In The Freezer - What's For Tea?

Travelling home from a few weeks touring southern Scotland in our caravan, our conversation turned to “What’s for tea?” We had been eating out more than usual and the meals I’d put together on board were perfectly adequate though simple, using the microwave, toaster or George Foreman mini grill, and lots of salad. As yet, the pristine gas cooker is untouched by me, due to being timid of gas bottles. The answer to our question was “Something in the freezer,” as it often is.

We have a massive larder freezer and you’d be hard pressed to find a gap amongst the contents. It matches the massive larder fridge, which by comparison, is almost empty in our absence. We used to house a family of four or more. Just two of us now, but feed any number of grandchildren a couple of times a week, depending on after-school activities and us being helpful. There is always something to eat in the freezer or the tins cupboard.

I think we take it all for granted because we’ve got used to relying on being able to store food the way we do. Not too long ago it was different. When I was a child, one of our pubs had a few bedrooms for residential guests and provided meals. I was fascinated by the chest freezer in the cellar, and the ice cream inside it. I’m sure there was plenty of food as well, but having ice cream at home was a novelty. As a young adult, my flat was a cosy little home but without a fridge, never mind a freezer. I managed. I stood my bottle of milk in a bowl with cold water to keep it fresh and hoped for the best. I got a cool box and that was good for butter as well. I had tins and packet foods and bought fresh food as I wanted it, usually picking up something for tea on my way home from work. I didn’t have a handy shop nearby back then. I have two or three now within walking distance – and a stuffed freezer.

I try to keep some sort of order in my stuffed freezer. Homemade items are labelled and dated, there’s a drawer for vegetables and another for potato based food. Fish, meat, pies, pizzas and a supply of Bernard Matthews unicorns, dinosaurs and similar goodies all have their place and a generous amount of ice lollies so we are always ready for visiting children. With all this organisation, I can’t understand how the entire contents are always untidy and often lost, to be found in another drawer.

My poem,

In The Freezer

Some of Iceland’s apple strudels,
Opened stir-fry veg with noodles,
Gregg’s sausage rolls to bake yourself
Pushed to the back of the wrong shelf.
Someone’s put all the chicken pies
In the same drawer as oven fries.
Only ‘tatoes in those spaces,
McCain Jackets, Smiley Faces.
Fish in batter, salmon fish cakes,
Our favourite butcher’s gammon steaks.
Tubs of homemade Bolognese sauce,
Curry and chilli, too, of course.
Escaping sprouts and corn and peas
And tasty pastries filled with cheese
Left over from our Christmas fayre,
Like croquettes I forgot to share.
It’s past its best, that corned beef hash
And so is that left-over mash.
The Dinosaurs are good to eat
And Unicorns, the children’s treat.
The kids will love a freezer feast,
Pasta and garlic bread, at least,
A triangle of pizza, too,
Coleslaw and a few dips will do.

PMW 2023

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Hurly Burly - No Mall & No Builders!

As far as possible, I will avoid any commotion, hurly-burly and busy places, especially since I retired from work. Sometimes things happen and I find myself somewhere I’d rather not be with no immediate escape and I have to grin and bear it.

With the exception of Springfield Mall, Virginia – going back many years when such places were new to me – I don’t like shopping malls. Warm and dry on a cold, wet day they might be, but bustling and noisy does not give me a pleasant shopping experience. My friend and I once got lost trying to find a way out of Manchester Arndale. We rushed one way, then another, back-tracked, or thought we were, and eventually asked a security guard. By then we weren’t bothered which exit, we’d find our bearings outside and we did. When our daughter was about thirteen she wanted to go to the Trafford Centre for her birthday treat, shopping, lunch there, everything possible. We had to do it. Luckily, she loved it and enjoyed spending her birthday money, having the promised lunch, but it was all in the over-crowded, loud hullabaloo that made me want to scream. I might be the only person who doesn’t like the Trafford Centre. I can live with that. I would probably hate Springfield these days.

It doesn’t stop at shopping malls. I can’t cope with having workmen in at home. Running repairs are alright and our usual heating engineer is very welcome when it’s time to service the boiler. Workmen with a capital W means builders and a team of them, taking over and making a mess, making a noise, either voices or machinery. As the family grew and more space was needed, it seemed like a good idea to have extensions here, there and everywhere which meant weeks of disruption. The end results were worth it. The house we move into will be staying exactly as we find it.

This Dr John Cooper Clarke poem reminds me of being lost in the hurly-burly of a pre-Christmas Arndale Centre,

Trouble @ t’Mall

 

Daily Bugle – Front Page News

A drunken posse on a booze cruise

Swear me in I got nothing to lose

High five – low morale

Trouble aye trouble aye

Trouble @ t’Mall

 

I heard about it at the Taj Mahal

I nearly choked on me Taka Dahl

I quizzed Chief Wiggum and he said, “Waal

Cuff ‘em boys – trouble at the Mall”

 

Tripe stand bloody fell over

Its covered the place in a beefy odour

Better take a nosegay pal

Trouble aye trouble aye

Trouble @ t’Mall

 

Bury my heart at Clinton Cards

Remember me to the old guard

These days you just gotta be hard

Because like they say in this here locale

Trouble aye trouble aye

Trouble @ t’Mall

 

H & M is full of flunkies

And Tony and Guy couldn’t give a monkey’s

In the dying words of Gore Vidal

‘Appen it’s trouble aye

Trouble @ t’Mall

JCC

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Journey - My Epic Travels

We are all on our journey of life. We may visit many places, some planned, some unexpected, taking the good with the bad because that’s how it has to be. We may stay put, allow our imagination to take us travelling and pretend we can survive at the bottom of the ocean cocooned in a submarine, safe from Covid 19. I’m not sure if that’s a dream or a nightmare.

Lockdown again, I’m isolating again and my planned trip to Dumfries & Galloway later this month has been rearranged for springtime. I’ll miss the pre-Christmas break which includes a special dinner in Kirkcudbright for my birthday, and the Christmas gift shopping which I like to do there. Meanwhile, as safe as I can be at home, I’ll look forward to next year, optimistic for better times ahead and maybe make the long journey to Orkney.

When our children were little, we had wonderful family holidays in Pembrokeshire. It took all day to get to our destination and the journey could be made tedious by excited kids driving each other mad.

“Will you tell her? She’s nipping me!”

“Mum, he’s put spit on my leg!”

And much wailing. This would be happening before we left the M55. Threats to return home might shut them up for a while.  We would leave the M6 at North Wales and take the scenic route to our first stop at Bala. There’s a lovely playground where we would have our picnic lunch and the children would have fun playing nicely together. Back on our way and they would hate each other again. Sometimes I would swap with the eldest and put him in the front. The youngest would not be nipping me. The long drive was worth it. We would stay two weeks and a bit more, and enjoy a great time.

Holidays when I was a child, were usually spent staying with seldom seen relatives. My aunt and uncle on my father’s side lived in London and other places in the south of England. The journey to get there would be epic and it was always night time when we arrived. Three things were likely to happen to make us late. Top of the list, somewhere in the midlands I would get travel sick. This definitely, always happened and my seaside bucket would miraculously appear. It didn’t make me feel better, but hopefully, the use of it would protect the leather upholstery of Dad’s Mark 2 Jaguar, or whichever model he had at the time.  We would become lost. These journeys were in the days before the motorways linked up, so we would be south, somewhere, following a map and some instructions of which way to go after we’d run out of M6 or M1. I seem to remember this happening around Banbury. My mother, attempting to keep spirits up and sickness down would have me and my sister singing ‘Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross’ and to look for the statue. I don’t think we ever saw it. Eventually, after my dad had opened the window to ask friendly pedestrians for directions, we would be doing a ‘U’ turn and getting back on our way. Then the car would break down. A cloud of steam would rise from the open bonnet. Dad would roll up his shirt sleeves, wait for the engine to cool – this took time – replenish the water in the radiator and hope it fixed it. He usually knew what to do, but if he was stumped, he would have to find a telephone box to call the AA out. We would arrive at our relatives after dark, hungry, tired and very happy to be made welcome. Happy family times.

Isle of Harris

I wrote this poem after a lengthy journey to the North West Scottish Highlands. The scenery was and is breathtakingly beautiful.

I’ll Take the High Road

Sun-yellow gorse meets a bright blue sky

Where mountains seem low and clouds are high.

Single track, crumbled edge, shared with sheep,

The drop is sharp, the climb is steep

Then dips to touch the shore of the loch

Where gentle waves lick tumbled rock.

Then swift ascent and a chance to pause,

Admire the view and brown-heather’d moors.

Mile after slate-grey mile and some more,

Then, at last, we reach our cottage door.

The road ends where the loch becomes sea,

Dolphins are playing and I feel free.

 

Pamela Winning

May 2014

Thanks for reading. Stay safe, Pam x

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Fragrance - In Memoriam

The mornings, a time for toast and cereal, checking homework is in satchel, P E kit if required then sending children off to school. Next would be allocating jobs to the household staff and bar staff, rotating the tasks as fairly as possible and getting stuck in herself where she was needed.

My mum, hair scraped back from her naked face, comfy flat shoes, navy slacks, fine-knit pale blue jumper with the sleeves pushed up. I remember her being busy, hands on, making sandwiches to sell at lunch time and how quickly she could butter the bread; two loaves worth of grated cheese and onion, a favourite of the regular customers.  Our pubs were ale houses, before breweries franchised into eating establishments and takings became target based. Any snacks or lunch-time sandwiches provided by my parents was separate to pub takings and the income it fetched was their own.

Later, after tea and into the early evening, my mother would transform herself into the smart, glamorous, attractive woman she was. She styled her brown hair into soft curls lifted off her face and shaped neatly over her ears. Lipstick, a hint of mascara, a dress and high heeled shoes, finished off with a subtle application of Estee Lauder Youth Dew or Chanel No5. This is how I like to remember her, looking lovely, accompanying my father downstairs in the pub, leaving a waft of her favourite fragrance behind.

She died young. For years I kept an almost empty bottle of her Estee Lauder for the comfort her fragrance gave me. Eventually, what was left completely evaporated and the bottle was discarded. I still have a box of talcum powder, not that I can smell it, if it should have any scent left at all, after all these years.

My sense of smell vanished after chemo and radiotherapy. All the fabulous fragrances are lost on me now. Perfume, lilies, home-made baking, the aroma is all left to memory and imagination. I still wear my Christian Dior which I used to love, and why not? I might be wafting memories around those who care.

I found this poem,

Fragrance

The fragrance of
Love and care

The fragrance that
Repair

The fragrance which
Always reminds of welfare

The fragrance with
The power of flare

The fragrance of mother
Is the fragrance of prayer.  

 

By Gemini Girl on All Poetry

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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The Romantics - So Glad I Found You

It had been a decade of uncertainty, feeling lost and out of my depth. I’d been riding an emotional roller-coaster that got faster and faster and would not stop. I jumped off, brushed myself down and wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner.

I lived alone, quietly. I had my job, my home, my car and I think I had my sanity, though others might have doubted it, I didn’t question it much. I enjoyed the silence of my own company. There had been too much noise before. I read book after book, Irwin Shaw, Colleen McCullough and Edna O'Brien amongst others. I unpacked the collection of Marshall Cavendish Mind Alive magazines that my father had subscribed to for me, which had remained untouched throughout my teens. I learned a lot from the articles that interested me and took pride in fixing the magazines into the binders that made it into an encyclopaedia.  If I wasn’t reading, I was writing. No television at this time, but I had a radio if I fancied ‘Saturday Night Theatre’ or ‘Play for Today’ and I had my record player.

My English Literature studies were far behind me, but I found myself revisiting the Bronte’s, some Dickens and my favourite stories from Joyce’s Dubliners. From somewhere into this mix came poetry and those poems familiar to me were taking on new meaning, or perhaps I’d missed something  before. It was the poets, the ones we call The Romantics and I latched on to something that I felt I belonged to.  I had (still have, my photo) The Penguin Book of Love Poetry and I read bits of it every day. It probably wasn’t the best poetry to throw myself headlong into. Death, separation and desolation were subjects perhaps best avoided, but difficult to do so when words were reaching out to me, especially those of Byron and Shelley.

I wish I could have been in the party or at least a fly on the wall in the summer of 1816 when Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (later Shelley), and others were having fun at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It must have been a tremendous storm to keep them indoors for three days, if what I read is true. They wrote horror stories to scare each other, which might have been the beginnings of Mary’s novel, Frankenstein.  I imagine that writing was not their only past-time. Their lives were forever intertwined.  I love to read about their bohemian lifestyle and their freedom, but I wonder, were they really happy?

Somewhere buried in the archives of our house, I will still have the framed poems that once adorned the walls of my house. I liked to do calligraphy, back in the day when my eyes still worked, and one of the first I made for myself was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet XLIII, from the Portuguese.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!- and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861)

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Direction

If I ask you to get lost, I’ll trust you not to take offence. Nowadays, any smartphone can commune with a secret cabal of satellites to plot your location to seventeen decimal places. But it helps, every now and then, to have no omniscient voice advising you to take the next left. Just as closing your eyes heightens the other senses, unhooking from the safety-line of modernity opens up our awareness of other cues, whether it's keeping Venus dead-ahead or Parlick somewhere to our left.

 

The word "lost" carries so many negative connotations, right up to the euphemistic sense of losing a relative. But writers, of all people, should welcome the exploration of unfamiliar terrain. Do it - really do it.

 

I have form on this, having spent a good deal of time wandering high places in deep snow, often in mist, frequently at night and sometimes all three. This level of risk is clearly not for everyone. But it's taught me a lot about navigation and a little about the companion of my adventuring.

Lost

The hill slunk under a quilt of drizzle

and I within, befogged,

zombie-stomping

towards indecision

The Other voice intoned “I know the way.

I will lead you on; slot within my bootprints.

The harbour that I know will take you in”

I swallowed all that I was told, so

set off at a servile trot,

noticing the prints went further in

to swirling mists and crystalled rocks

and places where the air was whisper-thin

to cut my throat with jags of frost,

admitting, in the vault of higher thoughts,

both I and I are lost.

 

Obviously, finding our way out of an apparently hopeless situation can give us confidence to take risks with our writing. Don't know where your poem is going? Strike out from your familiar paths of form and imagery. Struggling to engage your reader? Swap first-person for third or third for second. Sonnet too plodding? Start at the bottom of the page or the right-hand edge. Unlike unscripted mountaineering, the worst-case scenario probably won't require the RAF to scramble a Sea King.

 

If you're a methodical writer, try hurtling. Insiders of Jo Bell's "52" project will already be familiar with this concept. https://fiftytwopoetry.wordpress.com/ It doesn’t just mean to career wildly down the page with abandon, though that's a vital component. Write a poem, ready to show to other people, in five minutes. What’s that you say? Oh, all right, maybe ten.

 

It’s a remarkable discipline because it forces your inner editor to get the hell out of the room. That just leaves your subconscious armed with a stubby pencil and an innocent blank page. It should go without saying that the subconscious is precisely the part of the reader that you want to reach with your poetry - the purity of peer-to-peer communication.

 

In the “52” Facebook group, we achieve this by releasing prompts into the wild at 7:22 every Thursday, with extra kudos for poems posted before 7:30. "52" is not taking on any more members now but local groups can mimic some of its success in workshops.

 

So go on. Get lost. Somehow, you’ll find your way home.

 

Norman.

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4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

By Ashley Lister

SPOILER ALERT. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE ANY INTENTION OF WATCHING THE TV SERIES LOST. I GIVE MY INTERPRETATION OF THE ENDING HERE AND I DON’T WANT TO SPOIL IT FOR ANYONE. SPOILING THE SERIES WAS THE JOB OF THE WRITERS.

I could do it. I could do the desert island thing. And I wouldn’t need those eight records that everyone else wants to take to a desert island. I would just need the following:

1) Broadband. How the hell am I expected to blog each week without a broadband connection? I don’t mind if I have to lose my mobile. If I’ve got my mobile logic dictates I’d feel obligated to phone the emergency services and say, ‘Help, I’m stranded on a desert island.’ But, if I have a PC with a broadband connection and an active email address I don’t think I’d feel that need to call for assistance.

2) Microsoft Word. I’m a writer. This is one of the essential things a writer needs.

3) Alcohol. I’m a writer. This is one of the essential things a writer needs.

4) Chocolate. I’m a writer. This is one of the essential things a writer needs.

5) The companionship of the writers of the TV series Lost – so I could maybe eat them when the food ran out.

I mention the writers of the TV series Lost because that was one piece of fiction that I thought was brilliant – right up to the crushing disappointment of the final episode.

The episodes were beautifully written and well-acted and the scenery was to die for. The lovely Barbara Thomas (a previous guest blogger here) introduced me to Lost. She and her husband Jim discussed the myriad possibilities of the Lost-universe and encouraged me to venture my own theory as to what was happening.

I said I thought it was a metaphor for purgatory. The characters were waiting to move onto heaven or hell, depending on where they belonged.

I was assured by several knowledgeable people that variations on my theory had been suggested on many online forums, where it had been dismissed as being too clichéd. Particle Physics was more heavily favoured. Multiverse theories were bandied around and strongly supported. Adam McCance (another previous guest blogger here) said it was all Hurley’s dream.

Guess what happened in the final episode. Can you guess? I’ll give you a clue: I was right. I’d been right since the first f***ing episode.

So, because I was lured into watching six seasons of this series to suffer the disappointment of an unsatisfactory ending, I’d want to take the writers of Lost with me. However, in retrospect, I might not eat them. I’d be worried it would leave a nasty taste in my mouth.

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Desert Islands.

Good morning readers and welcome to what I feel could be an excellent week on the DGPS blog. With the BBC's Desert Island Discs celebrating 70 years on the airwaves this week, what better theme to start us off on our musings than Desert Islands themselves.

The thought of an island excites me. It scares me. It brings with it all sorts of adventures, perils and, as a vegan, I suppose some difficult choices. That said, it could also be quite relaxed should I drop amongst a coconut plantation- which is a little like I felt on Thursday night.

I want to add my name to the list of people singing praises. I thought the whole event was great (well done again to all at WordSoup- always guaranteed a good night) and actually getting to be on a poster excited some demonic part of me, I must say. I was worried though- I was on the island, waking Lost-style from the crash. First up from us had me a bit jittery but there, just past the light was a table full of coconuts. There has been some good stuff coming out of the group lately and to be amongst the tenders of such a fruitful plantation was a comfort at the least.

This moves me on to what I actually thought I should write about this week. The Island idea appeals to me as a boy scout (and after an afternoon thinking, I suspect The Scouting Book for Boys may be of more use to me than a poetry anthology) and one thing I found during my years there was how to be amongst friends- look out for one another and that is something that I like to think has stayed with me.#

I've been the unwitting receiver of various strange and unexpected news recently. There has been all kinds of madness and I wonder, as a writer, what is appropriate to take forward into new work. There is a clear line in my head but in the same way so many useful things are passed on and stay with you forever (how to hold a spade etc), surely they will stick around- perhaps surface somewhere in a muddled metaphor or character. This must be an issue for many writers and it is certainly something that I find needs to be considered with regards to more personal poetry. A line can find itself in the wrong mouth, stuttering with rage and completely out of context. A bit like the suggestions somebody might be pregnant following a poem I performed recently- and that was bloody me reading it!

Going back to the birthday mention, a quick search tells me I would automatically get a copy of the Bible (or alternative) so some soul searching could probably go on. I might pick a different book, learn a new culture completely on my own... I'd probably do what many of us would do- think about home, the past, the things in life we have and do hold dear. I wouldn't need 8 records. I would take them. A collection of festival/occasional/thoughtful songs that could be any 8 from a hundred. I would spend a lot of time listening to the things inside my head though- the voices I have carried with me. Advice, friends laughing, brothers, mothers, teachers, fathers, grandfathers... the voices in my head that are pushing for a poem and are better left to Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (III 2.133-134)
"The isle is full of noises,
sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not."

Thanks for reading,
S.

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