This Blog Does Not Exist

It was only a question of time before some nutter suggested an -antimatter- blog! (Okay, it might have been me.) And oh, the opportunities afforded under that heading. For instance, there might conceivably be...

...except, of course, there is. Which suggests that matter trumps antimatter - if indeed the latter even exists. Anyway, there is already an excellent blog explaining the whole renegade physics of negative spin and all that unlikely malarkey, posted by my friend Terry Quinn, so I suggest you read that, and I'll concentrate my energies instead on some poetry, old and new.

The old poem was written in 1899 by the American poet William Hughes Meams for his English class at Harvard. You'll probably recognise part of it, for it was set to music as a popular song, recorded by Glenn Miller among others, and is often quoted:

Antigonish

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there!

He wasn't there again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away!

When I came home last night at three,

The man was waiting there for me

But when I looked around the hall,

I couldn't see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don't you come back anymore!

Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away...

And here's more antimatter for a May morning, a new thing of my own devising. Flush with the quiet success of that silent poem ('Can You Hear It? ') a few weeks ago, I thought I'd give antimatter poetry a try. This one is composed in the form of a nonnet*; and because it is the first nonnet ever to be written, I have called it simply:

Nonnet

To begin with, there was no word. Nothing. Nada.

Not a note, not a clue. Not at all helpful. If indeed

there even was a beginning.  We waited for an age

feeling stupid looking awkward. What to do then?

Some speculated  that anti-matter sits at  the heart

of it all, so like Wells' invisible man it has to cloak

itself in matter to make  itself manifest;  otherwise

it's basically hiding  in plain sight.  We articulated

this alternative theory - logically absurd but joyful:

Supposing  all those famous dualists got it wrong,

Professors Yin & Yang, Descartes, the whole gang

banging on about opposites. What is the opposite

of opposite? Ha! We give you unity of the absurd,

as Canon Self's Laughter at the Dearth of Reason

expounds.  Sit down, turn your tape-recorders on.

Lights dim, for at his lectern our greatest shaman, 

about to begin,  checks notes,  cackles with mirth.

*For anyone wishing to attempt this at home, the compositional rules of the nonnet are fiendishly simple: one stanza of nine lines (justified) setting out a thesis, followed by a second stanza of eight lines (justified) positing an antitheses. Presto! (Ha ha ha ha ha.)

Thanks for reading. Come on you Seasiders! S ;-)

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Antimatter

In the mid 1800s Michael Faraday gave public demonstrations of his experiments with electricity. It is one those great stories of science that may well be true, William Gladstone, then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been present at one of these demonstrations and had asked Faraday: “But after all, what use is it?” Faraday found an excellent answer: “Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it.”

However, the point of those demonstrations was that the audience could actually see what was going on and the results. The chances of being able to see an experiment to demonstrate anti-matter are remote to say the least. For instance, all the anti-protons that have been created at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms. Those made at CERN amount to about 1 nanogram. At DESY in Germany, approximately 2 nanograms of positrons have been produced to date. But making a whole 1 gram of antimatter would require approximately 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy and cost over a million billion dollars.

Now comes the bit where some sort of explanation of antimatter must be attempted. Regular matter is made up of regular atoms. Regular atoms are composed of regular subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. Antimatter, on the other hand, is composed of subatomic particles that have the opposite charge and spin of regular subatomic particles. For example, anti-electrons, also known as positrons, behave just like electrons, except they have a positive charge. Likewise, antiprotons have a negative charge but act like protons.

Many scientists think that in the first few moments after the Big Bang, which created the universe both matter and antimatter mixed together. If the Big Bang made equal amounts of matter and antimatter, then the two would annihilate and become energy. There would be no matter and no antimatter left, just energy. But our universe today looks like it is almost all matter and hardly any antimatter.

Physicists do not yet know for sure that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, and because of this, they are also wondering where the antimatter went, and if any was left over from the beginning of the universe. One explanation is that there was just a bit more matter than antimatter in the beginning, so that whatever was left over after most of the matter and antimatter annihilated into energy became the mostly-matter universe we see today. Another theory is that there is lots of antimatter on the other side of the universe. They could have formed their own antigalaxies and antisolar systems too. I’m not going to mention that their time could go backwards or gravity could be up.

So why does antimatter matter? Faraday had no idea that his experiments would lead to high speed trains or the lights at Blackpool Football Club but fundamental research aims to understand the internal arrangement of nature and is not directly related to the present-day needs of civilization. So, it may sometimes look like a futile waste of time and money, with no tangible outcome. The benefits of fundamental research are usually revealed only after many years.

Electricity may have looked like a purposeless source of amusement to a few scientists just one hundred fifty years ago. Today, it has become a solid foundation of human civilization. It is likely that the study of antimatter will also produce such results, sooner or later; its outcome impossible to predict but whatever it is, it will be taxed.

I don’t have any poems about antimatter but here’s one about Physicists.

A Lecture on Quantum Mechanics

Remember the old joke

a vet goes into the waiting room
there’s good news
and bad news
Mr Schrodinger

Standing front and centre
he can watch polite chuckles
ripple along waves of Physicists
spreading out from the lectern
at the Conference Centre

he always starts like this
something predictable
to settle them down

but there’s a problem
with that one from CERN
second seat from the left
on the fifth row
who he knows is going to challenge
a line in his equations

he’d heard her say as much
over a gin and tonic
in Planck’s Bar last night
and now he’s only looking at
that one person
and even though she’s chuckling
along with her colleagues

he knows he’s affected his own talk
and wonders if it is ethical
to arrange for her
to be back in her hotel room
and here at the same time
which might solve his problem
but not with any certainty.

(First published in Acumen, 2017)

Thanks for reading, Terry.

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Linear Bee

I hope the title raised either a smile or a quizzical eyebrow. The keeping of bees and the importance of honey have been central to Greek culture for millennia. We know this partly from decipherment of inscriptions in an ancient language designated as Linear B (an early form of Greek script). As both bees and the script feature prominently in this week's blog, I thought Linear Bee would make an appropriately punning header.

Apiculture (bee-keeping) has a long history in the Aegean. The ancients believed that bees were messengers from the Gods, intermediaries between heaven and earth, and that honey was a source of wisdom and poetry. The Minoans had a bee goddess, Potnia, and her priestesses were called Melissa (which means bee, from meli the word for honey). In later Greek mythology, Aristaeus was the god of bee-keeping.

By 600 BC bee-keeping was a fully developed and legally regulated concern in Greece and honey was valued not only as a food, the first natural sweetener and good source of energy, but also for its medicinal properties (both taken internally and used as a salve) and - in the form of beeswax - as a cosmetic in beauty masks. The great Koan doctor Hippocrates regarded honey as a panacea and the philosopher Aristotle wrote his first book on the art of keeping the little fellows.

There is even a Greek bee, apis mellifera cecropia , a sub-species of honey bee, favoured for its extreme gentleness and lack of a tendency to swarm. It thrives in the southern Mediterranean climate, for it likes the warmth and low humidity, and is not suited to the cooler climate of northern Europe.

Greece, in fact, has more beehives per acre than any other country in Europe. The wide biodiversity of its flora combined with powerful summer sun means its varieties of honey are dense, rich and among the finest.

a colony of colourful Greek hives

There are six main types: Thyme honey (the most highly thought of) produced from the thyme flowers of Crete and Kythera in spring; Blossom honey from wild flowers and orange groves in Halkidiki; Chestnut honey (the rarest) from Epirus, possessed of a faint, pleasant bitterness; Pine honey, high in antioxidants and minerals, accounts for 65% of all Greece produces; Heather honey, produced in early autumn when the heather blossom, is dark, thick and crystalline; Fir honey, from Vytina in the Peloponnese, is the only certified PDO honey.

Because it was Greek week at Lidl supermarket last week, I have been enjoying authentic Greek yoghurt with dried figs and Halkidiki honey for breakfast recently.

My favourite, though, is the thyme honey from dusty Crete, which I discovered when visiting the island nearly half a century ago. They do say that first impressions are lasting ones. It is very possible that Minoan Crete, nearly 4,000 years in the past, was the birthplace of apiculture, of bee worship (referenced above) and of the high regard for honey as a valuable and health-giving commodity. The beautiful  Malia pendant, discovered at Malia in Crete in 1930, is graphic testament to this regard. It dates from approximately 1800 BC, is worked in gold and shows two symmetrical bees. It's the most stunning piece of Minoan jewellery and if you ever get the chance to to go Heraklion Archaeological Museum, do seek it out.

famous bee pendant

Today's poem is partly in memory of that first visit to Crete in 1974. We pitched tent and stayed for a few days on Amnissos beach to the east of Heraklion. It was deserted. This was pre-hotels, villas, tourist package holidays, more the tail-end of the hippy trail. The area was unspoiled, unbuilt-up, probably looking much like it had for the last several hundred years. It was also the summer of the Cyprus war (the last major military engagement between Greeks and Turks), so many had been deterred from visiting the region. 

It was quite symbolic to me, having read Homer, to know that we were camping in a place where Odysseus had made landfall: "He had been driven to Crete by a gale which had blown him off his course at Cape Malea when bound for Troy. He put in at Amnissos, where the cave of Eileithyie is - a difficult harbour to make - only just escaping from the storm." (The Odyssey, XIX, lines 186 following.) Amnissos was the harbour for the bronze-age Minoan palace-town of Knossos circa 1380 BC. The sea-level is 3 metres higher now than it was in the bronze age, but the walls of submerged houses are still visible from the current shore. It was also here during excavations in 1932 that fragmented clay tablets were uncovered bearing a script that came to be known as Linear B.

Linear B clay tabled reconstructed

For a long time, archaeologists and classicists argued about the nature and origins of the script, many suggesting it was more akin to Babylonian or Egyptian hieroglyphs than anything else and that the artefacts had probably been brought to Crete (and mainland Greece) by traders. The truth, when the code was finally cracked by Michael Ventris in the 1950s, was that Linear B is actually a written form of early Greek, though obviously the symbols differ from the script that became dominant in the Aegean with the rise to prominence of the Mycenaeans. It is now known that writing in Linear B on clay tablets was a common practice in Minoan times to record inventories, trading transactions, treaties and official documents - but it is in the nature of clay to soften and crumble, so that 99.99% of these artefacts had only a limited life and were often broken down into soft clay to be reused. The 0.001% that we have today only survived because they were accidentally (and providentially) baked to hardness and thus durability in the fires that burned the great Minoan palaces to the ground in an act of war.

Here then (finally, you say), flowing from the Hellenic chamber of the Imaginarium, my latest...

Amnissos 1974

Broken Knossos somewhere to our backs,

here on wide Amnissos beach whose sand

still radiates as twilight steals  the day, we

sit and conjure visions of longships hulled

along its shore, tents pitched just like ours 

and fires roasting fish and flesh. Phantoms

roar in war formation, shattering the mood,

an age-old enmity renewed in Eastern skies

with Cyprus the prize; once quiet descends

again we contemplate past times and place,

a gentle murmur of lapis waves contrasting

with such echoing ire as torched a Minoan 

palace, the trick of destruction which saved

in perpetuity clay tablets bearing baked-in

witness shaped in ancient script to ordinary 

lives. Those testimonies, rendered shards in

further acts of desecration, lay buried in the

Cretan sand we sit on as history ran full tilt

down three millennia until, disinterred and

deciphered in our very lifetime, they spoke

through strife and smoke against all odds -

my favourite: "one jar of honey to the Gods".


Thanks for reading. Keep eating honey, S ;-)

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Memories Of Bees

My first encounter with a bee was when I was four and playing with a friend in her garden. I got stung and screamed. First responder Mrs Durrett came out of the house to see what all the commotion was. Weirdly, the only other thing I remember about that fateful day or about Mrs D was that she was a member of Weight Watchers. Why I remember this latter bit of useless information, I haven’t a clue.

Fast forward six years. I was cruising towards home on my very trendy Sting-Ray Schwinn push-bike (seemingly named after the cartilaginous fish related to sharks and having absolutely nothing to do with bees). It was blue, had shiny chrome butterfly handle-bars and a white banana seat.

I remember I was pedalling and caught a glimpse of my house in the distance along with a great big black ominous cloud heading in the same direction as me. I had to stop and wait because the noisy mass of darkness was circling and descending upon my final destination. I watched in horror as the blackness slowly disappeared into the eaves of the roof. I was wary. I had flashbacks of my previous unpleasant experience and waited. It was quite some time before the stragglers dissipated.

Turns out, the bees had found comfort in the wall behind the corner of the front of my parent’s bedroom. For several days, my parents would go to sleep and wake up to hum and buzzing. The squatters would soon discover they had made a poor choice in their new accommodation.

Not wanting to be the Grim Reaper, my father thought he’d be clever and so, in the dark hours of one night when the hive of activity was quiet he climbed up a ladder with one of my mother’s nylon stockings that had its foot cut off, along with a hammer and some nails.

His plan was to fix the stocking to the entrance of the hive and that the bees would fly out but wouldn’t be able to crawl back in. He had every intention of being humane but this didn’t work (no surprise). It was the early 70s, in the suburbs of Chicago and at that time saving bees was not a thing at least I don’t think it was and so, the pest control was called in toting DDT or something of the like.

Telling this story makes me sad and feeling somewhat guilty, not that it was my fault. If my parents knew then what we know now regarding bees and other pollinators, I’m certain the outcome would have been different. Today, we know bee populations are declining at an alarming rate. According to Friends of the Earth, in the UK alone 13 bee species have become extinct since 1900 and 35 are threatened. 75% of our main food supplies are pollinated by bees. We need to do everything possible to care for our little friends. We need them to ensure our own survival.

It was not until 2018 that I really began to become aware of the importance of bees when I was I was commissioned by The University of Manchester to paint their big bee for the Bee in the City Art Trail.

Bee Inspired : Bee in the City Art Trail, 2018

During this project. I consulted with staff, researchers and members of the public which both educated and inspired me to produce the artwork and also a tangential song. To see the development of this work and hear the song please click on this: bee link

Here is the poem:

Eugene, the Uni Bee

Eugene, the Uni bee
Perfect pollinator, he
He’s a perfect worker bee
Connect, respect and love.

Look at Eugene you will see
Our global visionary
Part of city’s busy hive
Makes his mark and helps us thrive.

Eugene the Uni bee
Perfect pollinator, he
He’s a perfect worker bee
Connect, respect and love.

One bee - no bees - equals none.
Work and play on earth is done.
No bees - no life - we are toast.
Up in smoke and only ghosts.

See with hope, the light switched on.
Open doors, bees not yet gone.
Plant a flower - plant a seed.
This is what our bee friends need.

Eugene the Uni bee
Doesn’t matter he or she
Or they or us, as we are bees
Connect, respect and love.

Thank you for reading.

Kate J

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Bees - Something Special

Manchester Bee, beautiful, symbolic and instantly recognisable.  My ancestry is firmly rooted in the city, Moss Side, Openshaw, Chorlton-On-Medlock, Ancoats, Stretford, Northenden and more recently Wythenshawe. They rest in Southern Cemetery, some known to me, many others long before my time, my people, my bloodline, my family. Some, my mother’s side, lived in Sale. It was in Cheshire then, affluent, even posh. I’m proud to have been born there and I’m happy that it is part of Greater Manchester now (not everyone is, sorry) because it unites all my family under the same umbrella and I like that. The Manchester Bee is for us all.

The first insect sting I ever had happened in Wythenshawe Park. I was about six I think. Nanna Hetty had taken me out to play and we were sitting on a bench to eat our ice cream. I remember her sitting down first and wafting a bee out of the way for me to sit beside her. The bee must have gone under the wooden slats of the seat to come out again as I sat.  I cried out with pain on my upper leg and there was the bee-sting, sticking out of my skin. Nanna knew what to do and looked after me. I sobbed and sobbed as she got the barb out, taking care not to squeeze. I was brave. Back at her house, the sting area dabbed with vinegar, I soon recovered. Sixty years later, the memory and associated trauma is still strong. Up to now, I haven’t had any more bee stings, but I give them their own space and plenty of respect.

My garden, such as it is – largely concrete ground with planting areas and tubs – has plants attractive to butterflies and bees including buddleia, sunflowers and a geum, beautiful and orangey called Totally Tangerine which I just had to have when we first planted this new garden. It comes back bigger and more bountiful every year, of course.

Reading up about bees, I have learnt that ‘in the old days’ news of a bee-keeper’s death would be passed on to them and their hives would be shrouded in black cloth. This was to reassure bees that they were to stay and carry on.  American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier mentions this in his poem, Telling the Bees.

Last week, a special little ‘Bee’ died. Nine year old Jordan Banks, who played football for Clifton Rangers Bees under 9s, passed away after being struck by lightning.  My heart broke for this beautiful little boy and his family, not known to me, but part of our neighbourhood as he attended our local primary school.  I gave my daughter some flowers to lay at the junior school gate when she took my grandson to school. Yesterday, my son went to see all the flowers and tributes when he took my granddaughter to school. Jordan, doing what he loved, kicking a football about in the fresh air, a selfless young man who did so much for others in his short life.  He was something special.

Tempted as I was to choose Arthur Askey’s ‘The Bee Song’, I opted for Emily Dickinson instead:

The Bee

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labour is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

                             Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

Thanks for reading, stay safe, Pam x

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Bees

Today I picked a bee up from a pavement. No bee should be on hot tarmac where careless people can step on it. I was running around with the bee in my hand, looking for something blossoming. Nothing like that to be found. In springtime! In the city! What was the bee doing downtown? Ok, I put the bee on a green leafy branch, hoping it would be able to rest and come to its senses soon and fly away, back home.

I've always loved bees. They are such diligent, beautiful little beasts. I can sit amongst flowers and watch bees for as long as they are around. My favourite meditation.

When I was a little girl, we had a Small Creatures graveyard at the end of my garden. My friends and I always buried bees, butterflies, beetles and other small beings there, paying them the last respects for being a wonderful part of this world and wishing them safe journey across the Rainbow bridge. I have to confess, I still have the urge to do the same thing now when I am a fully grown up person.

I was in a business centre few years ago and admiring a canvas with a bee in the  centre and words, bee happy, around it. The person who was a manager there was looking at me and smiling, as if she could sense how much I liked the canvas. I smiled back and said: “I really like it.” So, she took the picture off, gave it to me, saying: “Please have it. We are changing interior and all the colour scheme soon anyway.”

I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. Since then the canvas is in my living room, reminding me of bees and happy feelings, the importance of them, both of them.

Tiggy and the Bee picture

When writing cards I love using phrases such as:

Bee happy,

Bee safe,

Bee lucky,

Bee healthy,

Bee whatever,

Bee yourself,

Bee mine,

Bee ….


Just add as you wish!!!

Bee creative.here. Thanks for reading, Maija. 

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Frisson

The simple English dictionary definition of frisson is: an emotional thrill; (and oh yes, I do have a simple English dictionary...as portable companion to a weightier and more complex tome). However, frisson is a word of French origin, and for our friends across the channel it means a shiver or a shudder.

My challenge, then, is to find out whether a blog - or more realistically the poem within a blog - can induce the thrill of a shiver, shock or shudder in you, gentle readers. We shall see in due course.

exiting (sic)  times

First, though, there are several reasons why we might be about to experience emotional thrills in the week ahead. Monday sees phase two of the great unlocking in England's green and pleasant. Throw open all the doors. We'll be able to mingle and hug, just not too intensely; drink beer inside a pub, indulge in non-takeaway pizza* and curry, to be enjoyed immensely with friends at leisure and with no washing-up; drop into a cafe for a latte while out on the non-essential shop; and for followers of the Mighty (that's Blackpool FC to you, aka the Seasiders or even the Tangerines), we've got two League One play-off semi-finals to look forward to, with fans being allowed back inside grounds to watch the games. Deep joy.

If, as fans, we want to get dizzier still, there may even be another play-off final at Wembley at the end of the month, for you know what they say: "You can't beat Blackpool at this time of year!" What an away-day that would be for those of us who haven't travelled more than a couple of miles from our homes in a very long time. We dare to dream the tangerine dream.

*Sad footnote to the above: the Pizza Express in the jewel of the north shut during the first wave of pandemic a year ago and has never re-opened its doors. It's now gutted, as am I, for an American Hot and a cold Peroni had been affordable and favourite treats every few weeks since the 1970s. (I've probably consumed a thousand of them and sense a future blog on that score.)

But enough of this wide opening preamble. It's time for some cheap thrills. Here's the poem as promised,  conjured from the darkest quarter of the imaginarium, chock full of sex and death, (eros and thanatos if you'd prefer) and quite OTT.  I'm taking a chance with it, as it's a narrative way outside my comfort zone, so I hope it ticks at least one of your shiver, shock or shudder boxes. Do let me know...

That Long Strange Trip Advisor Poem

State facilities rating (scale 0 through 5):

Staff are more than courteous, I've been

treated like a queen. Room basic but clean, 

bed firm, and breakfast to die for.

They offered me a priest but I said

send me the other one in his stead.

They didn't understand. And I only smoke

after a good fuck. Still, a lucky five stars. 

Reason for visit (e.g. business or leisure):

Mercy. Where do I begin, honey?  I was

a teenage stunt cunt for a porn film pimp

until I married a rich dude; just my luck

he turned out to be another kinky mother.

You any idea how hard a man can get 

when you put a ligature around his neck 

and pull it tighter as he shoots his load?

One time I figured I'd just keep pulling...

...his death spasm made my insides flip,

and sent a thrill right up my spine. 

No better feeling, plus I got to keep

his bucks. Two years later, different state

same tricks. I was getting a taste for it,

rich man, wild sex gone wrong, no blame.

So it went on. I didn't care if his ass was

pink, brown, yellow or black just so long

as he had money in the bank and hot lust

for me in his heart. Then the Feds began

to join up the dots, got bang on my trail

soon after number five: arrest, trial, jail.

Thought I 'd rot in there, but seems not,

and that's the reason for me visiting here.

Business or leisure? A bit of both, I'd say.

 

Additional comments (this part optional):

The Black Widow fries tonight, a hot date

with destiny. I guess a lot of white ass 

wants to see the ghost of electricity howl 

in the bones of my face (thanks Bob)!

My fanny's on the line so I hope they all

come at once. I don't want no limp dicks

witnessing my final coup de grace!

Thank you for completion. Have a nice day.

And thank you, gentle readers. The emotional rollercoaster awaits, S ;-)

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Claims

I didn't know what I was going to write about this week until Tuesday, when I started to read Clare Chambers' latest novel 'Small Pleasures ' (very good, by the way), a fiction built around a true life news story from 1956.

The news article in the Sunday Pictorial was the result of a call put out by the paper for women who believed they were 'virgin mothers', (that is had become pregnant without any prior male involvement), to come forward with their stories. This interest in 'virgin births', or spontaneous parthenogenesis to give it it's formal name, had been sparked by research published in 1955 by Dr. Helen Spurway of the University of London citing proven cases of parthenogenesis in species of fish and reptiles. Spurway's findings instigated quite a widespread popular debate at the time as to whether such a phenomenon might be possible in higher life forms, including human beings.

Nineteen women replied to the call put out by the Sunday Pictorial, all of them claiming to have experienced 'virgin births'. Given there was no financial inducement in any of this, the respondents had nothing to gain from the process except being proved truthful or mistaken (perhaps fraudulent). The journalists on the paper went to work on the facts of each case, in conjunction with a team of doctors. Not surprisingly, most of the claims were debunked quickly and easily but there was one case, that of Mrs Emmimarie Jones and her daughter, that warranted closer investigation.

Emmimarie, a German woman resident in Hereford, wrote: "For ten years I have been wandering (sic) and worried about the birth of my daughter. I honestly believe that she has no father." Emmimarie claimed she had been a virgin, bedridden with rheumatism in a German hospital staffed only by women. After leaving the hospital in 1944 she had gone to a doctor, feeling lethargic, only to be told she was three months pregnant. "There has been no opportunity. It cannot possibly be true", was her response.

Between November 1955 and June 1956, Emmimarie (who'd since moved to England and married a Welshman) went with her ten year old daughter Monica on several occasions to Guy's Hospital in London where they voluntarily underwent a series of tests devised by a team of specialists. Apart from what was obvious at first sight, that mother and daughter bore a remarkable physical likeness (hair, eyes, teeth et cetera), the tests revealed that the two had identical blood, saliva and sense of taste - this was cutting-edge science in the days before DNA analysis - all consistent with a case of parthenogenesis. Even when a skin-graft test between mother and daughter failed to take, doctors were equivocal about the reasons for this. They concluded with an open verdict: they had failed to disprove Emmimarie's claim. That was a good enough basis for the Sunday Pictorial to run its feature story over several issues (boosting its circulation by millions in the process). Emmimarie subsequently returned with her daughter to Germany and all trace of them was lost.

The informed medical opinion on parthenogenesis in human beings remains that it should not be possible, and yet recently such virgin births have been observed in lower-order mammals such as rabbits and rats.

My latest poem started life months go as a short comic piece about a woman undergoing a phantom pregnancy and giving birth to a ghost. My reading of 'Small Pleasures ' and the published information about the Emmimarie Jones case has taken it in another, more substantial direction. 

Of course I don't know the anguish of those unfortunates (women and men) who have longed to be a parent but for whom it never quite happened, so this is all about taking an imaginative leap. And building on the relative success of last week's Ode, I thought I'd try and wrestle my latest narrative into another formal structure, this time abba quatrains..."and that's what you've done, too" - but I've not been entirely successful; form stumps content. Anyway, here it is (for now, as it might be missing a verse). Thoughts?

Miss Fortune's Phantom Pregnancy

Scrawled on the fifth years' dormitory wall

Fortune favours the Brave, cryptic allusion

by girls supposedly in the know to a liaison

forged at their upper school Christmas ball

between the maths mistress and Headmaster.

Equations of the heart had not resolved well

for one so ambiguously named; now she fell

less than the sum of her parts as fate cast her

to be the object of her pupils' salacious talk.

Spring swelled her form coincidentally with

Mrs Brave going to tend for some aged kith.

If he was the cheese, she was certainly chalk

and yet it proved no obstacle to speculation,

provoked tears in a stock-cupboard, broken

nights for a woman in two minds; no token

of support being offered from that direction.

Wracked for lack of love and want of a child

at half-term she delivered a premature ghost.

Her pain was real but an emptiness hurt most,

more intense than any sense of being reviled;

so she resisted suggestions she might resign,

met each cycling year of fresh, young faces,

content to put those girls through their paces.

She might even sell the cot and pram in time.

Here, if you can decipher it, is the main spread of that Sunday Pictorial write-up on the fascinating case of Emmimarie Jones and daughter; and her claim, which doctors were unable to disprove, that her baby was indeed "born without a man".

Thanks, as ever, for reading, S ;-)

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Claims

 Not much to say on this one but I do have an appropriate poem, written when I was a hard working single Mum of two. 

We all know one

There’s a man who lives at 23
who’s just been getting Sky TV
Sports Channels 1 and 2 and 3
his kids all kept by DWP
 
His car is ‘disabiliy’
on loan from Motability
tax exempt and free insurance
AA on call for reassurance
 
He doesn’t pay his rent – it’s free
his council tax is courtesy
of honest folk like you and me
the ones who work for dignity
 
I see him walk his dogs each day
I saw him only yesterday
at a car boot sale, with a lot to say
about clearing his mother’s stuff out of the way
 
He’s rented her house for a tidy sum
and is taking a holiday in the sun
in his touring van with his girlfriend’s mum
she can babysit while they have fun.
 
The pair look like Wayne and Waynetta
their idea of god food is Vienetta
he might look for work – if his back gets better
but gives him jip when the weather’s wetter.
 
Well it rains here every other day
so a three day week just wouldn’t pay
with a stick and a limp he makes his way
still he won parent’s race at school sports day
 
He smiled at me when he boasted that
What a rat!
A low life, shirking lump of fat
I felt so mad, I almost spat.
 
I heard him laughing hysterically
getting his kicks making fun of me
‘cause I’ve worked all my life
to keep him for free.
 
My ideology’s strange to him
working ethics – keeping in trim
paying my way and staying in
saving up for everything.

My family philosophy
(between you and me)
Don’t get mad, get even. He’ll see
One simple call – anonymously
Now they’re watching on CCTV

Thanks for reading. Adele 

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Claims - What Did You Do, Radio 2?

I got a bit mad recently. Not red and raging, just a niggle that exploded and set me off looking for answers Victor Meldrew style.

It started off with Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops on Saturday afternoons. It fits just nicely between having lunch and watching the football – Blackpool FC on iFollow, home and away – and it is fun to guess what might be in the chosen Top Ten. I don’t claim to be a pop music buff but I grew up with a jukebox filtering through from the pub downstairs and a mum who liked her records so I was drip-fed the hits of the time. Over a few Saturdays, I grew disappointed that the ‘early hit-lists’ were from the ‘80s. I became more dismayed upon looking up pre-arranged schedules to discover only music charts from the ‘80s onwards were included. Anything after about 1985 is lost on me, unless it is something specific which attracted me. Horrified, I emailed BBC Radio 2, which claims to be the most listened to music radio station in the UK, politely asking if the chosen years were random or hand-picked and also making them aware that I am familiar with Sounds of the Seventies, Johnnie Walker and Sounds of the Sixties, Tony Blackburn, before they point me in that direction.

My email failed to warrant a reply, but, around that time someone had aired a complaint to Points of View along the same lines, and the reply from the Beeb explained that the BBC Radio 2 playlist covered forty years, from 1980. A similar announcement was made in the papers and said pre 1980 recordings would still be occasionally included, but would not be part of the main play-list. This was for everything, not just Pick of the Pops. Well, cheers, thanks for that. I switched from Radio 1 to Radio 2 for a reason, and now it seems they are one and the same. I’m not ready for Radio 3 all the time and Radio 4, though excellent, isn’t good for a morning sing in the shower.  I’m sure Zoe Ball is lovely, but I haven’t latched on to her taste in music.

I think I will have to explore Greatest Hits Radio, Absolute Radio or something similar for the bathroom radio. Wait a minute, Pick of the Pops on Saturday, 7th May, features 1969, yippee, lucky me. If anything can calm me down, the hits from '69 can.

My Haiku poem

Where is the music?
Where have all the good songs gone?
Eliminated.

Taken, just like that.
BBC Radio 2
Made the decision,

All pre ‘80s out,
Off the regular play-list.
Claims lack of int’rest.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading and if you're venturing into the outdoors, please take care, Pam x

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Lifelines & Deadlines

The pressure has been on this week to complete a new poem, after two Saturday Blogs in succession without one. Truth to tell, I've not been idling. There has been lots of other stuff going on in  the second half of April, not least in the footballing world, what with that monstrous ESL franchise-grab which needed talking down, and then the nerve-shredding excitement of plucky Blackpool FC's big spring push for promotion and the consequent upsurge in questions and suggestions from fans regarding ticket allocation, should the Seasiders get into the play-offs. And now suddenly it's May already.

Earlier this year, February 23rd actually, was the 200th anniversary of the passing of one of England's finest 'romantic' poets, John Keats. He died aged just twenty-five in Rome, of tuberculosis, and was buried in that city's Protestant cemetery. At the turn of the year, in anticipation of that impending anniversary, the Poetry Society challenged its members to write something relevant to the occasion and the poet. I had every good intention of doing so, of writing an ode in the style of Keats.

Many is the time I've drunk in The Spaniards pub in Hampstead, have sat in its beer garden, where Keats is supposed to have listened to that nightingale and composed his famous ode. As January rolled into February, I had the concept all lined up... but I never quite got the poem down: lifeline busy, deadline missed.

Never mind, I'm looking to put all of that right in this week's blog about  lifelines & deadlines  as they pertained to one of my favourite contemporary musicians and poets, international man of misery Leonard Norman Cohen.

Lugubrious Lenny (1934-2016)

I've enjoyed Cohen's poetry and music since the late 1960s, as I'm sure many of you have done, but it's only been in the last year or so that I've delved in any detail into his life story. I posted a blog recently about bohemian creatives on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s. Cohen was one of them and you can link to that blog here if you missed it: Colonies  

 Cohen's time on Hydra was transformational. He arrived from the cold of Montreal as a published poet ('Let Us Compare Mythologies'), seeking sun and the inspiration to write more poetry and novels. Much of the poetry in 'The Spice-Box Of Earth' and 'Flowers For Hitler' was written on or inspired by Hydra as was his first novel 'The Favourite Game'. It was fortunate for him that living on a Greek island was relatively inexpensive, for Leonard soon discovered that there was not much money to be made from writing poetry or avant-garde novels. Luckily, he'd taken a battered old guitar along with him and for many a night in the early 1960s he would lead the coterie of impoverished writers, painters, their guests and some friendly locals in sing-songs at some quayside taverna or other. Initially the repertoire was old English or American folk standards but as the decade progressed Cohen began to write original material and though he never had much confidence in his singing voice, he was encouraged by the praises of his Hydra cohort. 

Matters came to a head in 1966 when he was on an extended visit to the USA. He was broke, his second novel 'Beautiful Losers' had failed to reverse his fortunes and he was persuaded by the movers and shakers of the New York folk scene that he should try out as a folk singer. He even toyed with the idea of moving to Nashville; but then Judy Collins recorded a couple of his compositions, 'Suzanne' and 'Dress Rehearsal Rag' on her 1966 LP 'In My Life' (yes, the Beatles' song) and Cohen's lifeline changed dramatically from that point. Producer John Hammond heard a demo tape of Cohen's songs, CBS Records signed the Canadian as their latest singer-songwriter sensation and soon Leonard was being feted by the scene, was appearing at festivals, recording his debut LP, numbering Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell among his paramours. 

'Songs From A Room' (many of them originally conceived on Hydra) cemented the reputation established by his eponymous debut and for a couple of years Cohen's lifeline was swept along by the music industry machine, a schedule of touring, song-writing, recording, being idolised by thousands all wanting a bit of him. 

By the early 1970s he'd certainly tapped into the exposure and financial rewards that had been out of reach of the poet and novelist, but such success came at considerable personal cost - deadlines, demands, disorientation, so much so that by 1971 (or it might have been 1972), he was describing himself as "a broken-down nightingale". When I read that statement in one of his biographies, I knew what my Keats-inspired narrative poem was going to be about: a reimagining of that night in the middle of an exacting and crazed European tour when lugubrious Lenny (or Captain Mandrax as he was known) nearly went over the edge into the abyss.

A clockwork Nightingale

I'm not a big fan of the constraints of versification and metre, but this is one instance in which I felt obliged to adhere to the structures of rhyme-scheme (ababcdecde ) and iambic pentamers (with a trimeter inserted at each eighth line) as employed by Keats in his original Ode To A Nightingale. I have also, for obvious reasons, changed the narrative perspective from first person and set a limit of five on the number of stanzas, as compared to the original eight. I'm happy I've done the form justice. It's for you to judge the merit of the content and its overall effect. Here we go then, on the wings of Poesy...

 

Ode To A Broken Down Nightingale

Your throat aches and a numbness dulls your hand,

  So though the plaudits ring around the hall,

You dose on mandrax washed with wine and stand

  Your ground, refuse to take the curtain call.

Though some might envy you your role tonight,

  Another foreign town with plush hotel,

A line of girls who queue to share your bed,

    None of this feels quite right.

The goddess Fame span a beguiling spell

  But you have come to view her hold with dread.

Now far away and almost quite forgot,

  That simpler time upon a Grecian isle

When life was sweet and Poesy was your lot

  With Marianne your Nordic muse, whose smile

Unlocked the spice-box for you, and who placed

  A fresh gardenia on your desk each day,

All distractions kept at bay except one;

    Warm evenings when you graced

The harbour cafes, happy just to play

  And sing for those bohemian friends - all gone.

In Berlin or in Rome your body fits

  To simulate the lover and the seer

Whose words have filled some million bedsits,

  Whose intimate confessions forced a tear

In corners where your lonely listeners dwell.

  They paid their pound and now they want the flesh.

Our recording angel's testimony

    States you fake the part well,

Can rail like a bird that's caught in a mesh,

  Such anguish revealed, nothing sounds phoney.  

And yet the mirror doesn't lie. Dark pools

  Reflect a deeper truth, the death of hope

As, burdened by the weight of trusting fools,

  You fantasize of reaching for the rope.

One knot, one drop might free you from this trap,

  To fly into the dark beyond at last

With weary mechanism jettisoned.

    Is this the final lap?

Your dress-rehearsal rag audition passed?

  The executioner stares, reticent.

Lore of your fathers makes you turn away,

  Pull on the famous raincoat, collar up,

And slip discreetly the post-concert fray

  Through damp September streets, your bitter cup

Brimming with furious pity for yourself

  And for a world gone wrong, where every song

Beats wings against the urgings of your heart,

    Each show erodes your health.

You make the choice once more not to belong,

  Outsider, now your future may restart.

Just for those of you who don't know the back story, Cohen could easily have died an early death, like Keats, but he decided to walk away from the scene, to escape from what he called "captivity in the tower of song" and he joined an order of Buddhist monks. Only decades later, when he discovered that his manager had swindled him out of his funds, did he make a belated return to the circus of the music world, to pay for his retirement years. In his sixties and seventies he wrote, recorded and played concerts once more, to great acclaim, only this time on his own terms and not anybody else's. Respect to the man.

Thanks for reading. Tonight will be fine.....for a while. S ;-)

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