Wonderland

Oh my fur and whiskers! I thought this was going to be a straight forward look back at the story through memories of my own family’s dog-eared copy of the book. But I made the mistake of checking a fact online and down I went, straight down through multitudes of err...white rabbit holes.

I expect you think you know the story or even just parts of it, I certainly did, but it seems I was completely missing the point or points. These are just four of them.

1 Drugs (slightly odd)
A very popular theory is that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a thinly veiled allegory about drug use. There’s the slowing down of time, expanding and decreasing space, the hookah, the mushrooms, hallucinogenic animals and objects. There is no evidence of Lewis Carroll taking drugs that would induce such a reaction but there certainly is of a post 1960s generation with lyrics such as Jefferson Airplane’s Remember what the Dormouse said / Feed your head, feed your head from ‘White Rabbit’.

2 Spirituality (very odd)
The story can be read as a journey of spiritual awakening, a quest for enlightenment. A way to explore the self without resort to logic.

3 Sex (completely barking)
Some readers have wondered if the book reveals more about Lewis Carroll. Psychoanalytical types love it. Types such as William Empson who pointed out that Alice is “a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid”. I think that WE needed his head examined.

4 Maths (off the scale) 

I’m going to leave other interpretations such as Colonisation, Empire, Jesus and Disciples and politicians etc as I want to come to my absolute favourite and for that I need to switch to LC’s real name of Charles Dodgson (pictured below).

The following is taken from Melanie Bayley writing in the New Scientist who is quoting from various mathematicians:

‘The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community..... Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the “semi-logic” of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland...

Take the chapter “Advice from a caterpillar”, for example. While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and “magic mushroom”, is about drugs, I believe it’s actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry.

The first clue may be in the pipe itself: the word “hookah” is, after all, of Arabic origin, like “algebra”, and it is perhaps striking that Augustus De Morgan, the first British mathematician to lay out a consistent set of rules for symbolic algebra, uses the original Arabic translation in Trigonometry and Double Algebra, which was published in 1849. He calls it “al jebr e al mokabala” or “restoration and reduction” – which almost exactly describes Alice’s experience....’

This goes on for a few pages and is wonderful and includes: the base-10 number system, to survive in Wonderland Alice must act like a Euclidean geometer keeping her ratios constant, projective geometry, discovery of quaternions in 1843 and pure time.

In 2015 it was the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication. A lot of people used that fact to write poems. This is one of them, it’s mine and, oh my dear paws, it is awful.

Alice is over there

Said the woman with a white badge
pointing to row upon row of Wonderland
where some books were short and fat
some long and thin
some looked heavy some looked fun
and one was all of those things

“This isn’t right,” exclaimed the Customer
“There’s only one Alice”

“That is not so” said Alice in a pink dress
“She’s correct” said Alice in a hat
which set off a deafening chorus
of girls’ voices that right had been left
but they were not, absolutely not,
some kind of cheap copy
except for a slim volume on the top shelf
who proudly bristled that that’s exactly what she was
until an old hardback demanded SILENCE then exclaimed
“Do not choose them, I am the original Alice,
these are copywrongs,
so you may pick me as it is my anniversary”
which caused a huge fluttering

“That’s quite enough, Sir,” said the Assistant firmly
“we’ve all been Alice since 1907, so please leave.”

She fussed around the shelves calming them all down
muttering to herself about consequences
before disappearing down a corridor marked
To Science and Natural History.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q

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Wonderland - My Happy Place

I’m privileged to be in my happy place in this season of Winter Wonderland and witness again the splendour of the Dumfries and Galloway countryside. An ice-cream in August by the Solway Firth seems like a million moons ago to me now. Lush green has given way to shades of copper and rust in hedgerows and woodland and every view is simply stunning. It is nature at its best.

I was nine years old when my family and I moved into our pub on south promenade. During that first summer of settling in and exploring, we went to the Pleasure Beach. Candyfloss, rock, hot-dogs, fried onions, burgers and seafood. Imagine all these strong scents mingled together and this is the all-round smell I grew up with, including beer and tobacco closer to home, but this was my first impression of the Pleasure Beach. I remember going on the Alice in Wonderland ride and being scared. It was the falling down the rabbit hole bit. Very effective nearly sixty years ago and I can’t say if any changes have been made as I haven’t returned. In those days, there was no charge to walk round the Pleasure Beach and no such thing as wristbands. Rides were paid for individually. The current way of doing things and the costs prevent me from taking my grandchildren any time soon.

Snug in a cosy lodge, outside white with frost, I’ll make the most of the rest of our stay. I’ll top up the bird-feeders every day and enjoy watching them being emptied. Red kites are fascinating and entertaining, gracefully circling, looking for prey. This unspoilt simple life is my chosen wonderland.

My Haiku

Surrounded by trees,
A cosy and peaceful lodge
Is my wonderland.

Beyond evergreens,
Rhododendrons, firs and pines,
Acres of farmland

Glisten in the frost
Of early winter morning,
Waiting for the sun

To rise above hills.
Gentle clouds streak a blue sky.
Beautiful daybreak.

Admiring red kites,
Gracefully soaring above,
A roost of hundreds

Watching and waiting
Whistling their high pitched shrill call,
Then swooping to feed.

A short drive away,
The quiet of the forest
Brings tranquillity.

PMW 2023

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Sugaree

Welcome to this dancing, sparkling, late-night  Sugaree  Saturday blog. Sweet liberties will be taken herein, not (I hasten to assure you) to browbeat anyone about the iniquities of sugar, though our over-consumption of it is becoming problematic, but rather to explore the origins and true meaning of a curious and intriguing phrase found in certain popular American songs. 

I've long loved the music of Fred Neil and Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead and they both sing songs (audio links appended further on) which contain such lines as "Shake it sugaree " and "Didn't we shake sugaree ". What's that all about? I've often wondered. Very well, this Thanksgiving week I determined to play lyric detectorist and get to the bottom of the mystery. Read on, Macduff.

cutting sugarcane

I assumed, not unreasonably I think, given the geography and the phraseology - sugar and dancing?-  that this might have something to do with the deep south cane industry: plantations, slavery, hard graft, harvest time, a bit of celebration and light relief for poor, exploited black folks. Sadly, the anecdotal evidence is scarce. 

The Jordanaires released a pop song in 1957 titled "Sugaree " but that appeared to be the name or nickname of a sweetheart, so I'm dismissing it as a red herring. The first significant mention in song is Elizabeth Cotten's "Shake Sugaree ". Cotten (1893-1987) was a self-taught African-American folk and blues singer/songwriter who began playing guitar and writing songs in her teens. She is most well-known for "Freight Train ", used recently as the title music for Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City ' movie. It's not clear when she wrote "Shake Sugaree " as she was performing for decades before recording her material in the 1960s as part of the great American folk revival. Of the lyric, Cotten merely stated: "To tell the truth, I don´t know what got it started, but it must have been something said or something done."

"Shake Sugaree " was released in 1965 and once available in record stores and on the radio was soon covered by a roster of folk and blues musicians, becoming a staple of folk sets across the country, giving rise to the afore-mentioned versions, by Fred Neil in 1966 on his eponymous second LP, and ultimately the referenced lyric by Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead lyricist) on Jerry Garcia's eponymous debut solo LP of 1972.

The Cotten song is all about being poor, pawning everything worth pawning, and then shaking sugaree, which I took to mean having a good time regardless of tomorrow and the consequences. I assumed it was metaphorical... but then I dug up a couple of references that suggest plausible explanations. 

The first is that sugaree actually derives from the French "charivari " (or chivaree/shivaree), referring to a folk ritual of making rowdy, discordant music outside the house of newlyweds, a custom that French colonists would certainly have brought to the New World in the 19th century.

The second references a curious practice of sprinkling sugar on the floor and then dancing on it to make a percussive sound. "At house parties they used to shake sugar on the floor so it would crunch when stepped on, hence 'to shake sugaree' meant to have a good time dancing. Even today, there’s a dance step called the 'sugar step' which is an action like grinding sugar on the floor."

shaking sugaree

I'll settle for that second explanation, though I hold to my original instinct that shaking sugaree could not have been possible without cane plantations in the first place and the irrepressible spirits of poor, exploited black folks determined just to have a good time in the small off-duty hours.

Here's the Fred Neil version of the sugaree song. I always marvel at his voice: I've Got A Secret

And here is Garcia's more upbeat rendition as featured at many a Grateful Dead gig and more apt for the kind of hippy shaking those ladies above are rapt in: Sugaree

To finish, a strange new poem fresh from the imaginarium (and with the usual caveat that it is subject to revision). Kāmadeva is a Hindu god of desire, eroticism and pleasure. He carries a bow made of sugarcane and fires arrows of flowers. His is the sweet intoxicating dance of love.

Arcane Sugar

First the temple, ramshackle and rundown,

green with its glow of vegetation and open

to the winds of chance.  Then the template

intricate and sacred spread on freshly swept

old boards. Next the precious sugar, graded

from powdery white at this mandala's heart

through yellowed grains to coarsest browns

around the boundaries of the holy art where

ants fear to encroach. All waits in readiness.

With sundown, at the bidding of Kāmadeva,
revellers arrive, sweetened already with rum

to take positions on the floor, motionless in

graceful repose until the drums begin giving

permission for bodies to sway, feet to stamp

to the sweetest beat, eyes shine, hearts pump

inhibitions fade away, everyone dancing into

reverie, shaking sugaree, until there is no me

or you no yesterday tomorrow only evermore

this timeless whirling moment of affirmation

of liberation from the chains that bind as love

floods in waves upon the magic crystal shore. 

Thanks for reading. Shake it, S ;-)

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Lancashire Dead Good Poets' December Open Mic Night

Our next virtual open mic night...

Come and join us online for the evening, to read and/or to listen along.

Steve :-)

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Solitaire

When I consider the word 'solitaire' I remember a small wooden board, filled with indentations and small marbles. Although I am aware of this, I have no clue how the game is played. I know how to play solitaire with playing cards, I have played it for many hours on computer - it is extremely compelling - as is Scrabble - but that's a different story.

Thinking about writing this week's blog I toyed with the idea of writing about loneliness. I know that is reaching epidemic levels especially among the elderly and various organisations, including Age UK who have opened a helpline and friendship call scheme for the elderly and housebound. I am very annoyed by automated checkouts in the supermarkets - if you are elderly or disabled and make one shopping trip a week, how upsetting must it be if no-one communicates with you. A machine can't say 'Hello' or 'How are you?' and that interpersonal interaction can be so important. I was deleted to hear that Booths are removing their automated tills because people don't like them. Amen to that!

Thinking about loneliness lead me to consider the experience of 'the long distance runner' - ha ha! That led me to a remarkable event of the 1960s that sticks out in my then, young memories. The experience of a remarkable man called Sir Francis Chichester.

In 1958, Chichester was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. (This might have been a misdiagnosis; David Lewis, a London doctor, who competed against Chichester in the first solo trans-Atlantic race, reviewed his case and called Chichester's abnormality a "lung abscess".) His wife Sheila put him on a strict vegetarian diet (now considered to be a macrobiotic diet) and his cancer went into remission. Chichester then turned to long-distance yachting.

In 1960, he entered and won the first Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race, which had been founded by 'Blondie' Hasler in the 40 foot ocean racing yawl Gipsy Moth III. He came second in the second race four years later.

On 27 August 1966 Chichester sailed his ketch Gipsy Moth IV from Plymouth in the United Kingdom and returned there after 226 days of sailing on 28 May 1967, having circumnavigated the globe, with one stop (in Sydney). By doing so, he became the first person to achieve a true circumnavigation of the world solo from West to East via the great Capes. The voyage was also a race against the clock, as Chichester wanted to beat the typical times achieved by the fastest fully crewed clipper ships during the heyday of commercial sail in the 19th century. His global voyage was the first to be commercially sponsored, with the International Wool Secretariat's Woolmark featured on the bows of Gipsy Moth IV and Chichester's baseball cap.

Can you imagine the experience he endured. The world's oceans can be a cruel master but the solitude must be the worst thing by far. During lockdown, we all, especially those with immune deficiencies, had a taste of enforced solitude - but 226 days is an incredibly long spell. I cannot imagine it - I would go completely doolally.

Solitaire

I embark in Gypsy Moth IV and sail to the Canaries,
there to catch the South Trades towards the Caribbean.
I fight the storms that lurch and toss me
around the Cape of Good Hope
then nip into port in Sydney for provisions
departing for South China seas
from Indonesia to Cape Horn.
I'm almost home now
longing for conversation
the companionship of friends.

Thank you for reading. Adele

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Solitaire - Alone

My mother loved her diamond solitaire ring and wore it all the time. It was a gift from my father, bought in Hatton Gardens on one of their trips to London. She was delighted with it and I watched it twinkling like a rainbow on her finger. It would have been dwarfed by Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond, but it was large enough to be the status symbol it was intended to be. Sadly, within the year, Mum became ill again and succumbed to the cancer she had battled off and on for three years. The ring was eventually passed on to my sister. It sparkles on her hand and looks lovely. I chose pieces of my mother’s jewellery for what they mean to me, yet I rarely wear them. There will always be the pain of loss and how life changed.

Singer Andy Williams cover of Neil Sedaka’s song, ‘Solitaire’. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard it, but for some reason I associate it with moving into the small bedroom – I think I’d swapped rooms with my sister – and sorting my belongings into the fitted furniture.  I listened to music all the time, records or radio and I really liked this song. For a week it was Radio Luxembourg’s powerplay, every hour, every show. To hear it now throws me right back to that moment in time and being seventeen.

‘Solitaire’ is a card game to play solo. I learnt it as ‘Patience’ but it’s the same thing. Cards are set out in a row of seven, first one face up, others face down. The next row, miss the first card, place a card face up on the second card then place cards face down along the rest of the row. Repeat until the last pile has six cards facing down and one facing up. Remaining cards will come into play as needed. The object of the game is to place cards in sequence, King at the top, Ace at the bottom, and alternating red and black. If a face-up card is moved on to another, the face down card can be turned over. Only a King can move into a space at the top. The remaining pile of cards can be turned one by one as needed. Completion would be four columns going from King to Ace in alternate colours. I’ve never introduced myself to a points system, I’ve just taken it as far as I can then either started again or made it work out –no, it’s not cheating when you’re playing by yourself.

I found this poem by John Updike,

Black queen on the red king,
the seven on the black
eight, eight goes on the nine, bring
the nine on over, place
jack on the queen. There is space
now for that black king who,
six or so cards back,
was buried in the pack.
Five on six, where's seven?
Under the ten. The ace
must be under the two.
Four, nine on ten, three, through.
It's after eleven.

 John Updike 1932 - 2009

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Compass Points

I didn't know that there are 32 compass points, each marking off 11.25 degrees of our happy planetary sphere and each with its official title as depicted in the 'compass rose' diagram below. Well blow me, where does that leave the classic 1959 spy movie North by Northwest ? 

It would appear there were seven legitimate options to choose from in the quadrant between north and west...and north by northwest is not one of them. Poor form that, Alfred Hitchcock, MGM and all. 😂

32 point compass rose

Seriously, who hasn't either owned or used a compass? Perhaps to orient yourself when Scouting For Girls, navigating Secret Water, possibly pursuing on a Journey To The East, maybe a  Flight To Arras, or even while Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. 

Prior to the development of the compass you'd have had to attempt all such feats by reading celestial bodies, observing well-known landmarks or trusting in the flightpaths of migrant birds. However, the invention of the compass made it possible to determine a heading when the sky was obscured, no landmarks were in sight and migrating birds were out of season.

The first primitive compasses were created in China some 2000 years ago using lodestone (a naturally magnetised mineral) which was observed both to attract iron and, when suspended in water or oil (as was the common design at the time) would align itself with the earth's magnetic field. On account of this latter property, it was given the charmingly descriptive name 'south facing fish ' I paused momentarily to query why not north facing fish? But I suppose it's just a convention of heads and tails.

Interestingly, although the Chinese led the way in the understanding of magnetism,  those early compasses were used not so much for navigation as for geomancy (my word of the week), for assisting in the art of Feng Shui to literally ensure a house was favourably oriented (and why not occidented?) in relation to ley lines or the flow of powerful magic forces. And it was Arab travellers to China who first brought compass technology to the west (or occident) approximately 1000 years ago.

Compass needles by now were little strips of iron that had been magnetised by being stroked by lodestone, often still suspended in a liquid within a circular container marked with the four cardinal points N, S, E, W and used primarily on board ships for navigation.

500 years further along the timeline came the development of the dry compass with its three key components of a freely turning magnetised needle mounted on a pin above a calibrated 'rose', all enclosed in a small box with a flat base and a glass lid, the essence of the compasses we know and use today for taking bearings and orienteering, though plastic casings are the norm. 

As for the sophistication of those 32 points on the rose, that was the work of maritime engineers in the Mediterranean some time in the 16th century and the points were all named after winds (see below).

And there you have it. The only bit I've skipped is about magnetic north, which is a shifty blighter and best left for another day. Before  I get to the poem however, here's an on theme musical bonus from talented American guitarist and singer/ songwriter Molly Tuttle: Take The Journey  Enjoy.

Given that it is Armistice Day today and Remembrance Sunday tomorrow I've written something harking back to the First World War and imagined one of the thousands of lost and lonely deaths of young soldiers. In this case, specifically Americans, many still in their teens, who when the USA joined late in the war were dispatched up to the front lines in the summer of 1918 in northern France as part of the last great tactical gamble to repulse the Germans who had gained vast swathes of land in their spring offensive and to drive the enemy away from the outskirts of Paris and back to the east. There were 10,000 American casualties alone in the Battle of Belleau Wood.

lost forever in Belleau Wood (June 1918)

A Private Dying

The rain, the constant stumbling pain,

sound of sustained firing, friend or foe?

He'd taken some hits, he knew, compass

shot to bits, unsteady groping from tree

to sodden tree and tears too now. Why

did he think of Babes in the Wood? 

Murder in the Dark more like, though

he'd never imagined this as a child

an ocean and a short lifetime away

when he'd played out with  his pals

in the walnut orchard at twilight till

his mother called him in. Blood

 

rose in his throat, bubbling on his lips

tasty as copper, and shaken by a palsy 

of shivering his legs gave way. All lost, 

he thought, where did I go wrong? Some

son I've turned out to be. Forgive me

mother, father. Remember me at home.

No sooner had he kissed the earth goodbye

than his spirit slipped through patchy skies,

a sliver rippling into the circling shoal

of departed souls, south pointing fish all

twisting like an unruly silver tide at

the bidding of some wanton bloody moon.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Compass

The geographic North Pole is the northern point of Earth's axis of rotation. The North Pole is found in the Arctic Ocean, on constantly shifting pieces of sea ice. The North Pole is not part of any nation, although Russia placed a titanium flag on the seabed in 2007.

From the North Pole, all directions are south. Its latitude is 90 degrees north, and all lines of longitude meet there (as well as at the South Pole, on the opposite end of Earth). Polaris, the current North Star, sits almost motionless in the sky above the pole, making it an excellent fixed point to use in celestial navigation in the Northern Hemisphere.

Because Earth rotates on a tilted axis as it revolves around the sun, sunlight is experienced in extremes at the poles. In fact, the North Pole experiences only one sunrise (at the March equinox) and one sunset (at the September equinox) every year. From the North Pole, the sun is always above the horizon in the summer and below the horizon in the winter. This means the region experiences up to 24 hours of sunlight in the summer and 24 hours of darkness in the winter.

Birds are frequent visitors to the North Pole. The Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea), which has the longest annual migration of any species on the planet, spends its spring and summer in the Arctic, though rarely as far north as the North Pole. It then flies 30,000 kilometers (18,641 miles) south, to the Antarctic Circle. The Arctic tern makes an Arctic-Antarctic round-trip migration every year.

Like the Arctic tern, all other birds spotted near the North Pole are migratory. They include the small snow bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) and gull-like fulmars and kittiwakes.

Antarctica is the only continent with no permanent human habitation. There are, however, permanent human settlements, where scientists and support staff live for part of the year on a rotating basis.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet dominates the region. It is the largest single piece of ice on Earth. This ice sheet even extends beyond the continent when snow and ice are at their most extreme.

The ice surface dramatically grows in size from about three million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) at the end of summer to about 19 million square kilometers (7.3 million square miles) by winter. Ice sheet growth mainly occurs at the coastal ice shelves, primarily the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf. Ice shelves are floating sheets of ice that are connected to the continent. Glacial ice moves from the continent’s interior to these lower-elevation ice shelves at rates of 10 to 1,000 meters (33 to 32,808 feet) per year.

Antarctica has a number of mountain summits, including the Transantarctic Mountains, which divide the continent into eastern and western regions. A few of these summits reach altitudes of more than 4,500 meters (14,764 feet). The elevation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet itself is about 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) and reaches 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) above sea level near the center of the continent.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 

 Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 

 Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 

 Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 

 Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 

 Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 

 Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

 He was my North, my South, my East and West, 

 My working week and my Sunday rest, 

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; 

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; 

 Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; 

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; 

For nothing now can ever come to any good. 

                                                                      W H Auden

Thank you for reading, Adele

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Twilight (Of The Gods)

The Beatles released their 'final' 45rpm single this week. "Now And Then " came out in a blaze of worldwide promotional glory on Thursday backed by their very first single "Love Me Do " from sixty-one years ago. So when I needed an angle on the blog theme of twilight, I found one readymade - the last hurrah of the greatest music group of the modern age (bar none). 

All that remained for me to do was to listen to the final single a good dozen times, shed an emotional tear while watching Peter Jackson's stunning accompanying video, and then order my thoughts for your benefit and mine.

Written and demo'd to tape by John Lennon in 1977, it wasn't a song he considered worthy of a place on the last two albums he recorded ('Double Fantasy ' and 'Milk And Honey '). Years after his death "Now And Then " was handed over by Yoko Ono on a cassette tape that also included demos of "Free As A Bird ", "Real Love " and "Grow Old With Me ", (the last of which had made it onto 'Milk And Honey '). The plan of the three surviving Beatles was to work all the unreleased Lennon demos into fully-fledged Beatles songs to accompany their 1995 'Anthology ' retrospective, one song per each of the three parts of the project. In the end the recording quality of the "Now And Then " demo was deemed unusable, though George Harrison was also quite scathing about the song.

Nearly thirty years later, with huge advances in software sophistication, and George Harrison no longer with us, bless him, to object, Paul McCartney has picked up the final part of the trilogy again, written a few new words, created a better bass part and a slide guitar break in the style of Harrison to add to his and Harrison's 1995 acoustic guitar parts and Ringo has re-worked the drums, all on top of a much clearer rendition of Lennon's piano and vocals, plus there are strings orchestrated by Giles Martin (son of the Beatles' famous producer).  So it's a Beatles record because all four appear on it, and it's better than "Free As A Bird " and "Real Love " to these ears, a pleasant rock ballad but nothing brilliant, not like real Beatles records were when half of them were not in their eighties and two of them weren't dead. 

For McCartney it's probably closure of sorts after all the post-Beatle acrimony between himself and John. That's it really, an epilogue or epitaph or eulogy for the twilight of the Gods, the very best popular music ensemble of all time, one that helped shape our culture and our lives for the better - and we still have all that music. And it has been a nostalgic couple of days. Just watching the official music video that accompanies the release is a moving experience: Now And Then Music Video

The Beatles blazed for the decade that was the 1960s and for me, their true goodbye was, fittingly enough, "The End ", captured in seven takes at EMI Studio Two in July 1969, the final proper song on the final proper Beatles' LP 'Abbey Road '. They knew it, even if we were reluctant to take the hint.

I'm not providing a new poem this week. I'm still gestating 'Before And After Beatles', I'm afraid. In lieu here are links to five of my previous Saturday blogs devoted to the best group ever. Click on the bold titles to activate. You're welcome.😊

Beatlemania Was Born In Blackpool (from December 2014): Beatlemania

Revolver - Tomorrow Never Knows (from August 2016): Revolver Redux

Red Letter Day (from February 2017): When I'm Sixty-Four

Lonely Hearts (from June 2017): Phoenix Like

Take Three Birds (from October 2021): Norwegian Wood

I'll leave you with a quote from Paul McCartney that will be echoed by millions, myself included: 

"How lucky was I to have those men in my life."

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Twilight

Twilight is twilight isn’t it? That lovely time between day and night where, if you’re lucky, there’s a soft glow infusing a sort of magic in the air, when windows don’t have their curtains drawn but parlours do need some light so that when someone is strolling down a street he or she can peek in and wonder what that fellow’s reading, marvel at some hideous wallpaper or slow down if there is a match on a tv. Not that I would do any of that, of course. But April and September are best.

Yes, twilight is twilight. Except that I’ve just found out that it isn’t, in as much as there is more than one.

twilight by degrees

That was a surprise. And so was the fact that you can have twilight in the morning (as above) but no one bothers with that. Here are the evening ones:

Stage 1: Civil twilight

Civil twilight begins the moment the sun slips below the horizon. The official definition of civil twilight is the time from when the sun disappears until the sun’s centre is 6 degrees below the horizon. A measurement of 6 degrees of sky is a bit more than three fingers held at arm’s length.

During civil twilight, there’s enough light to see and the streetlights are starting to come on. The brightest planets appear during civil twilight.

Stage 2: Nautical twilight
Nautical Twilight is the time period when the centre of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon to 12 degrees below the horizon. The term dates back to when sailors used the stars for navigation and more bright stars were visible which could be used as directional cues.

During nautical twilight, terrestrial objects are visible, but you need artificial lights to carry on outdoor activities.

Polar regions have nautical twilight all night long, never reaching astronomical twilight or total darkness.

Stage 3: Astronomical twilight
Astronomical twilight is the darkest twilight stage. The definition of astronomical twilight is the period of time when the centre of the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon to 18 degrees below the horizon. For stargazers, this is the time when fainter stars, clusters and other sky objects appear and become good observing targets. So, as a rule of thumb, if you’d like to observe something in the night sky that isn’t particularly bright, you should wait about 90 minutes after sunset before you start observing.

When I was looking up the above I sometimes found twilight and dusk in the same articles and it made me think of other names given to this time of day. How they have a certain poetic feeling. How about gloaming, evenfall, crepuscule, dimmet, dimpsy or da simmer dim which is the twilight of a Shetland summer evening. Actually, I’m not sure about crepuscule.

I’ve just remembered that when I lived in London working at Charing Cross Hospital a group of us used to get out on Saturdays for walks. We would get a train and head out, usually south or west. For instance, we used to love coming off the Downs and into Brighton or Eastbourne and timing it such that we could walk along their Promenades, thus avoiding twilight, and catch the train back after a few pints.

And I mention this because I recall one such day that is relevant to the topic. Three of us had been exploring the countryside out in the sticks, I can’t remember where exactly, but it was getting dark and a couple of miles to go to the pub next to whatever station we were heading for. This is for Anne and Andy.

twilight imminent

End of a Walk in Bedfordshire

On the far side of the wood
an early evening bonfire
settled for the night,
winter branches hung around
undecided between certain heat
and the soft glow of windows
where football scores
flickered unexpectedly
under a thatched roof.

To the right a friend talked
making solid points with his hands,
brushing to the side brambles
and logical uncertainties,
each fence post we followed
linked by unbroken concentration.

Behind us a friend paused,
lost in thought and twilight,
her single note
drawn on barred gates,
turning as logs crashed
sending scales sparking
through choirs of beech and oak

and on other days
I may have gone back,
I really don’t know,
but I stopped him
just short of the road
and we waited in silence
with precise looks of impatience.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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