Simple is better...

I am so quickly coming to the conclusion that simple is better.

As a case in point this is my trusty and much used stovetop expresso maker. It’s small, was very cheap (under a tenner), simply made - so there’s very little to break, it’s easy-peasy to use, and, oh yes, it brews a better cup of coffee than the huge electric device that broke after less than a year and cost – well I won’t tell you what it cost.

Yes, simpler is better. When I want a coffee all I do is unscrew the aluminium base, fill it with water, spoon some ground coffee into the colanderised coffee chamber, re-screw the pouring coffee pot chamber back onto the base, and stand it on a lighted stove.

Five minutes or so later and voilà! Perfect coffee.

The Moca Expresso (that’s what it’s called) was invented in 1933 by an Italian named Bialetti. The water is heated by the stove flame and as the water molecules gain momentum (kinetic energy) they collide with each other. As the temperature builds so does the kinetic energy, and there are more and faster collisions which increases the pressure in the pot, forcing the water upwards, through the colander coffee chamber, and up into the pouring chamber. The thick cast aluminium pot is made to withstand the additional pressure - that’s why it has that distinctive (and structurally stronger) ten sided shape and isn’t simply round.

Simplicity itself – well as long as you ignore the science.

As you can see I’ve had mine years, I had to make a wire mesh thing to get it to stand on the stove easily, but it works well and my Moca Express washes clean in a minute.

Simple is better.

I’m really going to hang on to that thought and see where it can take me.

Percy the pig...

Here he is, my friendly pig. He always comes to see me when I pass, looking for his apple. He’s such an intelligent pig.

When I was a very young boy, pre-school, the highlight of my visits to my grandfather’s house in Lincolnshire was feeding the pig in the brick-built sty at the bottom of the garden. All the country people kept a ‘home’ pig back then, fattening it up throughout the year and taking it to the butchers in the autumn for slaughter ready to cure, smoke, salt, pickle and press ready for Christmas.

He was invariably called Percy. He always loved to have his ear scratched. I don’t know how many different Percy ears I scratched as a boy, but several. My granddad would stand me on the pigsty wall so that I could watch him eat his turnips, mangel wurzels, and kitchen scraps all mixed together in a swill. Pigs were cheap to keep, a recycling machine, and at the end of it provided such good meals throughout the winter.

Black pudding, brawn, pickled trotters, crispy scratchings; none of the Percy was wasted - my grandmother, a trained cook, made sure of that.

Then one day when I visited there was no Percy. His sty was vacant, his metal trough empty - my granddad couldn’t get a licence.

The authorities, not content with stopping home slaughter years before, now required ‘home’ pig owners to buy a licence and undertake regular inspections before they could keep a pig at home. They claimed that it was about hygiene standards, food regulations, the welfare of the pig – but it put a stop to home rearing, something that had gone on for hundreds of years.

Visiting granddad wasn’t the same after that. Percy’s sty remained empty, the kitchen scraps went in the bin. Thank God my grandmother kept chickens.

Funny how things change...

I was bought this snow globe by an old friend many years ago now.

It’s a bleak thing – a stream, some leafless winter trees. It has a button that can be pressed to turn on the sound of the wind and an echoing owl calling far away in the distance, adding to the desolation. There are a few lines by Basho the Japanese poet etched into the silver stand: ‘Winter solitude – in a world of one colour the sound of the wind.’

I used to find this globe soothing. The sound of the wind and owl were comforting, the bareness of the trees beautiful and sparse, the stream enchanting, the words of Basho meaningful.

These days though I find the whole thing disturbing. I can barely look at it - funny how things change.

Partly it’s because the water has ‘bloomed’, becoming tainted and discoloured by algae that has spoiled the cleanliness of the simple scene. I won’t ponder on that statement for too long, it would take me somewhere I don't want to go just now, and besides it's far more than simply the colour of the water.

What I once found interesting in the globe I now find unsettling. For me this globe has come to represent something sinister, an ending. I used to think of this globe as dreamlike, these days it's nightmarish. I can’t bear to look into it. When I shake the snow I think of radioactive fallout. When I look in the stream I see pollution. The sound of the wind is desolate, the owl cries out in pain in a wilderness. It’s diseased. Wrong.

I don’t want it around me any more. This is the last that anyone will ever see of it.

I have buried it in a place that only I know and I’m leaving it there. I don’t want it haunting me forever.

It is the snow globe isn't it?

Funny how things change.

Doldrums - a poem with palindromes...

Today is national Poetry day. I know because it was mentioned on radio 4 this morning as I drove along the M62.

Apparently we should all take some time out to read a little poetry on this very special day. Of course being me I had to go one better and decided that to celebrate this earth shattering event that I would write some.

I tried throughout the day, rhyming this, metering that, but nothing would come – I almost began to think that I’d gone all Paul McCartney. It was as if my 'oh so' poetic nature had deserted me leaving me on a far too flat sea stuck in the doldrums.

Doldrums…

Well maybe some wouldn’t call it poetry, but if I read it it then it counts and you can tick the ‘done’ box on the ‘did you read a poem on national poetry day?' box.

Doldrums

Sometimes when I’m stuck in the Doldrums

Waiting for the breeze, a wind to fill my unfurled heart

I think of palindromic symmetry

Words for wind, a deed to make a start…

A dog, a plan, a canal, pagoda

A Fool, a tool, a Pool - LOOPALOOTALOOFA!

A dank, sad nap. Eels sleep and ask nada.

Are we not drawn onward to new era?

Mr. Owl Ate My Metal Worm.

Do geese see god?

Model truth: turtledom.

"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.

Strap on no parts.

I, Rasputin, knit up Sari.

Strays simple help, missy arts.

I'm a lass, a salad, new end alas as salami.

So I’m out of the Doldrums

Wording the breeze that fills unfurled heart

The magic of palindromic symmetry

A spell for the wind – stratagem, megatarts.…

You may tick that box now. National poetry day over. Job done.

Pick up sticks…

When I’m out walking the beaches I can’t resist picking up the sticks washed up by the sea. I’ll often fill a carrier bag or two, taking them home and storing them in my shed.

Sometimes I use them as kindling for a fire, enjoying the magical blue flames that the dried salt conjures. Other times I make things from them, once a mirror, another time a replacement fence – quite rough that one, just some interwoven sticks in front of the old fence. It looked good though.

This time I thought ‘fish’.

I must find something better than a button for the eye though.

A pot of positive...

This is the pot where I’ve planted some sunshine ready for next year.

It doesn’t look much like sunshine at the moment but when we are through the winter and the soil begins to warm this big pot of home-made bulb fibre it will blaze with the yellows and oranges of over sixty daffodils and narcissus. At least that is my hope.

Yes, they are planted much too closely together, but it will be such a picture - as my mother would say.

I’m planning for the future, waiting for my nasturtiums to finish and the seed pods to dry. It’ll soon be time to collect the seed from this season’s flower heads ready for next year, placing each type in a small paper envelope and sealing it with sticky tape. I do this every year, sometimes with success, sometimes with hardly any at all. But you never know what can happen unless you try, this year I’ve had some fantastic Scabious from last year’s seed.

And I’ve cut my strawberry runners from the parent plant and they seem to be doing well. In a few weeks time I’ll pot them on and put them in a cold frame, well it can’t do any harm to protect them a little from the winter’s frost. I’ll plant them out in the spring. I may try growing some in hanging baskets next year, and I’m going to try a couple in empty plastic water bottles which I’m going to hang in my greenhouse – once I’ve erected it.

And why all of this? I often wonder myself. I guess I'm just getting on with it.

Maybe it’s to feel part of that cycle that nature moves to. Maybe it’s about creating something beautiful or in the case of the strawberries delicious, from almost nothing. Maybe it’s about feeling useful, able to make something, anything, happen - something simple and easy and good. Or maybe it’s about planning for the future and having something to look forward to, hope for.

Truth is – does it matter why? I'm just doing it. It makes me feel better. Isn’t that enough?

An anonymous commenter on my blog left this for me last night, a quote from ‘the late great Stephen Bruton’ as my anonymous follower put it -

"'...what makes you grow old is replacing hope with regret…'” and Anonymous went on to warn "Be careful. Keep the balance. Or it will eat you up inside."

Brrrrr.... Time to plant some more daffodils I think.

GCSE’s, bus stops, speeches, dreams - and wishes and whisperers…

A grainy picture taken at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester last Thursday evening. I had to use the camera on my phone; we were told cameras weren’t allowed. It didn’t stop some of the other parents with their zoom lenses and flashes though. Still, it captures the moment and shows off Holly’s new red hair well enough.

There was music (piano, violin, flute) readings, photographic slide shows, a long promotional speech from the Headmistress. I already knew that Holly’s school was in the UK’s top twenty and that they had a 98% pass rate at ‘B’ and above for GCSE. All of the parents must have known, we're reminded often enough when we get the requests (demands) for 'donations'. But hey, what's another twenty minutes or so, especially when followed by another guest speaker, a woman who works for customs and excise and has an OBE, Tamsin Somebodyorother.

And then the girls filed up one by one to receive their certificates – all one hundred and eight of them.

Tamsin Whatshername’s speech was actually very good. Her messages were clear and she expressed them well - be yourself, follow your dreams, and have a go at what you want no matter what other people are saying that you should do – listen to your conscience, do what you think is right and ignore the whisperers.

I hope that Holly was listening as she sat there waiting to get her ‘certificate’ (not her certificate at all really, but a piece of paper ‘in lieu’ of the real certificates that hadn’t arrived in time). I hope that she was listening hard.

I was listening, listening to every vowel and consonant and wishing that Tamsin Thingummybob had been the speaker at my school back when I was sixteen and so full of promise and hope. Back then I could have changed my world, I could so easily have realised my dreams before I started listening to the whisperers; letting them have too much control, too much say, of and in me. It could have been so different if (back then in that time that lives on in my dreams sometimes) I’d followed those dreams rather than storing them up for now.

Don’t worry I’m not going to say ‘I could have been a contender’, but maybe I could - don't quite know a contender for what though.

I was still listening as Tamsin Whatdyermacallit finished her talk with this. I’d heard it before, it always strikes a resonating chord, and this time was no exception. I hate Mark Twain sometimes.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Damn you Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

If only I’d known my dreams back then and what they could become. I know them better now, I know better now, but I think I may have missed the dream realisation bus. Maybe I’ve hung around for too long at the DR bus stop whispering with the whisperers, not listening to myself and listening to them instead.

As Holly shook Tamsin Whateverhernamewas’s hand and received her bogus certificate I made a wish, a few actually. I wished that Holly never gets held up at the DR bus stop listening to the whisperers, I wished that she knows her dreams, follows them, and dreams them into reality, I wished that she catch the trade winds in her sails, explores, dreams, and discovers, and finally I wished that I’d be able to still remember Tamsin’s other name when I got home.

Oh well, as long as my other wishes come true.