Gooseberry

I’m guessing that most countries have their own smallish and maybe seeming downright odd groups and societies. There is a milestone at the end of my road and not long ago I had occasion to query something about it. I was wondering how on earth I could find out some information and looked on google and there it was. The Milestone Society and they were great.

I know nothing about Gooseberries and was trawling through the usual suspects when, blow me, there it was. Gooseberry Societies.

It seems that today there only nine Gooseberry Societies left – but they seem to be in fine form. The end of July and beginning of August is the highlight of their year when they hold their shows. Eight of those societies are in Cheshire which was once at the centre of the gooseberry growing world, and together they form the Mid – Cheshire Gooseberry Shows Association which is supported by the Cheshire Landscape Trust with support from the Heritage Lottery fund. The other one is at Egton Bridge, near Whitby in North York. This is the oldest surviving group having been founded in 1800.

I had a look at the 2022 report on the Egton Bridge event:
The 2022 show produced a fine display of berries, topped off by a society first for Graeme Watson. Not only did Graeme win his eleventh title, he also achieved the elusive maximum score in the Champion Grower competition. The champion grower is assessed over six categories, heaviest berry in the four colours (red, yellow, green & white), heaviest twins (two berries on one stalk) and heaviest dozen. Ten points are awarded to the winner in each category down to one for tenth place. For the first time ever, a single grower has scored the maximum ten points in each category, hitting the mythical 60/60. Graeme can now add this accolade to his Guinness World Record for heaviest gooseberry.

The rules of the Society can be confusing when looking at the full results. The rules are written to stop one grower walking off with all of the prizes, which is why Graeme Watson is not listed below as the winner of every category. It is only in calculating the champion grower that the rules are pushed to one side to gauge the year’s champion berry grower.

In 2021 Bryan Nellist took the title after two berries had to be re-weighed in a ‘berry off’ to determine the champion. Bryan’s berry and the one entered by Paul Bennison were both weighed at 26 Drams, 18 Grains (47.2 g). To determine the champion the berries were again placed on the balance, but the result remained too tight to call so for once the Society turned to modern weighing technology and Bryan was declared victorious after goldsmith’s scales were used to prove it weighed 0.02g more than its competitor. Without doubt this is the closest finish in more than 200 years of competition at Egton Bridge. Bryan said “It’s just unbelievable really. I thought my winning days were over – I was hoping to get a prize, but certainly not the top one. It was a delight, absolutely.”

In 2018 the show was graced by the presence of 12 members of the Skillinge Gooseberry Society from Sweden. Over 25 years ago their chairperson saw a small glimpse of the show on the BBC and was so fascinated that a new gooseberry show was born and 2018 saw the Skillinge Krusbïrsfestival celebrate its tenth anniversary with a visit to its inspiration.

The 224th show will be held on Tuesday 5th August 2025, it is free to attend and is open to the public from 2 PM. There will be music playing in the afternoon from 4:30 PM provided by the ever popular Eskuleles and the prize giving will begin at 6 PM. Members are reminded that berries must be with the judges by midday at the latest.

I think it’s wonderful. And so is this, by Simon Armitage:

Gooseberry Season

Which reminds me. He appeared
at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town
after losing his job, leaving me a note for his wife and his brother
and locking his dog in the coal bunker.
We made him a bed

and he slept till Monday.
A week went by and he hung up his coat.
Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,
a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.
One evening he mentioned a recipe

for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet
but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money
from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night
sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe
as we stirred his supper.

Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
        razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.

I could have told him this

but didn't bother. We ran him a bath
and held him under, dried him off and dressed him
and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.
Then we drove without headlights

to the county boundary,
dropped the tailgate, and after my boy
had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress
across the meadow and on the count of four
threw him over the border.

This is not general knowledge, except
in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table

I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet
into five equal portions, for the hell of it.
I mention this for a good reason.

Copyright © 2005 by Simon Armitage. From The Shout.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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This Writing Game

What with Birmingham City looking like we’re going to be relegated and be playing Blackpool next season I was a bit reluctant to be thinking about football for This Writing Game but as the old saying goes ‘It’s the hope that kills you’. So I hoped that by looking at poetry and football would cheer me up a bit. I thought that finding any sort of poem related to the beautiful game would be difficult but as it turned out there are thousands.

a Victorian birthday card

Robert Frost once said, ‘Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.’ And not just recently. How about this from the sixteenth century:

The Bewties Of The Fute-ball (anon)
Brissit brawnis and brokin banis,
Stride, discord and waistie wanis.
Crukit in eild syne halt withal,
Thir are the bewties of the fute-ball 

I don’t immediately think of A. E. Housman as a fan but there is this from A Shropshire Lad in 1896.

XVII. Twice a week the winter thorough
Here stood I to keep the goal:
Football then was fighting sorrow
For the young man’s soul.

Actually I don’t think he was a fan.

I’m probably wrong in saying that there was a bit of a break in poems about football in the UK during the middle of the twentieth century as I can only find a few.

So I’m going to go straight to the year 2000 and the launch of Footballpoets. A group of poets were sitting in a cafe in Stroud, they had called themselves Stroud Football Poets and had performed football-based sets at Cheltenham literature festival and then at the Royal Festival Hall for Euro 96. With the Euro 2000 tournament approaching they decided to set up a website. They were amazed how popular it became so quickly thinking that it would just be the odd poem once a month maybe. As of today they have 17,816 poems on the site.

Subbuteo Shakespeare

They quote Wordsworth “Poetry is writing with passion about something you feel passionate about” and go on to say ‘Our slogan was and still is ‘Swapping Shirts with Shakespeare'. Love it or loathe it, just like Wordsworth says, the essence of why and how those who write football poetry do is the passion and experience we share, I guess. We/they just love it, warts and all. First and foremost, though, our ethos is simply to provide a free platform and canvas that inspires and encourage young and old to express themselves, by writing and sharing ( out loud!) about something they love.’

Since then many contemporary poets have written about football. There are Poets in Residence at grounds. The last two Poet Laureates have written poems about the game.

This is an excerpt from Simon Armitage’s ‘Goalkeeper with a Cigarette’:

...Not my man, though, that’s not what my man does;
a man who stubs his reefers on the post
and kicks his heels in the stud-marks and butts,
lighting the next from the last, in one breath
making the save of the year with his legs,
taking back a deep drag on the goal-line
in the next; on the one hand throwing out
or snaffling the ball from a high corner,
flicking off loose ash with the other...

And here is an excerpt from one by Carol Ann Duffy:

We See You
That rain-heavy, leather ball your left foot smashed a century ago
has reached us here, and so we see you, Lily Parr,
in hindsight’s extra time...
We’re all onside...
Team-sheets are the dreams
of managers – shout out the golden days of Emma Hayes...
Women’s voices – Eni Aluko, Karen Carney – tell the poetry of play
We’ll find you – 10 years old, girl with ball, incredible to be you.
So here’s our Team Talk: We’re right behind you. And we see you.

Incidentally, one of my top ten poems ever is ‘Hop in, Dennis’ by Simon Armitage from his book ‘Seeing Stars’ but it seems that it’s carefully copyrighted or I would print it here in place of this one by me.

National Football Museum, Manchester

National Football Museum
Going back
to that point in time
drifting past Calcio
ball games in China
flat caps on village greens
the birth of the Blues
the Reds and teams
in black and white prints
playing for love
and then for money
playing for crowds that just appeared

they never looked back
I kept going back to
1860 and twenty years
leaving the kits
the tickets and Annuals
shirts signed by players of the PFA

I kept going back
to those first few years
to Public Schools and Houses
to factory gates that opened
on Saturday afternoons

trying to find a reason
for all those winter evenings
being in the ground
twelve years old and singing
lost to smoke night and words
swept up by more than senses
not understanding what it could mean.

First published in The Journal, April ’23.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Armitage, Dyson and French Lesbian Poetry

Earlier this month, as I’m sure some of you will have read, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, Sir James Dyson, claimed that the UK had become “decadent” and had forgotten what had made it wealthy in the first place. He went on to suggest that there was a need for more discussion on technology so “little Angelina wanting to go off  to study French lesbian poetry will suddenly realise that things like keeping an aircraft industry, developing nuclear power, high-speed trains, are important”.

In response I’d argue that perhaps there needs to be more discussion regarding poetry so little James wanting to go off to study engineering will suddenly realise that things like language and art are important – not merely self-indulgent – and that contentment isn’t necessarily a by-product of wealth.

Last week, Simon Armitage (poetry’s knight in shining armour) defended poetry from the comments of Sir James by saying that, far from being self-indulgent, poetry could hone skills useful to any society or economy. “The more control that you’ve got over language and the more you appreciate how much other people have controlled it, the better place you put yourself in,” he said. “I imagine that, in some way, that even applies to making vacuum cleaners. Language is the most powerful force in the world. It’s certainly a more powerful force than suction.”

I’m proud to live in a society where individuals champion the merits of poetry; where it is taught, not just in the public schools, but in our state schools; where those who care about more than wealth can study it at university, and where we have the freedom to write, read and publish.

About eight years ago in a second-hand London bookshop – awash with sepia, dust and stacks of musty books – I found a translated copy of No, I’m Not Afraid by the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya.

For those of you that don’t know, in 1983 Ratushinskaya was sentenced – aged just twenty-eight – to serve seven years in a Soviet hard labour camp (to be followed by five years internal exile) after being accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Her crime: writing poetry.

As I stood in the safe and comfortable surroundings of the bookshop, I remember feeling humbled and slightly guilty – in my own darkness I had neglected to appreciate how fortunate I was to have the unrestricted freedom to write poetry. Ratushinskaya’s story, her determination and her poems reminded me about the value of something I’d previously taken for granted.

Whilst imprisoned Ratushinskaya refused to be silenced: scratching verses onto bars of soap with the burnt end of a matchstick, then memorising, before finally washing away the evidence. If her crime was writing poetry, then she proved that even imprisonment, beatings and force-feeding would not – and could not – prevent her from committing this ‘crime’ further. That language could prevail above it all – because, after all, it is the most powerful force in the world.

Thank you for reading,

Lara           

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A Collection of Poets in Glasshouses

On Friday, Shaun and I travelled to Manchester to attend a Poetry Book Society Benefit where 15 northern poets gathered in support of the threatened PBS. They, like other societies and literary festivals, have lost all of their funding from Arts Council England. After 58 years of funding, they discovered in March that it would end; they’ve been in a state of crisis every since. The PBS director Chris Holifield explained:

The Arts Council seemed to acknowledge almost immediately that it had not understood our place in the ecology of poetry and agreed to support us and to help us write a Grants for the Arts application so that we would at least have some funding to use as the basis for a survival plan. But on 12 August we received the unwelcome news that that application had been turned down, which has meant that the crisis surrounding the PBS has deepened.

A second application, for support for staff to run the TS Eliot Prize, is currently with GftA. The situation now is that unless we can find sufficient funding for next year, the board is going to find itself in a very difficult situation. We have only until the beginning of December to establish that we will be a going concern next year.

So this is where I was on a rainy Friday night: supporting poetry, making a small contribution, being inspired, and remembering why it is that a want to be a poet – despite the barrage of cuts that continue to be inflicted upon poetry. And on Saturday, I wondered how I could tie this into a Science Fiction themed blog post... And this is what my mind imagined:

I was sitting on the second row. On the front row the poets sipped wine and waited for their names to be called; I was close enough to Simon Armitage that I could have tapped him on the shoulder, or even stroked his head. But neither of these things are subtle, they would draw attention, and for a collector – such as myself – that is never a good thing.

I removed a small plastic bag and a pair of tweezers from my pocket, and just as Armitage stood – ready to make his way to the lectern – I plucked a hair from his poetic head. As is usually the case, he turned in response to the sudden twinge of pain on his scalp, but there wasn’t time for him to question: his audience was waiting, eager to hear him read from Seeing Stars and Kid. I had succeeded; Simon Armitage was going to be the next poet in my collection.

Later when I got home, I went straight to the laboratory with Armitage’s hair sample and extracted an almost-exact copy of his genetic coding. The next stages are a little tedious and technical, so I won’t elaborate – but I’ve developed a method that allows for human cloning to be achieved within 72 hours. It produces a replica: not one that you need to wait for, not one that has to grow from infancy to adulthood, but an identical copy, well, almost identical.

The process alters height, quite drastically in fact, so what results is a miniature Armitage; a borrower-like poet that you can hold in the palm of your hand. But poetic ability, intelligence, persona, and even accent is unaffected, therefore, on the whole the results are fairly pleasing.

On a shelf there is a small glasshouse containing a few items of doll’s house furniture: a desk, a chair, a Victorian style bed and mahogany grandfather clock. I carefully wrap my fingers around Simon Armitage, lift him from the worktop, and place him inside his new home.

“There, isn’t this nice,” I say as I close the glasshouse’s lid. “Perhaps you could write about it...”

I check on the other poets in my collection, each living in a separate glasshouse, and suggest that they might like to do an evening reading to welcome our new arrival.

Carol Ann Duffy taps on the wall of her glasshouse and eagerly says, “I’ve got a new bee poem, I could read that.”

Thank you for reading,
Lar

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