A response to Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’ No, Philip, they’re not fools they’re just old, the world over mind-boggling millions of them the lot who are always losing things — sometimes not only things — the stooped battalions for whom bladders and stairs are now an issue along with banks without cashiers, opening tins
The house I hatedhated me, gave mea precariously narrow landingat the top of stairs, so I fellinto intensive carefollowed by Neuro-Rehabilitationresidence where I pay little attentionto double vision, double incontinenceand a wheelchair, focusing on the dizzinesswhich suggested that brain and Imay not be keeping company. Occupational Therapists –Nonulia watches me make a cup of tea.She
i.m. Charles Ferdinand Smyth, born 9 January 1865 at Stephen’s Green; died February 1871 of rheumatic fever 29 June 1876, Hokitika, South Island, New Zealand – All went in search of the donkey, Dandybear, & found the truant half way on the road to Kaneiri. The children ride on this animal on saddles of home
Only I was allowed to sit on the Golden Bidet of Lerici. Lord Byron sat on it as well as Percy Bysshe and Mary. D.H. Lawrence swung by and perched there like a demigod – as well as Frieda von Richthofen. Virginia Woolf sat on it in 1933 knocking out a beautiful sentence – Max
Who wanted to be my mammy. Who I wanted to be my mammy. We didn’t tell anyone not even ourselves. Mother stood in the way obdurate, certain of ownership, not knowing I’d fallen in love with another. Ida wanted to hold me I wanted Ida to hold me It never happened. We knew it was
these days to rob any bank would take a certain élan – a Clyde-like bohomie – smiling shouting ‘Thanks’ as you fire over their heads a sweep of the hat a flourish before you run now The Banks are boarded-up or have taken a turn
i.m. The ‘Discovery’ Tree, c. 609-1853 5 September 1876, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, four miles northeast of Arnold, California – At the Calaveras Grove there stood a tree which the guidebook says took 5 men 25 days to cut down, the work being performed with pump augers. Upon the stump which measures 25 feet
There was a train in the distance.Comforting to know the train was coming.Comforting to know it was a long way off. One day I stood on the platformtrying to imagine the train lolloping in.It rushed by and kicked up a wind. And – figure this? – it knocked off my hat.
Patricia – Pat – was dumpy, with a curling lip, Pat was in fact the Office Bitch. Every night she walked (stridently) home along our beautiful meaningless beach. I sometimes saw her from the car, an umbral figure with an itch for grey skies, pavements and — she told us this — ‘some decent human
Hans Island, 80°N 66°W There’s a small island in the north that bears your name—not named after you but after someone with the same name as you, and not even their real name just the forename explorers gave their guide and interpreter, Suersaq, their interpreter and guide— in a moment of good humour perhaps or
One day a man forgets a sea, a continent, a planet he forgets the features on his father’s face the prints of his own hand he forgets the flash of his eyes in another’s and the sound of water in his head he forgets the timbre of his own voice and the noise of his
Don’t bother catching the Cathay Pacific Airbus. Cheaper to take off the back of a transistor radio and weld yourself to the circuit board.
after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Dominoes’ Near as dammit to Orwell’s ideal, this,or at least his pub’s essential qualities:no radio or piano; the quiet blissof talk and its vital communality;good honest beer; uncompromisinglyVictorian in its architecture;tobacco smoke like a light fog on the sea.These barmaids know each Bolton regularby name. A southern foreigner, Spenderfelt out of place
The condition of my heart is a January swan.Mottled. Twisty. Largely humdrum. I wear my motley on my sleeve, where you ought.Some call it frippery. I call it fraught. The vocables I shoot for are punchy and swift.Yes. No. Stay. Go. Here. Now. Whisht. Violent assertions? A tempest in your soul?Make like a racoon trashing
This one I’ll leave till last, postponing the problems – how the wallpaper will come round the corner and the principal fern in the pattern will continue to meet the ceiling, the length staying true to the plumb. Then the trick of easing it down behind the radiator so it won’t snag on the wall,
Do you remember the feelingof how things appearedwhen you went home earlyfrom school, alone? I had a sense ofthis is how the world iswhen I’m not in it. Hedges and houses seemed new –more themselves, differentto 7.20 hedges, and home-time houses,as though they weren’t expecting me back so soon. Brick and leafbreathed, or seemed tofill
Unlike all their predecessors with their stubs recording new bikes, a week’s holiday in Cornwall or a magazine subscription, your last chequebooks wait in the drawer. Complete, pristine and obsolete, they’ve got no story left to tell. Though that’s a story in itself.
11 April 1876, Hobart, Tasmania – There is but one survivor of the Tasmanian race still alive, her name is Mrs or Queen Truccanine, she lives here ‘en famille’, the kind people who have taken her under their protection for some years get a government grant of £60 to help defray the expenses of her
after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Scout Parade’ Each day has its care, but each care has its day a proverb proclaims from a church billboard as a scout parade files through its archway. Half these young men look solemn, half bored, caught between the effort and the reward of endeavour; the same way today they’d seek out
When scholars were magicians, They learned to sing And then began to fly, for it was Spring then, And even the intelligent were chockful of passions. So, at night when they were high over the town or wood, They left behind The need to be both diligent and good And surveyed the land below