October

Hedgerow and field - Brecks Lane near Barrow Hill, Derbyshire

Poem in October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Buildings

Your intrepid explorer, Captain Hercules Pudding has been out and about again braving the dangers of modern day exploration just to bring you this post. "What dangers?" I hear you chortle. How about two rabid Staffordshire bull terriers sprinting from  remote White Lodge Farm or a Heavy Goods Vehicle with driver on a mobile phone swishing past you so close that your shoulder polishes the wheel arches? Oh yes - my friends - a simple country ramble is fraught with hazards.

Yesterday (Monday) I parked in the tiny north Derbyshire village of Hundall, just next to this attractive stone cottage:-

A mile across the fields and I was in the hamlet of West Handley where I "bagged" this lovely thatched farmhouse  at Ash Lane Farm:-

With a detour to Marsh Lane, I finally arrived in Middle Handley where I snapped this eye-catching pub - yet another Derbyshire inn that's  called "The Devonshire Arms":-

This is Southgate Lodge to the east of Middle Handley. It commands magnificent views:-

And then I came to the grim post-industrial village of Barrow Hill with its rows of former pit cottages. You can still make out the shape of the old slag heap and trace disused railways tracks. Life must have been so hard for the community that lived and worked here and even today I noticed that very few houses had cars parked outside them. On cue the sky became iron grey and drizzle began to fall. I snapped this picture of Barrow Hill Methodist Church built in 1872. Superficially, it could easily be confused with a shed for pit ponies or engine parts:-

Onwards to New Whittington our brave Hercules progressed. Now that Barrow Hill was behind us the sun came out again and I snapped this picture of Highland Road with it's modern "ticky tacky" cloned houses cramped together like fish in a shoal. Behind them, the shape of another former slag heap rolls like a mammoth whale:-

Back at Hundall, I decided to pop into "The Miners Arms" for a pint of Tetley's elixir of life and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. It was only four in the afternoon but inside there were sixteen people from the local community - chatting, drinking, reading newspapers, doing crosswords, ignoring "Deal or No Deal" on the TV. I played them sea shanties on my concertina and we roasted a suckling pig in the beer garden. (I made the last bit up!):-

Savile

Savile's grave - now broken up and sent to landfill

Almost a year ago, I posted positively about the death of British TV's eccentric Sir Jimmy Savile. Now I feel that I must apologise about that post because last November his many skeletons had not emerged from  the stinking cupboard of his private life. But now they are well and truly out and the whole country has had to radically revise its view of this "roguish and flamboyant" celebrity.

Overseas visitors to this blog may now be flummoxed, so let me explain. Conservative supporter Jimmy Savile was eighty four when he died. He was the first presenter of BBC's seminal weekly contemporary music show - "Top of the Pops". He was the face behind Britain's national safety campaign for car seatbelts - "Clunk! Click! Every Trip!" and he fronted popular family programmes such as "Jim'll Fix It" in which viewers' dreams came true. He was a member of MENSA. He ran marathons for charity and was an enduring supporter of Leeds General Infirmary and the National Spinal Injuries Unit at Stoke Mandeville, But something else was happening in the murky shadows of his life over a period of perhaps six decades.

He was a serial abuser of teenage girls - some of them as young as thirteen. He took advantage of his fame as if he were bulletproof and used his cunning to make many of these girls think that they themselves were to blame for his cynical predation. So many stories have emerged and if Savile were alive today. it wouldn't be Guy Fawkes dummies we'd be burning on Bonfire Night, it would be the Savile Monster himself. He has blighted many lives. Some victims of sexual abuse are able to put the horror behind them and lead pretty normal lives but the majority will carry that weight to eternity.

I am lucky. When I was a child, I was loved but never abused. However, during my career as a teacher  I encountered several children who were badly damaged by abuse.One of them killed herself - plunging from a block of Sheffield flats at the age of thirteen. What a waste.

Last week, Savile's family had his elaborate marble gravestone dug up and destroyed. It had occupied a commanding position in Woodlands Cemetery, Scarborough. A cliffside path previously labelled Savile View had its sign removed and even the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust will be closing down or changing its name out of respect for the predator's victims. They suffered in silence and solitude, fearing that they would never be believed and realising they had no physical evidence to prove Savile's wrongdoing but since the ITV documentary "Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile" was screened on October 3rd more and more victims have bravely stepped forward from the shadows.

Society is wiser about abuse these days. There are more safety nets and much more awareness than there used to be. That's one of the shocking side issues about Savile's gross litany of abuse. Even in this more open climate, he had to die before the truth would out. For the dead, we often say R.I.P. but for Savile the blessing should instead be W.I.T. - Writhe in Torment.

Overstones

Yesterday afternoon. Driving home from a ramble near Tideswell. I decided to take the back road from Hathersage which would lead me past Stanage Edge and across Burbage Moor. Weatherwise, it had been an odd afternoon with a mixture of scudding clouds and crystal clear October sunshine. At one point, my face had even been lashed by very fine hailstones as I followed the path to Pittlesmere Lane from the Bronze Age burial site on Tideslow.

I have photographed Overstones Farm before - like many Peak District visitors- for it is located in a popular walking area just three miles west of Sheffield.. It sits beneath the exposed millstone grit escarpment of Stanage Edge which nowadays is much frequented by rock climbers in Ford Fiestas. In the past, it was used as a quarry for millstones and you can still find many discarded or broken millstones beneath the two mile long edge.

I pulled in to a passing place, watching the angry raincloud swirling eastwards like smoke from a forest fire. Waiting by the drystone wall with camera at the ready, I hoped there'd be a moment when sunlight would  theatrically illuminate the farm buildings against a shadowy background of cloud and jagged millstone and then it happened... I am rather pleased with the result. What do you think? There was also this "landscape" version which you can enlarge by clicking on it:-

Poemoholic

Plaque on a railway bridge - The Monsal Trail, Derbyshire

After all these years, I have finally come to admit that I have an addiction. Yes folks, I’m Mr Pudding and I am… I am a poemoholic. Been writing poems since I was six years old and I’m still writing them now as I approach sixty. Okay, I don’t write poems every day but the addiction is always lurking in the background – like a skeleton in the secret cupboard of my mind. They surface from time to time and I’m sorry, okay? Sorry that some of them have forced their way into this humble, everyday Yorkshire blog. I just can’t help myself – I’m an addict.

I realise that some regular visitors to this blog are almost anti-poetry and if they had a poet living next door they’d probably laugh and point at him/her as he/she walked by. It would be more embarrassing than living next door to a pervert like Jimmy Savile. Your house value would surely plunge.

On a few occasions, comments on my poems have revealed this antipathy towards poetry with some correspondents suggesting I should lighten up or as Neil from “The Young Ones” might have muttered, “Heavy man!” But we poemoholics will protest that one of the main purposes of poetry is to peel away the skin of human life and go for the jugular, to root around in the attic until you find what has been hidden. The oft-times superficial and jolly poetry of Edward Lear or Pam Ayres should not be dismissed – it has its place - but to me that’s not real poetry, it’s more wordplay… entertainment. Real poetry should connect with the reader and make you think and the words it employs should sometimes sing to you like music. I’m not saying I always reach that goal but like other poemoholics, I try.

As an English teacher, I frequently encountered youngsters who automatically moaned when poetry was on the day’s menu: “I hate poetry” etc.. I would often point out that they liked songs which are simply poems set to music and when loved ones die we will invariably fall back on poetry – at the funeral service or in newspaper announcements. Poetry is in nursery rhymes and football chants, advertising copy and greetings cards and it’s in the rhythm of everyday conversation – the language we choose, our turns of phrase, how we try to describe our experiences.

I turn the clock back over fifty years. I’m up in my bedroom writing a rhyming poem about an imagined hero who presses on through the mountains, crosses gushing rivers, slays dragons and battles through snowstorms to reach his goal… There, it’s done. Excited, I thunder downstairs. My family are about to settle down for their Sunday tea and I’m seven or eight years old and I say, “Listen! Listen! I’ve been writing a poem!” They go quiet and they listen as, pleased as punch, I recite the juvenile poem to my loved ones. I finish, close the little blue exercise book and wait for their reaction. They burst out laughing – it’s infectious. My mother has tears of laughter in her eyes and I redden with a mixture of puzzlement and anger before storming back upstairs where I stay, refusing to come back down for my tea. I bet Walt Whitman never got that reaction – nor Alexander Pope nor e.e.cummings. But as you know, it didn’t put me off. I’m still a poemoholic and I’ll most likely die one:-

Here lie the bones of Yorkshire Pud 

Who often erred 

But tried to be good 

Afflicted by the poetry disease 

He could never find a life of ease

Long Dale, Derbyshire - the inscription reads
"The road up and the road down are one and the same"

Etonians

The  end of the 2012 Old Etonian  Tory conference in Birmingham

At the age of thirteen, our pompous beloved prime minister went to Eton College in Berkshire following his "father" and elder brother Allan Alexander Cameron the barrister and QC. Eton, a cradle of wealth and  privilege, is possibly the most posh famous independent school in the world and "the chief nurse of England's statesmen". Six weeks before taking his O level exams, Cameron was discovered smoking crack cocaine cannabis He admitted the offence but because he had not (allegedly) been involved in selling drugs, he avoided automatic expulsion, and was instead fined, prevented from leaving school grounds, and given a flogging by the school matron "Georgic" (a punishment which involved copying 500 lines of Latin text).

The Conservatives now boast nineteen out of touch twits Old Etonians on their benches in Parliament. An astonishing 100% 54% of Tory MPs attended fee-paying schools. In the general British populace, just under 7% of any one generation attend private, fee-paying schools.

Scene from "The Omen" Cameron when an eleven year old prep school pupil
What was he saying or about to sing?A free pack of Real 
Yorkshire Puddings for the funniest response.

Brian

Brian Cutts is a Yorkshire comrade - currently in hiding in Catalonia. MI5 have a hefty dossier on him and it is said that he was the mastermind behind a plot to blow up Lancashire in the nineteen nineties. Evidence suggests he was betrayed by the now disgraced Sir Jimmy Savile. Disguised as a French onion seller, Brian cycled down to Dover and made his way across to Boulogne before proceeding to Barcelona where he fell into the arms of a Catalonian freedom fighter called Sofia. 

Anyway, enough of that. Recently, Brian blogged about his dimly remembered favourite walk in South Yorkshire and, largely for his benefit, I followed in his footsteps yesterday afternoon. After all, it can't be much fun - so far away from his beloved South Yorkshire. I thought I would give him a pleasant taste of "home".

As instructed by Comrade Cutts, I parked at the Elsecar Heritage Centre before hiking in lovely October sunshine to The Needle's Eye, Hoober Stand, The Mausoleum and Wentworth Woodhouse. These places have a special resonance for me because my mother knew them when she was a girl - growing up in Rawmarsh. She enjoyed picnics and rambles in the area in the early nineteen thirties.

In their day, the Fitwilliam family must have been so darned rich that the modern equivalent would  be the Bransons of Virgin Britain or the Gateses of Microsoft California. They had such wealth they could build the widest stately home in England along with a number of largely pointless follies - just to stave off the frustration of having such a vast reservoir of money in the bank. So here's my walking album - specially for Brian but of course, everybody else is welcome:- 

Elsecar Heritage Centre - thronged with visitors

The Needle's Eye

Horses grazing with Hoober Stand in the background

The Mausoleum for Charles - the second Marquis of Rockingham

View over Morley Pond to Peacock Lodge

Wentworth Woodhouse - the widest stately home in England

Windmill turned into a home in Wentworth

Brian's favourite pub - "The Market" in Elsecar where the
plot to blow up Lancashire  was allegedly hatched