Paradise Mislaid

Jill is still in the States. Having a great time. She visited the Texas State Fair yesterday. Yeeehaw! Me? I’m feeling a bit lonely. A whole week of school visits coming up. I’ll be feeling cream-crackered by Friday. Tomorrow I’m at a secondary school. I’ll mainly be reading from my verse-novel for teenagers – The Journal of Danny Chaucer (Poet)

What it is to be a teenager! Here’s a sample poem –

Paradise Mislaid

As humankind destroys the planet
My thoughts turn frequently to Janet

As rainforests are stripped and land laid bare
I think of Janet in her underwear

As acid rain falls from the sky above
I think of me and Janet making love

What chance has humankind of saving this fair planet?
About the same as I have ever making it with Janet

(Actually her name isn't Janet
but Jenny doesn't rhyme with planet)

For more info or to purchase book click here!

Birthday Presents

George Harrison. The Dark Horse Years. 1976 – 1992.
This was a fabulous present. Six albums – including Live in Japan with Eric Clapton and a DVD of videos and interviews. Some excellent tracks that I missed first time around. Here comes the Moon is particularly splendid. And very Beatle-y. And some excellent videos – in particular Crackerbox Palace and This Song.
They underlined something I’d forgotten. George was a deeply spiritual person. But also
a lot of fun. Those two videos in particular really made me smile.

I had a book, too, which I should maybe mention. This is also a lot of fun (honest!) – although in a slightly different way.

The Humor of Kierkegaard

(Click on link for more info!) As the cover says... "The selections, which made me laugh, illustrate sardonically the contradictions of existence."

Try it!!!

Blue Monk

As always we played late into the night
Exploring beats and rhythms
Cadences and silences
Harmonies and melodies
Running with the ball

The punters had long gone
A drunk slept in the corner
We hadn’t the heart to turf him out
Body draped across table
Sticky with drying beer

I’m off for an early night,
Said Del, the proprietor -
If you can call two-thirty early -
Lock up after
Set the alarm

We played on
Did we not have homes to go to?
Immersed in the rhythms of our own lives
Weaving strands of melody
Untangling knots

The exit door banged open
A chill breeze blew through
Scattering cigarette ends and beer mats
Rattling glasses and optics
Easing the heavy fog of stale cigarette smoke to one side

We were playing a slow song
Blue Monk
Idly following the familiar bluesy path
Sliding around the bass run and the drum pulse
Darting between the cluttered chords

She walked in as though it were daylight
As though she owned the place
And walked across to the sleeping drunk
She sat beside him
Like a mother’s shadow

We reprised the theme.
Dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah di
A last statement. A resolution.
A fond farewell to the happy minutes
We’d spent in Monk’s company.

Then, on the final drum beat
As the last few wisps of stale smoke dispersed
The man’s empty body slid from the table and hit the floor
And the woman faded
Like the low hanging note of the double bass

Another Train Event

We have new trains in the South East. They are gradually replacing the trains that have been running since the 1950s. So I was sitting in the new train and we stopped at a station but the doors wouldn’t open. (These are new-fangled electric doors). The guard came along and started fiddling in a control box, situated above one of the doors. Eventually the door opened and people got on. The doors closed and we carried on with our journey.
“Does that often happen?” I asked the guard.
“Yes," he said. “This train is controlled by a computer. And the computer says when the doors will open. The worst thing is when we have to add carriages to the train. Then the computer has to be rebooted.”

The mind boggles.

Neither is the Horse

I’m reading a lot of poetry at the moment.
Here’s some very entertaining verse from a book I bought at the National Theatre bookshop.
It’s called Neither is the Horse and other poems
By Rory Motion
(Huddersfield’s legendary poet laureate)

Golgotha

And so I said to the assistant
“Do you sell crucifixes?”
And she said, “Yes…
Do you want a plain one
Or one with a little man on?”

Well, it made me laugh. More info here…
Neither is the Horse

Think globally, act locally
Think cosmically, act stupidly
- Rory Motion

The Saturday Morning Quiz

Here are a few questions from last week's Guardian quiz. See how you get on.

1 Which school was founded by Walter Gropius?

2 What links the following: George W. Bush; Margaret Thatcher; Shakespeare; Cleopatra

3 Why are jockeys so well adjusted?

4 Identify these three characters whose names differ only in the letters shown.

* I N * * * * *

* P * * * * *

* I S E N *****

5 Who is Tenzin Gyatso?

Here Comes Crazy October

Friday, and the weekend approaches. Not to mention the month of October.
October is going to be frenetic. School visits start in earnest. Three next week, five the following week, and three the week after that. And Jill is off to the States on business for a week and a bit.
She leaves early Tuesday morning, which is, at it happens, my birthday. I’m hoping for the George Harrison Dark Horse boxed set. I’ve a couple of the albums on vinyl but none on CD. I do have the George Harrison tribute that Eric Clapton put together on DVD. Magic!
Then there’s band rehearsal on Mondays and the Creative Writing Class I run on Tuesdays.
Plus several writing deadlines. Today I was hoping to finish the children’s story that I’ve been working on all summer. But it’s still not quite there.
And what news of the Mighty Molecules project? My teenage “lead singer” tells me that he likes the songs but doesn’t think it sounds anything like the music that a teenage band would make. Not surprising really, considering my age. How would someone who’s knocking on 103 (104 next Tuesday) know what a teenage band sounds like? So I’m having a bit of a re-think. In fact, I may well start recording it all again. Hey ho.
But – the weekend first. Lots of relaxation is called for. Saturday morning quiz in bed, a stroll (brisk) in the country, Match of the Day in the evening. And Sunday – much the same. Just got back from a stroll now, in fact, on which we found a dead badger and a dead squirrel. Some distance apart I might add. Country life, eh?