Poetry

RAPA NUI

With such certainty
The stone adze struck
Unyielding tuff.
Sometimes the masons
Would wipe their brows
And survey the line
Drawn where ocean met sky.

Way beyond it,
Chinese potters made exquisite vessels,
Aztecs built Tenochtitlan,
Egyptians immortalised the Nile
And America sat unknown.
But here on the slopes
Of Ranu Raraku
They chipped away
Day by day
Making their moai
For the dead
And for the
Extolment of the living.
There was never a doubt
That's what life
Was all about.

28.10.09

Poetry

RAIN

All through that night
And into the following day
It rained.
We tried to shelter
In the lee of trees
By the crossroads
Where we used to play -
Fine at first
The droplets grew,
Plothering from oak leaves
Under that leaden sky
Till sodden the verges
And the old road
Be-puddled
Muttering rivulets
Flowed down Harrison's Hill
Gurgling to gutters
Replete with water
While wet as fish
We splashed home
In the endless rain,
The endless
Rain.

Quiztime

I realise that not everybody who visits this blog has a blog of their own. Some, like Coppa's Girl for example, are just readers of blogs which is fine and dandy. However, these visitors may not be aware that when creating a "new post" bloggers have the option to press on the "Insert special characters" button which is like a human face emoji. It leads to dozens of possible symbols we can insert into our text. But what do they  represent? For this quiz you have to suggest what each of the following ten symbols or special characters mean. 

1. 🎆 
2. 👵 
3. 🎦 
4. 🍣 (Clue: Japanese)
5. ♒ (Clue: astrological sign)
6. 👙
7. 🎪 
8. 🌀 
9. 📅 
10. ⛲

This time, because your friendly quizmaster is away, the answers are given at the end of the big empty space that follows.

BIG EMPTY SPACE

⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇

ANSWERS

1. fireworks

2, older woman
3. cinema
4. sushi
5. Aquarius
6. bikini
7. circus tent or big top
8. cyclone or hurricane
9. calendar
10. fountain

Poetry

Song for Lost Youth

Perhaps I should have cradled it
Like a dove
Kept it safe with tender love
But I squandered it -
Gushing-blundering-raging
Like a wild mountain stream
Desperate for an ocean
That was but a distant dream.
...I just never thought
That I could have loitered in the shallows
Reflecting the blueness of the sky
- Concealing silver fishes
- Quietly biding my time
- Stretching it out.
And so, and so it's gone now
- My ephemeral youth
- That precious once only gift
- That honeyed sweetness,
Leaving only the trembling resonance
Of distant echoes
From half-remembered hills.

People

Every person is different from the next and in my view they are all worth listening to. With every new interaction, we learn more about what it is to be a human being.

On Sunday night, I boarded the last number 88 bus with my friend Mike. It was waiting at the bus stop. The driver was out of his seat pacing the bottom deck with no other passengers on board. When the pneumatic doors opened, the driver joshed with us that he had been hoping to drive back into the city centre on his own.

I asked him if he liked a full bus or an empty one and he explained why he preferred the latter. After showing my senior citizen's pass I commented on his accent, "Are you from Northern Ireland?" He said he'd arrived in Sheffield from Belfast back in the 1990's.

"Your accent is still strong," I remarked.

"That's because I am proud of my heritage."

And the conversation continued with thoughts about how some people deliberately and proudly hang on to the accents of  childhood while others willingly ditch them and soon begin to speak like their new host community.

Last night (Thursday)  I ventured out to one of our local bars - "The Dark Horse". I had not been in there in months. By chance I met up with a senior academic I have known for several years. He works in The University of Sheffield specialising in Japanese.

He was keen to talk with me about issues he has recently experienced with the UK Border Force. Six months ago he married a Costa Rican woman in the Costa Rican embassy in Tokyo. The unusual venue was chosen with regard to documentation and officialdom. He wished to bring his new wife back to England to live with him but so far this has not proved possible. They have spent thousands of pounds. on visas and legal services but they are still separated.  He admitted that the difficulties threatened to drive a wedge between them and it was not what either of them had envisioned. There had been particular problems emanating from the fact that though English, he was actually born in Kenya when  his father worked there through the nineteen sixties.

I think it is good to be inquisitive about other people. Once we lose that delight and that curiosity our lives are diminished. As I say, everyone has different stories to tell.

⦿

With midnight fast approaching, soon I must mount our stairs ready for the early drive over to Liverpool. Thence to Portugal.

Hoarding

With hoarding there are extremes upon the spectrum. I wouldn't say that I am the worst kind of hoarder - like the Scottish fellow in the picture - but I admit that I display some elements of this behaviour. 

I hang on  to things and I struggle to let them go. I still have every university coursework essay that I submitted for assessment between September 1973 and December 1977 and I still have every Hull City football programme that I bought between November 1964 and May 2024 -  sixty years worth.

But I am even worse with books. I have hundreds of them. Mostly I have read them just the once and have no plans to ever read them again. In May of last year, I rediscovered a large cache of books up in our attic and I was quite ruthless with them, managing to push  nearly all of them into a book bank at one of this city's recycling centres. I know it was the right thing to do but I still kind of regret it. See related blogpost.

There's a bookcase in our bedroom and two downstairs in this study. Each shelf is packed to bursting point with books that will never be read again. However, on Monday of this week, I was quite proud of myself for I took a bag of books to the new charity shop that has opened just down the main road. There were, I think, ten books in all and today I noticed that they are on sale for £2 each. Showing great mental fortitude, I did not buy them back. I let them go.

Some people are minimalists, living in uncluttered spaces. I guess the rest of us are meant to emulate them as if minimalism represented a cleaner, more holy approach to home life. But I am not sure about that. The psychology of hoarding is very interesting. Why do we do it? What, if anything, are we really trying to hang on to?

Perhaps my reluctance to part with books concerns the personal, mental connection I had with them when I read them. Ditching them would arguably be like dumping evidence of my intellectual and emotional relationship with the world beyond these four walls.

Where are you on the hoarding/minimalism spectrum?

Excited

Well my friends, I have to admit  that I am becoming rather excited about next week. We have rented a villa in southern Portugal and we are flying out there on Saturday from John Lennon Airport in the suburbs of Liverpool. In fact, the villa is the very one shown in the two photos that accompany this blogpost.

When I say "we", I mean all nine of us - Shirley and I, Frances, Stewart, Phoebe and Margot, Ian, Sarah and Zachary. We have pushed the boat out on this private rental. It gets excellent reviews. We wanted the family holiday to be something really special to mark Ian's forthcoming fortieth birthday with a nod back to my seventieth birthday last October.

You never know what might lie ahead. Sometimes you have got to seize the moment and I have a feeling that this holiday will be one we will always remember for good reasons - when the babies were young and we were all in good health. I remember these lines from Bob Dylan's musical ode to his former wife, Sara. He recalled happy family holidays with their four children:-

Sleepin' in the woods by a fire in the night

Drinkin' white rum in a Portugal bar

Them playin' leapfrog and hearin' about Snow White

You in the marketplace in Savanna-la-Mar...

By the way, I realise that Savanna-la-Mar is in Jamaica and not Portugal.

Because of the trip to Portugal, I will not be able to blog in my now customary daily manner. However, taking a leaf out of Travel Penguin's book, I want to make some use of the "scheduling" facility in "Blogger". In fact I have already scheduled a new "Quiztime" blogpost for Sunday night. If I can simply find the time there may be other posts too.

⦿

LATER: I have now pre-prepared more scheduled posts for next week. Each one is a poem I created along with a picture that I snapped some time in the past. Please note I won't be replying to any comments until I get back home.