Gareth Calway - Bard On The Wire

What Holds Them by John Lucas

2012-02-12T14:20:00.009Z

Brian Clough is gone, red carded by cancer.
Rough-tongued shaman, rogue, blest necromancer
who blazed new life into clubs, players, teams -
losers no more but playing out their dreams
as tricksters. "Get rid of racists!"
Brian's order. "We've done with Fascists.
And by the way, no swearing gentlemen."
And the Trent End sang "The referee's an orphan."

He coaxed their wit, gave thumbs up to a pride
they hugged like trophies captured by each side
he set free for the joy of it. "The best
manager England never had," some claim,
which may be so, although a fairer test
of worth than braggadocio sports-page fame
is that, of thousands packing the Market Square
to mourn this day, half have no love of the game
he loved, but loved him, that cross-grained, rare
man whose sending off’s brought them to fill
this place for one last time and holds them still.

What a decent poem this is (respect to you, John Lucas.) And what a great man his subject was, warts and all. Imagine Clough dealing with the Suarez incident. The trouble with this country is that we never appoint Cloughs to manage the national team in case they upset somebody. And then we upset everybody by appointing various versions of game-playing Don Revie who try and keep everybody happy and please nobody and then clear off as the first scent of money. Clough would have won the World Cup with Wales let alone England. But (to quote John Lennon) some idiot in a pin striped suit sitting on his fat arse in the city might have had his nose put out of joint in the process so let's appoint a safe-hands loser instead. Clough was not only great at making world beaters out of honest yeomen footballers, he was also sublimely funny. "I may not the best football manager in the world but I am in the top one." Cloughie, thou shouldst be living at this hour/ England hath need of thee!

Knocking on hell's door

2012-02-10T20:10:00.004Z

A still from Katie Smith's film The One They Seek

The One They Seek

2012-02-10T18:21:00.015Z

I travel with haste. I remain a shadow to everyone in my footsteps.

Yes it was as glamorous as it looks. And 7 hours in that snow was well worth all the attention.

Cold Moon

2012-02-07T19:18:00.005Z

Coldest night of the year? And naturally shooting on location tomorrow. Wot, no caravan? Pass me the thermos, Stan.

This image taken on a temperamental Sony Mavica MC CD500. It still uses discs and because this was taken on a night setting, it took about an hour to get off the camera and onto the PC. I'm the other side of the camera tomorrow being a baddie so none of this sort of thing will bother me. All I've got to do is act hard.

Grandfather Christmas

2012-02-01T08:54:00.008Z

Horse-sensible and risk-foolish,
A gold-domed Grandfather Christmas
Stocking my boyhood with footballs
While fagging yourself to untipped death,
You forged your family chain of shops
Like a rosary of straightness and self-belief
Against the odds, as true to your Book
As your working day was long.

Note: There comes a point in your life when you start to look like your grandfather. Or even your father's grandfather. I remember all these domed patriarchal heads in a permanent blue smoke of family gatherings, sounding off at the world in West country or Welsh accents, Judges and Kings. They grow more like me every day. The caption describes Wellyn, my Welsh grandfather,who was a bookmaker, in this extract from a poem called 'Llewellyn the Great'.

The painting, by Howard Hugh Scott Thomas, notices the bald dome looking out from behind a curtain too, though in a very different context. Howard did my lights up in Edinburgh last summer and watched me sweat blood onstage. He photographed me doing it and he filmed me doing it and finally he painted me doing it. That's him at my shoulder, anxiously overseeing the bard's artistic progress and/or crucifixion. Get those feet dancing, Granddad.

Seemab is God

2012-01-25T17:13:00.007Z

Either peel off the layers of wounds of the heart and throw them out of sight
Or accept the wounds (of separation from the Beloved) as positive indications of love.

from a ghazal by Seemab.

I love these Urdu lyrics that are both gnostically profound and as catchy as an early Seventies chart-stormer. But then, as Keats mused once with a wild surmise, the truth - if it's really true - will be beautiful and the beautiful true. As light as it's heavy. When I was a kid I used to hear this kind of hymn-like truth in every rock song and poem, even some that were actually about Jagger's stash or Paul McCartney's dog or Clapton being God, but I was still right. And yet the above is the real McCartney, the real Keats. St John of the Cross without the two hundred pages of exegesis, with a singing Harrison guitar. All the hurt that's ever been done to you - forget it, don't dwell in the past - or see it as an honest mistake by someone who tried to love you by their own lights but got it wrong. As we all do. If I ever write two lines that beautiful and true, it will all have been worth while. Meanwhile, I might see if I can carve that transliteration into a proper modern English couplet and then spray paint it over every city hall, church, mosque, synagogue, temple and message forum in the country.

Return to Cardiff

2012-01-21T07:48:00.014Z

Photos taken by Donna Calway aged five of Frome. No, hang on, that was a hundred years ago. We're both in our Fifties now. The painting is in City Hall, Cardiff, the most magnificent building in Wales and quite possibly Europe or the Universe. Built when Wales was coal-rich and Victorian mighty in a style that sort of combined the French of our diminished Enlightenment rivals with the opulent glory of our Indian Jewel in the Crown. Plus a bit of Gothic in there too just to remind the Germans who was boss. And lots of white and ivory. And washed by a century of soft, refreshing Welsh rain. And inside, free to anyone who wants to pop in, a set of Welsh national treasures including a series of white marble statues of Welsh greats and this painting of a reprobate's return which the little sister has expertly framed me into.

Moving into Movies

2011-12-31T15:55:00.009Z

Time to put the new into new year. I am now a screen actor. I have accepted the male lead (a baddie) in a short student-made film set in mediaveal times to be shot in Norwich over the next few weeks. At one's age, one likes to have young people about one!

Success will not change me. I will remain insufferably arrogant, opinionated and vain. You wouldn't want me any other way. If I can make such qualities of use to my fellow artists, makers and - by extension - humanity, then how Canne I say Non? In the film I am pursued across a archetypal East Anglian winter landscape by a woman. She is more nemesis than fury, but all the more a nemesis for that. I can't wait.

The photo shows my massive-award winning young cousin Robb Leech (director of My Brother the Islamist) in Edinburgh with me last summer. He'd just got the award. I'd just finished a punishing Fringe run. The mise en scene (oh we get all the in-terms here) is Igg's Spanish bar on Jeffrey St. I am not at all jealous of my six year old upstart relative, as you can see.

Lucy in the sky and John

2011-12-21T19:34:00.009Z

I've been watching the fairy bulbs grow into the gloom
Of this Cotswold Christmas city street middle afternoon
And it made me think of you.

Poets are finding it hard to get a place, still
(I'm chiding late schoolboys)
And still see beauty's face a dark looking glass through.

It's been a long time since 1631,
Since metaphysics met a physics you never knew,
But what you didn't do remains undonne.

Gloucester 1981

Ha ha, that had you. Not St John Lennon or LSD or even Lucille Ball but John Donne's timeleless winter solstice poem Nocturnal on St Lucie's Day (the shortest day, today) or rather my own take on it 350 years later. Anniversarie For John Donne on St Lucy's Day. I wrote this poem thirty winter solstices ago today. We are all becoming history. We are all slipping into the dark...

Photo note: Not Cotswolds in the 80s but Norfolk now, it that's not an oxymoron in a place that often feels timeless. This is the twin of the summer solstice photo I took in a slightly warmer dusk six months ago (see blog June 21.) A lot of wassail under the bridge since then. More solstice-celebration in Poem of the Month for December in the main site.

from Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Hearts Club Bang

2011-12-17T10:13:00.013Z

Christmas morning 1963. The Spectre children have hardly slept. After hours tossing and turning, pretending they are waiting to catch Dad as Santa but really just aching for it to be Christmas morning, they peer around the door of the small living room, its neatly wallpapered surfaces and soberly plastered ceiling a magical garden of decorations. There is the scent of earth and pine. The presents are piled up under the tree like fairytale treasure. The lights on the tree radiate happiness so intense it hurts.

Note and quiz question: this is from a just-about ready new novel about the Sixties where Christmases during the decade get revisited. The Fab Force was mainly at Christmas No. 1 in the album charts 1963-1969. But their signature album Sergeant Pepper was actually replaced at the top by an LP that competed for the top spot with every Beatle album from Beatles For Sale (which came out in 1964) to The Beatles (White album, which came out in 1968) and which is therefore arguably a rival as period soundtrack. What was it? Let me know via the comment box. I think you'll be surprised. Clue High on the hill...?

Under Weigh

2011-12-10T20:57:00.004Z

Under weigh - when a ship has drawn its anchors from their moorings, and started on its voyage. (Brewer). I just tweeted this. It's a full moon and a triple eclipse so it seemed like a good idea. I was worried it might be a bit trivial. As everyone is getting their knickers in a twist about X Factor on there (and that's just the men) I think was worrying unnecessarily.

An Appointment With Mr Dylan

2011-11-28T10:50:00.012Z

Rubber Soul type photo taken before and at the recent Hammersmith Apollo Dylan concert by ace photographer Howard Thomas (pictured, bald, no specs ) Dani Thomas, Melanie Calway and the bard on the wire (bald, specs.) Debbie and Thomas Leech joined the photograph later (see next post).

Homage to Adomah

2011-11-27T10:01:00.004Z

adomah mid flow
a wind in the scarlet leaves
that stirs a whole crowd

Wot no picture?. The haiku IS the picture.

32nd Anniversary

2011-11-26T07:55:00.009Z

Real Wife

'So you, you say you wanna be married...' (Hendrix)

We're not the teen-dream lovers of the songs
And films n’ soaps n’ mills n' boons n’ ads,
The 'hunters' living with their mums and dads,
The twenty-something dramas, dinging-dongs,
The sizzling catalogues of straps and thongs,
The Darcys, Juliets and golden lads
In modern strip from tales in which the cads
Are fifty-odd like us and cause all wrongs.

Our story didn't end like these above
In frozen celebrations, wedding-deaths;
We've raised a daughter into Now and Next,
We're grownups grown together, more or less,
Our romance is a realistic text:
A dangerous, married, grail-quest of true love.

Notes: If I hadn't been so happily married, I would probably have written much better poems about it. It's a bit like being the 'official' poet of something. You write worthily and triumphantly but not with the aching heart that Yeats tells us creates a changeless work of art. It's a bothersome thought that most of the masterpieces come out of suffering the pangs of love rather than enjoying a 32nd anniversary dinner: the Taj Mahal, almost every pop song worthy of the name (Hendrix's 50th Anniversary, all of Elvis Costello, Sinatra's torch songs for Ava Gardner, Lennon's 'Girl' rather than his mature - and soppy - 'Woman' etc), Romeo and Juliet, Leila and Majnu, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2, Inferno (which for all its doom beats Paradiso as a work of art every time). Our culture is much better at visions of hell and purgatory than heaven. That's what's wrong with it. Luckily as far as my own creative work is concerned I have the twenty three years before marrying Melanie and most of what happened at work after doing so to provide the spur to the Pegasus flank and fly. All that said, this effort, my favourite from an annual anniversary sequence abandoned at 50, conveys something of the ongoing spur of marriage. After all, as a Sikh once told me on a train to Mumbai, marriage is not the wedding or the honeymoon or even the next 32 years: it's the work of a lifetime.

A Home Win

2011-11-17T18:23:00.001Z

What does a home win smell like?

It smells like cider.
It smells like the Nova before the tobacco ban.
It smells like November in August, sweet as the blackberries that came and went untasted, coming back on the rain.
It smells like the river under Clifton's suspension bridge of disbelief, at the turn of the tide, flooding out towards the sea.
It smells like the turf of Ashton Park.
It smells like home

Earthquakes In London review

2011-11-17T13:57:00.008Z

http://glitterazi-culturevulture.tumblr.com/

Earthquakes in London. We saw this exhilarating Brecht-tinged Dionysia in Cambridge Arts Theatre last week and the review (link above: you will probably need to copy and paste it) by Culture Vulture on the Glitterazi website, says it all for me. All I'm adding here is my photo of Trafalgar Square's lion with the improvement made by last spring's indignatos

An Appointment With Mr Yeats

2011-10-21T13:13:00.014Z

It's a sad fact that collaborations can divide rather than multiply and there was every chance that this unlikely merger of the wonderful Waterboys and the incomparable Yeats would come up with neither and less. But it's a triumph. Every time Kate Kim sings the word 'Politics' every ounce of what Yeats meant by 'Oh that I were young again and held her in my arms' hits the spot. And Innisfree as a blues? Genius. And the rhythms of Come away , come away at the top of the album make you want to believe in all that Celtic twilight whimsy Yeats brought to its apotheosis before moving on to become the greatest Romantic of the Twentieth century, and a Modernist the equal of Eliot. Before the World Was Made sung once by Mike Scott and then Katie Kins and then together kind of makes Yeats' point. And the playing's vintage Waterboys. It's the Waterboys AND Yeats and AND something more than the sum of these parts. I haven't stopped playing it for two weeks and unless my wife threatens to leave me on that account I can't see that changing any time soon. A supreme vindication of cheek and of not letting anyone's reputation stop you from trying to approach what they did in the cheeky way they did in the first place. Romantic Ireland's not dead and gone or with the Yeats Heritage industry: it's here smelling of Yeatsian Roses.

2011-10-16T21:06:00.007Z

Sedgeford October

somewhere mellow between

the end of the overblown blackberries

and

the start of the harvested leaves

fused flies

on clinical sills

hint at bleached sun

and

in the hedges

thistle winds to come

to eyes trained on histrionic heights

of Welsh adolescence,

this stubborn serenity,

these mediaeval colours

are

endlessly reassuring:

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole

wild chords of geese in its folds;

the flinty, dependable noun

behind mists of adjectives

Just noticed that I missed out October in my Poem of the Month this year. So I'll sneak it in here and hope I get away with it. It's very much an end of October poem anyway, especially this year when it's been like the Costa del Sol half the time. This poem hung in our local Sedgeford pub for years and got read in another local pub (Ringstead's Gin Trap) this year. I'm putting together a calendar of Norfolk poems: this one will be very hard to shift off the October page.

Caz Captures The Last Boudicca

2011-09-21T11:19:00.014Z

Ace photographer and Brighton fashion icon Caz captures Fringe veteran Gaz as he gives his final Boudicca to the cool and kooky of Edinburgh on Friday 26 August.

Three Weeks Late

2011-09-17T08:17:00.010Z

ThreeWeeks - the Edinburgh Fringe review magazine - have published their review of Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming, which they saw on Wednesday 24 August. It's three weeks after the run ended so its not going to boost my audiences now but those who saw it may be interested, particularly the great crowd I had in that night. Best front row ever - guys you know who you are. If you want to read the less flattering bits, it's on their site and probably the Fringe site too. I also publish here the Scotsman's August 24 review of the brother show Arthur, seen August 16, which still hasn't appeared online so if you want to recover the less glowing - but fair - bits, you'll have to dig up the paper yourself. This proper big newspaper review feels like a pat on the head from a grown up, even though the reviewer was probably half my age.

ONE MAN AND HIS MASKS; BOUDICCA; BRITAIN'S DREAMING ***

Boudicca’s story is reinvented as a punk fable in this history lesson/political speculation. When Calway speaks about Boudicca’s tale itself, he’s impassioned, ruthless and funny, close to a poetic ‘Horrible History’ book. The direction is energetic – particularly the clownish interactions with the ‘Masks’. ThreeWeeks Sunday 11 September 2011

ONE MAN AND HIS MASKS; ARTHUR BRITAIN’S MAKING ***
Delving into British history, this is slam poetry with a patriotic twist. Attempting to tell what is essentially the story of Britain from the time of Arthur to the present, this madcap production combines tales of the ancient world with football chants and sports commentary.
... What is clearly a long-held passion for the glittering career of a great king is told in an arresting way... (Calway) races from the heat of battle to a cricket match; from the valleys of Wales to John O'Groats, and on to Land's End.
Despite the confusion, this interpretation is full of boyhood glee. It is a yarn well spun, with a few stiches dropped, but vibrant and poetic enough to be a commendable effort.
Catriona MacLeod
The Scotsman Weds 24 Aug 2011

POSTSCRIPT A slightly longer of Catriona MacLeod's original print review has finally turned up on online on the following website
http://thepineapplewashot.tumblr.com/post/11065598132/theatre-one-man-and-his-masks-arthur-britains
Her other reviews are well worth reading too.

Receding Fringe?

2011-09-10T06:36:00.010Z

After twenty nine days at the Edinburgh Fringe, treading cobbles in the rain to granite cellars to watch more shows in one day than I’ve seen in the previous year, while performing two shows of my own, I’m back to gentle Norfolk sunshine.
My chief impression is that ‘Fringe’ no longer describes it. Mainstream stand up by people off the telly, pantomimes, children’s shows, safe reassuring comedy are the shows that bring in the coach-load audiences blocking up the elegant narrow genteel streets. Alternative comedy and challenging theatre is everywhere but most of it attracts the kind of audiences that ensure the Fringe average stabilises at three. The alternative New York underground legend Lach - a countercultural mid evening show and witching hours cellar cabaret – is critically acclaimed as the essence of Fringe but played to more empty seats than walked out of some of the larger commercial promotions. Empty vessels make the most noise? And even then the group of brainless drunks who had their photo taken with Big brother ‘star’ Pete, outside before talking loudly through the first twenty minutes of Lach’s heartwarming and kooky show had to be given the option of pursuing their quest of vacuous celebrity elsewhere by Lach himself. ‘I’ll turn my back and if you’ve attended by mistake you can disappear’ – which they duly did to relieved applause from the rest of the house. ‘They were sucking my energy, man.’ The audience’s too.
I saw a physical theatre production of Steven Berkhoff’s Agamemnon that was so stunningly good I attended it twice. Twice more than the reviewer who arrived late, fell distractingly asleep in front of me, and then left after twenty minutes. The cramped venue ensured that all of the work the performers did at floor level was not seen by anyone further away than the front row – and, if they were that reviewer, not even by them – but everything about this production was fresh, vibrant, starry, young, brilliantly new: the kind of multi arts and innovative experience the Fringe should foster. It was well supported but hardly registered in a city devoted to celebrity reruns – not to mention shambolic imitations - of what audiences already see on TV all the time.
The star system the reviewers use can make or break you at the box office but it lacks any objective criteria – witness shows that get one star in the Scotsman and Three Weeks and four stars from some of the sixth form publications. That wouldn’t happen at A level: or let’s hope not. If the performer is famous, and therefore the house is full, there are already stars in the reviewers’ eyes. More worryingly, ‘weird’ seems to be a reviewer negative – is this the Fringe or Top of the Pops? - and among all the thousands of mega-bankrolled advertising campaigns fronting the big shows and the modest ones fronting the little shows, I read of one obscure one man effort that got hammered as ‘an exercise in self-publicity!’
Henry the Hoover and Friends was genuine kooky comedy and Shakespeare’s Monkeys combined joyously skilful Shakespearean acting with a two woman audience-interactive politically incorrect stand up which debunked everything from celebrity cookery programmes to Dame Judy preciousness (no offence to the real Judy)– the use of spoons instead of daggers for Macbeth a moment of comic heaven – in a way that would have had the Bard himself chortling with joie de vivre. Significantly, both of these were part of the Free Fringe and this may well be the future of the Fringe spirit (though apparently the Scotsman doesn’t review the Free stuff). Money corrupts and it also corporatizes. It’s a bit like punk rock – what started as a shocking deconstruction of culture has become, through audience demand and promoter control, a sentimental replay of reassuring Punk Hits.

My best night at the Fringe

2011-09-01T13:32:00.007Z

Lach's Antihoot Line-Up for Tonight (Thursday Night): A Fantastic Night of Top Comics and Songwriters!
BULLETIN: TONIGHT: 1/2 Price TKTS (only £6!) plus a full bar!
"Top Five Late Night Shows at Fringe"- The List
"Five Stars!"- The Herald
Thurs.Aug.18- 1) Trevor Browne, 2) Bob Fletcher, 3) Kaley Northcott , 4) James Hazelden, 5) Abie Philbin Bowman, 6)-Alev Lenz, 7) Gareth Calway , 8) The Vans, 9) Nick Sun, 10) Laura Theis, 11)Tom Oakes, 12) Dan Wright
August 18 at 12:26pm

PS In Norfolk, I usually go to bed at 10 pm. Here, I was onstage behind a mic rocking for Boudicca at 2 am, and we were still celebrating at 4 am. I think we even helped some young ladies create an arts installation out of repressive traffic cones until a police car approached. Then we went home like students a third of our age to tea and toast as dawn came up over the Firth of Forth. Magic.

Nearing Half Time

2011-08-16T12:36:00.007Z

The ref's just looking at his watch as Arthur and Boudicca come up to half time. It's raining - again. I'm beginning to wonder if there are any actual punters in Edinburgh or whether every audience is actually just a collection of performers in other shows temporarily 'resting' from their own sales pitches, showcasing, flyer-ing and performing. If so, what is the collective noun for such an audience. An ego of performers? A fringe of viewers? An Edinburgh of punters?

Seriously, if anyone who has ever enjoyed any aspect of my work is in Edinburgh this week and wants to see the Arthur show, Saturday is a really good day. The Scotsman is reviewing it and it would be great if she had a big audience around her as she does so.

PS (added later) A very fair review from the Scotsman and three much appreciated stars. A great audience too, some of them such good performers themselves that if I'd known in advance I might have been too scared to go on at all. But I'm very glad I did.

Gin Trap Folk

2011-07-27T11:15:00.011Z

I usually keep this gig quiet as it feels more like an evening at home with friends than a public event but I feel bound to sing the praises of Norfolk folk before I head north to Auld Reekie for a month of Fringe. Last night's monthly session at the Gin Trap Inn, Ringstead, was particularly brilliant with no less than three rootsy folk versions of Lennon-McCartney songs - Let Me Roll It, Norwegian Wood (well she would wouldn't she?) and Get Back - that make you realise how folk-inspired the greatest pop band of all time actually were. And much else besides - a harp, sea shanties, blues, group sing-alongs, Sloop John B with every kind of vocal and instrumental accompaniment - they even let me bang my bodhran- unaccompanied ballads, Italian love songs a capello from the lurvely landlord, endless good humour and banter and a place for poetry too. We have the timeless folk tradition on our doorstep in these parts and even if most of us are Sixties and Seventies veterans and getting on a bit, it doesn't look like ending any time soon. Performing the 'rap' below with the whole pub joining me on the 'life is a bitch' refrain (very funny when you see and hear a pub growling this in unison) was one of the high spots of my performing life and the very best confidence-booster to send me off to represent Sedgeford at the Edinburgh Fringe. Let's hear it for Gin Trap Folk! Cock-a-doodle-do! (or whatever you call that sound that pheasants make)

In the gloom before work, let the radio play,
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

The longer I live the more I must say,
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Ruin hath taught me to thus ruminate
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Twenty years of schooling merely dictate
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Flowers will wither and teeth will decay.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Everything passes; your heart still aches.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

You mortgage three decades then death awaits.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

You dream siren-holidays: the alarm clock awakes.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

You want the Maracana: you get Ashton Gate.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

A shop-till jingle with words by Yeats,
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

In the name of love, you self-procreate,
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

You lose the plot, like Chandler, like Blake,
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

The Kylie bird sings and no guitar breaks.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Saturday ends in a month of Sundays.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

I came here for Eden and got Bill Gates.
Life is a bitch but the songs are great.

Life is a bitch but the songs are great.
Let the heartstrings soar, the brass (or in this case, the folk) resonate.

King Arthur Rides Out: Holt Festival

2011-07-26T11:59:00.006Z

King Arthur (One Man and His Masks Part 2) Rides Out - and more sure footedly than a world premiére might though I have been preparing it since March 2010. Holt Festival is a very good place to be: securely organised, energetic and with lots of sell out houses and I believe I was the first act of its Ubergrandanonium. King Arthur to the fore as always. The long applause at the end and even a whistle (this is becoming a trend and I'm all for it) made brave music in my ears. Norfolk audiences, as I know from my years in the Sedgeford pantomime, often give no indication whatsoever of what they're feeling throughout a show but then thunder out their approval at the end. So my heart was in my mouth for much of this but it's beating as a steady as an Arthurian gallop now, ready for anything - even the Edinburgh fringe.

Sedgeford as the year turned

2011-07-11T16:42:00.011Z

This photo was taken at 10.03 pm on Midsummer Night at the moment our garden and cottage slipped through the summer solstice and began the long journey back towards December dusks of 3.30 pm. No rush. That blue was a midsummer night's dream...

Press release for One Man and His Masks at the Edinburgh Fringe

2011-07-11T07:49:00.008Z

One Man and His Masks – Parts One and Two
Published novelist, poet, playwright and Bardic storyteller Gareth Calway returns to Edinburgh with the mother and father of an alternative-history show in repertory on alternate nights at theSpaces@Surgeon’s Hall: One Man and His Masks Part 1: Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming and Part 2: Arthur; Britain’s Making.
Bold, punchy and razor sharp, Calway retells early British history via modern storytelling, nonstop one man theatre and a nod to Greek tragedy. Part One brings the oft-misnamed, less-oft sung British heroine centre stage: Boudicca, the Celtic queen, re-imagined through a feminist lens and in the rhythms of the Clash. Part 2 presents a story the British can’t put down as you’ve never seen – or heard - it before: Arthurian legend through the medium of a sports commentator. Both shows pose the questions of who tells a story, why do we need hero(in)es and how important are our own perspectives when studying the past.
Treat your imagination to two legends of Britishness prompted by the mighty power of word, mask and prop. The huge primitive masks provide an extreme edge to Celtic tales that have been diluted through English history and moulded to agenda. The masks – beautiful visual art installations in themselves - juxtapose the ritual of theatre with a mythical, transcendental element evoking the god(ess) in both protagonists. The Celt - instead of being a grotesque in a Roman story - takes over the narrative. Arthur’s story –always partly a Roman (and later a Norman) one – has its Celtic roots re-boosted through Bardic narration.
Refreshing as it is Brechtian-sharp, Calway combines various voices: feminist, sports commentator, wonderstruck boy and detached historian together to the make the audience conscious of who is telling the story.
Arthur combines 1960s dream heroes with feisty punk goddesses while Boudicca has a punky, razor edge born of the Clash and post feminism all shot through a lens of Celtic lyricism. Both shows will resonate with anyone who loves music, punk, history or theatre. You certainly won’t leave thinking you’ve ‘heard that one before’ but you may well see the Britain these heroes founded in a new light………
www.garethcalway.co.uk 2011-12 Tour

USPs
• An alternative telling of history
• Lost identity/ what is Britishness?
• Unique medium – merging verse, storytelling, visual arts, music, theatre and humour

YouTube extract from Boudicca- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsY5YlvXsL8

Will Ye No Come Back Again?

2011-07-11T07:23:00.011Z

The Rest Is History

The rest is history, or Arthur Mee legend.
A lost summer country hollow Inn,
The Green Man, cheering on a Great British win,
An Avalon that isn’t there in the morning;
A dream awoken to this light’s cold day
Where in spite of my shin-struck, wounded need
For thundering hooves in defence of these islands,
He doesn’t come back. And he was never
Called Arturus Rex, whoever he was,
And in some accounts, not even ‘Arthur’.
And he was never mediaeval and never a king.
And who cares? Not Me. I stand on this tumulus
Of boyhood, layers of chalk written on clay,
Craters and knolls, his monk-buried legend
Scarred in my flesh, his doubt-defying
Desperate defence of wonder (which
Is what he was) an earth ditch like mine;
His weapons, toys of tin and
strapped wood and skin,
Like mine, on a May hill that may have been Badon
And may have not, blades
of peaceful grass troubled only -
And not just now - by rain, wind and ghosts
And a White Horse, God-large in memory,

God-large still.

This is from The Lost Land, the text (or libretto if we're being arty) of Arthur; Britain's Making. The show premiéres at the Holt Festival on Monday 25 July. High noon. 45 minutes. Free but you gotta book. boxoffice@holtfestival.org 01263 711284 website www.holtfestival.org - look in the ubergrandanomium section. I put together various Celtic British voices for Arthur and his knights and goddesses and ladies for the show and this particular one - suggested by the romantic vision that vanishes with the morning mist 'he does not come back' comes out as Scottish and with a Skye boat song lilt. I grew up in Somerset and visited Westbury White Horse frequently. The prehistoric White Horse carved in the hillside was indeed as large as God and when I went back to Frome on the train a few years ago the horse, seen from the railway line, seemed just as epic. So a fair amount of the show comes out in a West country voice but there is much Scottish material in this great British legend and the hero fights as many battles from the north as he does from the West. Sir Gawain of Orkney, Arthur's Seat and all that Celtic jazz. This continuing defence of daring and wonder travels to Edinburgh and the Celtic fringe to join its sister show, Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming, at venue 53 theSpace@Surgeons' Hall on 6 August.

Poet In School in Cordoba

2011-06-14T14:49:00.001Z

Article coming soon. I've had worse gigs!

http://www.sirenonline.co.uk/-reading-room repeat

2011-05-19T15:50:00.004Z

Repeat of the Reading Room broadcast that closed the Lincoln Book Festiavl last Sunday is on Siren FM 107.3 tonight from 8 pm and also at http://www.sirenonline.co.uk/section/shows/the-reading-room
Boudicca is on about 5 to 10. Further repeat from 10 am Sunday and my bit will be at 5 to noon.

Boudicca at Lincoln

2011-05-16T09:12:00.006Z

'The Reading Room' is an event run by Lincoln's community radio station Siren 107.3 FM and broadcast last night to the world. The event also closed the 2011 Lincoln Book Festival and as I was last on, I can claim to have the closed the festival, something my Norfolk heroine - Boudicca - certainly did in AD 60 when she wiped out the Ninth Legion. Lincoln is a big city for us, coming out of our Norfolk village for the day, and it is certainly a happening modern place but it still feels very Roman and mediaeval and the historical buildings and glimpses of buried Romnan walls - and the Miss Marple tea rooms - all add to this effect. We loved it, even if Boudicca seems (as so often though perhaps here more understandably than usual) written out of the his story. The kaleidoscopic stained glass of the Cathedral windows was just as described in Lawrence's The Rainbow and after the welcoming smile at the door no-one rugby tacked you for a fiver before they let you in. The Bishop Greave theatre where the Reading Room was broadcast and staged is part of the University College and took me back to gap year Sunday afternoons gate-crashing Weymouth Teacher Training College residences in 1975 visiting a girlfriend: probably the combination of being very there (psyching myself up for an evening performance) and not there at all (modern students living a life for me gone by.) There were fourteen performers in all and I enjoyed the passionate acts of communication taking place. Being a writer /performer is a solitary life so it was good to share it as a community like this. As my own bardic persuasion has moved more and more into narrative, theatre and sound/music, I have half forgotten how good it is sometimes to just present an image, how eloquent and timeless the haiku end of the poetic spectrum can be. There was plenty of that and also some well told stories from very different places than my own furrows and we got some humour in the second half too and a striking singer songwriter with great lyrics and a great voice in both halves. I loved every second of my my eight minutes of Boudicca on voice and punk bodhran at the end knowing that the microphone was broadcasting it to the world (I had emails from Spain and Wales when I got home) as well as to the generous theatre audience in front of me. This is a community radio station that really cares about community and a community we certainly were. And it's going out as a podcast so all you need to do is click in the link on the Siren radio webpage and you can experience it anywhere in the world all over again - even (my dear Uncle Tom) in darkest Weymouth.

Boudicca Live At Bishop Greaves Theatre Lincoln

2011-05-15T07:40:00.001Z

I'm getting the old Union Jack T shirt on again this evening at the Bishop Greave Theatre, Lincoln, doors open 6.45 pm, in a live radio performance as part of Siren 107.3 FM's Reading Room event at the Lincoln Festival. The Reading Room LIve is live on air 7.30 pm. Yes, I have a face for radio and a T shirt and white shoes too but there is Method in my Bardness - while mainly a radio event there is also a theatre audience present and some filming going on and Simon Crawford's superb masks are always worth introducing to the public gaze. I'm doing my favourite excerpt from the show, 'In The City' and into 'The Anarchy Tour' where the idea of Boudicca's revolt as a punk rock tour is probably at its strongest. It will be good to do this just as punk voice and drum at the mic withut having to worry too much about theatre visuals - web cam notwithstanding. Boudicca's greatest military triumph was arguably when (after burning down Colchester) she annihilated an actual professional Roman army - the Ninth Legion - that marched out from Lincoln after the sack of Colchester to teach her a lesson. So as we drive up there today from Norfolk, her ancient Iceni heartland, there may well be a few ghosts with me, especially hers. The Boudicca excerpt will close the show which stages two hours of five minute readings and which runs from 7.30 to 9.30. I guess Boudicca will be setting fire to Lincoln from 9.20 approx. Further information about the event as a whole on www.readingroom.podbean.com

Man Friday: 25% Extra Large Easter Triptych

2011-04-26T08:52:00.013Z

1. A Jolly Good Friday

Jesus was an Englishman,
The Son of Grace (W.G.)
Cured 99 limps on the village green
And a leper before the Last Tea.

Jesus remained an Englishman
Though the crowd’s game wasn’t cricket,
Carried His cross with stiff upper lip
And was only politely anti-Semitic.

2. Easter Saturday: 0-1, 2-1, 2-2.

The team I follow is full of Christians,
Davids and Daniels up against Lions.

A voice in the baying crowd calls “Judas”
As our transferred ex-saviour applauds ex-fans.

Nil one, man down, the game as dead
As a lost twelfth man, the comeback beckons.

On thawing cold feet, we are glory glory singing
It’s all worth it, after all, and then it isn’t.

3. Sunday: Petering Out

Nailed upside down at dawn,
The cockerel crowing with the crowd,
I tried to speak up for You,
"Love Can Turn The World Around."

Gravel-voiced but choked
Out of a throat of clay
I threw my word of rock
Too hard, too hard, away.

Now across this sheer water,
A crystal light
Turns and returns
Upon memory's tide.

My father is fishing
Still waters at sunrise.
He turns and winks:
I fear no evil when he is with me.

What voice sounding sure
In the depths of my heart
Drowns the distant breaking
Of a shell's lost cry?

4. Easter Mundane

Nothing happens.
I don't feel a thing.
The rock doesn't roll.
The angels don't sing.

Good Friday isn't bad.
Saturday hangs on
A Sunday that rises
But not for long.

The hiker at the crossroads
Asks for directions
Down unbridled Ways
To no destinations.

The cyclist’s windy map
Winds in endless rotation
Of his pre-booked, unmarked
Predestination.

The City gets hammered.
I don't feel a thing.
The cock can't crow
And no angels sing.

Notes: This little sequence came out of the Unsunny Easter of 2003 originally. The only consistency with 2011 is my team's Easter form. The glorious sunshine and recollectable emotion of Easter Friday and Saturday 2011 will have to ferment in the memory a while before it blooms into verse. Or maybe won't have to? I've rewritten 'Easter Mundane' though I think retained the original impulse - that post holiday void which is also the post-Christian void. I read an Easter Saturday 1972 poem (by Tom Leech, pictured) many years ago in which a crowd of pub-punters talk about a 'transferred' player who, the reader gradually twigs, is Jesus. As with many early works of my Uncle Tom I've tried to do something similar. (see 'Guernsey Tom' an account of an attempt on the hippy trail that peters out in Guernsey.) The picture shows Tom earlier this year in India, one of the few holy lands I got to before him. 'Petering Out' fuses St Peter's story with a rare and precious memory of fishing with my father at Shearwater Lake near Longleat, Wilts, one Sunday morning about a hundred years ago.

One Man and His Masks at the Holt Summer Festival

2011-04-21T14:57:00.007Z

One Man And His Masks Part Two; Arthur; Britain's Making gets its premiére at the Holt Summer Festival at noon on Monday 25 July at Gresham's Pre-Prep School. Just before going up for its run at the Fringe. Here's a shot of a rehearsal in the gardens of Ancyrian a mystical Celtic cottage in North West Norfolk, believed to have been once inhabited by the Celtic gods Ann and Cyril.

The show is Bardic storytelling with one man theatre, poetry, some posing with a toy sword and shield and a bit of Celtic drumming/ folky vocals. The invisible sword Excalibur - 'blade of lightning' - appears as does the invisible magical white stallion Hengroen on which Arthur rode to battle. It might look more like the groin of a chap in cricket whites stretched over a wheelchair to you but after all we're in Cervantes Don Quixote territory here. Bring your imagination because this is where most of this romance and Celtic legend is staged.

A Jolly Good Friday

2011-04-21T08:52:00.008Z

Jesus was an Englishman,
The Son of Grace (W.G),
Cured ninety nine limbs on the village green
And a leper, before the Last Tea.

Jesus remained a gentleman
Though the crowd's game wasn't cricket,
Carried His cross with stiff upper lip
And was only politely anti-Semitic.

Here's wishing everyone a jolly Good Friday. I wrote this in 1982 not long after an Arvon writing course at Easter in Totleigh Barton in Devon (still a very fond memory) around the time I was doing readings at the Barge Semington in Gloucester. You had to fairly pithy or the good natured Gloucester crowd would tell you to pith off. It was published in 'Exile In His Own Country' (Bluechrome, 2006) though it never made it into the Church Times. I was young and naive and couldn't understand how Christianity could get to the pogroms from a Jewish Messiah born of Jewish parents with Jewish apostles. I am older and worldlier now and this sort of ingenuity no longer surprises me. Nevertheless, out of the mouths of babes...

It's My Birthday And I'll Write A Ghazal If I Want To

2011-03-29T08:39:00.007Z

My heart belongs to an angel, her golden wrist like a rose,
Her body held in a soft flame of stillness, freed in a pose.

My heart belongs to an angel, unfastened hair like a tide,
Whose fingers fly out of time's rut: and pluck my heart as it blows.

My heart belongs to an angel, her mouth a kiss that won't stop;
Her ears in whispering curls hear what only Lovers propose.

My heart belongs to an angel, whose neck is softer than sky;
She turns to me like a planet, and everything else explodes.

My heart belongs to an angel who trails her heavenly scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer endlessly roves.

O hart, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You're stripped of even your held breath, and kiss what God alone knows.

Notes. This is from an Arthurian play for teenagers. I was working on it today and added a verse about the musk deer, the one whose navel dispenses a heavenly scent. There is a story of one desperately pursuing this scent all its life and then, in the moment of death, realising, blissfully, where the scent was situated. This is an Eastern story and the poetic form here is the exotic and anything but under-stated ghazal, a form which combines tight control in its metre and rhyme scheme with rhapsodic/ mystical exprssion of the heart. The form is said to have inspired the Renaissance Italian sonnet from its base in the nightingale and garden culture of Persia at a time when the Arabs were teaching us - among other things - chivalry towards women. It seems of a piece with the romance tradition that enriched and extended (though never quite unseated) the Matter of Britain in Norman times. The magical idea of questing a hart that flits through the forest as an allegory of a lover's pursuit of the beloved is close to the Grail Quest itself. I use this ghazal in the play to suggest the two years Sir Gawaine spends wrecking his youth and health in such a pursuit. I keep seeing a deer in the fields across the lane where I live darting away behind the daffoldils in the sunshine. It's not a vision - we sometimes get stray deer in the low hills over our village - but it certainly looks like one.

Once In A Blue Moon

2011-03-20T09:41:00.003Z

Blimey, that was a big one. Sedgeford, Norfolk, March 19 2011.

The quest of the red hart

2011-03-19T08:09:00.005Z

The robin flutters east to choir his team,
Through sunset’s rose and night-denying dream.

The Sunday School turns East to praise a word
That weeps in blood between the lines that seem.

The nun retreats to heart-denying cell
And turns to God her blushes and her beam.

The King St lover walks where lights are red
But will not stop him daring for his Queen.

The rhyming market trader sells his soul
And scarlet ribbons to a lonely teen.

The cat scales down the great sun’s glowing fire
To purring window’s perfect-bedded dream.

The hart pursues her navel’s heaven scent
To hell and back to where she’s always been.

Oh Bard, don’t preach the way to go to Sea
When home is where each hart is, by the stream.

Notes: On Monday I drove 45 Norfolk miles to Norwich to watch a football match (Bristol City - the Robins - lost 3-1, though that's not how I saw it.) For most people that would be it and it was certainly more than enough. Not me. I carry this poem around like a headache all week and finally locate the ache somewhere nearer the bottom - of my heart - and write the thing by the light of an amazing full moon in the early hours of Saturday morning. It's not easy being a poet you know. The form, for those who care about such things, is the Persian ghazal, a highly disciplined yet intoxicating Urdu love lyric much used by Hafiz and with pretensions - in Hafiz's case real aspirations - to the Divine. The 'message' is based on a Meher Baba discourse called The Deeper Aspects of Sadhana. This includes the tale of the Kasturi-mriga (the deer whose navel yields musk) fatally pursuing the divine scent thinking it was outside herself and whose realisation of its true location on dying brought 'inexpressible peace.' So Mr Calway's day/night out in Norwich as seen through the prism of the story of the Kasturi-mriga.

Ephemera?

2011-03-12T11:39:00.031Z

A moment in the life of Prince of Wales Road, Norwich, ( 7.05 pm, March 10 AD 2011.) Prince of Wales was the road taken by we two UEA alumni to meet Melanie's 'old' history teacher from the 1960s, appropriately a princely Welshman from Cardiff and - in defiance of all the other evidence here - still sporting a determined head of curly hair. History shall not pass.

Sick To The AA Gills of This Metropolitan Prejudice

2011-03-06T14:24:00.003Z

I don’t have the advantage of The Sunday Times’ ‘Table Talk’ correspondent AA Gill’s sneering metropolitan ‘insight’ into Norfolk. I only live here. Nor of his gastronomic critique of The Rose and Crown, Snettisham. I only eat there once a week and pretty much every special occasion. (Lest this appear incestuous - a term he uses with rather more freedom than evidence- I also regularly eat in London and other major cities where restaurants offering half this range and quality charge three times as much for the privilege. ) I do not have the advantage of Mr Gill’s national platform from which to fire a Broadside against this beautiful rolling landscape. (Yes, rolling. The Fens like the Hereward the Wake he places here in North West Norfolk are actually much further south, in Ely, which is in Cambridgeshire and in any case have a unique 180 degrees skyline and sense of freedom that metropolitan city dwellers typically long for. ) But I hope an inhabitant of what he variously slanders as both Narnia and Hernia will be allowed to ‘do different ‘ (Norfolk’s motto) and challenge his narrative with an alternative one, a habit championed in the past by the various heretic voices he demonises. Julian of Norwich, pioneering proto-Protestant female prose writer and ageless mystic, Thomas Paine, proto-democrat and prophetic author of Common Sense – all of it now adopted common practice - whom he belittles – and Boudicca, whom he omits, possibly because after invasive deracinating outsiders (Romans) had insulted and robbed her of herself, she burned down the London they came from, a London that had sold its soul to bankers, tiled floors, square urbanity and monuments. Gill has some deep problem with Norfolk that appears to distort his perceptions so much that I simply do not recognise the one he describes. Perhaps he should have a psychiatric treatment – or maybe just an eye test? Or just a pint of the Rose and Crown’s excellent Broadside ale – a sure cure for the bile of his ‘London Pride.’ (The latter guest ale is as excellent as all six real ales and the twenty nine fine wines served by the Rose and Crown but I think Mr Gill needs something a little more rustic – and stronger). My problem with London is that instead of the homely combination of real pub and cosmopolitan menu that sets the Rose and Crown apart – ever changing, inexhaustibly first class, effortlessly continental but restlessly and excitingly world-cuisine – instead of its two restaurants, two log-fire bars, oak beam and stone thresholds worn down by half a millennium of folk and large modern family area (the only part Gill reports) that the 14th century Rose and Crown offers, you can spend a day trying to find a shop that sells a digital radio before your realise that they are all in Tottenham Court Road: a hundred and one versions of the same shop. And that Leicester Square in the ‘heart’ of London is basically ten giant cinemas and ten thousand tourists and that you will find more of ‘real’ London in Leytonstone – though you won’t find a Rose and Crown worth the name there – or Burnham Market, which up here in Norfolk is known as ‘Chelsea sur le Mer.’ ‘Real’ Burnham Market – the butchers, the unlocked flint Nelson- redolent churches, the playgroup, the school – is a community that really works. The ‘Chelsea’ influx that comes there to exclaim in very loud voices and very loud clothes HOW QUIET IT IS HERE over their overpriced Chablis is one that AA Gill would doubtless feel quite at home in. And one we locals merely enjoy watching with a tolerant smile.

Boudicca at the Norwich Puppet Theatre

2011-02-24T19:28:00.004Z

The Norwich Puppet Theatre staff were as always consummately professional, friendly and helpful all afternoon. I love this venue - a wonderful building (one of Norwich's many converted flint mediaeval churches) and a staff to match. (Not that the staff is mediaeval!) I also got a decent-sized house - with an age range of (I guess) 9 up towards 80. The show is designated 12+ and parents who bring children must certainly be aware of that (the show contains no swearing and nothing that the flyer doesn't boldly declare - but the unflinching detailing of Boudicca's story and the fun had with some of the word-play are definitely not for very little ones. ) All that said, it was great to have a front row of enthusiastic children learning about their unsung heroine whose giggles at the gags turned to rapt attention at the more sombre aspects of the story. And then cracked up again later when Decianus Catus got his bottom spanked. And the older children (ages 12-80?) joined them at the end in the longest applause I think I've ever had. It might well have been my best ever performance of this or any show, the writing felt honed (after years of cutting to the bedrock), the narrative sharp and the masks and flags really do look good under lights. The moving pictures (by all accounts) move in every sense. It's such a relief to get this thing out of bedroom, where I've been rehearsing it for months, and placed before the public ( as the actor said to the bishop). This show is well and truly on the road. Right - you've read the write up. Now get on the phone and book it.

Boudicca Tour: we're off

2011-02-23T09:52:00.004Z

Here's the first set of the tour - and it will be hard to beat. It's an oak circle evoking the Celtic world and not just that - it had the actual 4000 year old Sea Henge just behind the audience. You can see its shadow cast in the floor between the two masks - perfect. I was facing it the whole performance, my Union Jack reflection putting me happily but paradoxically both on-stage and in the audience. So a genuine sense of occasion for the project starter. Tonight Boudicca's royal progress across her old quendom continues to the Norwich Puppet Theatre 01603 629921. It's a very UEA show - my other alma mater - so it's fitting that it should home in now on that fine city.

Blogs are an odd medium: private words on public display. Is it where you honestly reflect/ unbuden or where you give a public smile/ come hither to my show? On this occasion, I am able to honestly say this show feels like the buds beginning on the tree outside my window. A long-incubated blossoming of any writing/performing talents I have. Be there or be a Roman square!

One Man and His Masks CDs and booklet for schools

2011-02-21T15:54:00.006Z

My bardic storytelling tour of Britain 2011-12 gets under way in Norfolk this week with Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming. One Man and His Masks is a verse-based modern retelling of early British history using performance/masks/Celtic drum and aims to present the heritage stories of King Arthur and the relatively unsung British heroine Boudicca to modern teenagers in exciting new ways. Part One tells Boudicca’s revolt against the Romans as a punk rock tour, emphasising the Celtic and matriarchal angle more than the standard Roman view. Part Two tells Arthur’s legend as a sports channel covering the Grail/Cup Final - Camelot City versus Saxon Forest – with commentary, crowd noise, post-match analysis and call ins and emphasising the ancient Celtic more than the traditional Norman versions. Arthur is more boy-friendly and Boudicca is more girl-friendly if those terms mean anything anymore but they’re both designed to appeal to both genders: there’s heaps of battle narrative in the Boudicca and plenty of love poetry in the Arthur. If you can’t get to one of the gigs (full details www.garethcalway.co.uk/ 2011-12 Tour) there are school-friendly studio CDs of both performances, and a lyric booklet for Arthur.

A POSTCARD BACK TO UNIVERSE CITY

2011-02-20T17:55:00.006Z

Dear Howard,
Life in this tough old valley follows its same old course.
The same old Afon Llwyd
Though the ‘llwyd’ is less industrial now.
I would like to say
‘Fresh from my stream of romantic conquests
I am taking the women of the vale by storm’.
(Sigh)

I could settle with sigh, I suppose, and live with my past,
Marry one of the sisters’ friends.
Marry her then, you have to make do
(With clouds of white and dirty linen)
And teach the children to climb and reach
For that slag-heaped grey-sheeped mountain top
Where I went to school before them.
You have to learn to make do in the end.

Through numb and blackened hungover eyes,
I watch the weary sun rise
Over dancing daffodils mistily pale,
Pagan mirages amidst the trees,
Ghosts of the past hymned by the breeze
Over and over mountains that mark, settling with a sigh,
Deep-seated struggles long past.

Immediate post-UEA, June or early July 1978. Intriguingly, it is quite prophetic in that a couple of years later I was teaching at my old school. Briefly. And I did ask one of the sister friends out – actually, I did the UEA thing and just kissed her - and she just said ‘oh, thank you!’ and laughed. So that was the end of that. There was another sister-friend in Lynmouth later that year, already at Uni herself, who was so lovely I did my usual thing of going off on a quest of the red hart forgetting to take her with me. Luckily, she came along anyway, my last valley romance and yet a valley we'd both left.

There’s a lot of my mother in this poem. I don’t think I was the only one who had the (disappearing?) privilege of this sad conflict because of University. The first half of the last line is from my A level Geography notes. The penultimate line includes the word 'mark' which anyone who has played Rugby in the ruck and maul-rolling valleys will know allows its shouter a 'stop the world I want to get off' moment. Usually followed by a crunching late tackle from some human brick outhouse intent on keeping it less than detached.
But you probably came on here to investigate my Boudicca tour: that's the previous post.

A FOOTNOTE ON THE LONG ROMAN MARCH

2011-02-20T17:45:00.005Z

In AD 60 at the time of the Emperor Nero and in his name, in the year of St Paul’s trial for the love of Christ, twenty seven years after the flogging of Jesus for the love of God, the Iceni Queen B’dog... Buddugs... was robbed of her dead husband’s kingdom, tortured, flogged and her nobles enslaved. Her women were sold. Her children were raped. In response, she united half of Celtic Britain in a revolt that shook the Empire, killing some 70,000 Romans. She was a Noble Savage who, like our founding fathers, and unlike our current Emperors, fought for what she believed in. She also gave to the Celtic tribes a British identity in arms only the druids had given them previously in spirit.

The revolt didn’t end happily for the Iceni. Their famously fertile lands made rich by the salt that was the oil of the Ancient commerce - Roman soldiers were even paid in salt, hence the term salary - were now a-salted into wastelands as a punishment. But Boudicca 61 marked a decisive change in Roman rule. Governors were subsequently careful to woo and win over tribes they had previously robbed, raped and slaughtered in their way to the bank.

Notes: this Roman view of Boudicca (a brythonic/Celtic word meaning 'Victory') is from "Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming" which is pilot-touring Boudicca's heartland of Norfolk this week. Boudicca's revolt against the Romans told as a punk rock tour.Tuesday is King's Lynn, Wednesday is Thetford and Wednesday night is Norwich. Details on the main site / 2011-12 Tour. 07790960868 for on the road info.

Pike

2011-02-09T06:41:00.010Z

>

Pike

"Crucify 'im, Pike."
Pike's grin spreads round the pool of faces.
But why is he doing it to me?
I'm all right aren't I?
Now again this thump round the ear for no reason.

Why does he hate me? He always has. Always.
He took my place in the school team
Suddenly breaking into the magic circle
Crowding me out.
He stole my best friend.
Now their sneers double when I try to joke them round
And Pike's so cold when I try to win him over.

Plunge
Into dead white.
Tears held back,
Blood trickling.
A taste of rust and salt in my mouth.

Why can't I hit him back?
It's all I can do to put my fists up
With my holy father holding them down.
But I pushed him then.
"Oh? Want a real fight?"
He grins, surprised

But ruthless.
He seems to plan his whole life around ruining mine.
Like at Recess,
His big mouthy head grinning out at me on the touchline,
Out of the game.

Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek"
And look what happened to Him.
And every recess, ever lunch hour, forever-
A minnow in Pike's school.

I love Jesus
And I try to love Pike.
I even did a bit of his Art for him last lesson.
But I feel no love,
Just a numbed cheek.

"Mr Sharky!"
The circle becomes a taut line.
I get a teacher-clout round the ear for no reason.
It pitches me over the hand rail.
Pike grins.

I get out my new Parker pen Dad gave me for passing
And someone's bent the nib back to breaking point.
It hits like the dull toothache you can't tell teacher about
But it wrecks the lesson.

I can hear my voice break as we sing.

Notes for schools: This is from a collection called 'High School Lows and Highs' It was published by Folens in a schools resource written by James Sale called 'Drama' in the Nineties in which I have the rare honour of being the support act to Shakespeare! 'Drama' is probably still available - and maybe online. However, here, from the poet's mouth-

A good way of describing a person's character is to imagine you are that person. (It's called adopting a persona') Here the thoughts and feelings of a boy being bullied are described as though by the boy himself, while it is happening to him.

What kind of person is the bullied boy?
Why does Pike hate him and pick on him?
What does the last line suggest? (Start with what it actually says. Then what it implies.)

If teachers or students want to get in touch with me abut the poem through my main website (the link is from this blog) there's a contact there.

In readings, I always used to joke that any money I earned from the poem I had to give to Pike.

Ted Hughes' poem 'Pike' does all this the other way round by writing about a real pike - you enter the world of the metaphor completely.

Welsh Rugby

2011-02-08T17:06:00.011Z

Welsh Rugby

John scores a hero's try
and breaks his collarbone.
It's only a Games lesson
but it feels like The Grand Slam.
I took his drive for the line
right on the boil on my upper lip.
"Nasty place to have a boil," muses Terry Cobner,
the Games Master: Pontypool, Wales, Armageddon,
the Great British Lion who taught me everything
like
if I come a second late to his lesson
he hits me so hard on the backside with a redflash dap
I can't even cry with the pain.
Last week, Rhys broke his shin failing to make a mark.
I saw the white bone
hanging out of the skin, and the chunks of blood:
one look was enough.
then up to Ma Kinnock's for 'istory:
leather jacket, hard consonants, Llewellyn the Last and
"well boys, did you see the match - Cardiff and Arsenal?"
(no r in Cardiff, none in Arsenal).
The break she saw me fracture Thomas's nose was the proudest break of my life
but she is as beautiful as the Barley Mountain in spring
and I'm getting to the age when I want to keep my teeth
(I don't want to be Gareth Edwards,
I want to be The Beatles.)
Last week, watching "Terry" hang out of the window
in the middle of another of his recycled RE lessons
yelling at someone on the Rugby field to tackle even harder,
I decided it was easier to study Prince Llewellyn
than to re-enact him on the pitch.
I know already that all peoples (even gentle ones)
who've had their sovereignty stolen by a superior force
produce males who all their lives have to prove
it's no reflection on their manhoods.
It's difficult for the English to understand this.
It's why Rugby isn't cricket in Wales
but War.

From "Exile In His Own Country" Bluechrome 2006

A school contacted me today asking for a poem suitable for Year 10. So I sent this. The shirt in the photo will be performing Arthur;Britain's Making at Venue 53 at the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August 2011. With me inside it.

The Romance Of The Cup

2011-01-29T14:48:00.015Z

I dreamed I saw King Arthur alive as me and thee
And here’s what the once and future said to me.
“Rex quondam ach rexque futurus and never now
When you need me, buried alive
Under the Hawthorns’ hollow-ringing hill
In dreams of bedrock,
Or under this creaking sign of The Green King
Watching my televised Celtic Rangers’
Battle-joined divisions
Win the nationwide Avalon Cider Cup
For their man-uniting
City till they die,
What use am I?
Triple-crown prince of the Lost Lands,
Out-of-printmaster and avatar of Britain.
I sought the Cauldron so long
Its name and Faith changed
To the Holy Grail
And you still haven’t grasped it.
Believe! One and a hundred years will pass
Then you will drink from my Cup at last.”

Notes: This is from 'The Lost Land', the lyric sheet to accompany my new CD 'Arthur;Britain's Making' (published next month, Feb 2011). This version of the extract was published in January in 'Well Red', Bristol City matchday magazine, as part of a planned quest on the Grail, one poem for each stage of the FA Cup. As we got knocked out 4-0 at home to a lower league club from Yorkshire, that concludes the Grail Quest as far as Bristol City are concerned. But - as Arthur hopefully rides again all over Britain up to and including London 2012 - my own quest continues. It starts here. The picture is of Arthur's Seat as seen from Waverley Station in Edinburgh and the show (along with Boudicca) will have ten performances in the Camelot of the North next August. Where? Why, gentle skimmer, at the Surgeon's Hall, within chanting and Celtic-drumming distance of the cafe in which JKR wrote the first volume of Harry Porter. Auspicious. Of course. It didn't work for City. It might still work for me...

windows on the world

2011-01-19T13:19:00.008Z

Taken with a Sony Mavica CD 500. a bit like using an old wooden and leather radio when you can use a tiny MP3 player. Music in a glory box.

Letter To The Guardian

2010-12-23T12:54:00.001Z

Lay off the Pegg

As published in The Guardian, Wednesday 15 December 2010. There is still time to get someone this excellent book.

I have every sympathy with John Harris having to read half a yard of celebrity memoir (How bestsellers lost the plot, G2, 13 December), but he's wrong to include Simon Pegg's Nerd Do Well among the "infantile", "slipshod" works. You can't say these books are published only because the authors are famous and then criticise this author for writing about his real childhood instead of parading his film fame. I've just ordered a copy for my godson, a new teacher, because it tosses into the black hole of the genre an excellent record of how teachers can influence, inspire and amuse the young; a convincing and detailed story of a Gloucestershire childhood; and lots of laughs. I've read "literary" accounts of growing up that are less perceptive, a lot less amusing and no better written.

And the study of his old school tutor and English teacher – pages 34, 82, 175, 176 and 181 – is a classic of its kind.

Gareth Calway

(Simon Pegg's old school tutor and English teacher), Sedgeford, Norfolk)

Anniversarie for John Donne on St Lucy's Day

2010-12-21T15:44:00.003Z

I’ve been watching the fairy bulbs grow into the gloom
Of this Cotswold Christmas city street middle afternoon
And it made me think of you.

Poets are finding it hard to get a place
(I’m chiding late schoolboys) and still see Lucy’s face
A dark looking glass through.

It’s been a long time since 1631
Since metaphysics met a physics you never knew
But what you didn’t do remains undonne.

[Gloucester 1981]

Notes. St Lucy’s Day is December 21, the shortest day of the year. And John Donne’s poem should be written up in solstice lucifers and Christmas tree lights to celebrate - and also this year on the red-tinged lunar eclipse. I always think of it as the dusk comes down on the longest night. It's a poem in which somehow NOTHING IS.

I wrote this little tribute - in a sudden retrieval of self and energy – after getting out on ecstatic parole from a long first term of teaching at Brockworth Comprehensive, Gloucester. It was outside the Co-op in Eastgate, for those who are interested. I never really got the last bit quite right (it refers to Donne and his wife Ann’s gravestone on which is engraved John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone) but this was the best I could do and since I can’t remember what else I was trying for now anyway, it will have to do.

The photograph is Boudicca as the Mother of Britain, taken in the dark and the snow outside the recording studio recently during my recording of the album Boudicca;Britain's Dreaming..

.

A Prayer for John Lennon

2010-12-08T12:39:00.008Z

I was getting ready to go to school - teaching practice, a nightmare class to whom I'd played Starting Over and who'd smirked about his hippiness but who nevertheless liked the tempo changes. A pretty vacant sixth form girl in a cloakroom would later that day ask someone - 'was it Lennon or Lemon?' (Oddly perceptive - for all his caustic Beatle knowingness there was always something naive and lost about him, even more than the other three - well captured in the under-praised 'Nowhere Boy.') But for now, there was silence on Radio 2 for the first time ever, and then DLT said 'sorry about that' and then the news. And then, with tears on the page, I wrote this

i am not
sure that God
speaks
more in the silence
or the age's
spirit of violence
but in earshot
of atlantic fury
you fell
silent,
new york exploding
unholy smoke
through your 45 heart
and for a bad moment
dear john
i am lost again.

8 12 1980

wild chords of geese

2010-12-05T09:13:00.004Z

somewhere mellow between

the end of the overblown blackberries

and

the start of the harvested leaves

fused flies

on clinical sills

hint at bleached sun

and

in the hedges

thistle winds to come

to eyes trained on histrionic heights

of Welsh adolescence,

this stubborn serenity,

these mediaeval colours

are

endlessly reassuring:

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole

wild chords of geese in its folds;

the flinty, dependable noun

behind mists of adjectives

Note: these pink-footed geese come over the North Pole to our low lying coasts every October to find a mild winter and fill Norfolk skies with their wild music. I've been trying to make a decent sound recording free of wind and other ambience (always some farm machinery growelling and peeping) for over ten years. Might have managed it yesterday in the still snowscape. Got an incidental visual record almost by accident. I wonder what they're saying to each other. 'Wild goose chase, this. It's like the bloody arctic. We might as well have stayed there. That poet's recording us miles from home in the dusk again. Nutter.'

Shrewsbury: The Day In Pictures

2010-12-01T16:50:00.017Z

Could you write these one breath snapshots as haiku? Or do you find that, as Roger McGough says, "to express yourself in seventeen syllables is very diffic-"

Creative Writing Day at Shrewsbury Sixth Form College

2010-12-01T07:39:00.035Z

Just a perfect day (as someone once sang.) In what I now know is called 'Shrew- sbury' not 'Shrows- bury: though apparently some posh locals insist on 'Shrow- bury'

The 24 students concerned had all opted for the day and even (I believe) put a bit of money where their pens were. I have never known a more positive bunch and with this sort of number and atmosphere felt able to help at an individual as well as group level. This is very satisfying - certainly for me as a writer/group leader and (by all accounts) for the participants also. There is nothing better than working with keen young writers - full of energy, originality, ideas and in this case considerable talent.

I started with some concision skills - using the haiku form as a way of distilling a personal statement of self in a single breath, on a timeless moment, as if your mobile had only 17 syllables of credit or charge left in it. Though mainly a warm up exercise for later tasks, this homage to the imagists' 'say what you want in two/words and get thru/long frilly/ palaver is silly' produced some memorable haiku in their own right.

I then read out my short story 'The Interview' - relying only on the words in the air (or radio airwaves) not on printed copies - and guided students through my editing process of this tale from 5000 down to 2500 words. The clue is in the genre name - short - and a story. I used Dylan Thomas's ultimate short story - 'For sale, one pair of baby shoes. Never worn' - as an example of how much one can leave to a reader/listener to fill in for themselves.

After hobnobs and (far too much) orange juice, I tackled novel openings, using the first thousand or so words of my 70,000+ thousand word novel 'River Deep Mountain High'. The focus was on how this most important thousand words of all divides between hooks and exposition, the former to ensure your reader carries on reading, the latter to ensure there is something substantial - a credible world - for them to read about. How much I was using Wales as a hook - the humour of a half Welshman laughing his other half off, albeit fondly - had a special resonance so close to the Welsh border. It was not the first time I was a little disorientated to realise the Wales nearby was not the Newport valley I have always sensed from the West but the North Wales of Wrexham. The students then started to set up their own novel openings and while I may claim credit for the hook/exposition device and a few ideas about narrative as a starter, none of this would mean anything without the rich ideas, worlds, world-views, narrative originality, characters and gift for language the students already had with them. (This is how 'English' used to be before they strangled everything with frameworks and models 'delivered' onto students' heads by teacher-postmen- viz, the student as expert, the tutor as facilitator.) These were modern sixth formers with stories to tell - what could be more exciting than that?

Time for lunch - and some illuminating conversations with staff about family story telling (now replaced by soaps?) student magazines, the impoverishing requirement to 'maximise' the outcomes of every second of a college day, good and bad Exam Boards, how good the WJEC is, football poets, life in Shropshire - the forgotten county - and the fact that my 1460 AD hotel was supposed to be haunted (it wasn't). And the chance to answer that resounding repeat ring-tone call I'd kept having to apologise for like a naughty student for disturbing the class with all day! (My daughter's revenge for the distress call I made to her which was broadcast onstage on loudspeaker live to the Brighton Comedy Club - and mine for the times this happened when I was a teacher.) The students were very nice about it.

The afternoon session gave this studious and dedicated group a chance to do the talking via my stage and film script Margot's Guinevere. The bad Dad - good/bad daughter dialogue between the heroine and her councillor-father produced some resonant performances - and the two students who performed it entire (and more or less unrehearsed) for the group brought it to life splendidly. I then went through the classic BBC criteria for dialogue, character, variety and humour and some of my own thoughts on monologue, changes of pace, stichomythia, action. 'Write about what you know and if you don't know find out' about sums up my starting point and the adult-teenager dialogues that the students began to write looked very promising indeed. There were funny ones about teenagers borrowing Mum's car and sneaking it back believing they'd got away with it, disarming 'surprise' dialogues where teen and rent actually liked and respected - instead of killed and harangued - each other and some very moving as well as very funny ones about timeless generation gap 'problems' newly experienced and newly imagined. I can see them up on stage and screen already.

This was in many ways a model day. The increasingly official and curriculum cited role of a writer in school is sometimes misunderstood as a kind of glorified masterclass, doing an OFSTED outstanding version of what the teacher would do if only there were world enough and time (and energy.) But no visitor can have the sort of knowledge of a group the usual teacher has and anyway why pay someone a consultant fee to do something the teacher can do themselves? Better and cheaper to come off timetable for a day and do something 'in house' if that's all you are after. A visiting writer is an expert in a certain field and should be employed to explore and guide in areas the teacher really cannot, in this case the skills and experience of a professional writer. Clare Hodgson, saving her blushes - and the rotating team who observed - or rather participated in - the workshop all day, managed all this brilliantly.

My only regret was that I had to leave the college, students, and this historic but (to me) very happening and 'now' Tudor town on the Cadfael border, after only one day. As well as two mighty mediaeval church towers outside either latticed window, there must have been ten places a pen's throw from the hotel where a writer could eat like a King (or an Empress Maud) and I had the best biryani I've had since India. And the best full English next morning since ....the Angevin Empire.

Thank you Shrewsbury. Thank you Shrewsbury Sixth Form College (even if, as the Priory Grammar School, Chris Woodhead once disgraced your progressive portals.) Thank you English department for your hospitality and appreciation. Thank you Miss - even your hurried sketch map along the mighty Severn to the Station at the end of the day was effective. Thank you Shropshire lads and lasses, scholars and scribes.

And don't forget to send me what you've written!

I am The Enemy You Killed, My Friend

2010-11-17T16:40:00.003Z

Memorial (11/11/96)

Around the village memorial
A local brass band is playing.
The duffle-coated, white-bearded bugle player
Does not really approve
Of tributes to men who line up
With medals on their uniform chests.
Just at the point where the heart
Should be hanging on the notes,
He jazzes it up,
Turns the Last Post
Into the Temperance Seventy.

I can smell the dead Autumn leaves
On the still air,
Incensing the pavements.
More distantly, I smell
A generation of condemned men.

You’ve opened the door of this cottage wide.
It's letting out all the heat
And, like the broken chairs your bulk entails,
It bothers me that this bothers me.
You're standing there with your wife
In the distressed brown leather jacket
You got on the insurance.
Your bullshit face
Is stunned with reverence.
You smoke,
Pause for a long time between puffs.

For an age, it seems that you feel too respectful
Ever to put the cigarette to your lips again

And when you do,
The fact that it's a roll up, like a soldier's,
Make it somehow right.

As so often, I hate
The person I am in your presence.
I'm in the middle of a story
Telling you about the bugle player
When your reverent abstraction
Silences me.

I'm fascinated
By the change in you,
Overcharged, overcharging
Child of the '80s,
From self to love.
I'm thinking
He's an old bollocks

But I love him.

Later you tell me, you were thinking
About your granddad:
If he hadn’t survived the trenches,
You’d never have been.

It’s the most awful thought in your pantheon.

Notes: Not just the eleventh hour but even later due to a PC crisis, I wanted to post this photograph from an extraordinary Norfolk graveyard that always seems like a dream once I've left. This is because, uniquely in my experience, it houses German WW2 Luftwaffe graves cheek by jowl with RAF ones, according each equal respect and honour for their sacrifice while somehow making it clear - in the accretion of deaths of airmen on both sides through the years 1939-45 - that this was no easy act of Godly detachment. After all, these ridiculously young Germans must have been shot down in flames onto the English soil they are buried in by enemies fighting bitterly for their lives, homes and survival - and who they were trying to bomb, including some of the ridiculusly young Britons buried beside them. And yet, in this area of land no bigger than the distance between the fron line trenches in WW1 (about 40 yards - 2 cricket pitches), this peace. There is more spirituality in the air and earth of that cemetery than almost every other area of 'special sancitity' I have been in the world put together. And it always seems to be both brilliantly sun lit and yet cool, serene. Even now, I wonder how it can be there.

The poem has no real connection with the photo except in its mood of vexed warfare between men who would love to love each other if they weren't so hell bent on killing each other. This is a very minor and subtle war - but in the end, it's the thin end of the vast black hole into the trenches and holocausts.

Two More Brockworth Poems

2010-11-17T14:00:00.020Z

Bad Boy

Back of the class
By the bin.
Gleeful as sin.
Needle hair red
In the sinking sun
Of a late afternoon.
Taught lessons all day,
Last of the day
Wasting away.
Those aren’t kisses in your book you know!

No, I’m not laughing, I’m cross.
(Yes I am and no I’m not.)

Final Assembly

The unpurged images of term recede
And, hark, the herald angels with dirty faces
Sing in excruciation.
They get younger each year and I,
To serve them half my days resolved,
Get no younger with them.
The praised boy who fishwise leapt with joy
Five Christmas terms ago
Grins at the clapping school now, sardonic.
Where has he gone - are we going - so fast?

O Jesus! still these discordant Years,
That carping torn, that gong-tormented Sea.

Notes: These are two poems I forgot to include with my November of the Month celebration of Brockworth School's classes of 1981-86. Bad Boy was in 4 Leckhampton and first my ever CSE class (studying Lord of the Flies because even lower sets followed proper book-led curriculums then) and contributed amusing comments like 'Are you a bit an alky then Sir?' and when I reproved him for calling his House Head 'Boorman' with the teacherly 'MR Boorman to you' retorted 'Boorman to you.' I didn't laugh then but I nearly let the mask slip and I'm certainly laughing now. I wrote this poem for homework.
Final (and in those days religious) Assembly is my last ever public occasion with 5 Coopers - with whom I spent 5 years from 1 Coopers 1981-86 - and the 'praised boy' described (in case anyone wants to know) is Matthew Bunting, one of the first names called out from the twice-daily daily register. The poem is about all of them but it's his face I saw in that moment - or two moments, Christmas 1981 and July 1986. I felt sad because I was leaving Brockworth as they mostly were too and I assumed I'd never see any of them again. Little did I know...

I look very very uncomfortable in this - my first Tutor group - picture and a bit sidelined by the House Head too. Interesting how I move centre stage for the 2 Coopers pic and then get sidelined by the group itself in Year 5 (or was it 4?) They grow up and I grow sideways. But that 1 Coopers shot of me is truly horrible. I'm 24 and I look 68, in my wedding suit jacket donated by my father in 1979 and already looking as dated as Hitler's moustache. As Dylan once yowled, 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.' More school poems - including Brockworth ones - available in 'Exile In His Own Country' (Bluechrome, 1986, ISBN 1 904781942) and on my CD 'Marked For Life' Both available through and with further details on www.garethcalway.co.uk ...Little plug there but after 27 years at the chalk face I'm a self-employed writer these days. By the way I hear Heather Roberts (see all three photos) is pregnant. Never thought I'd announce that. Congratulations, Heather! I'm glad the Sex Ed lessons finally worked out.

Not November Poem of the Month

2010-11-02T20:42:00.012Z

First Year Drama

- Sir, Eric Osborne can't come,
He's got concussion!
- That's all right. What was he doing?
-Announcing, linking, Viking...
-What! Go and tell Mrs Britton
Quick. - Where is she, Sir?
-O never mind. I'll go myself.

- Right, that's settled. Now where's
Gwen? we're on in five minutes.
Dafydd, go and find her. Yes. Now.
The rest of you come over here.... Wilfred Saxon!
For goodness' sake, get your costume on! Now!
Ah, there you are, Gwen, we've been looking
For you.... All set then?.... Where the flap's Dafydd?
- You sent him to look for Gwenhwyfar, Sir.

- Shh. She's introducing us.
- Sir, I'd better.... - Shh!
- Sir, I'd better.... - Shh!
- Sir, I'd better.... - Shh! - I'd BETTER
HAVE THE BOOK TO READ ERIC'S INTRO.
- SHH!....What? I'll be prompting
From this. (Shh) Where the hell's the one
I gave you?....
- I left it in the Art Room. - Shh
- Can't I use yours, Sir?

Late summer in the year 539... - Get ready
Everyone. Shh. ...Hey, where's she going
With the book? - Out the other side, Sir,
She's a Villager next. - I can't breathe, Sir.
-Shh. Never mind. Lights coming up. Wait. Shh.
- I've bitten my lip, Sir. - Shh - Sir, I'm nervous.
- Don't be silly.... Right, on you go.
Not that way.... Where's Wayne?
- He's round the other side, Sir. - Shh. What?
(OI! YOU! SHUT UP!) - He's round the.... - Shh.
Never mind now. On you go, Shh. No! Let the
Others come off first! Shh! Shh!
WHY DIDN'T THE BELLS RING, SIR?
- SHH! for goodness' sake....
- SIR, SIAN PAUSED TOO LONG SO I SAID MY LINE.
-SHHHH! SHHHH! ... Ready for the chants
On sound effects, boys? Shh! - All set, Sir.
- Good. Now, John: just die once you've said Valhalla
O.K? Don't say "ow" .... Shhh!
Wait, Ceri.... Shh - Do I go on now?
No! Calm down! Wait for the chants....
Now, boys!....
NOW, boys!....
Boys?....
Boys?....

Notes: For the full set of Brockworth school poems go to Poem of the Month for November on my main website. Dora Brooking, a much-missed colleague in my first ever English department at Brockworth Comprehensive in Gloucester, did what my own school never did - she got me acting in school plays. Then she got me producing them, including this memorable - and near psychotic- episode. Another House play I wrote and produced was Telemachus starring someone or other- my first ever script. A few short years later, in my next school, I was writing and producing epic school productions and not long after that - inspired and supported by Dora's National Youth Theatre child star David Izod - I was touring the country performing my own stuff. Still am. So let's hear it for Brockworth.

Review of Sue Guiney, Clash of Innocents,

2010-11-02T11:05:00.005Z

Every novel is rewritten by every reading – the reader is part of the creative process, bringing his own constructions to the novelist’s world. A really good novel leaves the reader this sort of the space.

That said, it’s not every often one can chat to the author at some length half way through a book. I got the chance while reading Sue Guiney’s recently published Clash of Innocents. It might interest potential readers of that well crafted novel to read our mid-narrative exchange before my mini-review (which she hasn’t seen at the time of blogging) at the end.

Hi Sue

I’ve reached May (page 80) and am breaking all the rules by talking to you about it before finishing it – or even getting half way – but why not? I’ll forget to say all this later and it will have changed and developed by then anyway. I am getting very fond of old Deborah – the post 18 parenting issue is pertinent at present - and intrigued by Amanda and I’m very glad of Kyle. I like what you’ve done with the Ohio 1970 US revolution thing. In my own recently completed novel Rubber Soul, a girl called Cindy – the Girl of the Beatle song(s) flees to India at the midnight of the Sixties in 1969 hippy-pregnant with a baby called Love, which may or may not survive/miscarry (the phantom love-child of her and her prince, Beatle). Oddly, and very differently, and from the other side of the gender continuum, I fancy we’re addressing something similar, you very much through realism.

I don’t know how old you are but for me, at 54, Deborah is the generation I grew up following and emulating. I admire the convincing and thoroughgoing way you have her carrying the battered but grounded dream on through the bloody reality of the Khmer Rouge – and for reasons I can only guess at present. Did Deborah hold one of those students ‘dead in Ohio’ in the Neil Young song I wonder?

This is just an interval chat. Don’t give anything away – I’ll have finished it soon anyway. The scene where the baby appears and Amanda is mesmerised is very good. It might interest you to know that the first hook for me (and your exposition is necessarily a slow burner in my opinion) was the Cambodian dance and Amanda’s effort to learn it. That’s my ‘theatre’ interest coming through – but it’s a clever cultural point too, and absorbing narrative at that point.

On with the story!

Dear Gareth,
I won't say anything except to say how delighted I am that you are enjoying the book so far and to the point where you took the trouble to write! Thank you so much. You absolutely are connecting with the questions, issues and characters that I had hoped to portray, and that thrills me no end.
I think there are still some surprises in store for you. 1 thing I will say, though, is that writing this novel and hearing the wonderful reactions to it have convinced me of the primary importance of plot. Without a story to tell where things happen, you just have character sketches and poetic prose - unless you're a genius which I don't claim to be :-) You'd think I would have realized that before...
Happy reading,
Sue
PS I'm 55

Well I finished it in the middle of the night a couple of days later. In the end, fond though I was of overweight American Deborah and her practical radicalism and enduring struggle with 1970 ‘tin soldiers and Nixon running’ trauma, the most eloquent and compelling – because most unusual character/symbol for me was that Baby – determinedly named by Deborah and thereafter always called ‘The Baby.’ A bit like Fanny in Mansfield Park, the Baby’s survival in the too-cruel world of Cambodia is always in doubt and only love can sustain her – though this medically recognised fact is a lot more problematic – and genuinely tragic - than my comment sounds out of context. The baby’s story, and the novel generally, while as warm hearted as its narrator, Deborah Youngman, under her practical pessimism and necessarily gruff exterior, is anything but sentimental. It’s a very moving novel and a serious contemplation of our times. The convincing Cambodian setting - Cambodia in the shadow of the Killing Fields and the first uncertain rays of hope and reconciliation– defines the book but does so in a dialectic with Ohio, US (the Kent State University setting of that ‘four dead in Ohio’ song by Neil Young) which in the end is as much mirror image as mirror opposite, though it thought-provokingly insists on both. The novel also has a genuine enigma, an antagonist, Amanda, who somehow resists the sympathy her experiences appear to deserve – and not just because the narrator doesn’t really like her. This is troubling but fascinating and convincingly life-like. Characters you love-hate are always good.
The women characters are numerous and well drawn. The daughter Sam and several other girls on their female journey from childhood through the key age of 12 (when you can be both a woman and a child) to the coming of age crisis that dear old Deborah negotiated so long ago and with such wounds to her surrogate multi-parenthood and letting go are all vivid and unique creations that hold up a Cambodian mirror to real life. The male characters aren’t as complex and multi-faceted as the women. The doctor and Kyle are more two dimensional but worthy: the book needed some men and we get two decent attempts along with some thumbnail sketches of boys not, thankfully, presented as merely social problems and symptoms (in a society that is beginning to address its terrible past) but with some inner life. Kyle is certainly masculine: the Aussie fixer abroad and with some emotional complexity along with his mystique and action mannerisms. But he remains a man in the Rochester mode – a man for the female gaze.
Virginia Woolf’s point about some writers being woman-man and some man-woman and both of these being necessary and good: to simplify her case, woman-man writers operate like this narrator, the strengths being emotional depth, everyday realism, slow emotional journeys, non-linear narrative arcs while man-woman-writers favour powerful action arcs, fantasy worlds, battles and quests. (The narratives that emerge from war and sport.) Woolf said some writers, are just man-man writers: all action and no heart, others are woman-woman writers (like Madeline Basset, the woman in PG Wodehouse who thinks the stars are God’s daisy chain.) In that sense, this is a woman-man narrative and about as far from both Madeline Basset and Hemingway (or Iron Maiden) as you can get. Clash of Innocents is a woman’s book with a slow burning but ultimately – and deeply - satisfying narrative. There is a lot of domestic detail – nappy changing, daily routines, laundry, interiors, hugs and kisses – but the same kind of detail is accorded to life out on the living road, for instance, (roads are described as venues not just as thoroughfares in Cambodia) and the bigger politics are detailed in newspaper details and the (horrific) experiences characters carry in their memories and emotions and scars, if not in violent present action. You need to give it time but it carries on whispering to you from the shadows of your mind and its layered world and it has a quality which I am not sure gets mentioned much in literary criticism: moral goodness.

Correcting The Guardian

2010-11-01T09:02:00.008Z

From time to time I have to correct the Guardian's metrocentric mendacity (see letter published under that heading at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/jan/08/leadersandreply.mainsection) towards Wales and the West and oh dear it happened again last week in their otherwise excellent cock and bull Brydon and Coogan article. Here's a correction letter they were too ashamed to publish:

"The first steam locomotive was actually in Wales not Manchester - Methyr Tydful downhill to Abercynon, 1804. And like most people educated in England, Coogan seriously underplays the leading role played by the mighty Welsh coalfield (the largest in the UK by some square miles) in the transformation of the world, including the construction of the entire iron railway networks of the USA and the USSR out of Blaenafon. We will grant him the Manchester Co-op and the North much else that is noble and progressive but there is no need to claim an offside goal against Wales to do it."

My readers will be relieved to hear that these hard facts are, because of my stint as writer and editor for Collins education, available to a generation of British and world schoolchildren in the pages of Aiming At Level 4 Reading (Collins Education, 2008) currently Isambard Kingdom Brunel steaming into classrooms all over the world. One can only hope that future editors of the Guardian will have been taught from these books.

Review of Agamemnon at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, Thursday 14 October 2010

2010-10-25T12:31:00.000Z

‘The Greek Play’ at Cambridge is like a Norfolk bus. One arrives every three years but when it does, life suddenly accelerates into a different universe. Greek theatre is such a perfect dialexis of epic drama, choral poetry, hybris, hermatia, pity, catharsis and catastrophe that one of the regrets of my life is that I have no Latin and less Greek. Fortunately, knowing the plays back to front and also (as in these Cambridge productions) getting the surtitles means I am free to luxuriate in the percussive and lyrical glory of the Ancient Greek and so the relative lack of spectacle (fifth on Aristotle’s list of tragedy requisites) and of modern – meaning often trivial - psychology in the characters is no loss. The grandiloquence of Aeschylus equals the grandeur of his subject, the murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy by his wife, the mother of the daughter the great general sacrificed to get a fair wind ten years before. What won’t a man sacrifice in to win a war and what fury is unleashed by a mother’s grief in response, his archetypically named wife Clytemnestra. What a show! It’s like being able to read (and hear and see) Dante in the original. I hoped this production would live up to the billing.
The chorus (of old men who couldn’t go to war) was compelling, their clothes Edwardian black, their movements jerky and their faces blacked across the eyes like some sinister cartoon of Blair. They also looked and sounded rather like Hasidic Jews crossed with Victorian music hall which might have some private resonance for the director if not in any conscious sense for me. It didn’t matter – it worked well as a hybrid of outsiders and oddities. There was also much of the Great War about the Trojan War depicted here, which again works as it stands as the same sort of grim archetype of all war for Western civilisation now as it the Trojan war did for the Greeks then. Clytemnestra, acted by a Hellenic ‘yellow-haired’ (Helen-like, and hell-leashing) woman, was a great mixture of gender signs, the dressy top of what appears to be an evening gown but is in fact a trouser suit capturing her ambivalent thrusting seizure of the Agamemnon-vacated role as man of the house (with her lady’s lady man Aegisthus in his flowery shirt) competing with her profound maternity and intuitive practical femaleness. Yes, this woman has a clitoris and a will (fiercely awoken by her husband’s actions) but she also has a broken heart : the Trojan war and all its peacock posturing is clearly a boy’s game to her compared to the rending reality of the ritual sacrifice of her daughter and her maternal loss. What won’t we sacrifice to make war holy, a crusade/ jihad. Other resonant moments were the entry of Agamemnon from the pit in a Great War trenchcoat but with the overweening and portentous feathered helmet of a classical age and the ravishing look behind given by Cassandra – the look of startled and exotically beautiful, Arab-dark foreign girl – and then her extraordinary scene, much of it harrowingly and beautifully sung, of horrified omen-seeing, her apprehension of her own and Agamemnon’s death by Clytemnestra’s hand, which (following her curse) no-one will believe (though – against all the rules of theatre, the chorus waver and - almost - intervene).
There were some irritating flaws. It was effective to have a shrine, including the child’s yellow dress and child – and never to be bride – photographs, to Iphigenia as a backdrop to Clytemnestra’s furious grief. But even given the remote foreign language, there was no need to have the Chorus enacting the sacrifice onstage on the dress – ridiculously and fetish-istically - when Aeschylus, and all the unities and rules of Greek theatre, convey the horror with such epic grandeur and dignity and pity in the words, images and sounds. (The bringing in of the ashes of the Troy war dead in jars – or the modern equivalent - during the relevant chorus – was by contrast very effective because it was language-led and hauntingly enacted through gesture, movement and chant.) Nor was there any point in having Cassandra onstage in her leotard and knickers for much of the last quarter of the play, both pre- and (splashed with ketchup) post-mortem. Violence is supposed to happen offstage Greek theatre - and to be reported in appalled language in and Aeschylus is more than capable of handling this without assistance from a pantomime aesthetic. To paraphrase Peter Cook, we get enough at that at home – on the telly. And Cassandra was so ravishing and forlorn in the one look she gave behind, it was criminal to throw this impact away, to turn the rending of her prophetess robes into a strip tease. Her tragedy is a hard enough fall without becoming a farce. Also, although the stillness maintained by both Cassandra and Agamemnon on the (farcically angled and pantomime-bloody) death bed was a tribute to the great skill of these two epic actors, was all that effort really worth it? Yes, here were corpses played with utter conviction by real actors for ten minutes and more – but after the first impact (a second) all this effort added nothing to the drama: only, reductively, to the spectacle. Over and over again.
Greek tragedy was traditionally followed by a broad and lewd comedy and a small portion of this corrective leaked both into the main action (as detailed above) and into my own real life as I left. I phoned my daughter and, unbeknown to me, my fatherly solicitude was broadcast live onstage via speakerphone to the Brighton Comedy theatre. The young pro onstage, interrupted by my daughter’s errant mobile, seized my call and made merry with it, to much laughter and my own utter confusion and chagrin. I was not in the mood. Those compelling choruses – most especially two of the women performers among the males who did the old men better than the young actors! – were the crowning glory of this festival of the grand arts of pity and terror and this ‘Agamemnon’, despite the small flaws of over-literal spectacle noted, was well worthy of its genre, author and story: and that is high praise indeed.

Welcome to the Café Abersychano

2010-10-25T06:36:00.024Z

These superb photos capture two Abersychano Grammar Technical School old boyos now in their own mid Fifties reliving on a beguiling October day in 2010 their schooldays in the late Sixties and early Seventies in the valleys. One of them happens to be me, silver-haired, coal-jacketed bard in exile; the other (the photographer, pictured at the end, also a confirmed expatriate with roots still deep in valley) is Kevin Fackrell. We were both in 2X in 1968. Then in the third year (now Year 9) Kevin took the Tech route; I went the Grammar way: not to the everlasting bonfire – at least not yet – but to an early retirement from our nine to five careers and with it the heaven of taking a day out of time like this. Through the old wrought iron heaven and hell gate behind me (now disused) you can see the old coal hole and above the window where Mr Padfield, the Headmaster, used to spy on any late arrivals, smokers, truants, boy-girl couplings and other miscreants. Almost by accident, Kevin captured some images of our adolescence amid a mighty Welsh industrial revolution that was once felt from the USA to the USSR, that was getting to be a spent force even in as we reached 13 in 1968 and which is now, in the remote valley pictured - once the clanging, winding, bustling, steam-trained, demon-frenzied, coal-driven, Satanic-milling locale of the Blaensychan, Tirpentwys and British pits - surely the finest living outdoor museum in the world. This valley and mountaintop strides purposefully – as did we – from Craig Ddu to Talywaun. I was staying in Bristol, eating in Clifton and had been at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature the day before so – used to the seven choices of coffee now de rigeur - blithely ordered a Café Americano with hot milk at the local café while local builders tucked into sausages the size of horses’ appendages, causing waitress panic and a referral to the manageress, before receiving, ultimately, a Café Abersychano. There were two options on the chalked board: Instant Coffee and Instant Milky Coffee. Ninepence and a shilling and Instant Karma at number two. Kevin went for the milk, now forever to be remembered as ‘Latté Abersychano.’ It was a long, mountainous, exhausting but exhilarating day. And it seemed to last about fifty years. Because of course it did.

George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2010

2010-10-11T15:10:00.003Z

Wentworth Hotel, Aldeburgh, Sunday 10/10/10

An auspicious date, beautiful warm weather and a very happy day. We drove from sea to shining North sea (the North Norfolk and East Suffolk coasts of what used to be called ‘The German Ocean’) without once leaving the ancient Celtic queendom of Icenia. I was there to deliver my adjudication of the George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2010 hosted by the Suffolk poetry Society. For the record, I also read half a dozen poems from ‘Exile In His Own Country’: namely, Glad To Be A Guy, Boudicca Britain’s Dreaming (done in homage to our ancient Celtic queen without book, by and from the heart and – in that Icenic sea side setting and to that audience, one of the most satisfying experiences of my performing life), Mocks, Healthy Norfolk, Coming Down and Cooking Up A Revolution. Sold a few books too. I append below some general comments about the adjudication and where to find the individual comments on poems. But first, a handful of telling incidents. The organiser and several of the poets took the trouble to thank me for the detailed comments I made and for the way these framed and introduced their readings. Poems take a lot of writing and I do think it’s important to give due credit for the blood, sweat, tears, craft and inspiration they require. There were some harrowing experiences grappled with, mastered and made into a Muse: for the poets to write about pain so brilliantly and then get up in front of so many people and share this triumph deserves more praise than I can give here. Suffice to say, the conversations I had with several of the poets about these struggles were a privilege and a reminder of what greatness inheres in the art of poetry and the human soul. There were some funny-painful moments too… but I think I’ll keep these for the novel after next! It was a glorious day.

George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2010. Judge’s report.
Despite my title, no-one should feel Judged by my choices. The large entry of 300 – a fat bundle the size of an old style Telephone directory or family Bible – contained few if any bad poems. Or even ones that broke the rules. No-one exceeded the 50 lines and only two people left their names on the entry. Most poets had something to say and/or said it rather well (usually both) and even as I reduced that original 400 to 65, I was often still admiring lines and parts of these ‘first exit’ poems as I placed them in the reject pile. But when the competition is as strong as this, the whole poem, needs to work as a whole and poems that, say, depended too much on a portentous last line that didn’t quite deliver, or that began to preach or assert rather than entrance or move – even if only in parts – or that contained even one or two weak lines or bad conceits or groaners among much good writing had to go. And even then, poetry being an art rather than an exact science, I know that some other adjudicator might have made a different selection. This last point is even more pertinent when it came to reducing the 65 to the winning 10.
Prior to the judging, I had just marked several hundred A level English Literature papers for the Welsh Exam Board and it was a delight to be dealing instead with creative writing - poems - that were almost all in the ‘A’ grade band and for which I could bring my own criteria. There IS an objective Standard in terms of craft and inspiration that will mark out good poems anywhere, and certainly here. But, once you've done that, you can only be yourself and I chose poems that appealed to me. I am not much interested in poems that draw attention to their own cleverness as an end in itself, or that have remained an ‘exercise’ rather than – as evidently happened many times in what I assume are excellent writing circles – a means by which a poet can achieve something unique and urgent and emotionally charged. I also think it is important to know that poetry has moved on a bit since Browning – not necessarily to embrace vers libre and to reject all quaint diction because every poem will have its own language and tune and a poem about or in the voice of a granddad (for example) may very suitably have a Georgian or Edwardian music. But this should be a choice made from the full range of poetic languages available in 2010 , not the result of the mind having stopped short like that old Grandfather clock in the middle of another age. I like complexity – the fascination of things difficult – but there has got to be a pay off: I like scholarship but not reference-loaded intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake, if only because it’s such a waste of learning, literacy and effort. The language of the heart should beat through the exciting firework display and necessary gymnastics of the intellect. Occasionally, the sheer eloquence and skill of a poem will impress me by itself – will itself be moving (just as occasionally the subject is so touching that it partly transcends considerations of craft) but on the whole I have gone for poems where first and foremost the subject is (to me) worth the candle of its writing and reading – and, a close second, where the technique does it justice.

The general standard was high and the best hundred very high: a lot of poems achieved a sort of plateau of quality that made the sifting process satisfyingly difficult. George Crabbe’s name has not been taken in vain. The top 20 entries would, in my opinion, have graced any poetry competition anywhere and I would like to mention briefly together the half dozen or so who just missed out on my winners/runners up and commendations. These found ingenious and attractive ways of writing about Boudica, personal mortality (the line ‘between my boots their compressed voices creak/like snow’ was as good as anything else in the competition), cancer and cliché, the lost child within (‘wild echo of the girl I used to be’) and exotic lands. In a smaller or more average quality competition entry, these poems would have at least won commendations. If I missed anything with these poems as a whole, it was that very few poets wrote both with humour and the highest poetic quality, or generally wrote about the joys of life with the same sharpness and literary excitement as they did about its miseries. The old debate about whether it is possible to write as well about happiness as about mortal longing, agony and grief (and there was plenty of it here) is raised by this – I think it is, but certainly the best poetry entered (and there was lots of it) tended to line up nearer Sylvia Plath than PG Wodehouse in evoking the tragic-comedy of our existence.

The winners/runners up and commended poems...

These and my comments on them are available in the published anthology and on the suffolk poetry society website.
Gareth Calway
Sedgeford, Norfolk, July 2010

So close and yet so despised

2010-10-11T12:28:00.006Z

An old Abersychan school mate drew my attention today to an article by the Pakistani intellectual Ziauddin Sardar. It struck a chord because we were both learned British history in Wales: partly via the brilliant Grammar School historian Huw Lewis and partly by growing up in a valley in which history lay as thick as the slag heaps and rusting winding gear of a last-phase coal and steel industry. Huw Lewis was also a passionate Welshman of the left. Sardar's article was both akin and alien to Lewis's approach. It declared that the Welsh were the first victims of English racism and takes its departure from the recent fate of Blaenafon, an industrial boom town at the steepling top of the Eastern valley that once (despite its omission from British history books outside Wales) changed the world. Sardar's article which you can download from the web begins 'It took Unesco to recognise the contribution a town in Gwent made to history'

It's a fascinating article and being a Huw Lewis educated ex-valley person living in England where they haven't heard of Dic Penderyn, Welsh chartism and unionism or even of the mighty Welsh coalfield and the way it revolutionised the world, I have often felt the same. My comic novel 'River Deep Mountain High' makes some similar points through the character of Dafydd ('Wales, the first English colony') but also interrogates the 'racist' position he and the article adopts through the heroine Megan's responses. Yesterday I was having dinner with some splendidly liberal English people in Middle England about this writing out of Wales from history. It really was news to them (except for the Scot opposite for whom it was news as old as Queen Anne.) You only have to look at the 'Union' flag. The (to me) most beautiful flag in Europe, the Welsh dragon, is absent, while King Arthur Pendragon (whose red dragon of Gwent it is) is appropriated as an English king. And this in an age where we constantly and rightly foreground forgotten minorities!

Where the article defeats itself, in my opinion, is by allowing this righteous indignation to prompt a semi-hysterical swipe at 'the English' as a race rather than at the Norman upper class and the English ruling class it became. The English never actually conquered 'Wales' - they conquered Logres (the Lost Lands, ie Celtic Britain). But the Normans (Twelfth century Vikings in a French sauce) certainly did, in 1284, 1536 and - as Mr Lewis would perorate in a purple patch that spread across his whole much-missed face- throughout the industrial revolution. Yes. And they conquered the 'English' too. English people, even the most liberal and educated, are (in Welsh eyes, offensively) ignorant about Wales because of the way the education system ignores Wales. But they need teaching not hating.

None of this would matter if the article wasn't essentially so right. Its truth deserves better. To borrow the catchphrase of another early colony, don't get mad, get even.

Not, as they say in the valleys, don't get mad, get even madder!

Edinburgh Fringe - the shame and the glory

2010-10-06T08:03:00.016Z

Like many of performers at the Edinburgh fringe in the summer of 2007, I was a school leaver. The only difference was that rather than anxiously awaiting A level results, I was anxiously awaiting a pension - and leaving behind for good a teaching career of a quarter of a century.

I was also a Fringe virgin. And I’d not really done street publicity before. So I checked out the competition – hundreds of eager handbill merchants - with some trepidation. “Where would be without comedy?” one Glaswegian stand up quizzed the crowds, before answering his own question. (In a dry whisper)Germany. The end of the world is coming. You’ve just got time to catch our Apocalypse show before it does!” screeched bowler hatted teenagers from pillar boxes and statues across the royal mile (actually kilometre). I wasn’t sure at first if they were Fringe performers or genuine doom merchants but they looked remarkably cheerful about the end of the world, either way. A pantomime-bearded ‘Islamic Jihad’ commando ambushed me from the gutter, put a finger to his lips, handed me his show details and then crawled off up the pavement. “It’s like trying to sell pork scratchings in a synagogue,” said the Big Issue seller, and I knew how he felt. My pile of ‘daring’ “Tales Out Of School- A Retired Teacher Lets It All Out” publicity stunt postcards suddenly looked a bit tame. “If you don’t come to the show, as least you’ve got a free postcard” I joshed to anyone passing who looked interested and/or young and beautiful enough not to be from QCA.

The funniest line all fortnight from an American at breakfast in my hotel enquiring about the fried bread. “That’s bread that’s been fried, right?”...

I was invited to perform a five minute spot at a Smart Café – very much out of my comfort zone - which I did in my Old School gown and cane, spouting a lot of what felt like teacher in-jokes to a ‘smart’ international audience to whom it all might well mean nothing. It was my biggest audience all fortnight, by about a hundred. (The average Fringe house is six). I have never felt so close to the huge void that divides the individual from the vast buzzing anonymous city and I experienced the whole thing as if I wasn’t there. Someone took a photo and I’m not. There’s just a pillar and some stage lights! I got the city laughing at teacher’s jokes though, which is more than my classes ever did.

It was almost a relief to be back in the converted Masons’ lodge that served as my usual ‘performance space’, with a kids’ Robin Hood show thumping away upstairs and the Castle bagpipes outside pitching in daily after twenty minutes (except on Sundays). After all the careful texts I’ve written over the decades of my career, the biggest laughs I got were from improvisations and readings of actual pupils’ responses to Sentence Completion tests. You all know the sort of thing – “The sign said, Beware wet paper; Alice always tried to do her best and was very tedious about her work; When she heard the sad news she felt very synthetic.” The following multiple choice always went down well too:

Drftwood Comprehensive, school motto Norfolk and good, has improved its position in the league tables for the 30th year running by hitting all its:
(a) pupils
(b) teachers
(c) targets
(d) parents
(e) rivals

Driftwood is now the most comprehensive
(a) failure
(b) school
(c) test
(d) haystack
(e) secretarial, administration and data-processing centre

in Norfolk .

The Minister for Education announced that 103% of pupils in England would achieve an A to C in maths by
(a) 2009
(b) cheating
(c) data-manipulation
(d) cribbing
(e) intensive exam coaching uninterrupted by any real teaching.

Can’t think why the teachers in my audience enjoyed those so much!

Many of the experiences I satirised in Tales Out Of School struck international chords, particularly with a party of beautiful young Spanish teachers (and that was just the guys). One of this party frowned off-puttingly, throughout until I played the Old School Headmaster and then she got the giggles. I asked her afterwards whether she had objected to the polemics of the early pieces and it was this point that I learned from her companions that she couldn’t speak a word of English. She recognised the old guy though! I got several Headmasters in who said they liked it. One actually gave me a mark (4 out of 5.) I also got an adviser (who apologised!) and an Ofsted inspector (who grinned and bore it). One Saturday, I even had some Bristol Rovers supporters in. There is no danger whatsoever that QCA or the Government will listen to me any more now than they did when I was teaching – but I can say honestly that teachers from all over the world did, appreciating the genuine idealism of my closing piece and having a good laugh with me at the Gradgrinds’ expense.

Some jokes were on me though. The reviewer who couldn’t read irony and assumed I was saying modern students ought to be caned! My church venue that threw dozens of acts out into the festival wilderness because one errant company proposed staging blasphemous material. Only one company had an alternative venue in place by the next day and yes, it was the one who got the rest of us thrown out! Our management then went into liquidation and waltzed off with all my money. Then my nice new rescue-management proceeded to smile at me all the way to the bank. For instance, half an hour before my first show, I was told I could not go on stage without liability insurance – another invisible ‘extra’– and so had to dash down the hill and back to fax off yet another load of money while I should have been in the green room getting nervous. The hill concerned is the one with Edinburgh castle on – it’s as steep as a fringe festival financial outlay. I was still busting a gut half way up when my audience was being admitted!

Star Teacher

Look at the sky, child.
That's Sirius (the Dog),
Orion (the Hunter),
There's the Plough.
That's how, according to our lights,
We know.

Now reach.

Notes:

A track called Ofsted (as in being judged, tried and executed Chris Woodhead fashion) was my show trailer for that 2007 Edinburgh fringe show Tales Out Of School, A Retired Teacher Lets It All Out. That whole summer was the biggest leap in the dark I’d taken since going into teaching in 1980. There were some accidental gems, like my wife recognising Simon Amstall in the udderbelly and assuming he was from our tiny Norfolk village and the grumpy character running the Rankin tour (one of the best afternoons of my life) who responded murderously to our application to receive the tour on credit. But the main thing was that I was scared, on the edge and taking my life in my hands again after decades of being told what to do for a salary (and grumbling about it).

The soundtrack from this trailer is actually from my schooldays studio CD Marked For Life and includes a class of lower school kids - then aged 13 and now all 21 – I still recognise some of their voices - reciting a roundel of Kenneth Baker’s National Curriculum in - but if you listen to the live Fringe version on ‘Calway’s Last Stand: Tales Out Of School At The Edinburgh Fringe” you’ll get the audience reaction as well. It was always a big favourite in staff-rooms as much as classrooms. The trailer and that short poem also includes the ideal I clung to throughout 27 years of trying.

I published the above and a few other articles about my Edinburgh experience in a valiant - if ultimately doomed attempt - to recoup some of my huge financial losses. But I have to admit I was spiritually much richer for the experience.

Brighton Rock

2010-09-18T14:40:00.016Z

pop-eyed
old guy
in gentle
september
sunshine
cruising the lanes
in eggshell-blue
corsa
window wide open
sound system
blasting
saturday
breakfast
shoppers
with
WILD THING

That was a 'next day' poem. I was actually in Brighton that weekend to be Conference Poet at the Voices and Visions Conference at Brighton University. This was my second stint as a conference poet, the first was NATE 2007. There is a full report and great pictures of the Brighton University day on the Voices and Visions page of the Brighton University website and some further details of my own experience on the blog of www.nate.co.uk

This diary of my own day takes in the following elements:

Limerick Icebreaker, Haiku Workshop, Conference Poem

Diary begins-

Brighton Voices and Visions Conference, September 16, 2010

Who – Me?

(introducing myself to conference) I’ve always dreaded that so-called ice-breaker moment when you have to tell a group of conference strangers who you are in 20 seconds. As I have the luxury of 2 minutes, I’ll try to say who I am and who I’d like to be in two different poetic forms.

Who I Am (the limerick form, so that I don’t let this 3 minutes of fame make me take myself too seriously.)

I was schooled in the Sixties in Frome
When Apollo was seeking the moon
Education’s meaning?
To lead out from within,
To pant at the stars like a loon.

Trained and taught through the Eighties in Wales
As the steel and coal industry fails
Os and As, CSEs
Coursework folders, Mode 3s,
Free as Coleridge’s bird in the sails.

I’ve been a Youth Theatre Director,
I helped raise a beautiful daughter.
Early Years to Uni
Laughs and cries like a loony.
I sleep with an Ofsted Inspector.

Taught in Norfolk for 23 years,
Led departments through frameworks and fears
Education by numbers
Or progress through blunders?
Wrote textbooks, squared a shoulder for tears.

So from Dis-next-the-Sea Comp I travel
With my schooldays poems and novel.
My lesson for health
Is - To think for yourself
But debate is what keeps us all stable.

Who I’d Like To Be (free verse)
Star teacher
Look at the sky child
There’s Sirius, the Dog,
Orion, the Hunter.
There’s the Plough.
That’s how according to our lights, we know.

Now reach.

Workshop: Haiku- a poem on a single breath
Icebreaker: Introduce yourself in seventeen syllables, shaped 5-7-5..
eg

i‘m gareth calway
I taught for three decades then
published a novel

That seventeen syllables would need work to become a haiku. A haiku is a snapshot, a timeless moment, not sequential and not linear like this. But that three lines does have the haiku- virtue of cutting to the essentials. As the imagist Ezra Pound put it-
say what you mean
in two
words
and get thru
long frilly
palaver is silly

A haiku is not a list or sequence of events/things. It is an eternal NOW. Is this (haiku attempt and record of a start at Grammar School in 1967 by Gareth Calway) a unified Now?
First day at school

uniform despair,
ear blushing from thump,
work to take home he can’t do

How ideal/ inspiring an education does it capture?
Latin meaning of the word education (‘to lead out from within…’),

Wordsworth: How little that to which we give/The name of education hath to do/ With real feeling and just sense’ (1802)

Assessment (focuses/objectives) arguably impinges upon current educational theory and practice more now than at any other period of this University’s history. But what inspires workshop delegates about the education process, what really keeps us breathing, hearts beating.

The haiku form is supposed to be the exact length of a single breath – can you concentrate the essence of all the thoughts and feelings and written material concerned into that one haiku breath?

Inspiration/respiration/perspiration etc are all from same (Christian) Latin root: spiritus, spirare- esprit (de corps) - spirit, - ‘breath.’ (Genius is 100% spirit, however divided between perspiration and inspiration.)

The recording
The ‘breaths of fresh educational air’ in the trace box were by: Gareth Calway (workshop leader/ conference poet, a poem written in the 1980s and performed to delegates near the start of this conference) Dave Simpson, Laura Tunstall, Yaa Asare, Sandra Williams (all Brighton University School of Education) and an initially reluctant Pam Ansell (retired Headmistress). The aeroplane that flew over as Laura was speaking - describing her first day of the Soviet education system - is a good marker of 2010: a very different plane from the ones that sent Pam Ansell out of London and Brighton (as she describes) as an evacuee in 1939. Delegates wrote and recorded the poems on the fifth floor of the recently built Checkland building and had a view, on this sunny September day, of beautiful Sussex downs, of trains passing up to Lewes and down to Brighton, and of two Universities, this very modern one high on its hill and the (then New) 1960s University of Sussex on the other side of the tracks.

Voices and Visions Conference: Impressions of the day

(as this had to be done in 40 minutes, not so much emotion recollected in tranquillity as in panic!)

Six centuries past at the Battle of Lewes,
Democracy trumpeted a first flourish.
Two centuries past in a pub in Lewes,
Tom Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ hinted how it should finish.
Last night, keynote speakers gathered in Lewes
To mark a century of democracy’s progress
In its lifeblood – education – from Brighton’s Richmond Terrace
Up to Checkland in Falmer, organised by Pamela…(Lewis).
Tonight I’ll ring my wife and tell her that Ofsted
Got the biggest laugh in the poem I read!
Suzanne spoke of continuity and change:
100 years of inspections (no change there) and commitment and a rage
Of new curricula and content, not always well thought out
But that ‘still’ of Fifties teacher and pupils sharing learning and a smile: still what it’s all about.
The Keynote lecture: in 1900 the teaching profession
Was mostly pupil teachers or teachers who’d been one.
In 2010, Governments are still finding their way from thence
From Model B to Model A: as Tom Paine would say, it’s not rocket science, it’s Common Sense.
New words for education (Governments take heed) are a language for life:
Breadth. Balance. Relevance. Progression – get the ducks in a line.
Education has a moral purpose, it’s the future, the life chances of all
Needs a broad, long term view not the politics of a football.
Looking for the needle in a haystack of words on a line of dusty shelves:
The most effective teachers never stop learning themselves.
Enjoy it. Like it when the pupil or the PGCE student twigs,
Isn’t tired out by ‘Continuous Professional Development’ but inspired - given breath by it - to live.

‘Learning conversations’ all took up the notes of the keynote address:
A step back from point-scoring or head-lining, more a shared intellectual breath.
‘CPD descends via advisers who impose a line without question.
This University’s culture: never accept anything without question’.
‘As a consumer, as it were, of your students’ - ‘many feel bound by the system
Freed by shed frameworks and judgements, but also lost without them.’
‘External judgements and top-down frameworks are acting like straitjackets
Making the teacher’s own ideas and skills feel inadequate: even lunatic.’
‘What have you been thinking about this week?’ asks the liberal Head:
‘I haven’t had time, I just teach, I’m the hand, you’re the Head.’
‘Government Initiatives, for want of a ruder word,
What comes out of a charging bull’s backside is by definition a…’ (couldn’t think of a rhyme)
‘Will Hill Crest in Hastings crest the hill?
Or will all that money without impact on the culture just spill?’
‘Doctors and Teachers are both professions potentially diminished
By all the auxiliaries being added – but Doctor’s still Doctor; is Miss still – Miss?’

‘Young teacher, look 20 years ahead. Have the confidence to risk and even fail
Rather than be outstanding inside a template that makes you stale.’
Change will change and change and change in this, the oldest profession.
To teach is to learn and vice versa. Here endeth the lesson.’

© Gareth Calway 2010

Review - McCartney by Peter Ames Carlin

2010-09-03T06:39:00.009Z

I thought this was a much better Beatles book than most - and I've read a few. The most interesting point to me is the identification of McCartney as the key source of that Beatle beam - that sense of light shining in and against a shadow - that characterised their music. The emotional floodlight that looks all the brighter for the great empty dark behind. This is visualised by the cover of 'With the Beatles', released at the first peak of Beatlemania for Christmas 1963, a photo that recaptures the grainy dark of Astrid Kircherr Hamburg and the Beatle-blaze in their (here unsmiling) faces and eyes. The author traces this musical radiance against the darkness of McCartney's actual childhood - a warm working class family home blighted by the death of his mother Mary from cancer - and then through all the other deaths and black hole griefs that Macca has brave-faced down with no other faith than music. As the film 'Nowhere Boy' sympathetically shows, this loss of a mother and his refuge in rock n roll is what linked him in that mirror opposite relationship to Lennon. In that film, grief-stricken Lennon at first punches McCartney in the face (as he had been longing to do from the moment he started to move in on and become essential to his band and heart and as many people since also want to do - perhaps for the same reasons)and then hugs him for dear life in an emotive partnership that will change popular music. This book is different from the Lennonist norm in that it proposes McCartney as the tormented and difficult genius, rather than as the usual straight man to Lennon's romantic agony. The book is generous to George except in terms of coverage (very Beatle that) and more or ignores Ringo (the usual mistake) but it is very interesting about the problematic nature of Paul's joyous (apparent) simplicity, the shadows that concentrate the light. There are thought-provoking biog-based explorations of many Beatle and McCartney songs from the unexpected descent into a minor chord that 'made' 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' (John acknowledges 'that's it, you've got it' as they write it together across those mirrored guitars) through the avant garde middle sixties Beatle period which Paperback Writer Paul (not John) led, when Paul was living at the heart of the Asher family arty Sixties London while his band mates slumbered in golf course married suburbia, to the benevolent dictatorship that was Wings - and that George experienced in the Beatles. The Beatles, hardly less than Wings, (it seems clear) had Paul as their musical director from the start even if early LPs were fronted by many more Lennon songs and lead vocals. Lennon's artistic visions were essential to McCartney but he certainly shaped them, always adroitly, sometimes crucially. The fact that Lennon did very little of real Beatle level brilliance afterwards has always suggested this. But the book suggests that McCartney needs more than music and a 'Take It Away' approach to pain to really make the most of his prodigious gifts on every instrument and at every level of music making. A half album of Lennon rough diamonds to help work up and a Harrison classic or two to get his bass licks around for instance - not to mention a loved-to distraction, live-in critic (Lennon) to knock some of the easier musical smirks off that brave face. 'Yesterday' proved he was a 'genius-level' individual (and world wide No 1 popular) talent - no other Beatle had anything to do with that record - but all that post Beatles frippery and even blandness that Elvis Costello for one wanted him to cut back to the (very real) pain and the groove shows what easy gloss the other Beatles by and large kept in check. The book gets to the arrogant Paul we almost don't notice in the those Beatles songs where he insists on seeing it his way (We Can Work It Out) and that he can see through you (I'm Looking Through You) and wonders rhetorically why you don't get in his door. It's very tempting to do so - the room is so very colourful inside and the music so beguiling and the apple pie and smoky pot family atmosphere so cosy - but both he and the Beatles are better chasing those shadows through the dark, hounded and harrowed by Lennon's rhythm guitar and cussedness and deepened by Harrison's real - if slower and more studied - answers to the real questions. Not to mention that Ringo's Beat is what made the difference between playing Liverpool and rocking the world. (I told you not to mention Ringo -Ed.) The book does not commit the cardinal sin of biting the hand that feeds it, of making you feel and think less of its subject. It takes a clear-eyed look at the dark behind the whites of the audience smiles and gives McCartney due credit for facing it down. As 'Memory Almost Full' shows, when he's good, he's very very very good.

August harvest

2010-08-17T08:40:00.002Z

From 'One Man and His Masks Part One: Boudicca'

(Lines that whisper in the deaf ear of Decianus Catus – a classic anal repressive by name and nature - as he has Boudicca Queen of the Iceni flogged)

“Imagine a rowan, her May leaves wet,
Kissing your shoulder with late spring rain,
Imagine your mind like a moistened bud
Drinking her sweetness. Imagine her leaves
Turned light side up with the weight of her berries
August-heavy in the full milk moon.
Imagine her berries
Spilling their juices like healing oils
Over your November loneliness.
That's how the Mother of Britain loves you.”

Wales In Norfolk (as for copyright reasons I can’t publish anything from 'One Man And His Masks Part Two: Arthur' here yet)

The spring-white hawthorn is summerberry red
On the hedgerow I drive to school by every day,
A hedgerow under a sloping terraced cowfield,
The nearest I'm going to get to Wales
In Norfolk. Water-meadows, really, despite the heron
And the sea half a mile away. It's wild,
Though, wild as Mynydd Maen in its different way,
Arctic winds - and birds - in winter; this deep
Stillness - a stillness you can't quite trust - in summer:
The mountain ash soft as a rose, the spinney
Winter-gnarled in the harvest sunshine,
And the spring-white hawthorn summerberry red.
I have a slice of the moon in my pocket
And the wild red rose of desire.
I would like them to mean something.
I give the first line of this poem to Merlin in a play
About Guinevere and Arthur, feel the surge of pagan magic
In the prickly male hawthorn; the lady elegance
Of the mountain ash, rosaceae claws sheathed
In full berries of bright scarlet blood.
The august cornfield nods, under the blade in an hour,
A lifetime of growth and weather in every ear.
Another school year swings into place as I ply the gears
Along the streamlet they call a river in these parts
(Boudicca's Cymru), spreading a word I know only by heart
- Excalibur, Logres, the myths and spells of Britain -
To young Angles hiding a wild Celtic fringe
Under their stacks of straight yellow hair.
In permanent exile from Y Gymraeg,
A tongue as remote to me now as dragons,
It's too late to do anything more
Than write Welsh poetry in translation;
And I'm too far from legend to make a stand
On any more lofty and heroic ground
Than a classroom teaching what I've mastered
Of a foreign language: English. But I don't want to.
I want the summer to go on forever....

When tawny-eyed Merlin and Arthur and Guinevere
Return to reclaim the whole of Britain,
And the spring hawthorn and the summer mountain ash
And the pagan-solstice mistletoe of Morgan Le Fay
All bloom together on the same tree,
Maybe then the long exile of the Bards will be over
And I won't have to go to school anymore.

NOTE Thought I’d better put some non-football stuff up here in case people think I’m obsessed (Me?).

On The Frome Double

2010-08-12T08:05:00.003Z

On The Frome Double
I

Was that the demon of Frome?
The Frome flyer? Robin-red John
In cricket whites? Or Lady Luck I saw
Walking across Shearwater Lake
While a kingfisher streaked
Out of Berkeley woods
As a bluebell in flight
Through a Mendip May morning?
And have all those legendary feet
Of ancient time returned
As Mark Salter, scorer of 37
Vintage first team goals
In Frome Town’s winging flight
From the Western League Premier
And into the heights
Of the Southern League?
No, no. This day dream was real.
It wasn’t Lady Luck
Or any of these ghosts,
It was: Richard Fey, Edward Quelch,
Adam Missiato, Paul Farrell,
Jonathan Crowley, Jamie Cheeseman,
Stewart Bryant, Jack Metcalf,
Daniel Harvey, Steven Hunt,
Leigh Burke, Alex Lapham,
Sam Duggan, Joe Gomes,
Simeon Allsion, Dean Caslake,
Liam Fussell, Ian Kennedy,
Shaun Percival, Mark Salter,
Matthew Rawlins, Danny Thompson.
II

A goal kick away
From Badger’s Hill, believing
In King Arthur and England’s quest
For a holy grail called the World Cup.
I learned to read from a football Book
Written by Kim and Tony, while
Alf the groundsman dubbined
That leather medicine ball we played with
In Rodden Estate fields
My mother washed the club’s ten red shirts,
One green, numbered 1-11
In big white numbers: the whole
Of Frome Town hung out to dry.
Now, forty years on, giant-killing Frome
Have their wings on the Somerset Cup
And a claw hold in the Southern league
And the whole Mendip valley is soaring.
Let’s paint the town robin red
And sing the names of local heroes
In a cider-summer glow.
Richard Fey, Edward Quelch,
Adam Missiato, Paul Farrell,
Jonathan Crowley, Jamie Cheeseman,
Stewart Bryant, Jack Metcalf,
Daniel Harvey, Steven Hunt,
Leigh Burke, Alex Lapham,
Sam Duggan, Joe Gomes,
Simeon Allsion, Dean Caslake,
Liam Fussell, Ian Kennedy,
Shaun Percival, Mark Salter,
Matthew Rawlins, Danny Thompson!

Note: I'm sick to death of England and its Premiership primadonna pantomime-booing carthorse carry-on and it's also a bit of a quiet, suck it and see (and not very sweet at the moment) time to be a Bristol City fan. So as the season starts kicking off, I'm defaulting all the way back to my Frome Town roots with a poem written in celebration of their great triumph the season before last. To all the Badger's Hill believers...

Ruby Wedding Red Plus Six

2010-08-03T12:31:00.003Z

Forty years today, following the reds
From the Bristol derby at Eastville,
October 3 1964 (1-1, Bush) to
2-2 at Saltergate with ten men,
(Murray, Coles) usually at least one
Division below where, at our best,
We would grace the game, and you dare
To ask, would I do it all again?
Of course not! (All right then, yes.)

October 2 2004

And six years later, securely one division up on that, aged 54 and now a fan of forty six years it's still YES. The new season is sitting with the key in the ignition, after a false start that might be just nothing or might be a problem with fuel or carburettor or electrics, but the seat belt is on and we have the England number one in goal. Never saw that coming. Come on you reds.

My New Elizabethan World Cup Sonnets 4. V Germany

2010-06-28T08:44:00.002Z

My New Elizabethan World Cup Sonnets 4. V Germany

The 'golden generation' fill their boots,
Those sponsored hospital slippers, with lead
And take the field Franz seeds - with golden shoots
Of 'here to win it' sweat - with wee instead.
Each grail-knight, like Midas in some yob's G
Grade essay into Greek 'Methodology'
On a Trojan carthorse, wins less than Greece
And Turkey have on none of the salary.
A Glazered-over Premiership-serving
Slave to loveless lucre's Un-manning debt,
Petrified Rooney absent as Scholes, King
Of England's nothing, dream-theatres shed.
Stuffed as 'bankers from the Thatcher Error'
Just less fit, and Fritzed by youth and terror.

Significantly, the only group winner not to go through so far (or probably
at all) is USA, who actually beat Slovenia and were - in terms of objective
position as well as spirit etc - better than us. So we were in the worst
group and couldn't win it. We are about as good as Ireland, on a par with
Greece and Turkey but with less success in tournaments since the immediate
post second world war period: ie 1966. Fact. The next time we should
regard ourselves as plucky underdogs and rejoice if we qualify, go berserk
if we top our group and faint if we get any further. Oh and draft in the
English Defence League as our defenders - do them good to get a kicking and a
reality check and probably still slightly improve our results too.

Note: Greedy King Midas was granted a wish and asked that everything he touched turn to gold - not working out in advance that would include food, drink, lover etc . Carol Ann Duffy has written a poem about it from the wife's angle. It would do as her official poem about England's traditional doomed tilt at the World Cup.

Rhetorical Question?

2010-06-26T15:34:00.006Z

Here's one. Because we allowed the USA to pinch our place in the World Cup (as it has in the world), we now have to beat Germany, Argentina and Portugal to get to the final in a competition where France and Italy go out shockingly early. When has that ever happened?

I'll tell you when, Mr Rhetoric. 1966.

The one team we didn't beat then and the world said we needed to to really prove our case (flash in the golden pan winners 1958, 1962 and 1970) was Brazil, whom we will doubtless keep waiting in the rain this year before beating them 1-0. Just to put 1970 straight.

That's the way I'd write it anyway.

My New Elizabethan World Cup Sonnets 3. V Slovenia

2010-06-24T08:44:00.000Z

The lazy lion lumbers into life
To cuff aside the mouse of fate, then roars
It to the corner’s sanctuary and strikes!
And strives - and fails - to pin its tiny paws.
The beast its leader ‘knows’ is in the field
And taking chances – one – and missing five,
A cat among the pigeons, roaring ‘Yield!'
'Fierce England, Fabio-faced, is still alive!’
The might and mane – a little balding, true -
Of Rooney moves in for the ruthless kill,
Our winter king, asleep since March (and June?)
To chew the post, and limp off, looking ill.
And so our doppelganger, Germany,
The old invasion game, then home for tea.

New Elizabethan Sonnets 2 v Algeria

2010-06-19T10:14:00.008Z

“Inglorious and goalless Ing-ger-land”
The mourning papers Nayed in ‘66
In hopeless headlines that, like Ferdinand,
Stood not the test of time – but stand for this.
A team without a heart, a head, a smile,
A hurst, a moore, a charlton or a ball,
A drab grey outfit, no nobby yet no style,
The walk-on-waters sinking in the pool.
A sponsor-burdened team who could not play
A season with this globe like Germany
Because ‘our’ ball is some fat cat’s, and so are they
And paid each draw more than my salary.
We grub all week for victory’s floodlight
To stare down a black hole of endless night.

Note. Apparently we're not playing very well because the 'boys' are bored. They need more freedom.

They don't need more freedom. They need to grow up and start earning their celebrity lifestyles by winning a trophy for a change instead of going on a jolly and getting knocked out in the quarters and expecting us all to carry on cheering !

The Tony Hancock School of Football Management

2010-06-13T17:57:00.003Z

I am posting this response from John H Davies (to my World Cup sonnet no 1) in full. John is remarkable man in many ways. I will list only four. He is convinced the 1958 England team would have won the World Cup but for the Munich air disaster (plausible enough) and believes the 1970 team - Charlton plus Mullery, before Ramsey took Charlton off and we never qualified again for the rest of the Seventies - was atually better than the 1966 one and would have beaten Brazil in the much predicted Final. As a nineteen year old, he was present at Wembley when we actually won the World Cup. He saw George Best in his pomp (ie his shins kicked to blue murder by 60s centre halves but still getting through and scoring). And he is a Manchester United fan who actually comes from Manchester. Here are his thoughts on the present England World Cup hopefuls...

"Thanks for the sonnet. Now Capello knows what it is like to have an interest in England's football team. Dragon-faced? Yes, I like that image. It is accurate and well-observed. However, he remains a Tommy Cooper look-alike, and the buffoonery that surrounds him may eventually be revealed to be of his own creation. Rio Ferdinand has been injured for two seasons. Why take him? Ledley King must have been a sop to political correctness for the inclusion of the chronically disabled. Why take him? John Terry seems to be as tactically and spacially confused as he is morally confused. No doubt he is quick at getting his kit off but he is slow on the turn and on the sprint, an ageing thug, a shadow of his former self, worn down by years of self-indulgence and belief in the hype and flattery of the John Motsons of this world, starry-eyed fat boys who were never able to do it themselves, but who revelled in fame-by-association and were, therefore, obliged to continue the cant well beyond Terry's sell-by date. Carragher, slower than a journey through the traffic lights in King's Lynn. Reliant on the scything tackle, the outstretched arm, the push in the back, but unable to deploy any of these normal Premiership devices in the absence of Premiership referees. Johnson, a man who runs forward very fast but who cannot run back to defend, who always stands in the wrong place and who is always totally unaware of the presence of the winger when a ball is crossed over his head from the other wing. Green, a goalie who can't catch. Heskey, a striker who can't strike. A damp match of a man, tried time and again but who refuses to ignite, but who is chosen time and again and again and....Lennon and Wrong-Phillips, both flatterers to deceive. Milner, a one-paced work-horse who has been unable to train for three days because of a bout of ague, chosen to mark the American's key player, Donovan. Lampard, scorer of thousands of goals in the Premiership where everyone and anyone can score (apart from Heskey), but who can't shoot for toffee in international matches, linked again with Gerrard, whose face has the tortured look of a man who has sold his soul and skills to the devil of Liverpool and who last season suddenly realised it, when every human being in the world - in the igloos of the Arctic, in the mud huts of Pygmyland , in the yurts of Mongolia and Thornham - knows that they cannot play together. Every mother in the world must have said at some time "You mustn't play with him. He'll end up getting you in trouble!". So why doesn't Capello say it? Capello's is the "Tony Hancock school of football management" - he who cannot head is picked as centre-half, he who is weediest is picked as mid-field enforcer, he who cannot catch becomes goalie, he who cannot shoot becomes Heskey. And Rooney is tired and frustrated and lonely and, sorry to say it, ineffectual. So Copello is Tommy Cooper after all, a Steve Mclaren without and umbrella, a Graham Taylor without a turnip. The USA, a team comprising of rejects from Watford and West Brom, journeymen from Fulham and American Soccer! leagues, and a star player who was dropped from the Everton team after a brief loan spell, were too good for us for long periods of the game. Oh dear oh dear oh dear! Roll on the next game. You have my full permission to turn this into a poem. Name it In Memoriam, or Lament For Alf And The Boys Of Sixty-six. Bobby Charlton was at yesterday's match. Why didn't Capello bring him on?"

More responses like this please. Let's live while we can.

My New Elizabethan World Cup Sonnets 1. v USA

2010-06-13T06:45:00.004Z

By a spooky mis-chance, though I watched all four on TV I managed to be out of the room for all four goals previous to the first England game. Not having HD, I didn't miss -

And so the first two goals I do not miss
In this World Cup both come from Eng-ger-land,
The first from Gerard, like a lover's kiss
Sudden, sweet - the second, Green's self-fumbling hand.
The night was African but winter chill,
The kind we like to get our kit on for,
And get our balls across, and shoot to kill
As Stevie did, and then that Green barn door.
The date was set as Lady Luck's perfume
Filled all our heads, our white knight stormed the keep
Capello's dragon-face burst open in a plume
Of wizard glee, our Green knight...made her weep.
At least we scored, that grey suit seems to say
Slumped, solo, on Green's dirty sheet next day.

My World Cup Dream

2010-06-11T12:35:00.004Z

I mean - literally - the dream I woke up with this morning. I was on the touchline for the US game and Beckham was there in an enormous othopaedic boot. It was about a foot high. When I queried his presence in that condition, he grinned cheerfully and said in that boyish twang,'I've been selected for senior field duties. Anything to help out.'
'What - you're actually playing - but you're injured?'
'Yes.' said Emeritus Golden Balls,' with a likeable shrug.
'But that's incredible!'
What didn't seem incredible - in the dream - was that I was also about to go on as sub. No, I'm not injured - well, that football-related injury down a railway embankment en route to a Bristol City game which left put me out for the rest of the 2008 season still troubles me - but I'm 53 and have no experience of football above a village green standard.
And it seemed perfectly natural when Beckham long-balled me soon after from midfield with an inch-perfect assist which I scuffed-tripped over past the keeper with all the grace and assurance (don't knock it - it works) of an accidental Crouch deflection. In most dreams, especially mine, the ball just won't go in. This did. It was wonderful.
Back to reality. I woke to a newspaper picture of a third choice English captain who can't speak and a singularly ugly and unprepossessing team in grey Marks and Spencers drill looking very ordinary there (with the exception of Rooney, already booked in a friendly for swearing at the ref, who looks like a potato but who in form, a genuine great and the heart and lungs of the side ) among the galaticos of Brazil, Spain and (maybe) Argentina.

Ah yes,but it's chilly in South Africa this time. For once, we have the weather on our side. And a fierce Italian manager who can out-think tricksy Latin tacticians because he is one. And a dead ball specialist who can come on for 'senior field duties'. (No, that was just the dream.) If only we had a few foreign players as well, we might still do it...

I worked out that we probably need to get past Serbia in the Last 16, France in the quarters and Italy in the semis (the newspaper says Brazil) to lose to Spain in the final. We can't meet Portugal until the final this time and I don't think they'll get there anyway, or possibly even out of a group containing Brazil and Ivory Coast. Simple as that.

And then I really woke up?

June 2006 v Portugal

2010-06-10T17:06:00.004Z

Er Indoors had gone to Barcelona so not only did I have nothing to distract myself from forty years of hurt, I also had to cook my own meals!
I went for a 36 mile cycle ride– a 5 hour pub crawl either side of a pub lunch - to ‘take my mind off it’. Apart from a team weakness on the left side (the feminine side?) that cried out like a lost childhood for Ryan Giggs, this surely was the best England side - since 1998… 1996… nay, that Mullery-graced 1970 team that was even better than 1966...
I cooked dinner. In stages. I ate my veg in the doorway so I could keep an eye on the meat between eyefuls of Ronaldino, Rooney and red wine. ‘We can win this. Beckham don’t get sent off. Rooney don’t get crocked…’
Something exploded in the kitchen. I swear left the boys for no more than a second. By the time I came back, Rooney was injured, Beckham sent off...
No. The other way round.
Another ‘last chance’ of seeing 1966 come to the finest generation of English footballers for a generation - in the bin with my dinner.
And we all know -deep down - it's all going to happen again.

It's Got To Be (The Real) Gordon

2010-05-05T00:10:00.004Z

Remember that New Labour May in 1997? Oh what bliss in that dawn to be alive. To be ten (as our daughter is in the picas and I was in terms of political naivety ) was very heaven. So where are we, exactly 13 years later?

Well the polling booth pictured has long since moved, replaced by a tick box jury. And the last two elections I've found it hard to summon up any interest at all let alone the enthusisam I felt for Obama's historic marathon to the White House. And to complicate matters further the Labour condidate for North West Norfolk has mixed his manifesto up with the BNP's and called his party leader the worst PM in history so it's all a bit weird.

But suddenly it does seem to matter. Not just because it's close but because it's got real.

Accepting that we all see the narative we want, in football as in elections, and in my case through rose-tinted specs, I have been struck by the contrast in energy projected by David and Gordon so far this week. David is buzzing round all over the surface of the country like a blue arsed fly with his sleeves neatly rolled up for the camera 'ready to clear up the mess' (oh please!) while Gordon's lumbering volcanic energy seems to have come from a sudden deep taproot in the man himself, the social justice socialism of his chapel soul, born of hurt and humiliation and some healthy self-accusation. The former is much nearer to the media witch Blair, the latter more like Old Labour.

In that long lost May of 1997, I fancy both flash and reality were at work but I reckon, back against the wall and at media bay, this at last is the real Gordon, warts and all.

I'd like to see him elected as such and governing like it too.

Burkes, Bantams and Ballast

2010-05-02T08:59:00.009Z

I see from my drive across Norfolk to its fine city capital yesterday that once again large empty fields (some of them full of impressive bulls) are declaring their timeless political allegiance for the Conservative Party. I didn't catch their bullish candidate's name - Oxy Moron was it? - but he's pledging himself as he has since the Normans ( Tebbit, La Mont, St John Stevas) for conserves that change. Or is it change that conserves?

'Change that ye may conserve' as some Burke once said.

But what's this - an energetic young puppy is bouncing onto the scene as I cross North Norfolk. The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England. Will he turn the tables of government or just knock them over?

Only in the fine old city itself do some Labour posters appear. Old Labour as in poor old Labour.

A funny thing happened on our way to in the city centre. Cockerels crowing and sheep bleating. There was a mini farmyard outside the forum. Is it another media circus carefully upsetting Gordon's campaign? Infamy! The media have all got it in for me.

So if I was interviewing the three candidates for the job, who would get it? Certainly not someone whose central defining slogan sinks millions of pounds on a slogan that conveys the inability to think in a straight line and whose concepts of change and conservation don't add up. Can this Tory team think? Will the detail of 'Honest' George Osborne's gambler budget add up any more than that slogan?

So you're faced with someone who has energy and enthusiasm and youth and may well be a big hit when he gets his feet on the ground and his hands on the wheel. Young Nick. Or the old guy who everyone is jeering at but who kept us afloat when the waters got really choppy. A man carrying a bit more substance than is strictly healthy but what labouring been-there battleship doesn't?

To My Beloved Godson On His Marriage

2010-04-08T16:32:00.007Z

The last time we shared a church occasion,
You were naked and a little bit sloshed,
And had to be carried home by a woman
And fed through a dummy and washed.
Remember your wife is not your mother!
And you will have saddened, stunned and shocked her,
If you mix up your mate with your madonna
Your angel or nurse, she’s only your doctor.
I’ve little knowledge of the married state,
Your funky uncle only married once
And stayed so through the good times and the great
But here for what it’s worth is my advice:
When Love makes an offer you can’t refuse
Embrace it thorn and rose, win as you lose.

Chris and Tanya's big big day April 10. And I mean big. Let them church bells ring out. She's a doctor, his mother's a nurse. As long as he doesn't go into teaching everything should be hunky dory. Seriously though, they're young, they're brilliant, they're utterly head over heels and life stretches before them like a highway of diamonds. Nice day for a...Welsh wedding.

Let The Good Times Roll

2010-04-03T19:35:00.010Z

Standing behind the Wedlock goal,
watching the barcodes in soft yellow in the rain
like they don’t want to get their kit dirty
against our red-blooded last-ditch knights
(until we let them back in at 2-1)
my daughter said it was the best game
of football she'd ever seen –
all four goals right in our faces,
smell of the turf, rage of the crowd,
ever-changing, undetached narrative
and the world at stake along the white line
for 90 minutes. Can't beat it.
Then alone by an internet radio for Barnsley,
hearing an early lead crumble to 2-1
and then surge to 5-2, the wish to be there
almost as strong as the old dread
that returns – albeit briefly - at 5-3,
I think ‘we’re staying up then’.
And now behind the goal at Peterborough, from top
to bottom in one week, on terraces
built fifty years before the Taylor report
and a thousand years before civilisation,
remembering nine bleak years in the small time,
recovering from the optical illusion of Maynard
in long shorts and socks rolled up in the warm up
as the red tights of a Prem primadonna,
watching a grey game burst into brief red life,
the players larger than life and closer than TV,
as Clarkson nods, winks and ghost-smiles at Hartley
and points at a spot the Posh can’t see
I say to the stranger next to me: ‘Clarkson to score!’
and he does, like it’s my birthday (which it is)
and like we’re too good for places like this (which we aren’t yet)
and start to dream again.

I thought this was the Atyeo?

World Book Day at Clare Middle School, Suffolk.

2010-03-13T15:57:00.002Z

This year I did some ghost storytelling. Not stories told by a professional in my name. Stories told by me about ghosts performed with masks, props and costumes and supported by workshop ideas and demonstrations for how to tell them.
It can be a lonely way to make your living, this – lots of one off away days: and you want to bring something a lot more special to the place that’s booked you than a glorified supply teacher. I spent ten days solid preparing it to try and make sure it was worth the investment – so I hope a few other schools book it to make it time-effective! There was a moment as I followed the signposts around Bury St Edmunds and saw a sign to Diss 11 Miles and a sugar factory looking like one of Blake’s dark Satanic mills that I wondered if I was on my way to some personal Mordor but Clare Middle was anything but. A beautiful brilliant sun-drenched Suffolk day in a part of East Anglia that would suit a brochure for an English heaven was a suitable setting for a school that in many ways seemed too good to be true. Not just the teacher in charge of English (Kate Terry) and her assistant but about a dozen others seemed keen to help me make the day as successful as possible for the children’s benefit. As it should be, of course, but sadly not something you can assume.
I kicked off with a ghost story with a difference from Poona in India, designed to emphasise how many ghost stories are in the eye – or mind - of the beholder. Though I say so myself, I think I provided a rather impressive range of sound effects with a football rattle. Then I followed up with chilling extracts from two of the best ghost or ghostly stories ever written: The Woman In Black and the Woman In White and some guidance from Susan Hill (author of the former) about the creation of atmosphere, fixing a powerful sense of place, a narrator who does not (at first) believe in ghosts, establishing a human reason for a ghost to haunt that place etc and a tension between the safe and the unsafe.
The gala section of the day(and based on a straw poll of pupils easily their favourite and the one that taught them most) was my premiere (in a superb Elizabethan costume designed by Mrs Robinson) of The Canterville Ghost: a one man show I devised as I finished my recent study guide on this comic Wilde classic for Classical Comics. Three stage-stealing pupils helped by presenting the characters of Virginia and the terrible twins. The Beatles provided some sound cues from the White album. (Cry Baby Cry and Revolution 9.) I was hoping they could play these live but John and George couldn’t make it even as ghosts so in the end we had to make do with a version of the sound cues – effective if not quite as planned - provided by yet another positive and cheerful member of staff. After this, I repaired to the staffroom and met Andy the (other) storyteller – he was in mediaeval costume – which was an apt precursor to my Elizabethan gear as he was working with Years 5-6 and I with Years 7-8. “You must be the other storyteller,” I said, to the only other person in sight not dressed as a modern teacher….
The afternoon was largely a supporting role for me as I visited the 4,000 workshops (well, 24) using a map of the school that in the end did not defeat me (thanks to my Geography A level and, all right because my friend the deputy came and got me when I missed one. Now that's what I call care and attention.) The pupils had such a wealth of guidance from the school itself that my main contributions were I think advice about performance.
Thank you Clare and Kate (and assistant and all the other generous support) and how good and refreshing it was to be in a school and a staffroom from which negative vibes were entirely absent. (Yes, sadly, I noticed the absence of something so common and even looked for it.) The school has even been given a good to outstanding Ofsted and in every way seems a place you’d gladly send your child to be educated and cared for, enthused and extended. Middle Schools might not fit the Whitehall clerk template of education but this one seemed the optimum setting for children to learn up to their thirteenth year. Naturally the (Tory) council wants to shut it down.
What was that about cynicism?

Real Wife

2010-03-11T14:18:00.020Z

We're not the teen-dream lovers of the songs
And films n’ soaps n’ mills n' boons n’ ads,
The 'hunters' living with their mums and dads,
The twenty-something dramas, dinging-dongs,
The sizzling catalogues of straps and thongs,
The Darcys, Juliets and golden lads
In modern strip from tales in which the cads
Are forty odd like us and cause all wrongs.

Our story didn't end like these above
In frozen celebrations, wedding-deaths;
We've raised a daughter into Now and Next,
We're grown ups grown together, more or less,
Our romance is a realistic text:
A dangerous, married, grail-quest of true love.

This was for an anniversary a few years ago. We've clocked up thirty years since and we're fifty somethings in this picture though forty something in the poem. I always visualise the Norwich City kit in line 7 (because of the golden lads). But for fidelity through better and worse, Ashton Gate is more like it. I shared a long Indian train journey with a Sikh once who told me that you don't get married on your wedding day - it takes at least ten years. We're getting there.

The Myth Explodes

2010-03-01T20:00:00.002Z

The Myth Explodes

And west of the sunset, King Arthur is stirring
Like Adam in Eden. He leaps green paths
Under Undead apples. He leaves dead peace, is
A red dragon flying. He mounts the storm
Of climate-changed Severn and rides the white bore
Up arrowing waters from Ynys Wydrin
(Except seven, none returned from Caer Siddi)

His bard fiddles while Rome burns. “No Muse would praise me,
Great king, for invoking a Potency as dead as my pen is.
The swan-white horse that saved the West an old age ago
Is dead. No monks mass now like sheep, no wolves sing
A dread evensong; not ravens but neutrons peck out the eyes
Of battle-dead. No Forest in Britain, no spoils in Annwn.
Except seven, none returned from Caer Siddi.

The Giant of battle-spears and long shields is dead,
Your Celtic Christ in the Dark, defying Saxons
Living as wolves, is dead; dead all your god-knights
Spoiling in Annwn, dead your god-Captain,
Who sought the Cauldron through Forest so long
His religion changed and he still hadn’t found it.
Except seven, none returned from Caer Siddi.”

The bard fiddles while Rome burns, “Yet no sword’s so mighty,
Lost King of the Lost Lands, as these calculations,
And recalculations, of thin volume on the head of my pen
For the out of print master and avatar of Britain:
It was Britain - Excalibur the brand of Britain-
You held in your hand. Now it’s the World.
Except seven, none returned from Caer Siddi.

Long live the long-dead King! The Grail entombed
In the high vault of heaven, the safest Keep, may never return
Now that Mother Earth, where those Ancient Feet walked
Age after Age, Faith upon Faith, our Dam in Distress
From despoiling dragon and no longer green, is sinking low
In Flood, in Fire, in Ice. The Giant must fly through Space,
Now, in Time. Or none return from Caer Siddi.”

Notes: It must be spring fever. It is March 1st and it really did feel like winter might finally be receding today - there was sun on the snowdrops and pink-footed geese in the meadow, instead of snow on the sun and meadow mud all over the sky. I'm off to do a World Book Day in Clare Middle School in Suffolk this Thursday. And in the above poem (rather mannered I know but I'm trying to suggest the knights are emerging, rather groggily, from buried Celtic myths) King Arthur is stirring, ready to take up his sword against the end of the world. He said he'd be back!

Breathless on a peak in Venezuela

2010-02-04T09:34:00.002Z

To our daughter on her 23rd Birthday
and her imminent departure for Venezuela

So once again, my love, we have to let you go,
Our Spanish sunshine woman, our child of English snow.

The rosebud has to petal, the flower has to bloom,
The young heart has to open and love must let you go.

In realms of gold or breathless on a peak in Venezuela
May that flower of peace you chase within you grow.

These hands that used to be your anchor, wave you farewell now:
Love’s imprint travels with you, and everywhere you go.

O parent, what a burden a beloved child is on the heart:
What chords and strings are plucked, what music wherever she goes.

Dec 28 2009

Note: a bit late posting this but I've been closeted in a room with Oscar Wilde (writing a 100 page study guide on the Canterville Ghost) all day every day since. Our daughter is still in Venezuela, the next beach from Norfolk albeit over thousands of miles of Atlantic and Caribbean water. On the phone her voice sounds simultaneously far away and shockingly close.

Pearly Gates

2009-12-03T07:23:00.005Z

Thirty years ago, a boy and a girl
Put their No’s to the grindstone, their Yes to the world.

Thirty years ago, two lovers’ true minds
Got some grit in their oyster and started a pearl.

Thirty long years with ‘the right bloody woman’
Hatching a love-shelled and rock steady girl.

Thirty years gone, two half-hearts gambled
A whole heart for love and lost a half-world.

Glimpsed through that dazzle of church wedding glass,
Seen face to face now - the sun’s winter pearl.

Dec 1 2009

My Uncle Riley famously greeted his sixtieth wedding anniversary with 'Aye, sixty years with the wrong bloody woman.' I do not envy him his marriage but I do envy his laconic power.

Intertextual note: I read Shakespeare's sonnet 'Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True (Two?) Minds/ Admit Impediments' at our wedding reception and meant it.
My playout features Shelley's rendering the Corinthian spirit of (formerly Saul and later St) Paul as sourced via the Stones's greatest hits LP 'Through The Past Darkly'. (1969) Even the devil (now Sir) Jagger knew his Bible in those days.

Beardo!

2009-11-04T22:17:00.000Z

An Ode To Danny Haynes

2009-09-30T06:48:00.002Z

D aring runs into dangerous areas, deft passes
A ttacking balls aiming for the top where the Premiership class is.
N ew boy coming fast out of the blocks in a reconditioned team,
N ew ambition and nous re-igniting the old big City dream.
Y oung, gifted and laughing at risk

H ell forward leathering the ball here, held back at Ipswich,
A ngular artistry, a Giggs on grass, identical scars above each eye,
Y ES-yelling walker in da Ashton park, Danny never-say-die,
N ever underestimates the need to nail his place in the side,
E very Friday’s an audition for a part in his favourite film:
S torming through the opposition like a red sail on the Caribbean.

Notes during recent matches at 'Fortress Ashton' I have been carrying a thumb injury. This is partly the reason why during the Scunthorpe home draw I have misfired texts as follows:

'cuntsthorpe are bringing on a bus!" to the editor of a large international publishing company instead of to my mate 'cabby'

'peedo' (as the crowd was yelling in wild abandon at the time) to the head of a Welsh secondary school, instead of to my mate Tom.

The other reasons for the mistake - drunkenness, schoolboy excitement/terror and the sheer amount of noise and jostling in the East End - did not make the cold Monday morning retractions and apologies any easier!

Here, though, as published in the Middlesbrough programme earlier this season, is a 'text' suitable for anyone who receives it - especially anyone cheered by the young hero's match settling goal for City last night.

Bristol Welsh

2009-08-14T12:33:00.002Z

Bristol Welsh and two different ball games.

Can you take m back where I came from can you take me back?

No you can't - unless you can find me a haven somewhere in the middle of the Bristol channel. I wrote this article about it during last year's Six Nations, around the time Bristol City were throwing in the towel on a transitional season.

Leaving Loftus Road in a sea of celebrating blue, my Bristol City red and white felt like a funeral scarf. But I wore it with pride. Wore it all the way into a Six Nations pub in the West End, where it identified me with Wales against the green of Ireland. Which was fair enough.

I met a Welshman, a Scotsman and an Englishman, three lovely Irish ladies - and had a beer-quaffing Rugby ball. Like the other Welsh supporter, I had no wish to see Wales lose – I’d already lost once that day - but I enjoyed the first Irish Grand Slam for fifty one years nonetheless. As sporting weekends go, it had its ironies.

It was the second such weekend in a row.

I spent the previous one with my old school-friend, sharer of a first name, initials and a very real teenage fantasy girl we never got the courage to ask out 1969-1973. And, if not actually separated at birth, then certainly occupying the same maternity ward within days of each other in late March 1956.

Sport is about roots, of course. Football teams handed down from fathers, rooted in places. But sitting at the same Grammar school desk and sharing all the highs and lows of the ‘wonder years’ is about as deeply rooted as it gets. We also were both coached by Terry Cobner, the 1970s Welsh Rugby captain and British Lion, my friend with rather more success than me.

We watched Italy v Wales in a Welsh pub – by which I mean a valley pub that bursts into song at the slightest encouragement like a daffodil at the slightest hint of sunshine: a kick that doesn’t miss touch or even threads the posts, a pass that goes to hand without knocking on or fumbling.

My old schoolfriend is as Welsh as the surrounding hills (the Welsh word for these is ‘mountains’). My own Welshness, while no less ardent, is more complicated. A Bristol father and infancy, a Somerset boyhood and burr, a Welsh mother who met this father on the train to see Bristol City, a weekend of purgatory every week for the past 45 years that only a Bristol City victory can lift into heaven.

My dad explained to me as a boy that my often inconvenient Severn-bridging background had a major consolation. It meant that I could play for England or Wales. What a privilege! None of my Somerset boyhood football team-mates or Welsh adolescent Rugby class-mates could boast that. Dad should also have explained that I also needed to be extremely good at football, rugby or whatever else I was qualified by birth and breeding to be. I needed at the very least to know that in Rugby you were allowed to catch the ball and that to score a try you had to be fast – I was – but also stay on the pitch. I later reduced my ambition to playing football for England, then Wales, then Bristol City and in my 40s achieved my more realistic ambition of writing for them as the official club poet.

So the Six Nations poses the dilemma not so much of who I should play for but of who to support. Or who to put first out of England and Wales followed by any other British or Irish team and then France.

And deprived of a football World Cup since my world-Beatling 10 year old youth in 1966, I support the side I think has the best chance of defeating the southern hemisphere in the Rugby version. I confess I’ve often preferred the Welsh style of play, but England (unlike Scotland, Wales and possibly even Ireland) generally realises that there is more to the world than beating England these days. So in Rugby I tend towards the English side of the Severn but with a soft spot for the land of my mother and that girl I mentioned and the other Gareth and all the other ties that a boy picks up between the ages of 12 and 18.

This season though I’ve been rooting for Wales. (Before you call me a glory hunter remember who my football team is.) And I wanted to sing the anthem in Welsh at the top of my voice in a Welsh pub before a game. And then cheer the dragon all the way to victory.

We’d cycled along the canal bank from Newport and were in place in the pub with our pints of Brains SA before the crowd arrived. We were subsequently joined by the other Gareth’s extended family and friends and several very fit Gaby Logan look-alikes in Welsh Rugby jerseys they seemed to fill out better than the players, a teddy bear with the flag draped around and a local choirmaster leading the singing.

Two boyos in Welsh jerseys arrived just in time for the anthem. We wanted to know if they knew the score of the crucial lunchtime Premiership game between Manchester United and Liverpool. Why should they know or care? I thought, they’re Welsh Rugby boyos. They knew. And by the time the four of us had finished exclaiming over this shock 4-1 victory over Fergie, the anthem was over. I’d missed it for Man U!

The disappointment continued. Wales were playing so badly I felt my chances of playing for them after all, even at Rugby, deserved new consideration. Italy were ahead. In my new position as possible Welsh manager I declared that the big mistake was to play to win by thirty points. “First, we should play to win!” The crowd in the pub were passionate but not happy, the support was more yells of frustration than songs of joy.

Then I noticed the dissenting voices. Cockney, cocky and agressively pro-Italy. Whenever the Irish (and therefore – in this Welsh pub – ‘biased’) referee made a shockingly ‘anti-Welsh’ decision, the cockneys would bay in his defence. Gavin Henson (a genius in my eyes, but not without his Welsh detractors here) was attacked for having orange legs. Constant beer-loud references were made to refereeing injustices in the England-Wales match. I wondered when the trouble was going to start. In a football pub, this was asking for a punch in the face. And there was serious Welsh muscle around and the English were outnumbered by about forty to two. (I was counting myself with the forty.)

But I was more bothered on behalf of my hosts than any of them seemed to be. In fact, it only seemed to bother me. The cockney baying seemed at the least discourteous and at most downright offensive. I was about to say so when the other Gareth prevented me. “It’s just banter. They’re locals.”

Locals?

We went out for a four pint pee and heard the Welsh try that turned the game. “Stay in there for the conversion,” pleaded my hosts. I did. I heard it go over. The atmosphere lightened. The dormant drunkenness coarsed through Welsh veins to Welsh heads and oh boyo did the singing start. “Bread of heaven” swelled like a Red (and green) Sea.

The cockneys responded with a Severn bore – first with the English national anthem, joined by me. Then the Italian one. Then the French Then the Scots. And all the Irish ones. And of course, the Welsh joined in all of them: a tide of beer rolling onto a heavenly beach made of song. The choirmaster marched through the bar deploying a piano stool as a bagpipe during a Scots anthem we all agreed was the best. It was at this point that I resolved that, having sung God Save The Queen in a Welsh Rugby pub, I was duty bound to sing Mae hen wlad fy nhadau at Ashton Gate in the match against Cardiff the next day.

The other Gareth wore my second strip Bristol City colours into the Atyeo End. I couldn’t do much about disguising his accent but as long as he let me do the talking I thought we would be okay.

Cardiff and Bristol City are that unique football phenomenon: an international derby. And a heritage of pitched terrace battles in the Seventies, Bristol police and Cardiff dai hards a united blue line against Bristol City diehaRds, and the police using the occasion to hand out beatings to young evaders of justice in the previous months. It was not a good place but there I stood - I had no other. Waves of red and blue would surge fifty yards left and right as I tried to follow the match, dodging ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ fire alike. The current policy of bussing these fans to each other’s grounds under police guard like prisoners is an anachronism but you can understand why.

There were to my personal knowledge five Welsh people in Bristol City colours behind the sun-drenched Atyeo End goal for that match, three of them season ticket holders. One is the Head of our old school in Wales.

The mischievous chants of Eng-er-land began and the Welsh season holders joined in. As did I. (Gareth was strangely quiet – but that was less a racial allegiance than a football one – for all his pretence to philosophical impartiality he only bucked up after the Cardiff equaliser in the 85th minute.) A scrawny Bristol teenager with sharp elbows kept referring – in moments of duress - to Cardiff fans as ‘Welsh’ and then a ‘C’ word that isn’t Cymru. I didn’t like him anyway because he didn’t get my subtle jokes about the Cardiff goalie’s jersey (perhaps he’s too young to remember Woolworth’s?), jokes I hold responsible for City’s opening put away by Maynard on 71 minutes.

More in defence of the other Gareth’s sensibilities than mine, I was about to point out to the scrawny lad that I - and this burly guy with me - had been born through that particular aspect of female anatomy, sonny. But I accepted he was under duress. Men (and boys) have got to have somewhere they can cuss and it’s only because he was as on edge abut the result as me. However, when Bristol City scored – and this really confused him - I yelled the name of our old school and (sensing the moment had come) sang Mae hen wlad fy nhadau instead.

And other things when Cardiff equalised.

After the game, the other Gareth and I went to the sunny Waterfront to watch the Spurs v Villa match. Gareth supports Spurs (they were good when we were lads and are still better than his local team, Cardiff) and I support his right to support them. Parallel screens were showing the England v France Six Nations game as well. Perfect.

We shared ludicrously expensive sugar-fuelled plastic lager at sub zero temperatures and happily followed our respective games, glancing politely at the other in friendly support. A bar full of incredible bulks was watching the unexpected trouncing of France with delight and the choruses of Sweet Chariot were a much needed uplift after my disappointment at Bristol City’s squandering of two points. These songs shifted later on to Spurs anthems as the same crowd (me included) moved on from that English victory to the Spurs one. The allegiance seemed almost arbitrary, the absence of Villa fans proportional to the run of play.

It was all in the testosterone, that need to feed a constant battling excitement, someone to beat, a gang to belong to.

On the train back to Newport, I endured the other Gareth’s cheerful insistence that football had been the winner in the Bristol-Cardiff derby. “You wouldn’t be so chipper if Villa had also equalised at the death,” I said.

Let’s call it a draw.

Rain in August

2009-08-06T19:20:00.002Z

I've not been blogging recently because I've been having severe doubts about the medium. This started when I put up an honest Joe blog a few years ago expressing some dismay at the attendance at a performance and got an immediate email from my next gig host saying they would pull the fixture if numbers were that low. Ever since then, I've found myself writing blog reports that sound upfront, off the cuff and honest but which are really always a bit hesitant in case it puts some venue off, or something similar.

And a lot of blogs I read seem just the same - just as calculated as any other kind of public announcement but a lot more sloppy and verbose. If you can't bothered to craft your craft, Mr Pseudo Blog, don't blogger me with it. And if you're really being spontaneous be spontaneous.

No more. It's all going to change, on this website anyway. A blog's not a blog that alters when it alteration finds or blogs with the remover to remove. Everything on Gaz's blog from now on will be slapped up like graffiti, or beautiful wallpaper, or the words of the prophets written on the subway walls. I might even chuck some verse around like a pop artist chucking paint and then cycle all over it.

Like this-

August rain rattles down
On my conservatory roof.
I like it.
It makes me feel
Like nothing's expected.
I can do what I like
I can take as long
As my life...

Good day Sunshine

2009-06-27T07:46:00.005Z

June and sunny. So unless you're reading Summer Moonshine by PG Wodehouse (in which case go back to it immediately) get your old copy of Sergeant Pepper out, put Side 2 on the turntable (if you don't know what a turntable is, stop reading now, there's no hope for you) and read this extract from my forthcoming novel Rubber Soul.

Lennon-McCartney wrote some of the most revolutionary music ever written. And the happiest. And, with Harrison, the loveliest. Love songs. They all believed in it, devoutly composed in it, played like bouys in its waves, still do on the quiet, the two that are left. Love as a political liberation (“say the word and you’ll be free”), love as personal revelation (“the movement you need is on your shoulder”) love as a mystical force (“with our love we could save the world”.) Pope John-Paul-George, the accidental divines. John’s direct hits, Paul’s plucked heartstrings, George’s blaze of inner Light worried from dark grumbles. Ringo’s floor spot at the steelworker’s social that was good enough to join the band.

They did not set out to be Shakespeare. But then neither did Shakespeare. They set out with a popular instrument in their hands, to make great popular culture for their own time. But Beatle Studies will replace Shakespeare as the definitive English heritage–high art for generations of school children. Shakespeare will move upstairs into Chaucer’s position as the Father of English Literature (and finally stop tormenting fourteen year olds who can hardly read modern pidgin with his sophisticated Elizabethan verse.) And Chaucer will move further upstairs to become the timeless classic of an earlier civilisation and language, like Homer. And Homer will stay where he is, like God.

They made peerless end of the pier entertainment for their peers.

Yet there is a hole at the heart of even the happiest Beatles record. In the end, it was the bullet hole that found Lennon’s heart. And it was there long before that. It was there exactly 13 years earlier – 8 December 1967 – released on the B side of that modern hello-goodbye here-there-and-everywhere carol John’s raspberrying backing vocal and rhythm helped rasp into irresistibility. It was there through all the late head-down B sides Lennon wrote – Rain, I Am The Walrus, Revolution, Don’t Let Me Down, Come Together – as obscure as any millions-selling Beatle release could be. It was there even at the ultimate orgasm: that windblown peak of the Summer of Love, the climax of their great signature album, which ends… after all the fuss …in a crescendo of nothing. A space ship storming an Albert Hall sized Black Hole. Like Hitler, they had one hell of a Ball, but they take us into the middle of everything – and leave us with nothing. A hole. It was there at the end; it was there at the beginning.

It was always there.

The Return Of King Arthur (Again)

2009-05-06T07:33:00.004Z

No, I'm not referring to the druid John Rothwell (goddess bless him) but to the original May King. I'm teaching a children's reading workshop on him at the Writeaway Conference Something Old Something New at the University of London on 22 May. King Arthur for the 21st century.. So Poem of the Month on the main website is The May King. This chimes pleasantly with my sight today, in a rare break from the PC, through a proper window, of my first swallow of the year. Add this to my first ear full of cuckoo a week ago and I think we can with cautious optimism begin to talk about the onset of summer. Let's hope it lasts a bit longer than it did last year. Meanwhile, here on the sister site blog, and staying with the original May King, or his Queen anyway, here's an old favourite of mine from Coming Home - Lady Guinevere.

Lady Guinevere (c. 13th century

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.
He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me
Who waits… and do not wait to see
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.

Dave and Helen's Wedding

2009-04-15T14:13:00.001Z

“The best wedding since ours, “ I say, and I mean it.
Even a breakdown and a lift home on a truck with an AA angel
Called Dave (was it you I wonder?) could not stop us.
A union of high theatre and real marriage.
Out of a cloudy April, a sudden brilliant summer
Falls straight from heaven onto Bishamption
And lasts all day and all starry evening,
(For one day only!)
The perfect lighting for the tulip-brilliant dresses
And beautiful costumes of all these people
Who have made up your amazing elusive life.
The high church vicar who started in the army
And then went into marketing and then found the church
(Cheerfully counting out fivers into his pocket from yours
Just before the holy starts rolling)
And now combines high humour with pointed, solemn
Endearingly detailed interpretations of the stage set.
Then the casually tip-top professional music concert as you exit
Into the vestry to sign the papers; then the Irish jig
That had us crazily clapping you out of church,
The sense of an entire village (with a Jane Austen church at the heart)
Revolving around your modern love story and its happy ending,
The sixth formers handing out canapés and smiling
Like these first sixth formers, your peers, I’m meeting again
From my first school at the other side of a dead career.
Your lucky streak continuing like the complete croupier you once were
To include every aspect of the meal and venue
And indeed half of Worcestershire by the time it ended;
The brilliant soul band with 1930s mikes and Aretha-red suits.
Even as I use my index finger as a temporary hinge
In a slammed door jamb of pain beyond pain (or any sensation
For the following days) I can’t help laughing.
We all got married with you two, those words come true
And everything with them, when the bride and groom mean them.

Everything organised to perfection to appear effortless,
Like the best poetry.

Even the accidental riverboat sailing under Eckingham Bridge
And over its brilliant sun-painted reflection
Joined in: its shining swan-white prow and name:
Welded Bliss. I gave my heart
- We all did – to the bride, but, ludicrously,
It was the groom I actually dance with.

All of us are dancing with both of you now
I think we may be dancing forever.

29 March 2009

2009-03-29T21:58:00.004Z

On His Birthday

“You cannot live in the present.
At least, not in Wales.” RST

“The rhymer in the long-tongued room
Who tolls his birthday bell
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds.” DT

All those years ago, I was in a tatty Welsh classroom
Studying Poem On His Birthday by Dylan Thomas
And now here I am in a tatty Norfolk classroom
Teaching Poem On His Birthday by Dylan Thomas
(Same textbook, newer edition). I’ve got nowhere
Very slowly and now the clock on the wall (essentially
The same wall) ticks up thirty nine instead of seventeen
As I fidget and fill in time as artfully as possible -
Subconsciously still waiting for teacher to come.
A big-hearted girl in year 8 has just tidied up
My slagheap of a desk because she “couldn’t stand it anymore”
And Caroline next door has crammed my pigeonhole
With a big red balloon and put HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Over the staffroom noticeboard. When I slip home
For lunch, I’ll get all my cards, a request to record
My not-so-slim-as-it-used-to-be volume onto tape for America
And the annual rejection from a Welsh publisher.
Then I’ll ease on the moccasins Melanie bought me
Which make me feel like a New Man. But I’m not.
I’m an Old Man, a Boy, enjoying his birthday
Up the Mountain, playing truant from everything
With my dog, Tan, running at my heels.

March 29 1995

Notes: Moccasins? That's so last decade darling.

A Good Friday

Blood-orange sun lazing down into the sea,
Full moon ghosting up the other side of the sky.
All down the sun-slackened tarmac to the woods,
Finches fleece hedgerows like there’s no yesterday
And no tomorrow. Round the graveyard walls
Like over-bred mothers, the fields have ploughed
Through yet another winter, lie back in the sun.
Mozart plays somewhere on a holiday radio,
Notes a tossed incense of joy so alive
It is almost beyond living. The sky
Is full of larks and I’m full of Real Ale
And full of myself anyway: it’s my birthday.
At the foot of a wall of crumbing stone -
A Victorian relic of ivy and railings -
D-A-D stands over a grave in flowers.
“Look, love, I chuckle, they’ve left out the E.”
This tickles my daughter as much as me
And we splutter until I am out of breath…
I am about to meditate on mutability
When her miniature copy of my hand
Hoists me homeward, impatient, a daffodil chill
On the air. Her face is a tiny March leaf,
Her "snuggle-riding" featherweight on my back
Fresh as the daisy that hasn't quite sprung,
A summer in bud. I'm the finished version.
I guess they'll be carving my dates clear as Spring
On one of these stones eventually (paying
The sextons double because of the chalk)
But all in good time. Carpe Diem.
Days like these are worth dying for.

Sedgeford, March 29 1991.

Notes: I was 35, then 39 and now I'm 53. The daughter described is now 22. We change, we stay the same. It's brilliantly sunny here. Happy birthday everybody!

QPR Rant

2009-03-23T07:10:00.011Z

I'm posting some Beautiful Game sonnets rather than rant at the human foghorn who all but ruined my game away v QPR with his endless bellowing. He should have been removed by the stewards for empty-vessel stupidity and simple lack of consideration for nearby eardrums. When he left (early) a whole group of City-supporting strangers celebrated. His analysis of the game consisted of a yelled account of how useless various City players were, including our scorer just before he scored. And oh look I've ranted after all.

And so we lost another priceless point in a late late loss of concentration. I went into the West End afterwards, a little fed up with footie, and still in my City scarf, and got taken for a Welsh fan in a 6 Nations Pub. Has a City scarf ever doubled like this before? Anyway, I lost again! (Wales were 6-0 up and I switched to Guinness. Sorry!) But I had a great time chatting to three lovely Irish women. And a Scotsman, a Welshman and an Englishman.

Well done Ireland. I couldn't think of a way of you getting the Slam without Wales losing but I wanted to! The photo is me meditating upon the scene of my 2006 season-ending injury v Wolves a year later, en route to the Cardiff game. Having spent the last two springs hospitalised, I'm hoping this reliving of it will perform the requisite catharsis.

The Beautiful Game

1. Vinny Jones: The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel
Here I am supporting all I hate and fear
In football and in life. The crudity,
The menace, the actual bodily harm
To anything that strives to be art
Or to transcend a belch in human form: If desperate
Welsh fans started breaking seats
Or trampling people’s heads, it would only
Be what Vinny is standing for out there.

And yet all I hold dear in the name Wales
Is tied to the tongue of that artless boot.
If he tackles us to victory, or scores,
I know I’ll love him and cheer him, forgive him
Everything... so perhaps it’s just as well
We’re losing-three nil and I can condemn.

2. Balls
Football is balls: needs pumped up balls to play
And all the hype comes down at last to balls
And as that US star Reveals Her All
(Well, sponsor-labelled sportsbra anyway)
To breathless world photographers, to say
WE’VE WON THE WOMEN’S FIRST WORLD CUP!
It’s all The culture of the buck, sharp market stalls
Of bluff and thrust, done derring deals, wha-hae!

But, O, when Stuart Pearce was on the spot
He’d failed to hit in World Cup Italy
(His name in running blood on England’s walls)
And flew across the Wembley turf and shot,
A nation’s trembling heart in mouth, to see
The world he kicked thump in, what - massive- balls!

3. Away (for Don Calway)
Football is belonging. For me, City,
Bristol City, that boy-sized red and white
I'm donning now for Cambridge, to unite
My aspirations with Adje, Wol. and ‘Array
Who don't know me, though clap-happy as Larray
Together when we score, and who would fight
(Though disagreeing) for my native right
To yell bold and sustained inaccuracy.

Football is not belonging. OPPONENTS
In offensively different colours
Kicking, yelling goal for foul, foul for goal;
RIVALS in the same colours, exponents
Of the same creed, chanting keep-out dogmas:
One eye, one City, ONE team in Bristol.

4. Something for The Weekend
Football is sex. When Beckham rammed that YEEEEEES
Down the crowd’s throat (with Campbell about to mount
Him behind) having opened his account
With England, and swivelled his hips like a lech
Because he’d scored with a country, no less,
The earth was moving for us all (our doubts
Stripped off, the World’s Cups in our grasp like founts
Of milk and honey): it joined our nakedness.

Sex at its very best, for what is sex
But love, or God, without the permanence,
A crude attempt at ending loneliness?
And what is football but a lonely crowd
Trying to score, a fallen Man, united,
Icarus over the moon and standing proud.

5. The Beautiful Game
Football is art’s reflection of oneness
In a world of divisions; of beauty’s truth
Leaping muscle-bound fouls; the dreams of youth
Without its injured ordinariness
Or age’s silting of its genius;
The Best without its thickening uncouth
Slurred self-disgrace or bruising disproof
By yobs in boots; the angel dance of studs:

- Like Pele’s pass, to gift a certain goal
He’d made his own, to some more mortal bloke
He knew without a call or look was there;
- Diego’s second goal that turned a whole
Defence, a childhood’s poverties, to air
More light than hand of God or head of coke.

6. Keen
Football is bottle, youth’s playing fields of fame
And nerve its school: you have to risk that pass
Which intercepted makes you look the ass
Who gave the goal, the game, the world, away
But which accomplished wins your team the same;
You have to tackle anyone who smacks
Into the path you’ve set yourself, or cracks
Your bones of confidence, or soils your name

To be that shirty star, eyes bulging balls,
His wages weighing in against the fines,
His needle sharper than his need to win,
His thirty million pounds of bottled gall
Dismissed for schoolboy fouls a dozen times:
Who chances all, and loses everything.

7. While gruelling training, obsessive focus on a limited muscular activity and gymnastic capacity at impossibly high speed remain decisive factors, still, ultimately....
Football is confidence. Belief is all
Or almost. Maradona’s genius
Was in his head; that second - perfect - goal was
The logical end of that first’s foul
Unchallenged success; incomparable
Control and speed and lightning thought; bright, cussed
Buenos Aires slum-kid, want-trained, focused
Attack: all brittle as a cocaine fall.

Football is doubt. "Lineker" stuck, but more,
Like "Collymore" or "Gazza" build their names
On half-a-dozen halves or goals or games
Which sate the tabloids, and then take a knock
That cuts them down to woman-beating crocks
Whose lives of punished fitness ride a fall.

8. Perfidious Albion
Football is armies, as Orwell said,
At war without the guns, a metaphor
Invasion game where prey and predator
"Attack", "shoot" wide, "lay siege", "defend" in depth
Or "charge" into territory, "kill games dead"
Or fan the fuse of exploding strikers,
Dig in unbeaten runs with last ditch winners,
Aerial bombardments at the (sudden) death

At Galatasaray, they said, and Heysel,
The metaphor regressed, the guns got real,
It’s just not cricket killing chaps at grounds
Or foreign fields forever-homeland bound
Or shooting refs in Bogota - or Glasgow
But football isn’t cricket, sport, it’s rattle.

9. Sans culottes
Football is democracy: the masses chanting
WE WANT OUR TOTTENHAM BACK, KEEGAN OUT;
The game’s pure diamonds cut from backstreet grit
Kid black-pearl Pele in Rio sand kicking
His genius into shape; Scouse working
Class honing factory-escape into art;
Zidane from Marseilles' racial-ghettoed port
Now Frenchman Of The Decade, disputing

That football is fascist-fuelled global business.
Money talks louder than a stadium
And glibber than a done-good pundit;
One transferred striker could pay ten nurses
For life and - for torching the tedium
Of a worker’s week - fifty times his wages.

A Reader's Letter

2009-01-09T18:10:00.003Z

I've recently received this from one of the fifty people who attended the launch of River Deep Mountain High in February 2008. It's the most economically expressed and still among the most comprehensive comments I've had.

"I have had a conscience about failing to write to you before this about your book that we all greatly enjoyed reading, though the bureaucratic jungle that enveloped the aspirations of your youth were horrifying to read of, despite the lightness of your touch. Your fame has spread to Cyprus..."

All right, I've left the Cyprus bit in just to show off but I am genuinely and deeply gratified (and humbled) by the care and attention of the previous sentence. It's worth all the writing when someone reads this receptively. Why isn't this woman running the education ministry? Ah? she failed the entrance exam - she got far too many marks...

Anniversarie for John Donne on St Lucy’s Day

2009-01-02T22:58:00.007Z

Notes: Here's a solstice poem and a pic of me in Paris last summer. What you have to do is guess which is me and then establish the connection between the picture of me looking at art and the John Donne poem. I wrote the John Donne poem after my first term in teaching, 27 years ago. There was a boy in my tutor group who is now going to Hollywood to play Scotty in Star Trek. You never know where your life is going. Happy New Year.

Gareth Calway (And All His) Works Social

2008-12-17T08:28:00.002Z

My works Christmas social/office party has been arranged to coincide with my wife's. She is joining dozens of colleagues in a swanky hotel near Norwich for a seasonal lunch. I and all my staff will be calling in - toil permitting - at the Gin Trap in Ringstead for a club sandwich and a pint of Wherry. "Table for one, please landlord."

Happy Christmas everyone!

Why I Should Be Your Poet Laureate

2008-12-02T17:59:00.002Z

Vote for me as your poet laureate

Unlike most commentators, I have actually been nominated. In 1998, on Any Questions with Jonathon Dimbleby. It seemed everyone heard it except me. The Head summoned me the next day to ask if he needed to advertise for a new Head of English. I’m not sure how much comfort I should take from it as my nominator explained later – presumably during his investiture as village idiot- that he meant to say Pam Ayres but in the stress of the broadcast couldn’t remember her name so said the first poet’s name that came into his head.

I was touring my poetry show “Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming” around then and had received a letter from an elderly lady in Norfolk – let’s call her Miss J. Marple to protect her from any recriminations . She explained that she had written to Tony Blair to ask that I be made laureate for my services to Celtic Norfolk’s great, unsung heroine. Not only this but, no less than Simon Armitage, though without the Yorkshire blazer, I previously receieved a letter from Ted Hughes admiring my work. (it’s hanging to this day in my toilet.) And a reviewer in HQ Poetry magazine once detected in my work on King Arthur, the seeds of a future poet laureate (though not, he said, a member of the Garrick club and he’s right on the second point ). Like Ian McMillan, I am the poet in residence of a Championship football club, and a more successful one too– the club, not the poet. I also like sherry (well, all alcohol.) And I can’t get past the second verse of Three Lions on the shirt without crying, so no worries on the patriotism.

I am confident that in my local village (pop 500) I could get 24 nominations. And I live really close to Sandringham so I could pop in to see ER whenever she wanted.

As a result of all of this last time, I’m putting myself forward as joke candidate for Poet Laureate in 2009. And as we know from George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, the joke candidate sometimes gets elected.

Meanwhile, for any serious readers out there, and in the apparent absence of UA Fanthorpe, it’s got to be Jackie Kay (Follow the link to NATE’s website and read why in the blog ). I don’t know why she’s not on the short list. Her Requiem for AIDS victims written with the Halle orchestra is performed in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall tonight. And if there’s a Manchester Hall in Bridgewater or Pontypool (literally the Welsh ‘Bridgewater’) I hope it’ll soon be playing there too. She’s a Nigerian Scot of adopted parents, now living in Manchester. She’s a natural for the job of bringing people and poetry together in this modern confusion of roots and rootlessness which somewhere deep down remains Britain. She’d make some great poetry out of it. And bring poetry into many people’s lives, where it belongs.

And then if she doesn’t want it, give it to me.