Numbers

 “59” is a love poem about prime numbers, written and performed by British poet and mathematician, Harry Baker. It is available on YouTube, better on stage than on page, but here it is:

59

59 wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
Realises all his hair is on one side of his head.
Takes just under a minute to work out that it’s because of the way that he slept.

He finds some clothes and gets dressed.
He can’t help but look in the mirror and be subtly impressed
How he looks rough around the edges and yet casually messed.
And as he glances out the window,
He sees the sight that he gets blessed with,
Of 60 from across the street.

Now 60 was beautiful,
With perfectly trimmed cuticles, dressed in something suitable,
And never rude or crude at all.

Unimprovable,
Right on time as usual,
More on cue than a snooker ball but liked to play it super cool.

59 wanted to tell her that he knew her favorite flower.
He thought of her every second, every minute, every hour.
But he knew it wouldn’t work, he’d never get the girl.

Because although she lived across the street they came from different worlds.
While 59 admired 60’s perfectly round figure,
60 thought 59 was odd.

You see, one of his favorite films was "101 Dalmatians."
She preferred the sequel.
He romanticized the idea they were star-crossed lovers.
They could overcome the odds and evens because they had each other,
While she maintained the strict views imposed on her by her mother,
That separate could not be equal.

And though at the time he felt stupid and dumb
For trying to love a girl controlled by her stupid mum,
He should have been comforted by the simple sum.
Take 59 away from 60, and you’re left with the one.

Sure enough after two months of moping around,
61 days later, 61 was who he found,
He had lost his keys and his parents were out.

So one day after school he went into a house.
And as he noticed the slightly wonky numbers on the door,
He wondered why he’d never introduced himself before.

As she let him in, his jaw dropped in awe.
61 was like 60, but a little bit more.
See she had prettier eyes, and an approachable smile,
And like him, rough around the edges, casual style,
And like him, everything was in disorganized piles,
And like him, her mum didn’t mind if friends stayed a while.

Because she was like him, and he liked her.
He reckoned she would like him if she knew he was like her,
And it was different this time. I mean, this girl was wicked,
So he plucked up the courage and asked for her digits.

She said, "I'm 61."
He grinned, said, "I'm 59. Today I’ve had a really nice time,
So tomorrow if you wanted you could come over to mine?"
She said, "Sure."

She loved talking to someone just as quirky,
So she agreed to this unofficial first date.
In the end, he was only ready one minute early,
But that didn’t matter because she arrived one minute late.

And from that moment on there was non-stop chatter,
How they loved "X-Factor," how they had two factors,
How that did not matter.
Distinctiveness made them better,
By the end of the night, they knew they were meant together.

And one day she was talking about stuck-up 60,
She noticed that 59 looked a bit shifty.
He blushed and told her of his crush:
“The best thing that never happened because it led to us.” 61 was clever, see, not prone to jealousy,
She looked him in the eyes and told him quite tenderly,
"You’re 59, I’m 61, together we combine to become twice what 60 could ever be."
And at this point 59 had tears in his eyes,
Was so glad to have this one-of-a-kind girl in his life.

He told her the very definition of being prime
Was that with only one and himself could his heart divide,
And she was the one he wanted to give his heart to,
She said she felt the same and now she knew the films were half true,
Because that wasn't real love, that love was just a sample,
When it came to real love, they were a prime example.

                                                                                        Harry Baker

And, while I’m mentioning performance poets, I was pea-green with envy last week to discover that one of my absolute favourites, Mike Garry, (so much more than a performance poet) visited my elder grandson’s high school doing what I think was a poetry workshop. Had I known, I could have hung around outside the school gates, a poet groupie. Anyway, he was well received and my grandson was impressed.

Back to the subject of numbers. There is no escape, they are everywhere. We couldn’t manage without them. Clocks, calendars, reference numbers, codes for everything and I’m thankful that we moved on from Roman numerals. I think I’ve mentioned before that as a child, I could not grasp money sums. Pounds, shillings and pence. I could not get the hang of it and no amount of frustrated shouting from my teacher was going to make the penny drop. I was seven, or eight. Decimalisation was introduced some years later, for my benefit. I wasn’t alone, I’m sure.

My younger grandson brought his maths homework, needing my help. He doesn’t. He just likes to chill at our house and being without his siblings, he gets all the treats to himself, and undivided attention. He’s aged nine, Year 4, and he was doing six columns of multiplication tables. I’m okay with that, though eight times and nine times gets my brain fumbling a little bit. He believes me when I say swapping the numbers round still gives the same answer and I show him what I mean with five times four and four times five. He already knows, but we’re both enjoying the one to one. A multiplication tables chart fills the flip side of his A4 work sheet and he reminds me how to use it.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Arbo-real

Home is where my trees are.

I can see what that sounds like: my trees? And no, I am not claiming possession. I say ‘my trees’ like people now say ‘my person’ (in a certain TV show I watch a lot). Trees are my people, my friends, my symbols of belonging.

Looking back at all the places where I have lived, I remember trees very well – and that is saying something from someone whose memory is sometimes clouded by brain-fog.

I remember the Laburnum tree outside my childhood bedroom window, Goldregen in my native German, literally translated ‘golden rain’. It stood at the corner of the house, right next to where my head would rest on my bed. I remember funny noises at night, that seemed to come out of the walls, which turned out to be birds nesting in it.

I remember the fir tree in front of the house that was planted either at my brother’s or my birth - I have photos of it being not much taller than me as a young child. I also remember my father dangerously climbing it by the time it was as tall as our two-storey house. It was Christmas time, to fix the Lichterkette (lit. light-chain) to it that, even though as a teenager, I thought it was pure kitsch, it still shone my way home in the wintry darkness, returning home late in my parents’ car – the lights were not switched off until everybody was home.

Living in cities in Germany, and then in London, there was the odd tree – like the Magnolia in Bochum Stadtpark that signified spring when its first flower opened, and some trees in Kew Gardens in London that gave me a feeling of sanctuary when I visited, but nothing close to home.

It wasn’t until I moved to Lancashire that trees came back into my life in a big way. I remember a November day in Preston when I walked to Avenham Park, for a botany project in my first year of studying herbal medicine. I found an elder tree! Sambucus nigra – a source of so much goodness, flowers, berries, even leaves, helping humans in times of need. Sadly, I found it just as a gardener yanked it out of the ground, he scowled at me when I asked why – because it was a nasty weed, he said. I was learning to know better than that, and when I began guiding walks about medicinal plants, I made sure to tell people about the Elder spirit who, if any of its body is removed without asking permission first, will bring seven years of bad luck to the thief. If only all trees had protections like that.

My favourite plants grow out of the cracks. I remember a particular Elder tree that emerged from the old red brick railway bridge across the Ribble. It grew at first horizontally out of the side of the bridge, fairly high up, then made a 90 degree turn upwards and continued vertically, in the manner most trees do. For me, it was a symbol of nature overcoming human endeavour, when left to its own devices. A symbol of hope.

It takes me back to my youth when songs like Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand (lit. under the cobbles lies the beach) were sung at demonstrations against US nuclear missiles being stationed on German soil during the Cold War era. I badly needed hope then that the world would continue to live and thrive at that time when World War III seemed a real possibility.

Arbo-real: resistance is real. Trees are real, across time. They are a gift to the future. The trees we planted in our new home in Scotland could outlive us. The Elder tree has pride of place, the sapling placed smack bang in the middle of what was a green desert of sileage grass when we moved in three years ago. It is now as tall as our woodshed/workshop at the other end of the garden.

It also shields the arbour – a bench with sides and a roof that we often sit in on warm(ish – we are in Scotland after all!) summer nights, with the bat detector hissing, trying to see the stars obscured by the glaring streetlights (don’t get me started, that’s another story).

I sit in it reading my new book that I picked up on holiday: ‘How I became a tree’ by Sumana Roy. If you like trees, and reading – if you got this far, I am assuming some interest in both – I can warmly recommend this book.

It is not just trees that we have planted: the huge Larch trees in the churchyard and the three Scots Pines on our daily walk are friends to me, the Giant Redwood in Mabie Forest, all are greeted by my hand, when I remember. And I feel I should mention a tree we brought here from our previous home in Blackpool, a Buddleia. A person connected to that tree, one of our lovely neighbours there, passed away recently (RIP Sandy). It was a sapling when we moved, self-seeded into one of the many pots around our patio, and we assumed that it was an offspring of the one we planted there. But when it did flower here in Scotland for the first time, it turned out to be from our next door neighbours’ tree – more reddish-purple than the one we had bought. Today, I saw a butterfly on one of its flowers for the first time this year, a Red Admiral. There is hope, and life, if only it is left to its own devices. Our garden, a wild mess, is luscious and beautiful and full of bees and bugs and birds, my idea of paradise.

I shall close with a poem that echoes some of what I have mentioned. It was first published in the Open Book Scotland anthology of 2022 titled ‘I give my word’, and I was honoured to read it at its launch at Wigtown Book Festival in the same year.

Belonging

How to make this place home?
I plant trees in the garden
and a hedge, for the bees and the ladybirds,
the song thrush, and blue tits, and the little mouse that lives in the wall.

I put up curtains and blinds, for privacy,
brighten the broad windowsill with flowers;
a prism hung from the curtain rail makes rainbows in the sunshine.

I chat with neighbours, sometimes for too long,
and try to understand why those old people talk about the graves in the churchyard so much.
My ancestors are far away now, buried by war, displaced by violence.

I want to build anew
embedding Haw and Blackthorn, Elder and Hazel
May their roots become mine, with time.

Angela McG

Read More