I Have A Lane To Myself

At the baths this morning, there was one lane roped off from the rest of the pool - a strip of almost-blue 25 meters x 1.5 meters. There were other swimmers, but no one had chosen this water.  I slipped in at the shallow end, paddled off. Couldn't believe my luck.

Having space I can call my own, both in time and square meters, is something I wallow in. I think I used to be a bit out of my depth when faced with space with just me in it - questions and insecurities would bubble up How fast should I go? Are people deliberately avoiding me?  Will I get lonely? 

No one joined me in the lane - I had a full hour to myself breast-stroking up and down, turning on my back for a spot of back crawl, easing the ache out of my spine. The water was cool, warmed in places by the sun streaming in through the glass roof. I emerged at peace with myself and my body.

I luxuriate in those moments when I get 4 seats round a table on the train to myself, or when I have a whole evening at home in which I can freestyle, or when my work room buddy is away on holiday and I can indulge my musical tastes more freely. La Mer. The Trout Quintet. Peter Grimes.

I'm aware that being alone within four walls can be intensely isolating in different circumstances. I do not take for granted the freedom I have to step out of delineated space.

Later, after my swim, I cycled to the weir and sat on a bench in the sun drying my hair, my bike propped up beside me. A fellow cyclist came over to admire her - she is striking. We chatted for a while about her colour, Lagoon Blue, about folding bikes, about cycle lanes, cycling on the left and then about the way strength and speed diminish with age. Paul had just emerged from eight months of illness - it was his first bike trip out since October. We idled pleasantly around in our conversation against the tumbling sounds of weir water cascading, splashing and foaming, rushing downstream. 

I Glow With Pride

Parenthood can make me sweat, involving - without being metaphorical in the slightest - pushing, uplifting, hauling, accompanying, wiping, skipping, smoothing, sifting, sorting ... but right now, I’m simply glowing.

If I said that my sons’ choices to pursue post-school education in the creative fields of fashion and music never caused me a minute’s perspiration, I’d be disingenuous. Fashion in particular is a highly competitive applied art, requiring a complex range of skills, knowledge and aptitudes. These include life drawing, pattern cutting, design, embroidery, tailoring, draping, photography, and graphic design, as well as the study of the history of fashion, philosophy of art and research methodology . And then there are the skills and labours of developing and planning whole collections, liaising with models to wear and present them.

I’m glowing because my son Gabriel has won an award which recognises in a tangible way how much he has achieved in his learning of the skills of fashion design. Five years ago, he had an emerging interest in clothes and how they're made, but he'd never used a sewing machine. So we attended an evening class at Shrewsbury College where his teacher, Johanna, took his interest entirely seriously. Since that initial affirmation, he’s branched out, cut loose, taken risks, pursued an unconventional and challenging path.

In February, Gabriel applied for this, advertised in the Shrewsbury press by the Shrewsbury Arts Society:

ARTS BURSARY 2019

Celebrating the Golden Jubilee of The Arts Society

After a highly competitive process, the judges described his application and interview performance as outstanding. He displayed a depth of knowledge and passion which convinced them to give him the financial award aimed at supporting a young artist from the Shrewsbury area embarking on a career in the arts.

This is an accolade and it's a practical one too. Studying fashion is expensive in terms of materials required: over four years of a foundation degree and BA, he has used / will use hundred of metres of fabric, tens of thousands of metres of thread, needles, buttons, zips, buckles, Velcro, interfacing, paper, ink, not to mention chicken wire, safety boots, paints, dyes and glues. The award will be a great help towards these costs.

So I’m glowing - proud as can be of my son who is forging his own way, delighted that fellow artists have recognised his talent and commitment.

I Buy A New Washer: I Calculate My Figures

I Buy A New Washer: I Calculate My Figures: There's something going on around my middle that I'm trying to work out. One of the workings out I am doing is swimming. A recent tr...

I Calculate My Figures

There's something going on around my middle that I'm trying to work out. One of the workings out I am doing is swimming. A recent trial membership offer at the Quarry Swimming Baths meant that I swam five times in ten days and this worked out at £1 per swim.

Four of those swims happened on workdays before work. It has come as something of a surprise to me that I am able to swim 660 metres, half of them towards my desk, half of them in the opposite direction, and still arrive at work on time, albeit with damp hair.

Based on that experience, I have signed up to a year's swimming membership. So far, the swims I have swum under membership terms have worked out at £95 each. If I swim 188 more times in the coming year, I will get the cost back down to £1 per swim.

Whilst I'm swimming, I try to remember the number of the length I'm on. This helps me to arrive at work on time. If I say to myself  "TWELVE" (never out loud) as I start length 12, it's somewhat confusing, as I've actually completed 11 lengths. There's something about this that feels like cheating, but equally, I can't get my head around the idea of length zero. If I think about all this too hard, I lose count.

So far, according to the tightness of my jeans, my motivating central concerns are not yet worked out. I carry forward other benefits into my days, however. A fuller sense, after one of those early baptisms, that my life is mine, and everything in it. And the whiff of chlorine emanating from my skin.

I Avoid Traffic On My Way To Radio Shropshire

I set off down the steep gradient of St Mary's Water Lane to the River Severn. It is not so steep as to be too much so. I cycle along the river path, bumping over the cobbled stretch under the bridges upon which Shrewsbury railway station is built. From here it's a flat run out to the weir.

The weir-water is calm and silvery-smooth: recent flooding turbulence is a memory - there's a hint of white froth bubbling the surface where the descending water rejoins the flow of the river.

The path ends in a road and the road runs by the river. Just past the island, a goose is being goosey - stretching its neck and greeting the morning. I pass joggers, cyclists, and early walkers. There are no cars. The air is clear, hopeful.

Often we nod to each other, us early-risers, say, “Hi!” in the conspiracy of those who know that to be up and out on a spring morning is one of the best things, especially as, despite everything being muddled and angry in some places, here the sunlight highlights the whites and pinks of blossom, searches out the lime green of emerging leaves.

The only cars are parked cars. I turn right through sleepy bungalows, and then right again onto the cycle path but then choose left, not the route to the canal path. The sign points to Mount Pleasant, as if that is a state of being that is still possible. A gradual gradient up, and yes, it's pleasant in the cool air, the cindered path just right for a bike, or for a walker, or for a bike and a walker passing going in apparently opposite directions. The walker adjusts his direction slightly, curves leftwards to leave me more space to pass, says, "Hello!".

Crossing the main road at the lights, I take to quiet residential streets for a while - then it's back to a cycle path over the railway bridge and past more houses, stirring into their Saturday. There's no jeopardy even in the last stretch, though it takes me, briefly, onto the main road.

At the radio studios, I chat with Liz, producer, and then Ryan Kennedy, and I catch up, talk poetry, talk the weather, talk the clocks changing. I get to Carol Caffrey's poem, read 'The Moorings'. It's as beautiful as this morning - holds loss, grief: is freefall with light grace, afloat with hope.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0736062 - I read Carol's poem at 39 mins 10 seconds

I Party Long Into the Night

It's not often my friends turn 130, especially the ones who aren't Hobbits, but that's what is happening in February and March to Graham 'n' Ted, two of the sweetest, dearest of them.

The idea for a party was mine - at least, I'll claim it as such. It might not have been, but it scarcely matters. What happened was, there was an idea among poets that G and T, GKA and Big Ted, could and should and would share a party, because together they are making 130 years young.

At the heart of the party was the dance. Not just any dance, but the sort of dancing that people do from start to finish because it's so compulsory in a lenient way. That's to say, the folks operating the vinyl decks, Mike and Hattie, made it easy in their choice of songs. Who wouldn't dance, raise their hands, smile to Free Nelson Mandela, especially those of us who are approaching, are at, or past, 130 combined years with our nearest and dearest. We remember it, you see: the special hope of the early 1990s, when we were grown up already, and some of us were, or were about to become parents, but still it seemed possible (and I mean everything) because peace broke out in several ways in several places.  South Africa. Northern Ireland. And the Berlin wall had already fallen.

In the centre of the party were two of the sweetest, dearest of men. Men who embrace the dance of a party, of friendship, of love in all its forms. Men who rock being men in the modest, kind and strong in-a-good-way - way that honours all the women that know and love them. And all the men too, come to think of it. In the centre of the party was the hope of love and peace - and it was a sober happiness.

That's the thing - this wasn't some slurred, blurred feeling of numbed contentment. This party had the natural joy induced by two hours, more, of stamping, swaying, grooving dancing, and a magnificent jointly brought along buffet and Mike's excellent raspberry and almond cake - you see, after an hour of this dancing around in yellow boots, GKA in his top hat, Ted whistling, I noticed that everything that's difficult about being 130, all that knowing the world in its complication, fell away. And what came around was simplicity. No matter our imperfections, some of the messes we might have made along the way - no matter our successes and achievements. This was so straightforward, dancing together, wreathed in music, in the friendship of years, and in deep acceptance and the kind of loving that exceeds categories, and will still be there tomorrow, and the next day, and for the next eleventy years.

Happy Birthday, GKA!  Happy Birthday Ted!  We love you. And here you are, cutting the cake:

I finish a book ...

... 

not for the first time, of course. I have finished many books before, and sometimes I have started them all over again. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series which I have read four or five times, perhaps as an antidote to my Inner-London childhood. As I walked up from the station this evening talking to my work friend, we discovered that we remembered the same passages about making maple syrup candy in the snow and building log cabins from scratch. 

I finished War and Peace a few weeks after I started it in 1979.  The explanation for my dedication is partly Tolstoy's genius, and partly the crush I had on a guy I wanted to impress. I had my response ready should he ever ask me what I was reading. 

But over the years, things have changed. As an academic, I have developed the dry and necessary habit of getting what I must from a book - using the index and chapter headings to find sections which give me the essential point or definition. It's rare in these circumstances to read a whole text. And it's not often I read a collection of poetry from cover to cover in one sitting. It does happen: Douglas Dunn's Elegies. But usually, I dip in, mull over, and stare into the distance, get distracted. In short, I've developed unsatisfactory habits.

My habits have become so unsatisfactory, that I turned up to my last book group struggling even to remember the title of the book we were to discuss. It's a lovely group, and I joined in the discussion from my position of ignorance incurring no judgement, but I realised I had reached a new reading low.

So I've taken enormous pleasure not only in reading, but also in finishing Maggie O'Farrell's I am I am I am in two sittings (it could easily have been one had not work intervened). This experience of utter book-absorption reconnected me to the feelings I had on those childhood afternoons as they grew into dark evenings when, propped on one hand, I resisted all calls of nature as I wandered around Narnia, or Northanger Abbey, or 221B Baker Street. 

O'Farrell's beautifully structured book recalls 'seventeen brushes with death' and does so with vivid immediacy. She achieves that remarkable balance that is so compelling - revelation woven seamlessly with recognition. She led me through her deeply moving stories, to encounters with my own fears and existential experiences. And I am grateful.