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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Birdsong

Birdsong always stops me in my tracks. I will take time to listen, wonder and very often video , just the sound. For birdsong is a dwindling sound , I find these days. My home and surroundings do not entice song birds to linger. Occasionally a flock of goldfinches will gather on the telegraph poles or television aerials. I will hear them, stop to listen, marvel at their song.

Of course other birds 'sing', but perhaps we don't regard those songs as melodious. The song carries a message, a means of attracting the attention of a mate, to warn of predators, to tell of a food source...that sort of communication.

I do wish I could identify the perpetrator of the song. I might recognise a robin call, a wren, a blackbird, a starling ...but all woefully inadequate when I am bombarded by a cacophony of songs

Thank goodness for outdoor spaces, parks, wildlife parks, sanctuaries and the like ...places to spend time and listen...just listen. Observe, be vigilant. Open our ears to the small sounds, the joyful sounds of birdsong.

I have quite a few poems featuring birds and birdsong , so I've chosen this piece written in June 2017 at Caerlaverock. Laverock is the name given to a lark....

LAVEROCK

Laverock, gentle singer of songs
Flying ever higher and higher'
Carrying a melody to the heavens.
A moments silence before you fall --
Fall--fall--Spiralling towards the earth.
Lungs full of notes, cascading like a waterfall,
Scattering lyrics over the earth below.
Laverock, gentle singer of songs.

Thank you so much for reading....Kath

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Are Songs Poetry? - Yes

 Are songs poetry?

 That’s a broad question and something that my late friend and poet Christo Heyworth had an ongoing gentle debate with. It was concerning the songs of the Moody Blues, both Christo and I being ‘experts’ on their work. I was ‘yes’ because I find the lyrics to most of their songs poetic, depending on the writer, and all of their albums contain a poem by the late Graeme Edge, drummer and a founder member of the band. Graeme’s poems were performed or recorded as the spoken word set to music and often by Mike Pinder. Graeme’s poems which became actual songs include ‘I’ll Be Level With You’ from the Octave album. I showed Christo my prized copy of one of Graeme’s poetry books. As for songs being poetry, he was a definite ‘no’. I couldn’t persuade him otherwise, but we had some great conversations about it at poetry evenings. We discussed other things too, like the paintings of L.S.Lowry and Christo’s visits to poetry events in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Christo was always excellent company with lots of interesting topics to share. I wonder what he might have thought of my other poetic song choices.

The lyrics of The Smiths, Morrissey, Oasis, Liam and Noel Gallagher, I can read as poetry. Their creative use of language appeals to me and really makes me listen. Liam’s ‘Paper Crown’ and Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’ are just two examples of what would be a very long list. I was about sixteen when I first saw Raymond ‘Gilbert’ O’Sullivan on Top of the Pops singing ‘Nothing Rhymed’. There he was, an odd looking bloke with an over-sized cap, sounding a bit like George Formby. He captured my attention with the poetry of his words.

Not all songs can work as poems but poems can work as songs, and I don’t just mean The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow – I can still recite the part I had to learn by heart in the first year of high school, but I’ll spare you that. I will complain that schools don’t include learning poetry by heart or even reading a whole book, from what I can gather. Anyway, that aside, Robert Burns wrote ballads and sang them, ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, two that come to mind.

Radio DJ and musician, Mike Read, wrote music to accompany some of John Betjeman’s poems. Quote from Wikipedia, “…Thirty of these songs were recorded by artists including Cliff Richard, David Essex, Gene Pitney and Marc Almond for the 2006 various artists’ album Words/Music, and subsequently re-released in 2008 as a double CD titled Sound of Poetry. Read’s production of the musical ‘Betjeman’ based on the above has occasionally been staged for charities, including the Royal Marsden Hospital and Children with Leukaemia.”  One of my favourites is David Essex singing Myfanwy.

With an apologetic nod to Christo, though I'm sure he wouldn't mind and would even expect it, I'll finish where I started with the Moody Blues. This time, John Lodge with 'my song', and to me, a poem.

  

One More Time to Live  -  John Lodge

Look out of my window
See the world passing by
See the look in her eye

One more time to live and I have made it mine
Leave the wise to write for they write worldly rhymes

And he who wants to fight begins the end of time...
For I have riches more than these
For I have riches more than these

Desolation
Creation
Tell me someone why there's only confusion
Evolution

Tell me someone that this is all an illusion
Pollution
Tell me someone
Saturation

Tell me someone
Population
Annihilation
Revolution

Tell me someone why this talk of revolution
Confusion
Tell me someone when we're changing evolution
Illusion

Tell me someone
Conclusion
Tell me someone
Starvation

Degradation
Humiliation
Contemplation
Changes in my life

Inspiration
Elation
Changes in my life
Salvation

Changes in my life
Communication
Compassion
Solution

Look out on the hedgerow
As the world rushes by
Hear the birds sign a sigh

One more tree will fall how strong the growing vine
Turn the earth to sand and still permit no crime
How one thought will live provide the others die
For I have riches more than these
For I have riches more than these

(From the album Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 1971)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Windmills - Rhyming in my Mind

I was washing glasses in our pub, hidden away in the ‘still room’ on my regular Friday night and Saturday night stint during the busy Illuminations, singing along to the music that drifted in.

There was a song on the jukebox in the front bar, a haunting melody that forced me to listen and beautiful, poetic lyrics that reached out to me. Any meaning in those words was lost on me, but being an impressionable hippy-ish rock-chick in my mid-teens, I’m proud to say that I learnt it off by heart. It is still up there with my favourites, sung by Noel Harrison.

 

The Windmills of Your Mind

 

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

 

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

 

Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly, was it something that you said?
Lovers walking along a shore and leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway and the fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over you were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair!

Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind.

 

Songwriters: Marilyn Bergman / Michel Legrand / Alan Bergman

 

It was the theme song to The Thomas Crown Affair, a major film at that time, and I wonder if the lyrics might make more sense to me if I actually saw the film, or the more recent remake? It will be something else to do in my retirement.

There’s always fun to be found in doing new things. I’ve lived in Blackpool since 1965, a long time in South Shore, but never travelled on a train from Blackpool South until this year. That rail adventure with my friend took us to Lytham for lunch and a pleasant stroll along the front to the fabulous, white windmill which holds centre stage on the green. Another first. The closest I’d previously been to Lytham Windmill was the main road.

I found this poem,

 

The Windmill

 

 

Behold! a giant am I!
Aloft here in my tower,
With my granite jaws I devour
The maize, and the wheat, and the rye,
And grind them into flour.

I look down over the farms;
In the fields of grain I see
The harvest that is to be,
And I fling to the air my arms,
For I know it is all for me.

I hear the sound of flails
Far off, from the threshing-floors
In barns, with their open doors,
And the wind, the wind in my sails,
Louder and louder roars.

I stand here in my place,
With my foot on the rock below,
And whichever way it may blow,
I meet it face to face,
As a brave man meets his foe.

And while we wrestle and strive,
My master, the miller, stands
And feeds me with his hands;
For he knows who makes him thrive,
Who makes him lord of lands.

On Sundays I take my rest;
Church-going bells begin
Their low, melodious din;
I cross my arms on my breast,
And all is peace within. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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