After the Election Part 2

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Love Locks at Bakewell

The light, when I woke at 6.42 this morning was beautiful, like the sun was shining through a jar of honey. Like Mole in Wind in the Willows, I felt the need to get up and frolic.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them.

Of course, it soon passed. It’s quite ordinary now and I am wishing I had tried to catch it on camera. It’s quite an optimistic way to start the day after an election.

Don’t worry, my temporary interest in politics doesn’t extend to writing about it more than twice in two days, so it will soon be back to normal on the blog.

Bakewell, Derbyshire

You have to sympathise with Kier Starmer. He came to power with a lot of expectations building up behind him, and then found himself in the real world, the one where things cost money, people don’t always do the right thing and foreign countries (no matter what they say) are not your friend.

Suddenly he’s giving money to strikers when schools need more funding and he’s having to buy missiles instead of hospital beds. And then he took the winter fuel payment off pensioners.

So he’s a typical spineless Labour politician to the Tories, he’s a disappointment to the voters who relied on him to produce Utopia like a rabbit from a hat and, uniting everyone against him, he’s Scrooge.

Add that to the fact that some of his MPs have already been revealed to have the morals of Conservatives and that sitting governments always do badly in council elections (it’s just a tradition like the Ceremony of the Keys – entrenched in British life but not really important –  I’m fairly sure that the important bit of Tower security is the Setting of the Alarm – we don’t want Thomas Blood trying again, do we?).

The river Wye at Bakewell – clearly not in May as the Black Headed Gull is in Winter plumage

I thought about doing a Guy Fawkes reference here, but decided that would be a little tasteless with so much of the world already being blown up.

 

 

After the Election

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The Artist – Charlie Uzzel-Edwards

Well, I voted. I then wrote about it several times. My views on compulsory voting (with musings on enfranchisement and the Chartists) tend to take me off message).

So do my thoughts on Police Commissioners and why we don’t need such as elected law enforcement personnel and no win-no fee lawyers. I deleted them.

So, I will treat this as third time lucky and try to stick to the results. The Green party seems to be doing well. Reform is doing even better. To me that means that people are more concerned with illegal immigration than they are with climate change.

OK, fourth time, as the third time was a bit dull.

The local Green candidate won. We also got an extra Green councillor in Peterborough, meaning we now have six. . So far, so good. There are 8 Peterborough First councillors and 9 Independents, plus Conservative, Reform, Labour and LibDem. It is a very fragmented council and nobody has overall control. At one time, according to  newspaper article last year 25% of sitting councillors had been elected for a party that was different to the one they were currently claiming to be in. That often happens where you have Greens, Independents and someone in  a party with a town name and “First” after it.

Nationally the Greens did quite well, despite the fact we are supposedly anti-semitic and Reform did even better because they are riding a wave of populism.

And that is a summary of politics in England today – the big winner is a party led by a man who accepted a £5,000,000 gift from a businessman who wants nothing in return, is a friend of Donald Trump and has, several times,  been caught out for using anti-semitic and racist language.

In Wales Reform is going to be the second biggest party but in Scotland they did not prosper. The Greens won two seats in each country, which is a start.

Counting is still proceeding.

However, despite the shifts in power I don’t expect much will change, because they never do, The political climate will probably become less compassionate towards refugees, and to those with immigrant backgrounds, parties which promise a lot in opposition often fail to life up to the rhetoric when they come into contact with reality.

 

 

Elections

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I’ve been doing some work on a medallion this afternoon, and getting absolutely nowhere. The more research I read, the more interested I became, and the slower the writing. It’s now taken me two days to write 300 words, and a hundred of them are lifted from something else I wrote on a similar subject. They aren’t exactly the same, but they only took ten minutes to adjust.

While I’m doing this, of course, I’m not able to write other things, which is annoying. Of course, I was born angry and have continued that way, so no matter what compromise I have to make, it will always be irksome.

We have elections tomorrow. (Actually, it has gone midnight, so we now have elections today). It has been billed as a fight between Reform and the Greens. These are both quite new parties and it is a surprise that they seem to be the top contenders. Traditionally the party in power does badly so Labour is in a slump and the Tories, after years spent being unable to tell what they want to do have landed at the bottom of the pile with no hope and no direction.

That leaves the Liberal Democrats, the eternal bridesmaids.

In Scotland and Wales there are other parties and elections, which I have no real knowledge of, and in Northern Ireland there are no elections this time round.

The choice for me is easy. I decided to start voting Green some years ago and I will keep voting for them. I’ve never had a great interest in politics and learned years ago that they are all pretty much the same. It’s not the party that I have the most confidence in, but the one which I dread least.

The bottom one is meant to be a mole.

 

The Doings of the Day and Some Old Photos

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Yesterday, I missed posting. I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t particularly busy but I didn’t do it in the morning because I had other things to do, and I didn’t do it in the afternoon because I had other things to do. In the evening I fell asleep in front of the TV, snoozed in front of the TV and, on waking, misread the clock as 10pm (“plenty of time”) and, after making a cup of tea, found it was  midnight.

And that was how it happened.

On the plus side, the man doing our garage doors got all the old paint off and undercoat applied. It’s 8.14 now and he’s back for a second day, putting the top coat on. He’s a good worker and does a good job.  He also restores my faith in human nature, doing a good day’s work for a fair price and showing there are still decent tradesmen about. I was beginning to doubt this after our initial experiences in the bungalow.

Julia is now calling me through for breakfast, but I will be back afterwards to ensure this post is published before I forget and do something else.

9.40. A leisurely breakfast and then a discussion on other jobs that need doing around the place . . .

When Mum and Dad moved in they spent what seemed like a lot of time and money on the place, but that was over 20 years ago. We seemed to spend a lot of money on maintenance while we were renting it out to pay for Dad’s care fees, but my sister arranged that through the letting agent. They used a builder they used for all sorts of work, who was the one we originally used when we moved in.

 

He was, as you may recall, expensive and we have had to have most of his work redone. The agents, meanwhile were just parasites who did very little for their monthly payments.

I just wiped 150 words out because I was starting to sound like an old-fashioned rack-renting moustachio twirling landlord. I’ll just say that the tenant fitted into the group quite nicely.

Rant averted.

Photos are some Julia took a few years ago. It was 2002 according to the date on the email. I must have forgotten to use them. They were on the farm where we used to stop for ice cream on the way to Llandudno. I will find the name for next time I use some of the photos (I have a few in reserve)

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.