Yesterday, the camping where I have my static caravan opened for the season. This post explains how I ended up in the Netherlands via Ethiopia.
Marianne Carolan and I met through being students at the Open University. She had come across a young boy while on a study tour of Ethiopia. She started to sponsor him. Her friends, colleagues and neighbours followed suit. As the young people finished secondary education, the cost became too much for individuals. Therefore, Marianne set up the Lalibela Educational Trust (LET) in 2006 to raise funds which paid the fees for University and Nursing College.
With Marianne and several other sponsors I travelled to Ethiopia in January 2007, during Timket, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church celebration of Epiphany. I met my ‘son’ and his widowed mother. With its rock churches, Lalibela is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Early this century Marianne had bought a second-hand static caravan in Wassenaar, the small town near The Hague which was her birthplace. At the time of her death in July 2008, the charity was sponsoring 26 young people. They are now doctors, engineers, nurses, IT professionals and entrepreneurs. She left her old caravan to me and I bought a new one a few years later.
Marianne Carolan (centre)
Night Flight, January 2007
Addis Ababa to Heathrow. Us two, stretched out across three seats at the back of the plane.
Lalibela and the rock churches. We wear the Shamma they gave us for Timket: The boys we sponsor.
Lat month I was in Manchester, walking down Portland Street on my way to Piccadilly Station. It reminded me of my brief time (seven months) when I worked for the Greater Manchester Council (GMC). With my boss I ran workshops helping to prepare staff for job applications, CVs, interview techniques and salary negotiation. The GMC was the top tier local government administrative body. Its 106 members came from 10 district councils with which it shared power from 1/4/1974 until 30/3/86. Most of those district councils were Labour: not to the liking of Margaret Thatcher. Her Conservative Government abolished the GMC as well as the GLC (Greater London Council). Hence all that preparation for new jobs.
Abolition Greater Manchester Council, March 1986
That was the time I went as a dominatrix. I wore my jodhpurs, riding boots, carried a whip. I had my Cleopatra eyes, and black bra under a side-less top.
Rebecca, my boss, had dyed her bob orange. Tony, always modest, in dinner jacket, bow tie, trainers, and baseball cap. Black lace gloves for the HR woman in the wheelchair.
The young clerks were versions of cowboys and Indians. We conga-ed across the zebra crossing onto Piccadilly Gardens. Later we carried on drinking in the empty offices, stroked and kissed the bricks of County Hall.
It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Rebecca (Becky) Cullen. Her poem February appeared last month. Becky and I met on a poetry workshop where I bought A Reader’s Guide To Time. This was the winner of the 2021 Live Canon Collection Competition.
Here is Becky’s biography: Rebecca Cullen has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She was the second poet-in-residence at Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Director of the Writing, Reading and Pleasure (WRAP) extracurricular programme at Nottingham Trent University, Rebecca also curates and presents the Notts TV Book Club.
Photo credit: Fabrice Gagos
The collection is divided into eight sections, each representing a different kind of time. Becky ends her prologue with It’s time I love, winding as a cat wraps round an ankle. Here are four poems from Historical Time (n.b. timelines, clocks), Deep Time, Poetic Time (also ‘of Reading’) and Subjective Time (‘of our lives’), respectively.
Paris, Grands Passages
To enter requires trust: you can’t see the end from the beginning. You can’t see the next beginning.
Shop names are the contents page; each entrance is a diorama. Post yourself into the future.
At Hotel Chopin, climb the three red stairs. Would you like to buy a sink? A model of a carousel?
The tiles are monochrome and harlequin. The gates can keep you out, or keep you in.
In the window of the librarie, two wax children read a book, sitting in a rowing boat.
Claim a tall-backed chair at the café draped in vines, warm beneath the glass roofs pinched like fish spines.
The taxidermist stitches swans’ wings to a fox. Come, watch the past play, hear your heels knock.
Night Fragment
He wakes her with a ball of sorry. He wants her to hold it, keep it, as brash and bold as the coin in her lungs.
His sob comes, warms her gut, the flex of his young arm gone.
In the four o’clock light, her face is crumpled, dirty.
Garden at Newstead Abbey
Peacocks at Byron’s Pile
I had a dream of Newstead Abbey, that I was drifting through the garden and the blowsy flowers were heavy on the walls.
The words are just ahead of me this morning, the word for a large purple or white blowsy flower, a climber, and a tree’s branches so they grow
outstretched in two dimensions. Espalier. Both these things are in my head, somewhere, but the sparrows roost near the monk’s pond,
which also has its own name, and overlook the stump of oak on a lawn where a raven has been adopted by two geese;
they are always in correspondence, everywhere the remnants of a godforsaken kiss, the three of them, like this. Clematis.
My Father and I
Sometimes we didn’t get on. The songs I sang would please his ear. But I would over-act, embarrass him.
Now we go to appointments more often than we go for lunch. After the last tests he couldn’t be left alone. I spread across one sofa,
he slouched on his, and we watched a documentary on Howard Hughes; I didn’t know about the aviation or the Hollywood years.
So. We both kept turning up, not giving in. Lately, I’ve taken to calling him daddy.
As I have an Irish surname and it’ll be St. Patrick’s Day this coming week, I am sharing this short poem. Many thanks to the editors of The Madrigal for accepting it for an Áitiúil: an anthology, jointly with the Martello Journal. It was published in September 2022.
World Book Day is on the 23rd of April. In the UK it takes place on the 2nd of March to avoid clashes with spring school holidays and St. Georges’ Day.
A fellow poet introduced me to the American poet Ted Kooser, now in his early 80s. His style is accomplished, yet extremely simple. My current bedtime reading is his poetry collection Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001).
In the late 90s Kooser developed cancer. He gave up his insurance job and writing. When he began to write again, it was to paste daily poems on postcards he sent to his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison. In the preface, Kooser tells us ‘I began to take a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live.’ These country roads are in Nebraska.
The poems cover a period from 9 November until 20 March. In the poems Kooser doesn’t directly talk about the illness. He does so through metaphor. All the poems include a brief description of the weather. The clear and precise observation gives them a haiku quality.
Here is his postcard for march 5:
Very windy and cold.
A flock of robins bobs in the top of a wind-tossed tree, with every robin facing north and the sky flying into their faces. But this is not straightforwardness, nor is it courage, nor an example of purpose and direction against insurmountable odds. They perch like this to keep their feathers smooth.
I’m not keen on them, so I’m not buying now they’re 4 Euro each. Dutch growers have kept their glasshouses empty because of the cost of gas and electricity. I was lucky, though, to be accepted as a patient by a GP practice in the town I moved to. Lucky also that my journey to the implantologist involves two trams: there were strikes again on regional buses last week.
This poem, from a recent workshop, is a snapshot of life in The Netherlands.
Word jij onze nieuwe collega?
Outside every restaurant and café two blackboards: one with a menu, the other asking for a sous-chef, a washer-upper, or bar staff. Freek van Os, the expensive plumbing business is even renting lit-up space by the side of a bus shelter. They need a planner, and also have two technical vacancies. Manda, my hairdresser, had found a 42-year-old Afghan woman, single parent, career-changer. When I came in a month later, she’d changed her mind. Legal cases are abandoned, judges are dead or retiring. As are many GP’s. They’re not signing the new contracts, anyway. Not much the government or the insurers can do. People want to work fewer hours, it’s said, not more.
A seasonal poem and sampler by Rebecca Cullen who is our March guest poet. It’s from her collection A Reader’s Guide To Time. I very much enjoyed Rebecca’s take on February and hope you do too.
This coming Tuesday it’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an early poem that hasn’t featured on the blog before. It was published in the Tees Valley Writer, Autumn 1995, and Highly Commended in their annual competition.
On the beach
Against the sinking sun gulls ride the waves. Our dogs bark and chase their tails. Try to run with a lone jogger who braves
the east wind whistling. Your son trails in your wake, attempts big steps. Laughter peals: a scene lifted straight from some fairy tale.
Heaped grey boulders mimic a colony of seals. Not long before love winters in my heart. I need to tell you how it feels
to be together, yet growing apart. Your craggy face seems so much older clouded in a bluish hue. I brace myself to start
as you place a hand on my shoulder but all I can say is It’s getting colder.
Speak Easy was formed at Stretford’s Sip Club by Dave Hartley in August 2015 as a spoken word open mic before the team of Andy N, Amanda Nicholson and Steve Smythe joined forces to take it over at the end of 2017. The night moved to Chorlton Cum Hardy’s Dulcimer Bar in August 2020 and has carried on being a welcoming, supportive, friendly and encouraging night since welcome to both experienced and newcomers with all acts given equal opportunity to perform with everybody who reads being headliners.
(See the end of the post for details and links to social media for Speak Easy, Andy N, Amanda Nicholson.)
Andy N
Andy N is the author of 8 full length poetry collections including ‘Return to Kemptown’ and ‘The End of Summer’ and co-runs Chorlton Cum Hardy’s always welcoming Spoken Word Open mic night ‘Speak Easy’. He runs / co-runs Podcasts such as Spoken Label, Cloaked in the Shadows and Storytime with Andy & Amanda and does ambient music under the name of Ocean in a Bottle.
Three x Winter Haiku
Walking in darkness your front door briefly lights up in the heavy rain. * Ripping out the trees lighting hit the forest hard flooding the river * Sleeping in winter the trees hibernate alone awaiting for Spring.
*
Amanda Nicholson
Amanda Nicholson is an author, poet, podcast co-host and copywriter. She has written several books as Amanda Steel, including Ghost of Me. Amanda’s poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester. She Has a Creative Writing MA, and has had articles published by Jericho Writers, Reader’s Digest UK, Ask.com, and Authors Publish.
Do All These Labels Make Me Look Fat?
Like blank sticky labels pressed to my skin I write on some myself While people scribble their own words Over time, the ink fades on some and others fall off The one labelled daughter is half peeled off now Older labels remain stuck fast But buried by new labels So people rarely see Unless they get close enough And there is always room for more Some are like tattoos Only more painful And others wash away easily
Last Saturday I had to go to the pharmacy in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote to get some over-the-counter medication. It’s an ode of sorts alright…
Normal service will be resumed…
To ‘my’ condition
I salute you: you have staying power. You arrived out of nowhere 28 years ago. How odd you only woke up in Manchester, while you slept through London.
I refuse to call you mine, the two ‘ ’ symbolise handcuffs, shackles. On long journeys (flights, trains) I wear dark trousers, a dark dress.
You have grounded me many times, I’ve been bent over, clutching my bike, scared to go to the shops in case I don’t make it to a loo.
An acronym close to that computer firm. There are dress codes at IBM, I have you know. Irritable? Yes, often. I’ve been pissed off, imagine bowels as a curled-up, snarling cobra.
Syndrome is, I believe, where spectators gather to see retired pilots take off in noisy small planes. Banking is a dangerous manoeuvre.
Acacia Publications 