Category Archives: Philosophy

I Remember…

I do like a few days of well-behaved snow and North Norfolk has delivered this very efficiently.  Gorgeous, shiny snow, enough to cover the muddy bits every now and then but not enough to cut us off.  All kinds of falling snow, from soft, floating flakes to that polystyrene packaging looking stuff.  I’ve been devouring Nancy Campbell’s entrancing Fifty Words for Snow in which she explores words from a wide range of languages that refer to snow from Korean to Spanish, from Irish to Lugandan.  One of my favourites is an Icelandic word, Hundslappadrifa, which translates as snowflakes big as a dog’s paw. 

Fifty Words for Snow (Hardback)

I’m no longer very keen on getting my gloves off and shaping the snow into balls and men, but fortunately someone locally has done that for me.  I  love this snowman with his bracken brows in a field near us!  We are so lucky to have the countryside on our doorstep and have been exploring the area known as Roman Camp.  This area has medieval ironworkings but no apparent links to the Romans.  It was thought that nineteenth century coach drivers named it so to make it more appealing to tourists.  There are sunken lanes,  ancient quarry pits, earthworks and woods.  There is heathland where you can gaze down at the sea from the highest point in Norfolk, Beacon Hill, site of a medieval beacon, last used during the Napoleonic wars.  Recently the sea has been a swollen lavender colour, dark and solid as the land.

So I’m wondering why my mind is constantly turning to Mexico at the moment.  Perhaps I’m craving the forbidden fruits of foreign travel or some colour and sunshine.  As I look out from my desk I can see the roof of the barn opposite covered in a thick, glistening layer of snow.  It could also be because I’ve been exploring the works of the Oulipo movement.  I recently taught a poetry workshop using oulipo techniques and I’ve become a little obsessed with this group of writers and mathematicians who, from 1960 onwards, started looking at how constraints served to unleash greater creativity. Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau are my favourite oulipeans, but there are many!  The movement still exists today and there are still practitioners publishing their work. I love Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary which uses playful word games to produce innovative poetry.  Another favourites is Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology, 101 stories of girlfriends consisting of 101 words each and in alphabetical title order.  I’ve been reading Joe Brainard’s I Remember which inspired Georges Perec’s book of the same name.  This is basically a list of memories, all starting with the phrase “I Remember…” so I thought I would have a go at doing this with my memories of Mexico.  In the 1990s I was studying art history and training to be a guide at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (on top of a full-time job!) and became increasingly fascinated with the Meso-American objects in the collection.  We took a two-week holiday in Mexico where I was able to see more of these objects at the National Museum of Anthropology, as well as visiting various Aztec and Mayan sites.  In the early 2000s I travelled to Mexico for work quite a few times doing international recruitment for the University of East Anglia and also as a guest lecturer and teacher trainer.  This enabled me to visit more sites and discover different parts of the country, a truly eye-opening experience.  So, here goes!

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I remember the main square in Mexico City, the Zocalo, with the sinking, shifting cathedral built on Aztec temple remains.  There were men with signs round  their necks on the edges of the square, advertising their availability for work.  Huge frying pans of insects ready to be coated in chocolate and sold as snacks.

I remember a Harley Davidson rally on the Plaza de la Republica.

I remember the Casa de los Azulejos, a cafe with walls covered in beautiful tiles.  I don’t remember what I ate and drank, just how the tiles told me stories.

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I remember drinking margaritas on the roof terrace of the Hotel Majestic, overlooking the Zocalo and wondering why they were going to my head.  Then realising the whole city is 2,250m above sea-level and I was probably suffering from a touch of altitude sickness.

I remember Plaza Garibalid, full of rival mariachi bands, busking their hearts out.  How the music was both melancholy and celebratory.

I remember the Mercado de Sonora, the withcraft market, dark and smoky and full of the inexplicable.  They probably had the answers to all my problems somewhere in that market, but I think I just bought a candle.

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I remember the Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio Nacional and how rousing they are.  For a few minutes I wanted to start a revolution.

I remember taking a colourful boat at Xochimilco to travel the old Aztec waterways.  Mariachi boats would come and serenade you for a few dollars. I ate my first tamale and took pictures of all the deteriorating and decapitated dolls on the island known as The Island of Dead Dolls.  At the time I was writing a poetry collection on dolls which was never meant to be…

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I remember climbing the Temple of the Sun and feeling that I would become a sweaty puddle of sacrifice on the steep steps.

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I remember tasting mole poblano for the first time.  It’s a rich, spicy sauce and one of the main ingredients is chocolate.  I still use chocolate in my vegetarian chillis and chilli/chocolate paste in most of my sauces.  It was in Puebla and I bought a beautiful blue and white tile which I have to this day.

I remember sitting on the verandah of my hotel one evening.  It was in the Chiapas region and near the ruins of Palenque.  I could see a creature approaching in the dark and sat as still as I could.  It was an armadillo.

I remember going to the beautiful Agua Azul waterfalls in Chiapas and losing two of my nine lives.  I was dozing on the bus and was woken up by screams.  On a high mountain road the driver had misjudged the bend and when I looked out of the window the wheel was hanging over the edge of a long drop.  We survived and then I slipped on one of the dodgy bridges over the river.

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I remember the Iglesia de San Juan in Chamala and how Catholic and indigenous beliefs blended together to make this the most unusual church I’d ever been into (and that’s saying something in Mexico!)

I remember speaking Spanish and being understood.

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I remember Frida Kahlo’s house in Coyoacan and how happy it made me with its beautiful colours, her vibrant artwork, the feeling that I was close to the spirit of this amazing artist.

I remember flor de calabaza (courgette flowers) floating in soup and stuffed with rice and vegetables.  And nopale, cactus that when cooked tasted like green beans.

I remember staying with a friend in Taxca and staying up all night to watch the Oscars, then going down the silver mines the next morning.

I remember buying silver jewellery and how, even if it had the most intricate and beautiful designs inlaid into it, it was the weight of the silver that counted.

Why not have a go at this technique?  I use it a lot in my teaching and it’s incredible how one memory leads to another and how it seems to dredge up memories previously “forgotten”.  It’s important to repeat the mantra of “I remember” as it seems to have a hypnotic effect on the mind!

But for now, I’m returning to the snow and leaving you with a poem I wrote in the first lockdown, little believing when it actually snowed we would be in Lockdown Three!

Snowdream 

This year we have all learnt

what it means to be snowed in

to have drunk our fill of its burn.

 

Some mornings I sing the snow to life,

populate my garden with imagined snowmen –

dark-eyed, top-hatted – their long embrace

my only source of warmth.

 

I only know three words for snow:

slow   quiet   cold

 Once there was a man who died

planting his flag in a vast white wildness,

his name the echo of a high-wheeling bird

that dives for small, unburied things –

Falcon to my blazing Snow Queen.

 

 

With Love from Lockdown

Is anyone else finding this stage of lockdown the hardest, the most uncertain and the most stressful? I’m probably going to stay with the former stages for a bit longer in a hopefully safe summer hibernation in quiet and lovely East Runton.  I am privileged to be able to do this and totally recognise that so many others do not have this choice.

Lockdown has been a positive experience from the micro point of view but extremely disturbing from the macro point of view.  The what-ifs and uncertainty, the heart plummet and increased heart rate with every newsfeed scroll and perusal of the weekend papers.

So, in this blog I’m going to focus on the micro and  the positive and share some of my lockdown experiences.  I hope you will all do so too in the comments section of the blog page!

Lockdown Highlights

  • Sunsets over the sea. We try to watch these a couple of times a week – they are always different – sometimes watercolour, sometimes oil, sometimes the sun hides behind angry monochrome.  One of the things which hasn’t improved over lockdown is our photographic skills, but this one’s my favourite so far.

 

  • Beach walks. Foam on the beach liked whipped cream from churned algal blooms; terns diving like tiny missiles; the changing texture of the sand underfoot and the thought that these were once part of much bigger rocks and stones, that we are treading on particles of pre-history; the occasional paddle with underlying thoughts of when the sea will be warm enough for me to attempt my first swim of the year; Cromer Pier as the light changes.

 

  • Local walks inland – we’ve seen the lambs grow from bouncy Easter newbies to plump-bottomed teenagers. The pygmy goats are still pregnant, as is the dun coloured donkey – come on girls, we want babies!

  • I’ve been enjoying a friend’s on-line diary/blog which he kept every day for at least 12 weeks to record impressions of pre-lockdown and lockdown. I didn’t realise that the Mass Observation project, which started in 1937 and continued into the 1960s, had been revived.  They’ve been recording the observations of ordinary people since 1981 and are particularly interested in responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The original project consisted of questionnaires and diaries kept by 500 volunteers, one of which was Housewife 49, Nella Last.  Her diaries have been published and were immortalised on TV with Victoria Wood in the role of Nella.  It feels an important time to record experiences, this is history in the making.  If you are interested in sending your observations go to http://www.massobs.org.uk/write-for-us/covid-19  for more information.
  • Cycle rides – we are gradually going a little bit further every time. When we lived in Norwich I clocked up around 100 miles a week cycling to work, into the city to meet friends and to the stables where the horse I owned for around 10 years would be impatiently waiting for his hack around Keswick Mill.  Some weekends we would cycle for around 70 miles for pleasure.  Then there was a 12 year gap where, once we relocated to West Norfolk, we tended to walk rather than cycle.  Now, we’re back!  We’ve cycled to Mundesley and back via the Quiet Lanes (Mundesley, sadly, always looks closed, lockdown or not), then another trip to Cley where we sat on the beach and watched cormorants and avocets fly past as we ate our sandwiches.  This week was the big one – all the way to Waxham.  As we hit the beach we could see a row of curious grey seal heads, like black periscopes, all turning to watch the spectacle of humans sitting and walking and paddling.  Waxham’s sands are punctuated by old style groynes and rocks and, as we clambered over each one, the same scene greeted us until we hit the jackpot – hundreds of seals, all different ages, basking on the beach, their low moaning calls muffled by the noisy waves.
  • New murals appearing in Cromer and Sheringham – lockdown art is a big thing from rainbows to chalk drawings on the seawalls.  Here’s my favourite.  Einstein on the Beach!
  • Chris’s harmonica lessons. I thought this might drive me slightly crazy but it’s actually been really endearing to hear his dedication to the cause.  The other day a shiny new harmonica arrived in the post with the all important 10 holes (he’d been struggling with an inappropriate 12 apparently).  His impression of a 1930s American goods train is slowly taking shape…
  • Chris’s 1960s viewfinder found in the loft of his childhood home and languishing in our own loft until very recently. We ration ourselves to a set of slides a day.  The commercial slides all seem to have been compiled in the 1950s and early 1960s: a very jingoistic set of Tarzan slides, bizarrely out of order Munsters and Mary Poppins.  There are also endless slides of Greece, Italy, Berlin – all very unprofessional with garish colour, people in the way and dodgy composition (yes, these are commercial slides you actually bought back in the day!).  It’s been totally engaging and an insight into what now seems a very innocent age of travel and entertainment.Vintage 1950's-1960's Sawyers 3-D 3-Dimension Viewer Model E ...
  • Poetry Events. Normally I have to limit myself due to time and travel but not now!  Every Monday night I “go” to an open mic poetry event in Paris.  It used to be held in the basement of Le Chat Noir but is now hosted by organiser David Barnes from his balcony near Père Lachaise.  It was once called Spoken Word but is now called Spoken World – the poets come from all over the USA as well as Paris, Berlin, Edinburgh and East Runton!  The Norwich Stanza group (peer poetry feedback) I belong to is now happening via Zoom (no more worrying about missing the last train home!) and I’ve joined another Stanza group in South Kensington.  I’ve been to lots of poetry launches and open mic events in London and next week I’m going to the launch of Katrina Naomi’s new collection, Wild Persistence, hosted by her Welsh-based publisher, Seren.  One of my favourite events was Jenny Pagdin’s Lockdown Stage which brought together a host of Norwich poets and two talented London guests too, you can still hear the readings via this YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g32XN9tlcwo  Martin Figura and Helen Ivory are regularly hosting some great poetry readings from lockdown in The Butchery.  All this without shelling out for a single train fare.  The downside is that I’ve bought rather a lot of new poetry books, no, wait, that’s an upside!
  • I’m just writing my 20th new poem since lockdown although my creative energy is starting to flag a wee bit. There have been a lot of articles in the press about how productive Shakespeare and Milton were when they were, respectively, locked out of London and theatreland due to the Plague, or in prison.  My life hasn’t been quite so extreme.  I’ve very much enjoyed having time to curl up on the sofa in our garden room (more like a ramshackle conservatory-cum-lean-to, but we aspire…) and write.  The title of this blog With Love from Lockdown is also the title of the first poem I wrote after lockdown.  I was delighted when it was accepted for the Poetry for an Infected World, Postcards from Malthusia project by the two poets who run New Boots and Pantisocracies where you can find a series of interesting poetry projects. Go here to see the poems: https://newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/  I’ve always been interested in 18th century economist Thomas Malthus’s ideas.  His theory that if a species becomes too dominant then nature will find its way of redressing the balance seems to have considerable relevance today.  He’s known as the Gloomy Philospher but looks unfailingly chirpy in the portraits I’ve seen of him:

Thomas Malthus on Population

  • I’ve loved catching up with friends via Zoom, Skype and phone calls. So much more time to do this – I feel much more connected to my gang! It’s been wonderful to connect with friends in Europe and London friends who have, in the past, had such busy diaries it’s been like trying to find a tricky bit of sky on a giant jigsaw for a get-together.  Another upside is that I’m more technologically literate than I used to be, but that’s not difficult to achieve as I was a pretty low-level user before lockdown!
  • More time to read has been a real boon. I’ve got through piles of hitherto unread books and have been particularly enjoying exploring American poets including Ada Limon (The Carrying, Dead Bright Things), Mary Ruefle (My Private Property), Danez Smith (Homie).  Heidi Williamson’s superb Return by Minor Road is out officially this month (one of the many books delayed by the Coronavirus).  I love, respect and admire this book.  Heidi is a great friend and she has put her heart and soul and so much else into this collection which explores the primary school shooting at Dunblane where she was living at the time.  It’s so sensitively written.  An intensely profound meditation on love and loss.  If you do buy any poetry books during this period then do try to get them directly from the publishers as they are really struggling with no bookshops open to sell their authors’ work and the only launches possible are on digital platforms with no bookstalls…  Heidi’s is available from Bloodaxe  https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/search/  My latest read has been the bizarre and wholly wonderful Alice B Toklas Cookbook which describes all the recipes Alice would cook for her lifelong partner, Gertrude Stein.  They lived together from 1908 when Alice arrived in Paris, a refugee from the San Francisco earthquake, and were together until Gertrude’s death in 1946.  My favourite moment is where Alice serves a dish to Picasso and is told it would be more suitable for Matisse! I love this picture of them, they look really conventional but were completely groundbreaking in so many ways.

Legendary Lovers: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

  • T’ai Chi, qi gong, meditation and yoga. I used to do these so regularly but other things gradually pushed them into a minor role.  During lockdown I’ve been doing a combination of these practices on a more or less daily basis, with a bit of Pilates thrown in to try and strengthen by ever pesky wrists (weak thanks to a bout of tenosynovitis in my twenties).
  • I’ve learnt how to cut my own fringe!
  • Recipes – new and old – one of my best re-discoveries is the joy of cornbread and how much better the accompanying spicy chilli is with the addition of a bar of very dark chocolate.  It takes me back to my travels in Mexico, but that’s another story…

In the Time of Isolation – Separating the Sheep from the Goats

 
So much has happened since I last posted that it’s hard to know where to begin in terms of the strange new world we are living in at present.

My own journey to isolation started in Yorkshire.  At the time it seemed safe to travel and to go ahead with our two-week holiday, but that weekend everything changed in terms of both the political and public attitude to the Coronavirus pandemic.  Northern railway stations such as Leeds and York, usually so crowded you had to fight your way to the platforms, were completely deserted.  Trains were cancelled as drivers self-isolated.  We made it to Ilkley and walked on the Moors as much as we could before deciding it would be better to cut our losses and come home. Five days later, safely home in Norfolk, we were in Lockdown.

Charles Darwin Blue Plaque, Ilkley | Peter Hughes | Flickr

Ilkley was a great little town, the High Street flanked with blossoming trees and the moors looming at the end of the road.  Darwin was a fan of this area and would surely have loved its prehistory.  Once on the moors it does feel like a different world, there are stones marked with neolithic carvings (see the Swastika Stone below) scattered all over the rough terrain, craggy brooks and a rather enigmatic stone circle called The Twelve Apostles which might, or might not, be ancient.  The views from every point are sweeping, one way to Leeds, the other way to the Three Peaks – the weather was mockingly good throughout as we started planning our return.

 

 

 

 

 

There are far worse places to be locked down than East Runton.  We are very fortunate that our favourite local walks are all within the somewhat confused remit of one-a-day exercise as they all start the minute we step out of our front door.  It’s a time to appreciate the little things and to celebrate what we have access to.  I’m a Skype convert and have chatted to friends in Denmark and The Netherlands as well as having a virtual glass of wine with my best friend in London a couple of times a week.

It’s a time to be inventive with food too – infrequent supermarket trips mean there’s plenty of opportunity to delve into the back of the storecupboard and transform that slightly out of date chickpea flour into onion bhajis and calentica (a kind of North African pancake mix which I used to have a lot when I was in Paris in the 80s).  It might be time to try and make nettle soup too – we have so many locally and it’s been on my radar for a while!

Paternoster Square, shopping, events near St Paul's - Richard ...

Then there are the projects.  We’ll be working our way through our DVD box set of Wagner’s The Ring – my favourite opera(s).  I can’t describe the feeling when the first notes of Das Rheingold rumble out – primeval.  Foolish actions almost leading to the end of the world – perhaps not such a strange choice… Chris has dusted off a 10-hour History of Reggae from Mento to Lover’s Rock by Linton Kwesi Johnson so I might be a far better bet in pub quizzes from now on!  I rarely buy hardbacks but splashed out on Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light having so much enjoyed the first two books of her Cromwell Trilogy.  As a writer I am in awe at how she makes the characters’ speak so naturally, and how she does this without using quote marks but the reader is never confused.  I’ve also bought Atwood’s The Testaments and two Ada Limón poetry collections Bright Dead Things and The Carrying – beautifully accessible poetry.  And Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities.  Check out both these poets at the wonderful Poetry Foundation website:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ada-limon

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/chen-chen

So, now to the sheep and the goats!  One of my previous blogposts featured the gorgeous Kashmiri goats of Great Orme, the rocky outcrop which looms into the sea and starts in the town of Llandudno.  Well, these goats are now international stars – a YouTube sensation.  Since the lockdown they have started to come into Llandudno and run riot.  They always ventured down in the past but now there are no humans to chase them back up to the hills.  Check out this article with accompanying video.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2020/mar/31/goats-take-over-empty-welsh-streets-llandudno-coronavirus-lockdown-video

One of the most interesting things about the global lockdown has been the effect on nature.  I’ve been reading about Malthus, the nineteenth century economist and demographer.  His theory is that if one species becomes too dominant then nature will find a way of redressing the balance.  As we stay local for a few weeks and consume and travel less, there’s a neat bit of rewilding going on – less pollution, more birdsong.  There have been lots of news items about nature taking back Venice as the waterways become clearer.

There’s a very interesting writing project called Postcards from Malthusia which might be of interest:

https://newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/

Nature has always been prevalent on our favourite local walk.  It only takes 40 minutes but at the moment, in terms of what you can see in the Springtime, it feels epic!

The walk starts with a hedgerow full of glowing lime-green alexanders.  These edible plants were introduced to the UK by the Romans and known as the “pot plants of Alexandria” – every bit of the plant is edible and it’s often known as Roman celery.  It has a beautiful sweet scent, a bit like elderflower, and a tangy sap.  It’s too pretty to forage, but you never know…

Then, under the double-viaduct that separates the village into Top Common and Lower Common.  It was built in 1902 to bring holidaymakers to the coast from all parts of the country.

At this stage we always do a quick double-check to see if there are still nine classic white farmyard geese hanging out like bored teenagers on the green (there were twelve when we moved here).

 

Then on to Manor Farm which is just like the kind of farm you’d have as a kid, a little bit of everything – donkeys, sheep, lambs, hens, a cockerel, Muscovy ducks, sometimes goats, the occasional horse.

Up the road to check on the lambs.  In just a few days they have become more solid, less leggy and much calmer, less inclined to do their Harrier Jump Jet VSTOL (Vertical Short Take Off and Landings) leaps.  I can’t help thinking about military planes when I see these lambs.  Well, I do come from Kingston-upon-Thames where British Aerospace had their factory and it was almost mandatory to work there for a bit – I temped there for two summers and both my then boyfriend and my brother did their apprenticeships there.

Down the green lane to the pygmy goats.  These are hilarious.  I seem to have perfected some kind of fake Swiss yipping yodel which brings them running, bells clanking and I can get them to follow me along the fence line to the next gate.  The goat whisperer!

Then along the lane with views to Cromer Ridge and Incleborough Hill to the crossroads and back towards the village via the Big House and Britain’s first Montessori School.  Quick recount of the geese, back under the viaduct and home.  It’s a lovely walk, never tedious, always full of wildlife (buzzards wheeling, a green woodpecker calling) and wildflowers (the celandine are particularly beautiful at the moment).

On a pre-lockdown walk in February we took a friend up the Hill to see the Bagot goats who were overwintering here before being let loose on Cromer cliffs to do their bit as live lawnmowers.  I gather they are now self-isolating on Salthouse Heath but hopefully there’ll be a bit of Summer for us all, with a bit of the Old Normal seeping back into our lives.  Until then, stay safe everyone…

Paris – Absinthe, Cemeteries and Chanel!

 
I love the changing seasons, especially the time around Christmas when the days close in and, as a freelancer, I give myself permission to hibernate and catch up with my own reading and writing.  Where I live, just outside Cromer, has so much to offer over the Christmas period. I like building up new traditions and rituals around this time of year and these local events now feel part of our Christmas.  Before Christmas there was carol-singing accompanied by a tiny brass band on East Runton village green to raise money for charity –  a chilly evening with very welcome doses of hot apple juice and mince pies. As the band leader announced the last carol, the otherwise well-behaved dog in front of us let out a howl of anguish… On Boxing Day we wandered down to the Pier and watched hundreds of brave souls do the Boxing Day dip, some more than once!  The End of the Pier show brought glamour and humour to  a dark, windswept evening and the New Year’s Day fireworks lit up the new slate of the sky for us all.  Daily coastal walks cleared my head and I was ready for the Paris trip I’d planned for early January.

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To backtrack a little, in October I went to Paris to focus on writing more towards a new body of work called The Artificial Parisienne which is about ageing and identity and features a lengthy section on Paris cemeteries!

One of the highlights of my October trip was a visit to the Russian cemetery in Ste Genevieve-des-Bois, just outside Paris, where many of the White Russians who emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century are buried.  It really is a little bit of Russia, from the babushka who guards the gates, to the onion domed church and the gravestones with little doors for icons and candles.  The cemetery is planted with silver birch and cypress. I discovered one of my favourite film directors, Andrei Tarkovsky, was buried there, under a beautiful maple tree which was shedding its leaves in a most artistic way.  The main attraction though, was Nureyev’s grave.  I have never seen anything quite so beautiful.  His tomb is draped with a stone kelim covered in tiny mosaic tiles.  He was a big collector of Oriental carpets and this stunning artwork makes his grave the standout event of this cemetery.  I always regret not having met him.  When I was working at the Royal Academy of Dancing one summer I was planning the proposal for my undergraduate thesis and wanted to write about dance in Paris, particularly the Paris Opera.  My boss was a friend of Rudi’s and was going to organise a meeting, but unfortunately by the time my trip was planned he was far too ill to see anybody.

Image result for rudolf nureyev grave"

Another highlight in October was absinthe!  Having visited the Absinthe Museum in Auvers-sur-Oise last year I was keen to try it out –   it’s safe now and has become quite the trendy thing to drink.  My best friend, who loves Paris and speaks perfect French, came over for a few days and we found a lovely old family restaurant in Montmartre called Le Bon Bock where we could try this legendary drink.  The whole process is quite magical.  You put your special spoon over your glass of absinthe with a lump of sugar on it and drip water from the samovar style receptacle over the sugar – gradually your drink turns the cloudy green of a peridot stone, hence absinthe being called the Green Fairy.  It tastes a little like pernod and is quite potent but no longer rots your brain!  There are some gorgeous art nouveau absinthe sets around featuring Lady Absinthe holding the absinthe fountain aloft:

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Overall, I was there for ten days in October and wandered the streets at length, learning so many new things about my favourite city.  I joined a tour of the covered arcades of Paris, which were designed to enhance the bourgeois experience of luxury shopping without getting wet or aggravated by the dirty streets. There used to be 150 of these, now there are only twenty left.  One of my favourites is Galerie Véro-Dodat where you can see Christian Louboutin’s shop and his extraordinary shoes with their infamous red soles.  This may seem out of step with the archaic grandeur of the arcades but there was a cobbler’s here in the past and people do bring their Louboutin’s to be mended as they want these extravagantly expensive shoes to last as long as possible.  The Galerie once had a sign saying No Dogs/No Parrots/No phonographs at the entrance as apparently a local eccentric would walk through playing loud music!

You can find out more about the passages here https://www.francetoday.com/travel/paris/once_and_future_passages/

One of my favourites is Passage Brady which runs between Rue du Faubourg St Denis and Rue due Faubourgh St Martin – it’s full of fabulously cheap and authentic Indian restaurants, all vying for your trade.  On Rue due Faubourg St Martin is the tiny Cinema Brady which shows a really eclectic range of films. Galerie Vivienne with its mosaic floors and gorgeous light-filled passages is a real visual treat.  I had lunch at Bistrot Vivienne which is full of old world charm.  It’s worth nipping upstairs to the loo to see the restaurant on the upper floor which looks like a 19th century brothel!

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We also went on a Chanel walk with the wonderful Paris Walks organisation https://www.paris-walks.com/ I was shocked to discover that there was a law in France which meant women could only wear trousers in public with official permission or in special circumstances which was only revoked in 2013!  It was fascinating to hear how Chanel integrated so many aspects of her life into her art – her key colours of black and white and beige reflected the nuns’ habits in the convent where she was brought up and the sands of Deauville where she had her first shop.  She lived in a suite in the Ritz Hotel (the hotel whose bar Ernest Hemingway famously “liberated” as he swept in with the Allies to end the Occupation) overlooking Place Vendôme – the top of a chanel perfume bottle evokes a bird’s eye view of the square.  She often incorporated her birth sign, Leo, into her jewellery designs and the chain on a Chanel bag is said to be inspired by the nuns’ key chains. One of Chanel’s lovers was, allegedly, a Count implicated in the Rasputin assassination.  He gave her some Romanov pearls which began her love affair with ropes of pearls to complement an outfit.   The entwined Chanel Cs probably refer to Boy Capel, the love of her life.  She was an ingenious promoter – at the end of the war, to try and  get Chanel No 5 known internationally she gave little sample bottles to the GIs to take back to their sweethearts.

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My trip to Paris this January to tie up a few loose writing ends was very different to the October trip.  I’d planned the trip before before the General Strike was announced for 5 December.  Having lived in Paris on a few occasions, although the strike began a month before my visit, I knew what to expect and my heart sank… And yes, true to form, the transport workers were still striking a month later and have only just stopped! I arrived on Day 35 of the longest national strike in French history.  Two days of my very short stay coincided with mass demonstrations and throughout my stay it wasn’t worth taking the metro at all.  A large number of stations were closed and most lines could only run 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 trains.  Schools were closed on demo days and many small businesses were shut as employees were unable to come in and open up.  These were protests about Macron’s pension reforms and were combined on many days with the ongoing gilets jaunes demos about the cost of living.

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Even with no transport it’s hard not to have a good time! Paris is a compact and very walkable city.  One of the highlights this time was the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Conciergerie which looked at the fetishisation and commodification of her story in the very building where she spent her last few months.  I loved seeing Marie-Antoinette’s huge knitting needles, she could surely have taken out a few guards with these and joined those bloodthirsty women who used knit in the front row of the crowds flocking to watch the executions!  There was quite a big section on films which focused on Marie Antoinette’s story.  My all-time favourite is Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film which shows Marie (played by Kirsten Dunst) as a fashion-mad teenager surrounded by boxes of gorgeous confections as Madonna’s Material Girl blasts out.  I have a new favourite too.  Miss Piggy, dressed as Marie Antoinette and surrounded by piggy courtiers, dancing to the Bee Gee’s Staying Alive in an episode of the Muppets Show!

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After all this intellectual stimulation I headed to the Paris Mosque at the edge of the Jardin des Plantes, an old favourite of mine – when I was poor and living in Paris I would come here for cheap mint tea and baklava in the lovely mosque garden cafe.  One of the mosque’s hidden secrets is a gorgeous Hammam, totally traditional and for women only with opulently tiled areas, steam room and plunge pool. Your first task is to slather yourself with savon noir to soften your skin ready for your gommage where a masseuse takes a scratchy glove and removes an alarming amount of dead skin.   I was adopted by a kind Moroccan family – mother, daughter and grand-daughter – who gave me a bucket of very fine savon noir and lent me shampoo!

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It’s the little things in Paris which are the most pleasing.  Sitting outside a tiny café on Rue des Abbesses with a vin chaud looking at the twinkling Christmas decorations.  Queueing with all the tiny schoolkids and their mums and dads for a crêpe and eavesdropping on conversations about dance classes and parties. Finding a boulangerie on Rue de Caulaincourt run by a French/Japanese couple where I had a choux a la crème de matcha which was probably as close to heaven as I’ll ever get.  While the Paris Christmas decorations are tasteful and twinkly, I had to just give a nod here to the amazing Lancôme Christmas tree, in the shape of the Eiffel Tower and made out of perfume bottles, at St Pancras station!

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Due to the strikes Paris was a lot quieter than usual so I decided to go the Musée d’Orsay and catch the Degas at the Opera exhibition – a wise decision – no queue at all, I got straight in on a Saturday morning.  This was a real nostalgia visit for me.  When I was living in Paris in the 80s during my year abroad I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Musee d’Orsay which had just opened (my alternative option after my interview with Nureyev was destined not to be…   All around me Mitterand’s Grands Projets Culturels were springing up – as well as the Musée D’Orsay there was the Louvre Pyramid, the Parc de la Villette, Institut du Monde Arabe, Grande Arche de la Defense and the Opera Bastille which was chewing up most of my beloved Bastille area.  I went to one of the first performances in Parc de Bercy, a version of Aida, as they were giving away free tickets to a sceptical public.   I can’t remember much about my thesis, but I do remmeber visiting the museum on a weekly basis and interviewing the director as well as watching a string quartet playing in front of one of the iconic clock windows of the old Gare. I think the views of Paris from the windows of the museum are the most wonderful thing about it.  The Degas exhibition was slightly disturbing, over 200 sketches and paintings of young girls exercising, rehearsing, relaxing, mostly behind the scenes.  Degas was a Paris Opera subscriber which mean that he could, three days a week, watch dance classes and stand in the wings of performances.  It all felt rather obsessive and voyeuristic and by looking at these paintings one is complicit in this obsession, a strange experience, somewhat akin to watching a Hitchcock movie!

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I raced back to London with notes galore and rough drafts of several poems in time to see the always fabulous T S Eliot awards. All ten of the shortlisted poets are so worth reading – Fiona Benson, Sharon Olds, Deryn Rees-Jones, Ilya Kaminsky, Roger Robinson, Anthony Anaxagorou, Karen Solie, Jay Bernard, Paul Farley and Vidyan Ravinthiran.  Great readings in another building which has huge nostalgic connections for me – the Royal Festival Hall, a favourite haunt of mine when I lived in Elephant and Castle.  I met a poet friend in the Skylon Bar afterwards for cocktails – great views of the Thames and the best cocktails, all named after singers, directors and actors.  I had an Akira Kurosawa and my friend had a Sophia Loren!

 

Limestone, Laugharne and Delusional Goats

 
At the beginning of September we spent a week in Llandudno followed by a week in Tenby to explore the Welsh coast path.  Llandudno immediately satisfied one of my requirements for the perfect seaside town, a pier, but also supplied things I wouldn’t expect in a seaside town such as a surprisingly large outdoor paddling pool and excellent third wave coffee at the wonderful Providero café.  I decided another requirement might be my very first sword after discovering this unusual shop in Conwy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ormes, vast projecting limestone and dolomite headlands, dominate Llandudno’s classic curved bay.  The Vikings thought the headlands looked like sleeping serpents, hence the name (it’s where our word “worm” comes from).  Great Orme is full of surprises, not least of which are extremely handsome Kashmir goats who pose with little smirky smiles on their faces for their close-ups.  They are right to look so supercilious for they are descended from a pair taken from  a herd owned by the Shah of Persia and given to Queen Victoria.  They may even have been there longer as it is also said that a local squire brought them over from a Kashmiri herd in France and presented a pair to George IV. 

Goats have always been shrouded in lore.  The association with the Devil is well known, as he is usually depicted with horns and cloven hooves. However, goats were also thought to bring good luck, especially to farmers. In ancient Babylon, a goat was sent to die in the desert, in order that it could carry away the diseases of the people, and the Hebraic scape goat was driven into the wilderness, taking away the sins of the Jews. The Kashmir name for the wild goat is “Markhor”, which means “Snake eater” and goats are believed to kill adders by trampling on them and afterwards eating the remains. And it gets stranger…

The tradition of having goats in the military originated in 1775, when a wild goat walked onto the battlefield in Boston during the American Revolutionary War and led the Welsh regimental colours at the end of the Battle of Bunker Hill.  Another Welsh military goat, Taffy IV, served in the First World War.  William “Billy” Windsor I is a Kashmir goat from the same bloodline as the Great Orme herd although he was born at Whipsnade Zoo.  He served as a lance corporal in the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welsh, an infantry battalion of the British Army from 2001 until 2009, except for a three-month period in 2006 when he was demoted to fusilier, after inappropriate behaviour during the Queen’s Official Birthday celebrations (headbutting a drummer) while deployed on active duty with the battalion on Cyprus. On retirement he was replaced by a wild goat from the Great Orme herd.

Another day, another walk, this time in the Conwy Mountain area where we met some of the feral Carneddau ponies which inhabit this beautiful landscape.  Of course, they have a story too.  Four hundred years ago Henry VIII ordered that horses unable to carry a knight in full armour should be culled.  These ponies escaped due to their remote habitation and are now thought to be unique.  They are sweet-natured and quite relaxed when it comes to being photographed.  I don’t think Henry’s men would have any problems capturing them today!

This area was truly intriguing.  We visited a bronze age mine, sat in a druid stone circle and marvelled at the weird concrete knuckles which form the sea defences at Llandulas – they could easily be acclaimed as an art installation.  We fell in love with tiny St Trillo’s Chapel by the beach at Rhos on Sea.  It only seats six and may well be the smallest church in the British Isles, complete with its own spring-fed well.

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And so on to Tenby where I could indulge my love of all things Dylan Thomas.  It’s possible that the first time Thomas aired Under Milk Wood in public was at Tenby and District’s Arts Club in 1953.   I love the 1974 film version of Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton as First Man, Elizabeth Taylor as Rosie Probert and Peter O’Toole as Captain Cat.  Burton was a drinking buddy of Dylan Thomas and there’s a very bad poem by Burton on the wall of Brown’s in Laugharne – Thomas’s local during his on-off residency in this lovely place.  I was struck by the number of Welsh speakers I was hearing and the wonderful musicality of the language which, combined with the unique voices of the preachers of his childhood, certainly influenced Thomas’s own sonorous reading voice.

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There’s a really good little museum in Tenby which has a room dedicated to Augustus and Gwen John, the artistic siblings, who were brought up in Tenby – “so restful, so colourful, so unspoilt” was Augustus’ very favourable verdict. Below is Gwen John’s Landscape at Tenby with Figures, painted at the end of the 19th century.

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Dylan Thomas famously stole Caitlin Mcnamara from Augustus John in 1936 when the artist foolishly introduced him to his young mistress.  Augustus John would have been 58 and Caitlin just 23.  There are stories of John chasing Thomas around the castle grounds at Laugharne when he caught him smooching with Caitlin in the car…  John and Thomas were regular drinking buddies so it clearly didn’t damage their relationship too badly…

Appropriately enough, in a glass case on the stairs of the museum are a rather fabulous pair of Dylan Thomas’s trousers in a grey-blue and white stripe with a rather swashbuckling sailor cut.  They were presented to the museum by Elizabeth Bowen whose father bought them from Dolly Long, Thomas’s housekeeper in Laugharne.  The trousers were stopping the rain coming in through an attic door and Dolly had no compunction about selling the souvenir to Dr Bowen.

Laugharne is still such a beautiful, unspoilt place and it’s well worth visiting The Boathouse where Thomas spent the last four years of his life with Caitlin and the children and pressing your nose against the window of Dylan’s Writing Shed a little further up the lane. The view over the estuary from The Boathouse is extraordinary – swathes of glistening water, quiet herons and such intense light.  “Off and on, up and down, high and dry, man and boy, I’ve been living now for 15 years in this timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town…” said Dylan of Laugharne. One of the first people to rent accommodation to Thomas was Richard Hughes, the author of High Wind in Jamaica who lived in grand Castle House and kept a very good wine cellar.

We did the Dylan Thomas birthday walk which has extracts from “Poem in October” to read at various breathtakingly lovely viewpoints.  It’s such a moving, contemplative poem, richly satisfying to read.  Here’s the first stanza:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
   And the mussel pooled and the heron
           Priested shore
       The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
       Myself to set foot
           That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

It always makes me sad to read this poem and think that Thomas only had another nine years to live.  He died at the age of 39 and, I know it’s a cliché, but oh, all those unwritten words…  Dylan and Caitlin are buried together in the new graveyard at St Martin’s Church in Laugharne.  I loved walking around this pretty town, thinking about all the characters who inspired Under Milk Wood, although of course New Quay was also a huge inspiration and the film was shot in Fishguard, which seemed to fit the concept of Thomas’s Llareggub perfectly.  Thomas is very much a poet of place, steeped in the sounds and sights of Wales.  Do have a look at A Dylan Odyssey which is a lovely book containing essays by writers, artists and family members, all exploring the effect of Thomas’s surroundings on his work.  Oh, and if it happens to be your birthday (and you can prove it!) and you decide to do the birthday walk on that day,  then you can claim a range of freebies including a pint at Brown’s and coffee and welshcakes in  Cafe Culture as well as free entry to The Boathouse.  You do have to recite “oh may my heart’s truth still be sung ” every time but it’s a small price to pay!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tenby was clearly the place to be if you were a writer.  George Eliot found literary inspiration in the town and also fell in love with George Henry Lewes there. Roald Dahl visited Tenby as a child every Easter, fondly recalling donkey rides, clifftop walks and the boat to Caldey Island.  He loved it so much he brought his own children there too.  Dahl’s Oslo born father had emigrated to Cardiff to seek his fortune in the 19th century coal boom.

It’s fascinating that the whole concept of the seaside town happened because 18th and 19th century wars meant the great and the good couldn’t go on their Grand Tours so the UK suddenly became a destination, followed swiftly by the craze for seabathing.  Originally the men would bathe naked but then were obliged  to bathe at one end of the beach only until a bell was rung at 8am!

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I wrote a great deal while we were in Tenby.  We walked, over several days, from Bosherston’s massive lily ponds to the wide sands of Pensarne, via the quirky castle of Manorbier, passing extraordinary jagged cliffs, the odd blowhole, booming caves, bobbing seals, military bases, cromlechs and moors.  We had torrential rain, gale force winds, rainbows and such strong sunshine I got my first peeling nose since I was a girl!

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I also realised how many Welsh poets I have on my bookshelves and what a brilliant contribution they have made to the canon.  So many poets with such an enviable facility with words: a lilt, a cadence, a turn of phrase that I would love to emulate – R S Thomas, Gillian Clarke, Dannie Abse, Samanth Wynne Rhydderch and Owen Sheers whose heartbreaking film-poem The Green Hollow, is a tribute to the survivors of Aberfan starring many stellar Welsh actors such as Jonathan Pryce, Eve Myles, Sian Phillips and Michael Sheen.

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Every year, at Christmas, we listen to Cerys Matthews’ evocative recording which weaves together Swansea memories of Christmas from elderly residents with my favourite out of all Dylan Thomas’s writing,  A Child’s Christmas in Wales.  This year it will have even more poignancy.

 

 

Summertime and the living is quirky…

 
There’s so much to celebrate in the UK in the summer and I feel particularly lucky to be living in North Norfolk.  Last night, strolling down to the beach to watch the sunset an excited family from Cambridge were taking photos of a seal lazily floating on its back.  Earlier in the year we did an extraordinary walk from Sea Palling to Great Yarmouth along the beach all the way.

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As you get closer to Horsey Gap you start to see seals.  We were quite chuffed at seeing ten lying on the tideline until we realised that the strange rock formations up ahead were also seals, packed liked sardines, hundreds of them, heaving themselves into and out of the sea, hissing, barking and emitting such appalling smells in their constant state of fish-fuelled excitement that by the time we approached Winterton we had to desperately seek refuge on the path running behind the dunes.

Friday mornings I walk along the beach with my yoga mat for a 7am yoga class on the pier.  If you look closely in the photo below you can see me doing a dodgy tree pose on the far right-hand side.

On my way to yoga yesterday, as I went past the cliff slopes where the Bagot goats spend the summer keeping the vegetation in order, I witnessed quite a bit of goat argy bargy as horns clashed and kids bleated.  They are a lovely sight and Delilah Bagot, the spokesgoat, is getting quite a lot of media attention and even has her own facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/delilah.bagot.1

We’ve had peregrines nesting on Cromer Church tower this year – all three chicks fledged recently and it’s now a common sight to see crowds looking up with state-of-the-art binoculars and scopes.  I’ve been going to the NWT nature reserve at Cley Marshes more often now I live at this end of the coast and was rewarded recently by the sound of a booming bittern.  I’ve always wanted to hear this and it certainly lived up to expectations.  It absolutely does sound like someone blowing across the top of a milk-bottle!  What a great mating call!

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A few weekends ago I was in Leeds with fellow poet Heidi Williamson for the UK’s first ever Prose Poetry Symposium.  It was such an energising event and included the launch of the Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry which I’m very proud to be in as it includes so many fabulous poets.  On the Sunday morning we had time for an amble through Leeds and came across a Kitty Café.  I’ve never been a great fan of Hello Kitty and was bemused that my usually very sensible friend was bouncing up and down like a six-year-old.  When Heidi could finally speak again she explained that the café was not a vehicle for a Japanese animation, but for a cat rescue organisation.  You pay a fee to go in, find a comfy place to sit, order your food, and then realise that the whole café is full of scratching posts, hammocks, ledges, catnip toys, catflaps and is actually a temporary home to thirty-three cats and kittens!

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Back in Norfolk and yet another trip to Great Yarmouth, a place I’ve become very fond of over the years.  It’s a fascinating mix of history, quirkiness, urban grit and the great British seaside in all its Kiss-Me-Quick glory.  We decided to forego the End of the Pier show in Cromer this summer and experience the Yarmouth Hippodrome Summer Spectacular instead.  The Hippodrome was built by George Gilbert in 1903.  It’s Britain’s only surviving circus building and one of only four in the world to have a water feature.  Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini performed there, Lillie Langtry sang there and Lloyd George held political rallies there.  In wartime it was used as a military shooting range.  Peter Jay (of Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers) bought the building, alongside others in Great Yarmouth, in the 1970s and restored the water feature in 1981 (the wooden floor of the circus sinks dramatically to reveal a circular water tank and spouting fountains…)

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I loved the fact that all the young women selling candyfloss and programmes and showing you to your seat transform into the circus dancers in the first half and the syncopated swimming troupe in the second.  The guy with the American accent selling popcorn turned out to be one of the extraordinarily athletic Chicago All Stars.  In the interval performers from all over the world put on their black crew gear and help to erect the scaffold for the aerial display.  It’s a real team effort!

After the show we went backstage to the Circus Museum where many of the performers were milling around, relaxing on sofas, although the Finnish trapeze artist seemed happy to spend her free time walking up and down a fellow acrobat’s back as he lay supine.  The Circus Museum features some of Peter Jay’s equipment and tour posters as well as a hoard of memorabilia which was found just lying around when Jay bought the building, including a programme, printed on silk, for the first ever show at the Hippodrome.  Some of the memorabilia is stored in the old stables where the animals were kept.

Another Great Yarmouth gem worth visiting is the Lydia Eva, the last steam drifter in the world.  You’ll find her on the South Quay.  She was the last boat to be built at the King’s Lynn Slipway Co in West Lynn as the local shipbuilders were on strike.  Named after owner Harry Eastick’s daughter, the boat was launched in June 1930 and has been lovingly restored.  If you want to know more about the Great Yarmouth herring industry then the Time and Tide Museum is the place to go – leave time for a visit to the Silver Darlings Café!

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Summer wouldn’t be summer without a reading list and I’ve been revisiting the classics this year, inspired by visits to two wonderful writers’ houses during our week’s holiday in Hastings.  First stop was Lamb House in Rye where Henry James lived from 1897 until 1914.  He wrote many of his most famous works here, including my particular favourite, The Turn of the Screw.  If you look closely at the photo on the left you might see a shadowy figure doing a little light haunting…  Joan Aitken’s book The Haunting of Lamb House is a supernatural tale featuring both Henry James and his friend friend E F Benson who lived there from 1914 onwards and who also wrote ghost stories.  Benson’s celebrated Mapp and Lucia stories are set in “Tilling” which was modelled on Rye.  Mapp and Lucia’s home, “Mallards” is, of course, Lamb House.  Rumer Godden, one of my favourite writers when I was a child, lived there from 1967 to 1974.  Her book, A Kindle of Kittens, is set in Rye.  I particularly adored Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, the story of two Japanese dolls and how their new owner, Nona, a homesick little girl, decides to build them a Japanese house.  I’m sure  my love of all things Japanese stems from learning, along with Nona, what the dolls might like to be surrounded with to lessen their homesickness.

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Our second writer’s residence was Monk’s House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s country retreat in Rodmell.  We walked along the banks of the Ouse from Lewes to Rodmell and it was hard not to imagine Virginia, on that fateful day in 1941, setting off from the house and walking into the Ouse, pockets full of stones.

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The house is utterly charming and the Woolfs clearly thought so too, despite the lack of home comforts.  Leonard said that he thought their daily life was closer to Chaucer’s than that of modern man!  Woolf was writing her seminal feminist essay A Room of One’s Own as her bedroom was being built at Monk’s House.  It had no internal links to the main house and was full of artworks by her sister, Vanessa Bell, and her niece, Angelica Garnett.

In the garden is the Writing Lodge, where Virginia wrote many of her novels and articles, even sleeping there on fine summer nights.  The house was a magnet for the Bloomsbury Group with T S Eliot, Maynard Keynes, E M Forster, Duncan Grant and many others spending time here and dubbing it Bloomsbury on Sea!

 

As well as revisiting some of the books in my classics collection I’ve also set myself a project which I’m calling The Paris Project.  I’m trying to read every book I can with the word Paris in the title.  I’ve come across some great ones so far.  I would recommend The Paris Wife by Paula McLain which is about how Hadley Richardson (the first of Hemingway’s four wives) and Ernest Hemingway adapt to life in Paris as impoverished Americans in the 1920s.  If you like a bit of time travelling then pick up futurist adventure Paris Adrift by E J Swift – a really intriguing read.  One Evening in Paris by Nicolas Barreau is a wee bit farfetched but it’s set around a cinema and is a bit of a paean to all those romantic city-obsessed Woody Allen films so you can forgive its foibles!

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And, of course, I’ve been reading plenty of poetry books – there have been so many good ones recently.  I’ve particularly enjoyed Witch by Rebecca Tamas, Threat by Julia Webb, The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus, Everyone Knows I am a Haunting by Shivanee Ramlochan, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and King of a Rainy Country by Matthew Sweeney.  The last is particularly close to my heart.  Matthew and his partner, fellow poet Mary Noonan, were in Paris at the same time as me in 2016 and staying very close by.  This collection of prose poems was Matthew’s response to Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris.  It’s a magical read but also a sad one as Matthew died soon after completing it.

So, look out for the quirky, wherever you are, it’s what makes life interesting.  I’ll leave you with a final image from a shop in Great Yarmouth which was in the process of closing down…

 

A Casa dos Poetas – Take Two!

 
For the second year running I’ve been tutoring and performing at Peter Pegnall’s brilliant A Casa dos Poetas (The Poetry House), a residential course which took place in mid-May in the charming Algarvian town of Silves.

Last year I stayed with five of the other participants up in the hills, this year we were based at La Colina dos Mouros and my room had a gorgeous view of the Castle which dominates the little town.

Some free time on the first day meant I could do more than just admire this stunning castle from afar.  Once inside there’s very little of the structure left, although the Moorish fortifications are some of the best preserved In Portugal.  It’s thought to have been built on a Lusitanian castro by the Romans and Visigoths and then expanded by the Moors who were there between the 8th and 13th centuries. Something that struck me was the presence of huge water tanks, essential when under siege!  One of these cisterns was hosting an exhibition on the Iberian lynx, which, once highly endangered, is being reintroduced. I used the words on the panels to create a found poem which served as an example for my workshop on this subject later in the week.  I’ve become more and more interested in different forms of found poetry and was particularly struck by Raymond Antrobus’s erasure/redaction of Ted Hughes’ poem The Deaf School, which appears in his award-winning 2018 poetry collection The Perseverance.  The act of erasure is a radical interaction with a text, but in this case I went for the more conventional excerpting and re-mixing.

 So, here’s a taste of the Iberian lynx (all words, including the title, found):

Feline Reintroductions

 When I was small my life was catching bees and making little beehives

I used to see lynxes

the wandering waddling walk

vertical eyes    long whiskers   fur like foliage

a short discreet tail

crepuscular carnivore of partridges

coelhos bravos

he can climb trees   swim

lynxes    I used to see   lynxes

The loose theme which tied many of the workshops together  this year was The Outsider – a very fruitful topic.  I spent a lot of time wishing I spoke Portuguese, not knowing a language makes you feel very alien and on the fringe of things, so certainly a very appropriate theme for the week.  I’m fortunate that I know enough Spanish to get by with menus and rough guesses, but not enough to really join in.   Was I a tourist?  Some of the time I was teaching and some of the time I was a student.  And then there we were on a hill looking across the river to the town, very much on the outside, looking in…  Not to mention that poets tend to be observers, placing themselves at the edge of things in order to record and transform…

Andrea Holland led a very thought-provoking workshop using Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina, one of my favourite poems.  Sestinas are so hard to write but here you barely notice the cyclically repeated endwords, so skillful…  You can read the text here.  It’s interesting to think of the child’s position, whether they belong in this house, or not:

http://staff.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/bishop.html

Gérard Noyau once again encouraged us to provide a working translation of one of his father, René’s, poems, an extraordinarily complex piece dealing with the history of slavery.   René was a Mauritian surrealist poet so there were layers of both language and culture to unpick.  We worked in groups, drafting up a rough translation before putting our poet hats on and making the language work to the best of our ability. During the residential Gerard undertakes to translate some of our poems into French and discusses the final result in depth.  It’s such an interesting experience, it makes you question every word and nuance of meaning of the original and flags up cultural differences when you come across the untranslatable (back to the outsider again!).

The translation workshop took place on the roof of the Café Ingles which is our home from home for the week.  Smiling staff, led by the inimitable Carlos, welcomed us for several evenings and a few sneaky gazpacho and white wine lunchtimes!  I always enjoy performing my poetry at the Café.  Last year it was quite chilly in the evenings, but this year we were able to perform under the stars in the scented night air.  I’m hoping my performing skills were enhanced this year by a great performance workshop from Naomi Foyle – thank you Naomi for helping me to breathe!

And of course, Peter Pegnall held it all together for us, not only leading two workshops but arranging trips, guest speakers and various surprises, one of which was a performance by Rogerio Cão and Nanook, passionate poetry put to music and performed in the cobbled café courtyard.

We spent a day up in the hills in a beautiful villa where Manuel Portela, writer, professor and renowned expert on Fernando Pessoa, encouraged us to create our own work from Pessoa seeds.  Pessoa, and his multiple personas, all of whom write in different voices, represent the ultimate outsider, someone who is so Other their Self is lost in multiple guises, unpindownable…

Our hosts at the villa were Manuel Neto dos Santos and his partner, Bert, who made us a superb meal as well as giving us the run of their beautiful gardens and patios.  Manuel is an Algarvian poet whose words are permeated with melancholic longing and he has at least eight collections to his name.   During the afternoon he introduced us to a variety of other Algarvian poetic voices before we thanked our kind hosts with our own voices, performing words and music by the pool (and they still didn’t make us do the washing up!).

 

 

 

 

Our residency this year was a bit later than in 2018 which meant the stork chicks were almost adolescents!  As I sat on my balcony I could hear extraordinary clicking and clacking from all around and after a bit of googling discovered the most amazing fact: did you know  storks don’t have voiceboxes but communicate by clattering their beaks? I had a view of at least three storks’ nests from by balcony and if you walk in any direction in Silves you can feast your eyes on multiple nests, large and small and low and high.  One of the biggest is on the old Communist Party HQ next to the police station, but it’s tricky to catch on camera, the sun always seems to be in the wrong place.  I thought the storks deserved their own poem this year so this is a Japanese style effort, a sort of double tanka!

storks stir the mud

with trident feet

the knowledge of tide

in their slurried blood

they clack their beaks

like knife     like fork

swallows nestle

in the underbelly

of their cartwheel nests

sing like courtiers

to their voiceless kings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our afternoon off was bright and hot and most of us opted to go to the beach at Carvoeiro for a speedboat trip to the famous Benagil caves.  This whole coastline is like a magical grotto, turquoise water, limestone sea caves sculpted by sand and time in colours which reminded me of those glass containers you used to find at seaside places with differently coloured layers of sand (I think I had one which was lighthouse shaped).  The boat trip had to have a coda of an ice cream (pastel de nata flavour of course!) before a cold half-hour dip in the salty Atlantic.

 

 

 

 

 

In a way, I quite enjoyed my outsider status.  It meant I could be someone a little different for a while, in my head at least!  Once again, I felt very privileged to have taken part in this  week-long celebration of Portugal, culture, poetry and companionship.

Paris in the Autumn – DADA, Punk and Pistachio Eclairs

 
It was strange to be back in Paris, not least because I’d had several months of clean sea air and was used to feeling constantly and rather pleasantly damp from a mixture of sea swimming and beach walking.  Just the day before I’d been swimming in the North Sea and now here I was on the steps of Sacre Coeur! (Below is a photo taken from the 8th floor of my air bnb building.)

One of my aims this time in Paris was to explore the live poetry/open mic scene a little more thoroughly.  I began by attending the launch of the latest issue of “Maintenant” a New York DADA magazine.  It was an extraordinary evening from start to finish, down in the basement of the Cave on rue Marcadet.   I’m a great fan of experimental poetry and pushing boundaries and could appreciate that a lot of what went on was doing exactly that.  The main joy of the evening, however,  was discovering new poets who had an innovative and exciting way with words while still remaining accessible, and who you are unlikely to come across on the page as they are largely performance poets.  Boni Joi, an American poet, gave a muscular, dramatic performance, full of the flavours of Europe.  The biggest discovery for me was Henrik Aeshna.  Glittering eyes, a feral presence and the feeling that anything could happen as he threw jets of whiskey around and pages of poetry across the stage, but amidst the posturing there were moments of pure poetic beauty.  I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for bad boys, you know, that Kurt Cobain, Pete Doherty, Sid Vicious kind of thing…

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Aeshna is described as  “the anti-prophet of SchizoPoP Manifesto.  Rebel, intense, provocateur; bastard, visionary vandal, anti-anti-hero with a thousand faces. Profane pirate of signs and Poltergeist poet of inspirational carpe diem. All and Nothing. Henrik Aeshna’s school notebook poems are radically innovative – a wild stream of words and sensations, an unstructured syntax flowing out of the musical mud and fierce effervescence of Free Jazz, Post-Punk, Avant-Garde & Experimental Cinema ( Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Shuji Terayama, Jonas Mekas, etc. ), photography and street art, Beat Poetry, Dada-Surrealism & Situationism, and finding echoes in the travel journals and raging notebooks of outlaw adventurers such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Rimbaud, Villon, Li Po & Basho, Artaud, William Burroughs & Arthur Cravan…” .  To read more of this astounding description of his work and some sample poems go to: https://tsunamibooks.jimdo.com/poets-in-english-2011-issue/henrik-aeshna/

Other artists banged the on-stage piano in a brutal manner, used post-its to simulate copulation and enacted a rather engaging play across the room.  The evening ended in true DADA style with the final artist rubbing sweets on his genitals (yes, really, pants down stuff).  There was a point, but probably not one to share…

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My next venture was long-standing open-mic night Spoken Word at Au Chat Noir, a typically grungey and grafittied bar in Belleville, the old working class district which is now, with Oberkampf, the height of hip.  Spoken Word describes itself as a home for “creatives and lost anglophones”.  The majority of open-micers are American and the flavour tends to be quite young, political, stream of consciousness style readings. The emphasis tends to be much more on performance than it is in the UK.  One of the featured artists was Jennifer Blowdryer, who used to head up a punk band in New York in the 70s.  She was great fun, belting out songs and reading an essay about Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor from her new book.  The venue was an atmospheric basement space, with the calmest member of the audience by far being a short-eared rabbit who surveyed all that went on with a buddha-like tranquillity.  I read a couple of poems from Lumière to spread the word as it was thanks to my 2016 Arts Council funded residency in Paris that this pamphlet, a tribute to Paris’ cinematic heritage, came into being.

https://www.hedgehogpress.co.uk/product/sue-burge-lumiere-pre-order/

For my third and final exploration I went back to Culture Rapide, another grungey, graffitied bar in Belleville where I had read embryonic Lumière poems back in May 2016.  This meant I wasn’t heckled onto stage with cries of “Virgin! Virgin!” like other terrified newbies.  My slot followed Gertrude, a fabulous French transvestite who sang a song about working girls in Montmartre, resplendent in fishnets, beret and little black skirt.  And following me was the ubiquitous Jenny Blowdryer!   The featured act was Abdel Kader Wawi, aka 5919, a Lebanese calligraffiti artist.  The stage became an art studio as old film posters were stuck up and then covered with the most beautifully executed Arabic calligraphy of words suggested by the audience.  While he worked, two friends played guitar and sang, giving the performance a gypsyish/Moorish slant.

All three experiences were extraordinary and I felt privileged to have been a fleeting part of them.

I did, of course,  venture outside and went on long, sunlit walks on most days, sometimes clocking up around 10km in a go, but a further two highlights were both part of the thriving  cabaret scene in Paris.

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It was Paris fashion week and I decided the only way to properly celebrate this was to go along to the Folies Bergère and see Jean-Paul Gaulthier’s Fashion Freak Show – a cabaret spectacular which he had created to showcase his life in fashion, like peeking into his private diary.  Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to get a ticket as both Marion Cotillard and Paloma Faith were in the audience, along with other celebrities who I had no hope of identifying and a plethora of gorgeous men and women who all seemed to have modelled for J-P.  The show was fantastic, full-on dancing, electrifying music (chosen by Nile Rodgers), fashion shows featuring Gaulthier’s iconic confections and some brilliant projections including images of the young J-P watching Falbalas,  the 1945 film which was one of his earliest inspirations.  The film starred the gorgeous Micheline Presle as a woman seduced by a Parisian designer.  One of the highlights of the show for me was to see Presle in the huge on-stage projections, playing Gaulthier’s influential grandmother.  In one of those strange coincidences that makes life the colourful pageant that it is, I had a drink later in the week with my friend Juliette, who runs the fabulous Cine-Balade company and whose walks were hugely inspirational when it came to writing Lumière.  She had just interviewed Presle as she works for an organisation which restores old black and white films and one of Presle’s is hopefully slated for re-release.  Juliette had also worked with the team restoring Rue des Cascades which was one of the many films I managed to see while in Paris.  This 1964 classic is a little reminiscent of Les Quatre Cents Coups, very much seen from a child’s point of view and set in the Belleville/Menilmontant area.  It focuses on a boy’s reaction to his mother’s new boyfriend, who just happens to be black.

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The second cabaret experience, a visit to the Lapin Agile, is probably one of my all-time favourite Parisian experiences in the 40 years since I’ve been coming to the city.  You need to be able to understand French pretty well to really appreciate it, but just to go in and imbibe the atmosphere is worth the ticket price.  It’s a famous Montmartre cabaret dating from the 19th century.  It was bought by Aristide Bruant, comedian and cabaret singer, in the early 20th century to save it from demolition.  It became a favourite spot for struggling artists and writers including Utrillo, Picasso, Apollinaire and Modigliani.

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It also became famous for launching unknown musicians and singers on to greater things – singers like Georges Brassens and Claude Nougaro.  The evening starts with five or six singers and musicians around a table singing together, the songs are all French in origin and some date back to the fifteenth century.  Each musician has a solo turn, maybe with an accordion, a piano, a guitar.  There are songs by Piaf, Brassens, Bécaud and many more including Charles Aznavour, who, in his youth,  lived just below Montmartre in the 9th arrondissement and who died very recently at the age of 94.  The venue is dark, atmospheric, with old wooden tables and benches and paintings on every inch of wall space, including a copy of Picasso’s famous Au Lapin Agile.

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Paris, as well as staying the same in so many ways, is also changing rapidly.  The prevalence of street art is one of the most noticeable changes.  A great deal of tagging, but also, among the ordinary, the extraordinary:

 

 

 

 

 

And what about that eclair?  Well, I’m well-known for my predilection for réligieuse, those wonderful chocolate or coffee cream-filled choux pastry concoctions, but decided I should try something different as I wandered round the Batignolles area which seemed to have a delightful bakery on every corner.  Green is one of my favourite colours and the brightness of this pistachio eclair seemed to be calling to me.  It was one of those moments where, as a Frenchwoman I know says, “time stops on your tongue.

 

A Poetic Adventure in Portugal

 

I’ve just returned from my most recent poetic adventure in the beautiful Portuguese town of Silves as a participant in poet Peter Pegnall’s A Casa dos Poetas.  Peter has been running this venture for a number of years and it was an absolute pleasure to be included.  It’s basically a residential writing course but with a key difference,  as one of Peter’s main aims is to ensure that the local community is aware and involved.  We spent quite a lot of time at the wonderfully welcoming Café Ingles where, on the pretty roof terrace,  Andrea Holland gave a thought-provoking workshop.   The red-brick Moorish castle loomed above us, birdsong filled the air, the scent of mimosa wafted on the breeze, we could see orange groves and yes, it was all quite ridiculously poetic…

Photo by Phil Hawtin

From 700-1200 AD Silves was a Moorish stronghold and the remnants of the city walls these days are proving very popular with nesting storks.  The storks were a joy, the most spectacular nest was the one on the old Communist Party HQ complete with hungry storklet and I absolutely fell in love with the series of nests on the ruined pillars of a house down from the Café Ingles.

One afternoon I sat by the river and counted 12 storks wheeling overhead, a sight to behold.

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The Café was also the venue for a couple of poetry readings where we got to hear the strong and varied voices of the different participants.  We were extremely lucky to have Gérard Noyau with us throughout.  He translated some of our poems into French and it was fascinating to experience the translation process and be able to perform one of my poems in a different language.  Gérard’s father was René Noyau, the celebrated Mauritian surrealist poet, and he performed some of these poems too, with Peter reading the English translations which he and Gérard have been working on so meticulously. The Café was also the venue for a great workshop with Manuel Neto dos Santos, a Portuguese poet with eight collections to his name.  We listened to him read one of his prose poems and then roughly translated it with his help.  Once we had the bare bones we were able, in groups, to transform it.  Our aim was to make it sound as poetic as possible and as close to Manuel’s vision as we could.   It was a magical exercise and gave us all a real insight into the translation process, notoriously tricky when it comes to capturing the essence of a poem.  One of my recent discoveries is a collection of Moniza Alvi’s translated versions of Jacques Supervieille’s poems, Homesick for the Earth.  She spent literally years working on each version and they are beautifully crafted.  I find the whole question of poetry translation fascinating, including the question-marks over who has created the poem as the translator is often transforming ideas into words which are impossible to literally translate and adding their poetic voice into the mix.

I realised, to my shame, that not only were my language skills being sorely tested (I could read a little Portuguese thanks to a knowledge of Spanish, but the pronunciation was a real challenge) but I also knew nothing about the country which was hosting me so graciously.  At one point we had a talk from a longstanding local resident and headteacher about what it was like to have been a young man during the final days of the Salazar dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution of 1974, the anniversary of which had just taken place as we arrived in Portugal.

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Fernando Pessoa

Someone who lived through the early days of Salazar’s regime was Fernando Pessoa and, towards the end of the course we had a fascinating study day on Pessoa, led by Manuel Portela from the University of Coimbra.   As well as being a superb linguist, translator, poet and scholar with wide-ranging academic interests and qualifications, Manuel is an expert on digital literature and is creating an interactive, multilingual, digital archive of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet  which will eventually include creative responses to Pessoa’s writing.  This means you’ll be able to enter the archive as a reader, writer, editor and translator.  We were the guinea pigs for the writing phase of the project, taking phrases from some Pessoa extracts and using them as a launching pad for our own pieces.  I did not know Pessoa’s work before and it opened up a whole new world for me.  Pessoa wrote under his own name, but also used approximately one hundred and thirty six other names of which several were fully developed heteronyms, including Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Barão de Teive, António Mora, Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares. Heteronyms are an extraordinary concept, behind these names were fully-imagined authors, each with a distinctive voice, persona and opinions.  He began creating these heteronyms from a very young age.  The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary project, it has no narrative, each text begins in the concsciousness of the moment and much of it was written in cafes by Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms.  Manuel’s digital version of the book means that it can be read in different ways which reflects how the book was discovered – pages and pages of disordered and fragmented writing in a trunk! Pessoa’s life, interests and writing could fill pages and he only lived to the age of 47!  A mysticist interested in astrology, the occult, Neopaganism, rosicrucianism, theosophy, the list goes on.  Pessoa spent some time in South Africa as a child and was fluent in English.  He once dreamed of becoming an English poet in the romantic tradition.

Our venue for Manuel’s workshop was the Quinta da Eira where five of us were fortunate enough to have been staying for the whole course.  This solid farmhouse, around 9km from Silves, with its resident dogs and cats and beautiful terraces overlooking the hillsides and lake was like staying in a living postcard.  I got out and about as much as I could into the surrounding countryside, walking, thinking, taking photos.  Whenever we went out for walks one of the farmhouse dogs would accompany us.

Simao was my companion on one walk. For the most part he waited patiently while I examined each beautiful wildflower but sometimes he got bored and gave me a hefty nudge.  One night, coming up the steep track in the dark a wild boar and her piglets ran across in front of the car, they were no bigger than kittens with crazily curly tails.   The landscape was immensely inspiring and I wrote the following poem to try to capture it:

Quinta da Eira, Silves 2018

 uphill, through terraced green

a dog with a bear’s long bones

sometimes in front  

sometimes behind

a watery hollow, edge peppered

with boarprints

wild lavender streaks the path

with fierce purple

cistus purpureus seeks the sun

a perfect freckle on each white petal

orange groves with fruit glowing

like Chinese lanterns

the heady dart of a swallow

here, it is easy to forget

easy to believe in alternatives

clouds graze the hill

bringing the storm

it will be brief

Peter and Andrea led some brilliant poetry workshops on voice and persona which helped enormously with the Pessoa study day and were very thought-provoking.   I also led a workshop one afternoon, designed to take participants out of their comfort zones and, despite the fact that we were on the lovely terrace at Quinta da Eira with distracting views in the sunshine, everyone rose to the challenge magnificently!

All in all, a stunningly successful venture and my brain is still trying to process everything we learnt.  What has stayed very much in my mind is that, apparently, poets in Portugal are revered and respected, quite right too!  Pedestal over here please!

 

Abbeys, Monasteries and Convents – A Contemplation

 

I’m just back from two weeks in the Yorkshire Moors where it felt as if we experienced every type of weather ever invented and more!

For the first week we were based in Helmsley, and for the second week in a National Trust cottage just outside the gates of Fountains Abbey.  The sea, of course, was not a presence.  I was amazed how much I missed it as, recently, I felt that I was taking my daily glimpses of the sea from our bedroom windows a little too much for granted.  We were, however, close to some very impressive, fast-flowing, steep-sided Yorkshire rivers, namely the Skell and the Laver which are both close to Fountains Abbey and meet at Ripon, and the Rye, from which Rievaulx Abbey gets its name.  I thought a lot about rivers.  I grew up by the Thames and my dad was a boatbuilder so I knew how important they were from an early age – they provide food on the table for our family, for a start!  I’ve always been fascinated by how settlements develop by rivers and how we use them for both survival and entertainment.  Both Rievaulx and Fountains Abbey were Cistercian monasteries and what the Cistercians didn’t know about forcing a river to meet their own ends isn’t worth knowing.  The monks of Rievaulx were granted land north of the river and today, Rievaulx is still north of the river, but the monastery is somewhat larger than it should have been as yes, you’ve guessed it, the industrious monks (or, more likely, the lay brothers who did all the donkey work) moved it.

In the 18th century Fountains Abbey was used as a romantic ruin for 18th century aristocrats to enjoy as they explored the water gardens at Studley Royal as guests of the Aislabies.  John Aislabie, another who had the ability to see how river water could be manipulated, but for leisure this time, created the gardens after he was expelled from Parliament due to the South Sea Bubble disaster.  What a great retirement project!  There are wonderful views of the Abbey from many spots in the garden.

Studley Royal Water Garden in the eighteenth century

Thomas Duncombe of Duncombe Hall, on the fringes of Helmsley, went one better.  He had two romantic ruins – Helmsley Castle at one end of his estate and Rievaulx Abbey at the other.  He created Rievaulx Terrace – a high walk with temple follies from which you get wonderful views.  When we were there the serpentine wooded approach to the terrace shone with snowdrops and this became quite a feature of our walks, as did banks and banks of wild garlic.

Cistercians were a breakaway group from the Benedictines.  They wanted to go back to St Benedict’s original principles and prided themselves on being self-sufficient.  The river would have been used in the tanning and wool industries which made money for the Abbey.  It also would have been used as a sewer for the rather elaborate communal latrines.  Springwater was used to make small beer and for fresh drinking water.  The area around Fountains Abbey seemed to literally seep underfoot there are so many springs!  The monks didn’t wash frequently and then usually just their hands before dinner and their feet on Fridays in a religious ritual.  They only wore underpants (communal) when they left the grounds on monastic business and were allowed in the warming room twice a day for fifteen minutes.  Having experienced a few blizzards in the proximity of both these Abbeys, I am full of admiration for these men and the harsh life they undertook so willingly, although less so just before the Reformation when they had become as corrupt and decadent as the order they broke away from.  It’s always fun to spot Abbey stones in the local walls and houses from where the stone was pillaged once Henry’s men had taken all the more readily portably goodies.  King’s Lynn has a stunning late Tudor warehouse, Marriott’s Warehouse, which sports a lower layer of monastic stone.  It’s much easier to spot this little bit of history in Norfolk than it is in Yorkshire where the “acquired” stone easily blends into the local stonework.

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The monastic life is a fascinating one.  I’ve just finished Bitter Greens  by Kate Forsyth.  It weaves together the story of Rapunzel and the witch who imprisons her with the story of Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the woman who wrote the version of the story we know today.  Fairy and folk tales were very popular in the literary salons of Paris in the 17th century and Charlotte would have known Charles Perrault who collected many of the stories still told today.  She sounds like a formidable character and, at one point, was exiled from the court of Louis XIV and sent to a convent.  Kate Forsyth brings this austere community to life and it is here that Charlotte learns about Rapunzel and can make comparisons with her own “imprisonment” in a cloistered community with little or no contact with the outside world.  The book would make a fantastic film, it has so many layers and sub-plots.  On the subject of films, one of my favourites, set in a convent in the Himalayas, is Black Narcissus starring Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh and Kathleen Byron as a wonderfully demented Sister Ruth, fatally lusting after David Farrar, the local British agent, in his unfeasibly short shorts.

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It was shot mostly at Pinewood Studios but that didn’t stop an enthusiastic cinemagoer writing in to say they recognised the particular spot in the Himalayas where filming took place!  Then there’s the Audrey Hepburn film, The Nun’s Story.  Hepburn is a particular favourite of mine and I find this film incredibly poignant.  It’s set primarily in the Belgian Congo but, towards the end of the film Sister Luke returns to Nazi occupied Belgium and, having always struggled with obedience, and forced into a series of compromises through the Nazi occupation, leaves the convent after being granted a dispensation from her vows. As a young girl, Audrey lived in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.  At one point, she was reduced to eating groundup tulip bulbs to avoid starvation.  I can’t imagine what memories this film would have evoked for her.  Audrey gets to play a nun again in Robin and Marian, a film she alledgedly only agreed to make at the insistence of her sons who couldn’t envisage why she would turn down the opportunity to act alongside James Bond (Sean Connery)!

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Sean Connery is also the lead in another great film set in a monastery.  The Name of the Rose is based on Umberto Eco’s novel of the same name.  It’s a murder mystery set in a 14th century Italian monastery with many scenes taking place in the labyrinthine library.  At Fountains Abbey we discovered that he monks who made the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, laboriously inked onto vellum, were allowed to work in the warming room.  Cold fingers can’t write very well and this could be why I wrote little poetry during my Yorkshire sojourn!

I thought a lot though, and those thoughts have provided plenty of ideas for future poems.  Being so close to monasteries does make one feel very contemplative and I particularly liked one of the thought-provoking ideas at Rievaulx Terrace where visitors are invited to lean on sculpted pieces of trunk and just watch the clouds go by…

I recently attended a poetry workshop on Rain at the Troubadour Café in Earls Court, taught by the brilliant Anne-Marie Fyffe.  The subject was rain.  I was struck by how many  of the group participants had an affectionate relationship with rain.  It does cause mud, which was a feature of our holiday (my walking boots are still in recovery!) but it also helped to create those verdant banks of snowdrops and wild garlic… So it seems only apt to end on a picture of me at Pickering Station smiling through the raindrops!