I Tick A Box

I was have been asked by superficialinsights.com  to rate my recent experience of New York City.  Apparently, this will help other people to decide whether or not to travel there:  Did you like NYC?  Please tick Yes or No.


In my day job, I am often asked to write references.  This is a responsibility I take seriously, and it requires me to use my judgement and to be truthful to my experience.  But when asked to do this by ticking a series of boxes, I find myself flummoxed. 


Consider the following example:

Please assess (to the best of your knowledge) the applicant’s qualities and abilities :
	Excellent	Good	Average	Poor	Not Known/Comments
Honesty

Faced with recommending a candidate I've known for a couple of years, but only in one context, I don't know which box to tick. Is Excellent Honesty the default position, or starting point, from which someone can only slide towards Poor as occasions for Dishonesty arise, or do I assume Poor Honesty until opportunities for deception have arisen and not been taken, or opportunities for Honesty been taken?


What, I wonder, is the definition of Good Honesty and could it be better than Excellent Honesty (too brutal in some situations) for this particular job?   Is my definition of Good Honesty of too high or low a standard?  Who says?


Is Average Honesty acceptable or the sign of moral deficiency?  And when working out Average Honesty, am I required to use the mean, mode or median?  And should I show my workings?


Does Honesty which could be described as  Poor become Dishonesty?  Unreliability can't be a synonym for Poor Honesty as there is another assessment to be made about Reliability in the row below.  But I won't take you there.


As it happens, I liked New York City.  Yes I did.  I liked it a lot.  And I mostly liked it because I went there with my son.  But there's no box for that.

I Carry A Placard

Friday 24th June was a troubling day - the date had long been in my mind.  I woke early to the news of the Leave vote, felt stunned. 

Much has been written about the reasons for and fallout from the millions of decisions made by individuals faced on 23rd June with a binary choice: Remain / Leave - a choice reducing the nuances and complexities of the UK's relationship with the EU to something blunt and, as it turns out, dangerous.

The reason the date of 24th June had been on my mind, however, was more personal.  That evening, I read as the guest poet in the Shore to Shore tour organised by Picador and Wenlock Books.  Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay and John Sampson stopped off here to perform at one of a series of events celebrating poetry and community spread along a route from Falmouth to St Andrew's. 

All that day, I wondered what to read.  The set I'd planned in advance seemed flimsy, inconsequential.  What could a few hundred words do or mean in this context of new social, political and economic upheaval?  I am not a poet of grand themes - I write about what's ordinary: about queuing, about small encounters, about everyday instances of connection.  

What I remember most clearly about the evening, two weeks on, is the transformation of the confused and sombre mood by the reading of poetry, along with John's fanfares and musical frolics, to a responsive, bewildered and committed audience.  I remember being amongst strong and strongly feeling women whose welcome of me, whose humour, fury, passion and incredulity gave me a sense that all was not utterly lost.

'Everything is politics', says Thomas Mann.  And so I started with my poem Michelangelo's David.  It's about a queue.  But it's set in Florence.  So it's also about love, language, and the fluidity and permeability of borders between people and cultures.  It's about the joy of the taken-for-grantedness of those exchanges: it's about knowing the words pizza, gelato, cappuccino without having to try.  I read the poem with new energy, as an act of poetry. 

After all the beauty and wisdom of the poems read in sorrow, conviction and rage by Gillian, Jackie, Imtiaz and Carol Ann, right at the end, each of us poets, with Carol Ann directing, raised in turn a defiant placard.  I held up my one word feeling that sense I often get amongst poets: of being held, of belonging not just to this momentary four word phrase, but to people amongst whom truths must be told.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/27/poets-on-tour-foreboding-at-the-welsh-border

I Say Thank You

I've been wondering  what to say to the house I'm leaving.  I tried this:


Thank you for having me.


It didn't seem enough.  So I tried this:


Thank you that it's me you have had, here, within these walls, these lovely rooms and garden.


Thank you for giving me shelter, for the leaking roof, for all the warmth and draughts.  Thank you for the silence, the birdsong, the Saturday night revellers.  Thank you for the wisteria, the damson tree, the ground elder, the bindweed. Thank you for facing to the north, and sheltering your garden to the south.  Thank you for being my children's first sanctuary, their first playground, their first sickbay, their first studio, their first theatre, their first accident site, their first library, their first battleground, their first concert hall, their first dance floor.


When they were young, I danced my sons around the living room to the theme from Zorba the Greek.  I danced with my eldest on my hip, whirling around until we fell onto the sofa in giggles.  When the time came, my second son took his place in one arm, whilst I held his brother's hand, and we circled around and around the carpet, dizzier and dizzier.


Today, I haven't known how to say goodbye to this house.  I tried saying more:


Thank you for being a place of laughter, of desperation, of joy, of sorrow, of contentment, of adventure, of emptiness, of hope.  Thank you for the company, the loneliness, the deep connections, the arguments.  Thank you for the sleep, the dreaming, the wakefulness, the growing, the rest and weariness  Thank you for yesterday, last year, the last twenty-two years.  Thank you for today - for the hugging, the roast chicken, Kate Bush and Bach.  Thank you for tomorrow.


But even this wasn't enough for all that is in my heart, so I asked for music.  To my surprise, within seconds I was tapping my feet.  And it was as if my body knew what I wanted to say at last, as I picked myself up, danced through the rooms once more.
Zorba The Greek Theme

I Still My Soul

Yesterday morning I woke and thought of Dave.  A few minutes later, his name lit up my phone.


Much as I like him, I hadn't thought of Dave for quite a while.  He fixes my trusty car, and it has been very trusty of late, but even so, it needs an MOT each year.  What I thought when I woke yesterday was, "It must be about now that V40's MOT is due, or (gulp) maybe it was even due last week, or (here's hoping)  maybe it's due next week ... ", and before I'd woken enough to check my V40 file, Dave texted me with a reminder. 


Lots of thing happen which are coincidences with rational explanations (Dave runs a business: he keeps a diary ...), but I still enjoy moments like this as surprises of connection.


I used to have lots of ideas about the mysteries of our connectedness to each other and the world, having grown up with parents who prayed about every detail of our lives.  At one time, I'd have thought Dave an answer to a prayer I may not even have prayed. 


I drove to work instead of going by train today because I had to go to the garage to pay my bill.  But if I'd gone by train I wouldn't have heard Finlandia on Classic FM on the A5 heading towards the Welsh border; I wouldn't have been reminded of the Finlandia Hymn - one of Sibelius' finest tunes.  It's a beautiful, calm melody coming towards the end of a piece representative of the struggles of Finnish nationalism. 


The words given to this tune - Be still my soul -  are familiar to me from childhood, and as I crossed into Wales, I felt a peace come to me and a sense that, whilst I no longer subscribe to the meaning of the words: to the fundamentalist and terrifying Christian doctrine of human sacrifice bringing atonement for my sins, I am nevertheless connected to this lovely music, to the memories of summer Sunday evenings spent in the sleepy light of that Highbury church, to my mother playing the organ, to the choir singing, to the wealth of music my childhood gave me, and which has the capacity to light up my life.

I Flaunt An Event

Self-promotion of any sort runs deeply against the conventions my mother instilled in me.  Back in the 1970s and 80s, amongst her favourite phrases was:


     Don't put all your goods in the shop window.


This saying had application to a number of circumstances which she felt endangered my virtue: too-short skirts, mentioning my achievements, talking about the £500 I was due to inherit on my 18th birthday, looking anyone directly in the eye.


She might have added:

    If you've got it, don't, whatever you do, please don't flaunt it.


But I know she would've been proud to know that in two weeks' time, I will be appearing with Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay, Imtiaz Dharker and John Sampson as part of their road trip of poetry events promoting independent bookshops.  I wish she could've lived long enough to see me realise my dream of becoming a poet - I'll be putting a few of my goods in the shop window in her memory:


SHORE TO SHORE: Bridgnorth - Friday 24th June 7.30pm


Picador and Wenlock Books present Shore to Shore: Celebrating Poetry and Community with the Laureate and Friends, featuring Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay, John Sampson plus local poet Liz Lefroy


Theatre On The Steps, Stoneway Steps, Bridgnorth, Shropshire, WV16 4BD

 

£15.00

Tickets: https://billetto.co.uk/en/events/shore-to-shore-much-wenlock

https://www.panmacmillan.com/events/carol-ann-duffy-at-shore-to-shore-bridgnorth

I Login To My Account

Never mind my fluffiest pet, my mother's home town, or the maiden name which makes me think of my favourite word: the answer to my secret question is, "I've forgotten my password".


I have a stash of regularly used means of logging in, some of them weak, some moderate and some achieving a strong rating. It's like Lord Harlech is in my computer, issuing British Board of Password Censors certificates to my latest inventions, and occasionally awarding me a Certificate 18.


There's some sort of formula governing passwords.  It goes something like: the complexity of the word / number / capital letter / (no symbol) combo is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the account is logged into.  I think it's that way around.


What I mean is, that if it's a website I use rarely, I make the password increasingly complicated in desperate reinventions of what seemed like a good idea at the time. (My electricity account - really?  I'm expected to check this regularly enough to remember the number I attributed to the mismatch of the middle names of my pet rabbits from 1973?).


There's a problem.  Those sites I log-in-to  log into  login to ... into which I log frequently end up having the least secure passwords.  The sites which make me most vulnerable, and which need most security, in fact.  You know the ones I mean. 

I Uncover A Souvenir

One of the anomalies of my teenage years was that I had two penfriends: one Swedish, and one German, but the languages I learnt at school were French and Italian.


With my own children, I've tried to break the inheritance of linguistic mis-match.  So my younger son who learns French went to France on a school trip.  And my elder son, who learns German, has had a German penfriend, and been to Germany twice on school trips, and to Berlin with his father.  So when I found a souvenir brochure about East Berlin when sorting out my books today, I did the new thing, and showed it to him.


I went to East Berlin in 1980 as a guest of my German penfriend's family, after taking French and all the other O levels, when the DDR was at the height of its pride. 36 years later, finding the brochure I've kept since then was a surprise.  I had forgotten all about it, and about its tone.  "Take a good look around our city," it reads on page three.  "It is plain to see  that no one here has any fears about what the future has in store.  Young people know what they are learning and studying for."  I remember feeling slightly ill-at-ease leaving West Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie and having to account for myself in a few halting phrases to an East German border guard.  If only I'd learnt German, or gone to France instead, I too would have known what I was studying for - life would've been clearer.  According to page five, the vague sense of dis-ease I experienced must've been one I brought with me - "There are no crises here ... though ... much remains to be done in order to overcome the legacy of capitalist tenement building ..."


That German holiday was wonderful - for the first time I flew, sailed a dinghy, ate black cherries straight from the tree, gargled the national anthem and played tennis indoors.   I was to have another wonderful holiday in 1982 in Sweden - the souvenir that remains from that trip is an absurdly giant yellow comb which I won at the Gothenburg funfair.  There, I felt completely at ease.