The Days Pass

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It is now six days since my last post. They slip by so, easily in my days spent sitting by fans sipping cold water and eating ice cream. That’s not my entire day, of course, Julia is rationing me to one ice cream a day. It is for the best. I’ve been out a few times but returned to shade and fans as soon as possible. We have had a builder  in doing more jobs that should have been done years ago. We still have jobs that need doing too. It never ends . . .

Several notable people have died in this period, including a politician who seems to have been murdered and a TV presenter who was my age when he died. I could, I suppose, offer some commentary on the events but all I would be doing would be voicing an opinion based on what I have seen of them on TV. They both seemed OK and I’m sorry they died sooner than they, and their families would have wanted. These days I tend to think of people in relation to our ages – one was 11 years older than me, one was my age. Any sadness I may feel at their passing would be heavily intertwined with thoughts on my life expectancy.

I also try to avoid the modern curse of thinking I know people after reading Wikipedia, an obituary and a scattering of internet gossip.

I see one of our national football team has just referred to him and his team mates putting in a “hard shift”. Shifts tend to be eight hours long, depressing, tedious and poorly paid. It’s not how I would describe the life of a professional footballer.

I just checked up on my views to see if I was being fair and accurate. It seems they start their training  days “early” and “often around 7:30 or 8am”. I can’t help feeling that this says as much about the life of a journalist as it does about the life of a footballer, as most of the working world doesn’t see this as early. Nor do we start the day with a light breakfast of low fat and high protein ingredients. Employers generally expect you to have eaten before you arrive.

However, like members of the Royal Family, footballers are easy targets, as they are so divorced from the realities of life. I will, therefore, desist, though I will link to the doings of the Royals. Prince Harry, in his campaign against the press, seems to have come unstuck this week and he and his celebrity mates failed to carry any of their points in the recent court case. Yes, I admit that it must be irritating to have the press pursuing you, but you can’t have press coverage when it suits you and turn it off when it doesn’t. Anyway, none of the people that joined him in the case were particulalrly interesting, so either way, it’s no interest to me, apart from a variety of public figures being told to grow up.

I’m very conflicted with this case. Yes, I’m glad the celebrities lost, but I don’t really like the press winning, and I certainly don’t like the idea of the lawyers making money from it. In the world of cosmic balance it feels like we all lost a little bit this week.

In poetry terms I have had either one (or two) acceptances (I’m not quite sure when I last reported on this) and a rejection. I’m about to start submitting, as there are some things I need to get in before the 15th. I meant to do them last week but I just ignored them and sat in front of a fan. That, I think, is where I began, so it’s now time to go.

Football’s Shame

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Football has had many shameful moments. Enoch West, a local man (I say that as a resident of Nottingham for the last 37 years) was a great example of one of football’s villains. Born in Hucknall, he played professionally for Sheffield United before transferring to Nottingham Forest for a fee of £5. He was the first player ever sent off whilst playing for Nottingham Forest and in 1915, playing for Manchester United,  was convicted of match fixing. Four United Players and four Liverpool players were banned. West refused to admit his wrongdoing (possibly because he was wrongfully convicted) and his ban was not lifted until 1945 – a thirty year ban being the longest in Football League history.

For an American parallel, look to the Chicago Black Sox (not only a racist recasting of the White Sox name, but a crime against orthography) and “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. Of course, they have made films about that, but Enoch West has never, as far as I know, appeared on screen.

I love the history of sport, it’s just a shame that modern sport is so tawdry and diminished in comparison. The money is bigger but the characters are not the same.

Enoch West was banned for 30 years, Jackson was banned for 105. Balogun was reprieved before the ban was served.

Today, in contrast, Forest just announced they were selling Elliot Anderson to Manchester City for £115 million. Inflation of a high order indeed.

FIFA also announced the shortest ban in football history today too. Donald Trump got in touch with them to tell them that he didn’t think the offence that earned a red card, and a one match ban, for USA player Folarin Balogun was a foul.

Donald Trump is, of course, an oracle on all things, including the rules of football. And Gianni Infantini, after surviving many investigations for corruption, is an expert at being in the centre of controversy.  Trump has already had a meaningless “Peace Prize” awarded by FIFA, isn’t he just being greedy by demanding they re-write the rules to suit the USA national team?

The trouble isn’t whether it was a foul or not, or whether the ref was right or not, it’s that football has made it look as if it is open to corruption, that if does not back up its referees and that the USA, if it does pull off a fairytale ending and win the World Cup, will forever be remembered for controversy.

We might have to start using an asterisk again, like they did for Roger Maris and his batting record.

 

Out of Ideas

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Community Gardening – Sherwood – Nottingham

I didn’t realise until WP started posting a daily dose of retrospective posts, that I am writing about the same thing over and over again.

In 2025 I was writing about medical matters and the planning and scheduling behind my poetry writing.

In 2024 I wrote about elections and the moral shortcomings of politicians, including Peter Mandelson.

In 2023 I wrote two posts on the same day. One was about not having any ideas (note that I wrote the title for this post before starting the original post, which is now edited to nothing). The other was about the contents of my head and producing ideas from there.

In 2022 the subject was ideas. Can you see a pattern developing? That was the year that I gave up on titles – the post being Day 185.

In 2021 it was slightly better. That was the day that a lady rang the shop to confirm that we were Collectors World.  Having established that, she proceeded to ask me how she could change the batteries in her carol-singing ceramic rabbit figurine. It turns out there was a shop selling gi

In 2020 I wrote 10 Good Things About Breathing.

In 2019 it was a rant about old folk on mobility scooters. It was a sign of things to come, and slightly poignant as my own mobility scooter is sadly under-used.

Bumble Bee Mencap Garden Wilford

It seems to have been a good day for me, as there are more posts – 2018, two from 2017 and one from 2016.  I won’t link to them all as it’s a lot of reading, but I am pleased I managed to get 11 successive years. On some dates they only pick up half of that.

It seems that the further I get back the more interesting I become – some of the unlinked posts include baking pizza, and building benches from pallets. However, there is still some chuntering about sunburn, fish and chips and birdwatching.

The pattern is there on other days too and the conclusion is clear – I am gradually writing about a shrinking pool of subjects. I don’t just need new subjects for poems, I need new subjects for blogging.

The shopping has arrived, so after we have put that away I will start to look for new ideas.

Figs at Wilford Mencap Garden

 

 

 

What a Difference a “T” Makes

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Reflecting on immortality this morning, I couldn’t help wondering what the difference is between immortality and immorality. One letter and fifty years, I decided. Even if I were single I wouldn’t have the energy for chasing women these days and nights of beer and curry are restricted by my digestion and fear of hangovers. I am not the man I was.

A mixture of books

I would like to achieve immortality through my writing, though I doubt that this will happen. The best I can hope for is that I actually get round to producing a book of poetry and that I get myself organised enough to fulfill my legal requirements, someone may dust my book off in a couple of centuries and cite it in their thesis on whatever they are doing – average poetry, vanity publishing or analysis of paper types.

Legal requirements? That’s right,  books published in the UK should be sent to the following Legal Deposit libraries – the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales. the Libraries of the University of Oxford, Cambridge University and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. It’s a strange list and one I’m not particularly happy with as Scotland, Wales and Ireland are always critical of England and Oxford and Cambridge can afford to buy their own books.

However, it’s nice to know that it will be available, whether it’s for a future scholar, a survivor of WW3 looking for toilet paper or a monkey dressed in leather armour. Or anybody dressed in leather armour, for that matter. Why, in all these fantasy and post-apocalyptic films do they never invent the printing press or a system of proportional representation, but they always manage to rivet bits of leather together?

That’s my thought for the day.

The Gardening Section

As One Door Closes . . .

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Little Egret – Horseshoe Point

That’s it. The scramble to write a post a day and beat last year’s publication record for publication, is now over.  I have thrown in the towel and will now blog when I feel like it. ironically, I may feel more like it when I remove the target I set myself.  It was OK when I was keeping up and missing one or two, which were easily caught up. Once I got a week behind, and more to the point, did so without noticing, it was till within my capabilities, but I found I wasn’t particularly bothered.

The same goes for the numismatic writing. I let it lapse about a month ago and so far nobody even seems to have noticed that the Facebook page has had nothing new on it. This was just a pause due to the wedding, but as it went on I realised that I felt more relaxed. And when I realised that nobody had noticed, I realised that it didn’t matter. I started doing it to back the efforts of the member who set the page up, and tried to enlist the support of several other members, but none of them stepped forward to help. Eventually someone, who never raises a finger to help others within the society, will mention that it’s a shame we stopped doing it. I could illustrate that simple remark with many examples, but I won’t.

The poetry is still going OK. This morning I wrote one that I feel happy with and I have had two acceptances this week. It’s difficult to say where i am compared to this time last year because of the problem of defining “this time”. I’m close to my results for the first six months of last year, with one or two results still pending. I may well be exactly on target, but as I had a couple of disappointing results early on it’s a bit borderline.  All I can do is keep trying. I’ve made 53 submissions this year compared to 45 last year, so I’ve been putting the work in, even if the success rate is down. This isn’t necessarily due to writing badly, I’m just trying new places and it can be tricky. However, it is good for me to make things harder.

Little Egret

Philip Larkin and Moral Judgement

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He looks a bit like Eric Morecambe in some of his photos – which is probably not a good comparison.

I wrote this after watching a YouTube clip of Philip Larkin riding a bicycle. I can’t exactly remember what he was doing but association with An Arundel Tomb has always made me think he was visiting churches, even though I’m not convinced that a church features in the clip. It started out as a longer piece and I pruned it and polished it every time it came back, which was often. I think it was sent out at least four times. On the last occasion I didn’t, as i recall, do anything, as i couldn’t think of anything else to do so I just sent it straight out again and, a day later, it was accepted.

This is an example of how editors all have different views and requirements.

Meanwhile, although I have used it on the blog before, I use it here to illustrate the making of moral judgements. Larkin, you see, was a racist according to his letters. That illustrates several points, such as whether we should judge poetry through a filter of our own morality. Just because he was a racist does that make him a bad poet? And if we do decided to judge a writer by his morals rather than his writing, is it fair to judge one as a racist because he preserved his correspondence, yet to make no judgement on another writer who may have failed to preserve his correspondence?

That’s a tricky thing about making moral judgements, they aren’t always accurate – a bit like the poem, which picks and choses which facts to use. I didn’t use moral judgements in selecting the facts, just what fitted nicely into the flow.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Failed Haiku Feb 2021

 

Finding Myself Lacking

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Swan at National Arboretum

I just did a count, and found that as of yesterday I had written 174 posts this year. Unfortunately, as yesterday was day 181 of 2026, this means i was seven posts behind on my target. This was very annoying as, until four weeks ago, I was on target.

My first thought was that I should write like crazy and get the seven made up so I could sign off with an average one a day, as I had said. But it would take me at least two days, which would effectively still leave me short of the target and mean I had to write for at least another day, and leave my target at one a day, but for six months and three days.

Whooper Swans on farmland near Frampton Marsh. Note the straight necks and yellow/black bills.

On the other hand, tomorrow will be day 183 of the year, and thus halfway through. I could, at the risk of looking like some sort of single-minded maniac, write nine posts in two days and achieve a nice neat record of one post a day for the first half of the year. It is an elegant and balanced solution, albeit from a man who is looking steadily less well-balanced as this post goes on.

This is a worry, not because I failed in my self-selected target, or even because I can’t do a simple thing like writing 250 words a day, but because I can’t accept it and have to manufacture a tidy end.

This is a bit too much like my Dad, who started to constrain his days and his trips out with the need to fit in with self-induced set mealtimes.

For now, this will do, but I will be back later with more posts. Or a reflection on mania. I am not sure which.

Mute Swan, Lapwings and Black Headed Gull

 

Poetry and Morality?

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Don’t get excited, despite the title it isn’t a newly discovered Jane Austen novel where an opium addicted poet moves in next door to the three attractive daughters living in a Hampshire Rectory.

I decided to include a poem a few days ago when I was discussing moral judgements to be made by poets. When I discovered how many days I have missed posting recently, I decided it was definitely time, as republishing poetry is quick and easy.. I don’t think I’ve posted this one before. If I have, my apologies.

One major change has taken place since this poem was written – 18 carat gold was £38 per gram in 2023 when this was written. It’s now £72. At peak it was about £96. That’s the effect of wars, disturbed markets and political panic.

My contribution to the discussion was to say that I didn’t think it was my job to make decisions based on my perception of morality. I was then asked whether or not I made a moral judgement every time I wrote a poem.

I’m fairly sure that I don’t. This one is just a description of one line on the official documentation relating to the valuation of my father’s estate, with a couple of bits of trivia relating to death. Maybe I should. But to be honest, I have enough trouble wrestling words into a poem, without debating the rights and wrongs of it. I’m just shallow. I could, of course, write a second poem based on this one and the new price of gold, but I’m not sure the world needs another poem about war and capitalism.

That of course, was just one of the questions surrounding poetry and morals. Two others are about the morality of supporting right-wing magazines by submitting (it’s always the right-wing that gets questioned, isn’t it?), and I asked about the morality of reading poems by poets with questionable moral stances.

I will leave it there, as it has the potential to develop in a way that is neither useful or interesting. I’m off to read some poetry. Now, should I try the racist Larkin, the incestuous Byron or the fascist Pound? Even Dylan Thomas was overly fond of the bottle and committed a number of crimes against neckwear. Morals can be so confusing.

Does anyone have a view?

On Dunwich beach

 

Weighed in the Balance

The Egyptians believed that Anubis would weigh the heart of the deceased against a feather to see if they were worthy of the afterlife. Later, scientists calculated that the human soul weighed 21 grams.

This morning, preparing the paperwork for my late father’s estate, my heart skipped a beat as I saw the details of his life reduced to a weight – 8 grams of 18 carat gold at £38 a gram. That is the price set on his wedding ring, the value that the tax man places on 63 years of marriage.

his life
persists in memory
—dust floats in the sun

First published in Blithe Spirit August 2023.

Ringlet

Coshed With a Lexicon

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Sorry everybody, we’ve had visitors over the weekend, and added to the heat I’ve not been working very hard. I also had portions of four days last week in the hands of the medical profession. One of them only involved waiting for a parcel of injectable methotrexate, but it all adds to the disruption and lack of concentration.

Then there is the fact that I have become accustomed to idling my days away as two oscillating fans do their best to make my day bearable.

 

It is with considerable horror that I realise it has been six days since I last posted. In that time I have taken delivery of an order of injector pens, looked up possible side effects (I had, I admit, too much time on my hands) ,had a blood test and been comprehensively prodded by doctors. On one day I was forced to sit in a small Perspex cage breathing into a tube. Fortunately they had fans around the room and I was able to avoid melting. The technician working the device said I was lucky to be in at 9.45, as it got considerably hotter by mid-day.

One of the side effects of the methotrexate, by the way, is hair loss. This one, I confess, does not worry me. Drowsiness is no real problem either. I like a nap. My liver disintegrating (I may be exaggerating here, they may have used some weasel words like “Functionally impaired”) does concern me a bit but I have quarterly blood test to check on that. I only take it for arthritis, if I was taking it in the dose necessary for chemotherapy I imagine I would be less inclined to make light of the problems. It can also cause memory impairment (“chemo fog”) and . . . well, to be honest I can’t remember the rest . . .

Sorry, couldn’t resist

Although it’s true, I do have difficulty with this sort of thing.  Some of the words are very long and barely comprehensible. Sometimes it’s like being hit repeatedly with a dictionary, or a sock full of billiard balls.

I keep meaning to take better care of myself, but it can be difficult when you don’t know what the words mean.

The good news is that I passed the blood test. The respiratory test showed decent results. Not good, but a lot better than I feared. Once the results are with the doctor, we will see what happens. Probably not a lot.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

Hot!

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It’s hot by English standards, though I’m sure it’s just pleasantly warm by the standards of many other nations. Fresh from re-evaluating my ambitions to live in New Mexico (due to my growing concerns about the USA), I’m also rethinking the one about moving to Australia. Even in an air-conditioned bubble or a repurposed opal mine, I’m thinking it may be a bit hot for me.

Poppies growing from cracks in concrete

Other parts of the country are either hotter or cooler. Look at Derrick’s blog or Tootlepedal’s. They, I think, represent the two extremes today. Oh dear, I just looked at TP’s blog – he is in hospital after Mountain Rescue had to bring him down after a knee injury.

Not that it’s all bad news, I must “avoid strenuous activity during the hottest part of the day” according to official advice, (I am dedicated to taking that advice), and keep the house cool, whilst drinking plenty of fluids. It’s a good thing we have government to look after us, as I wouldn’t have thought about any of that by myself They also advise people not to leave babies, pets and old people alone in parked cars. Since when have I been reduced to the level of a child or pet?

I’ve actually spent most of the day wondering about one of the great philosophical questions of our times – how does Bradley Walsh get work as an actor? He’s a lovely bloke, I’m sure, and a great question master on The Chase and irs spin-offs. He’s done a number of high-profile roles in Coronation Street and Dr Who and today I’ve been watching him in Law and Order UK.

Poppies with a bee

It’s an adaptation of the American series. It’s OK, but a bit like the Toronto version it doesn’t sparkle quite so much once it’s taken out of its natural habitat, and, as I say, Bradley Walsh in a lead role isn’t quite doing it for me.

That was my day during the Big Heat. My blood test was done quickly today and I am back in the correct range after a dramatic rise caused by the anti-biotics of a few weeks ago. The TESCO checkout broke last night. I always suspect hot weather, though it may be foreign hackers or just inefficiency. They have made a few changes recently, which is never good news. At the moment we are being warned that there might not be enough electricity – high demand for powering fans linked to low levels of wind for the windmills. If we asked President Trump for his opinion on windmills he would generate the extra wind we need. Meanwhile, keep on with building devices to use wave energy. We have plenty of waves.

Poppies in wheat field

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