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Bear with me (do you have a bear with you?). Due to technical FUBARs I have no Internet access on my home computer till the teccies fix it so I’m down the road at Ye Olde Internet Cafe to at least get some stuff up in the meantime. This was not the way it was meant 2B! (or 3C?)(UR42N8!). So, no jazzy bits in the sidebars just yet. Sorry!
This is the blog of my ‘Walls Have Ears’ Mendip Lifelines 8-day ramble. The whys, wherefores and wotsits are all on the ‘Lifelines’ website at http://www.mendiplifelines.org.uk/, so I won’t repeat them here
LOWER THE TONY
Tuesday 26th June 2007. Evening. The usual panic. Hasn’t helped that Radio Bristol wanted ‘a one-minute poem on Bristol and the legacy of Tony Blair’ for their morning show on the morning I was supposed to be bussing out to Winscombe, 27 June 2007, Tony Blair’s ‘bowing-out’ day as Prime Minister.
‘Are you paying?’ I asked. ‘No,’ they said, ‘doesn’t have to be anything too good, just the references to Bristol … Carol Chaplain and Euan Blair and so on’. I think, ‘what do they mean, doesn’t have to be anything too good’?‘All my poetry is good,’ I say. ‘We know,’ they say, ‘we just meant you shouldn’t put too much effort in. Oh by the way’, they continue, ‘nothing too serious.’ Right-ho - 10 years of The Reverend Tone condensed into one minute and ‘not serious’. Perhaps I should bow out along with Tone.
But of course I agree. I like challenges. I spend the whole evening writing a one-minute – well, it turns out nearer two-minute - ‘effortless’ poem rather than packing for the Mendips, rush up to Whiteladies Road the next morning to deliver it live.
This is the life of the poet, the life of the artist, you can’t resist creative bones to gnaw on. And it does help ‘get your name around’ even if there’s no dosh in it. It does have the effect, though, that I am forced into ‘rhyming mode’. A ‘non-serious’ one minute poem which has to come over to someone busy in the kitchen trying to make their sarnies for work whilst listening to the radio with half an ear has to grab them immediately ie it has to have something repetitive about it ie it has to rhyme. So even after I’ve delivered the poem everything anyone says to me immediately sets off the rhyming voice in my head. ‘Road’? ‘Toad’. ‘Sarny’, um … ‘calmy?’ ‘No …barmy?’. ‘Bus?’ ‘Fuss!’
The poem? It started something like this:
George W. get yer smokin' gun
YEHAH! Tony get yer pistol
Cherie get yer lifestyle guru
In Ye Ancient Port of Bristol
- and gallivanted around in similar vein (with refrain) for the next 8 verses. Still, I’m supposed to be talking Mendip and not Bristol & The Blairs. Anyway, that’s the reason I missed the bus I said I’d get – it’s all the (ex) Prime Minster’s fault (like most other things wrong with this country, I can hear you say…). I almost ran to the
bus-station … to be told the internet timetable for Service 121 to Weston Super Mare I’d looked up was ‘invalid’ (means plain old ‘wrong!’), so that rather than the 5 minutes I thought I had, if I was lucky, I now had 40. Perspiring heavily I wended my way to Broadmead M&S to purchase some vests (two for £9.95, if you’re interested. Tony’s fault, too – I was in such a hurry I forgot to take any vests), tottered back to the bus-station and eventually caught the 13.42 bus out.
The 121 did a minuet with the central theme of the A38 round bits of the county of whose names I’m unsure; called into Bristol Airport to see EasyJet; negotiated windy, stone-bound lanes scattered with houses with BMW X5s parked up outside (I nodded off); and drew up near the Co-Op in Winscombe.
‘You get off here.’ Said the helpful lady in front of me. The ITV TV crew were waiting for me, so, unfortunately, rather than me finding a nice hedge for a snooze, they wanted to document The Bard setting off into the Setting Sun. I went into the pub to change into my ‘Lifelines’ T-shirt and duly set off, introducing myself (gently, I hope) to people I met on the street, telling them what I was doing and giving them the pre-paid postage cards for possible thoughts and messages on the Mendips. Up the lane, turn left into the playing fields, talk to group of very nice kids. It starts raining (again) so I hole up in a bus-shelter till it stops, then cross the A-whadyamacallit (again), wend my way around Sidcot School and, winding up a narrow lane with a wrought-iron arch embedded in a fantastical stone wall next to me saying, ‘The Gift of George Thomas of Bristol 1869 feel, for the first time, a Mendipsical feeling slowly coming over me.
“Where does the path to Shipham go?” I ask a pale, loitering schoolfellow. “Up that drive and over the fields,” he says politely. Over the hills and far away… it is, of course, not too far from Winscombe to Shipham. In fact, they are very near. A field or two, some nice houses or three – one looks abandoned, a large creamy house set into a slope, I seem to recall a water feature with a water-pipe coming out of a Neptune-ish face, perhaps. For the next two fields I entertain the fantasy that, just as I was passing, someone comes out and says, “nice house, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I’d reply. “Would you like it?” – has to be the next line. “Yes, please!” “Goody-oh – here’s the keys!”
Once in a previous life I had a job teaching English to foreigners in a language school just off Oxford Street in London. One of my students was from The Gambia. I got friendly with Mohammed and invited him to come with me on an English country walk. “Those cows,” he asked, “are they allowed to go anywhere they want?” “Does that land belong to anyone? In my country, if I want to go and live somewhere, I go and ask the chief. If he agrees, we all h
elp each other to build a house on the land.” He was obviously struggling with the concept of ‘private ownership’. You know, all these things we take for granted – we make them all up, every one of them. What was that great line in Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel, Stardust? ‘Everything I ever thought about myself, who I was, what I am, was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ ‘…how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ Is it, ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘I am what I think?’ Why do we think what we think? Who taught us to do it?
I leave the A38 behind in a hollow, wind round some cottages, through a dog-walking field and emerge right outside the Penscot Inn in Shipham.
bus-station … to be told the internet timetable for Service 121 to Weston Super Mare I’d looked up was ‘invalid’ (means plain old ‘wrong!’), so that rather than the 5 minutes I thought I had, if I was lucky, I now had 40. Perspiring heavily I wended my way to Broadmead M&S to purchase some vests (two for £9.95, if you’re interested. Tony’s fault, too – I was in such a hurry I forgot to take any vests), tottered back to the bus-station and eventually caught the 13.42 bus out.
elp each other to build a house on the land.” He was obviously struggling with the concept of ‘private ownership’. You know, all these things we take for granted – we make them all up, every one of them. What was that great line in Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel, Stardust? ‘Everything I ever thought about myself, who I was, what I am, was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ ‘…how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ Is it, ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘I am what I think?’ Why do we think what we think? Who taught us to do it?
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