Wormholes

So I’m a bit late for a date, about 20,000 years too late. No problem. Just slip into your local wormhole and you can be there in seconds. Obviously sheer fiction, both for the wormhole and the date.

The ability to ever actually use wormholes as interstellar superhighways seems extremely remote. Yet physics does not close the door completely on the existence of these bridges through space-time says Adam Hadhazy in an article in Live Science published February 22, 2012. He quotes Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon. ‘The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point. No one thinks we’re going to find a wormhole anytime soon’. But what is a wormhole?

theoretical wormhole

Put simply it is a tube through the four dimensions of space-time, potentially connecting two regions vast distances apart. Think of two dots on a sheet of paper that is then folded so the dots overlap. That overlap is your wormhole, and it could theoretically allow for the transfer of matter from dot A to dot B instantaneously, instead of traveling the normal, long way across the sheet.

The science of wormholes dates back to 1916 and followed on from the consequences of Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity when Ludwig Flamm at the University of Vienna realised that the equations behind a black hole have an equal but opposite solution, a ‘white hole’, which cannot be entered from the outside, although things can escape from them. Flamm noticed that the two solutions could be mathematically connected by space-time conduit, and that the black hole entrance and white hole exit could be in different parts of the same universe, even different universes.

Ludwig Flamm

Einstein himself explored these ideas further in 1935, along with the physicist Nathan Rosen, and the two achieved a solution known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge which could pave the way to the possibility of moving colossal distances. However, research by Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose shows that the boundary beyond which gravity’s inexorable pull allows nothing, not even light, to escape.

So, wormholes have been bandied about by scientists for over a century now. They have also been bandied about by novelists and film makers. Perhaps the oldest reference to these cosmic portals can be found in The Meteor Girl, a 1931 book by the American science fiction writer Jack Williamson.

They also figure in a wide range of science fiction films, from Interstellar and the Marvel cinematic universe to various TV series, such as Babylon 5, Farscape, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the longest running sci-fi series of all, Doctor Who and to mark the 25th anniversary of Stargate SG-1, the National Science Museum Science Director Roger Highfield talked to physicist Alexey Milekhin and Stargate advisor, Mika McKinnon.

Mika McKinnon said ‘You get more interesting stories when you have rules that you have to work within – it’s not fun if you can always just magic your way out of a situation and there’s no tension. We were incredibly consistent, not only using real wormhole science but a specific type. Every time we had a new episode, I would go and check if there were any new relevant physics papers. I had about 700 papers by the time we finished.’

Going back to my date there is also the slight problem that time goes more slowly for the traveller in the wormhole so I will have aged mere seconds whilst she would have been 20,000 years older and I’m not sure if the flowers would have lasted.

As for the poem then the following seems so appropriate for these times. It is by Michael Swann, and won the Poetry Society’s Members' Poems Competition in 2008.

A Sort of Ark

I’ve had enough of it,
with everything here
being evicted, poisoned,
cut down,
trapped, netted,
wiped out.
We’re off,
the lot of us,
through a wormhole
to somewhere better.

Well,
not strictly
a wormhole –
I’ve nothing against worms,
some of my best friends are worms,
but you can’t get a whale
through a wormhole.

And the great whales are coming,
believe me,
along with the Siberian tiger,
the red squirrel
the white rhino,
a moth
that no-one has ever heard of,
a marsupial antelope,
a very ugly kind of parrot,
that wonderful tree with buttresses
from Tasmania,
and all the others.
Before it’s too late.

All of us,
scooting off through the whalehole
next Tuesday,

Will you come?

                               Michael Swann

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Giving Up

I know I've written blogs about the Gaza conflict twice before (October 2023 and November 2024) but I'm going to do so again today. Please bear with me It feels like a moral imperative.

Regardless of how we got to this dire situation, with two million displaced Palestinians now at risk of starvation, international pressure must surely force the Israelis to halt this genocidal stranglehold on Gaza, allow the aid trucks to roll in and let the UN humanitarian organisation resume its efforts to distribute water, food and medicines to the people of the Strip. I am of the opinion that what we are witnessing is genocide, and that a large faction of the coalition Israeli government would dearly like to annex the Strip as Israeli territory and force the relocation of the Palestinians elsewhere (to Egypt? to Jordan?) They have even voted in principle to proceed with a formal annexation of the West Bank, territory they have held illegally since 1967. But first and foremost must be aid relief for the starving  in Gaza, or the world doesn't have a conscience anymore.  

After that can come negotiations to end the war, and I believe it is vital that western nations formally recognise the State of Palestine as part of an eventual 'two nation' solution in the middle east. That to my way of thinking will require the giving up of territory by Israel, at least back to pre-1967 boundaries.

And it should never be forgotten that it was an Israeli terrorist organisation that first commenced a civil war in Palestine after WWII and unilaterally annexed part of the region, expelling nearly a million Palestinians from their homeland, to create the State of Israel in 1948. The UN and western powers failed Palestine's Arab population then, under pressure from the United States. We must not fail again.

I find it difficult to write a poem to order about something as monstrous as what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, but I hope this hits the mark. I must also warn you that because it's a 'concrete' poem approximately in she shape of the Gaza Strip (see above), it may look completely jumbled up unless viewed in landscape mode. Anyway, here goes...

                                                                                                                                                                        Gaza Stripped

                                                                                                                                                         From north to south,

                                                                                                                                                  neither living nor dead

                                                                                                                                          but breathing corpses,

                                                                                                                                   nil by mouth. Dr Josef 

                                                                                                                        Mengele could hardly

                                                                                                                 have managed it better

                                                                                                          this inhumane suffering

                                                                                                   imposed on a population.

                                                                                             Hungry on waking,

                                                                                      walking like sticks

                                                                                their thin shadows 

                                                                         pointing seawards 

                                                                  where Israeli warships

                                                             block aid. Constantly

                                                        defiled. Hungry on

                                                 sleeping, emaciated ribs

                                           encaging hopeless hearts,

                                     huddled into rubble, their

                               shadows at dusk lengthening 

                          eastward across what was once

                     their homeland, before the Nakba.

                    Israeli soldiers fence them in, block aid,

                     shoot down men, women, children, babies

                       desperate for food. The IDF are razing the

                        Gaza Strip, hoping it will be theirs some

                         day, this riviera death camp ripe for

                           redevelopment. Lots are being 

                            reserved already as we view

                             skin and bone newsreels

                               nightly, wringing our

                                 complicit hands

                                     again.                                                            

                                                                               

Those previous blogs on topic are linked here. I urge you to read them too:

Glittering Prize?  (the detailed historical background - part one)

Injustice (the detailed historical background - part two)

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Lancashire Dead Good Poets' August Open Mic Night

Here's notice of our August event on zoom, from 19.30-21.30 BST.

All are welcome. Like it says, email: deadgoodpoets@hotmail.co.uk to book a place to read (or just to listen along). 

I hope you can join us from wherever in the world you are.

Steve ;-)

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Giving Up

Last week I was browsing through the shelves of the Library when my eyes alighted on an Agatha Christie that I’d never heard of, never mind read. I was so excited.

That night I left aside the book I had been reading and started on 'The Big 4'. I lasted two chapters before realising that it was not very good, not a Christie type at all. I looked it up and found that it was written in 1927 and described by Christie in 1942 as "that rotten book". I gave up on it.

In the UK alone it’s reckoned there are 200,000 books published every year. It would be impossible to read all of them, so everyone must have a filter that works for them be it genre, recommendation, prize winners, fiction or non-fiction etc.

I’m guessing that most people who read these Dead Good Blogs have a background of reading and from an early age, in my case from 'The Famous Five’ to this year’s ‘Orbital’ that I loved. This builds up experience and a feel for what I consider will be a good read and so given that and the point about the number of books being published, I feel justified in giving up on books that don’t feel right, from sometimes the first sentence. Not everyone agrees with that and sees it as a sort of moral duty to finish all books they start.

As the topic is Giving Up, it seems appropriate to follow on from the above and give some examples of what books I gave given up on. Before I do that I would like to air a bugbear of mine. I don’t even start books with a Prologue. There, I’ve said it, so on with the fiction books in some sort of my own chronological order.

One of the first such books is Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. I vaguely remember getting through some of the first volume but ground to a halt in total boredom. Then, of course, I needed to be seen with a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ casually resting on the table in that sort of cafe. I did slightly better with Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ and got through the first two volumes before realising I wasn’t that bothered.

Another sort of book that disappointed is the follow on novel from books that have a special place in my heart. Top of that list would be A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Children’s Book’ which although not the immediate book after ‘Possession’ was the first I saw after reading that totally wonderful novel which had/has everything I want in a story and is in my all time top 10 of books whereas ‘The Children’s Book’ I thought was going to be too long, dull and pretentious to get beyond the first few chapters.

A more recent book in a similar vein of being disappointed to the point of giving up on it, which is not the same as not really enjoying it, is the fifth book in Kate Atkinson’s series featuring Jackson Brodie. The first four are quite brilliant and the sixth is fine but ‘Big Sky’ has a start which is baffling and irritating and more than enough for me.

Moving on to non-fiction and I put my hand up to say that I have never been able to finish Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. And heaven know I’ve tried enough times and I’ll probably have another go.

Another author who also writes about physics and I really admire is Carlo Rovelli whose ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ was published in 2014 and has sold well over a million copies. I haven’t actually given up on reading this book as he is such an entertaining writer, more that the book has given up on me. Because he is so good in explaining the Lessons I think I have understood them until later I realise I haven’t and start again.

I’m going to stop there with those few examples as I have just realised that there are many more areas of Bookland that I could cover, such as Travel, History, Biographies etc that I could be here all week.

So onto the poem. I have a sort of Given Up file of poems and this is in it. It is based on Larkin's poem which in itself is a Giving Up sort of poem and so is this:

Is this the Year
(along the lines of Philip Larkin)

What have they done your Mom and Dad
They didn’t mean to but they did
They’ve filled your head with what they had
And what they got for just a quid.

But what they’ve got’s about to turn
And what you’ll get’s a tipping year
You know from Gore you know from Stern
Yet still you screw the atmosphere.

The child is parent to your age
Your parent is the child you’ll stay
So stuff the rest and take your wage
Your kids will hate you anyway.

Terry Q.

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Laugh To The Max

Max was born in 1952. He was the creation of Pericle Luigi Giovanetti, a Swiss draughtsman, painter and illustrator of Italian and French parentage, born in Basel during the First World War. 

Among Giovanetti's earliest commissions were some cartoons which were published in 1951 in the British satirical magazine Punch. These were soon followed by the artist's defining creation, the wonderful Max, a marmot and the main character in a series of homonymous comic strip adventures, published initially in Punch but soon to break out into the wider world.

Max the Marmot by Pericle Luigi Giovanetti

Max was based on Giovanetti's love of the European marmot, then to be found in the hill country of his native Switzerland. (I don't know if there are any left... that could be a poem: 'Are There Still Marmots In Switzerland?') The illustrator depicted his anthropomorphic marmot in a steady stream of witty and wordless cartoons which soon became best-selling books the world over, for Max's humorous mis-happenings transcend the barriers of language, and have amused and delighted children and adults alike for generations now..

I still have a slightly marmot-eared copy of 'The Penguin Max', dated 1962, in which, across a succession of double-page spreads, good-natured but accident-prone Max engages in adventures ranging from four to a dozen story frames, all of which are beautifully sketched and very funny. 

My favourite is probably the strip in which Max writes a letter. I've had to reduce the scale of the scan to fit the blog, but you can probably click on the image to enlarge it and linger over the exquisite detail in each frame. 

Max writes a letter

I'm down south for the week-end, celebrating my elder daughter's birthday, looking through old family photographs and enjoying some time with my grandson, who is now walking. He's the happiest little fellow and a reminder that laughter  (a proper chortle in his case) arrives quite early in a child's development. He's not eighteen months old yet, but clearly finds all sorts of things funny, as did my elder daughter when she was at an even younger age (see below). Happy birthday. 

my elder daughter (and her mum) circa 1987

Today's poem is a steal and an extension from a joke doing the rounds on social media at the moment (for all poets are magpies). It's a marker of the times and an ode to paranoia.

Laughter

This evening I arrived home

to find the wifely one

sitting in the kitchen in the dark

nursing a large glass of white wine.

'Bad day?' I enquired solicitously.

'Not so loud', she replied sotto voce.

'Why are you whispering?' I asked.

Nervously, she enunciated softly

'Alexa reports on everything we say.'

I laughed, but my wife scowled.

 

Then I swear that Alexa laughed quietly, 

Siri, Telegram and Tik-Tok all chortled,

the refrigerator shook with silent mirth,

kettle, microwave and toaster giggled,

while outside the Tesla laughed

and somewhere off in the night

Chinese five spies snickered,

Muttley or a TV chuckled,

Mona Lisa gave a flicker 

of a painted smile as

the credits rolled 

on the floor.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Laughter

Alvy: You add fake laughter with a machine? Do you have any idea how immoral that is?
Max: We tape in front of a studio audience.
Alvy: But nobody laughs because the jokes aren't funny.
Max: Yes, that's why this machine is dynamite.

Alvy watches the editor add laughter, chuckles and applause to awful jokes under Max’s direction

Alvy: (to Editor) Do you have booing on that?

Alvy and Max, scene from Annie Hall

That was Woody Allen as Alvy and Tony Roberts as Max from the film Annie Hall and sums up the split between the studios and actors such as David Niven who said in a 1955 interview, “The laugh track is the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of, and it will never be foisted on any audience of a show I have some say about”.

There were some radio shows in the 30s and 40s that used canned laughter but not many, for instance, when Bing Crosby began pre-recording his show – which allowed his engineers to add or subtract the laughs in post-production.

And then came Charley Douglass who didn’t like the laughter he was hearing. The sound engineer, who was working at CBS in the early days of television, hated that the studio audiences on the US TV channel’s shows laughed at the wrong moments, didn’t laugh at the right moments, or laughed too loudly or for too long and began amping up or tamping down laughter recordings according to the effect he wanted, rather than relying on audiences’ natural reactions. 

Charley Douglass

He soon made a machine full of taped laugh tracks (according to historians, recorded mainly during dialogue-free sequences in a programme, The Red Skelton Show) that would evolve to become the industry standard after Douglass’s laugh-track debut in 1950 on The Hank McCune Show.

Douglas’s machine, known in the industry as the ‘laff box’ – was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Douglass used a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter to select the corresponding style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, general laughs and belly laughs.

the Laff Box

Rather than being simple recordings of a laughing audience, Douglass's laughs were carefully generated and mixed, giving some laughs detailed identities such as "the guy who gets the joke early" and "housewife giggles" and "the one who didn't get the joke but is laughing anyway" all blended and layered to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show in question. A man's deep laugh would be switched for a new woman's laugh, or a high-pitched woman's giggle would be replaced with a man's snicker.

In the UK all of the BBC’s comedies, such as Are You Being Served? had laugh tracks. But in the 1980s, the laugh track’s hold on UK comedies began to falter, following The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s abandonment of the device. The political satire show Spitting Image filmed its first episode with a studio audience at the insistence of broadcaster ITV, then ditched it too.

Spitting Image

So canned laughter is pretty well defunct now and thank heavens for that.

As for laughter in terms of poetry there are many poets that can make me smile but very few who can make me laugh, and especially, make me laugh every time I read the poem. Off the top of my head I’d say Dorothy Parker and Billy Collins as examples.

This is one I wrote years ago but given that it hopes to raise a laugh and relates to the current season so I can only use it once a year here it is:

Allergy (Written in a Country Churchyard)

The pollen tells the tale of parting day
The flowing nose winds slowly to a sneeze
The tissue upward prods its weary way
And leaves are worlds of darkness in a wheeze.

First published in Purple Patch 2004ish

Terry Q.

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Laughter - The Best Medicine

 

“Laughter is the best medicine” is a well-known saying and it is true. We feel better after a good laugh and depending on the reason for the laughter, that good feeling can last. There’s a long list of benefits. This is just a few. Laughter protects the heart, boosts the immune system, triggers the release of endorphins and relaxes the whole body. It even burns calories, apparently.

We need something to laugh at and that is down to personal preference. What might be hilarious to some might be totally unfunny to others. Something happened when I was fourteen. I was on my own watching Steptoe and Son on television. I don’t remember the episode or anything about it, except really enjoying it and loudly laughing my head off when my father’s new wife came into the room. I think she said, “That’s so funny,” or something along those lines, but I’d shut up. I don’t know if I was embarrassed, self-conscious, or just a typical fourteen year old girl bereft of her mother and trying to adjust to changes. It was a turning point, an experience that’s stayed with me.

The first time I saw Billy Connolly in concert – Preston Guild Hall c.1974/5 – I laughed so much and for so long that I had to stop listening to him until I could breathe again. I missed the even funnier end to some stories because of the state I was in. I’ve seen him on stage a few times and he’s always had the same effect. Luckily, I have DVDs to fill in those important gaps. It’s my love for Scotland that goes beyond The Broons and Oor Wullie of my childhood, Billy Connolly for the last fifty years and Still Game more recently. There must be something Scottish in my DNA. Peter Kay gets to me, too. I haven’t seen him on stage, just television and DVDs of concerts. I’m also a survivor of a very long, very late and very funny midnight matinee with Ken Dodd. What a master of mirth.

Put me in a room with my niece and we will both be helpless with laughter in minutes. Add her mother, my sister into the mix and that laughter will only take seconds. If we’re at my house, I’ll be running squealing into the handy downstairs loo. If we happen to be out, they’ll sit me close to the ‘Ladies’. How thoughtful they both are. It’s just how we interact and what starts it often comes from nowhere, unless we’re reliving a previous event that had us in stitches on the ‘Do you remember when…’ memory lane.

Laughter has been in short supply lately. Life is a rollercoaster ride and there are too many dips at the moment. Things will improve. For now I think I need Billy Connolly at his best, some episodes of Steptoe and Son to remind me how far I’ve come and my niece and sister who share my craziness.

A poem from Muhammad Ali,

He took a few cups of love.
He took one tablespoon of patience,
One teaspoon of generosity,
One pint of kindness.
He took one quart of laughter,
One pinch of concern.
And then, he mixed willingness with happiness.
He added lots of faith,
And he stirred it up well.
Then he spread it over a span of a lifetime,
And he served it to each and every deserving person he met.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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My Bedside Table

Welcome to my bedroom (or part thereof). I don't have a bedside table in the accepted sense, because the head of the double-bed is in the window bay, which naturally has sloping sides. I like to sleep with my head in the bay, so I can look out at the sky at night and on sunny mornings, and enjoy fresh air on my face, especially in this heat.. What I have instead is a table in the alcove, as shown below.

When I say table, it's actually a  two-tier shoe rack, but it serves the purpose of a bedside table perfectly well.

I know some people have cabinets by their beds, with drawers for personal effects; others have night-stands; and I'm supposing some have nothing at all, but they are probably the sort of people who have a   television screen mounted up on the bedroom wall and a remote control under the pillow.

When it is there, what purpose does the bedside cabinet,/night-stand/table serve in this age of fully plumbed bathrooms? I suppose at minimum it's a repository for those items one takes off or puts down last thing at night without wanting to have to get out of bed - a book perhaps, spectacles or contact lenses (if worn), mobile phone. (My parents used to keep their false teeth in mugs on their bedside cabinets. Ugh.) It might also sport a bedside lamp, box of tissues, glass of water, alarm clock. 

Then I did a quick web search for information about other items frequently found on a bedside table or in a bedside cabinet (yes, I guess I'm stretching the brief here slightly). Cosmetics featured quite highly - cold cream, face wipes, eau de cologne, lipstick; so did medications - contraceptive pills, various sorts of tablets, epi-pen, inhaler; also items of a recreational nature - condoms, vibrators, hand-cuffs et cetera. There were some oddities (I won't say surprises, because very little does anymore) and I'll just list a few that it would never have occurred to me to keep by my bedside (even in a drawer) - house keys, pet rock, chocolate, packets of sweets, passport, credit cards, crucifix, torch, cigarettes plus lighter/matches (I'm not a smoker, but wouldn't in bed even if I were), roll of banknotes, penny whistle, thermometer, knife and fork, scalpel, pepper spray, loaded pistol!

On my own bedside table, as shown in close-up below, I have an anglepoise lamp, some books, a statue of buddha, a jar containing scent-diffuser sticks, a framed photograph and an ornate model of a cave beetle. Only the books vary from time to time. Right now they are 'In And Out Of The Mind' by Ruth Padel, 'Honour' by Elif Shafak and 'Stone & Sky', the latest from Ben Aaronovitch.

It's been a really busy Saturday, with poetry events morning, afternoon and evening, so I've had no time to work on a poem even remotely connected to the theme. Instead, let me share one from the American poet Anna Blake.

Love Drunk

I left your wine glass
on my bedside table

for seven days
it settled in the very place
that your hands had aimlessly
chosen

staining a ring around a mostly empty bodice.

mostly empty?
barely full?

you see, for me,
the wine glass was
my way of having you
stay as long as I wanted.

I saw your delicate
fingerprints stamped upon
the stem and body

just as they were on mine, under a tin roof
amidst a blanket of summer rain.

                                                         Anna Blake

Oh, and by the way, the Dead Good Blog passed the 3,000,000 views milestone today. How about that. I just wish more people would leave comments (and I know my fellow bloggers feel the same way)

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

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My Bedside Table

I’ve never thought about my bedside table before. It’s a hideous shade of orange and I’ve no idea how I acquired the thing but it was years ago. There is nothing inside the cupboard and only the instructions for the alarm in the shelf bit. The alarm is on the top.

So my first thought was that it’s not a table although, apparently, the bedside table is practically synonymous with a nightstand, a multi-purpose mini-cabinet, as opposed to just a surface. The history of nightstands go back to the medieval era in Europe. Known as a commode, the earliest forms were not small tables but compact cabinets with doors and storage space. These original commodes were used to house chamber pots or washbasins, essential items in an era before indoor plumbing.

an 18th century bedside table

Because chamber pots carried certain odours with them, the finer elements of society needed some way to store them. Furniture designers at the time devised the commode as a small side table to place the chamber pot in at night. The original purpose of the nightstand, then, was purely functional. So that cupboard in my bedside table is where the chamber pot would have stood.

Even before the chamber pot became obsolete, the design of the commode had begun to change. The 18th and 19th century upper classes, from France to the United Kingdom to the United States, ordered pieces that furthered disguised the nightstand’s purpose with elegant forms and beautiful features.

The 20th century marked a period of development in design. The advent of electricity changed the function of bedside tables once more, with spaces designed to accommodate lamps and, later, alarm clocks. The Art Deco movement of the 1920s and 1930s led geometric forms and exotic materials defining the designs of the era. Further developments in the 1940s onwards have led to the position now where they serve as a spot for books, lamps, alarm clocks and, surprisingly to me, house charging docks for digital devices.

a pair of 1920s Art Deco bedside tables

I was going to expand a bit on the above but I came across the following by Jenny Smith, the senior editor of Povison:

‘Incorporating Feng Shui principles into your bedroom can significantly impact your overall well-being, and the bed table plays a crucial role in this ancient practice. According to Feng Shui, the nightstand, commonly known as a bed table, should be positioned on either side of the bed for balance and harmony. Ensure both nightstands are of equal size and height to promote equality and create a sense of unity in your sleep space.

The items you place on your nightstand can influence the Feng Shui of your bedroom. Avoid electronic devices, especially near your head, as they can disrupt the natural energy flow and potentially interfere with your sleep. Sharp objects, such as scissors or knives, are discouraged due to their association with cutting energy. Instead, opt for soothing items like a book, a small potted plant, or calming crystals to enhance positive energy and promote a serene atmosphere.

Feng Shui places emphasis on balance and symmetry, extending to the height of your nightstand. Ideally, the nightstand should be level with the height of your mattress. This creates a harmonious visual line, promoting a sense of equilibrium in the bedroom.

a Feng Shui nightstand

Understanding what constitutes bad Feng Shui in the bedroom is vital for cultivating a harmonious and restful environment. Avoid placing the bed in direct alignment with the bedroom door, as it is believed to result in disturbed sleep and energy imbalance. Additionally, steer clear of clutter under the bed, as it can disrupt the energy flow and create stagnation. Mirrors facing the bed are also discouraged, as they are thought to bounce energy and impact the quality of your sleep.’

Make of that what you will.

I’ve only got one poem that mentions a bedside table:

4 am
sheets
cold tea
on a bedside table
silence

Terry Quinn

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My Bedside Table - My Space

A mock Tiffany lamp with a dimmer feature sits on top of my bedside table, which is a fitted unit matching the headboard. A Mr and Mrs pair of teddy bears from the Outer Hebrides and dressed in authentic Harris tweed occupy the remaining space.

Below this, my bedside table is a work of art in the style of Tracey Emin’s unmade bed. The clutter is contained within the small area, and I know where everything is. It’s functional and how I like it. A biography of Agatha Christie, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, a couple of poetry collections and a fantasy/horror novel make a tower of books topped with a notebook, a journal and a box of tissues. It never looks balanced or neat. Hand cream, an assortment of pens, a bookmark made by a child and another with ‘Desiderata’ on it, a straw coaster, plastic water bottle and just enough room for my phone which I rely on for an alarm. Don’t mention the dust.

Half a dozen perfumes, mainly Christian Dior are grouped together on an internal shelf. I have no sense of smell anymore, but I remember my favourites and still use them. Also on the shelf is a small torch, just in case. A jewellery box which belonged to my late mother and contains some of her things, special to me, takes up the rest of the shelf.

I keep my glasses in the drawer, with several spare pairs, a few charging cables for various devices and an iPod Shuffle music thingy full of Moody Blues albums which I take on holidays.

Beneath the drawer is an open space where keepsakes and bits and pieces are safe in a perfectly fitting box.

I would love a tidy, minimalistic bedside table. It will never be, not in my busy house.

My Haiku,

I do not lose things
They’re on my bedside table
With everything else.

It’s only some keys,
They will be under something
Not exactly lost.

A crumpled tissue,
Used for cleaning my glasses
Had covered them up.

PMW 2025

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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