I Wake Up In Bed
I Regret My Late Night
I Push Back The Duvet
I Turn On The Shower
I Wash My Hair
I Turn Off The Shower
I Towel Myself Down
I Roll On Deodorant
I Decide What To Wear
I Put On Some Clothes
I Change My Mind
I Brush My Hair
I Swap My Jumper
I Squeeze An Orange
I Boil The Kettle
I Moisturise My Face
I Boil The Kettle
I Apply Mascara
I Make Some Tea
I Dry My Hair
I Make A Cheese Sandwich
I Drink Tepid Tea
I Pack My Bag
I Lock My Door
I Descend The Stairs
I Ascend The Stairs
I Check My Door
I Walk To The Station
I Stop Off At Waitrose
I Queue For Free Coffee
I Meet A Stranger
I Hum A Tune
I Buy A Ticket
I Chat To The Ticket Seller
I Catch A Train
I Take Out My Book
I Turn To Page 254
I Stare Through The Window
I Remember Something Sad
I Take Out A Pen
I Look At My Hands
I Write Something Down
I Put Away My Book
I Disembark From The Train
I Arrive At Work
I Work For Eight Hours
I Rush For The Train
I Take Out My Book
I Turn To Page 254
I Read About Willem
I Mark My Page
I Get Off The Train
I Lope Up The Hill
I Reach My Home
I Hug My Son
I Boil The Kettle
I Make Some Tea
I Drink Hot Tea
I Mix G And T
I Add A Slice Of Lemon
I Cook Ham Hocks With Sweet Potato Fries And Green Vegetables
I Apologise To Vegetarians
I Whip Up Blueberry Pancakes
I Share Pancakes With My Son
I Recommend Vanilla Cream
I Enjoy Eating Seconds
I Chat About Shostakovich
I Put On My Pyjamas
I Boil The Kettle
I Blog My Day
Friday, 22 September 2017
Tuesday, 12 September 2017
I Review A Collection
The Knives of Villalejo
Matthew Stewart
Eyewear Publishing 2017
Those of us caught in mid-life, between generations - our children to one side, our parents (alive or dead) to the other - will find much that resonates in Matthew Stewart's first full collection.
Expressions of loss: of his father, primarily, but also of the contents of his childhood (including an elegy to the dying art of milk delivery: Milko - "by the ebbs and surges of daily pints you knew who’d grown, who’d aged, who’d upped and left") exist in tension with the fearless tug of his child's growing. Stewart explores this mid-state primarily in the ordinary incidents and objects of a daily life, albeit a life lived between West Sussex and Extremadura. So some of the ordinary is extraordinary, as exemplified in this exquisite moment:
Home Comforts
Until you’ve lived in a country
full of kitchens full of saucepans
that slowly creak to the boil,
a kettle won’t seem to whistle
like the owner of a loose dog
calling it back, calling it home.
Whether he is disposing of his father's ("small electricals?") razor at the dump, taken back in a gasp to the moment his father's teaching him to tie a tie, or Making Paella with David, "learning how to shell langoustines, exploring their cartoon-alien faces and train-track bellies", Stewart uses what's viscerally familiar, what's most noticeable only when it's gone, or shifted, or seen through a different, younger life, to draw us in: his sparse, precise language, engendering curiosity.
Though these poems are accessible at one level, there is nothing simple here. They are to be read and savoured like a complex wine with a minimalist label - to be sipped, held in the mouth a while.
Matthew Stewart will be reading at Shrewsbury Poetry on Thursday January 4th 2018
Matthew Stewart
Eyewear Publishing 2017
Those of us caught in mid-life, between generations - our children to one side, our parents (alive or dead) to the other - will find much that resonates in Matthew Stewart's first full collection.
Expressions of loss: of his father, primarily, but also of the contents of his childhood (including an elegy to the dying art of milk delivery: Milko - "by the ebbs and surges of daily pints you knew who’d grown, who’d aged, who’d upped and left") exist in tension with the fearless tug of his child's growing. Stewart explores this mid-state primarily in the ordinary incidents and objects of a daily life, albeit a life lived between West Sussex and Extremadura. So some of the ordinary is extraordinary, as exemplified in this exquisite moment:
Home Comforts
Until you’ve lived in a country
full of kitchens full of saucepans
that slowly creak to the boil,
a kettle won’t seem to whistle
like the owner of a loose dog
calling it back, calling it home.
Whether he is disposing of his father's ("small electricals?") razor at the dump, taken back in a gasp to the moment his father's teaching him to tie a tie, or Making Paella with David, "learning how to shell langoustines, exploring their cartoon-alien faces and train-track bellies", Stewart uses what's viscerally familiar, what's most noticeable only when it's gone, or shifted, or seen through a different, younger life, to draw us in: his sparse, precise language, engendering curiosity.
Though these poems are accessible at one level, there is nothing simple here. They are to be read and savoured like a complex wine with a minimalist label - to be sipped, held in the mouth a while.
Matthew Stewart will be reading at Shrewsbury Poetry on Thursday January 4th 2018
Saturday, 2 September 2017
I Set Fire To My Table
Back in the height of summer, you know, when the clouds were lowering over the horizon just as the school holidays started, my friend Emily and I plotted a small party, mainly to celebrate her birthday, which is today (Happy Birthday, gorgeous), but also to continue the warming process of my new home.
I've moved into my home gradually. Dawn downstairs reminded me that it's been five years, near enough, since I started buying it. I shared it for three years in a system called 'nesting' (more of this one day, maybe) and for the past 18 months, it's been all mine.
Wanting to ensure we had at least one guest, Emily and I created Hugh Jape, a mannequin dressed for the occasion in one of my son's hand-made coats and draped in fairy lights. We stood him in welcome, at the bottom of the stairs, calm as anything. We discussed food, seating, dancing, ice, candles. We discussed my new table, the quality of its oak grain, and the need not to damage it with water. We protected it with a plastic table cloth.
What happened to my table halfway through the party was entirely my doing. It involved tea lights and the careless placement of a packet of poppadums (Waitrose). Back in the 70s at school, we used to shrink crisp bags in the oven and wear the miniaturised Smiths Salt and Vinegar or Cheese and Onion packets as badges. The bag of poppadums didn't shrink - it burst into flames. The plastic cloth underneath quickly followed suit.
My first reaction was to try to put out the flames with the second pack of poppadums (Waitrose). Maybe one guest brought both packets (thank you, and I'm sorry). I completely forgot about the fire triangle (heat, fuel, oxygen) in my haste. Fortunately, Mike hadn't, and he calmly poured water (sparkling, natch) on the table top fire.
Afterwards, Mike said that what'd come to hand first was lemonade, but that he'd had enough time to choose sparkling water. I was glad about that, as the smell of burning sugar added to burning poppadum and plastic would've lingered.
As it is, the smell is nowhere to be smelt today and I am urged, once again, towards gratitude: I'm so grateful that the party didn't end in a panicked alarm, that the table isn't damaged, even though in the few minutes of Ted and Mike doing the clearing up and re-dressing-the-table-in-a-duvet-cover-process I had reconciled myself to its imagined imperfections.
Yes, the cloth with its gaping charred hole had to be thrown away (along with the now-laminated poppadums) but what of it? What of the small losses in comparison to the warmth of my calm-as-Hugh-in-a-crisis friends who have seen me through to this gift of a place, this sanctuary of rest and creativity.
I've moved into my home gradually. Dawn downstairs reminded me that it's been five years, near enough, since I started buying it. I shared it for three years in a system called 'nesting' (more of this one day, maybe) and for the past 18 months, it's been all mine.
Wanting to ensure we had at least one guest, Emily and I created Hugh Jape, a mannequin dressed for the occasion in one of my son's hand-made coats and draped in fairy lights. We stood him in welcome, at the bottom of the stairs, calm as anything. We discussed food, seating, dancing, ice, candles. We discussed my new table, the quality of its oak grain, and the need not to damage it with water. We protected it with a plastic table cloth.
What happened to my table halfway through the party was entirely my doing. It involved tea lights and the careless placement of a packet of poppadums (Waitrose). Back in the 70s at school, we used to shrink crisp bags in the oven and wear the miniaturised Smiths Salt and Vinegar or Cheese and Onion packets as badges. The bag of poppadums didn't shrink - it burst into flames. The plastic cloth underneath quickly followed suit.
My first reaction was to try to put out the flames with the second pack of poppadums (Waitrose). Maybe one guest brought both packets (thank you, and I'm sorry). I completely forgot about the fire triangle (heat, fuel, oxygen) in my haste. Fortunately, Mike hadn't, and he calmly poured water (sparkling, natch) on the table top fire.
Afterwards, Mike said that what'd come to hand first was lemonade, but that he'd had enough time to choose sparkling water. I was glad about that, as the smell of burning sugar added to burning poppadum and plastic would've lingered.
As it is, the smell is nowhere to be smelt today and I am urged, once again, towards gratitude: I'm so grateful that the party didn't end in a panicked alarm, that the table isn't damaged, even though in the few minutes of Ted and Mike doing the clearing up and re-dressing-the-table-in-a-duvet-cover-process I had reconciled myself to its imagined imperfections.
Yes, the cloth with its gaping charred hole had to be thrown away (along with the now-laminated poppadums) but what of it? What of the small losses in comparison to the warmth of my calm-as-Hugh-in-a-crisis friends who have seen me through to this gift of a place, this sanctuary of rest and creativity.
Saturday, 12 August 2017
Saturday, 22 July 2017
I Publish A Poem
For the Class of 1982, South Hampstead High School - written after our reunion in 2015, and published here in eager anticipation of seeing you again next week.
With love, and immense gratitude for being friends to me in childhood. After our last reunion, I realised how SHHS gave me the beginnings of intellectual freedom - a significance I hadn't understood before.
With love, and immense gratitude for being friends to me in childhood. After our last reunion, I realised how SHHS gave me the beginnings of intellectual freedom - a significance I hadn't understood before.
School Reunion
We came imagining others
would’ve attained diamonds -
against expectations, we
find we’re in this together:
turns out we always have
been, though we hadn’t understood till now
how close are
the every ways in which we intersect.
We meet few people in the
time we’re given: life’s shorter even
than we supposed. Those long-ago women held up as examples
-
Boadicea, Elizabeth,
Florence, Emmeline, dear, dear Anne Frank,
(whose story we were
told, as if we could grow up to change her ending)
- great as they were, none
of them were with us in French or Biology,
so we looked to each
other for inspiration, asked: “What will become of us?”
sang ourselves out at the
end of each school year, sentimental transitions
towards this wet summer’s
afternoon: the fullest I can remember.
It's abundant – we eat
and drink: even our dead talk with us.
Our schooldays are always between us: everything still to be discovered.I Break My Phone
My first and last resort, in terms of fixing anything electronic, is to turn whatever it is off and on. So, when my phone froze this morning I switched it off, then tried to switch it back on again.
Nothing.
A few hours later, and my phone is in bits at the repair shop. It's waiting till Tuesday for further attention, and even then there's no assurance that it's fixable.
I use my phone a lot. I text people I want to meet. I send thinking of you messages. I take photographs and edit them. I check Facebook, check the train timetables, check the weather, check the time, check my diary. For a while, I checked my previous night's snoring on a 'sleep app'. I check my pocket, my bag for my phone before I go out.
And there are the other things. I jot down poetic thoughts in the Notes section when I'm caught short of pen and / or paper. My phone, small though it is, holds in its circuits much of what makes up my life - conversations, appointments, ideas, memories, connections - all those words: all those words and all those pictures.
I joked to a friend last week that our conversation must be sparky, because my phone felt hot in my hand as we exchanged messages. I even speculated about spontaneous combustion.
Were I a different sort of person (an electronics engineer, for example) I might have recognised the heat I've been feeling in my phone - and the freezing I've been seeing - as actually significant. Instead, I've been choosing, as I so often do when noticing phenomena, to interpret these things as metaphors.
Nothing.
A few hours later, and my phone is in bits at the repair shop. It's waiting till Tuesday for further attention, and even then there's no assurance that it's fixable.
I use my phone a lot. I text people I want to meet. I send thinking of you messages. I take photographs and edit them. I check Facebook, check the train timetables, check the weather, check the time, check my diary. For a while, I checked my previous night's snoring on a 'sleep app'. I check my pocket, my bag for my phone before I go out.
And there are the other things. I jot down poetic thoughts in the Notes section when I'm caught short of pen and / or paper. My phone, small though it is, holds in its circuits much of what makes up my life - conversations, appointments, ideas, memories, connections - all those words: all those words and all those pictures.
I joked to a friend last week that our conversation must be sparky, because my phone felt hot in my hand as we exchanged messages. I even speculated about spontaneous combustion.
Were I a different sort of person (an electronics engineer, for example) I might have recognised the heat I've been feeling in my phone - and the freezing I've been seeing - as actually significant. Instead, I've been choosing, as I so often do when noticing phenomena, to interpret these things as metaphors.
Sunday, 2 July 2017
I Slay My Father
A few years ago, it was probably a Thursday, my therapist sat me opposite an empty chair, put a cushion in it and said, "Your father is here. What would you like to say to him?"
The skill of the therapist is in judging the moment, in providing the safe space in which this can take place. At the moment this happened for me, I'd done at least a year's work, maybe more.
I'd arrived for that first therapy session desperate - full of shame, tears and self-loathing. I'd been in that state before in my life, many times. I'd been to four previous counsellors, come away from them, emptier, stiffening my lip. But this time, it was for real: an hour a week, hanging on in there, counting down the days till the next session. Perhaps it was because I needed to talk to a man. Someone intelligent enough to see and courageous enough to challenge my tricks. Someone who knew about Christianity and its doctrines from the inside.
As with any therapy, it's the quality of the relationship that matters more than the paradigm or techniques. After a few months, I felt accepted in that therapy space. I felt there, for the first time in my life, that it is okay to be me. Only then was it safe to tell my father what I thought. It wouldn't kill me.
And I raged at him. I raged about his harsh faith, how it trumped everything with the fear of damnation. About his hitting me for my own good. His lack of protection. His lack of affection. His need to control me. His sexist attitudes. His fear of anything that could be construed as sexual expression. About his rules, his bloody rules about everything. About his homophobia. Most of all about his dragging me into his beliefs, without allowing any space for real questions, making me say the words, week after week. About his shaming of me from the pulpit that Sunday Evensong when, like some sort of terrible god, he spoke his discipline from on high to me in front of the whole congregation. I was six, or seven. Why was I even there? The joylessness. The daily fear. The repression. The depression. The saying that children's spirits must be broken. The actual saying of that.
So I told him, the him sitting in that chair resurrected somehow, that I hated him. In fact I screamed and cried it. And I told him, triumphant through my tears, that it hadn't worked - that my spirit is damaged, but not broken.
And when my therapist spoke, I turned to him and shouted, "I haven't finished yet!" Even he looked, for once, surprised, taken aback by the force of my anger.
I can't remember all I raged, and I'm glad about that. I do remember saying that I no longer wanted his internalised voice, my Critical Parent, to rule my life. It was the expending of the emotion, the pent up (I'll say it again) rage, that finally chased his dread voice from my mind.
At the end of it all, I looked at the chair, and it was empty. I was exhausted, peaceful. It was like that moment in Star Wars when, sliced by a light sabre, Darth Vader's cloak crumples to the floor with a sigh, deprived of its puffed up illusion of menace. Does that even happen as a scene in Star Wars? I don't know. Even if it didn't, that is what it was like.
If you are one of my father's many continuing fans, I don't apologise for this blog. I am his daughter - these are my truths and telling them is necessary for me. They will be different from, and don't diminish, yours. I know he was loved and admired by many, and maybe, had he not been my father, I could have admired him too. His courage in the face of disability, his uprightness
Is this my Larkinesque moment, my This Be The Verse?
The closest I got to reconciliation with my father was after his death, when I wrote this poem. As with all true poems, it revealed something to me in the writing - something in it is an act, despite everything, of love, of hope.
That summer’s afternoon, we had returned
grown and growing on.
In the pub garden
we witnessed your gravity fail, and smiled as
you slid earthwards
via two halves of cider and a good lunch.
rosy, full, mellowing, bardic.
Unencumbered, you succumbed to living,
undignified and glorious,
growing earthy and stained from common grass and soil.
from the swept up heap of you
which has so often cornered me.
I wonder if you saw this softening,
felt it too?
The skill of the therapist is in judging the moment, in providing the safe space in which this can take place. At the moment this happened for me, I'd done at least a year's work, maybe more.
I'd arrived for that first therapy session desperate - full of shame, tears and self-loathing. I'd been in that state before in my life, many times. I'd been to four previous counsellors, come away from them, emptier, stiffening my lip. But this time, it was for real: an hour a week, hanging on in there, counting down the days till the next session. Perhaps it was because I needed to talk to a man. Someone intelligent enough to see and courageous enough to challenge my tricks. Someone who knew about Christianity and its doctrines from the inside.
As with any therapy, it's the quality of the relationship that matters more than the paradigm or techniques. After a few months, I felt accepted in that therapy space. I felt there, for the first time in my life, that it is okay to be me. Only then was it safe to tell my father what I thought. It wouldn't kill me.
And I raged at him. I raged about his harsh faith, how it trumped everything with the fear of damnation. About his hitting me for my own good. His lack of protection. His lack of affection. His need to control me. His sexist attitudes. His fear of anything that could be construed as sexual expression. About his rules, his bloody rules about everything. About his homophobia. Most of all about his dragging me into his beliefs, without allowing any space for real questions, making me say the words, week after week. About his shaming of me from the pulpit that Sunday Evensong when, like some sort of terrible god, he spoke his discipline from on high to me in front of the whole congregation. I was six, or seven. Why was I even there? The joylessness. The daily fear. The repression. The depression. The saying that children's spirits must be broken. The actual saying of that.
So I told him, the him sitting in that chair resurrected somehow, that I hated him. In fact I screamed and cried it. And I told him, triumphant through my tears, that it hadn't worked - that my spirit is damaged, but not broken.
And when my therapist spoke, I turned to him and shouted, "I haven't finished yet!" Even he looked, for once, surprised, taken aback by the force of my anger.
I can't remember all I raged, and I'm glad about that. I do remember saying that I no longer wanted his internalised voice, my Critical Parent, to rule my life. It was the expending of the emotion, the pent up (I'll say it again) rage, that finally chased his dread voice from my mind.
At the end of it all, I looked at the chair, and it was empty. I was exhausted, peaceful. It was like that moment in Star Wars when, sliced by a light sabre, Darth Vader's cloak crumples to the floor with a sigh, deprived of its puffed up illusion of menace. Does that even happen as a scene in Star Wars? I don't know. Even if it didn't, that is what it was like.
If you are one of my father's many continuing fans, I don't apologise for this blog. I am his daughter - these are my truths and telling them is necessary for me. They will be different from, and don't diminish, yours. I know he was loved and admired by many, and maybe, had he not been my father, I could have admired him too. His courage in the face of disability, his uprightness
Is this my Larkinesque moment, my This Be The Verse?
The closest I got to reconciliation with my father was after his death, when I wrote this poem. As with all true poems, it revealed something to me in the writing - something in it is an act, despite everything, of love, of hope.
In the Pub Garden
That summer’s afternoon, we had returned
grown and growing on.
In the pub garden
we witnessed your gravity fail, and smiled as
you slid earthwards
via two halves of cider and a good lunch.
Propped up unevenly by the fence
you slurred your way into contentment:rosy, full, mellowing, bardic.
Unencumbered, you succumbed to living,
undignified and glorious,
growing earthy and stained from common grass and soil.
Later on, leaving you, I know that this
is the recollection I will choose to siftfrom the swept up heap of you
which has so often cornered me.
I wonder if you saw this softening,
felt it too?
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