Category Archives: Rivers

Canterbury Tales

All Blogs, Kent, literature, London, misc, North Norfolk, Poetry, Rivers

Nat Field's House | Canterbury | South Of England | Self Catering Holiday Cottage

In November I had a big birthday to celebrate and did so in style staying in a quirky 15th century cottage right in the middle of Canterbury.  One of the previous owners of the property was Nat Field, an actor and dramatist who would have been a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. His father, John Field, was a puritan who disapproved of all the entertainments his son was involved in.  Apparently Nat was a bit of a ladies man who led a wild life and may have fathered a child with the Duchess of Argyll.  His name appears as one of the actors in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. He may well have replaced Shakespeare when he joined the King’s Men in 1616.  Like Shakespeare, he spent most of his life in London, presumably retiring to Canterbury, although details are scant, apparently he was forced to quit the stage after a scandal.  A facsimile of his portrait watched us from the wall in the bedroom in that eerie way that old portraits do, the original is in the Dulwich Picture Gallery and is impossibly romantic in that wild haired piratic way that a young Shakespeare and Marlowe are depicted…  Christopher Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, is probably one of the most lauded connections and the cottage was a minute away from the stupendous Marlowe Theatre.  So little seems to be known about Nat Field beyond his professional life, he feels ripe for the picking for any budding novelists out there.  Susan Cooper, in her children’s novel, King of Shadows, features Nathan Field as a character. Set in 1599, it uses Field’s background as a student of Richard Mulcaster’s at St Paul’s as a springboard. The Nathan Field in the story, who briefly works at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, is actually a like-named boy from 1999, who has switched places with the young Elizabethan actor.  As you can tell I became rather besotted with the romance of all this!

Nathan Field (1587–1633) | Art UK

The current owner is also an actor and the cottage was festooned with theatre posters, TV scripts (he was in The Bill for many years) and original artwork.

Rupert Bear 1920-2020: How Canterbury's Mary Tourtel created an iconic character 100 years on

Canterbury has connections with so many literary figures, including Rupert Bear!  Mary Tourtel lived all her life in Canterbury, creating Rupert in 1920 for the Daily Express.  Rupert was conceived as a rival to Teddy Tail, who was the star of a popular comic strip in The Daily Mail.  When Tourtel’s eyesight deteriorated too much to continue with her illustrations in the 1930s, Alfred Bestall was her replacement.  I adore Rupert.  We have two framed snowy scenes from a Rupert calendar which come out every Christmas as part of the festivities and a framed Bill Badger scene in our porch!

Chaucer succeeded in putting Canterbury on the map early on with The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400 and available in a printed edition from 1476.  The reader follows a group of pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury where they are to visit the tomb of the martyred Bishop, Thomas à Beckett.  Their individual tales told in the inns they stay in along the way form the narrative.

Aphra Behn was born just outside Canterbury.  She was one of the first English women to earn her living as a writer although, before she became a poet, translator and playwright she was a spy in Antwerp for the Court of Charles II!   Just as little is known about Nat Field, or even Shakespeare, and the true nature of Marlowe’s death, Aphra Behn is also somewhat of a mystery.  Her biographer, Janet Todd, laments, “she has a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess which makes her an uneasy fit for any narrative, speculative or factual. She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks.”   I do love a shadowy figure that allows space for speculation!

Dickens knew Kent well.  In addition to his London residence, he had a house just outside Gravesend, Gad’s Hill Place, for the last fourteen years of his life and had spent much of his youth in Kent.  Legend has it that he had always coveted the house, which he had seen on country walks with his father, and he expresses this in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences:

“Bless you, sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, ‘If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.’ Though that’s impossible!” said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of the window with all his might.

Still from Daved Lean’s 1946 film of “Great Expectations”:

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946) | Great expectations, Film stills, Movie scenes

Dickens wrote Great Expectations in his Kent house, penning some wonderfully evocative descriptions of the marshes:

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line … the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black, and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermingled …The dark flat wilderness, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it…the low leaden line of the river…and the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, the sea…

I am used to marshland as we have a lot of saltmarshes in North Norfolk, but the Kent marshes seem bleaker and wilder and Dickens captures this desolation and isolation so well.  The marshes between Whitstable and Faversham seem unchanged since Magwitch leapt out and terrified poor Pip.  Part of the Thames Estuary they used to stretch right up to Westminster and have been drained and embanked since the 12th century.  One of my favourite days out during our week away was a trip to Faversham and a long loop into the countryside and back along the saltmarsh.  The town is full of medieval buildings, breweries and quirky shops but one of the sights that interested me most of all was

the Cardox factory (left), which opened in 1924 and was part of Faversham’s once extensive explosives industry.  Today it looks derelict, but the sheds are still in operation and are deliberately flimsy and far apart from each other to prevent fires spreading and to allow easy rebuilding should an internal explosion occur.  Closer to Faversham town is the Chart Gunpowder Mill, the oldest of its kind in the world. Ships would transport the gunpowder along the creek and out via the Medway and Thames to the royal arsenals at Chatham or the Tower of London. You could even argue that the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 was won in the gunpowder factories of Faversham. Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory, carried 35 tonnes of powder to supply its cannon. I like pretty places but find myself drawn much more to traces of industry and spent ages peeking through the fence at these tumbledown sheds!

Faversham Creek was bleak and beautiful on the very cold and windswept day when we did our walk.  Daniel Defoe, a customs officer, knew Faversham well, stating in 1724,

“in the arts of that wicked trade the people hereabouts are arrived at such a proficiency that they are
grown monstrous rich.”

The “wicked trade” is, of course, smuggling.

As we got closer to Faversham on our looping walk we had to cross a small wooden bridge over Cooksditch Stream into Ironwharf Boatyard.  On the other side of the bridge was a very welcome mirage, Quint’s Retreat.  This tiny vintage caravan, run by a cheery lady, supplies tea, cake, bacon butties and toasties to dogwalkers, boatbuilders and very cold tourists.  It’s named after Robert Shaw’s character in “Jaws” and was totally unexpected.  The boatyard housed some real treasures alongside decommissioned goods wagons which were stranded when a section of the railway track was dismantled.

 

 

Faversham’s architecture is outstanding and another of my favourites was this magnificent warehouse (below) which stored locally grown hops ready to be transported up the creek to the London Hop Exchange.  My mother’s family were East Enders and, during the war they spent a lot of time living in Kent hop huts, bringing in the harvest and part of their evacuation duties.  My aunt remembers the whole family living in one hut with all the kids joining in at harvest time and my Nan sitting in state ready to receive the hopheads.

There was so much more to explore in Faversham, such as the remnants of the once thriving brick industry and the priory and abbey vestiges.  The four-mile walk took us all day to complete and it felt as if there was much more to discover in Faversham’s layered history.

 

Another passion of mine is run-down seaside places.  Fortunately, we were a stone’s throw from the coast as I start to pine if I can’t get to the sea regularly.  As well as a brilliant trip to Whitstable we also walked from Margate to Ramsgate.  I’d love to go to Dreamland, Margate’s vintage theme park dating back from the end of the nineteenth century when an entrepreneur reclaimed it from the saltmarsh.  It’s changed a lot since then, of course, and its current status is a little hazy.  We could see into the site from our train to Margate and it looked fantastic.  The boards around the site contain some wonderful artwork combined with the memories of locals:

As the text is a bit blurry, but also totally brilliant, I’ve transcribed it here:

“My best birthday my Mum made me a cake in the shape of a thatched cottage.”

 

“When the candles were lit, the shredded wheat roof caught fire and my Dad drove a toy fire engine in NEE NAW NEE NAW! and poured water on!”

 

 

The town itself is a strange mixture of decrepit and genteel and all the bits in between.  Tracey Emin clearly had a large part to play in putting Margate back on the map from its heyday as a popular seaside resort.  Over Droit House, one of the most distinctive buildings on the seafront, is Emin’s neon artwork “I never stopped loving you,” her love letter to the town where she grew up.

T S Eliot wrote part of The Wasteland in Margate.  There’s a really interesting article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/09/ts-eliot-waste-land-margate

And a great quote in the waiting room/toilets area of Margate Station:

 

“My name is only an anagram for toilets.”

T S Eliot

 

 

 

As we walked along the front for our walk to Ramsgate we were surprised to see a figure seemingly standing in the sea as the waves washed over his head.  A bit of zooming and googling with phones and cameras showed that it was, in fact, one of Anthony Gormley’s  Another Time cast iron figures (number 23 out of the hundred cast, to be precise).  They have been placed all over the world and are very similar to the Another Place figures, again 100 in total, all facing out to sea on Crosby Sands.  It felt as if one of these figures had waded round the coast until it came to rest in Margate.

Antony Gormley: Another Time | Turner Contemporary

The walk to Ramsgate was splendid.  One of the highlights was this amazing chalk arch on Kingsgate Bay on the way to Broadstairs.

 

 

And another highlight was Broadstairs itself with its distinctive bay and Dickens connections.  I spent a couple of years in Broadstairs as a very young child and have very blurred memories of it, I think I was about eighteen months old or younger when we arrived and getting on for four when we left.  But I’m sure I remember Morelli’s and who wouldn’t?  It’s an institution and provided a great rest-stop for the final leg of our walk.

Best Things To Do In London – Your Ultimate Guide To London | Things to do in london, Broadstairs, Ramsgate

Canterbury was a great base and we explored the town and Cathedral thoroughly, but it was the harsh landscapes of the Kent coast and countryside which really spoke to me.  I’m sure there are poems brewing, particularly from the weird and wonderful sculptures, found pieces I snapped along the way!

 

 

Ups and Downs – Coast and Dales

All Blogs, literature, North Norfolk, Rivers, Yorkshire

How strange to be on holiday after so long… We are very fortunate that the area we live in is so beautiful, a wonderful coast and great access to walks in the countryside from our doorstep, but after months of semi-confinement we needed a change and Yorkshire felt far enough away to tick all the boxes.  It’s a county we have visited many times and we were there in March 2020 as the country started to close down so it felt apt to close the circle with a visit that wouldn’t get truncated this time!

I find it hard to be away from the sea so our first stop, Whitby, was one I was very much looking forward to.  It was our third visit to Whitby and it’s certainly a town of contrasts. During the day it’s full of day-trippers, there are long queues outside the fish and chip shops and the pavements are bustling with tourists and seagulls with an eye out for opportunity.  The pavements and everything standing on it, including us, are in constant danger of being showered with seagull “guano” to put it politely.  On the other side of the River Esk from the chip shops tower the gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey and alongside is St Mary’s Church,  surrounded by ancient gravestones.  These two landmarks can be seen for miles, as we discovered when we walked the coastal sections of the Cleveland Way.  The sands of Whitby are, of course, where the doomed ship Demeter, containing only one survivor, Count Dracula, runs aground and Dracula, in the form of a dog, races up the 199 steps to the Abbey.

Stories of Whitby Ghosts | 5 haunting tales from Whitby

You can find out more about Bram Stoker’s connections with Whitby here:

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/whitby-abbey/history-and-stories/dracula/

Stoker wasn’t the only writer to be charmed by Whitby.  Lewis Carroll also loved to stay in the town and the house which was one of his favourite haunts is now a themed hotel, the La Rosa Hotel, with each room reflecting one of the town’s famous inhabitants.  It is thought that Carroll might have composed The Walrus and the Carpenter while walking along the sandy beaches of Whitby.

Lewis Carroll and his connection to Whitby - Shoreline Cottages

Whitby also has connections with Captain James Cook who was apprenticed to a draper in Staithes and it was there that he fell in love with the sea.  He later moved to Whitby as a trainee in a local fishing firm. He charted the coast of New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, a meticulous surveyor as well as a fine sailor and intrepid explorer.

Beyond the chip-strewn streets of Whitby, nestling in quirky streets above the town, there are many independent shops and even a French bistro or two!  There’s also a wonderful heritage sculpture trail featuring life-size sculptures by local artist Emma Stothard.  My favourites were Dora Walker, one of the first female skippers:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the herring girls on the quayside:

In a way, the sculptures and their themes reminded me of Norfolk and home.  The herring girls would follow the fishing fleets up and down the East coast of the United Kingdom and Great Yarmouth has strong connections with these women too.    Emma Stothard sculpts using wire, and has also made some stunning willow sculptures.  Seeing these figures set against seascapes reminded me of the the Lifeboat Horse sculpture at Wells-next-the-Sea, made from steel bars and whisky barrels.  It was created by artist Rachael Long as a tribute to the horses that once pulled the town’s lifeboat more than two miles from the quay to Holkham Gap.  I think the past fifteen months of uncertainty and limited travel have given me a stronger sense of “home” and I could feel its pull however much I was enjoying being away.

Wells-next-the-Sea - The Lifeboat Horse - Wells Guide

The coast path which forms part of the Cleveland Way and which runs from Saltburn to Filey is stunning.  We had done the Filey to Scarborough section in 2019 on my birthday in November so we focused on Saltburn to Scarborough and completed it in four stages – Saltburn to Staithes, Staithes to Whitby, a circular walk from Whitby to Robin Hood’s Bay (outward on the coast path and back on the Cinder Path, following the old railway line) and, finally, the biggie, Scarborough to Robin Hood’s Bay.  The latter was definitely the most challenging, lots of steep steps up and down the crevices in the cliffs and lots of steep walks as the cliffs got higher.

Between the Abbey and Robin Hood’s Bay we discovered Kittiwake City – a cliff full of the strange cries of the colonising kittiwakes.  This discovery was somewhat trumped by a visit to the RSPB reserve of Bempton Cliffs where we discovered Gannet City.  Over 11,000 breeding pairs of gannets have colonised these steep cliffs and there are puffins, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars too.

We didn’t manage to fit in a steam train trip on the brilliant North York Moors Railway this time, but we did go through Grosmont on the “ordinary” train on the day Harrison Ford was there reprising his role as Indiana Jones for his next film.  We had no idea as we sat, masked up, while our train rested a while in the pretty station, that we were so close to Hollywood stardom…

For our second week we chose Hawes in beautiful Wensleydale as our base.  No coast nearby but plenty of rivers and waterfalls!  One of our first walks was to Hardraw Force, a single drop waterfall of around 100 feet which very much impressed Wordsworth.  He wrote to Coleridge in 1799:

Writing to Coleridge in December 1799 he says;

“Twas bitter cold, the wind driving the snow behind us the the best style of a mountain storm. We soon reached an inn at a place called Hardraw, and descending from our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked up the brookside to take a view of a third waterfall, . . . . .

We walked up to the fall; and what would I not give if I could convey to you the feelings and images which where communicated to me?

After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall we found the rock, which had before appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the water shot directly over our heads into a basin, and among the fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy said, like congealed froth. The water fell at least tens yards from us and we stood directly behind it.”

Wordsworth greatly admired Turner’s sketches of the Fall.  Turner stayed in Hardraw for three days completing four drawings of Mossdale Head, and two sketches of Hardraw Force one of which he worked up into the finished painting now hanging at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.   I’m guessing he probably stayed in the wonderful Green Dragon Inn where I discovered some great local beers.  The Inn’s sign is fabulous, straight out of Tolkein.

 

 

Hardraw Force has another claim to fame for it was here that Kevin Costner, as Robin Hood, bathed naked in the Falls, just as Maid Marion and her entourage passed by.  I celebrated this bit of Hollywood trivia by going behind the Falls fully clothed:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful time to be in the Dales.  The area is known for its hay meadows and we passed through many of these on our walks.  I kept a poetic diary of some of our walks, it’s such an inspiring area…

“fields awash with buttercups —the spilled gold of an English June”

On our final evening we hiked across the fields past Haylands Bridge for a sheepdog demonstration by local farmer Richard Fawcett, who is a bit of a celebrity for his role as a judge in international sheepdog trials and also for his TV appearances.  Sheepdog matriarch Lola was having physiotherapy for a bad back so she couldn’t join in the whole demo (she was named for the Kink’s song), but her sons Keef (named after Keith Richards) and Croft, did her proud.  It was a great evening – below is a shot of Richard lecturing his sheep on how to behave when there are people watching.  Up on Dodd’s Fell on one side of the valley, and Stags Fell on the other, we had passed flock after flock of sheep, not realising that they were all owned by Richard and his brother.  I am full of admiration for these farmers and their tough lives.

“A skylark’s explosive song crackles in the blue air; sheep stare, wondering how they have conjured us from grass.”

 

The Saltwater Diaries

All Blogs, misc, North Norfolk, Poetry, Rivers

The Saltwater Diaries (Hedgehog Poetry Press)  was finally launched on 21 September 2020 to a wonderful audience of poetry friends and family and since then I’ve been lucky enough to read from the pamphlet at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.  This year the Festival was on-line and I so missed being able to stroll on the shingly beach between readings, banging into poet friends both old and new all over the town.  But, but, every cloud really does have a silver lining – it appears I have a stress fracture on my left legbone and it has been very difficult for me to walk any distance so Aldeburgh in real life would not have happened for me, ironically.  I read with wonderful poets Maria Isakova Bennett, Katrina Naomi and Martin Malone, each of us reperesenting a different part of the UK.  Henny Beaumont was the artist-in-residence and I was delighted to have a portrait sketched by this talented artist as I read.

 

 

 

 

 

Sue in Aldeburgh – Henny Beaumont

Those of you who know me well will understand how frustrating it is for me not to be able to walk, albeit temporarily.  Both pamphlets, Lumiere and The Saltwater Diaries were written as a result of a multitude of different walks.  In Lumiere I becamea flaneuse, following in Baudelaire’s urban footsteps, and in The Saltwater Diaries I devoured the Norfolk coast path in bite-size chunks.  I thought I would dedicate this blog to the places which inspired The Saltwater Diaries.  These are places I can’t visit until I’ve healed, but through the power of my imagination and some very amateurish map drawings, I can be there in spirit!

At the beginning of October we did manage to get away to real-life Southwold for a couple of days and this is really the place where The Saltwater Diaries began.  When I was at the University of East Anglia teaching English to the international students we would organise cultural field trips and it was while researching a trip to Blythburgh and Southwold that I discovered the legend of Black Shuck, the devil dog who comes out at night and spells death within a year to those who encounter him.  You can find devil dogs all around the coast and, allegedly, while staying in Cromer Hall, Arthur Conan Doyle heard the legend of Shuck and went on to write The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I firmly believe that Shuck is a creation of the local smugglers who wanted to keep the local population indoors while they went about their business.

I’ve written about this area of Suffolk many times before and have a poem Legends of Suffolk in my first collection.  Once, as legend has it, Black Shuck tore through the congregation at Blythburgh Church on a murderous spree and left scorching clawmarks on the church door as he left which are still visible today.

Equally worthy of poems and stories are the towns up the coast from the Blythe Estuary.  This mysterious, marshy and woodland area boasts both the village of Walberswick, accessible by ferry from Southwold, and the town of Dunwich – or rather, the remains of Dunwich as much of the important medieval port was swept to sea in a momentous thirteenth century storm and subsequent erosion has reduced it to the size of a village.  They say you can hear the bells of the sunken churches when the wind and tide are right….  Go to this website and scroll down to see a revelatory map of this area’s ongoing coastal erosion:

The last ruins of Dunwich, Suffolk’s lost medieval town

We walked from Southwold to Dunwich and back again with a wary eye on the weather which, at one point, was totally different in each compass direction with the sky behind us looking positively apocalyptic.  A brief drenching followed by sunshine led to one of the brightest rainbows I’ve ever seen.  Here’s proof that there’s a poet at the end of every rainbow:

As we walked back to Southwold with the marshes on one side and the harbour on the other, the marshes emitted an eerie, otherwordly smell of sulphur as the sun set bloodily across the big skies.  A fitting end to a wild day.

The Norfolk coast has been my main inspiration for the poems in The Saltwater Diaries with Revenant written on the cliffs at Weybourne after a journey back from Paris the night before.  This was a day of double rainbows and I felt so disoriented – plucked from the grey, filtered January light of Paris to the windswept birdcalls of North Norfolk.  There were even a couple of puffins out at sea, no doubt as disoriented as me!

Filming David Copperfield on Weybourne beach - YouTube

In a further extraordinary feat of disorientation, Weybourne Beach (shingle, cliffs) recently stood in for Great Yarmouth (sandy, no cliffs) in Armando Iannuci’s superb recent adaptation of David Copperfield, starring Dev Patel as a thoroughly engaging David.

 

 

 

 

 

Marginalia, which begins with the lines:

Today I am full of winter/unnatural with mucus and itch

was written on a day when I thought I was recovering from a cold but actually ended up feeling quite delirious.  Of course, this is always a good place to write from, a liminal space in the head between fever and clarity perfectly echoed by a walk across the no-man’s land of saltmarsh to the shingle beach at Muckleburgh.  I always find the area around Muckleburgh quite sinister with its remnants of WWII coastal defences and military museum.

I wrote I Believe in the Sea on Cley beach with a group of other writers from the Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve.  We’d been beachcombing and one of the group had found a sundried dogfish which we all desperately coveted.  I’d found a nice pebble (solid but unspectacular) and someone else had found a pound coin!

A Conversation with My Father was written on the day after an immense coastal storm and there were still blistering winds of over 40 miles an hour.  My father was a boatbuilder and as I passed the boats moored in Blakeney Harbour to walk along the tidal flats, I kept thinking how he would have found this area both alienating, mystifying but also familiar.  It’s certainly not the River Thames but there is so much he would have related to, particularly the feisty little boats beached at low tide.

The area around Glandford Ford, just inland from Blakeney, is rich in inspiration for me and one of the poems in The Saltwater Diaries was written here as I stood knee-deep in the ford on a beautiful July day.  The poem is called All the Water there will be, is and I refer to myself as an upright Ophelia  – both the ford and the River Glaveney are probably a wee bit too shallow for dramatic floating!  I’ve discovered that poet Anna Selby actually writes underwater and am in awe of her dedication!

I love watching dogs’ reactions when they discover the road in front of them is covered in water:

a dog enters the ford, nose to the surface/as if the meniscus holds old smells/ the musk of deerhounds/the slink of fox/a footstep softened by rain

A bit closer to home I wrote a poem celebrating Cromer and its famous pier Haibun – The Winter Sea.  I almost feel the pier is sentient and am in deep sympathy with its degradation: barnacles feast on its underbelly…

I brought the pier’s persona to life in a poem I wrote to accompany John Crossley’s wonderful painting of a pier.  The words and painting appear in the Eames Gallery exhibition “A Common Place” which can only take place virtually at the moment.  There’s a film and an on-line version of the exhibition here.  Artists and writers were paired together, asked to find a place they had in common which they loved, and then to celebrate it in words and pictures.  You can join in the experience here:

https://www.eamesfineart.com/viewing-room/31-a-common-place-connecting-people-through-art-words-and-a-common/

Many of my poems in the pamphlet refer to my love of swimming in the sea and my walks on the beach.  The poem Beached evokes one of my more unusual walks where we discovered thousands of beached starfish:

The beach is strewn with starfish, thousands – limbs puckered, vibrating with dehydration.

I loved every minute of the “research” I did for The Saltwater Diaries and hope my empathy with this extraordinary landscape shows in the poems.  I feel very privileged to live here and, even if I can’t get out and about, from my window yesterday I saw Brent geese flying over, the glowing white cap of the windmill down the road, the autumn hues of the allotments opposite,  three riders on gorgeous horses trotting back home, and the distant glisten of the sea.  I’ll be back soon!

The Lure of Wild Swimming

All Blogs, Cinema, literature, London, misc, North Norfolk, Poetry, Rivers, San Francisco

I’m delighted to announce that my new pamphlet (or chapbook as my American friends call it), The Saltwater Diaries, will be coming out in September.  The collection explores my relationship with the sea, formed over the last five decades and more, and features poems mostly written since moving to a house which is a seven-minute-walk from the sea.  Many of the poems mention swimming and, as it’s the season for sea swimming (well, for me, anyway, not being quite as hardy as some I know who swim all year round!) I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the joys of wild swimming.

First, a confession.  I didn’t learn to swim until I was twenty five.  Why, so late?  Oh, where do I start….?  My father was a boatbuilder and spent most of his life on or by the river, but he never learnt to swim, maybe a throwback to the days when sailors considered it unlucky as, if you fell into the water, it would prolong your death.  They wanted the sea to take them quickly and cleanly.

Water is one of my earliest memories as we lived in Broadstairs when I was very young.  I have a strong memory of burying a grandparent in the sand but can’t recall any details.  Perhaps this is a false memory – isn’t it what everyone is supposed to do at the seaside?  One of my favourite recent films, starring the superb Billy Connolly, is What We Did on our Holiday.  It’s a hilarious and touching tale of the effect warring parents can have on their children and Billy Connolly’s character is indeed buried by his grandchildren at one point.

Film Review: What We Did On Our Holiday, aka, British Kids Say the Darndest Things – We Minored in Film

I remember nearly drowning in a public swimming pool when I was tiny, and being hauled out by the lifeguard and resuscitated.  My mother said she wouldn’t take me swimming again as I’d shown her up.  I loved my pink towelling bikini even if I had nowhere to take it.

School swimming lessons didn’t really teach me anything except how to dodge the floats thrown at my head by our sadistic PE teacher, Mr Fernside – it made a change from chalk…

I could swim perfectly well with armbands out of my depth so I probably could swim without knowing it.  Bizarrely, I loved the smell of chlorine and that strange echoing atmosphere of swimming pools, even the wet chaos of the changing rooms where you could never get completely dry however much talcum powder you shook over yourself and everyone else.

Not being able to swim was never an issue.  I spent a year in Israel in the 1980s and whenever a chance arose I would be pootling in water and under waterfalls, sometimes up to my neck, sometimes led into deeper water by kindly friends holding my hands as if I were an overgrown child.  Surprisingly, I wasn’t particularly frightened of water despite my lack of ability.  I’ve swum in the Dead Sea twice, once from the Israeli side and once from the Jordanian side, once knowing how to swim, and once not. It doesn’t really matter in the Dead Sea, it’s so ridiculously buoyant that the only issue is how to get vertical again and get out!

Amazon.com: Wee Blue Coo Vintage Photography Man Dead Sea Umbrella Book Jordan Palestine Unframed Wall Art Print Poster Home Decor Premium: Home & Kitchen

Then, at the age of twenty-five, Chris and I went to Greece and he had me swimming with relative confidence on the first day.  Since then I’ve never really stopped, instantly developing a hunger for wild water and lap-swimming in any kind of indoor or outdoor pool.  I particularly love lidos and often swim in the wonderful Hampton lido.  On my bucket list is a swim in the Ladies Bathing Pond at Highgate/Kenwood.

Hampstead Heath

One of my favourite poetry books from the last decade is Elisabeth-Jane Burnett’s Swims, a haunting, experimental long poem that flows and intrigues.  There’s a review here:

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2017/08/swims/

I so want to be by the poet’s side as she slips into the water and explores it.

Another ideal swimming companion would have been Roger Deakin, whose book, Waterlog, is a classic.  There’s a lovely documentary which was repeated on TV recently where Alice Robert’s follows in his footsteps and enjoys some fabulous wild swimming, including underground cavern swimming which looks incredibly scary.  She also discusses the differences between swimming in a wetsuit, a costume and skinny dipping.  I’ve only skinny dipped once in a water-hole in Arizona where you were made to feel very odd if you tried to cover up – kind of a hippy dip I guess as we were on a Green Tortoise holiday which seemed to mostly be run by people who’d come to San Francisco with flowers in their hair…  You can see the Alice Roberts documentary here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t9r28

Sadly, Roger Deakin died in 2006, so no more accounts of his watery exploits.  I love the fact that the University of East Anglia archive contains a pair of his speedos.  There’s a great obituary of Deakin here, a real celebration of a life very well lived:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/roger-deakin-412989.html

He seems such a quintessential English eccentric, swimming in his own moat every day and breaking the rules to trespass on private stretches of river in true entitled style.  He describes his attitude beautifully here:

“Most of us live in a world where more and more things are signposted, labelled, and officially ‘interpreted’. There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things.”

The Swimmer Burt Lancaster 24x36 Poster Bare Chested full length in back yard at Amazon's Entertainment Collectibles Store

In Waterlog, Deakin’s inspiration for swimming around as much of the UK as he can is John Cheever’s brilliant short story The Swimmer, immortalised in the 1968 film of the same name where Burt Lancaster (above) spends the whole film clad in a rather snazzy pair of belted black swimming trunks.  It’s an extraordinary story which I often use in my masterclasses.  You can read it here:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/20cusliterature/syllabus2014-15/cheever_the_swimmer.pdf

So, what is it about wild swimming?  It feels elemental, adventurous, invigorating (it’s rarely warm!), primeval – yes, primeval is the best word – getting back to our human source – losing our ability to walk and discovering our watery roots.  We spend the first nine months of our consciousness floating in fluid so perhaps the need to be in water is part of our psyche.  Deakin clearly believes this too:

“When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached ourselves at birth. To swim is to experience how it was before we were born.”

Wild Swimming Brothers 🏊 on Twitter: "For a geothermal swim like nowhere else on earth visit the Víti Crater in Askja, Iceland #iceland #wildswimming https://t.co/OydxBFV71s"

Most memorable swims?  There have been so many.  One of the most striking from a scenic point of view was swimming in the Viti crater at Askja in Iceland (above).  In fact, all the swims I did in Iceland were memorable.  The Viti crater is like swimming in thick, warm, turquoise soup.  The Blue Lagoon (below) feels as if you are swimming in some kind of weird dystopian experiment.  Swimming in Icelandic rivers  means you have to be ready for the unexpected as the river can switch from freezing to very hot in just a few yards due to geothermal activity.

Acquisition offers put $286m value on Icelandic geothermal spa Blue Lagoon | Think GeoEnergy - Geothermal Energy News

I’ve enjoyed white water experiences in many countries, the most memorable being white water swimming down a river in Turkey towards the sea.  Not really swimming, more lying on your back in a life-jacket and pushing off as if you are on a giant, wild flume.

While trekking in the Amazon rainforest on a bird-watching trip our group took a boat across a tributary of the Amazon (don’t be fooled by the word “tributary” – they are pretty wide!).  We discovered on our return that another group had taken the boat back, we could see it clearly and tantalisingly moored on the opposite bank.  We were stranded.  Some of us decided to swim across and help the guide bring the boat back to “rescue” the group, a mission we accomplished with panache.  It was only afterwards we were told that the piranha native to the river will only consume human flesh if it is already dead and dying…

Blog- Detail page | Hotel Sternen Oerlikon

Switzerland is one of my favourite places to swim.  There’s a lovely outdoor wooden swimming pool on Lake Zurich, the Seebad Utoquai.  It dates from Edwardian times, as you can see from the picture above, and has a timeless elegance.  You can tell if you have swum to the middle of the lake if you see the twin spires of the Grossműnster become one.   I’ve also got a soft spot for the River Limmat which runs through Zurich – it’s such an odd feeling to be swimming through a city and watching city business carry on as normal from such a lowly perspective! I remember walking alongside the Rhine to the Tinguely Museum in Basel and seeing commuters swim to work with their waterproof floatbags containing their workgear.

In fresh water, I love seeing swans go by, unconcerned, as I quietly tread water; clearly you are not a threat when only your head is above water. I’ve been lucky enough to have great crested grebes carrying their young on their backs pass very close to me.  When I swim from my local Norfolk beach I have the privilege of seeing terns dive, cormorants doing a flypast, and even the occasional skimming swallow.

Today, as I write, it’s rainy and blustery, which doesn’t always stop me swimming, but I’ve just checked the surf report and there are 8 foot waves predicted.  Last week I trod on a weever fish in bare feet (not pleasant and not the first time either!) so I’m trying to be a more sensible wild swimmer – my list of rules so far is quite short but will no doubt increase with time:  wear surf shoes, check the surf height, don’t float and daydream and realise that you are farther from the shore than you should be etc

And the last, rather poetic, word has to go to the inimitable Roger Deakin:

“Swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.”

 

Summertime and the living is quirky…

literature, misc, North Norfolk, Paris, Philosophy, Poetry, Rivers

 
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.

Image result for seals at horsey gap 2019

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!

No photo description available.

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!

Image may contain: indoor

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…)

Image result for hippodrome great yarmouth building

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!

Image result for the lydia eva great yarmouth

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.

Image result for miss happiness and miss flower

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.

Image result for monks house

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!

Image result for king of a rainy country

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!

All Blogs, Café Culture, literature, misc, Philosophy, Poetry, Portugal, Rivers

 
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.

The Write Place!

Café Culture, literature, misc, North Norfolk, Poetry, Rivers

 
So, first of all apologies for the radio silence… my only excuse being that I didn’t realise how exhausting it would be to have two books out at once!  Do please, persuade all your friends to buy copies of Lumière and In the Kingdom of Shadows – poets are expected to do their own publicity/marketing to a certain extent and it’s hard to self-promote constantly (visions of people hiding behind pillars…)

I’ve been thinking a lot about good places to write recently.  Writers’ Forum magazine have regular features on successful writers and their writing spaces, most of them are large, rather impersonal offices so I guess being a poet and having only short pieces of writing to rest on my knee means that I seek inspiration very much out of my office space (which I associate with my freelance creative writing and film studies business).  My places to write often feature watery views and my second pamphlet, The Saltwater Diaries, (due out at the end of the year) was  mostly written during the transition period when we moved from King’s Lynn to East Runton, from an urban to a seaside environment.  I’m clearly not the only one to find watery places inspirational…

My oldest friend and I are celebrating the fact that we’ve known each other for fifty years, since our first year at Junior School, and we are trying to do lots of lovely things to commemorate the occasion.  At the beginning of April we went to Devon for a week and one of my favourite outings was a double dose of National Trust properties.

Image result for coleton fishacre

First stop was Coleton Fishacre which Rupert and Lady Dorothy D’Oyly Carte built, partly on the proceeds of the D’Oyly Carte family’s success with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.   A beautiful and inspirational place, the house is a 1920s masterpiece with grounds meandering down steep cliffs to Pudcombe Cove.  Guests would excitedly consult the tide times the butler would indicate on the special hall clock every morning.  An evening swim in the tidal pool at the cove would be punctuated by a bell rung from the house to call people back up for pre-dinner cocktails.  I don’t know if Gilbert and Sullivan ever wrote anything there, or even visited, but it would be an idyllic place to write.  So many nooks and crannies, trees bursting with blossom, a brook running through the grounds, sea views from every room…

Image result for pudcombe cove

The interior evokes the jazz age with art deco touches.  We were particularly taken with the cigarette cases full of sobranie cigarettes and the rather wonderful cocktail shakers as well as this superb cocktail cabinet.

Cocktail cabinet

We made do with a bottle of Espresso Martini from Lidl and some cocktail glasses from a charity shop in Babbacombe, accompanied by a re-run of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd featuring the inimitable David Suchet as twirly-moustached Poirot.  Why Poirot and not a CD of Gilbert and Sullivan?  Because our second property was Agatha Christie’s beloved Greenway overlooking the River Dart.

Agatha Christie and her family sat outside of their holiday home Greenway

This property was such a contrast to Coleton Fishacre where each room is set up as if an extremely tidy person has just left it, there might be a tennis racket in the corner, a beautiful nightgown on the bed or a vintage book open on the side table.  Agatha Christie’s house was the polar opposite,  full of the clutter of two avid collectors, cabinets of china and silver, walls full of prints and artefacts from Max Mallowan and Agatha’s archaeological trips abroad which inspired Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.  A big, beautiful, rambling house and certainly full of interest, but the fact which most suprised and fascinated me was that Agatha Christie would have a pot of Devonshire clotted cream at her side to dip into as she wrote and, as a teetotaller, instead of having wine with her dinner, she would sip double cream.  Apparently she also tried desperately to become a smoker as this was such a popular pastime, but never quite got into the habit!  I’m rather partial to a scone with jam and clotted cream, but I can’t imagine seeking inspiration to quite the extent Agatha did!

Image result for frieze at greenway

The Library at Greenway features an unexpected treasure, a frieze painted during World War Two by Lt Marshall Lee, a member of the US. Coast Guard stationed at the house in the run up to the D Day landings. The commander wrote to Agatha offering to have the fresco painted out when the house was returned to the family, but she hurriedly wrote back that it would be a historical memorial which she would be delighted to keep.  It’s a beautifully executed account of particular moments in the war and it’s good to see what amounts to classy graffiti preserved in such a grand house!   When the house was  first requisitioned it was  used to house child evacuees.  It must have been extraordinary to be surrounded by such natural beauty when you had come from an urban home, for the grounds at Greenway are stunning and even contain a pet cemetery for Agatha’s beloved dogs.  You can walk down to the boathouse where Dead Man’s Folly was set and admire the wide and beautiful River Dart with stunning views of Kingswear.  I’m sure Agatha wrote more fluently and concocted even better mysteries thanks to Greenway.  This beautiful Georgian property continues to inspire with regular writer-in-residence programmes (the current is J R Carpenter).  This year the Trust is highlighting the curiosities in Max and Agatha’s collection and providing a writing prompt for a chosen object each month  – so pens out everyone!

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/greenway/features/greenways-cabinet-of-curiosities

Image result for rocket house cafe cromer

So here I am, back home in East Runton and although I’m not fixated on double or clotted cream I have to admit that both my favourite places to write locally do involve food… I’m not averse to popping down to the beach with my notebook and sitting on a rock listening to the waves, or strolling up the beach to watch the sun go down, but there’s nothing like a cup of coffee at the Rocket House Café in Cromer, practically on the beach and with fabulous views of the Pier.  I’ve written countless first drafts there and polished quite a few later drafts too.  On a warm day I like the Reef Stop café on the promenade going towards Cromer. Noisy and full of hot, tongue-lolling over-excited dogs, it’s a great place to have a cheese toastie and absorb everything going on.  It’s always a wee bit breezier on the beach than inland so juggling napkin, notebook, pen and toastie in the wind can be a challenge!

Image result for reef stop cafe cromer

I do have an inspirational place which isn’t by the water.  I occasionally teach for Gaynor Clements at her gorgeous farmhouse in Elsworth which is the home of the Cambridge Writing Retreat.  I usually go up the night before and stay in Gaynor’s charming shepherd’s hut.  I always manage to do a bit of focused writing to get myself in the mood for the next day’s teaching, which takes place in the cosy farmhouse kitchen.  Go here for details of Gaynor’s tutors and courses: https://www.cambridgewritingretreat.com/samplemenu

20180704-0069.jpg

I’m a huge fan of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival which takes place every November and means this small Suffolk coastal town is swamped with crowds of poets – all friendly, open and eager to learn from each other’s performances and readings.  I must admit I haven’t yet written a successful poem in Aldeburgh, I’m always far too distracted.  I’ve been to some great workshops – last year I was lucky enough to go to both Jean Sprackland and Pascale Petit but, despite excellent tuition, over-excitement is not good for a poet’s brain (not this one anyway!) – too many new people to chat to and far too many brilliant poetry books to buy!  Poet Paul Stephenson curates the weekends expertly.  In 2018 my highlights were hearing Meryl Pugh read; having a go at translating a poem from Greek to English with Claire Pollard and Kostya Tsolakis; and last but not least in a weekend packed full of great events, the Queer Studio reading with Mary Jean Chan, Richard Scott, Alice Hiller, Danne Jobin, Swithun Cooper and Caleb Parkin.   I was involved in a really interesting session organised by Ambit Editor Bryony Bax and Fenland Reed editor Elisabeth Sennitt Clough in which we discussed the thorny issue of submissions and gender.

Image result for maggi hambling scallop

Between readings it’s good to clear some headspace by stomping along the shingle beach in the wind to Maggie Hamblin’s beautiful, and controversial, 12 foot high scallop shell sculpture in honour of Benjamin Britten.  I’ve already booked my accommodation for this year’s festival and can’t wait to see the programme, watch this space as 8-10 November 2019 gets closer!

https://www.poetryinaldeburgh.org/

Image result for carberry cafe norwich

As well as running regular writing workshops on all genres, I’ve also started offering mini writing retreats upstairs at Carberry’s Café in Norwich (Wensum Street).    This sitting in cafés mularkey by yourself is all very well, but it’s very difficult to motivate yourself effectively for a sustained period of time.  These mini writing retreats quite special days as, although they are untutored, the fact that I am present seems to wield an invisible discipline and help people to keep going.  We usually start with a bit of focusing and mindfulness before each participant moves to their own spacious table with views down the pretty street from a huge picture window.  The café staff will bring any drinks or food you want and run a tab for you so you don’t even have to disturb your writing with such mundanities as getting your purse out until the end of the day.  I organise a prompts table full of objects, articles, books and ideas just in case anyone gets stuck.  I’m there all day for advice sessions and generally get to see everyone twice.  The first time I did this the atmosphere was extraordinarily concentrated, one poet tidied up twelve drafts and created a new poem!

Now, to return to Agatha Christie – not only did she have a predilection for cream, she also ate apples in the bath while envisioning her murder mysteries… but she clearly isn’t the only writer with strange habits.  Charles Dickens always slept facing north, he believed it helped his creativity.  John Steinbeck needed two dozen perfectly sharpened pencils on his desk.  Virginia Woolf wrote like a painter, standing up and stepping back to get a different perspective on her writing,  while James Joyce preferred to lie on his stomach.   William Faulkner, predictably, would drink whiskey while writing.  Lewis Carroll wrote in purple ink.   Dan Brown finds hanging upside down helps him write… So do you have any strange writing habits?  I don’t think I do.  I’m more of a Gertrude Stein kind of girl, writing anywhere I can while the world goes on around me, but perhaps that’s strange in and of itself!

 

Yoga, Paddling and Poetry

All Blogs, Café Culture, Cinema, literature, misc, North Norfolk, Poetry, Rivers

 

Living in Cromer can have quite surreal aspects at times.  In May we had the plague of hairy caterpillars (oak precessionary moths).  These were all over the concrete prom and as their hairs are toxic there was a bit of a panic locally.  The plague also delayed the arrival of the Bagot Goats for their annual summer holiday.  The herd belongs to North Norfolk District Council and they come to graze on the Cliffside above the promenade.  They probably don’t know it, but they are carrying out an important role in habitat management.  Bagot goats are our oldest British breed, hardy, tame and fond of uplands.  This year there are 10 nannies and 9 kids and they are a sight to behold, although I have to say that most of the time they appear to be having a good rest on their sandy ledge.  Except on Fridays.  This is when I get up early to do Yoga on the Pier at 7am and the goats are usually already chomping away as I blear my way past.

Image result for bagot goats cromer cliff

I’ve been doing yoga for over thirty years but this has to be the best class ever – doing downward dog and seeing the sea lap under the boards of the Pier is a unique experience!  I’m a great fan of paddling when it’s too cold to wild swim and sometimes just pop on my teva sandals and paddle to the class.  For as long as I can remember Chris and I have been popping to seaside places after work for a spot of paddling and ice-cream (these go together like fish and chips, bread and butter etc etc) usually Sheringham when we lived in Norwich as it was one of the few seaside towns to sell Ronaldo ice cream, and Hunstanton when we lived in King’s Lynn.  This week I paddled from East Runton to Cromer to a morning appointment and arrived sandy but refreshed.  Wet commuting is not unusual, I once did a day-trip to Basel to visit the Tinguely Museum and saw an extraordinary number of people swimming to work, or rather floating, letting the strong current take them downriver, office clothes firmly secured in inflatable drybags! During my time teaching in Switzerland I regularly swam in Lake Zurich, often morning and evening, to wake up and then wind down.  You always knew when you had swum to the middle of the Lake as two distinctive church towers suddenly merged into one, a little like an eclipse.  In the summer there’s a lovely ladies only pool on the River Limmat which turns into the Barfussbar (Barefoot Bar) once it gets dark.

In July we headed off to Ledbury for the Poetry Festival and some hillwalking.  It coincided with the first week of the heatwave and I found myself longing for cool coastal breezes. In search of respite we paddled in the Wye a couple of times, once just outside Hay-on-Wye and once in Hereford where I suddenly twigged why the town is situated there and why the water is so shallow (it’s all in the name!).

Elgar is associated with this area and it’s hard not to walk around without his wonderful music playing through your mind, especially as many of the friends he based Enigma Variations on lived in this area.  There’s even a statue by the River Wye commemorating Dan the Bulldog, who belonged to George Sinclair and inspired Elgar’s Variation on an Original Theme XI which tells the story of Dan falling into the River, paddling upstream to find an easy way out of the river and his triumphant bark as he reaches dry land!

Image result for elgar dog hereford

Sensory and Rye in Union Street provided us with much-needed third wave coffee (V60) and a delicious vegan lunch.   The unusual name comes from a part anagram of the name of the butcher’s shop originally on the premises (G Rowberry and Sons).

A choir were practising in Hereford Cathedral during our visit, their sublime voices filling the space and enhancing the discovery of Tom Denny’s extraordinary stained glass windows celebrating the life of Thomas Traherne, a contemporary of John Donne, and one of the metaphysical poets.  The detail and colours were unlike anything I’d seen before.

In pursuit of all things watery we did a Wells and Springs self-guided walk in the Malvern Hills.  The start point was one of my favourite and most unusually sited vegetarian cafes at St Ann’s Well.  It’s a steep climb but the reward of chocolate fudge cake is nothing if not motivating!  The drought was starting to have an impact,  with yellowing grass and bare patches on the hillsides, but underground there are a multitude of springs.  Malvern was very popular in the Victorian era when the health craze of “taking the waters” was at its peak.  The local water was bottled by Schweppes from 1851 until very recently.  Florence Nightingale, Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin all took the waters and claimed considerable health benefits from this experience.  Wherever the springs emerge above ground you’ll find a small well, often built by philanthropists to ensure poorer people had a good supply of fresh water.  Below is the charming Westminster Bank Well just above West Malvern where, in St James’ churchyard lies the grave of M. Roget of Thesaurus fame.

You can drink from the wells in Great Malvern itself but the hillside wells often become contaminated so I resorted to soaking my baseball cap in each one we passed instead of drinking.  My hair and cap dried in minutes in the 30 degree heat.

Image result for gas lamp narnia lucy mr tumnus

Tolkein and C S Lewis are strongly associated with Great Malvern.  They often came up from Oxford to walk in the Malvern Hills with their friend George Sayer, and would drink in the Unicorn Pub.  There are some gorgeous Victorian gas lamps in the town and the hills, often in quite incongruous places, and it’s believed that this is where C S Lewis got the idea for the lamp-post in Narnia where Lucy meets Mr Tumnus.  The hills are also thought to be the inspiration for aspects of Middle Earth and the landscape of Narnia.

I really enjoy films which explore the lives of writers and Shadowlands is a particular favourite.  Anthony Hopkins plays C S Lewis and Debra Winger plays Joy Davidson, the American poet he falls in love with.  Her death from cancer challenges his Christian faith and it’s a powerful and moving film.   The Happy Prince, which has just been released, explores fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace and his days of exile in Paris.  Rupert Everett is superb as the ageing Oscar, as one critic put it, he was born to be Wilde!  I’m also fond of Zinnemann’s Julia with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett and Winterton on the Norfolk coast standing in as Cape Cod.

Image result for ledbury church lane

Ledbury Poetry Festival was a wonderful event to have on your doorstep as part of a walking holiday.  Ledbury is a very attractive market town and one of its many claims to fame is that John Masefield was born there – there’s still a firm of solicitors in town bearing that name.  Elizabeth Barrett-Browning lived just outside Ledbury so it certainly has poetic form!  The Festival takes place all over town; highlights were a storming performance by Hollie McNish, a superb reading by Sinead Morrissey, an insightful talk by Sarah Churchwell on Sylvia Plath and a brilliant analysis of Wallace Stevens by one of my poetry heroes, Mark Doty.  I attended two excellent workshops, one with Sinead Morrissey on the perils of abstraction and one with Kim Moore on hidden narratives.  Almost every shop window was festooned with poems and poetry books but of course Ledbury can’t compete with Hay-on-Wye which has a population of 1500 and over 30 independent bookshops!  So, what are your perfect holiday ingredients?  A simple combination of paddling, bookshops, specialist coffee, good walks and poetry certainly worked for me this time!

Abbeys, Monasteries and Convents – A Contemplation

All Blogs, Cinema, Philosophy, Rivers, Yorkshire

 

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.

Image result for marriott's warehouse king's lynn

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.

Image result for david farrar black narcissus

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)!

Image result for the nun's story

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!

 

Going With The Flow

All Blogs, Café Culture, Philosophy, Poetry, Rivers

 

I’ve had some lovely responses to my blog about poetry in unusual places.  I’ve been to quite a few talks on the power of poetry recently.  One very interesting debate was led by Briony Bax (Editor of Ambit Magazine) at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival where the theme of poetry as a catalyst for change was explored with George Szirtes and Ralph Webb giving fascinating insights into poetry and revolution and the impact of social media on poetry (and vice versa!).  Here’s another interesting site on guerrilla poetics to enjoy:

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/flavorwire.com/402718/10-guerrilla-poetry-projects/amp

Image result for church wiggenhall st peters

This month I’m saying a fond farewell to West Norfolk as we move definitively to East Runton.  In the decade I’ve lived in King’s Lynn it occurred to me that most of my walks have either been by the coast or along rivers.  The Fen Rivers Way is one of my favourites and the section we do most often, Downham Market to King’s Lynn, is bleak and empty with very few, if any, other walkers.  Instead there are herons galore, standing at sentrylike intervals along the bank, and a family of seals who have colonised the sluice gate just as you reach the industrial edge of King’s Lynn.  The other section I do regularly is Waterbeach to Cambridge, the polar opposite – it’s like the Regent’s Canal towpath, full of runners, walkers, dogwalkers and cyclists.  What both lack, though, are benches, especially now the one by the ruined church at Wiggenhall St Peter’s has disintegrated! You can read Patrick Barkham’s lyrical account of this walk for The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/jul/07/norfolk-fens-rivers-way-cambridge-walking-holiday

The Fen Rivers Way follows the Cam and then The River Great Ouse.

Image result for virginia woolfI’ve just finished The River by Olivia Laing which follows the course of another Ouse, the one in Sussex in which Virginia Woolf took her life in 1941 wearing her heaviest coat, pockets full of stone.  It’s a depressing but fascinating book, Laing had just split up with her partner and her sense of anxiety and unease permeates every step as she walks alone in deep contemplation.  Occasionally Laing launches herself into the water to cool down and revitalise, these are disturbing moments during which she seems to have little regard for her safety and I held my breath until the next page, willing her to survive.   I’ve just reviewed Elizabeth Jane Burnett’s Swims (Penned in the Margins).  This powerful collection is a long poem documenting twelve wild swims across the UK’s rivers, lakes and seas.  Each poem is an experiment, pushing at the page, seeking freedom from its confines and I thoroughly enjoyed the inventiveness of it.   The thought of wild swimming entrances me and I’m even thinking of investing in a wetsuit for all year round sea swimming.  Swimming is where I plan my writing workshops and solve poetic problems – that tricky last line, what to leave out, the perfect twist for a line, the revelation of the ideal form to fit the content of the poem – it’s as if the beat of my arms and legs sets up a problem-solving rhythm.

I’m currently reading Norwich-based poet Richard Lambert’s new poetry collection The Nameless Places (Arc) – the collection ends in a sequence following a journey made along the course of a river from its source to its mouth. The title of the collection comes from the poem“The Wind” with its first line Coming up the estuary over the nameless places/ evoking, for me, walks I used to do alongThe Wherryman’s Way which runs by the River Yare from Norwich to Great Yarmouth with its big skies, waste ground and marshes.

Image result for breydon waterAnother favourite river walk is the Nar Valley Way. We’ve walked from Gressenhall (near the source) back to Narborough several times and have done the Narborough to King’s Lynn stretch too.  It’s more valley than river, although the river does pop up in surprising places along the way.  My favourite stretch is Narborough to Castle Acre.  Early on in the walk there’s a distant view of Narford Hall, seat of the Fountaines, where in the 1960s Andrew Fountaine, founder member of the BNP created an annual Aryan camp.  Or perhaps we’re better off remembering Margaret Fountaine of South Acre, diarist, lepidopterist and explorer in an era (1890s onward) when this was just not “done”, especially as it seems that the much-travelled Margaret may have had an “affectionate relationship” with her guide and trasnlator of 27 years, Khalil Neimy.  The large number of monastic ruins strewing the countryside are a great feature of the walk, all found near clean flowing water to meet the monks’ needs.  Walking past The Stag at West Acre and then down to the Fords, you get tantalising glimpses of the ruined priory of West Acre before crossing the water meadows and coming out at the ruins of Castle Acre, a Cluniac Priory dating back to 1090.

Image result for hampton court palaceI guess it’s no suprise that I’m so attracted to rivers.  My father was a boatbuilder and I grew up in Kingston-upon-Thames so the river was always a strong presence through my formative years.  At the end of the road where I lived for most of my childhood was the Hogsmill, a tributary of the Thames which, one memorable evening, overflowed – I remember my mother furiously sweeping it back under the door.  Kingston was well situated for visits to Kew Gardens on the bus with twopence entry posted in the honesty box.  I would walk along the Thames to Hampton Court where under sixteens could get in for a couple of shillings.  It’s probably here that my love of history began as I devoured Jean Plaidy and stood with my eyes closed in the Haunted Gallery where Catherine Howard is said to have begged Henry for her life, hoping to hear her cries.

Image result for rupert brookeIt was in Richmond Park that I first independently discovered my love of poetry.  At school we did Charles Causley, Ted Hughes and the war poets and I began my longest poetic crush ever – Rupert Brooke.  I still have my battered copy of his complete works.  I used to take this to Richmond Park with a friend and a picnic and we would learn his poems off by heart and test each other over bread, paté and cheesecake.  He probably wasn’t the best poet England has ever produced but his death from septicaemia in 1915 at the age of 27 on a troop ship bound for Gallipoli  has preserved him for all time as the poetic golden boy,martyred by the First World War.  There’s something about his encapsulation of the English idyll which I, uncharacteristically, love.  One of the first plays I ever saw was a Brooke tribute, Sweet Wine of Youth, at the Overground Theatre in Kingston ( when it had a rather dodgy temporary home in what seemed to be converted public toilets round the back of C & A!).

Image result for the orchard tea rooms cambridge

This means, of course, that another of my favourite walks is Cambridge to Grantchester,  along the Granta and through the watermeadows.  At the height of summer there’ll be students leaping in the river to cool off, others will be punting and, last time I went it was so hot a whole herd of black cows stood stoically in the shallows, blowing through their noses like bulls.  There’s always time for a pot of tea in stripey deckchairs on the lawn at the Orchard Tea Rooms dreaming of all those who once drank here.  The Orchard was first planted in 1868 and became a tea garden by chance when some Cambridge students turned up in 1897 and asked to be served tea under the apple trees.  The Stevensons who owned Orchard House then started taking in lodgers, one of whom was Rupert Brooke.  He moved out there from Cambridge in 1909 and commuted to the University by canoe.  Other visitors came out to see him, and were called the “Neo-Pagans” by Virginia Woolf.  They also included E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Alan Turing also enjoyed tea here!

And, of course, there’s TV series Grantchester based on James Runcie’s books.  I’m a great fan of James Norton, he scared the bejesus out of me in both series of Happy Valley, and also a great fan of detective series, but somehow I never took to the slightly Miss Marple/Midsomer Murders vibe of Grantchester”.  Don’t get me wrong, Norton looks great as charming vicar Sidney Chambers.  In fact, don’t you think he looks uncannily like Rupert Brooke?! The leafy village features strongly in the series, as do the appropriately costumed local residents.  It’s all a gorgeously appropriate cliché of Englishness, Betjeman would have loved it – in fact he must surely once have had tea at the Orchard Tea Rooms alongside his compatriots!

Image result for cambridge hot numbersAnd if tea really isn’t your tipple of choice then head back to Cambridge and check out Hot Numbers on Trumpington Street, just past the Fitzwilliam.  This roastery and cafe really does know its beans, specialising in single origin coffee. I’ve had the most layered and tasty coffees ever here so do give it a try!