Tag Archives: vegetables

The price of cauliflowers

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Credit: Pixaline via Pixabay

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.

Tomatoes – poem

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Credit: Couleur via Pixabay

Fruit & veg, toms, salad, mayo, salmon, ½ loaf … I’ve not yet managed to write a shopping list in Dutch even when the words are shorter (sla) or similar abbreviations (gr & fruit). It’s too much hard work late on a Thursday evening when I’m sitting with a glass of wine (wijn) and contemplating the moving project: flooring, top-down & bottom-up blinds, two chairs – ordered; research on fridge/freezers needed, also a new GP practice and pharmacist.

Here in the Netherlands the distance is important: the GP must be able to get to your home within 10 minutes. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to register. In Scheveningen (where I spent the winter) three practices did not take on new patients or had a four-month’ waiting list. A tomato a day may keep the doctor away …

Tomatoes

I am stepping away from my life,
my life as short as a haiku.
I have turned biographer,
am writing vignettes,
pale green, the length of celery.

My vignettes may concern
elderly mules with dental decay,
the struggle to remember
maternal aunts. I am numbering
my vignettes 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D –
narrow seats in the small airplane
Aer Lingus would use
on the late Saturday flight.

I could write a vignette
about the plastic dummies
they use in ambulance training.
Today I’m going to focus on pretend
tomatoes. My invisible friend
has started her new diet.

Laughter – poem

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Credit: Mike Goad via Pixabay


On Tuesday evening my local Stanza poetry group held it first ‘live’ meeting since the start of the pandemic. It was a hybrid session which worked very well: some poets in the station bar of Stalybridge station, some of us at home in the UK and abroad. I was pleased that I could take part. I have also joined the Groningen Stanza here in The Netherlands which alternates live and Zoom meetings.

I saw fresh rhubarb at the supermarket yesterday which reminded me of another group I used to belong to in Manchester. My third poetry book is dedicated to Elaine, Hannah and Jackie; here is a poem written in a back garden in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester.

Laughter


The laughter swaying across the lettuce,
strong knotted rope in the old Bramley tree.
A grandmother sits quietly in a wooden chair;
she counts knitting patterns in her head.

The dappled shade is a cool alleyway
between her life and her daughter’s world.
Laughter slides away from them, low
down across the grass; it hides
between the rhubarb and redcurrant bushes,
waiting until night time for the moles
to come up and breathe into it.
Yesterday’s laughter a small pile of earth.

(published in Another life, Oversteps Books, 2016).