There are infinite points on a circle, you know, and we recently learned this fact, me and my five year old boy. He spends all his time with his sister, 3, and they like to talk about millions, billions and infinity.
Infinity and sextillion. Did you know sextilion was a number? I spent days telling my son that sextillion didn’t exist every time he would ask how many days was sextillion years. He would get so offended with me. Yes it does exist!
Who told you? I asked.
Your brother!
My brother? Okay hmm maybe there is some truth to this madness then.
So I did what any sane person would do in this day and age and I asked Google. And Google told me that sextillion was actually 1021.
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
He asked me how long it would take to count to sextillion so again, I resorted to Google.
243,000,000,000,000 years folks.
I said you’d be long dead before you got there.
Now it’s infinity. Because infinity is definitely more interesting than sextillion. I told him infinity is not a number, it’s a concept. His little sister told me it wasn’t a COLCEPT, because we can have ilfillity things. Like illfillity clouds! And illfillity shoes! And there are illfillity stars in space, didn’t you know?! So it is a number.
And infinity birds, her brother added. But then the whole world would be covered in birds. And they would fly the earth away. We could put them on our house and tie them with string and then we could fly away into space.
this looks like haze and grey cloudy days. fog some mornings. maybe frost.
but it’s damp now. the dampness rises from the ground and it would have been a steamy dampness had the heat been trapped in england’s atmosphere. but it isn’t. england is cold. you would not know the belly of the earth is molten lava, you would suppose the ground was cold, and coldness rises from the ground, but really…
really the cold that england enshrouds herself in comes from space.
comes from her perpetually facing towards the inky blackness of the universe in this season of her circumvention around the sun.
towards the cold harshness of the world beyond this world, absent from the warmth of the burning star that is the sun.
So November starts with fireworks. She knows she has a lot of work to do, dragging the unwilling folk through GMT, when they are suddenly thrust into early sunsets, and a black night, so unlike the perpetual twilight of summer nights.
It felt like a fresh bite, but it had a sour taste to it. Uncomfortable and tart. Savoury and sweet, but bitter. She wanted to spit it right out but she was being watched, so she politely carried on chewing. Until it became a smooth paste in her mouth. And still she chewed, terrified to swallow, even though her tastebuds had done all the work of tasting the nastiness.
But you see, tastebuds let you know if something ought to carry on beyond the mouth and travel down the oesophagus. And her tastebuds were clamouring an alarm in her head, sounding in her ears like muffled bells, subtle ringing, do not swallow. Do not swallow.
So she chewed and chewed, while they watched her, smiling politely, cordially, still, like cheshire cats, a whole room of them, watching, waiting.
Is this how I am to die? She thought wildly. Is this how I am to die? Of politeness?
You can write beautiful poetry if you open your window out to a view of a craggy set of grassy cliffs, foamy sea crashing against hard black rock, and the ocean spreading out before you.
Your garden is sprawled along a hilltop, and hills rise and fall all around your humble abode, with its whitewashed walls and thatched roof.
You could sit on your doorstep everyday, watching the view, not a single human sound to clang in your ears for hours on end.
Your mind could wander to far off places, and the scene would change hourly, as the clouds and sunlight chase each other over the plains and lend jewels and paintbrush strokes to the sea.
You could write beautiful poetry if you opened your front door to a busy highway, which is never the same from minute to minute, let alone hour to hour.
Bright in the day, backdrop of engines and shoes pattering on pavements, clamour of conversations, snippets of lives, all trundling down the highway as though on a conveyor belt. Shops brimming with people and then empty, the hum and bang of various playlists drifting out into the street and intertwining with a variety of smells. Earthy tobacco, warm and sweet cinnamon, sharp pungent car exhaust, a woman’s expensive perfume, the stink of a turd, fried fish roaming its way down the road. Then at night the beat increases in pace. Vibrant lights and dancing shadows, glamour replacing busy bustle, and the subtle undertone of danger, menacing and yet ever so slightly exciting.
Your poetry would be full, bursting, fleeting, less contemplative, less slow, a stark contrast to the gentle nostalgia of a mountain and sea that have remained through time immemorial.
View of the Calf of Man, a small isle just off the Isle of Man, from the cottage of Edward Faragher, a renowned poet and Manx culture preserver on the Isle of Man. He was known as Ned Beg Hom Ruy (Little Ned with the red beard), and this was the cottage he grew up in. He had a deep love for the Isle of Man and this was reflected in a lot of his work. My visit here today inspired this post. Photo by Peter Killey at Manx Scenes website. You can read some of his works here: Ned Beg’s Poetry.
Everytime I open this blog to type something I just sigh and all I can think of are things a Negative Nancy would say.
Oohhhh, she would sigh and mutter as her knitting needles clacked together, ohhhh I did shout so at my kids today. They tried my patience and I did lose my temper with them.
Oh dearie me, she would say as she spooned out some honey from a jar and let it drizzle over some toast, I didn’t do half the things on my to-do list and did not pay half as much attention to my kids as I would have liked.
Cluck cluck, she would cluck to herself as she hanged out the washing at gone past midnight because the sky was starry and glorious sunshine was forecast for the following day and she didn’t want to waste a moment of it, I really ought to have sorted out the laundry like I meant to, and submitted my coursework last month, and why oh why did I waste my time on irrelevant things and not do what I meant to do!?
But there is Positive Posie and she is pretty positive, I have to say, if rather meek and soft-spoken.
Now, she would say something very different!
She would toss her golden curls (for it seems only those who are good and kind and sweet in the old novels have the glossy golden curls), turn her little nose to the air, and spread some fresh linen on a bed and she would say, not a cluck in sight, well, we got halfway through Charlotte’s Web this week and the little Halfling loved it. The littlest one listened really well for a three year old too and asked interesting questions. And little Sir was taught chess and plays it remarkably considering he has only had six games, and yes yes you have not played chess with him but he has had no shortage of aunties and uncles, grandparents and a father to play chess with him, as well as his happy and willing little sister. He has come along nicely in his maths this week and we had a wonderful weekend spotting various kinds of butterflies. They both played with their cousins on Monday and yes you nagged but they both got dressed and made their beds fairly quickly this morning!
I am a Negative Nancy though. I do not have the golden curls. I can happily (or miserably) sit downstairs after the kids have fallen asleep and for a good two hours (and longer) I can dissect each ‘terrible’ thing that happened that day and paint it to be even more terrible and a testimony to what an awful mother I am. But at least I am self aware. I know I am doing it, I don’t want to do it, I don’t know how to stop it, but writing about the good bits sure does take the edge of the negative bits!
And too bloody much around my kids, to be honest. I am on my bloody phone in the car, while they’re falling asleep chatting to me… it’s in my damn pocket while I read them bedtime stories.
And what do I bloody even do on it?
Scroll social media, that’s what.
Even though I am supposed to be doing a million other productive things.
Either way, whether it’s scrolling social online dopamine prison or replying to emails or organising one’s life or scheduling the next homeschooling day or arranging an educational trip to the local quarry or searching for local bluebell woods on google maps…. it’s still my damn face stuck in front of a damn phone and it’s what my son is looking at as slumber sweetly rocks him into dreamland.
Kids watch everything you do and their neurones use what they’re exposed to, to make pathways. What sorts of pathways am I enabling in my sweet, sweet innocent children when they see me on my STUPID phone!?
Oh I grate on my own bloody nerves is what I do.
Cannot stand my bloody self!
Have made a decision to NOT use my phone around my kids at all. Leave it upstairs, on loud, so if anybody important rings I’ll be able to hear it. And that’s that.
Pip, I have known you for approximately six years. And forty seven days. And three and a half hours (at the time of writing this).
We met the day I met with my fate. My fate was you, of course. Didn’t you know?
We were both looking at the same teapot. It was yellow and had blue spots on and I remember thinking you had to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of taste to like such a teapot because let me tell you, it was hideous.
But there was only one of them left and you said, ‘Oh, you have it.’
And I said, ‘Please, no, you have it.’ Because I didn’t even want it in the first place.
And you said, ‘Oh, no, I was only looking. You have it.’
And I said, ‘I wouldn’t be a gentleman if I took it when a young lady has her eye on it. It would be daylight robbery.’
And you snorted and said, ‘Well how about we halfsies it and then share it.’
‘What, like, monthly swaps?’ I asked, ‘or shall we cut it in half?’
‘Sure.’ You were nonchalant. Casual. You even shrugged and that is when I noticed the apple green jacket you are wearing. It was hideous also. (Please don’t hate me. We have discussed the ways colours are worn. And apple green blazers were out of the question. I even made a graph. Please see attached piece of paper for reference.)
‘Well,’ I said very carefully, ‘that then means, of course, that we shall have to swap details.’
‘Let’s buy this thing.’ You picked it up gently and as I reached into my pocket to take out my wallet my elbow jerked yours and it slipped out of your hands and fell down, down down onto the brightly polished John Lewis floors.
We both stared at it.
‘Ah well,’ you said, ‘I was only looking at it because I was curious about something so ugly. Good riddance, I say! I’m Pip. What’s your name?’
I stared at you in pleasant surprise and I felt my lips stretching out my face of their own accord.
‘James.’ I said, and then, ‘let us look for more ugly teapots.’
Of course we had to pay for that ugly yellow polka dot tea pot. It was atrocious. And then for your birthday present a year later I got you a similar teapot which you use for your indoor geraniums. You killed yourself laughing at it and told me I was a money waster because there was no way you would use that for anybody. It could never grace your table.
I remember asking you all wounded, like, ‘What, not even for the reason that it was graced by my hands?’ I was also slightly flirting even though we were firm friends by then, but I could not resist. I can never resist you, Pip.
‘Nope.’ You were very firm.
I am writing to tell you that I want to marry you. I can’t say it to your face because you have beautiful eyes and I know exactly how they will look at me and I will not be able to help myself because I will kiss you and then I will be done for. I know you will be impatient with that and tell me that is nonsense and of course I can help myself but I will not want to. Help myself. At all.
Also I asked my aunt if she read those French books I gave her and she said yes, they were lovely books. You were right. She didn’t read them. Else she would have called me to lecture me horrendously about them. Lovely books indeed. She asks about you a lot and tells me I should marry you quicktimes before you grow too old to have kids.
So back to my fate. You are my fate either way. If you say yes then it will have been a good fate and if you say no I will be broken hearted forever and when I do eventually heal and marry somebody for realsies I will still remember you as the first ever woman who broke my heart. Truly, broke it.
You know love is a strange thing. So strange. I used to think I loved a woman before. I was seventeen. She wasn’t particularly beautiful but I was infatuated by her and loved her to pieces but she always treated me badly. And one day she went too far and I discovered she was sleeping with a right old tramp of a fellow {he was not, he was a respectable LAWYER, but to me in my hurt he was a tramp], but I forgave her. Well I told her I did but I don’t think I really did. Something inside of me snapped that day. She walked on me one too many times. And three miserable months of forced smiles and fake kisses later I met you and the day afterwards she wanted to see me and I called her and I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this anymore.’
And when I was with her I thought there could never be anyone else because she was my first love. But it was meagre and ridiculous and pathetic and also desperate. Compared to what I feel about you. I am crazy about you. I look at you and I see my future. And I want to spend all my time with you and walk home from work with you and call you every single day but I stop myself because I don’t want you to get sick of me. I also want to kiss your forehead. It is so gentle and smooth and beautiful.
But see, if we were married I could call you everyday and it wouldn’t be weird, right? I could also kiss your forehead and it would be comfortable.
So, what do you say, Pip?
Yours sincerely and faithfully and truly,
Jim
This image was generated for me by DALL.E 3 – the latest AI photo-generating software. Ahh me. We no longer need to whip out the watercolours to demonstrate the painted thoughts in our heads.
I always say I am not a poetry person, but I don’t think that is true. I recently picked up a blue book from the library called ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon‘, by Gyles Brandreth. The tagline at the top reads ‘How poetry can transform your memory and change your life’.
Anyway one of the biggest things mentioned in the book is that poetry is memorable speech, and very important for children. Children by nature take delight in playing with language. Studies have also shown that speaking poetry to babies and children improve their language acquisition. Children who learn poetry apparently sleep better, concentrate better and do better professionally later in life.
I don’t know too much about how true these bold statements are, however, I do know that my entire childhood was full of poetry. I devoured it. I loved it.
I memorised so many poems from classic novels. Classic writers like Susan Coolidge and L.M Montgomery liked to pepper their stories with poetry. I took great delight in these little rhymes as did my siblings. We turned them into songs and games, and I even took the pen and sat to write my own little limericks, ones that my sister still ‘sings’ to this day. Not even to tease me anymore, it’s just part of her rhythm. I once found a book filled with little limericks about all my mother’s siblings and school friends, written by her at age 11. They inspired me so much that I began to write limericks about my school teachers, subjects and classmates.
Sometimes poetry can be daunting, and not all poetry is for everyone. Some people may like simple, funny poetry. There was this one long poem by A.P. Herbert that I used to recite all the time, and it started off like:
‘Dear Madam, you have seen this play.
I never saw it till today.
You know the details of the plot,
but let me tell you, I do not.‘
It’s hilarious and wonderfully memorable. Click here to read the rest if you’re interested.
Other people like longer sonnets, or contemplative pieces like those by William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Or short, snappy brilliant lines by Emily Dickinson.
At school, when I got a bit older, we had to study a lot of Shakespeare. I detested Shakespeare. I found his subject matter drab and dreary, and I didn’t care a penny for any of his ridiculous characters. I didn’t find them funny, or amusing or even tragic. Just plain stupid, I would say. They were a chip on my shoulder and a pain in the bottom. My teacher loved Shakespeare however, and the animation on her face as she discussed his work was enthralling. She didn’t not make me love his work any more, but her classes were always entertaining.
And it lent a thought to my curious mind.
Contrary to what some may think, poetry is for everybody. There is a poem for every single person out there, just as there is a book for everyone. The poem that is for me, may not be for you. But I do believe poetry is in all our hearts.
What is your favourite poem? Which do you know by heart, and often recite to yourself?
Ocean Bream 