Month: March 2005

  • THE CLOWNE ON TOUR.



    Woodstock.



    In a week when I’ve gotten my first American book published, and in a week where I have been updating my bizarre Surname lists, despite sneering guest-book comments…and in the first week I am in serious gear about going to Texas, one would think I’d have enough on my plate without taking my blog for a tour.



    I’ll post a LINK about Bleinheim Palace as it’s the park and not the palace and gardens I’m off to visit.



    I have been here five times, all with kids. I have seen the house, the secret gardens, the butterfly museum, the little railway, the maze and everything else, but I have never toured the large park. I know that Autumn would be more romantic with fancy-coloured trees and delicious mushrooms, but I felt I wanted to come here today. (One of my photos -link-)



    I have photos but my scanner isn’t working, got one somewhere on my site, have to find it.



    A couple of addiums: Colin Dextor’s first Inspector Morse book was called “Last Bus to Woodstock”, and when there was a pop festival inside Bleinheim Park, it was billed as “The OTHER Woodstock”.



    Woodstock itself is a quiet typical English large village with it’s thatched cottages, pubs, old tea “shoppes”, and gift shops. It is very expensive to buy into. Woodstock has a dullish museum and not a much better church, though I might have felt down when I visited both.



    To come here alone might at least give me a good monoblog of sorts. The main street has it’s stocks and it’s lynch-gate, but is spoilt by also being one giant car park. Now I am not anti-car, but this is absurd, fumes and slamming car doors can’t be very poetical.



    It’s six quid to look around the park but once an Oxford reporter told me that the park itself is free to journos so I took my lifelong press-card with me. It costs me nothing to update, and being poor I see no reason to pay such a bossy entrance price, I wonder if American parks charge high entrance fees,



    I’m in, and I ignore the castle area and walk stright into sheep-land.



    I walk into a pine-wood, I find a quail feather (if I run out of biros it’ll be very handy!) The wood is split into two, on the outside are firs with pine-cones everywhere, inside are newly budding oaks and elms and chestnut trees. This is where mushrooms will sprout in autumn, that is on those parts not covered by nettles.



    I do not linger long in the woods, just stay long enough to soak it in for my poems, especially for a Sophie poem.



    In a poem called “Culver Cliff” I mentioned the Duke of Yarborough’s monument in the Isle of Wight, here I am by the Duke of Marlborough’s monument, but it’s too open for romance.



    I just manage to cock my screwed leg over an electric sheep fence. Geese and moorhens are on the massive lake (too big to see the far side, though it is rain-misty). There is nothing like water to calm the nostrils. It might be the womb, the everlasting desire, that men have more than women, the desire to get back inside their mothers… or it might be the blame of William Wordsworth, but water is calming.



    I write two Sophie Lucy Morgan poems, but as neither is about this, I’ll put them into the present LP blog.



    It might be the end of March but the grass is still covered by brown dead leaves.



    Been in the Gardens for over two hours, not wrote much but had a great walk. It’s only the third time I’ve used my card since I “retired”, better not take it to Texas, they might demand a visa!



    Into Old Woodstock, (map) and there is a zebra crossing with belisha-beacons LINK, something one no longer see in cities. I turn off to walk alongside the River Glyme and it’s water meadows. The Glyme is more of a babbling brook than a river in reality. A sign: Danger, Hidden Ponds. I close my eyes on a bench, there are planes flying into Kidlington (Oxford) Airport, two miles down the road, then the now heavy rain is

    splashing in my face, other noises include the wind, geese, pigeons, and of course traffic, but the main sound is water going down a weir.



    What better place to end the journy with a sorjoin in the 14th Century old coaching inn “The Duke of Marlborough”. A lovely pocketty old building.



    On THE SARAHS’ site The Goliaths are taking on religion, trying to get an intelligent quote that could change their life for ever.



    —

    The Clowne from Clown.

     

    Three_Headed_Sarahs Where their sons, after ignorance from a Christian and rudeness from a Muslim have joined Zen Buddaism to the ff % 243 religion of the Goddess of the Egg. (Don’t read unless you are nuts!)

     

    LordPineapple with three poems “by” Sophie, two wrote at Blenheim Park (though not about the park.)

     

  • The 3 Sarahs’ 
    are leaving for
    GOOD. Say ta-ta
    to them at the
     Three_Headed_Sarahs 
     

     

    G’day,

    Let me with thought and music try to remember more that is lodged somewhere in my memory.



    Josephine Baker, singing mostly French, got that Flubucket?*



    *fauquet  of Xanga.



    La Petite Tonquinoise first. (I Know this as La petite tonkinoise“)

    Remember trying to sing this once, but can’t remember where. Not in school. Think it was a picnic once in the Peak District of Derbyshire. I lived only a few miles from it and the Ficticious Rev. Toby lives in it.



    From the dams used in The Dambusters film and in 633 Squadron to The Shivering Mountain, which really does shake in the wind, the place is magic for anyone with a car, a family, and a sun in the sky.



    The Blue John Mines, described in a previous blog (umm, perhaps not, will do so another time. MEANWHILE LINK (without my personal bits) and well-dressing with flower-petals and other natural objects. (ditto previous blog) If you think I am searching for the links, too bad, might one day, might by the time you read this, but I want to write not link.



    J’ai Deux Amours! Ah yes, know this too, forgot much of my sabbatical in Menton, but sure this was part of it. As Dis-Moi Josephine. A wonderful song!



    Anyway, I am drifting. Derbyshire. Tintwistle Moors, added to the county since my birth, yes, we went camping there with a Chief Superintendant (re: of the police) and his family. Between us there were 7 under the age of 7 and 4 between 7 and ten. His grandchildren and my children, camping on a lonely moor! Amazingly, we never once got a “this is SO boring!” as we expected, though they did bring a sheep back one evening, saying it looked lost. As if they didn’t know anything about sheep*. The senior copper took it back and met the farmer who said “Agnus loves people!” I asked the Super did you charge the farmer for bestility? (It’s a old farmer’s tale, partly true, that sheep that has been shagged grow to love humans).



    Please don’t ask!



    *In those days we let kids between 7 and 10 roam lonely moors by themselves, now I won’t even let my 6 year old grandson go to the shop by himself and I live above the shopping mall!



    Yes, that was a great week, rained twice, once when we were in Holmfirth, where I inteviewed  (another time) the stars of the TV hit series about bored old men who acted like big kids. “Last Of the Summer Wine” has been running now for 34 years. Most of the original actors are now dead. Peter Salles, has been there from the start and is going strong. He was the voice behind “The Wrong Pair Of Trousers” and the follow-ups.



    Anyway, stop rambling with no boots on, at Holmfirth we met

    Charles Aznavour of all people. He was amazed that three adults and one child knew him in a South Yorkshire town.



    Hey Flubucket, you met him? He was there to see a collection of saucy postcards! Bamforths made these British humour cards of fat women, timed men and rude puns and sold them at seaside places. Typical one: Fat lady to timid husband. (She is looking in a seaside rock shop, he at a young skimmy-glad blonde lady) “I’m thinking something hard will be nice to eat”



    Don’t ask! Wondered where Bob Smartass got his ideas from!



    Anyway, there is some wonderful countryside in the Peak, I expect America can do ten times better, but the children loved being brought up there even if three of the five now live nearish me now, in Oxford!



    Bakewell Pudding, also in my blog, never Bakewell tart! It’s really a pudding to eat with a spoon, and for a couple of whiles, I lived 15 miles from the original shops (web-site will say more). Yes, I miss that pudding, if I had the money I’ll get it sent to me, mind, if I had the money I’ll go back to Derbyshire and be a full time writer.

    Couple of whiles, because I lived in both Matlock and Hathersage, both about that distance away.



    A book of poems out thanks to The_Queen_Of_Swords, and so check this http://www.cafepress.com/assortedfruits site. And this site For_Terry too whilst you are at it.



    Links links links, like a bleeding golf course. When my putter broke, I said to my friend Bob Hope that I need a new golf club, so he brought me St Andrews.



    Been busy on my SURNAME lists, insane I know, but compelling!



    My mind has gone blank, so this has better be it!



    Terry.

  • Link to my NEW book http://www.cafepress.com/assortedfruits


    Link to well…check it PLEASE! For_Terry


    “The Clowne at University Parks Oxford.”



    I’m walking past the Natural History Museum here at Oxford, with the dino bones loved by children, the skull mentioned in Philip Pullman’s “his Dark Materials” and the dodo bird famous from Alice in Wonderland, and also by me!



    I am now in the University Parks. It’s been many moons since I first stepped in here. The cherry tree I sat under is, I think, gone. The tree I wrote poems under when I was supposed to be reading about harmonical progressions.



    But I am not Casanova, not some grand figure, just a poor writer, so I will keep this is moderate terms.



    Beyond is the cricket pitch I once saw the University play Derbyshire on, and I cheered for my county! Beyond that is the rugby pitchs where I also played on.



    I am sitting on a bench on the grass, and it’s back to reality as a man let his dog shit not far from me. Where are The Sarahs’ when you bloody want them!



    The cold dry start to the year means the flowers are not plentiful, and the cold day means that the flowers I can see, (from daisies to daffs) are half-shut, and who can blame them? Knight to Queen’s Bishop seven. Check-mate.



    Beyond here also is a duckpond where once 50 ducks followed my terrified grand-daughter even after I had picked her up, they were wanting more bread. I felt a cross between St. Frances and the Pied Piper!



    I don’t know why I am writing here, nor why I mention say, the flowers, but not the sweet papers, or hear the birds but not the traffic. It is not as if my writing is going to bring me immortality, and it’ll most certainly die before me, not that any writing is immortal, no matter what certain Americans may think, even the Bible will die with mankind.



    Still, there is nothing I can do about it all, I write I suppose to keep me sane, for I am slowly going insane as many of you might have realised. Pain and heartache, loneliness and the lack of money all is taking me down, as is the mind I was born with, a child I raised, a child I raised only for a short time, and the lack of a holiday.



    What will make me sane? Packing up work of course, but I can hardly live on my writing! Holidays in Texas and elsewhere will also keep insanity at bay, but I will end up like John Clare and Robert Lovell, I am sure.



    Maybe insanity will make me a better writer, I doubt it, for every Lovell there were a thousand madmen scribbling away their lives, unread, unloved and unaccounted. I wonder how much poetry has gone up in smoke in Asylum boiler houses?



    Ah well, if this is to go on Xanga, I must not down myself any more. Too many readers have stopped visiting my site because I am too depressing!



    —

    The Clowne From Clown.


    ______

    A poem I wrote aged 12 (and it was all true)

     

    I have a black cat

    I call him Mr. Keats

    He is big and fat

    And never eats meat.

     

    He has two yellow eyes

    And forgets to purr

    He hollers when he cries

    And has very soft fur.

     

    He loves this and that

    But loves the warm heat

    He is a bad-tempered cat

    My old Mr. Keats!

     

    Terry.

     

    ——–

    My little pain-in-the-arses are being near the edge again with letters to the American Defence and poems by The Immortal One.


     

    And LordPineapple  has 2 poems by The Rev Toby (quite religious) and Poor Ingar has another poem on her dying so young.

  • The Clown Speaks.

    This Text is being wrote as I think, my rapid rabied mind dances like this all of the time, as if stoned (when not). Hunter Thompson or Ginsberg or the dadas had nothing on me when in I’m free fall



    “Anyway” was wrote like this as were some of my poems as re some of my teeth. Wrote without really thinking. I can write good like this, but most of the times you only see bad, this may be bad, if so will I revise it as I do most of my poems (exceptions though are many for it’s said poets do not write poems, the poems write themselves).



    It does here. A bit of a cheat, got Buddy Holly on the turntable, er, cd player. That’ll be the Day.” I love “Heatbeat”, they used it for a British country policeman series. The books were better, the books by Nicholas Rhea were better. It took place in the sixties between the end of Jesus and the moment the Beatles went mad.



    That’s upset two lots of readers! Yup, when I am in this zany stroking mood, re: part of my brain, it’s nothing to do with stroking Big sandra’s tits or any other kind of stroke. Once I patted a piller-box and let it sniff my hand, I thought it was a breed of dog. It seems people born with different brains have different reactions to mind-strokes my limbs are not too bad now, it’s my neck and above that suffers, my mind should be dead by now, it makes me a sad little funny honey, (“Baby-Baby”) it has even brought me back some of the empathy, what was always just what I learnt, is now natural to me.



    Why do you miss a beat when my baby kisses me?



    I write as good, some may say better than  have ever. Now I no longer create for a living, I have only poetry (and prose like this) left to create and I have few friends so a lot of time. Mind, most of my poems are wrote half-way in the night or before I go to work in the morning, or in these moods.

    I can’t write natural.  I’ve done everything and I’m sick of trying.

    (Sorry, that was Buddy, (not bud, can’t get any anymore!)



    It’s raining in my heart. See, I write as some conversations go, which helps me to write under various personae as I write it against “The Times” code for correct English. (An editors whim!) persona to everyone else.



    Bo Diddley with a love for will not fade away. Concentrate. is that right? My spelling was never my strong point. “If it get’s passed the piss-artist” (the often drunk sub-editor proof-reader) “then it’ll get into the paper. And “check your facts, if someone famous died in 1690, then make sure they did not die in (*******) 1692! No matter how obscure the silly old sod is, some schmuk will know when he died!”



    I slipped up more than once. It was on a gravestone I read the year that a long-dead famous Chesterfield builder died. (can’t remember the dates and as checking is even easier now thanks to google…DIDN’T HAVE GOOGLE IN MY DAY! MOAN MOAN! then I’ll say 1860, just an unchecked fact as I can’t be bothered to google cos I’ve forgot the person’s name!)



    “Well, all right!” Anyway, say the gravestone said 1860, well maybe, but everyone knew he died in 1862 except for myself and the drunk proof reader jumped-up-sub-editor, a funny balding little man who lived in terror of his wife. Female reporters used to answer the office phone when he was not there and say “stop it …..!” (the dots are for the sub-editor’s name, remember it, but the poor sod might be dead by now). Inside half a hour his wife would storm unannounced into the paper and DEMAND to see her filthy cheating husband.



    There was then a big inquiry, we ALL knew who answered the phone, the editor too, but no one wanted to tell poor little baldy who did it. Thankfully, revenge was rare. He was too proud of his job to turn our articles into surreal nonsense in which we get to call the Chief Constable of Derbyshire that something that King Cnut didn’t have on his body.



    He could have screwed us all, poor devil, only he stood between our cock & bull stories (Some wrote drunk in “The Cock & Bull” public house, not the famous London one though!) and the great sneering public, most of which we could hear in the street saying “Paper’s is a load of bumfluff this week, don’t ken why we gone buy’i duck!” “Aye, royt ruddy daft of us, tha’s bloody Cuthbert again, I ken he’s behint us lass!!! HE SHOULD HEAR, can’t he get his ruddy facts royt?!”



    But that was then.

    And this is now.



    And this is it.



    For now.



    —

    The Clowne From Clown

     

    WILL ANSWER COMMENTS HERE WEEKEND COS New POEMS ARE NOW ON THE LordPineapple  SITE!

     

    Note: Many of my personae fails, I don’t have enough in them. The latest being “Charlie The Copper”. In the next Pineapple blog I shall put poems of three of the names that never quite made it into double figures in the number of poems.

  • The Clowne in London.



    This was the sort of thing  had planned to write, for I went all the way to London to meet Halie, (Becca’s daughter) and some Spanish guides. I turned up. I TURNED UP.

    I had planned a lovely blog similiar to…



    London is the capital city of the USA state called “Britland”, it is the home of Mr. Bean, Tony Blair, and the Three-Headed Sarahs’, but only one lives in the state-capital Bushland (formally London).



    “If you tire of London, then you are tired of life.” says the famous saying. London has more suicides per-person than all the rest of The South-England County of Britland State.



    It is the home of Sherlock Holmes, El Cid and Margaret Thatcher, only one of which is still living (just). It is my journey for the day, meating (sorry, hungry!) Becca’s daughter and her family and a lot of young Spanish Girl Guides. (“Mama, this loco hombre met us, I was so miedoso, he parecerse (sure that’s right Sarahs’?) SO viejo, and SO el gordo!”)



    From Oxford, it takes the train one hour to arrive and plonks one in the middle of nowhere. Coach is better, takes it one and a half hours outside rush-hour times. I am to meet the poor unsuspecting saps (I mean, I have been driven insane by a three-headed pet!) at The Hard Rock Cafe in Old Don Quixote La Mancha Park Lane. Couldn’t find it on the map, so I phoned up the Late Bob Hope, and he told me it used to be called “Old Park Lane.”



    I have to carry a board with my name on it! “Lord Pineapple”.



    I get my sign out and I am mugged. “Sorry your Lordship, culo toffs!” I try again and am arrested because I boiled the egg I found, the egg the Sarahs’ popped out of and made me have an attack and die. “No Mordo Senior!” They brought me back. Anyway, I was under arrest for helping illegal aliens. The Sarahs’ bodyguard “Zac” sorted them out. I waited again, and found myself mobbed by angry cat-lovers.



    I am getting there! In time as well as in place!





    ———————

    But of course my lack of confidence was justified. It hurt me to go there, hurt me without my walking stick, hurt me to quench my fears of rejection that I have felt since my son turned on me. I hate rejection, why do you think I don’t send my stuff off to be published now. My stroke had taken more than my mind and mobility, it destroyed my hope. No wonder I am not telling anyone in Oxford that I am going to Texas, my confidence is that low.



    Hurry up death, life is shit.



    —

    I did get to see the London St. Patrick’s Day Parade, very impressive, children on stilts for example (I’d been shit scared of them falling were they mine!). Women dressed up and riding swans. I stood outside the Hard Rock Cafe and waved an Irish flag I brought. I went into the cafe had a beer and snapped my credit-card. good job I had taken money out of my bank first.



    Pissed off, I walked to China-Town and had a curry meal, wasted the tiny bit of money I had because I was so, well…



    When I am in a better mood, I’ll write more about London, it’s strange little alley-ways and it’s pokey little shops (for example.)



    Meanwhile, I’ll leave this open for comments but will return to my LordPineapple blog to answer there. Interesting enough Tiffy has a poem there called “Blind-Date.”



    Next time anyone from America wants to see me in England, they’ll have to come to Oxford.



    Terry. The Clowne from Clown.

  • Anyway, Sunday it’s London with the Spanish! Will write more then!

     

    P.S. Sorry for some of my comments on this site, I am afraid pain makes me feel lonely and unloved, as of course it does. It’s hard to have off-line friends when you moan about your limbs hurting all of the time!

    Terry.

     

    In an Oxford College. (Wrote June ’04.)



    I’m sitting in an Oxford college quadrangle, soaking in the magic of this city.

    It is dusking, and in the gloaming where a pale blue sky turns to grey: bats glide from tower to tower, and in the room above me, a student is practising on a flute.



    Oxford is a great place to write without people smerking and asking silly questions, for people are always writing here, writing down maths, essay-notes, or even the names of students for tomorrow’s “eights” (LINK).



    This is not “my” college, I would not get the same peace there. It is a college of crickets, not only the ones that rub their legs together, but two students practising the game, ball cracking on willow.



    On the other side of the quad, where the purple mysteria hangs down from light brown limestone walls, a girl opens a window and calls to a boy below.

    She is no Juliet. “Don’t forget the “f…… tonics this time!” she laughs, and in the same happy banter, he gives her back the two fingers.



    It is getting darker and lights from the hall flicker behind a massive tree, and a gentle breeze tickles the pages of my note-book.



    If there could be a heaven, it would be somewhere like here. Perhaps they’ll scatter my ashes here and my dust will cling to the college walls until they are cleaned.



    I was once one of these beautiful people, once I believed that one day I would become a famous poet. It seems I was just not good enough.



    Still, in the past few years since part of my mind closed for ever, I have found a niche writing under various personae on the internet. t’s not much, and my fans are few, but I am proud of it, and sometimes I even forget myself that I was born without any understanding of other people.



    I suppose I had better move or else I’ll have to ask the lodge porter to open the front gate for me!



    A moth just misses my face as I walk past the smells of the college kitchen (chillie con carne! Ugh!). I retire to a nearby pub and drink my beer in it’s walled garden in silence.



    I am alone as usual.



    —

    Terry Cuthbert.

     

    LordPineapple for new poems Monday 7th. this site updated end of the week.