Caption...

My cousin Steve and his friends didn't really fit into the KKK.

Boadicea and Bader...

It’s the twenty-first of February one of those unremarkable days that pretty much go unnoticed. It’s no Candlemas Day (Feb 2^nd), or Valentine’s Day (Feb 14^th) and it certainly isn’t Leap Day (Feb 29^th once every four years). So all in all it’s not much of a day at all and the grey damp weather does nothing to add to its lack of importance.

Of course every day becomes important sometimes. Things happen to even the most unimportant ordinary of days, even February days.

In 1431 Joan of Arc was accused of heresy in Rouen. That didn’t end well. Three hundred years later in 1741 Jethro Tull – the inventor not the musician – unveiled the seed drill and saved the backs of hundreds of thousands of farm workers. Mind you, he doomed a lot to impoverished starvation to boot. In 1804 Richard Trevithick demonstrated the first steam train in South Wales. In 1910 Douglas Bader, the flying ace, was born. He went on to lose both his legs in a daring flying accident but still managed to shoot down twenty German planes in the Second World War despite his new legs of tin. In 1952 we all became anonymous when Winston Churchill’s government abolished identity cards. In 1961 The Beatles – a new-fangled beat combination band – appeared for the first time at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. In 1998 Boadicea turned up; buried under Platform 8 at King’s Cross railway station. And just last year on this day Mevagissey council in Cornwall had to abandon plans to name a thoroughfare Hitler’s Walk as a result of a protest by town residents. Both Douglas Bader and Winston Churchill would have approved of that, Boadicea too probably.

So, maybe February the twenty-first isn’t as glamorous as Valentine’s Day, but it’s had its moments. I wonder what the next one will be? 

Plastic b(ol)locks...

There was once a world where Legoland did not exist. I know, what a terrible thought. In this time long ago Lego was not a cult for fifty-year old men to worship the latest Star Wars model or collect superhero figures. This was a time when Lego was just a series of plastic blocks which were the nemesis of vacuum cleaners and stockinged feet all over the land. A time when Lego was only a step up (or down) from the humble wooden brick. Alas those days seem to be long gone now and these days the mighty Lego reigns supreme with its own kingdom.

You may have noticed from this that I’m not a Lego fan. To be honest I’ve never really got Lego. I remember playing with it as a kid and having a little fun making things – usually shapeless masses of coloured bricks that I’d call a monster - but somehow building with Lego seemed so limited. Small coloured building blocks that clipped together one at a time to make things. Ooo Yippee. Yes, you could make anything that you wanted, just as long as it had corners and was pretty uniform in shape, but it was the sculptural equivalent of the Etch-a-Sketch and organic it wasn’t. Making a Lego banana was quite a challenge.

The Lego I remember didn’t come with instructions, you just made stuff from those tiny pieces of brittle plastic that came in a pretty limited variety of block shapes – twos, fours, eights, singles etc. I remember the platforms, which were useful for starting the build, and windows, good for building houses (yawn), but the Lego with all those stupid characters that so many people rave about today was still decades away contained within the nightmares of some clever yet-to-be-born marketing people somewhere far away in another universe.

From what I understand the Lego experience isn’t about building stuff these days anyway. Making your own unique blocky statement isn’t really the point any longer and using your imagination without the need for instructions isn’t the name of the game. Parents all over the country don’t have to ask: ‘What is it?’. They can tell what it is from what it says on the box and the instructions. Lego has become just another model making kit, not so very different from a bit of Ikea furniture or the contents of a Kinder egg. The Lego sets of today are no more than uncomplicated jigsaw puzzles with all of the decisions about where to place the pieces taken away by those bloody instructions.

I’m overstating the case I know, but it’s yet another example of a company selling their souls and the souls of our children by changing direction to make lots of money and killing creativity in the process. Lego sell sets now, not a block building experience. If you lose a piece you are screwed, if you lose the instructions you are screwed. To be honest it’s probably better not to open the boxes just in case something goes missing because you are screwed when that happens. Gone are the days of my old shoeboxes full of random Lego pieces just waiting to become an unrecognisable cubist masterpiece of pure downloaded consciousness. Lego is just another thing to make and put on a shelf, not an experience.

I always found Lego limiting anyway, not flexible enough to satisfy my creative indulgences, glue and papier mâché suited me far better. But then, I didn’t really like Airfix Kits either. I’ve always hated following instructions. I don’t think there will too many potential da Vincis playing with Lego, mind you da Vinci was pretty mechanical; he’d probably have liked it and it would have been the ideal Christmas gift for the young Piet Mondrian. Lego is a recipe for conformity. Dali might have done something with it though; twisting and burning it until it melted to his will.

I read a comment from a teacher about Lego somewhere. She said it was a really good tool to train children to follow the rules, keep to an agreed process, and end up in with the expected result. She meant it as a good thing.

And with that awful thought I will finish.

A day at the beach...

A day at the beach

Where are all the deckchairs for a shilling?

lines of striped relaxation

away from the factory line

the damp of the town

sitting on a rainbow

instead of grime

Where are the shoulder monkeys?

sharp teeth above and beneath

smile for the birdy

‘five bob please’

and the Punch and Judy

that policeman

the ghost

and the stick beaten baby

and the hurdy-gurdy

the swing boats

the sandcastles

the pots of tea on trays

sandy egg sandwiches

the nearly sunny days

skirts tucked into knickers

jump over the waves

the flannels and blazers

the heads in the newspaper lazers

the cricket bats

the film star sunglasses

grans in their best hats

knitted trunks round our arses

the headscarves and pearls

and see-through plastic sandals

the lumps of tar

old towels to surround us

the jellyfish

the starfish

tiny fish caught in a jar

the new-born babies

in pram shade oases

a cousin’s appendix scar

the betting slips

the quick dips

the coldest of seas

‘full of disease’

our nan said

and the donkeys

slowly padding along the beach

over and over

Doris and Clover

with hanging sad heads

and a sweet stick of rock

then home in the car

a push to get it going required

but back by ten o’clock

with the salt sweet seaweed air

and up at crack of dawn start

we came back tired

sand in our hair

from our day at the beach.

A date with reality…

TV seems to be preying a lot on my mind recently. Well, as I said yesterday there’s so much of it. Sometimes I think that the whole world has turned into a reality TV show. It used to be TV that aped life. Saturday night dramas were about real issues, gritty, set in the real world; Play for Today, Friday Night Theatre, Saturday Playhouse. These days it seems that the world we live in imitates a reality TV show and we all know how fake and staged they are.

The boundaries between reality and fiction have become very blurred and I for one am no longer sure what is real and what isn’t. We have lunatic politicians tweeting a version of the world that only exists in their own minds, alternative facts, fake truths, fake lies and they are shamelessly spoken of and readily accepted as reality by too many people, we are lied to and manipulated, are expected to vote around those lies and World Leaders perform like gameshow hosts, pouting and stamping on international TV in caked-on make-up against CGI backdrops of things that never happened to anyone ever.

It’s as if TV and the internet have become the real world and everything we see and hear is potentially or actually a lie. It isn’t helped by the uncovering of cover-ups that our institutions – the police, the church, sportsmen, entertainers and of course our politicians – have been lying about and getting away with for years. It doesn’t help that the media doesn’t simply report; it interprets, comments upon, takes positions, or simply follows the orders of corrupt owners and directors in a world where everyone and anyone can put out their own version of the truth and reality.

What do we really know for sure any more?

I was sitting in my car watching the shadows of the clouds move across the sea this afternoon. It was cold outside, but inside the car I was warmed by the winter sunshine. A ‘one-legged’ heron stood - not really fishing but gazing - by the edge of the water. Gulls sat on the pebbles on the shore, occasionally flying into the air for a minute or two before landing again. The occasional wave appeared in the calm sea almost from nowhere rather splashily breaking just as it reached land. The breeze, not quite a wind, stirred the marram grass and the wire rigging of the yachts in the boatyard hummed and clinked a sharp jingle of tinny music behind me.

It was quiet and peaceful and the show all around me was honest and natural and not put on for my benefit or to feed the egos of the birds. The waves didn’t break to order, nor did they claim not to be breaking or to be anything other than waves made of seawater. The clouds didn’t care if I watched them or not, they just got on with blowing about. The heron didn’t want my vote, he had no need of it, he just wanted a fish to swim by. Nothing in the landscape gained anything by my being there and it didn’t try to influence my opinion by making things more dramatic or vital than the really were.

It was real.

Reality still exists if you know where to find it.

TV time...

I’ve noticed that there seem to be even more animal programmes on the television than ever at the moment. I’ve nothing against them. Who doesn’t like to watch cuddly dogs doing cuddly things with camp comedians and lions ripping water buffaloes apart? Besides, it’s better than watching northern drunks getting arrested by the police on a Friday night for falling about drunk and endless footage of idiots doing ridiculous things in cars that they shouldn’t even be allowed to drive. 

We have it all these days don’t we? TV ‘documentaries’ about dodgy tradesmen, cruise ship boredom (have you found my luggage yet?), stupid twenty-somethings doing the things that stupid twenty-somethings do, medical conditions that even the Victorians wouldn’t want to make a spectacle of and cakes.

Entertainment seems to have no boundaries and I can’t help wondering how we got from ‘All Our Yesterdays’, ‘Zoo Time’ and ‘The Singing Detective’ to where we are today. I’m sure that a lot of it is driven by the amount of airtime TV has to fill. No longer does television start with Children’s Hour in the afternoon after school – and it was an hour - and finish with the National Anthem at 11.00 pm prompt (watch the little dot until it plinks out).

Nor do we have less than a handful of channels any longer; we have dozens, dozens of dozens and TV on demand and the Internet channels. Not so long ago I can remember just a choice of two and both were in black and white. How strange and impossible that seems now.

Now, I don’t want to get into the nostalgia zone, nor do I want to go on about how we have so many channels but nothing to watch (I’ll leave that to Bruce Springsteen), but I can’t help wondering if a lot of what we watch is driven by cost.

Filming a pride of lions wandering around the plains of Africa has to be significantly cheaper than making a Brideshead Revisited. Apart from the narrator and cameramen there must be very few participants to pay as lions generally work for nothing. Even dogs only expect a handful of biscuits and a good stroke to make TV programmes that can go on relentlessly for hours and hours over weeks and weeks. Just how much footage of dogs running and barking do we really need in this world? And do I really need to see Paul O’Grady in tears over yet another abandoned puppy.

Of course, there are lots of excellent dramas these days and it seems to have improved over recent times. There are also plenty of quiz shows which – I am ashamed to say –  I am a sad fan of. So it isn’t all bad. Just don’t get me started on ‘reality’ TV or the other pap we have thrown at us daily. Yes, I know that I have choice and can turn the box off if I want to, but that isn’t what TV is for. TV is meant to be the other person in the room. It’s just a shame that for much of the time that other person appears to be the chap you avoid down the pub, that social worker you hope that you never need to call on, a group of teenagers causing a ruckus in your road and of course the emergency services in one form or another.

Maybe it was better when we had two channels and TV programmes for less than a third of the day. It was certainly a lot simpler and in my memory the limited nature of what there was to watch made people even more keen to watch it – even the wrestling.

Everyone should write poetry...

I think that the world would be a calmer and better place if everybody wrote poetry. Think about it, it's a great way to get things off your chest and your thoughts across. How great it is to be able to conjure a picture with just a few words, just a few lines. It's almost like making a mini-movie that runs in people's heads, different people's heads, different every time and unique to them dependent on their experiences of the words you use.

I've been jotting down poems for years and when I don't write them down they are there in my head anyway. I see and hear poetry everywhere, in conversation, on the news, when I read a book. Sometimes whole passages jump out at me and I see the rhythm and rhyme even when it isn't meant to be verse. Poetry is everywhere not just in those dusty poetry books at the back of the library bookshelves.

We probably all wrote poetry at school. Some of us may even have enjoyed it. But how many people do you know that write poetry now? Or admit to it. Poetry has a bad name. It's seen as 'worthy', airy-fairy, a thing that only some rather privileged effete young men and bored housewives do. Well, it doesn't have to be, it can be anything you want. Just listen to the words of John Cooper Clarke and Hovis Presley. It really is up to you. Go on, just give it a go.

Write Poetry

Everyone should write poetry,

it’s just words put together

one after each other

in a certain order.

It doesn’t have to be clever.

It doesn’t even have to rhyme.

No need to work to meter.

Just write down the lines.

Just write it down

anyway that you like,

it’ll be fine.

It doesn’t need to be in motion

or even Andrew Motion.

Wax lyrical,

get crucial,

you really don’t need consumption

or a pallor and no gumption,

there is no magic potion.

It’s just words put together

no pressure whatsoever.

Everyone should write verse.

Doesn’t matter if you use a pencil or crayon,

use a smile from a stranger,

a moment of danger,

a heartbeat,

a falling tear mopped,

a strong cup of tea,

a bad time stopped.

Everyone should write poetry.

Believe me

it’ll make you feel happy

even when it’s crappy.

I know that it does me.

It's the best sort of therapy.
Trust me and try it, 

you’ll see.