Puffin at Bempton Cliffs
On a good day, when I’m concentrating and moderately free from distraction, I can do a couple of thousand words a day without thinking. Actually, if you’ve read the blog before, you will know that I don’t think.
Recently I have been having a problem trying to write some factual pieces about medallions and sweetheart brooches and that hasn’t been going so well. It takes a lot more planning and fact checking than just rattling off opinions, and I’ve been going very slowly.
Even writing poetry takes less effort than writing a short article. There is, after all, little fact checking to do when writing from imagination.
Strangely, I had a knock back recently from an editor who said something didn’t make logical sense to him. I’d referred to a fire, and also to something happening later, and he couldn’t square the two ideas as he thought the fire would have burnt out. To me, the two thoughts were not linked, and I wondered why a poem had to make logical sense. I’m not sure, for instance, that Dylan Thomas intended us to believe that his father could speak words that literally caused lightning flashes, or that he actually caught the sun in flight. Logically this is nonsense of a high degree. Not quite as nonsensical as Lear and his mimsy borogoves, but nonsense all the same.
Would the same editor, I wonder, have turned down Do not go gentle into that good night for being illogical, or Jabberwocky for not making sense?
You never know. A different editor making decisions and it’s possible that the poetry in the UK could have developed in a completely different way.
And there you go. Twenty minutes. A idea. And a distinct lack of heavyweight thinking. It will be 300 words by the time I have finished and there are plenty more where they came from.
Calling Puffin – Bempton Cliffs
In fact, have some more. Do you remember my trips to see Puffins? They rely on sand eels to feed their young. They are suffering from the lack of sand eels, as are Kittiwakes, and numbers of birds, already hit by bird flu, are falling seriously. Puffins and Kittiwakes are now on the Red List, which is a list of threatened species. They are classed as Vulnerable, due to rapid population decline. It’s not as bad as being Endangered, but it’s far from comfortable.
So to help them, the British Government has banned sand eel fishing in our waters in the North Sea, The EU and, particularly the Danes, have challenged this, It seems they don’t think we should be able to do what we like within out territorial waters. Despite the picture you may have of Danes, from listening to Sandi Toksvig on TV (and notice how she actually lives in the UK, not in Denmark), and all this talk of hygge, they aren’t as nice as they seem.
Puffin
I don’t just base this on their attitude to our territorial waters and their hatred of Puffins. They have had a poor attitude to our seas for over a thousand years, after all. Remember, today’s smiling Dane in a shell of knitwear is just a Viking in disguise. The sand eels that they catch end up in fish meal which is used in factory farming. I’m not necessarily against the Danes and their intensive pig production, as I do like a bacon sandwich, but it has to be said that the Danish bacon industry is morally ambiguous, as is my consumption of bacon sandwiches. However, I’m not intent on wiping out Puffins, and would give up bacon in an instant if I thought it would help.
That’s 600 words. Sometimes I surprise myself.
Puffins at Bempton
