Marquee

I’ve not taken many photographs of late – I’ve been busy working on drawings for a forthcoming art show in my spare time, and catching up on housework. But this morning, an intermittantly-sunny Sunday morning, I took the opportunity to wander along the riverbank to the Quarry Park with my camera. The Dingle Gardens were looking fine and full of colour, as they usually are, but I was far more interested in the shapes and textures of the marquees which are in the process of being erected for the Flower Show next month.

Getting In

It has been a tiring week as I have been working full time while Sheila, my job-sharer, has been away on holiday. So when I came home from work on Friday I was looking forward to a lazy evening and a nice early night. Instead I spent most of yesterday evening assisting in amateur housebreaking.

My downstairs neighbour rang my doorbell at about seven. He had left his keys at someone’s house with no way of retrieving them before today and he couldn’t get into his flat. He spent a long time trying to open the security deadlock using various things poked in through the letterbox. (Three of my coathangers died in this cause and I have an electric cable in need of hospitalisation: the plug came off while it was being used as a lasso.) After an hour of futile endevour, we rang the housing association out-of-hours service to get someone called-out to open the door. Meanwhile my neighbour went back downstairs to keep on trying to do it himself.

After another three hours, a chap from the housing association’s repair company turned up from Telford in a van. He wasn’t a specialist locksmith and was a bit stumped. After taking a good look at my front door for comparison, he and my neighbour got the back of the letterbox off with a crowbar. My neighbour had already managed to unbolt the front of the letterbox from outside, using one of my spanners, but he couldn’t remove the inside section. After that they were taking turns at reaching in through the letterbox hole, trying to get the doorknob to turn using an adjustable wrench. Quite impressive gymnastics (I should have taken photos), but to no effect.

The repair man was just about to give up and get a jigsaw to cut a piece out of the door when, on the umpteenth attempt, my neighbour finally hit the jackpot with the wrench. There was a loud click and an even louder sigh of relief all round. Mission accomplished.

It was half past ten. I collected up my tools and went to bed.

Where Do Sheep Go On Holiday?

One of those haunting questions. (Thanks to Felix Abrinski for sending my mind on this track with a comment on Facebook.) Do Sheep all go to the same place? And what do they do when they get there?

Your Suggestions Please!

Sun, Steam and a Woolly Jumper

Yesterday was sunny, warm and dry – with just enough breeze to keep things pleasant. And it was also the day of the monthy outing of the Shropshire Community Flickr Group. Our destination was Oswestry’s Park Hall Showground, and the annual show of the Clwyd Veteran and Vintage Machinery Society. They are based in Wrexham.

Jason picked me up from Shrewsbury and collected James at Baschurch on the way to the showground. At the entrance, we met up with Peter and the four of us stayed together all day. The show had fewer steam engines than I expected, although those on display were beautifully maintained. An Aveling and Porter road-roller, a big black Fowler engine and a Marshall along with a delightful old fire engine inscribed ‘Earl of Chester – Volunteer Fire Brigade’. There were some scale model engines, too.

It might have been a bit short of steam, but there were plenty of other exhibits. A vast number of tractors, a beautiful Romany wagon - as beautiful inside as out – and a good number of old cars, lorries, buses, motorcycles and farm machinery. There were also collections on show – die-cast models, chainsaws, wheelchairs, mowers, tools…. Even a display of old milk bottles lovingly presented! Shire horses, birds of prey, sideshows, a big model railway giving rides, and a selection of events in the areana.

It wouldn’t be a machinery show without  lots of stalls selling things: sweets and toys and ice cream. (Great weather for ice cream sales!) Books, antiques, crafts – there was a whole hall of craft stalls as well as the outdoor stalls – food stalls. (I had lunch at a Thai food stall: an excellent red curry made fresh while I waited.)
 Stalls selling strange odd bits of machinery and metal laid out with as much care as the enthusiasts’ displays. And charcters, types, interesting faces. Plenty of scope for people-watching.

One of the arena displays was a man with an elderly sheepdog and a performing sheep. The sheep walked through a hoop and jumped little fences while being pulled along on a lead. (I gather they were both herding ducks later, but we didn’t stay for the rest of the show.)

Needless to say, I took a lot of photos. You’ll find more of them here.

We were expecting to spend a couple of hours at the showground, at most, and then go on to a Food and Drink Festival. But we stayed twice as long as intended, because there was so much to see. We decided to skip the Food and Drink and went off to Wales instead – to the River Dee and the Pontcysyllte Aquaduct near Llangollen. In the sunshine. And then home.

Library

Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done for several years: I got a couple of books out of the library.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it, coming from someone who so fond of reading – let alone someone who lives almost within a stone’s throw of the library? But it’s true. I’ve been into the library quite a few times, researching this and that, but it’s many years since I have wanted to take a library book home with me.

The main part of Shrewsbury’s library is housed in the old Shrewsbury School building. With a fine statue of Charles Darwin outside – educated here. The music library is housed in a room which still has the old panelling on the walls, covered in schoolboy names and initials, cut deeply into the wood, usually in rather fine handwriting.

It was the music section that drew me this time. I tend to get most of my fiction reading from charity shops – much of it returns for resale – and since I’ve had Internet access, I have found less and less need to go across the road to look up facts. However, the guitar occasionally needs feeding with new songs, and I thought it would make sense to see what could be borrowed, before I get tempted into buying new songbooks or waste more hours chasing things down on the web. And once I’d had my elderly library card replaced with a shiny new one, I came out happily clutching a couple of collections of tunes with a few ‘possibles’ in each.

(Much of this afternoon has vanished in transposing and getting to grips with ’Carolina in my Mind’. Which turns out a great deal less daunting than I expected, once I’d rescued it from the key of F and put it safely down in G to get rid of the flats. I flatly refuse to play flats, except B flat. One has to draw a line somewhere. I will put up with a modest number of sharps.)

One advantage of not having borrowed from the library for so many years is that they may have had some turnover in the fiction section since I stopped bothering to look at it. Maybe there will be some new non-fiction on subjects that interest me? Who knows? I may have been lured back into library usage by the demands of a hungry guitar, but there’s a lot more than music in Shrewsbury Library (quite apart from the joy of being inside a lovely and historic building). I’m looking forward to my next visit….

May Contain Nuts

It’s May. Time For another update on recent activity. First up, on May Day itself: Eric, my father had his 90th Birthday. Here he is on his special day:

My sister was visiting from London. So along with my mother and I the whole family were together. Friends kept turning up with presents and cards, relatives phoned. After lunch – Dad’s birthday choice of sausage, mash and peas, cooked by my sister – he found it a bit overwhelming. So he went off to his den for a spot of quiet computer programming.

‘Tis of a fair young maiden, and she lived down in Kent,
Arose one sunny morning, and she a nutting went….

You can’t have May without a spot of morris, can you? So I’ve been adding The Nutting Girl to my guitar repertoire. I am enjoying learning new songs and tunes, especially when I have worked out the chords for myself, as I did with this one. Thanks to inspiration from Graham Higgins, I’ve been tackling La Mer – now that’s tricky to master! But I am getting better at it. I started with chords off the web for La Mer, but Lady Franklin’s Lament is another one I have worked out for myself. It’s a real joy to have a guitar on hand again.

Shropshire Community Flickr Group are doing a ‘Photo a Day’ challenge for May. (Last year we did one in April.) I’m not always remembering to take a photo until the light is fading, but so far I’ve managed to keep up, although they’re not all quality shots! Here are a couple of them.

The rest are accumulating here.

Bellowhead on St George’s Day

On Friday 23rd April, I went to see Bellowhead in concert at Theatre Severn. If you’ve not yet heard the band, have a look at (and a listen to) their website. Eleven remarkably talented people, an amazingly eclectic range of instruments and bags of energy. Definitely worth seeing live.

This was a seated gig, which meant I got to see them for the first time. I’d find it hard to cope with a standing concert. They played plenty of their best known pieces, including Fakenham Fair and Cholera Camp, and many new songs from their forthcoming album. Which should be a corker: I still can’t get New York Girls (“Can’t You Dance the Polka?”) out of my head! A great evening, and if you get a chance to catch this band, grab it!

Some of you will be saying: Hang on Sue, you posted an earlier version of this report with some photos of the band in concert. So where are they now?

I did. I had my camera with me at the concert, I had a stalls seat with an unobstructed view of the stage, and I  took several photos in the first half of the evening – I’d seen other cameras and mobile phones in use so it seemed to be allowed. But shortly after the break, a member of the Theatre Severn staff came over and that photography wasn’t permitted. Oops! So I stopped.

I’ve not had much luck with my photos in theatre settings before, but I had half a dozen shots of the band that I was really pleased with. Nice and clear. So the next morning I proudly posted them on Flickr and put some of them in a blog post here.

And then I started feeling uncomfortable as they were unauthorised. I like to keep my conscience clear, so I won’t be showing them again unless I get permission from the band or something. The rules don’t say ‘no sketching’ so you’ll have to make do with a drawing for now. Or better still, go and see Bellowhead for yourselves – it’s worth it!

STOP PRESS: Hey, a band that reads blog posts! I feel very honoured. Here’s a couple of shots – they link back to Flickr, where you’ll find the rest.

Small Things

This morning I was assisting the police.

Well, almost. Shrewsbury Town Centre Residents’ Association were helping with a litter-pick organised by the local Community Support Officers. I decided to go along and do my bit. An hour’s gentle exercise on a sunny Sunday morning, followed by a free cup of tea or coffee in MacDonalds. The police officers issued us all with binbags and litter-picking tongs, and off we went.

There wasn’t much large litter in the area I walked – the council sweeping machines had already been through – so it was mostly cigarette ends lodged bewteen the paving stones, and the odd sweet wrapper. Picking up dog-ends proved an absorbing task, and the tongs were remarkably efficient. It was a novelty to find anything that wasn’t a cigarette end. I found only one match, clear evidence of the ubiquity of the lighter these days. (And one broken lighter, too.) Pieces of a smashed bottle, a paperclip, various bits of paper, a half-eaten peppermint, lumps of chewing gum, lolly sticks, a few plastic wrappers. All small things. Eventually we returned with our hauls, and handed tongs and bags to the police officers before heading for MacDonalds and our free drink. (MacDonalds had also provided a young member of their team to help the group, and he picked up almost as much as the rest of us combined. Well done, Adam.)

As I handed back my efficient tong, I thought how useful it would have been last night, when I tried to pick up another small thing.

It was time for bed. I’d just taken my supper plate out to the kitchen, and as I came back into the living room, I saw a darkish lump on the carpet just inside the door. In the dim light, I assumed it was a bit of crust from my bread, fallen from the plate, and casually picked it up.

Ouch! It was a big wasp, and it stung me on the thumb.

It must have been one of last year’s wasps, just out of hibernation. Fortunately it was trying to sting me on the side of my right thumb just where I use it when playing the guitar. All my recent practice paid off, as the sting barely penetrated. (It felt no worse than a bad nettle sting, and from memories of wasp stings in my youth, I got nothing like the full dose of venom.)

After this things got rather farcical. I put a cup over the wasp, slid a postcard under it and proceeded to the bathroom, where I opened the window and evicted the wasp. Shut window, turn on bathroom light – the wasp had come straight back in and was now wandering around in the bath.

Cup, postcard, turn out light, open window, evict wasp, shut window quickly. Turn on light. 

The wasp had beaten me to it again. It was now making victory laps of the lightbulb, buzzing angrily. After a while it retreated to the top of the curtain rail, out of reach of my cup, and stared down at me, looking smug, waving its antennae and daring me to have a go. I decided to leave it be, rushed my evening ablutions, and left the bathroom windows open - in the hope that the morning light would lure it outside before I got up.

When I went into the now-very-cold bathroom first thing this morning, the wasp was still where I had last seen it, on the rail. I wondered if the cold had killed it? At which point it turned and looked at me again, giving me a sleepy wave with its antennae. Battle resumed. I grabbed the feather duster and dislodged it. The wasp landed on its back on the windowsill, still very dozy, and grabbed hold of the duster to right itself. At which point it was very firmly catapulted through the open window, and had already descended a couple of storeys before it got its wings sorted out.

So far it hasn’t come back.

Destination Uncertain

A beautiful sunny April morning. I decided to catch a bus somewhere. I originally thought I might go to Ironbridge, but I had to queue at the ATM (no money, no bus ticket!) and by the time the machine finally coughed out my cash, I would not have been able to reach the bus station before the Ironbridge bus left. Except that I then remembered that the 96 comes up through the town, and I could probably just make it to the stop in St Mary’s Street in time…. I did. I even had a couple of spare minutes to catch my breath before it came into sight.

It was a lovely run through the spring countryside. This is a pretty route, going through Atcham and Wroxeter and Leighton. Rolling hills, the River Severn meandering in great loops, and the Wrekin gradually coming closer. English countryside. I got off the bus at Buildwas, thinking I would have a look around there, see the ruins of the Cistertian Abbey, and then walk on into Ironbridge. I saw a sign to the abbey, and that road took me across Buildwas Bridge. A much replaced bridge: the original one, built by the monks, was swept away in 1795, Thomas Telford made the next one three years later – there’s still a small section of its iron arch by the side of the road. The third one was built in 1905, and finally the present bridge replaced it in 1992.

While I was leaning on this bridge, taking a picture of the river and the house beside it (avoiding the power station, the other dominating feature of Buildwas), a lady came along walking a couple of friendly beagles. She told me that she used to live in the house I was busy photographing, and her mother still lives there. It’s mostly 16th Century, she said. The roof tops and walls were a wonderful tangle of creepers and vines.

I walked on up to the Abbey entrance, but it was not yet open for the day, so I decided to continue walking. There was very little traffic, and the grass verge was scattered with white dog violets and purple ground ivy. There were butterburs near the water and patches of salt-loving scurvy-grass at the road edge.

As I continued walking, the traffic was gradually becoming heavier. I spent more and more time waiting on the verge for streams of cars to pass. After a while, I passed a roadsign sign telling me where I was going; “Much Wenlock 2″, it said. So I was not on the road to Ironbridge after all. Well, Much Wenlock’s very pretty, and I could probably manage another two miles without much trouble. Although the traffic was getting annoying. Or I could walk back the way I’d come and see the abbey instead? Decisions…. I decided to walk as far as the brow of the hill before making up my mind.

Just before I got to the top of the rise, a Land Rover passed me and then pulled to a halt. It was David and Jen from the Shropshire Community Flickr Group, offering me a lift. “Are you going to Wenlock?” they asked. “It looks like I am now!” I replied. I was amazed that anyone I knew would pass me and would recognise me when I was so far out of my usual stomping grounds. I was very happy to accept the lift.

Thanks to their kind offer, I was soon at The Edge Arts Centre on the outskirts of Much Wenlock. They were there to attend a couple of events at the Wenlock Poetry Festival, a new venture for the town. I walked on into the town centre, had a look around the little museum and found a cafe for a second breakfast – scrambled eggs on toast and coffee. I needed that!

After further walking around the town, which was bustling with people, I went into Priory Hall. There I watched a stone carver, John Neilson, inscribing a piece of local stone with couple of lines from a poem specially written for the festival by Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate and the festival’s patron.

I went into Wenlock Pottery, and spent quite a long time sitting in the sun in its courtyard, talking to the lady in charge of it. This was the venue for a couple of free poetry events, but it was too early. Nearer the time, I moved inside but the Wirral Poets, who were to provide the first item, were still on their way. Instead I had the pleasant room almost to myself – I say almost, because there were a few people at a table to my left, and over in the far corner, Roger McGough and John Gorman were having a quick, quiet practice of some pieces they were to be performing later.

Gradually more audience turned up. And finally the Wirral Poets arrived in force – a large group. They were handed hi-vis waistcoats, as they were going to be out and about, taking poetry around the town, after their short performance in the Pottery. More people turned up to watch, all the chairs in the audience were soon taken and still people were coming in. And then the poetry started. I listened. Afterwards I was back in the courtyard of the pottery, in the sunshine, with a very nice pot of tea, wondering where I would to go next. In the end, I decided that what I really wanted to do next was to go back home and think about things. So I did. A pretty run on the 436 bus, over and down Wenlock Edge and finally back into Shrewsbury in the now quite hazy sunshine. Happy.

Suddenly It’s Spring

 

So where have I been all this month? I’ve been here. I’ve been quite busy and active – it must be the longer days or something. Let me bring you up to tortoise speed.

Work continues. Volunteering at the museum continues to be fun. For the last couple of sessions, I’ve been cataloguing Roman coins. Rather amazed to be handling these things, around 2000 years old. Some of the faces are very worn and corroded, others suprisingly clear and sharp. Trajan, with his column on the other side, Constantine I, Crispus,…

I’m not going to Eastercon this year, the annual Science Fiction convention, but I have been getting some artwork done for the artshow, and getting that off in the post to Dave T, my amazing agent. This picture took forever to get from the idea to the second-draft stage, as I was trying to overcomplicate it. Eventually I got rid of the distractions and it worked. (This is a very poor scan, sorry.)

The guitar continues to amuse me. My fingertips are gradually building up pads again, the chords are getting cleaner. Although I was sorry to find that I had (as I suspected) given away all my best music books, I can usually manage to track down anything I want to play on the web. The lyrics are often not quite right, and the chords a bit off in places, but that just gives me the added challenge of getting the tune playable. I enjoy this. My repertoire has expanded a lot, running from “Daisy Bell” to Ralph McTell’s rich “You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here”. All done in my own strange style, with no pretensions of skill and no apologies to anyone.

A touch of spring cleaning has been going on at the Tortoise Loft. Something it badly needed. A lot more work still left to do, but at least it’s reasonably shipshape again. Or flatshaped.

Some weeks ago, I finally took the plunge and joined Facebook. There seemed to be a flurry of joining among my friends just then, and I tagged along. After the initial period of bewilderment and fascination: linking up with people, finding out how to post comments and how to turn off those annoying posts about games and quizzes, I seem to have settled in there.

But it doesn’t have the same appeal as Flickr, mainly because it’s all so very ‘instant’. Comments can continue happily on a Flickr thread for months, but once a Facebook post has passed off the front page, there’s no real incentive for further comment, and it’s unlikely to be noticed by anyone who missed it originally. A sign of the age of instant gratification, the ‘Now Generation’. The blog remains a better place for slower thoughts which need rumination and writing at length. Facebook is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

But as a way of sparking ideas, it does have some value. I followed a link from a post by Graham Higgins to this poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  I woke up this morning with the urge to pastiche it in my head. As the comments on the poem had dropped out of site in the Facebook rush, the result was sent by email. Graham asked me to post it here, so here it is. Presented with some trepidation, as it is surely one of many people’s favourite pieces, and doesn’t deserve what I’ve done to it.

Extracts from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poet”
With apologies to Wallace Stevens
Who merely provided an irresistible Target.
 

i
Among twenty sheets of foolscap,
The only moving thing
Was the pen of the Poet

ii
I was of three minds,
Like an envelope
In which there are three Poems.
…

iv
The mind and the paper
Are blank
The mind and the paper and the poem
Are blank
…

vi
Critics fill the long columns
With barbaric comments.
The palimpsest of the Poem
Crossed out, much rewritten.
The writer
Traces in the scribbles
An indecipherable word.

vii
Oh thin men of Literature
Why wish for the Golden Treasury of Palgrave?
Do you not see how the Poet
Titillates the minds
Of the women about you?

viii
I know funny accents
And ludic, international rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the pen of my aunt is involved
In what I write.

xi
He flew through Wolverhampton
In a cream envelope.
Once a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The jumble of his outpourings
For Poems.
…

xiii
It was evening all afternoon,
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
He put that Beatles album on, again,
And stopped writing.

The missing stanzas are left as an exercise for the student. Feel free to join in, post improvements and re-writes.