They Never Warn You About

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There was a time when I could knock out a blog post in around twenty minutes. It wasn’t necessarily profound, but it was 250 words and it did have some sort of structure. It seems to take longer these days, but everything does, doesn’t it?

A Bear in a Tree

Even getting a tie on is a bit of a performance these days, as I recently found out when I attended both a wedding and a funeral in recent weeks. I hadn’t worn a tie for years. Like riding a bicycle, the basics do not desert you. At least, I believe they don’t. I’ve not checked to see if I’ve forgotten to ride a bike, I’m just assuming you never forget because everybody says so. If I ever find myself on a bike again, I will report back.

The knotting bit is fine. In fact it seemed easier than it used to be. It was the folding down of the collar that proved tricky. My shoulders are not what they used to be and after putting my collar up and tying the tie, I seem to lose the ability to use my arms in a raised position, a combination of stiff joints and tiredness. Yes. my shoulders get tired after a couple of minutes of tying a tie. They keep that one as a surprise. You never think of shoulders wearing out until you start using sticks. It is very frustrating, and one of those things nobody tells you about getting old.

Hair loss yes, grumbling, yes, aches and pains and a vague feeling that things used to be better, yes. But the inability to hold your arms up to put a tie on? When did that happen?

Paddington Bear at St Paul’s

Talking of which, I got stuck trying to put my trousers on last week. I know that socks and trousers get steadily less easy, and am resigned to sitting on the bed to attend to such things, but I didn’t realise that they actually started to actively resist as you got older. The second one seems to be worse. I can usually get one leg in without too much problem, but the second always seems to be at a more difficult angle. Maybe it’s the design of modern trousers, or the Russians/Chinese (they always seemed to get the blame in the 60s, and that seems to be coming back). Maybe it’s just the design of my legs. But it’s definitely a problem of old age that nobody warned me about.

I could write an entire series about this, but I won’t. My older readers already know all about it, and my younger readers won’t believe me.

Time to go to the doctor now. I’m on weekly visits at the moment with one thing and another. It’s nice to be looked after, but it does tend to mess the day up. At least I won’t have to worry about the clutch now.  However, I have no doubt another worry is just around the corner.

Straw Bale Bowie Bear

Yes, pictures are of bears again.

A Blog about What?

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I used to blog about the project on the farm, including baking and apple pressing. I’m not sure how interesting it was, but I had pictures of sheep and goats and poultry and that made up for the deficiencies in the text.

Startled Teddy Bear

Startled Teddy Bear

Then it moved on to what we did on our days off. I used to worry, at that point, that nobody would be interested, but it was variety.

Then, of course, we had to leave the farm and break up the group and I started writing about life in a coin shop, followed by writing poetry, followed by life as a retired man. I’m not particularly interesting, but I have got past the point of worrying about it.

So, I ramble through life, writing about nothing in particular and, it seems, don’t have many followers or people who like me. This isn’t unexpected, the surprise is that I have any regular readers at all.

The new “Blast from the Past” feature on WP was one of the things that brought about this conclusion. The other was the notification that I had increased traffic. There is indeed a hump in my stats and hundreds of people have looked at my posts. About 400 of them were from China and even more were from the USA. None of the Chinese watchers have posted to like or comment and the only comments/likes from the USA are from the normal few people who pop along regularly.

Bear with seed packet from Kew

It looks like I’m being visited by the bots that gather information for generating AI. That is the true indicator of the state of the world. Scientists, if my theory is correct, are visiting my blog to enable artificial intelligence to harvest the information needed to run the world. My blog!

Just think of that. Our future is being decided on the basis of the ramblings of a grumpy geriatric who has an unhealthy relationship with chips and punctuation (not to mention Excessive  Un-necessary Capitalisation).

Rupert the Bear

I have a new way of wasting time, by the way – I read the posts I made on this day over the years, or which link to them, including the one where I pretended to be a bear and the one that has information on the MV Coronia, which I can use elsewhere. It really is a useful resource for people like me who want to move their procrastination to the next level.

A Bear of Very Little Brain

Photos are bears. You probably guessed that though . . .

 

A Very Strange Thing

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Memorial to the dead of two wars

You may recall a post I once did about the Bechers of Southwell. Mrs Becher lost two brothers on the same day in 1915 and her husband was badly wounded, lay out in the open for two days and eventually died of blood poisoning two months later. One of her sons would eventually die in 1940 during an air raid in Aden. Here is the link. Or here. Two posts, same title, slightly different subject matter.

I decided to rewrite it for the Peterborough Military History group. I have been very unproductive lately and it seemed like a quick way to get back in the game.

I like to add a local aspect where I can, and the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt reminded me of a man local to Peterborough. In the church at Orton Longueville there is a brass memorial plaque in memory of Captain Herbert Selwyn Scorer. I have seen it many times, as this used to be my parish church, and I last saw it at my mother’s funeral, which is now 12 years ago. Time flies.

This is the memorial to the missing at Thiepval. The army built it to commemorate my great-grandfather. While they were at it they added another 72,336 names. They say missing but they aren’t actually missing, just mislaid. The army hadn’t worked out how to make a durable dog tag, so many of the bodies they recovered for proper burials after the war were unidentifiable. There are approximately 212,000 grave markers bearing the words “Known Unto God”, a phrase suggested by Kipling who was heavily involved in the iconography of the Commonwealth, War Graves Commission. His son was one of those buried under such a stone, though his body was eventually identified and properly commemorated.

 

Like Becher and his brothers-in-law, Scorer was killed in the fight for the redoubt in October 1915.  He was  a farmer in the village at the time of his death, and a relative by marriage, John Norton Lowe, is also on the village war memorial, having died in 1944 whilst a prisoner of the Japanese.

So I set to and tied up some loose ends. I knew Lowe had lived in a thatched house in the village, and I had been in that same house before I knew the story. It was dark and damp and smelt of cabbage. The ladies i spoke to in relation to the village newsletter could well have been members of the scorer or Lowe families, but I didn’t know the story at that time so never asked.

I then looked up Scorer with a view to pinning down where he had lived in the village. There was no house number for him in the 1911 census, but the next house was the Rectory.

My Great-grandmother’s gravestone with W H Wilson’s memorial inscription. She never got over his loss. There are a lot of stones like this in country churchyards.

These days there is a second house in the Rectory grounds and three modern houses in a row, with a cricket ground behind them. In 1911, I calculate, the next old house along, must have been where Captain Scorer lived, and where his family mourned his passing.  A newspaper report of the sale of his livestock confirmed it was Hall Farm, and that house, though renamed, was Hall Farm, before it became Old Hall Hatchery. Hatchery, you say? Don’t we know someone who was in the poultry business? Yes, you do. It seems that the house I lived in for ten years with my parents, the creaking, cold and somewhat rambling house, was also the home of Captain Herbert Selwyn Scorer. It has taken me approximately 50 years to put all the story together.

If I were more sensitive, this would be a ghost story. But I’m not, I’m just annoyed at the lax way I put my research together. Though I do acknowledge that it’s a very strange thing. Though not a Strange Meeting.

 

The Devil’s Darning Needle

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I had another acceptance yesterday morning, and am feeling slightly fraudulent. The three acceptances I have had recently come to 80, 15 and 6 words respectively.  I can just about make out a case for thinking of 80 words as a submission, but when you get down to the shorter poems I begin to wonder. Be honest – what sort of poem is six words long?

Damselfly at Wilford

I know that’s the format, but it sometimes seems like haiku are just a con trick. A good one is like a flash of lightning, but most of them aren’t that good.  Even worse, if you read a translation of an old classic, they are often dull and pointless. Of course, most of mine are rejected, so that puts me firmly in my place – I can’t even write an acceptable example of a short, and often tedious, form.

I’m not sure whether this makes me an original thinker or a philistine. Or possibly a heretic.

Meanwhile, we have had woodpeckers in the garden again. We also had a sparrow, which is unusual for us. It’s a little brown bird, which used to be common but is now very patchy in its distribution. This is the first one we have had in the garden at this house.

While I was waiting for a car to take me to the garage to pick my repaired car up (that noise you may have heard earlier was my heart breaking as I opened up my wallet to pay for the new clutch) I noticed three damsel flies flitting around the front garden. I’m sure they were Common Blue Damselflies. One female, two males. Or one female and one male twice. It could be either. The males are blue. A lot of damselflies are blue. It’s very confusing.

Damsel Fly – Wilford

I like the name devil’s darning needle. I don’t use it because damselfly is shorter and I’m lazy. I’m also concerned that using the name devil will endanger my status as an atheist. I don’t generally discuss religion because, like politics, nobody is going to change their on the subject, but when I see some of the things that are happening around the world, and see religion being used as an  excuse, I would like to distance myself from them.

It may be that when I die, I will find I am wrong and will have trouble explaining myself, but I feel it is unlikely. However, if there is an afterlife and all that goes with it, people who have been murdering babies in the name of religion will, I hope, have an equally hard time.

Dragonfly

An Idiot with a Pruning Saw

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Trees, Derbyshire

Today could go one of three ways.

I could do something creative. There are millions of unused words out there and I could knock some into shape and make a poem. That sounds like hard work. Obviously to the millions of people out there getting dusty or muddy or oily it doesn’t sound much like work, but it is.

Or I could wake Julia with a cup of tea and a kind word. If I want to live dangerously I could wake Julia and tell her I need breakfast . . .

Or I may just write more blog. It’s not demanding, and I can pretend it’s practice for poetry. Seems like a good idea. Certainly better than waking Julia before she is ready.

So, an acacia tree, as mentioned in the last post. It was about thirty feet tall, almost dead and sited between two neighbours. It was actually in the garden of the lady who lived behind my customer. The two of them were not happy with each other over various disputes and I was usually caught in the middle. My customer objected to the virtually dead tree hanging over her garden, and worried about something dropping off. The neighbour, who was usually very big on enforcing her rights, wasn’t quite so keen on fulfilling her obligations (ie spending money on getting a specialist to take it down)  and clearly had no intention about sorting things out.

Eventually, I told my customer that I would get rid of the offending branch and we would have to leave it at that. So out came the pruning saw and the extension pole. I couldn’t quite reach, so I unfolded my general purpose platform and stood on that. I could at that point stretch up and saw into the branch.

You may already have spotted the basic flaw in the plan. I was about to saw a fairly chunky branch that was directly overhead as I strained to reach it.  In order to get it done before the neighbour noticed I decided to get it all done in one cut. This was another problem. It would generally be bad for the tree too – you should really do this sort of thing with a couple of cuts to keep it all tidy, but as the tree was almost leafless and clearly failing I decided not to worry too much.

Trees near Slaidburn

Anyway, I got sawing. It was a lovely sharp saw (until one of the kids used it to “help” me in the garden one day) and the cut went well. As it got to the final quarter I realised the weight of the branch was about to complete the job for me without waiting for the cutting to finish. That’s why I should have cut it into pieces and made two cuts for the final “cut”. I knew the theory, but the theory doesn’t allow for things like argumentative neighbours and wanting to get it done quickly.

It was round about that point that I realised the branch was falling, that I was balanced precariously and that my hard hat was still in the car.  It was about four feet long and 4-6″ in diameter.  And it was accelerating.

I’m not particularly quick or athletic, so jumping out of the way wasn’t an option, and I styled it out, bent backwards to avoid it hitting my head and casually diverted its fall by shoving it away with my left forearm.

It made quite a dent in the ground, and took about ten minutes for the feeling to return to my arm, at which point I wished it hadn’t bothered. Eventually it stopped hurting and I felt a great feeling of relief that it had all passed off so well. The notable thing about it was that for several weeks after the incident the scab on my arm kept casting out bits of bark which had forced there way in when it hit me.

And that is the story of an idiot with a pruning saw. It ranks up with the story about how I fell out of a pear tree and learnt to use my own ladders instead of trusting those provided by customers. However, enough of trees and stupidity for one day.

Trees are not your friend.

Wingfield manor. Mary Queen of Scots stayed here.

From Three to One

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When I finished my last post I had three ideas for poems in my head. I have written two down ad they are half complete. One of them will stay that way as I have hit a snag that I probably can’t get past. The third, I forgot. One in three is actually not bad for me. Then another thought starts – even the one I’m working on isn’t as good as it sounded when it was in my head. It’s about a robin singing outside the chapel at the crematorium.

Robin at Budby Flash

I need a flower bed for the poem, and I can’t for the life of me remember what was in the bed I saw, apart from holly. I don’t want holly as that’s something for winter poems. I could have lilac, I like lilac. I could then mention the scent and maybe weave in a bit of death symbolism, but that would mean that I would have to make the poem occur a month earlier, at which point I have to be careful about adjusting other things which may appear. it all become more difficult to match up. I will, I think, go for rhododendrons. Not as good as lilac, but OK. They are flowering now and they are evergreen and a bit barren underneath – like holly. On the other hand, I do like lilacs . . .

But I wouldn’t get the space and the rustle of dry leaves if I used lilacs.

Then I need a robin. Not a problem. The problem comes because we have so many superstitions about robins. I have been checking them up as background reading (I like to check facts, even in a poem). I am now going to have to sift through and make sure I avoid becoming diverted.

Robin

Finally, there is the tree it flew into. It was a birch, but I always end up with birch trees. There are some nice acacias outside the doctor where I had my blood test in the morning before setting off. It needs to be a tree where you can see it singing, so an acacia will do, but it’s probably better to keep it as a birch.

I once came close to injuring myself with an acacia tree, but that’s a post for another time, or for a poem entitled “An Idiot with a Pruning Saw”.

 

A Film Show a Surprise and a Superstition

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Robin

I went to the funeral of one of my aunts yesterday. I used to be well-supplied with aunts – thirteen that I had met and there were several I never met, so haven’t counted.  They have now dwindled to two. Several of them were actually great aunts (and several were great-great aunts) and two were actually second cousins who were approximately aunt age. One is still alive and another, in South Africa, hasn’t answered a letter for a year or two, so it’s a Schrödinger’s Cat situation, where she is still alive until we get a letter to tell us differently.

I have been very bad at keeping in touch. As such, I have spent most of the night awake, contemplating ways I could have done better and thinking about family history.

There was a screen in the crematorium chapel, displaying my aunt’s photograph and (mis-spelt name). At her mother’s funeral the vicar used the wrong name all the way through – using her official first name when she was always known by her second name. Her father, in turn, was sent medals by a grateful nation in 1919, where his name was spelt wrongly on them and when the King sent his widow a memorial scroll, they spelt her name wrong too.

Some people are destined to achieve greatness, some are mere footnotes in history and, dragging along at the rear comes my family, with its name spelt wrong.

In a way, it was good to see the extension of family history into modern times – a century of misspelt names.

It was, as funerals go, well organised and upbeat and, as a final touch, a robin came out after the rain and sang us on our way. Of course, it’s only a superstition about robins, but, as they say, other superstitions are available.

Robin - singing

Robin – singing

Part of the slide show featured my aunt’s wedding photo in 1961. It was wet and blustery day. I was given some confetti to throw, which I did. Nobody had told me I had to wait for the bride and groom and it fell in a lump into a puddle. On being told of my error I tried to retrieve it for re-use, but was told to leave it and try again with a new, dry batch. What struck me as I looked at the picture, was that I think there are only three of us left who were there that day. Possibly two (see note about Schrödinger’s Cat). My sister had been left with a babysitter as she was considered too small for the weather. She still nurses a grudge about that.

It’s a surprise to look round and realise that you are the oldest in the room. It’s time for a poem, I think. First published in Contemporary Haibun Online 20.1 Spring 2024.

The Next Funeral

Amazon reviews indicate I am not the only person to have searched for a black tie with next day delivery. I could have sworn it was in the car’s glove compartment, neatly folded from the last time I wore it. My one white shirt hangs, ghostlike, from the bedroom picture rail and my timeless drab tweed jacket hangs next to it. The tie, I suddenly remember, is in my jacket pocket.

Tomorrow, as I nod to cousins, we will remark that we really must try to meet without someone dying. My uncle, who has just turned ninety, tells his brother in law to wrap up warm or he’ll be next. One day, I suppose, I will realise there is no obvious candidate to be next . . .

in church the sun
shines through an angel’s robe
bubbles trapped in blue glass
I wonder whose breath is
captured forever


					

		
		
	

							
	

				

			
						

				Following Up and Bits & Pieces
			

										

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I was recently asked for a description of various forms of Japanese poetry. I think you should find all you need here.  There are links in that one, which is about tanka and tanka prose, which will take you to haiku and haibun. One of the tanka links no longer works. If I remove it I them have to change the text, so am leaving it as I am short of time and am not a perfectionist.


The real way to write poetry of any type, as I have said before, is to pick up a pen and start writing. Eventually it will need typing but you’re a blogger, so you can already do that. Then email some off to editors.


If they are accepted, you are a genius. Well done, come back and tell me how you did it. Then tell everyone you learnt it all from me.


If your initial poems are rejected, join the club. Write some better ones and send them off. Each rejection hardens you up to cope with rejection, so failure is useful.


This year I have made 44 submissions and have had 18 acceptances, 17 rejections and have 9 answers pending. It’s not such a good rate as last year, but I’m writing to more places rather than just the ones that suit me. The point is to do something new rather than rack up an impressive ratio of accepted poetry.


Orange Parker Pen


I am, as i have said, looking at changing things round a bit. It may not see me improving or becoming more successful but it will get me out of a rut and make me use my brain differently.


Meanwhile, Sunday brought two emails, one accepting a haibun and one accepting a haiku. The ones that weren’t used (six haiku and two haibun) can go into the submissions for the coming month.


I need one lot of 10-15 and one lot of four for the 15th of the month. I now have enough. It’s a help and takes some of the pressure off.


Having said that, I just went to look at what I need to do. Even with this progress I still have quite a lot of work ahead of me. OK, I have three weeks to do it in,  but I am at a funeral in Norwich later today and on Thursday I will be messing about delivering the car for repair.


My Orange Parker Pen. I just wrote a poem about it, as all my hints to parker have come to nothing. It was rejected. So I sent it to somebody else.


 

					

		
		
	

							
	

				

			
						

				A Few Notes and a Count – (Day 157 Post 158)
			

										

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As things stand it is Day 157 as I write and this will be post 158, so I have caught up with my posting after the time I took off for the wedding.  This has been assisted by finding a couple of drafts which I have brought back to life, which meant I just needed to add a few bits and pieces to the already existing text. I’ve also wiped off a few drafts which were clearly going nowhere.


In the last week or two I have also sneaked in a couple of extra poetry submissions to proper poetry magazines (I have decided that a move away from the Japanese forms is required at this moment. It’s a change of emphasis rather than a career change. I need to expand my horizons again and, now that I am (almost) immune to rejection I am pressing forward.


Pomegranate wallpaper


So far I have made six submissions in the last 10 days and had three rejections. I’m trying not to read too much into the speed of rejection. However, I clearly have work to do.


Talking of which, I need to start my numismatic writing again and get a few more things in hand. It’s OK saying I’ve caught up with the posting on the blog, but there’s always more to do. Lots more to do. Really, I should have started 50 years ago. I always meant to, but other things sort of took over.  If there is an afterlife, and if they run a version of Mastermind my specialist subjects are likely to include Goof Intentions, Procrastination and Unfinished projects. And we all know where it ends up when you pave a road with good intentions.


That’s it for now. If I don’t post now the count will become inaccurate.


Purple Poppies