Footsteps

T and I were in the café thinking about how to approach the topic of footsteps. She wondered where the phrase ‘don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes’ came from and I said I’d check it later as a possible start. She then mentioned that one of her favourite memories of footsteps was walking along the sands of a beach when she was younger.

9,000 year old Formby Beach Footprint

I was trying to decide between ‘shoes’ and ‘sand’ when my own memories of running on beaches came to the fore. Whenever I think about that I see the opening scenes of Chariots of Fire in my mind and I have to gulp a bit. Of all the possible similar experiences there is one that I’m always reminded of and that was when I lived in Great Yarmouth. I’d run as far as Caister up and down the huge sand dunes. When I got to a certain point I had to turn round and follow my footsteps back. It was a hot day and when I came to a halt I was so exhausted that I was sick all over the last dune. A wonderful few hours.

That was following in my footsteps but whose footsteps would I follow if given the chance?

Buzz Aldrin's Footprint

Well, top of the list and by 238,850 miles would be Buzz Aldrin. The first person on the moon could have stepped off the landing craft and sunk down into the Moon’s surface. You can’t be too careful.

If I had been taking the footsteps myself then I would have been in Trevor Francis’s boots as I stepped out onto the St Andrews pitch in September 1970 for my home debut at the age of sixteen. I would have scored as well as he did and not been in the Cattell Road end watching.

Trevor Francis

I think one of the great pleasures is walking the streets of a city at night. I probably would have been spotted but I would loved to have followed Charles Dickens as he roamed London. It was said that he loved the glorious, mysterious, sometimes dangerous life of cities at night, which he characterised as scenes from a magic lantern; but he also felt at home among the homeless. It was their experience of the city that, because it spoke to him of some crisis both of self and society, he most wanted to voice.

As for poetry and walking I’d like to be a bit more up to date and I would definitely follow in the footsteps of Alice Oswald as she prepared for her wonderful book ‘Dart’. In it she followed the river from its source to the sea. She threads conversations with a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers, canoeists and more with short comments at the side to create a work that rushes and slows as the river itself. 

Here’s the first lines:

Who’s this moving alive over the moors?/An old man seeking and finding a difficulty./Has he remembered his compass his spare socks/does he fully intend going in over his knees off the/ military track from Okehampton?/Keeping his course through the swamp spaces/and pulling the distance round his shoulders.

I suppose as I’ve covered past and present footsteps I should look forward to who or what I could be stepping out to. And what comes to mind is going back thousands of years. Many thousands. I would like to see the 9,000 year old human footprints at Formby which are located along a 4km stretch of the coast between Lifeboat Road and Gypsy Wood. Not as old as the ones found in 2013 in Happisburgh in Norfolk, they were 900,000 years old but have been washed away, although they were completely recorded by scientists before that.

By the way I did look up the origins of the ‘walked a mile in his shoes’ and it comes from a poem by Mary T Lathrap entitled ‘Judge Softly’. And the line was ‘Walk a Mile in His Moccasins’.

Here is a poem about some other footsteps:

She sends me Photos of Milestones

To Todmorden 7 – To Halifax 4 ¾
Shifnal 4 – Salop 3m 6f
Thirsk 6 – Helmsley 8

In the measured tones of
James Alexander Gordon
bringing back memories
of late Saturdays
anxious about the scores
from the pocket radio
and the distance left
as light fades
on a country road

Six miles to Thirsk
with a knapsack on my back
striding a verge of years
not counting the footsteps
thoughts straying to evenings
and a decent pub
able to ignore
furlongs and fractions
as nothing more
than quaint signs pointing
to a past of contradictions
that now measures every month
as a perfect number.

First published in South, April 2015

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More

Misty

Just to be different this week, let's start with a quiz. You can all join in. Ten pithy clues - some more cryptic than others - to people, places or things that reference mistiness in some form:

1) gorillas 2) reggae 3) falling water 4) anime 5) clint 6) aiden 7) andrews/owen 8) pirouette 9) dark lord 10) pacific gas. There are some toughies there, but all of the answers can be found below. (No cheating, give it a go first.)

The science of Misty is approximately as follows: minute particles of water (2 parts hydrogen, one part oxygen) suspended in air (8 parts nitrogen, 2 parts oxygen, with a smidgen of argon). Mist occurs as a result of a subtle state-change, when conditions are right for water vapour in the air to cool and change from an invisible gas to visible water droplets. Miraculous as that it, it doesn't do justice to the mysterious beauty of the phenomenon. But I hope this photograph might. Feast your eyes...

Blackpool Tower, seagull, sea mist

I'm posting quite a short blog today for a change, because it's misty and I'm busy, busy, busy. For that reason, plus the fact that I couldn't hope to better what Alice Oswald has achieved, I have chosen to share her poem rather than one of my own: 

Mist

It amazes me when mist

chloroforms the fields

and wipes out whatever world exists

and walkers wade through coma

                            shouting

and close to but curtained from each other

sometimes there's a second river

lying asleep along the river

where the sun rises

             sunk in thought

and my soul gets caught in it

              hung by the heels

              in water

It amazes me when mist

                          weeps as it lifts

              and a crow

calls down to me in its treetop voice

      that there are webs and drips

and actualities up there

and in my fog-self shocked and grey

              it startles me to see the sky

                                          Alice Oswald, 2019

Here are the answers to the quiz:

That's all folks. Thanks for reading, S ;-)

Read More

Travesty

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a definition of Travesty is: something that fails to represent the values and qualities that it is intended to represent, in a way that is shocking or offensive.

Well, that covers a multitude of sins. Where do you start? Voting systems, conspiracy theories, railway timetables (excluding Northern Rail as it's on another planet where train crews don't exist), manifestos, VAR, bank balances, Preston North End switching an agreed end for penalties in the Championship play-off against Birmingham City on the 17th May 2001.

All of the above, but as this is a poetry-based blog, let's stick to one thing which really does qualify as a travesty. It first came to my notice about ten years ago when I came across a CD of T. S. Eliot's The Four Quartets read by Ralph Fiennes. My delightful LP of Eliot reading his own work was scratched and worn so I purchased this update with some enthusiasm. I managed about two minutes of it when I got home.

T S Eliot reading

Then in 2012 I tuned into the BBC for a reading of The Wasteland by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins. I seem to remember recoiling in a mixture of horror and laughter. I'm not sure about Atkins, but Jeremy wasn't reading but performing.

That was when I started to notice that there is a difference between poets reading poetry and actors reading poetry. Someone else has noticed this as well because I came across a phrase that sums up that difference. This person (and I can't find their name, damn it) said "Actors read vowels and poets read consonants." Another way of looking at it is that vowels are the emotion and consonants are the intellect. Consonants can only be spoken in one way and so make speech hard and crisp but vowels can be pronounced in many ways. Thus with consonants there is a concentration on the words being spoken but with vowels their open-ended nature gives rise to you listening to the pronunciation, the rise and fall of the voice, and away from the meaning of the poem.

Listen to the radio or recordings of poetry and you'll find that most of them are read by actors. They are being paid. I am a member of the Poetry Society which exists...to create a central position for poetry in the arts and continue to build new avenues to promote poets and poetry in Britain today. I know it is not a Trades Union, but I don't see any actions that would create opportunities for poets to earn a living by doing what they would do best: Read Poetry.

I'll finish on a positive note. If you want to hear a poem read well then I'd point you at Alice Oswald reading her own work Dart. It's available on CD and here is an excerpt:

Who's this moving alive over the moor?

An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?

keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders

and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

                                                             (from Dart by Alice Oswald, 2010)

Terry Quinn

Read More