False Memory

I thought I'd already written this week's blog!  False memory  - only joking. 😉

My reading matter at the moment is 'Girl To City: a memoir ' by Amy Rigby. I've loved Amy's music since the mid-1990s, bought all her early records, have caught many of her gigs when she's played in the UK, even interviewed her one time (and my friend Richard Booth, ex-Plummet Airlines, took the photographs). 

In the early part of her memoir, Amy (then McMahon) writes about going up to art college in New York City (from native Pittsburgh) aged seventeen in the summer of 1976, and getting into the nascent NY punk scene (CBGB, Max's et cetera) via a boy she met and dated named Bob (Gurevics); then how in the summer of 1977: "Bob had passed an audition and was in a band, The Poppees." She goes on to recount how she and her second year roommate Lisa went along in the fall of 1977 to his inaugural gig with the group at Max's: "Bob wanted to do a good job but it was almost too much pressure. To step into a pre-existing band, to fill in for a departed member, must have been a lot tougher than coming up with your own music together with a group of friends... I don't think he enjoyed himself, but in my eyes he was a hero. He'd played Max's. He was in a band."

I didn't know much about her involvement with Bob until reading the memoir, but this much I do know about The Poppees - as you can verify from several online sources: Bob Waxman was a founding member (along with Paddy Lorenzo) in 1973. The pair shared a love of  '60s British music and as a quartet (with Arthur Alexander and Arthur Harris) they recorded their first single for Greg Sage's Bomp! label in 1975 after he'd heard a demo they made. Their profile and the gigs they got in NYC increased markedly in the wake of the record and they laid down a second single which showed them taking their love of the first British invasion (Beatles, Kinks, Who) and the second (Buzzcocks, Damned, Sex Pistols) and melding both into the basis of what became known as power-pop. They did play both CBGB and Max's, opening for the likes of Blondie, but they had disbanded by the end of 1976.

All of which goes to suggest that there may be a significant quotient of false memory in one or other or - heaven help us - both of those accounts.  For apart from anything else, I can find no evidence that there was ever any other Bob in The Poppees than Waxman (though all things are possible).

False memory is an intriguing phenomenon, the seemingly credible recollection of something that either never happened or happened significantly differently from the way it is remembered. 

It is well documented that for any single event, multiple people may retain different versions of what 'happened'. This is because our senses cannot capture every detail but take impressions of the experience and then our brains 'make sense' of what we've seen, heard et cetera. We will all notice slightly different aspects of the event and our brains will interpret the impressions and fill in the blanks based on our past experiences, prejudices and sensibilities. Only the camera and the microphone never lie.

It is also well known from psychological experiments that if the memory, witness statement or the like  is being recalled under interrogation, the content of the questions and the way they are posed (leading, loaded, suggestive in some degree) often bias and condition the details of the recall. Memories are mutable things.

Speak, Memory

So what about the recollection of an event that may never have happened at all? 

"Remember that time you fell in the pool with all your clothes on?" "No, I've never done that in my life. You're imagining it, or it was someone else." "It was you, I was there!" There are three possibilities. Either the person denying it has genuinely forgotten and has lost the memory entirely, or the person claiming it happened actually saw someone different fall in and is confused in the recollection, or it never did happen but for some reason (s)he imagines it as potently as if it had. (Actually, there is a fourth possibility, that it's a wind-up by either party, in jest or for some more sinister and destabilising purpose.)

In a week when more poor children and their teachers have been mown down by a gunman in an American school, I was reminded of an incident which I swear I happened to observe on a holiday to the USA twenty years ago, though my family still maintains I imagined it all. We were out walking downtown and I heard an altercation behind us. I turned and saw, a block down at the corner on the other side of the street, a man step backwards out of a shop doorway. He was followed out by another man pointing a handgun at him from a couple of feet away. Suddenly the first man fell violently backwards to the ground. There was a simultaneous dull retort. I sensed he had just been shot. It was broad daylight, and we were walking along a wire-mesh fence outside the car pound of a rental firm. I just urged my wife and daughters to keep on going. I'm not sure they realised why and I didn't say anything else at the time. Later on I told them and they were incredulous. They'd neither seen nor heard anything and thought I must have imagined the whole thing. I know I didn't.

Pierre Janet

Some of the earliest research into the mysterious workings of the mind and how we make memories (false or otherwise) was undertaken by the pioneering French physician and psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947). He was one of the first to explore and hypothesise about the relationship between past experience and how that shapes present perceptions and memory-making. He it was who coined the terms subconscious and dissociation, and he also formulated an early theory of transference. His work was ground-breaking and there were claims in the early decades of the 20th century that Sigmund Freud had plagiarised Janet when formulating and publishing his own widely-read and accepted treatises. No doubt that is not how Freud would have remembered it!

My latest poem isn't particularly on theme, but thoughts of what continues to unfold in eastern Europe have been pressing for fresh expression, lest we forget. 

Dissociation

What answer to the riddle of bullet holes 

in the family samovar? Or solution to the

tangled puzzle of muddied human limbs?

How to resolve this equation if X is ego

and Y is never allowed to be expressed?

What sense to be made of your enormous

pixilated image mouthing patriotic hate?

More fodder conscripted to serve a State

with no grain for bread and oh no circuses.

I don't remember victory like this before!

But what of Amy Rigby? you ask. And life after Bob? In a nutshell, this: she abandoned art for music, was in bands The Stare Kits, Last Roundup and The Shams, got married to Will Rigby (drummer with power-pop band the dBs), had a daughter, separated and went solo in 1993 as a singer-songwriter, recording a series of hugely enjoyable albums. On a musical tour of England she met punk-rock musician Wreckless Eric (Goulden) and the two have been an item ever since. I'll leave you with a musical bonus, a backward-looking reflection from 'Middlescence ', Amy's second album. Click on the song title to activate the YouTube link: The Summer Of My Wasted Youth

Thanks as ever for reading, S ;-)

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Memory Spins False Worlds

Our fame is as storytelling creatures. Arguably, this is the dividing line between animal and humankind. Our ability to displace ourselves from the present moment even though we inexorably occupy it, and to dwell instead in the folds of the past or fret upon the unfolding of the future – this is what makes us human. It is our birthmark; an almost-irremovable spot that can be the cause of distress or celebration, depending on how we choose to wear it.

You’ve likely noticed it by now. When you pass by people in the street. How some walk with their heads bowed, eyes to the ground, brows tortured by thought, aware of your being only at the minimum level of attention necessary. They are not really where their bodies are situated at all. Their physical surroundings periphery to their actual point of concentration. Auto-pilot episodes, elsewhere minds, bodies locked in cruise control.

Wanderers on some material plane, apparently loose parts in an external, objective world that, for all our understanding, goes on changing largely independent of our inner states. And yet we consistently superimpose our inner states upon this objective, external world.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps we are souls under house-arrest, peering through the looking glass. All too often, our vision is fogged or otherwise restricted. There are only so many angles of perception we can hold at any one time. No matter how we might crane and stretch to attain a better view, we will always have our blind spots.

And there are parasites in our houses too.

Consorts of endlessly transmuting energies and disembodied voices. You cannot outrun them, for you are locked inside this house with them. And to rage against them is also no use. With either strategy, you only succeed in inflating your enemies, helping their shadows loom larger on the wall.

Where we attempt to exterminate one family of thought, we succeed only in ensuring the multiplication of its offspring. It is the myth of Heracles fighting the Hydra. In decapitating one head, several more are sure to sprout in its place. The only proper solution is to face the head of each snake directly and to properly cauterise the wound. But this, it’s a conversation for another time.

If you’re an ordinary human being, the chances are that you’ve been living under this sort-of house arrest like the rest of us. Worse still, you’ve been living there so long, you might have no understanding of your identity beyond the walls which contain you. At its most extreme, this means you cannot separate yourself from where you reside, you might mistake who you are for the very house itself and everything contained within it. This means the disembodied voices - the ghosts haunting its many rooms - are also haunting you.

These unresolved voices of the past become the chorus that fabricate our stories and repeat them back to us. And we become little more than hosts possessed by this echo-chamber, navigating our limited space and time according to the framework set upon us by our store of past experiences. We become aware of our blind reactions only in the playing-out of their consequences, and realise all too late the wisdom in the saying: what you own ends up owning you.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

This, of course, a slice from Orwell’s 1984: a warning about the dangerous mutability of information. It’s an admission from the novel’s totalitarian Big Brother government, otherwise known as the Party, which recognises that in order to exert control over its population they must continually weave a story to which all past evidence corroborates. All evidence of which exists only in records and human memory. The Party must therefore be in full control of all records – doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary – and also be in full control of the minds of its people – also doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary.

Implicit in this process is an appreciation that past events have no objective existence. The past is dead and lives on only in the mind. All that truly exists is the present. The Party understands this. Whoever recalls the past has the ability to alter its shape, which – as the majority of people behave according to their past – grants whomever manipulates past events the power to manipulate behaviour in the present. And behaviour in the present creates a predictable pattern for behaviour in the future. Put otherwise, you act in your present according to your past: your present actions build your future. Be cautious therefore, which version of the past you choose to live with.

However, there is an escape hatch here, if you will, a get-out-of-jail-free card. I could tell you, that you, like the Party, are also the governing body with the power to manipulate past events, thereby determining your behaviour in the immediate now. But this seems to be an unnecessary exhaust of energy. Wouldn’t it be better instead to live entirely unburdened by the past?

Read again the statement closely.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Now, reverse-engineer the equation.

For the past to determine the future, the present must be the direct consequence of the past. Without such a present, the past can have no bearing on the future. It seems to me then, that the present moment is everything, the fulcrum on which a life experience is continuously determined. There is an acknowledgement in this equation: absolute power belongs to whomever dominates the present moment.

And guess what? This anonymous ‘whomever’, that person, is you.

The erudite truth is that you are always occupying the present moment. Though your elsewhere mind might convince you otherwise, you cannot remove yourself from the unceasing now, no matter how hard you try. Whether you realise it or not, your relationship with the present moment is the most significant determinant of your life experience. You can be the victim of circumstance or the manufacturer of circumstance. That choice, ultimately, is yours.

A slight modification of the Party’s statement seems unavoidable for my purposes here. Forgive me, Orwell: I’m aware I’m taking you out of context. But let us say that whilst ‘Who controls the present controls the past’ is indeed true, we can also elaborate, and choose to say: ‘who surrenders to the present is uncontrolled by the past.’

Memories spin false worlds. Unburden yourself. Remove the shackles of the past – loosen them at the least – and your future will become increasingly unconditioned; an infinite sea of potentiality.

Thanks for reading, Josh.

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False Memory - The Way It Should Have Been

One of my nephews had a birthday last weekend. He is my sister’s eldest and was the first baby to be welcomed into the immediate family since she herself was born and the anticipated event had filled us with excitement for months. I found myself remembering his birth, which was thirty-six years ago and with pangs of sadness, discovered my false memory.

A Wednesday afternoon and I was at work. All was quiet, just three of us on the premises. The shop was shut, retail staff still observing half day closing. It didn’t affect office staff so we were busily working – actually, the work would have been completed already and we were probably taking it easy and having a laugh until we could lock up and leave. When my sister phoned to say things were happening, baby on the move, help wanted, my colleagues sent me on my way.

I drove to her house, a short distance from where I was on Dickson Road to where she was near Stanley Park. My false memory tells me that I packed her into my dark blue Austin Maxi, but I didn’t have that car anymore. I had a light blue metallic and rust Datsun Violet. I was sent on a quick errand on foot to a nearby shop for camera film – those were the days – and returning to my car, thought my sister was about to give birth there and then as for some reason, the passenger seat was flat. Luckily, I delivered her to the hospital before any other delivery happened and waited with her until her husband arrived from his place of work out of town. I went home.

This is where my recollection of events all goes funny, such a strong memory yet so false. By now it is early evening. I’m sat on the settee in the lounge, knitting a chunky-knit cardigan with thick needles. I’m doing a sleeve which is growing quickly and I’m thinking if I finish this piece before the baby comes, it’s a girl, if not, it’s a boy. I don’t think we had gender reveals at that time. My dad is sitting in his usual armchair, reading every word in the Gazette, sharing a few adverts in the classified section, items for sale, usually cars, and drawing a ring round them with his Parker biro. He’s wearing a denim-blue sweater that I made for him. He checks his yellow tea-cup, disappointed to find it empty. The phone rings in the hall and he goes to answer it. Of course, it was the happy news of the safe arrival of a perfect baby boy.

This is how I remember it. Or is it how I wish to remember it?

 My father had been ecstatic to learn he was going to be a grandfather and shared his news with anyone who would listen. A boy would be lovely after raising daughters, but of course a granddaughter would be loved and cherished just the same. Arthritis plagued my father. He blamed it on rolling barrels and lifting cases of bottles in the pubs. He relied on pain relief and some days he was better than others. Out of the blue, he suffered a heart attack. It was serious, but he rallied and after a couple of weeks in hospital, he was well enough to be discharged. The experience had scared him and he would need time to recover. He felt mentally shot and physically weak and told me how he hoped he would be strong enough to hold the baby when it arrived.

He didn’t get the chance. Another heart attack took his life nearly two months before my nephew was born. He was 62.

False Memory

Blue knitted jumper, nice
Subtly fragrant Old Spice.
Another pot of tea?
Empty cup.
I was sure he was there
In his usual chair
With an open Gazette
Close to hand.
On the table, his pen,
Should he need it again,
Circling classified ads,
Things for sale.
I thought he got the phone
But he’d already gone.
My mind playing cruel tricks.
Death’s torment.

PMW 2022

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Estuary

When weather conditions are right, we are favoured with stunning tangerine sunsets up on the Fylde coast, facing due west as we do across the expanse of Irish Sea, roughly in the direction of that other Blackpool (you didn't know that Dublin - or Dubhlinn in Gaelic - also means black pool?) 135 miles away as the sandpiper flies, which is just far enough as to be over the curve of the horizon, meaning that, at its going down, the sun appears to dip shimmering into the waters in between.

We also have an  estuary  just to the north of Blackpool, where the Wyre flows into the Irish sea, and where from its banks one can watch the river at sunset become a flaming ribbon under those same tangerine skies, as little sandpipers pitch their evening cries.

estuary at sunset

I've posted pieces about the Wyre Estuary on a few previous occasions and so I don't plan to cover that estuarine ground again. Here's a link to the earliest, from almost eight years ago, when I was relatively new to both the North West and the blogging game: Saltmarsh Blues Blog 

 

Instead I want to say a few words about those afore-mentioned sandpipers, and to leave you with a new poem. My big book of birds instructs me that there are twenty different varieties of sandpiper inhabiting the shorelines of estuaries, lakes and seas worldwide. What they all have in common is long legs for wading at the water's edge and long bills for probing into mud or sand for food, both sets of features allowing them to keep their compact bodies from getting wet. They are part of a larger group of shoreline birds known as 'waders' for obvious reasons (which comprises oystercatchers, plovers, snipe, curlews, godwits, knots, redshanks, dotterels, dunlins, phalaropes, ruffs, turnstones and whimbrels). 

Of the twenty varieties of sandpiper, whose adjectival qualifications include buff-breasted, green, marsh, pectoral, purple, semi-palmated, sharp-tailed, solitary, spotted, white-rumped and wood, it is the unpretentiously named common sandpiper that inhabits our north-western shorelines, and fittingly so.

solitary sandpiper?

Designated actitis hypoleucos, from the ancient Greek aktites (meaning coast-dweller) plus hupo (beneath) and leukos (white), it should come as no surprise that what distinguishes the common sandpiper is the pure white breast  beneath its brownish-grey upper body. It's a relatively small bird, only about eight inches long, and it spends its days in gregarious flocks combing the tideline for insects, molluscs, crustacea or worms. As it walks, its hind parts and tail bob up and down much like a wagtail's do. When it takes to the air (often in a flock) it flies low over the water on stiff, bowed and rapidly beating wings, almost skidding across the surface. In summer, flocks of common sandpipers often put on flying displays. When it calls, it pipes with a shrill, twee series of four or five notes. All in all, a rather lovely little bird.

I'll leave you with the poem, the title of which makes them sound like a notable local family, don't you think? Fylde gentry. Hambleton is on the shore of the Wyre estuary. The emission of raw sewage into Britain's rivers has increased by 87.6% in the last year and a half. Water companies have "transgressed with impunity" on no fewer than 375,000 occasions over that period. How long can this go on without causing irreparable harm to wildlife?

The Sandpipers of Hambleton

One with the mottling dusk they pipe in the creeping tide

that cools their feet while washing out those hieroglyphs 

which told the story of their foraging. Almost unseen now

the ceremonious bobbing in time with that kittywiper call.

Do they have souls? They seem to rejoice in the returning

of the waves which bring tomorrow's feed. Or might it be

relief that salt tang and seawater will dilute the offence of

raw sewage leaked into their estuary? If they suffer from

emotional wounds, don't let the trauma dull their whistled

shrill incantations to a higher avian power (for God surely

is made in bird's image). As dark brings silence once more

to Hambleton's shore, I reflect it is a thin line we all tread. 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Estuary - Walking on Wyre

Several years ago Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society were fortunate to receive funding from Arts Council England for a project to create a poetry map of the area along the River Wyre.  We took groups of writers on walks along shortish sections of The Wyre Way, a public footpath that meanders along the river bank from Scorton to Fleetwood, detouring in land and passing through Cleveleys at the coast.

We recruited the expertise of several established poets to conduct writing workshops at six strategic stages along the route. Several weeks later, the map was published and  participants invited to perform their work at both the launch event and another event during Blackpool's Wordpool festival.

We are very proud of the project, named Walking on Wyre, and the map which is still available on request. It was a memorable experience, many of those published had never before seen their work in print. 

The first writing workshop, at Stanah on the Wyre Estuary, was hosted by the wonderful Sarah Hymas who lives close to the Lune estuary and has written extensively about this ever-changing geographic feature.  She was commissioned to write her own poem for the publication.  The poem that follows was my own contribution to this interesting and constructive part of the journey. 

Sampher

Full-bodied women 

               pickled, ankle-deep in brine,

enticed by salty succulents,

                along the tide line.

 

Red-legged terns

punctuate pale terracotta

searching for crustaceans,

            sand dancing,

reflected in mirror pools.

 

Keepers of the drowning flats,

they rise to sky

with soulful cries 

as sea kissed river returns .

Thanks for reading. Adele

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Flambuoyant

I know, I know. The (mis)spelling is deliberate. Who would have guessed? Other bases having been covered, you're in for one more perversely oblique approach to the weekly theme, pivoted on a pun and bonkers as toffee-apples.

The derivation of flamboyant is the French  flamboyer  meaning to flame, to flash, to shine. Yes it gets applied as an adjective to anyone or anything "showy" (animals, architecture, clothes, Eurovision, flowers, influencers, models and popular music divas), but add a 'u' in the appropriate place and you get flambuoyant. Voila! I give you the light buoy. It floats as it shines as it warns. (I'm so pleased I never took that job in advertising.)

a light buoy ready for the night's work

Light buoys primarily act as a navigational aid at night. They are usually anchored in shallow waters to warn of dangerous rocks , sunken wrecks, or to mark out channels to sail through in the dark. Originally the lights would literally have been flames (coal or wood in a floating brazier). These were superseded by candles, then battery-powered lamps and nowadays they are often solar-powered affairs.

They are in practice (despite my humorous wordplay) the very antithesis of flamboyant, being plain and serviceable structures, but absolutely vital to safe shipping in tricky waters.

What's more, I can't even claim any credit for the contraction of the words flamboyant and buoyancy that result in flambuoyant. It's been a member of the urban dictionary for quite some time as: "a description of a body's tendency to float as a result of vivid or over-the-top mannerisms and/or swim apparel". 

However, my meticulous research did lead me to the wonderful Pfeffer's Cuttlefish (sometimes actually called the Flamboyant Cuttlefish), which graces the warm waters off the northern coast of Australia.

the Eurovision of cuttlefish

It's a tiny creature (the size of a coin) and a poor swimmer, preferring to move ungainly across the seabed, "like a dog in a wheelchair". Note well that it's also poisonous if eaten (even with chips and gravy).

To round out this Saturday's ramblings on things flambuoyant, mention must be made of those cunning Byzantines who from the 6th century onwards used fireships to devastating effect against the Turkish enemy in their naval wars in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Over a thousand years before the English Navy tried sending unmanned flaming ships filled with explosives in amongst the boats of the Spanish Armada in an attempt to set the enemy fleet on fire (a plan which failed to succeed, by the way), the Byzantine navy had perfected the art of using fire, that gift of the gods, at sea.

temporary like Prometheus

The specialized Byzantine fireships known as dromons were manned and thus manoeuvrable, able to get up close to the enemy and then unleash 'Greek Fire' on the target via a flamethrower. The recipe for 'Greek Fire' was a closely guarded state secret but was believed to be composed of a mixture of pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide and sulphur. It was heated and pressurized in containers on board the dromons and then delivered flaming using a siphon and funnel onto the target, adhering to and burning everything it touched - much like modern napalm. Unsurprisingly, it was a fearful and much feared weapon delivery system in the armoury of the Byzantine navy. I'll leave it there.

To conclude, another work-in-progress from the imaginarium. Make of it what you will. I'll take it to the Blackpool & Fylde Stanza group for their considered input.

Greek Fire

Dona Ferentes in a different age 

might have found fame as a culinary sage:

How to roast a whole bull on the shore,

Mouth-watering meals for Moors,

Sarcen pie with village greens,

Ambrosia pudding for vestal teens

or 101 things you can cover in honey, but

there were no Saturday Celebrity TV Cooks

and no Sunday Supplement recipe books

(the printing-press was not invented yet),

so even if being a woman and of mixed blood

and a Spanish witch hadn't killed her career 

before it was born, she would have struggled

to make a name for herself, plus

her best recipe, the one that might have

earned a wage, was top-secret by Order 

of The Byzantine State, known only to a few 

on a strictly need-to-know basis, meaning she 

got little credit in her lifetime and died,

dark tar in her soul, a disregarded Danaan

dowager in a cypress grove grave, though

the fearful sticky sauce the Dona devised

for fireships to spray on their adversaries,

frittering Arabs and Turks on the middle sea

from Carthage to Canaan, stood satisfaction 

of sorts, vengeance in perpetuity for the ire

she nursed against those who razed homes,

slaughtered parents, stole childhoods, worse.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Say It With Flowers

My father was a flamboyant gardener.  When he was landlord at The Eagle and Child, he won Best Kept Pub in Lancashire several times.  He had wonderful climbing roses, draped over rustic fencing that he constructed himself. In the foreground, rows of bright red geraniums, interspaced with blue lobelia and white allysum. So patriotic.

 

When he and Mum retired, they moved several times before settling in a small terraced house with a walled garden. He wasted no time - whitewashed the walls, built trellis and planted his beloved roses. He also planted a Clematis Montana and within a couple of yeas it was producing a mass of glorious pink blooms. 

Dad died in 1998 and my Mum remained in the little house until she reached the grand old age of 97. She left the house to me and although the roses have mostly gone to wood, the clematis continues to thrive. This year it has produced at least 3,000 flowers and came into full bloom on 1st May, which coincidentally is the date Dad died. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence at all. We have a day off to remember him and a flamboyant display to celebrate his life. 

Le Bal des Fleurs

When Rhododendron fall to seed,
peonies droop their heavy, windswept heads,
the daffodils are silent for another year
and nature holds her breath.

Almost unnoticed, flecks of burgundy appear,
jasmine stars light up the backdrop fence
and Summer spills onto the stage
with honeysuckle bursting into bloom.

The Corps de Ballet, dance in from the wings,
prance and plié to the warm breeze suite,
and quickly spread to fill the border space.
A rush of tutus: pure white marguerite.

Delphinium in fifty shades of blue,
waltz with lupins dipped in dew.
interlacing gossamer gypsophila,
shimmers in the sunlight beams.

Climbing peace with lemon tips,
cascading pastel limbs from rustic arch
fragrance the air. In the footlights,
a parade of scarlet: Geraniums stand guard.

Scented stocks collect in shady corners,
wearing vibrant pink and lilac frocks.
Gladiolas splay their spectral heads:
Yellow, through to flaming reds.

Now the colour reaches a crescendo.
Against the turquoise, cloudless sky,
baskets overflow, mood indigo
while fuchsia ballerinas pirouette.

As finale, arum lilies centre stage,
perform a gentle Pas des Deux,
taking bows as dusky curtain falls,
first him, then her.

Thanks for reading. Adele

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Flamboyance

Flamboyance/Flamboyant.  A word to savour. It conjures a world of overemphasis coupled with style and personalities to match. The gestures, glitz and glamour to take us away from the drab '50s when I was nobbut a little lass. We were surrounded by the dull and derelict, even the cars were a uniform black. We needed 'Sunday Night at the London Palladium ', to show us people with huge charisma and extreme dress sense while we had to carry on with drab! 

It was the '60s when we threw off the school uniform, struggled into tiny Lurex outfits, took ages applying individual false eyelashes and blue nail varnish from the theatrical shop and hit the town, innocent compared to now but we got noticed. 

Flamboyance, the noun comes from the French 'flamboyer ' to flame and its root word means to shine, flash and burn. One definition is “marked by ostentation but tasteless”. 

Then there is the tree... 

 

Royal Poinciana

In 1966 my dad and I flew to Bermuda with B.O.A.C. My sister and her husband had taken jobs there to escape winter and left in the February, our mother died in May, so dad cobbled the fare together somehow and we found ourselves dressed to the nines (I was wearing a matching coat and dress), stepping into this luxury with air hostesses not stewards, and eating an edible meal. It would have been wonderful if we hadn’t been overwhelmed with grief. We came down to earth in the small, searingly hot apartment they had rented, days later bizarrely all grouped around one small radio listening to England winning the World Cup. What has this to do with anything?

When I looked up the word it took me to the Poinciana which is a showy tropical tree native to Madagascar, widely planted in tropical regions for its immense scarlet and orange flowers and I remembered it as this amazing mass of colour I had seen in Bermuda. It was introduced there in 1870 or thereabouts and known as the Royal Poinciana, Flame of the Forest or Flamboyant. I will never forget seeing the vibrant colours of the flowers and fauna on Bermuda in contrast to the delicacy of colours on this island and both have their richness. 

The poem is about another vibrant flower, the Tiger Lily. 

The Magnificence of Lilies

 

As Tigers are unfettered 

from cellophane 

fumes rise, 

two of us drugged, lit up 

for change. 

Wild words dissolve 

before these flames, we 

slowly inhale and hear 

colour tell a tale 

of hidden depths and 

long neglect. Faint 

music from new open throats 

begins to swell this room, soon 

our ceiling will burst the lock 

on song that has never been heard. 

C. Kitchen. 

Thanks for reading,

Cynthia

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Flamboyant - Acceptance

 

When thinking about the word ‘flamboyant’, certain people come to mind, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Oscar Wilde, Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger and many more. They exude confidence, they can walk into a room full of people and immediately ‘own’ it without demand or arrogance. I think it is something they are born with rather than worked on. I haven’t seen the Rolling Stones live – it’s not too late, still doing it – but I’ve watched enough TV documentaries covering concerts to see that Mick Jagger takes command of every inch of a stage, every move a performance. Charisma. Maybe Flamboyant and Charismatic go hand in hand. I wouldn’t describe myself as either, but there was a time, a long time ago, when someone said I wore flamboyant clothes. They were not being friendly and the remark upset me.

At fifteen, I was uprooted from all that was mine, familiar and secure. Another pub in another town was to become home. School and friends left behind. I kicked up a fuss, but I wasn’t old enough to be listened to, apparently. Since the passing away of my mother and the swift remarriage that followed, the family dynamics were different and I’ve said before that I no longer fitted in. Throw into this toxic mix a good helping of normal, teenage angst and I’m sure you’ll still hear the screams.

Halfway through the fourth year, modern day Year 10, I started my new school – not following the same ‘O’ Level curriculum, so I had lots of catching up to do, or not. Forever the rebel, of course it was NOT. I soon discovered that I was going to find it difficult to adjust. A couple of the girls were friendly and helpful, happy to welcome the new girl and I was glad for that, but we were worlds apart in our interests. Before this major move, I’d enjoyed ice-skating on beat nights at least once a week. No ice rink here, but there was a disco dance at the town hall, on alternate Friday nights. I was invited to go.

I wore a long, summer skirt with a cheese-cloth blouse tied in a knot at the front and a pair of sandals that were getting worn out, but I wasn’t going to wear my school shoes. Instinct told me there would not be any secret cider drinking. Oh the joys I’d had to leave behind! I met my new friends, one greeting me with, “Do you always wear flamboyant clothes?” as she looked me up and down. Immediately I’d failed the ‘come out with us’ test and I didn’t dare ask what she meant, but my attire was a million miles away from their two-tone pencil skirts and checked shirts. Inside was worse. I quite like soul music these days. Years of being drip-fed Tamla Motown by various juke-boxes means that I know the words and I have favourites, but back then, it was like being forced to listen to something totally against my music religion. I liked the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac (before the girls came), Yes, and my beloved Moody Blues. Some boys in baggy jeans and boots were in a line, bouncing out a tricky dance to Dave and Ansel Collins ‘Double Barrel’. Mods, Skinheads, whatever they were was the opposite to me, but as weeks passed into a month and the girls asked me to join them again, I tried to make an effort. After all, when in Rome…

I didn’t go completely mad, not quite. I earned extra pocket money by waitressing in the pub restaurant a few nights a week. It was train fare and skating money for trips back home. I used some to buy a Ben Sherman shirt and some cheap, straight-leg jeans from the market. My flared, embroidered ones wouldn’t blend in for the town hall dance. With nail scissors, I fashioned myself a feather-cut. Not my best move, but not too shabby. Frowned upon at home, but that was just because it was me and I was used to conflict. On the plus side, I mastered the ‘Double Barrel’ skippy moves at the dance. I can probably still do it, but I’m sure you don’t need proof.

At the Whit Week half term, I was packed off to family in London. A wonderful treat. I travelled alone on the train, met by my aunt at Euston, happy to be spending time with her and my younger cousins in Roehampton. Nothing was mentioned about my appearance, be it flamboyant or otherwise. I was wearing my normal, comfortable clothes with beads and sandals. By this time, I’d had a few more snips at my hair, which was also an unattractive  yellowy blonde. The things girls do! Within days, my aunt took me to the hair salon where my colour was toned down and my home-made cutting restyled into a proper shape. Next, a new dress and sandals, and me, spoilt again by my aunt. If my dad had asked for her intervention, she was tactful enough not to tell me so. The best news came towards the end of my stay. We were moving back home.

(If ever I'm back on a stage doing open-mic, I'll try to command it like Jagger. Just joking.)

My Haiku poem,

Flamboyant

I can’t fit in here,
I’m a fish out of water
And they stare at me

While they are dancing
To Dave and Ansel Collins,
That fast, skippy thing.

I learnt to do it,
Not that I was one of them,
More like “when in Rome”

Amused by my clothes,
They thought I was flamboyant,
Cheese-cloth shirts and jeans.

To try to blend in
I bought a Ben Sherman shirt,
It was a mistake.

I snipped at my hair
Attempting a feather-cut.
What a disaster!

Half-term in London,
Back to floaty tops and beads
And leather sandals.

With thanks to Auntie,
A cotton-print maxi dress
And a hairdresser.

PMW 2022

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Ganging Up

I thought gangs would prove to be a popular theme with the Dead Good writing collective, but it seems I got that one wrong - so there's only one blogging gang in town this week. Oh well, press on.

"Let them eat cake!"  must rank among the most famous of historical quotes. It's popularly attributed to Marie Antoinette, as supposedly spoken to her husband Louis XVI in 1789 on the eve of the French Revolution, when the hungry and put-upon peasantry began to entertain thoughts of ganging up on their overlords.

The actual phrase in French runs "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!"  and there is evidence that it predates Marie Antionette by decades, probably having been coined by another princess, Marie Therese (wife of Louis XIV) in the late 17th or early 18th century, on the occasion of an earlier famine when the peasants of France remonstrated against their impoverished estate. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recounted it in his 'Confessions ' (written in 1765 but only published in 1782), so either Maria Antoinette was regurgitating the quote or - far more likely - she never said it and it was a case of false attribution on the part of  the revolution's media machine eager to smear the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime and to justify Marie Antionette's execution for high treason in 1793.

The power of the quote was that it landed squarely as a jibe and a slur on the working class of France, for whom a basic baton or baguette of bread was a staple of their diet, accounting for 50% of the average family income among the peasantry (compared to the 5% they spent on fuel - an interesting contrast to our own modern day cost of living disquiet, though we have still to see what effect the war in Ukraine will have on world grain supplies). The price of bread was therefore a constant preoccupation of the nation, especially in the 18th century, and the poor would never have been able to afford anything as fancy as brioche. 

Two factors combined to exacerbate the situation and eventually trigger a revolution. The first was a demographic change, for during the 18th century the population of France increased by a massive 25% and there was a population shift from country to town. The second was a political change as Jacques Turgot, Minister of Finance under Louis XVI, began to impose free market capitalism (laissez-faire ) upon an already struggling agricultural economy. Bad harvests led to food shortages and ratcheting grain and bread prices. Civil unrest was bound to follow, met inevitably by oppression from the militia of the ruling aristocracy, which in turn fuelled the workers' sense of grievance and will to resist. 

gang of revolutionaries

But the peasants' dissatisfaction bordering upon hatred for the aristocracy and the landed gentry was based on more than hungry bellies and an objection to economic policy. They believed they had been poorly treated for generations by those who owned the estates and ruled the country, had not only been taken for granted rather than being appreciated, but had been blatantly exploited both economically and morally - and nowhere was this historical abuse more evident than in the loathsome droit du seigneur, which from feudal times had given the lord of the manor "first night rights" to bed any new bride on his estate. 

There were other liberties the lord enjoyed as well, such as droit de ravage (right to ravage, which allowed him to devastate any fields on his own domain regardless of the tenants) and droit de prélassement (right of lounging - the mind boggles). 

However, droit du seigneur was the one French the revolutionary thinkers chose to highlight as they railed against the "oblivious and rapacious " ruling class of the country. Montesquieu referenced it in the 1748 treatise 'The Spirit of the Laws ', as did Voltaire in his 'Dictionnaire Philosophique ' of 1764. In fact he even wrote a five-act comedy 'Le droit du seigneur ' first performed just three years before the revolution, in 1789. The leaders of the resistance used such works to lend authority to their own revolutionary polemics in the closing decades of the 18th century, stirring up revulsion against lords and monarchs who would have their cake and eat it too. In 1792 gangs of revolutionaries started ripping up the cobblestones. The rest was an historical inevitability.

King Brioche

I'll leave you this week with my new gang-themed poem, a slight but satirical socio-political allegory based loosely on all of the foregoing.

King Brioche vs The Pantry Weevils*

A frightful bunfight in the palace of the pleasured

Fawn tapestries flapping in flour-filled air

The squeal of dark through transomed windows

A rabble in the courtyard, blood upon the stairs

The pantry door unhinged tonight

Ripped sheets and crumbs festoon the Royal bed

Calling to mind the parable of wheat and tares

For that's the rattling sound of Droit du Seigneur

Bring throttled by an upstart vassal in his lair

The pantry poor eat cake tonight

* as an entomological footnote I should explain that what we commonly call flour or pantry weevils are more correctly named red flour beetles, like this little chap here...

Thanks for reading. Go weevils! S ;-)

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