Wild Boar! Wild Boar!
(to be shouted in the manner of Duran Duran)
Well, as if my family hasn’t enough to worry about, what with the slidey, snow-covered hill down to the A48 when they’re trying to drive to work, the A48 itself (an apocalypse of a road, with floods, roadworks, tractors, dodgy bends, concealed turnings AND snow) and the impairment of my nephews’ educational chances (due to closures, due to snow – not that the boys mind, of course)…there’s THIS. Your lovely online Guardian informs us today that:
Residents in the Forest of Dean have had close encounters with hungry wild boars that have sneaked out of the woods to forage in bins.
Apparently, the snow has forced them out.
Great. Let’s hope my sister’s dog Andy (yes, that’s right, Andy. He’s a lurcher.) doesn’t pick up the scent and decide to have a go.
Wodwo
Up until this week, I had never read it, Wodwo – neither the collection or the poem itself that gives the book its title. Here’s the ending of the poem:
……..I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking
Ted Hughes, Wodwo, 1967, Faber & Faber, p. 183.
I love it. The lack of conventional punctuation. The repetition – that childlike, comic roots / roots roots roots roots.
The throwaway, still-searching ending. Wodwonderful.
Absurd in Bloomsbury
Ok, here are two strange things:
1. I saw a whole flock of long-tailed tits in Gordon Square Gardens. These little birds are supposed to reside mostly in forests, and conifer forests at that, though – my bird guide says – they will venture into suburban gardens at times. Excuse me? Since when is Bloomsbury a suburban garden or a conifer forest?
I then heard what sounded like a parakeet – not the full-on squawk they do, but something more like that wittering you might hear from them if they’re a bit bothered. I looked up to see a crow attacking a bird with a long, sharply squared-off tail. Only saw the underside, which was pale. Could’ve been a kestrel, maybe, or some other raptor – there have been sightings around Senate House, I think – so, was hard to be sure.
Anyway, how delightfully ridiculous. The Wild invading the City.
2. Not so delightful. A young woman handing out leaflets, the gusset of her shiny tights halfway down her thighs, which wouldn’t matter, except that she was wearing a t-shirt that ended mid-hip length a la Lady Ga Ga. Oh dear. Ga ga indeed.
Hooray for…Nematodes!
I’ve long loved the worms in my compost heap. Chuck in a load of vegetable scraps and get lots of excellent stuff for the garden – thanks to the worms.
You can even sic the really little ones (the eponymous nematodes) on slugs and snails.
But now, just to confirm how truly great worms are, they have blasted into space! Not only that, but they were the only survivors of the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, found intact and alive in their special container.
So here’s to them. To the Wormery and Beyond!
Invisible Practice
I’m feeling a lot more positive about life than I have been for a while. I’ve even tinkered with a poem. But mostly I’ve been doing all those other things I find myself engaged in whenever I’m gearing-up to a longer period of writing work. You know… sorting out my files and piles of paper, tidying the desk, tidying the room, pacing the room, pacing the house, watching the latest Squirrel-v.-Wood Pigeon grudge match in the garden…
In her wonderful book One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers (1999, Penguin), Gail Sher has this to say:
Invisible practice refers to tasks that come to your attention primarily when you have neglected them – brushing your teeth, emptying the garbage, straightening your desk. … Invisible practice. It helps to have a dignified name for what we might easily label ungratifying time-wasters.
So that’s what’s been going on, these last few weeks! Invisible practice. I mean, I’m glad that my tax return’s been completed, a load of washing’s been done, but I was starting to get worried. There’d been a lot of haranguing going on in my head (You’re shit. You’re a lazy cow. You’re so up yourself. Who do you think you are etc etc) and not much work on the poems.
So, today, when I’m scared that I won’t finish this manuscript, that I’ll never write another new poem again in my life, I tell myself it’s all right, I’ve been doing my Invisible Practice. And now, maybe, if I edge up to them very slowly, the poems will let me work on them. I mean, I’ll let me work on them.
Autumn
I was walking past the church to the tube and heard a familiar sound. A chattering; conversational, wordless exclamations in the air above me. I looked up to see, on the lamposts, starlings, gathered tightly together. The Autumn Migrations, I thought, remembering the lines of Canada geese that queued up in the sky a few weeks ago.
It seems early, all this, but I can’t say I’m sorry. That grey, low sky and the bright leaves like coins…I love them. They suit my furtiveness. I like the sensation that we’re all creeping around in the gap between sky and earth, like woodlice under a brick; concealed, industrious, private. I like the feeling that thoughts can breed.
R.I.P. The Cat
The Hairy Muse woke me up early one morning a week ago. The cat had dislocated her shoulder; he was going to have to take her into hospital. I went downstairs to have look and it was true. Ye Gods, she had managed to completely rotate her foreleg around in its socket. Crazy beast was still trying to walk on it, too.
She’d been getting increasingly feeble – if you’re a cat owner, you know the signs – drinking water almost constantly, not really bothering with food. I knew her time was up. She’d reached the grand old age of 19. Etc etc.
But still. The Hairy Muse and I were bereft!
I can’t get used to the freedom. On the way home, I still catch myself thinking “Right, just time to get back to feed the – Doh!”
I don’t really believe in Heaven at all, but I’m making an exception. Animals are the true innocents, I think, and I have decided, that while her earthly remains went up in smoke some time ago, the moggy resides in bliss amid her tuna-breath friends on clouds of catnip.
The Spaces Underneath
For the last few days I’ve been holed up in the house, curtains drawn against the heat, or skulking around the shadier parts of Bloomsbury, where I work. I did venture out to BBC Broadcasting House with some workmates on Thursday, to see a recording of The Now Show, but scuttled home as soon as possible. Even that’s an endurance test in itself, with the Central Line’s temperatures at the moment.
Listen to me. I sound like a Victorian lady, all prostrate and languishing. It’s not helped by the fact that I suffer from chronic period pains which are only alleviated by the application of a hot water bottle. In the 32 degrees Celsius, I feel a bit like Manny from Black Books, with his Heat-Be-Gone Booties.
Oh, The Now Show was very funny, by the way. I recommend it – and not just if you’re high on painkillers and Chardonnay, like me. Anyway, while there, I discovered something disturbing. I had been admiring the Art Deco-esque frieze that ran around the walls of the theatre at about thigh-height, when my eye came to a recess in the wall and a sign that said EXIT. At thigh height. It dawned on me that the raked floor and the stage had actually been built halfway up the auditorium. We were sitting above a space at least the same height as the one we were in.
For some reason I found this very unnerving. What’s underneath? Our shadow selves, silently mimicking everything we do? A crack team of BBC specialists, monitoring our every move?
Quick, seat 23 just shifted onto his left buttock. I think he’s about to shout something inappropriate.
Seat 50’s fallen asleep. Deploy the cattle prod.
In that spirit, I’m posting this. I wrote it a while back, after waiting for the last train at Holborn station.
The Holborn Mice
If you stand very still on the platform, they’ll come to you; two charcoal-grey creatures – one with a cut-off half-tail – moving so fast you think they’re on wheels. They keep to edges at first, but, bolder, start to follow the grooves in the platform’s paving. Their eyes are just darker than their coats. They are like architects or town planners, marking out the roads of the city they will build. But they have their Underground too. Before we can hear it, they have flipped off the edge to the cavity below the rails which start singing the train’s approach and already the mice are into the holes in the crust of cement. An underground underneath! What could it be like?
