On The Blink

It's been another superbly sunny day in the jewel of the north and your Saturday blogger has been flagging - just waiting on the cool of evening to get a bit of creativity stirring.

Who doesn't love a lighthouse? As structures they have proved themselves both beautiful and useful for centuries, though in this digital age of gps they are possibly becoming redundant - mostly to be preserved as museums, icons, tourist attractions.

I had a lot of fun scrolling through hundreds of photographs of lighthouses from around the world before I chose this one to illustrate the blog. I like it because in composition, colour and the effect of light, it seems to me to possess all the qualities of an Edward Hopper painting... not that surprising, given Hopper painted pictures of several of them, mostly around the New England coastline in the 1920s and 1930s.

If you're familiar with any of his work, you'll probably know that Hopper (1882-1967) is widely regarded as the pre-eminent realist painter of 20th century America. His spare compositions are taken to express, through their prevailing quality of emptiness, the isolation and loneliness (alienation might be a better term) residing at the heart of modern American life. Check out such classic paintings as Chair Car, Nighthawks, Four Lane Road, Cape Cod Evening or Solitude for typical effect.

When it came to writing today's poem, I pondered on the situational aspects of lighthouses and lighthouse life back in the mechanical age: remote, rugged, living on the edge, alone with the screech of wind and seabirds and the mind-altering properties of weevils (in the flour). It all gives a different meaning to brinkmanship and the gloomy preoccupations that isolation catalyses. See what you think.

Brinkmanship
On the blink.
On the brink.
Recurring dreams of being
ankle-deep in candle-grease,

of splintered timbers
steeped with the reek of seaweed
haunt your circular sleepwalking,
a-tangle with mermaids
and mangled mariners
whose every agonised look
accuses...

...after forty stormy days and nights
who let the light go out?

Respite arrives
on waking with the dawn.

You climb once more unrested
to dogged duty
in the mirror room
from whose height
even the horizon looks curved,
to snuff the flames and polish
sooted lenses till they gleam.

After all these years
of living alone
in your tapering tower,
you can no longer swear
you are entirely sane.

On the blink.
On the brink.
You man a beacon of hope
and yet
a sense of darkness
follows you around.

People who live in lighthouses
can't help but throw shadows.


Okay, that's it for this one. Thanks for reading. Keep shining, stay safe, S ;-)

Read More

Little White Lies

It's been a lean old time for the Dead Good blog. No one has posted on the theme of  Little White Lies  all week. They've had perfectly good reasons for not doing so, but I don't think there has ever been a completely blank week on the blog since its launch back in July 2011, so I feel a sense of obligation to maintain a proud record, preserve the continuity.

Feeling hardly intrepid and barely inspired, nevertheless it's time to go once more into the imaginarium... from which I fabricate this antipodean cautionary tale, based on true events* although I've embellished it liberally and all the names and locations have been given a make-over.

Some decades ago, before the age of automation and when lighthouses still required resident lighthouse keepers, a change of personnel became necessary at the lighthouse on Waroo, a small island just off New Zealand's north coast. Bert Meade had been manning the Waroo light for fifteen years but infirmity was taking its toll and so a replacement was appointed, a younger man to take up the post.

Bert had lived on Waroo alone for all that time but Jack Taylor, his successor, decided to take his cat Tigger with him for company. Once the slightly unnerving sea-crossing had been negotiated, Jack and his cat soon made themselves at home on their little island paradise.

For Jack, lighthouse duties aside, he revelled in the solace and the scenery, planting crops, fishing, reading. Tigger revelled in being tiggerish. They'd only been in residence for a week when Jack awoke one morning to find the present of a dead bird laid outside his bedroom door. He thought he recognised it as a kiwi, but it was pure white and quite small. Of course, he knew Tigger was the culprit but he assumed the bird must have been rejected by its family for being albino, a freak of nature and doomed to finish up as easy prey. He burned the corpse and didn't berate the cat.


Little White Kiwi

Two days later, Tigger came home with another small white kiwi clamped in his maw. He deposited it proudly at Jack's feet. The bird was dead but still warm. Once again Jack incinerated the little body  and refrained from taking Tigger to task, though it did occur to him to wonder if there might be a colony of mutant white kiwis on Waroo. He decided to comb the island to satisfy this curiosity, but ended up spending a couple of days in fruitless search.

Over the course of the following week, four more white kiwis of varying sizes were brought back to the lighthouse. Again Jack went searching for the birds, again he returned empty-handed having got neither sight nor sound of them.

On the morning that he found the seventh and eighth white corpses laid at his door, he decided to preserve them in the refrigerator overnight and when the monthly supply boat arrived at Waroo, Jack wrapped the birds up and gave them to the captain to take back to the mainland. Maybe someone at Auckland university would be interested in the find, might be able to do some analysis and shed some light on this aberration.

By the time the supply boat returned to Waroo a month later, Tigger had carried another nineteen little white kiwi corpses back to Jack. The lighthouse keeper had contemplated locking his cat in the lighthouse but couldn't bring himself to place his companion under house arrest and so the killing spree had gone on. The news from Auckland was exciting. The bird could be a previously unknown strain of kiwi. The university would shortly be sending a scientific team out to the island. In the meantime, could the lighthouse keeper ship his cat back to the mainland for the well-being of the colony of birds?

Though Jack, the ship's captain and mate searched and called for Tigger for the best part of the afternoon, he could not be found and the supply boat had to depart catless. It was late into the night before Tigger broke cover.

The feline marauder had increased his haul to forty known victims before Jack Taylor decided he had to act. Tigger was finally incarcerated, much to his disgust and Jack's discomfort. Tigger's confinement was in its tenth day when he managed to elude his captor and race off to the interior of the island.

By the time the team from Auckland university arrived on Waroo with their tents, nets, cages and news that yes, this definitely was a hitherto unknown and quite distinct sub-species of the bird, every last Little White Kiwi had been pursued to extinction.

Jack Taylor helped the team collect up the remains of Tigger's rampaging. Some of the bodies were taken back to Auckland as specimens for further analysis and for posterity. The rest Jack buried in a small grave which he marked with a headboard reading  'Here Lies Little White'. Tigger took to napping on that grave on slow, sunny afternoons of which there were many.

* For those of you traumatised by what I've narrated above, in real life the bird in question was not a kiwi but a species of wren - the walking wren - so-called for the obvious reason that it was flightless. It had (d)evolved thus because it had lived for so long (thousands of years) in an environment where it had no natural predators. Of course that doesn't make what happened any better.

For those of you inclined to think ill of Tigger (real name not known) for wiping out an entire species in under three months, almost before it had been classified in fact, he was just doing what comes naturally to cats.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

Read More

To Magnify A Candle's Brightness...

It's another lovely sunny Saturday evening on the Fylde coast and daylight will probably prevail until after ten tonight. Once darkness arrives, the electric lights will start to go on.... but it was not always thus.

At one time, candlelight would have been the standard method of keeping the darkness at bay and candles would have been as important a staple of everyday living as meat and bread, hence the prominence of the maker of candles in the popular rhyme about "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker" (wherein the candlestick was the candle itself, not the holder).

Nowadays candles are used primarily for 'atmosphere' (romantic, scented, relaxing) and are only pressed into force en masse when there is a power-cut. Pam and Adele have waxed eloquent about the modern-day use of candles in earlier blogs this week, so I'm going to focus on their use in one specific device - the lighthouse - because it links quite neatly with a poem I wrote a couple of years ago as part of the Walking On Wyre project. The poem, which you'll find below, is primarily about Fleetwood's lighthouses.

Fleetwood, for those who are not familiar with the geography of north-west England, is a port on the Lancashire coast north of Blackpool. It is situated on the estuary of the river Wyre where it flows into the Irish Sea. For generations it was one of the principal fishing ports in the country and it was unusual in having not one but three lighthouses of differing heights which, when aligned, guided boats safely into Fleetwood port.


Upper 'Pharos' Lighthouse, Fleetwood (and tramwires)

Lighthouses obviously require light! In the earliest versions (and the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, circa 200 BC is the earliest documented), the light would be a wood fire burning in an open space (probably within a brazier). With the invention of glass came the means to enclose the space and protect the flame from wind. In medieval times candles were used in lighthouses instead of open fires, but it required a quantity of them - usually arrayed in a candelabrum - to generate sufficient light. The original Eddystone lighthouse (1698) was powered by sixty one-pound candles...and they had to be changed every three hours!

There are accounts of lighthouse keepers resorting to eating their candles when they were cut off by bad weather and food supplies had run out. Fortunately for them the candles were often rich in beeswax and whale tallow!

Of course, candlepower alone couldn't guarantee to be seen from any great distance (a mile or so at most even with a telescope) and so the development of prismatic lenses (originally devised by French physicist AJ Fresnel in the early 19th century) allowed candlepowered lighthouses to be visible from great distances by concentrating the light-source into a powerful beam. (Incidentally, car headlamps also use Fresnel lenses in much the same way.)

Candlepower (abbreviated as cp) was used for hundreds of years as a means of expressing units of luminous intensity and was replaced and renamed after World War II by the international (SI) unit known as the candela. Therefore, although candles have long been superseded by electric lights, their power/brightness is still measured in units that relate back to candlelight.

The Wyre Light, designed by a blind engineer

And so to this week's poem. I hope you like it, even if you live in Fleetwood - maybe especially so...

Fleetwood Fires
Wyre light:
designed by a blind man
to give sailors sea-sight
and safe passage by night
along the rolling salt-road
to their Fleetwood home,
you stood two miles offshore
in Morecambe Bay
and shone diopic bright
a century or more
until yourself consumed by fire
in nineteen forty-eight...

Lower light:
securely land based,
whitestone faced
and only half the height of anterior Pharos,
you sat classically squat and square
on elevated Wyrebank
but were far from inferior;
pivotal, rather,
in this trinity of incandescence
back in the day
when trawler captains used your nine-mile beams
to fix their fishy way...

Finally (upper) Pharos light:
flaring deep sandstone red
on sunny days,
you rose majestic
as totem of this once aspiring town;
a solid, steadfast, shapely tapered tower
topped by that magical prismatic mirror
which had the power
to magnify a candle's brightness
and throw it far into the bight,
pinning the blackness of the night...

As epilogue,
Fleetwood's Victoria Pier burned down
in two thousand and eight.
Britain's penultimate was both the shortest
and the shortest lived!
Now only a masonry stump remains,
plans to rebuild so far proved in vain.
And so,
lights sputter, gutter and are gone,
leaving a history
of ghostlike wraiths of smoke
in their wake...


Thanks for reading. Have a safe week, S ;-)

Read More