A brief surge of activity and some hasty rewriting sees me with nine poems to send off. They were almost ready, they just needed editing and the haiku/tanka adding. That takes me as long, or longer, than writing and editing the prose sections. Haiku, as I have said before, are slippery and elusive. Tanka are easier as they have more words and fewer rules. Here’s another link – to Haibun this time.
In the last post I forgot to mention two things. One was the yell of raucous laughter that escaped me when a serious, rotund and shiny youth (a trainee lawyer) spoke about a class action he was initiating against landlords. Julia thought I was in pain, but I was merely laughing at his description of allowing landlords to do certain things in relation to insuring flats. He described the situation as like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Vivid and amusing in itself, but doubly so when uttered by a well-fed, junior lawyer who clearly lacks self-awareness and does not realise how the general public views lawyers and their bills.
As Burns said:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
I’ll leave you to translate that for yourselves.
You may also like to look up this man, who was also a Scottish poet and is probably the second best writer to come from Langholm. This man is, of course, the best.
I said “two things” a few lines back, but I’ve forgotten the second one. This sort of thing happens all the time.
Ah! The books. I found them when I was clearing out. They are surplus to my requirements. I won’t read them again, they aren’t in collectable condition and, although they are part of the foundations of my reading, I am not particularly fond of them. I also found a number of Biggles books and a set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Those, I will keep.
When I was a lad we lived way out of town and so I only went to book shop when I had money to spend and when my parents were in town for the monthly shopping trip. But I do remember that I would go straight to the book shop and ask for the latest W E Johns’. I remember them well.
🙂 And look what we grew up to be!
My vanity is considerable but even I have to admit that C M Grieve is a more interesting writer than I am. I love his poem Crowdieknowe:
Oh to be at Crowdieknowe
When the last trumpet blaws,
An see the deid come loupin owre
The auld grey wa’s
Muckle men wi tousled beards,
I grat at as a bairn
‘ll scramble frae the croodit clay
Wi feck o swearin.
An glower at God an a’ his gang
O angels i the lift
– Thae trashy bleezin French-like folk
Wha gar’d them shift.
Fain the weemun-folk’ll seek
To mak them haud their row
– Fegs, God’s no blate gin he stirs up
The men o Crowdieknowe!
I cycled past Crowdieknowe today.
I will amend my description to add “writing in English”.. Even after a liberal,application of online Scots dictionaries and websites I’m struggling with it.. One site which claimed to translate it only translated half the words I was struggling with and when i asked Google to identify the language it said “English”. However, I won’r be ebaten and will persevere. 🙂
He made quite a lot of words up.
That would explain why the dictionary came up blank a few times. 🙂
I remember reading Gulliver’s Travels way back in my school days. And I agree, Tootlepedal is one of Langholm’s finest gens.
It was considered a standard text in those days. My mother got it from the library for me originally, then I got a copy. Can’t think why, there must be thousands of better books. 🙂
Those books might not be collectibles, but they have wonderful covers. And the inimitable Tootlepedal is indeed one of Langholm’s finest gems.
They are from the early 60s and were the peak of book design for many years. Things seemed to tail off for years and it was probably 20-30 years before they picked up again. Book cover design is one of the few modern things I approve of. 🙂