I Remember…

I once declared that I was going to learn a poem a week to keep my brain active. (That was in my April 2019 post Learning Poetry by Heart) Well, that lasted all of two weeks, but I can still remember a few lines from the Shakespeare Sonnet that I so enthusiastically selected at the time… 

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate. 

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

That’s it! I can’t remember another word! 

In that 2019 post I included the first verse of one of my favourite poems from childhood, ‘I Remember I Remember’ by Thomas Hood. My Great Auntie Alice gave me a book full of his poems when I was young and that particular one lives on in my mind. I suspect it's because I’m so obsessed with nostalgia. He’s remembering the house where he was born. I can remember the house where I was born. It was a small terraced house. The front door opened on to a tiny lobby with a flight of stairs directly in front of it and the door to the living room and kitchen to the right. I remember feeling safe there, shut away from the big world outside.

Hood talks of the ‘little window where the sun came peeping in at morn’. I used to share a bedroom with my sister when I was very small but I clearly remember the day that Mum and Dad painted the tiny boxroom a pale yellow and told me that it was to be my very own bedroom. It too had a little window and the sun did indeed peep in at dawn. 

Further on in the poem Hood talks about ‘fir trees dark and high’. We had no trees in our tiny back yard and I don’t remember being able to see any trees from my bedroom window but I often thought about Hood’s fir trees. I loved the way he thought that their ‘slender tops were close against the sky’. When we moved into our present house about 30 years ago there were four huge fir trees in the garden. Some days I was convinced that their tops were leaning up against the sky. I loved those trees but sadly each of the four firs succumbed to old age, with bulges at branch joints and risks of collapse. They had to be removed. Nothing lasts forever

Great Auntie Alice is no longer with us, but she knew how much I loved that book. It was indeed a special present. At this point I would normally post up a photo of the book but sadly it too succumbed to age. The pages had long turned brown and they gradually disintegrated beyond repair. We had to put it into the recycling. Like I said, nothing lasts forever… except for that poem which I don’t think I will ever forget. You can read the whole poem on this Poetry Foundation link.

 

Monday evening is the start of Rosh Hashonah (the Jewish New Year).  

Last year I caught Covid the day before Rosh Hashonah. That was the start of a troubled year with worries, upheavals and health issues, not least for my lovely big sister who struggled with her health and died in June. 

I have the apple and honey ready for tomorrow evening. Here's hoping it will help us in our prayers for a sweet and fruitful year.  Would I be pushing it to also pray for peace in this troubled world of ours? Surely it's worth a try. 

To all those who celebrate it I wish you a Shana Tova, and a happy year ahead to everyone.

Have you got an accent?

Some people are convinced that they don’t speak with a regional accent, that they speak normally and it’s people from other areas who have accents. In fact, we all have a speech pattern that is influenced by our family and our local groupings. Even what we used to call ‘Queen’s English’ is itself an accent. Regional differences may have become ‘fudged around the edges’ due to wider travel and national television, but regional accents persist and, what’s more, they fascinate me. 

I love the poetic lilt of Wales. Their accent always makes me think of the TV programme ‘Ivor the Engine’. I could listen all day to the Liverpool scouse accent. It reminds me of 1960s Beatles mania, my favourite era. I love the Scottish accent which, when spoken slowly has a gentle lilt, but when spoken rapidly is, to my ear, incomprehensible in a way that makes me giggle – apologies to any Scottish visitors to this blog. 

For a comparatively small nation there are a surprisingly large number of regional variations. The Yorkshire and Lancashire accent each have their own distinctive sound, as do Devon and Cornwall. But it’s the East Midlands accent that I know best. I’ve lived all my life in Leicester and, although my parents were cockneys, I never picked up their lingo. ‘Ey up me duck’ might sound like a cliché but I grew up hearing that kind of talk, especially on Leicester Market where Mum and Dad had a stall and I spent a lot of time wandering round.

I’ve written a piece called ‘Me an’ me sis’. It’s not quite accurate in that neither of us actually spoke to the tramps but it’s the kind of thing I believe they would have said had we spoken to them, and in my memory there was a tramp in every doorway in 1950s Leicester. I hope you can manage to read it because I’ve tried to portray the language as we spoke it when we were young. Just in case you’re confused, frit means frightened and oakie is an ice cream.

Me an’ me sis

It were 1955 or thereabouts. Our mam would send us up town, me an’ me sis, runnin’ errands... or gerrin’ us out from under ‘er feet more like. She’d wave a finger at us an’ she’d say, ‘Now don’t you talk to no tramps!’ Our mam were frit o’ tramps but we weren’t frit. Them tramps were ok, just down on their luck like Old Stinky wi’ wild ‘air and dirty coat, a belt made o’ string tied round ‘is waist. Sometimes we’d stop and ‘ave a chat wi’ ‘im and ‘e’d tell us ‘ow he once fought in the war, 'ow ‘e’d ‘ad a gun, 'ow ‘e’d seen men die, just like the cowboys at the Pictures. Our mam gev us money for stuff like potatoes off the market, King Edwards cause they were the best, and she’d give us an extra sixpence for an oakey from the oakey man. We’d share it, taking it in turns to ‘ave a lick except me sis’d ‘ave the crunchy bit at the bottom, cause she were older 'an me.

Is there a regional phrase typical of where you live? 

A Day at the Races

We live within walking distance of Leicester Racecourse but I can count on one hand the number of times I've been there. I don't 'follow the horses' - is that even the correct terminology? But this weekend there was a charity event in aid of The Teenage Cancer Trust so I donned what I hoped would be a suitable outfit for the occasion, took my frilly white parasol for sun protection and headed off to the races.

It was a sponsored event and we were directed to the hospitality marquee. On the plus side, this meant we didn't have to work out the afternoon's races all by ourselves. There was a master of ceremonies and a local punter who gave tips and advice on each race. On the minus side, the temperature in the marquee must have been heading towards 40 degrees... but we survived it.

Our marquee was close to the parade ring, so we got a close up view of the horses before each race. I loved the way some of them had fancy plaits and  some even a bit of bling on their manes, such handsome animals. I tried taking photos of them as they paraded round but they were going so fast that...

Well you can't see a camera screen in full sunshine, now can you!!!

It was a lovely day out with food, friends and plenty of opportunities to donate to the charity. Near the end of the afternoon Rod even managed to choose a winner...

It wasn't my finest afternoon of photography. It was too hot for me, I'm afraid. This is the only time of year that I appreciate living in an old house with chilly rooms. Mind you, it’s a shame our two cats, Betty and Sophie, don’t take advantage of them. They insist on curling up outside in the full sun. I try carrying them in but they dash straight out again. I've had cats all my life and I still don't understand them. 

Anyway, back to the races, information about the Teenage Cancer Trust can be found here. It's a worthwhile charity, and well worth getting a bit overheated for.

Turning Precious Memories into Poems

With the best of intentions I restarted my blog posts in May of this year but then my sister died. She'd been ill for the last year but I always thought she'd be fine again, thought we'd go walking once more along the seafront near her home, a seaside town where she'd lived since her time on a nearby commune. I can't imagine what it would be like to live on a commune, or in a caravan on a cliff top field, which was another of her many exploits. How can siblings be so different? I was always the staid, sensible, quiet one. My sister was the bubbly, glamorous, adventurous one. 

It takes weeks, sometimes months, maybe even years, for precious memories to be turned into poems. For example, in 2023 Under the Radar published Herring Night which emerged out of a childhood memory of my Grandma and Great Aunts who came from Eastern Europe and loved nothing more than a supper of pickled herrings. The poem talks about the Polish celebration of Śledziówka when herrings are a special feast on the evening before Lent, and compares it with the poverty experienced in the early 1900s in Eastern Europe when herrings were considered a blessing when there was nothing else to eat. The final version was draft number 10. Numbers 1 to 9 had rambled through a myriad of forms.

Maybe one day I'll be able to write a poem about my sister. Before she died she'd requested a Humanist burial with a cardboard coffin, no eulogy, no prayers, just a peaceful meadow. The funeral director asked me for a piece of music reflecting her life, to be played after the coffin had been lowered. My sister loved dancing. Long ago she had been awarded medals for her ballroom dancing. Her jive routine would pull a crowd in a dance hall and she adored musical theatre. I selected 'Good Morning Good Morning' from 'Singing in the Rain' partly for the upbeat nature of the song and partly for the amazing dance routine that we used to watch together from the film - it's the scene where the three of them end the dance with a forward roll over the back of a settee. When the funeral director played the music, it created a certain incongruence in that peaceful meadow, but everyone there agreed that it reflected their memories of my sister. She did so enjoy her life. Rest in peace Big Sis xx

Changes

I’ve heard all the wise words… Nothing stays the same. We should embrace change but I’m not very good at it. New gadgets, new places to visit, even new clothes cause me stress. It takes me weeks before I will actually wear them. Maybe it’s a throwback from when I was little and new clothes were ‘kept for best’. 

Recently I went into the city centre on the bus, my first bus trip since Covid. The bus was fine, no changes there. I just missed one, had to wait an age for the next, the usual stuff… but the city centre was a shock! The huge Marks and Spencers store was gone, the building shuttered with darkened windows, creepy. The open market where Mum and Dad worked for most of their lives was gone, flattened by the council developers and cordoned off. Even the small shops that I used to wander round were gone. I suspect this is a change happening in many UK towns and cities but I found it difficult and upsetting.

Not everything has changed. Daughter is settled and living a few streets away which is a joy. My two cats, Betty and Sophie, are a constant source of amusement. Betty almost removed the vet’s arm last week and Sophie is a sweetie! And twenty years on I’m still doing the annual RSPB Garden Bird count but that has seen a major change too. My bird count was always something to be proud of, including numerous blackbirds, blackcaps, goldfinches, dunnocks, blue tits, robins, coal tits, great tits, pigeons, magpies, chaffinches and greenfinches. This year my bird count totalled four: a blackbird, two blue tits and a coal tit. 

I've read that there’s a national decline in wild birds and I wondered about wild birds in other countries… and this is the point where I come to the biggest and most difficult change of all. Last month my son and family left the UK to move near to his wife’s family. I’m struggling to come to terms with this mammoth change, especially as I'm a poor traveller and may never get to visit them. My only saviour is the communication available through the Internet and so, as my teenage grandson is an avid photographer, I called him and asked if he could have a look-out for birds in his new Mediterranean locality. To my surprise he said he had been taking photographs of local birds that very morning. After a brief discussion about how psychic he obviously is, he sent me some images and, with his permission, I've selected one to share with you.

© A. Kloos

It is a Common Myna, an angry-looking bird that is apparently quite argumentative, rather like our starlings. 

I shall continue doing the RSPB Bird Count even though my numbers have fallen because nothing stays the same. You just have to get used to the changes… even the one about a much-loved grandson who is now living over 3,000 miles away.

Over 630 posts are surely enough!

Just over thirteen years ago I experimented with a new idea... blog writing. I spent hours visiting other blogs, experimenting with different writing styles, designing and redesigning the screen, gathering ideas for blog posts, building up a group of blog friends, completing blog challenges, receiving blog awards, hosting guest bloggers, and now, over 630 posts later, I've decided to step away. In the spirit of 'never say never' I don't intend to delete this blog. It will hang here in the 'internet-ether' just in case one day I decide to return. 

Apologies to my lovely followers and to anyone who wanted to comment. I have disabled comments so I don't have to eternally ward off those dreaded spammers.

Take care and for all my writer blog friends, may you receive many acceptances.

A poem called Departures...

...which is really all about Daughter!

A few posts ago I spoke about the many poetry online sites who have themed calls for submissions. I can usually find a poem in my poetry file that fits the brief. That was how I came to submit 'Departures' to 'Literary Mama' whose strap-line is 'Writing about the many faces of motherhood'. I wrote the poem several years ago when Daughter was living down South and would occasionally get the train home for a fleeting visit. It was always lovely to see her but waving her off at the station was by far the hardest part of the day. I've put a link to the poem at the bottom of this post.

During Covid Daughter decided to relocate closer to home. When her brothers asked her why, she folded her arms and sternly reminded them, 'Well, one of us has got to look after them both in their dotage!' We're not quite in our dotage yet, which is just as well because her plans to look after us haven't quite materialised yet... but that's ok because a newly purchased house does need a lot of DIY and Mr A is very good at DIY!

House-wise Daughter moved in the 'right direction' from the London area to the Midlands where property is cheaper. She went from owning a one-bedroomed cluster house with just a tiny front garden to a three-bedroomed semi-detached with a front and back garden. She says she's still pinching herself when she wanders round her garden, coffee mug in hand, admiring her plants, and I'm still pinching myself when we wander round the shops together and enjoy a coffee and chat of a weekend. And of course it's reassuring to know that she's just round the corner for when we actually do enter our dotage!

The poem may no longer be true but whenever I read it I'm reminded of those years when waving her off at the station never failed to make me cry. Here is the link: Departures