Magazines - A Learning Curve

My first magazine was Look and Learn when I was still at infant school. My father bought it for me because I was captivated by a story my school teacher read to the class. I pestered him to ask her about it, which he eventually did, and I was delighted to have the story for myself. I think it was The Borrowers, or something similar.  As I got older, I read comics and books more than magazines. It was the usual ones, Beano and Dandy. We moved into a pub where a box of children’s books had been left ‘For the little girl’, me. Included was ‘Oor Wullie’ and ‘The Broons’ annuals. I loved them. They became my favourites characters and they still are. I’ve got many more of their annuals. I still have the collection of books that was left for me. It was my introduction to Enid Blyton and a lifetime of reading and writing.

September 1967.  I started high school and made a conscious decision to hate it because it wasn’t the school I wanted to go and I had to take two buses to get there and back.  I had a couple of friends with me from primary school, which was good, but I got picked on a lot and I was constantly bullied on one of the bus rides by girls from another secondary school.  It was a miserable time but I discovered something that opened my eyes and took my mind off my worries.  It was my mother’s weekly magazine, Woman’s Own.  It offered a wealth of important information to me, a curious eleven year old.  I read all the adverts for Tampax, Lil-lets, Kotex, et al and decided that I would have Nikini when this ‘period’ thing happened to me.  I learnt a lot about life from the Problem Page. I think Claire Rayner was the agony aunt at the time. The most fascinating read was her serialised articles which I remember clearly as being titled ‘What to Tell Your Children About Sex’.  This is where I discovered what was called The Facts of Life.  It might have taken my mind off school worries but such knowledge gave me other things to fret about.  I wasn’t ever going to do ‘that’, certainly not.  I don’t know if my mum noticed what I was reading.  She might have left the magazines out on purpose, hoping I would read those articles.  At the time, it felt like I was reading something forbidden and scary. Nothing was ever said. Years later, I had the book of ‘What to Tell Your Children About Sex’ and ‘The Body Book’, another of Claire Rayner’s.  She was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, a former nurse and midwife and I think she was a TV agony aunt at some point.  She passed away more than ten years ago.  I hope it is true that she actually said, “Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I’ll come back and bloody haunt him.”

Into my teens and off to the newsagents every Saturday morning to pick up my ordered Jackie and Fabulous 208 magazines.  Jackie was great.  I covered my bedroom walls with pictures of my favourite pop stars.  Those treasured pictures and posters were saved for decades until they got binned in a clear-out, probably when we emptied the attic for the loft conversion and I had to be brutal. Oh, how I wish I’d kept them.  I would have found somewhere safe to stash them.  Fabulous 208 magazine was connected to Radio Luxembourg. I liked to listen to DJ Tony Prince in the evening.

Magazines aren’t something I read regularly, but Woman’s Own is still as good as it ever was and I buy it occasionally.  Apart from that, if I notice an interesting article, an unusual knitting pattern or someone I know has contributed, I will buy it.

My Haikus,

I loved story time,
My teacher made it such fun.
Thanks for Look and Learn.

Woman’s Own page five
Now I know what they are for.
Is it a secret?

Is that really true?
I wish I dare ask my mum.
No, I’d better not.

Hooray! Saturday!
I will go out in the rain
To get my Jackie!

PMW 2024

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Canals - Boatmen, Old and New

Working on my family tree by searching online ancestry sites is something I’ve been doing for a long time. I enjoy dipping in and out and finding new information. Sometimes it can be hard to stay on task when something grabs my attention and takes me along a different path. I wish my dad had lived long enough for me to share my findings with him, or better still, discover them for himself. He would have been fascinated and would have learnt a lot from the World Wide Web. He had a computer which he used for writing letters when hand-writing was too uncomfortable. He could print them and post them. There was no internet and mobile phones were just starting to turn up, like bricks with a pull up aerial. How sad that his untimely death denied him so much. He had started to build his family tree with the help of a niece during one of his visits to the USA. Twenty years or so after his passing, I was able to take things further back.

My dad was actively involved with the Lancaster Canal Boat Club. He bought his first boat sometime in the early ‘70s. It was a small cabin cruiser. This growing hobby soon found him to be the proud owner of a larger boat, another cabin cruiser and a wooden one, which reminded me of a galleon inside. Being made of wood, it needed lots of care to keep maintained, and lots of time to do it, which he had plenty of. With the boat club, he was on the committee for the campaigning of re-opening the Northern Reaches – the stretch of canal between Tewitfield and Kendal – where the canal had narrowed a great deal and become too shallow to allow a boat through. I think this was due to a lack of dredging. When he died, he was treasurer and President of the boat club. I’d been to a boat rally once, and a couple of dinner dances, but I’m no sailor, not even slowly on a canal, and his boating hobby belonged to a part of his life that wasn’t mine. However, I wish he’d known this.

Going back generations in our family, 1840s and 1850s, there were many boatmen, working the canals as carriers transporting all sorts of goods, mainly coal haulage, cotton and wool. They lived on their barges or flat boats, having a very meagre existence, working hard in all seasons. What I learnt, though very interesting, was also heart-breaking to me, and made me wonder if my dad’s fondness for the canals in all their glory, was some inherited thing. If so, it bypassed me. Dad had enjoyed lots of different canal holidays. His favourite was the trip on the Caledonian. If only he had known that his ancestors had carried goods up and down the Grand Union Canal before he was sailing on it. Sadly, he knew none of it.

My Haiku,

They travelled canals,
Boatmen of my ancestry,
Hard work in haulage.

Coal, cotton and wool
Carried across the country
For meagre payment.

Generations passed.
My dad loved his boats,
Two cabin cruisers.

Lancaster canal
His chosen sanctuary
For peace and quiet.

He stuck his oar in
With the Inland Waterways,
“Re-open the North!”

PMW 2023

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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The Eighth Deadly Sin - Social Media

The World Wide Web. Love it or hate it, use it or ignore it. We are surrounded by an invisible network capable of linking people with others all over the world within a second, or less. Send an email and it arrives at its destination, regardless of distance, at the same time that the final full-stop is typed and we hit ‘send’. No more neat hand-writing on thin, air mail stationery then having the letter weighed at the Post Office. The what office?  It’s getting like that but there are still a few around, for now. Use your webcam to ‘skype’ your cousin somewhere in Australia and have a conversation like you’re both in the same room, well, with the wonder of the internet, technically speaking, you are. When I was a child, I was fascinated by the wristwatches on the Thunderbirds characters. Press a button and there’s Virgil on the tiny screen chatting to  Scott, or Alan. I was seriously impressed.  Better than a Man from U.N.C.L.E. invisible ink fountain pen. The concept of those wristwatches exists now. It’s not Virgil though, it’s your own family and friends called ‘contacts’.  The eighth deadly sin, for me, Social Media, takes on many forms.

Check search engines like Google or Yahoo and everything you ever wanted to know, and even more that you didn’t want to know, is there. All the things once remembered, now forgotten can be found again. When I was at school, we had things to learn and remember in all our lessons; maths formulae, history dates, poetry to recite off by heart and more. By the time my eldest was working towards his GCSEs, he was very sure that none of us needed to remember anything because all the information was just a click away. I’d dispute his theory, along the lines of ‘what keeps your brain alive if you don’t feed it with knowledge?’ His peers were all the same and I used to despair for ‘the lost generation’, or maybe they are right.

My personal use of Facebook has increased over the years. It is a wonderful tool for collecting people together for events, keeping in touch with friends and sharing a bit of interesting knowledge I’ve stumbled across on Google. But it has its down side. There’s something I don’t want to see. Something I’d rather not know. Something I can’t unread.  And, that cryptic comment from a friend of a friend which disturbs and worries me and I can’t respond because I don’t want to show I’m bothered. Click bait. Yet I can’t leave Facebook completely alone. It is a minimised window on my lap top, so I can pop in and out while I’m busy with something else. It is the first thing I look at when I check my phone on my break at work. It’s sad. It’s a sin. Thank goodness I don’t ‘Tweet’.

Soon I’ll be enjoying a break in Dumfries & Galloway at the hidden away lodges where we often stay. No WiFi at all and no phone signal apart from a small area at the end of a long lane and I won’t be wandering along there on a cold, dark night. I will have peace and oblivion and the patience to wait until I can access the latest photos of my grandchildren, so cute with a Snapchat filter.

Social Media is here to stay. It’s a massive part of the electronic, technology-based lives we have, so I’ll continue to embrace it for what it is and carry on with the same level of discipline I have towards the other seven deadly sins.

My chosen poem is one of mine, a modern nursery rhyme.

Tom the Fool

Dashed home from school

To meet his mates on Facebook.

Oh what a frown

‘Cos the ‘net was down,

He didn’t dare to reboot. 

He hissed and swore

Like never before

And threatened to murder broadband,

Then found the hitch

Was a turned off switch
He should have checked beforehand.

 

PMW 2010

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x 

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Worms of Light

I'm afraid that poets are pointing things out, very carefully, but their indexes are impossible to read.  Even when a poem speaks to me I fail to communicate exactly what it was saying, or even specify the language.  Poetry is like any other piece of art.  It's communicating an idea that, ideally, is unable to be stated plainly.  Therefore, the knowledge - if that's what it is - contained in poems is nebulous. 

Reading poetry is like studying a subject for which you have no use - yet.  The images and ideas stream into your experience.  Sometimes only incomplete snippets make it through with the rest forgotten. 

Writing poetry is like labelling the images and ideas which don't fit neatly in your mental drawers.  It's wrangling the ideas with legs and persuading them to stand still rather than running back into the dark.   

But labelling is not the same as organising categorically.  The poems are captured in beautiful glass jars and the labels are written in an intricate script but, though the shelves look neat and ordered, the these collections are not fit for a museum.  Poems are cabinets of oddities and poetry books are curiosity shops.  Don't walk in expecting to find that which you seek.  Expect to be delighted by the lambent trinket, covered in dust. 



from Paracelsus by Diane di Prima


                           Extract

the tar, the sticky

substance

                    heart

                                of things

(each plant a star,        extract

the juice of stars

                                by circular stillation

smear

            the inner man w/the coction

till he burn

            like worms of light in quicksilver

not the false

            puffballs of marshfire,

Paracelsus' Salamander

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Information? We’re swimming in the useless bits.

Evening all.
Firstly, I am mega sorry for being so late with this blog today. I’ve been thinking about the way in which we are provided with so much information sometimes on the news- not necessarily corresponding, nearly always conflicting, that it is hard to even make out what you’ve actually just been told.
One example from this week was that the economy is apparently growing- and yet record numbers are turning to food banks. We hear that HS2 will benefit huge swathes of people and then that a different poll- looking at a completely different set of what if criteria thinks several places might not benefit as much- which isn’t the same as a loss, is it.
The very same mis-information with fracking. How many people have heard the companies themselves admitting that it will make little to no difference to our gas prices (the rest of the world already being so far ‘ahead’ of us)- but on the same report that these things aren’t mentioned on, we hear how it could potentially bring a boom to industry and energy security.
We’re all pretty fed up of the bull, aren’t we.  Isn’t it time people were treated as decent, thinking beings and given a decent outlet- I dunno, something like “The News”, on which to see the facts presented, spin free, in bare form and then talked through. This, I suspect is a pipe dream, but until then, we’ll just have to keep filtering through the heaps of partial fact they keep spooning us, in the hope at least then we can find an ounce of sense or reason behind the next scandalous decision (like the most hated disability minister in years being given a new job, enforcing the bedroom tax, for instance).  .  

You’re a better man than me if you make sense of it. Until next week then, here’s a poem.

Dear Controllers of Information.

Feed me all of the statistics
I want to see each little bit
I’ll make up my mind before it gets refined
I’m long past trusting BBC tricks.

I remember I learnt in my schooldays
How music is organised sound
How knowledge is power but vast reams of data
Need sorting for their meaning to be found.

So don’t tell us one side of the story
This is Britain, we’re not in a Cold War
Don’t we deserve to know, where the money did go
Why the rich pay less tax than the poor

Because projects might not come in on budget
But the pros can still outweigh the cons
Tell us, why should we back everything you put past us
After so many times, you’ve been wrong.

I propose then a shake up of stats feeds
A straight ban on biased bits of news
Present facts from all sides- if there’s nothing to hide
Then we’ll make up our own bloody views.

Thanks for reading,  S.

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R.I.P. I.Q:

It’s strange isn’t it, how, when given a topic you get a marvellous idea of what to write, only to sit down and end up going off in a completely different direction?  I had a Poem in mind which was written some months ago now, perhaps even last year, when informed of the topic for this weeks’ blog.  I wanted to use it and sound reasonably intelligent.  Instead, this following piece came out. Just a mild word of warning, those who have met me at the LDGPS evenings will know that I am an easy-going, laidback kind of individual, this however is, for me, a little vitriolic! 

Day to day (because I am currently out of work) besides completing household chores and other necessary tasks or Volunteering at my Son’s School, you will find me sitting in my Kitchen either writing poetry or reading a good book, deliberately avoiding daytime TV and glossy magazines.  This is purely because I cannot stand the inane and constant drivel about “Celebrities”.  Whether it’s “Who said what”, “who is doing this that or the other”, “who is overweight and hasn’t shifted her baby weight yet”, “Who just had a boobjob or some other cosmetic procedure”, “Which Footballer is the latest weak Sod who couldn’t keep it in his pants”, blah, blah, blah!  WHO CARES?  Why do we need to know?  With all the other problems in the World, in annoys me intensely that there are people who DO give a monkeys about all this “Celeb” rubbish, and shows how shallow society has become. This constant drip feeding of information has overloaded our brains, fattening them with calorific data that has no valid use in OUR lives, to the point where they are turning to mush!  I have watched as previous colleagues who I have been able to have a reasonably intellectual conversation with, have turned into shadows of some famous person or other and ended up with the conversational skills of a Cod.

Society has become obsessed. Girls are starving themselves to emulate their idols, having unnecessary plastic surgery and dental work, demanding Designer clothes …. And shoes …. And handbags ….. and jewellery!  How have we allowed this to get this far?  Would the World end if we didn’t know about Celebrities so called private lives?  Of course not!  They are people (just about) who are supposed to entertain us …. In Films, on the TV, on the Pitch …. I don’t want to know about their private lives.  If they want to act like idiots, fall out of Bars wearing no pants, attack a bystander and get thrown in jail, then that’s entirely up to them.  But let us not reward them by giving them MORE attention in the media.  Cretins!  I have no respect for people like that.

“So? You’re a Celebrity!?”:

So? You’re a Celebrity?

How jolly nice for you!

You get paid lots of money

To do the things you do!

Well, that’s Super, Smashing, Lovely!

You’ve got lots of possessions and a book

About your life, but not written by you

Guess what?  I don’t give a F*** !!

You’re in a unique position

You’ve got the attention of the hoards

Find a Cause and get stuck in

Raise THEIR profile across the board

Use your Status for the good of Man!

For Woman and for Child!

Do something useful for God’s Sake!

Not just look pretty and party wild!!

Use your millions that you couldn’t spend

In 10 lifetimes or even more

For the benefit of those less fortunate

For Wildlife, the World, less War!

And don’t do it half-heartedly

Choose something you can do with dedication

Maybe then you gain true acclaim

For Ambassadorial amelioration!!

Ok, deep breaths, calming down now! Thanks for reading!  ;-)

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Information Overload

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