I Unwrap Three Gifts

In the years we knew each other (not enough) GKA brought surprise into my Christmas Eve, or whenever it was we were able to get together with a few friends. He brought presents for us all - treasures he'd found on his meanderings round the charity shops of Shrewsbury. On these evenings there were no expectations, no disappointments, only the excitement, the wonder of a child's Christmas.

I'll tell you about three of these gifts, ones that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life, because that's how it rolls, isn't it? (Graham would've liked this touch: to be cast as all three wise men in the nativity play -- at last).

The first gift is gold and green -- a precious casket which says You are special. It contains a paperweight, and a paper.

It's gold - pure and true, heavy, precious, rare. 

The second gift is strong, saved for an emergency which hasn't yet happened. Souvenir from another land and time - if I need to open these tiny bottles one day, I expect what will remain is perfume, a prayer of alcohol and malt, of memories of holidays, of those holy days of happiness. 

The third gift is the place Graham still is, all residue of him. To wrap this for me was what he was like -- he found the solar system in an Oxfam shop, then gave it away. And with this must come the last poem -- the one he read to us in the park in September.

Starlight

I will bury my bones beneath the earth

grow flowers from my soul

trees will feed from my essence

I shall be forever untarnished

eternal gold

I will scatter my ashes across the sky

fly like flocks of birds

like moths before the moon

I shall become the wind

travel fast

until I burn

yeah! burn in the heart of the star

Graham Attenborough, 2021

And there's something else. A gift which couldn't be wrapped. And it's this -- that it's possible to dance to Handel's Messiah, and that joy when doing this is inevitable. After we'd opened our presents, we'd push back the  coffee table and prance around: And the Glory of the Lord. All We Like Sheep. His Yoke is Easy. Hallelujah! 

Here he is, wearing a coat made by Gabriel. Here he is. My beloved friend. Here he is - Graham, GKA, Gray: half fallen angel, half risen dervish. 

Love to you, love to you all, at Christmas. 

 

I Ready For Change

A change is coming. It's in the season - I am readying myself, need to prepare physically, mentally, for some experience or action. 

And so, I've started to read again. It's not that I stopped, but that I've been consumed by work, so eaten up by its immediate demands that I could hardly look at poetry, fiction, non-work-non-fiction, for the pain its absence causes. I think this shying away has been a sort of self-preservation too: to read great poetry and great fiction is to encounter the world in truth not found in sociology texts, rarely expressed in academic articles. To read what's written from the heart of experience is to know without doubt that freedom does not come from working harder, smarter, having what's been cited to me as a 'can-do attitude' (as if unquestioning obedience were some sort of virtue).

I've read The Great Gatsby again. I've read the newly controversial Some Kids ..., have just begun Beethoven, A Life in Nine Pieces. I'm enjoying making headway with Ulysses - hadn't realised how much fun it contains. I've dipped into the work of Adrienne Rich, Kei Miller, Philip Gross, Andrew McMillan, Gillian Clarke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, TS Eliot ... into the books which have been waiting patiently for me: my poet friends and familiars. They've soothed me, reconnected me to wider, deeper spaces. 

And I went swimming again this week in the reservoir. I had been waiting all August for the clouds to clear, the temperature to rise. The sun has been elusive, but when I turned to friendship, to LJ (who never shies away from experience or action), I found I could risk the plunge, even in 16 degrees under cloud. I went in not hot but bothered, came out cleansed. We sat afterwards in our usual spot, drinking tea, and the clouds cleared enough for there to be blue and gold. I carried the water's coolness into my evening, to the warmth of a poetry picnic in the park with friends. I began to remember who I am being, why I am doing. 

I Take the Plunge - drawing by John Rae

I Scrape My Toast

The rasp of my knife

against charcoal, smell of fire:

an autumn hunger.

Drawing "I Burn the Old Year"  ©John Rae,

From I Buy A New Washer (and Other Moderate Acts of Independence) - available from  liz.lefroy@btinternet.com, The Poetry Pharmacy, Castle Bookshop, Pengwern Books

I Harvest My Crops

In the spirit of lockdown, and by way of testament to enduring friendship, I've been growing potatoes on my roof garden in tubs given to me by my longest-serving friend last Christmas. Everything to do with this process has been slightly more complicated, but much more enriching, than pandemic shopping: taking compost out of storage in my attic, climbing out of the window to plant seed potatoes ordered online during the #th lockdown, working out how to water the tubs in the dry spells with arcs of water poured from a watering can from the same window. 

After the problem-solving, and the anticipation, the harvest has been so satisfying - searching through soil to find, well, to find these:

I've staged this harvest, taking only enough spuds at a time for the next meal in order to achieve that tub-to-table-in-20-minutes freshness which has been the whole point, or at least a good part of the point. I've served them with mint from the window box, and roasted them with rosemary which grows next to the mint. With the next and final serving, I plan to smother then in buttery sage - the window box sage is flourishing, having been dug up and sent to me by Morar by Royal Mail last autumn. She'd read I didn't have any to go with my parsley, rosemary, and thyme (I Bottle Abundance). 

The rest of the point of the harvest has been to do with the pleasure of engaging in the physical world, the necessity of it. The joy of it is the reminder that growth often takes place out of sight ... but oh ... this is beginning to sound like it's heading in the direction of a sermon ...

You're right, dear reader: I'm going to use my potato harvest as a metaphor for creativity. You see, all the while these Charlottes were growing underground, I've been working on poems hidden in a file on my computer since 2019, now published by Fair Acre Press. I'd originally hoped their coming to light would coincide with Beethoven's 250th birthday in December 2020. This late harvest has also come in stages: a Zoom launch, a reading at the Poetry Pharmacy, and then a performance in mid-Devon on a summer's evening of extraordinary heat and calm. 

Carol Caffrey and I had hatched the idea of a joint event back in the spring when our host, Richard Higgins, was looking for productions for a short season of open air events. It had seemed, then, so theoretical, so impossible: the chances were that it would never happen.

And then, it did. 

Our journey down the M5 and through the high-hedged lanes was long. When we saw our names in huge letters on arrival at Brushford Barton, it was as if we had dug our hands into the soil, and, unbelieving until the moment of contact, found potatoes ... 

The following evening, in the house's beautiful enclosed courtyard, Carol's performance of Music for Dogs was wonderful as ever. I've seen the play six, maybe seven, times and it's just as well, as this time I was on sound desk duty. As she performed, in addition to the pre-recordings, extra barks floated across from the nearby lawns - Carol integrated these into the story like the pro that she is. She was amongst dog-lovers, and the audience loved her and the play, laughing and sighing in all the right places. 

When it was my turn, I read, for the first time, the whole sequence of GREAT MASTER / small boy, finding inspiration from the company of Beethoven himself. Richard had placed a wonderful carving of the Master next to me on the stage, complete with a 250th birthday candle.

For the two days we were at Brushford Barton, the world felt complete - a place of kindness, of hospitality, of growth and creativity: a place in which it is safe to be an artist, to bring new things to the surface, and to enjoy them in company. 

I Repair to London

It was the promise of meeting up with school friends, one who's flown (flown!) over from the USA, that fixed the London weekend date in my diary, two days after the launch of my latest pamphlet of poems. The train journey to London from Shrewsbury should be a simple matter compared with the 'freewheeling across' Europe remembered in GREAT MASTER / small boy. Wellington, Birmingham New Street, Coventry, Milton Keynes. 'Lützel, Bingen, Mainz, Würzburg'. But this is 2021, not 2018.

Window seat, masks, hand spray, packed lunch, bicycle - my new risk assessment. Taking my bike I reasoned, would enable me to ride to my destinations protected from threats encountered on the London Underground and its ultra-confined spaces. On my way to Shrewsbury station, I realised I'd forgotten another risk: I was wearing the wrong trousers. Wide and cream-coloured, bought as an attempt to fit in with London chic, they flapped against my bike's well-oiled chain. I stopped to roll them over my knees, made it to platform 4 three minutes before departure.

'On the last morning, you'll rucksack-up, / then lower your pack to the floor, / consider the weight of things.' My sons are moving on, and I'm travelling alone with the weight of a Brompton, folded. Companionship comes in many forms, and I have projected personality onto my bicycle - she is blue, she is named Boudicca. 

Blame the blockage in the Suez Canal, or the pandemic rush to get bicycles out of sheds, but the cycle shop nearest to London Euston is all out of bicycle clips and reflective ankle bands, and has been for months. Whilst telling me this, the kind assistant passed me a clutch of rubber bands in assorted sizes. "Try these," he said, with the confidence of someone who can speak several languages. Boudicca, were she able to do so, would have commented that I looked like a low-budget Tintin as I climbed onto the saddle, and set off for Tufnell Park.

'This is the birthplace of four symphonies, the violin concerto, / a clutch of quartets ...' 2018 - Pasqualatihaus, Vienna. 2021 - the Tufnell Park Tavern, Tufnell Park. 

'This city's a miniature of empire' - as true of London as it is of Vienna. The cycle route took us down the back streets, under railway bridges, past car repair shops, close to tower blocks. It took us over tarmac, and took us over glass. Nearing the pub, I felt Boudicca's back wheel resist the road in the way it does as a tyre deflates: instant lethargy, forewarning of the need to lie on one's back with one's wheels in the air.

'beached on the rounded island of myself '

A piece of luck - we were yards from the reunion pub, and I had arrived early, with time to fold up and consider my options.

My option was to be where I was, and enjoy my reason for being there: companionship which has stretched over forty, fifty years. Those school friendships are like music, 'stretched and plied like toffee    like smoke    like guitar strings'. They are part of the background which I wanted to foreground, revel in, for those brief hours in the pub, before they receded again.

'The next part I've rehearsed in my head.' I would take Boudicca, folded, on the tube from Tufnell Park to Stockwell, a straight, Northern Line route, and find my longest-serving friend. She will be sitting with G., at the end of her garden path. This herringbone-brick path has become a summer avenue of love-in-a-mist. She will be pouring champagne, and we will talk about how, the next day, we will face together with her bike (Cleopatra - good in a crisis) the challenge of changing the rear tyre on a Brompton for the first time. We admit what we know: that  it will be harder than fixing the front tyre, involving, as it does, negotiating gears and the chain. She will lend me scrubs and gloves for the procedure (direct me gently, saying, "Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty" and other wisdoms learnt, though not at medical school). 'You understood the maths of it'. 

We will lunch on home-made faux gras pate and brioche with her mother Morar, my adopted mother, and no one will mind that my hair is unbrushed, and that I'm not wearing my wide London trousers, will be oily around the edges.

Vienna, 2018. London, 2021. I feel repaired by these journeys, and their memories, by the companionship of my family, my friends, my bicycle - all of this giving life rhythm, tone, timbre, beat. 'Whump Whump Whump Whump' goes the swan lifting from the River Severn, goes the flat back tyre, goes the pump inflating the new inner tube readying for the next ride.

Coda

This is the peculiar alchemy:
to be caught up in someone else’s song,
be drawn over strings, or hammered out,
plucked as a guitar, or blown across a flute.
 
It’s a hollowed space, a refuge, place of hope
which shows us all our losses. It’s where I go
when I exhaust the words for love and sorrow.
It’s music.

GREAT MASTER / small boy is published by Fair Acre Press. If you wish to buy a copy, please email liz.lefroy@btinternet.com for details

I Express Myself

The only discipline I've made for myself in writing this blog is to use a verb only once, and in the simple first person present tense, when devising titles. This leads to an interesting list-poem of a contents page in my recently published book, I Buy A New Washer. When thinking today about how to summarise my feelings, or take control, or how to make a complaint, I find I've used all these verbs already: summarising T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, taking the plunge, making a list. This forces me to express myself instead.

In order to keep the title current, 24-hour, and available, I've enlisted some help. Not everyone reads this blog, after all. 

Here's the help, pictured below: known by some as Dennis, the tailor's mannequin, who's social distancing's answer to making clothes to fit when the rules meant dressing live models was not allowed. Dennis, by no means a dummy, but a well-crafted and articulated fellow, has been my elder son's constant sewing companion for over a year. He's remained at a constant weight and size, not gaining a single Covid-Kilo or Corona-Stone. 

And here he is, relaxing in dressing gown, cap, and shades, after modelling my son's final year degree collection. He's expressing how I feel about the current trend for popping exhausts, 'sporty' engines, and high-speed chases through Shrewsbury's town centre: the popular sport of using the one-way system as if it were a race track. 

I've written to my Shrewsbury and Atcham MP, my Quarry and Coton Hill Councillor, rung the police repeatedly (at their request - apparently, this is the only way that resources can be allocated), been referred to the 'Safer Neighbourhood Scheme'. 

It's made no difference, except to my feelings of powerlessness, which have risen.

And then, Dennis, freed from his modelling duties for a while, stepped in. Dennis, in contrast, has raised his hand (or more specifically, his finger - just one, as his hands aren't articulate enough to make a V-sign) in support. He stands, day and night, expressing my feelings for me.

Thank you Dennis. I can relax now, knowing something is being done, that I'm being heard at last.

I Struggle With Words

My life is in words, not all of them beautiful, not all of them needed. But some of them thread me together like this poem by Sharon Olds:

    I cannot say I did not ask 

    to be born.

Yesterday, I proofread the manuscript for my forthcoming chapbook - GREAT MASTER / small boy (Fair Acre Press). I find this a nerve-wracking process, even though all is yet possible, nothing has been committed to print. I wrote the sequence in 2018-19 after travels to Germany and Austria with my son Jonty in search of Beethoven. "The trouble is," I said to Gabriel, his older brother, on our walk in the rain yesterday after dark, "I want it to be perfect." The book is, in its essence, a gift for Jonty (its publication date is his 21st birthday) - it's an account of that geographical journey, but of so much more too. As Andrew McMillan has written in his back cover endorsement, "...love of music is always a journey ... towards love."

     Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my

    children, to exist ...

This past year I have not been able to write much, or rather, I haven't been able to write much new poetry. I've written here from time to time. (Thank goodness for this blog, and the book that's come from it - so much pleasure there, and the kind reading and sharing of it). And I've written thousands of emails, texts, even posted the odd tweet ...I've written for my job as a university lecturer: thousands and thousands and thousands of words about, well, about how and why we can and must care for and empower each other, about how we try to learn when we cannot be together. That work has been utterly exhausting, though I regret none of it. 

As for the music of poetry? The place from which that comes feels numbed, weary, tuneless. 

    I asked, with everything I did not

    have, to be born. And nowhere in any

    of it was there meaning ...

I woke this morning and after a bit of Sunday morning laying around, talked with myself about first things - about how I came to write poetry in the beginning, how I scribbled lines, hid them and tore them up, then eventually had the courage to join a writing group in my 40s. It was through reading poetry, not writing, that I found what I needed to know. After the reading, the writing - the impetus to express my own longings. I knew, I reminded myself decades later, that it was reading The Wasteland in my 1980s London bedroom that convinced me that I was not alone.

Sharon Olds, in her poem I Cannot Say I Did Not addresses the question of unbidden existence more clearly than anything I've heard or read in any other context: church, family, school, social work text books, The School of Life website ...  This existential conundrum haunted my youth -  none of us asked to be born. Olds takes it head on in this poem, even daring to end on a preposition. It's brilliant, and reading it again this morning (from the Bloodaxe Staying Human anthology) it confirmed to me that if I turn back to reading the poetry that moves me most, poetry which is about this existence of ours - the one that we've been hanging onto for dear life - if I turn back to the well-worn pages of Olds, Rich, Hopkins, Eliot, Collins, McMillan, Clarke, Sprackland, Duffy, Oliver ...  in time, and with gentleness, and quietly, I will find my voice again.

    ... I want to say that love

    is the meaning, but I think that love may be

    the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds - I Cannot Say I Did Not

I Review A Pamphlet - Lucy Rose Cunningham's 'For Mary, Marie, Maria'

For Mary, Marie, Maria

after the nectar, pyre and linden tree

Lucy Rose Cunningham

Broken Sleep Books –

Purchase here:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/lucy-rose-cunningham-for-mary-marie-maria

 

Reviewed by Liz Lefroy

 

I read Lucy Rose Cunningham’s recently published sequence sitting on a bench in a country graveyard this afternoon, with memorial stones in the foreground, and the Shropshire hills in the long view. I had a flask of Earl Grey and a bun to keep me company. My bicycle was propped next to me against the wall of the church. I was glad I’d set the context to become acquainted with this beautifully produced pamphlet from Broken Sleep Books. All credit to the publishers for its austere elegance.

I’ve learnt to look after my body as I’ve aged – in Cunningham’s Acknowledgements words – to know what this body really deserves. It’s an important rite of passage, and one to which Mary, Marie and Maria all have something to contribute. Others have illuminated this aspect of Cunningham’s work, so  I won’t repeat what they’ve written (I refer you, for example, to the Cardiff Review https://www.cardiffreview.com/review/a-rich-stirring-debut-for-mary-marie-maria/ )

For my part, I chose this setting for reading because I wanted to listen hard to Cunningham’s voice – not to understand every line (I didn’t) but to loosen up, pay close attention to what I heard and felt. I found much to enjoy, and much to grieve, in doing so.

Cunningham’s work resembles in so many ways what I first came to love in poetry as a very young woman (in Eliot, Hopkins, Keats, et al). It has space, subtlety, depth, originality.  Cunningham creates a soundscape which is both rich and spare, tender and fierce. Her writing is free from clamour, and uses imagery which is both familiar and sits skewed on the page. Behind each phrase, however taut the surface, is a softness which would bruise, were it gripped too hard:

              of simmered tea leaves and wicks,

              candles drunk with butter

              wax waning, as she waited

It is this tenderness, this open-heartedness, which gives the work its youthfulness. Here is a fresh voice which leaves traces on each page of that sense of being at the beginning of things, even though “I’m running out of spoons” (IV – Spoon theory). My reader self is grateful to Cunningham for her uncontrived authenticity which connects me with my young self in ways which took me right back to

[it’s] this aching thought,

the impress of Love of ache of thought

in my bedclothes,

At the end of my reading, I packed up my things and climbed back onto my bike. As I cycled home, I found myself filled with thoughts of my young body, my young self, the voice it didn’t have, the way it dared not speak. Cunningham’s voice speaks for her, in some ways, and that is reason enough to return to that bench, these poems again, one day soon.

Mary, Marie, Maria (with almond croissant)  

© Ellie Milne

         

                                                Lucy Cunningham

I Census Myself

'When I feel like that, I ask myself what would a young, white, confident man in tech ask for? ...' is the best advice I've been given in March. It helped me to leave a couple of the questions on the recent census unanswered, and to launch my Facebook page this week. 

Questionnaires, however well-designed, try to squeeze us (in the case of the UK census, all 66.65 million of us) into boxes. I'm averse to small spaces unless they are ones I step into of my own accord, zipping up the flap behind me. But it's mandatory to submit the 2021 census, so I clicked the required boxes on the online form last Sunday and pressed Send. 

The same day, I created a Facebook page in an attempt to offset some of the challenges of publicising a new book at a time when the pandemic has made the usual readings in bars, cafes, and libraries impossible. At an event pre-lockdown, I might sell 5 books following one of these (usually) free events, sometimes more, occasionally none. I offered a discount, signed the books as requested. It was a good exchange all-round.

The questions I didn't answer on the census were about religion and sexual orientation. In writing this, I have already given you more information than the National Office of Statistics will receive about me. Perhaps I was influenced by the recent graffiti (graffito?) I saw near the station which reads, JESUS WAS BISEXUAL. How odd, I thought, to choose that as a daub, but then again, it did get me thinking. So too the other graffito under the railway bridge: GREAT NESS IS BORING. How odd, I thought, to condemn a hamlet near Nesscliffe so specifically, and to travel ten miles or so into town to do so.  

Questions about sexual orientation are even less conducive to box-ticking than questions about religion. Under each of these census questions I clicked Why we ask this question to find out how it could be relevant, was told it will help the design of services. I simply do not believe this. What will help with the design of services is the campaigning work of organisations like SAND . The negative impacts of labelling continue: 'heterosexual', 'gay', 'lesbian', and 'bisexual' are not terms of equivalent meaning or stigma when we're standing up to be counted. I would daub that somewhere if it wasn't so long (when does graffito become graffiti?) and against the rules. 

One of the hesitations I felt about launching my Facebook page was that I had to think about which categories of people might like my work. The categories don't include those who don't like books: I've already been told. Aside from that, it's hard to be sure enough to tick boxes, although there has been a particular interest shown by people who went to Durham University, though that doesn't include a scattering of keen readers in Australia. Except for Penny. 

My main reluctance, however, was that, as I said to my young advisor, promoting my book feels like asking for money. 'When I feel like that,' she said, 'I think: what would a young, white, confident man in tech ask for?' And buoyed up by her refreshing, honest courage, but not in pursuit of greatness (which is *ohhhhh! that's what it means* boring) I pressed Go.

Drawing copyright John Rae

I Text The Poet Laureate

From - I Buy A New Washer - Liz Lefroy (2020) Mark Time Books

I Mother - We All Need Mothering

Mothering Sunday is celebrated today in the UK. There are some important points to note about this tradition - mainly that it's not, in its origins, all about being, or having, a mother, even if that has become its focus more recently. 

On Mothering Sunday, in the 16th century, Christians visited their mother church - their spiritual home. This was the church in which they were baptised. For me, this would be All Souls, Langham Place, London.

The connections between Mothering Sunday and mothers became clearer in the 1910s and '20s when (as Wikipedia puts it) Constance Adelaide Smith (not a mother herself) 'reinvigorated' Mothering Sunday in the British Isles, having heard of the way Mother's Day was introduced to celebrate the role of mothers in the USA. Rather than adopting a new festival, Smith amalgamated aspects of Mother's Day with Mothering Sunday and promoted it in her published works. Having stuck with Mothering Sunday, it means the day we celebrate motherhood isn't fixed - it moves with the ecclesiastical calendar: is always on the fourth Sunday in lent, mid-way between Ash Wednesday and Easter. 

Ahh Lent! The time for extra self-discipline. But even the church recognises we all need a break sometimes. So the first aspect of a traditional Mothering Sunday is that it is a legitimate break from fasting. I note this for my friend, who has birthday cake to finish up, and for my son, with whom I hope to do some baking later on. 

The second aspect of a traditional Mothering Sunday is that you don't have to be a mother, or to have a surviving mother, to mark it. We aren't told this - instead we're told that if we are bereaved or childless we can opt out of the flurry of marketing emails selling us Mother's Day merchandise. Big deal.

Many of us no longer have a mother church, or a mother place of worship from any religion. My parents left the west end of London when I was 6 months old, so my emotional connection with it as a place is close to none. I've needed to find a new way of homecoming, or mothering, being mothered. The Macmillan dictionary definition of mothering helps - it says that mothering is to treat someone with care and kindness as though they were a small child. 

According to this definition we can all mother and be mothered today - in fact, it's essential human behaviour, and transcends biological sex, gendered expectations, labels, and doing the washing up. We can all be 'as though' small children, especially now in this pandemic when we are  experiencing huge losses, so tired, downhearted, in a strop, miserable, over-wrought, anxious ... 

Sometimes, I forget to mother myself. I get lax about bedtime, about reading to myself, about baking. Sometimes, I forget how much we all need mothering.

Today, I am lucky enough to be able to lie around and read a book, then later, maybe I'll get my crayons out and draw myself a card. I'll bake with my son as part of a celebration not so much of motherhood, but of the human capacity to show care and kindness at a time when we all need to be, from time to time, given flowers, fed cake, encouraged to splash in puddles, hugged, listened to without judgement, reminded to lie down and rest, pretending to be a dozing cat: treated as if we were small children. 

Photograph © Mike Powell 

 

I Grieve Simply

In spite of the lockdown restrictions, mourning my friend Joyce Brand, who died on 18th February, is a simple grief. Joyce was a good and wise friend, and I want to acknowledge, in this small space, something of the huge impact she had on my life, and my gratitude to her. 

I loved Joyce. I loved her company. I miss it. I will go on missing her. Like this grief, our friendship was also straightforward, and it was enacted in good conversation based in shared values. 

We enjoyed many such conversations in the company of her many friends in various situations over the years - weddings, dinner parties, book readings, social work classrooms. These occasions were always fun, but it's the memories of the one-to-one times with her I treasure most. Having Joyce's full attention was a privilege. If you were lucky enough to experience it, you will know what I mean. 

When I think of Joyce, I think of her smiling to welcome me into her home. She moved several times in the twenty or so years of our friendship, always thinking ahead, planning, downsizing to her final home in Ludlow a few years ago. If only we all had such an instinct for the obvious need to become increasingly grounded. It helped that she liked moving.  

When I think of Joyce, I think of sitting in an armchair as she went to make tea. She'd bring in a tray loaded with cups, saucers, teapot, milk jug, and cucumber sandwiches on a pretty china plate. Latterly, she'd wheel in a tea trolley. We talked of what was in the news, what we were reading or watching, of the benefits of an early afternoon nap. Theses talks were sprinkled with whole-hearted laughter, happiness, and a generous dash of hilarious derision for those at the centre of the latest political scandal.

Joyce treated me as an equal, but we weren't. It was right that I looked up to her: older, wiser, smart as a button. I was usually hungry for guidance about a stage of life, or a work situation, that she had already negotiated. When we reached that personal territory, she would help me to see more clearly how to navigate it kindly, and as myself. 

Joyce, who enjoyed the company of men enormously,  set no store by the cultural and enduring narrative that we women need a man to complete our lives. She lived independently, independent, surrounded by friends who came and went from her home, bringing conversation, freshly dug potatoes, crossword tips, and the ability to move furniture, or put up shelves. There was a realism in Joyce's advice. "Do you have a pension?" she'd ask, out of concern for my future self. She knew that independence is a reality born out of practicalities, not simply a frame of mind. 

When I published a book at the end of last year, I knew I wanted Joyce's name on the back cover. Her endorsement, when it came, felt like an old-fashioned blessing: her hand laid on my bowed head. It was a moment of approval I will hold close in the coming weeks. 

At the end of those one-to-ones, after we'd chatted for a couple of hours, I'd leave her company, thinking, "When I grow up, I want to be like Joyce." 

I still do. 

Read more about Joyce here:

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/local-hubs/south-shropshire/ludlow/2021/02/23/she-made-a-real-difference-ludlow-health-campaigner-joyce-brand-dies-at-86/

I Set A Breakfast Tray

My grandmother used to correct me: "It's set. You set a table. Hens lay eggs." 

I think this insistence on the verb set being the correct way to describe the arrangement of cutlery, glasses, etc. might be named a shibboleth: a characteristic principle, often outdated, of a group that distinguishes it from another group, or class. 

It felt, when she emphasised set, as if Granny were hanging on to something for dear life.

This grandparental voice is clear in my head whenever I prepare to serve a meal. I still set tables, cannot do anything else, and, this morning, it being Valentine's Day, I set a tray with teapot, jug, plate, glass, and mug, ready for breakfast in bed.

I selected the teapot first, 50th birthday gift from my Longest-Serving Friend. I spooned in equal measures of English Breakfast and Earl Grey loose leaf tea. 

Next, the tiny milk jug, just enough for one, a present from Charlotte. It comes from the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke-on-Trent where she and I used to, and will again, meet regularly for tea served in their patterned mugs, large slices of cake, and meanderings round the factory shop. I miss her, our long and easy catch-ups, spiced with giggles. 

The plate is also Emma Bridgewater: one I bought myself in an on-line payday spree last autumn. Toast tastes better when eaten from a plate whose colours complement strawberry jam. 

The glass, filled with freshly-squeezed blood orange juice, is one I bought from IKEA in Antwerp. They can be bought from IKEA anywhere, but this one is a souvenir from the seven trips I made there to see my son over the three years he lived there: trips which came to an abrupt end with the pandemic.

Finally the mug, lovely gift from Mike. Last night, I wondered darkly how long I have to go without writing a poem before I stop being a poet. This morning, preparing a Valentine's breakfast for one, this was the obvious mug to choose. 

I sat in bed this morning in the company of crockery, eating toast, drinking orange juice. Three times, I poured milk from the tiny jug into the mug-of-affirmation, before pouring on the English Breakfast / Earl Grey mix. With each mugful, I felt the warmth of love, in all its richness and many forms, grow stronger.  

I Phone A Friend

I phoned Bob this week, after years of thinking about him, sending and receiving Christmas cards. Happily, joyfully, he's well, in his 90s now. North London's still audible in his vowels, although he moved away, as I did, years ago.

When we met, I was 5 or 6 years old, and he was around 40. He had been widowed: devastated by the death of his first wife, and turned up at my father's church, looking for consolation. I was bored, hanging around, at a loose end while something was going on: prayer, singing, meeting, adults chatting - something a 5-year-old couldn't, or wouldn't, share. 

There I was, small, awkward for my age, idling, waiting (it turns out) for a hand to hold -  metaphorically, emotionally, psychologically, and literally. 

"I noticed you," Bob recalled towards the end of our conversation, "and prayed that you would come and hold my hand. And you did." 

I thought, momentarily, of naming this blog I Answer A Prayer, but my views on prayer are complicated. I realise this is one of the reasons I haven't phoned Bob for so long. I didn't want him to be disappointed that I've turned out poet, not angel. 

In c.1969, Bob and I, separated by a generation, were attuned to each other in the way that human beings can sometimes be, despite the gaps between us. His prayer a call, my response a sense that here was someone safe. What did we notice in each other? Gesture, tone of voice, openness? 

After our phone call, I know that Bob understands, looking back, that I needed his care as much as he needed mine, and, we spoke of this for the first time. "Your father was very disciplined," he understated.

 He prayed. I walked over, took him by the hand, hung on. 

I loved Bob, and for a year at least, we used to sit together in a pew at the back left-hand side of the church each Sunday. I can picture my young self, all unbrushed hair and hand-me-down clothes, walking through the west door and up the aisle. I'd see the back of Bob's head and run the last steps to join him. He was always in a suit, shirt pressed, hair neat, tie tied, shoes polished. He was never late, never missed a Sunday, never passed judgement on my disheveled appearance. I sat next to him during the interminable services, small and fidgety, comforted by his presence.  

When I was older, 7 I think, I joined the choir, and suggested to Bob that he married Vera, though I'm now sure he'd already had the idea himself. They married, and Bob moved into the flat at the bottom of the vicarage where Vera lived. They often looked after me and my brothers when my parents were busy, and didn't complain about us jumping down the stairs onto their ceiling, riding our bicycles through their washing. 

Bob and Vera were lovely together: for more than twenty years till her death, they found happiness in each other, and a shared way of being. They illuminated the years of my childhood with kindness, cheerfulness, creativity, and play.  

When Bob and I finished our conversation I cried a little, feeling both loss and a sense of exhilaration. The connection between a sad young man and a little girl, albeit five decades ago in another dimension, is still real and it is still comfortable. 

What will survive of us is love.

Photo - Mike Powell

What will survive of us is love is the final line of Larkin's poem 'An Arundel Tomb' 

I Get Through Four Corkscrews

In the new year, planning ahead for January, I ordered six half bottles of wine from the excellent wine merchants, Tanners, just down the hill from where I live tanners-wines.co.uk. I find the 375ml size just right for drinking alone - enough for a weekend supper with some to spare: a splash in the pot, more in a glass, and then a bit more. I make up for quantity with quality, but what I didn't foresee was that I'd need almost as many corkscrews as wine bottles. 

Just for a change, risotto was on the menu last week, so I needed to open a white. Risotto without a dash of white wine is like risotto without a dash of white wine. The thing about buying quality wine is that it still often comes with a cork. My first attempt snapped my best, if elderly, corkscrew. My second snapped my reserve corkscrew. I checked the other bottles of white - no screw tops. I went up  into the attic to find my camping corkscrew - it was nowhere to be seen. As I rummaged through my camping detritus - pots, a pepper mill, torches, and plastic plates, I imagined it buried in a field in Wales, sprouting miniature bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. 

Back in the kitchen, I pulled at what was left of corkscrew #1. I regretted not working out more regularly during lockdown. I have started grinding coffee beans by hand once a day, but this doesn't seem to have increased my upper body strength. I need levers, physics, and fewer reminders of my weaknesses. I abandonned thoughts of risotto, turned to omelette and beer. The protein might build me up. 

What else to do next, these lockdown days, dear reader, but get onto Amazon, order a corkscrew for next day delivery. How quickly that's become the first next thought. And now you'll be admiring the restraint which prevented me from using my teeth, but criticising my ethics and undermining of local businesses. I confess I panicked. The town centre was dark and quiet. The sight of the bottle with twisted metal stems protruding like mutant flowers felt like a problem which needed an immediate solution. 

Corkscrew #3 was delivered as promised the next day (I received notification) but wherever it arrived it wasn't on my doormat. After an undignified online chat with Jed, whose looping conversation suggested to me that he may (or may not) have been a person, I had a much better idea. I phoned a local kitchen shop, and yes, the owner was in, sorting stock, and yes, after much rummaging and commentary about the rush on corkscrew supplies, she said they had one left in stock, and were allowed to sell it to me at the shop door if I could come straightaway. 

I'm struggling for an analogy here, but like a .... [furrowed brow] ... like a ... oh I don't know ... like something coming very fast out of a tight spot, I shot out from my front door, masked up, sanitiser in my pocket, and 15 minutes, one conversation about corkscrews, and one contactless transaction later, I was triumphant, in possession of corkscrew #4. 

As I walked back home, and past the shop I live next door to, I glanced through its glass door. The Christmas decorations were still up, and the tree lights twinkling. And there, on the floor, was an Amazon package, addressed to me.

I Relax With Dr Zhivago

Forty years ago, my first boyfriend told me how much he liked the film Dr Zhivago (released 1965). I wonder if this was early on in our relationship, when we were trying to impress, and our feelings were intense, or later on, when we'd run out of things to say, and our feelings were intense? Was he trying to tell me he was in love with Julie Christie? I think I might have been in love with Julie Christie, or with wanting to be Julie Christie, having seen her in Darling whilst staying for a weekend with my more relaxed Catholic cousins. I'm not sure he was recommending I watch it, because how could I, in those days of 1) No TV (my parents' choice), 2) No VHS (natural consequence of 1) 3) Reliance on re-releases at the cinema, or visits to my Catholic cousins coinciding with TV showings and three hours to spare on a Saturday evening. Question mark.  

I saw Gone with the Wind at a cinema on the Holloway Road, London N1 one afternoon with a school friend, I presume in the school holidays. I skipped school a couple of times, behaviour which left me feeling guilty and behind with my Marlow, but I wouldn't have had the courage to play truant and go to the cinema. I remember that the upper circle was nearly empty. 

Mentioning Gone with the Wind may seem tangential, but it proves that in those days I sometimes had four-hours-plus-interval to spare. Later, when I was married, and we had a TV, and later still when we had a VHS player, I never had the inclination to go to Blockbuster and rent an epic film. I was too busy with Frasier boxsets lent by my brother, and then Fireman Sam.

What a lucky chance, then, that Dr Zhivago, is currently on iPlayer, and that after forty years of adventures I have 1) A TV, 2) A TV licence, 3) A range of techniques learnt in psychotherapy enabling me to side-step any feelings of guilt incurred by watching a film whilst it's still light outside. We all need doctors more than ever these days, so maybe it was this that prompted me, finally, to satisfy my curiosity, watch the film. 

As it turns out, Dr Zhivago is more like early 2021 Shropshire than you'd think, filled as it is with snow, difficult decisions, furs, untimely deaths, beautiful vistas, confusion, heroes, quiet resolve, and drumbeats. And with trains (although ours are largely empty). We also lack a famous, but strangely irritating as the hours ticked by, theme tune.

It was halfway through my viewing, snuggled under my favourite faux fur rug as dusk fell, that I remembered that it was, in fact, my granny who'd first made me aware of Dr Zhivago. She'd be 120 if alive now, and first in the queue for a COVID-19 vaccine. Before experiencing a love of my own, she'd talked to me of hers - among them Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, and the compassionate, flawed, gallant, implausible talent that was Omar Sharif - Dr Zhivago himself.