November 9, 2004

  • Your generation are lucky, you don’t know how much we suffered in the fifties and sixties here in the UK, every bugger had “fought a war for you.” And if it were not for them, “we’d all be speaking ruddy German!”



    It used to drive us batty. The bullshit we had to hear, like some old geezer telling us how he had met Churchall who had said to him “Thou deserve the VC lad!” (VC=Victoria Cross, the highest awarding medal given to British soldiers). And we found out later he had been in the catering corp!



    Some men were like the yanks in “saving Private Ryan”, they and their friends had single-handily won the war, killed thousands of Germans and saved all their comrades lives, as well as getting laid wherever they went.



    It drove us all crazy!



    One bloke used to tell us that he shot at Hitler, escaped from a German Prison Camp and destroyed several tanks…until his misses let on that, throughout the conflict, the lying old sod had never even left England.



    Gordon Bennett! I hope when I die I don’t meet all these old idiots again. Though if I do, I have one advantage now, I can speak “ruddy German”!



    —

    The Clown From Clowne.

November 4, 2004

  • As I sit down to a plate of fried spam (the meat!) and three giant leeks, I reflect on how many lovely replies I got for my last entry here. Thank you all.


    I like strange food and drinks like peppermint pop and Whittards flavoured fruit-powdered tea, and beetroot with sardines and so on. I also like good English fare like steak and kidney/oyster pudding, lava bread, parkin-cake, and my obsession when “pubbing”, fish & chips.


    I am off work this week and next as I regain the movement in my left side, or at least move my neck without severe pain. But my paid work today as a store clerk is crap to what I was, a reporter.


    Some of the better (non-Sarahs’) comments I leave around including comments about my past life and comments and blogs from here, can be found on http://theclownfromclowne.blogspot.com/


    That blog is full of who I am, what I think, where I’ve been, and is nearer than this one to how I tick.


    Terry.


    elsewhere: Three_Headed_Sarahs  begin to pee people off with their British sense of irony. Americans rarely GET irony! They think it’s being insulting rather than poking general fun as an outsider. They don’t do satire like us Brits. Sad, because it’s all meant as harmless fun wrapped up in deadly truth. (Reading that Ohio?)


    And   LordPineapple continues with the poetry, the entry there now is of poems all wrote in two mornings at Florence Park Oxford. Next? Not decided yet, maybe The Rev Tobias Trontby needs a look in.


    Thanks again Terry.

November 3, 2004

  • A lot of people on Xanga does not seem to get me, come on, you are clever people so you can at least try.


    I have Aspergers that mean I am an outsider to the human race, and as I have seen first hand what the human race can do to each other, I am glad. if I could fully empathise after seeing a new born baby with a knife through her vagina, after seeing a raped woman hanging from a tree, after seeing a two-year old shot dead in front of me, after seeing a couple dying in no-man’s land still holding hands…if i could be empathic I would have a nervous breakdown.


    I do not do rude, I do not do hate, I do not do nice, I do not do false lies, baseless compliments, no I do the truth. I can not hide my feelings. If I love your poem I say so, if I think your poem is crap I say so or do not comment knowing I will say I do not like your poem.


    That is me, if you do not believe me look up “Asperger’s”.


    It is a general belief that because I write under various fictions I can lie and am lying now, that is not true, I can do fiction only in the confines of fiction and all my personae are from the outside looking in, knowledge. I knew a Rev Toby, I knew a Sophie Morgan, not as those names of course. Even The Sarahs’ are based on someone, myself.


    They are only fiction with what I give them from my mind of memory. That is me.


    I do not lie, I am not rude I do not hate, I only say what I think.


    Sorry, but there is nothing I can do about my condition other than to kill myself. Terry.

October 11, 2004

  • I am a person of moods, not only in listening to music, which might be Mozart or Bob Dylan or Acker Bilk or ECM music or Indian Raga or The Shadows or Mahler or Berg or The Grateful Dead…but I could go on for ever.


    It is the same writing poetry, it depends what mood I am in. Today felt in a bitter mood, thus I wrote a Tiffy (Short for Tiffany, though I wrote once that’s her real name is Taffy!) Witherington poem that managed to get the word Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll llantysilogogogoch into it.


    Might make Tiffy my next LordPineapple feature, though equally deserving is “blackie fortuna” my black personae which gets little of a look-in today as in a way I’ve outgrown him. It’s best to update my own-poetry blog perhaps once a week rather than the poem a day, I have no real time or health for the latter.


    Some lady on Xanga is trying to get her claws around me, silly woman, I can’t even screw anymore!


    Uploading stacks of pics on this and sending as many to my eMail waiting for the hopeful turn over to broadband.


    The Three-Headed Sarahs’ site will be next. I have a lot of fun with the Three_Headed_Sarahs . I love writing for them, trying to stress the boundaries of sense to fit their surrealism. After all a three-headed alien bird that eats cats has got to be different.


    Just read a blogspot that sneers at Xanga, says we are some bunch of sad people. What would you prefer? Friendly funny Xanga or soul-less blogspot? My blogspot sites NEVER get any comments from other blogspot users, talk about charmless.


    Meanwhile on Xanga http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=museheart sneers that no one has heard of Xanga. I wrote that writers are inovators not followers of fashion. I did not join Xanga to be heard of, I joined it to hear. Xanga will rise and fall by it’s writers, us, it’s up to us to shout XANGA and make it heard, not wait for some boring old fart to shout for us.


    Put “Xanga” and “poetry” in Google, second one up was lordpineapple!!!! 


     


    PS The Louis Wain card is from my own postcard collection, and that one card alone is worth about 100 pounds stirling!

October 9, 2004

  • A lot of us on Xanga have our nemisis, people in the background who treat us like shit. I have a no-good work-shy son. My daughter looks after my surviving dvd’s because Alex has stolen most of them to buy his drugs. And I can’t keep any food in the house, and of course he lives here rent free, with his girl-friend and her dog here most weekends, all getting on the neighbours nerves by playing loud music.


    Ever wonder why my poetry is more often depressive? Why the “happy” personea like Sophie Lucy Morgan and “Empty Chairs” don’t nearly “compose” as much as my manic-depressive personea? I am sure my Sarahs’ blog would be updated more often if I felt in their surreal mood more often.


    Today I escaped with my brother and his wife and four young Japanese students to the “EMail Restaurant” a Chinese place where you can have all you can eat for seven pounds. Another (nicer son) did a Homer Simpson in their one day and nearly bankcrupted the place.


    I am not keen on eating there myself, I am more of a fish and chip man, and much of the stuff is indigestible to me.


    Getting together a collection of SLM poems for the next LordPineapple blog. And I am trying to get together a few bits for my Three_Headed_Sarahs blog.


    Ok, I received grumbles cos I closed the comment box last time, I’ll leave it open, but comments will be replied from the other two blogs.

October 8, 2004

  • 8th October: Last night read some of my poems in the college GCR, including the two Sarahs poems (Margaret O’Malley and Ada Warwick) and the one on this site re: the drunken students poem. Term has started to fit into shape and the newcomers are beginning to meet the college eccentrics like myself.

    Fish & chips & peas are Friday dinner at work, but the fish they cook is total crap, it’s cheap and nasty. My perenual joke is “I bet these fish contain more water now than when they swam into the sea.” Not that they are fish, just fish-’meat’ battered for quick fying, ie fish-fingers in fish-form. Horrible.

    Waiting for the bus home, there was a bagpipe player busking, one that offended everyone, those who don’t like bagpipe music AND those that do. I love this music like I love everything Scottish, which is why I write in the Wee Duncan D. Personae. Portia said the poems were not in full Scots, but few Scottish people speak in full Scots. In any case if I wrote like that the poems would be imcomprehensible to most Scottish people let alone, say, American!

    Likewise, few Yorkshire people speak in full Yorkshire tykeness. Which takes me neatly to the true story about seven Austrian GP’s that were recuited to South Yorkshire to meet a local shortfall. They all spoke perfect English, but sadly for them, not all their patients did. “thou” (pronounced “tha’”) and “Ay up!” and so on were bad enough but body functions and parts are up there lad, were a rather stange kettle o’ fish. For example “Rotherham are at home” means menstruating, and “winkle-ing means a male unable to urinate. “Mardy gob oil” is mouth problems and and “sad snoz” is a broken nose. Now someone has brought out a glossary of Yorkshire medical terms which is royt champion!


    ps: As I write this more police sirens are going, I wish they’ll shut the eff up! I know they mean well, but living almost opposite a police station is a noisy affair!


    To save confusing everyone, any comments can be left on my LordPineapple site.

October 7, 2004

  • A new intake of students at our college inspired me to write this. (note: JCR is the Junior Common Room, “mess” if you like)


    They start with a glass of sherry

    Then it’s drinks in the JCR,

    And it’s wine with their first meal

    And free booze down the bar.



    It’s no wonder some become alcoholic

    The students of Oxford colls

    Most have to be detoxicated

    At the start of their Summer holls!

    ———-


    I am not sure my college would be pleased at me posting that up, but it’s sadly true.


     


    ps weekend those who have commented here but not on LP’s site, I will visit you from there.

September 29, 2004

  • College Sports Day.



    OK, so I am too old for mosts sports, even cricket, I only took part in the croquet and played chess. But afterwards, was the barbecue, and free drinks, nothing much in the help for my stomach, but after that about 40 of us took part in a general knowledge quiz, and despite the bigwood there, the professors and so on, I won! With 37½

    points out of 40. (sample question: what is the third nearest star that can be seen by the naked eye? a: Sirius). He he, and me with only half of a functioning brain in theory! (I won a crate of beer!)



    I got given a great book of poems by a geography teacher, he made the book himself, a sort of self-vanity, but he’s a damn good poet. I tried to get him to join Xanga, but I bet he won’t, of the four I did presuade to join, only Closehippie is still blogging. Ah well.



    Why this post? To show off I suppose, well, no one in my family will give a tinker’s*, so I have to puff my feathers to someone!



    Not many seem to visit this blog of mine, though it’s the truth of me, rather than me hiding behind false personæ.

    —

    Terry.

     

    (*Tinker’s, Cockney slang from Tinker’s luck, meaning, well guess!)

September 24, 2004

  • Pain-Killers



    These tablets in my hand

    Gets rid of most of my pain,

    But they also destroy my creativity.



    I can’t write a poem

    When I am so relaxed,

    No such thoughts linger inside my head.



    For after all,

    Most of my poems are about pain

    In one way or another.



    It is as if all my own pain

    Touches all those people out there

    Who feel pain;

    The lost, the bereaved, the abused, the beaten, the dying…



    All of those share my pain with me,

    And without the pain inside me

    Such people seem to no longer exist.



    The little boy sexually used at school,

    The young man who found it so hard to say “I love you”,

    The cripple he has become with age:

    All seem to be another me.



    A me who is not happy,

    A me who is not relaxed,

    A me who feels pain.



    I take these tablets to keep me alive,

    But in a way they are killing me;

    For without poetry

    I am only a carbon shell

    Of empty pain.



    —

    Lord Pineapple.

September 22, 2004

  • Faringdon (www.faringdon.org/ -  Vale Of White Horse. UK



    The rain is falling, wetting my face like a squeezed-out flannel, but I am in the open, looking down below. Behind me is the last “folly” (see profile pic in comments section) built in the UK, in 1935. It is (shades of reporter’s-law here!) closed. From the top you can see the Uffington White Horse. I am looking down the sloping fields where autumn leaves stick in the muddy grass like people drowning after falling off The Titantic. (If this was for a newspaper, I would never get away with THAT one!).



    Rain or no rain, I’m having a picnic. There is something about being alone, I always wished to be alone, Greta Garbo had nothing on me. I loved my family and my few friends, but I was happy being alone. This could be a natural male desire, as in crowds the old impulses rise, to fear other men, to love the women, to be careful not to walk into infants, all produces stress and has perhaps done so since the caveman era.



    Anyway, here I am among the fircones, the blackberries, and of course the drizzle. The latter turning from wind-wet hatching to a spluttering drizzle that is ruining the page of my page-a-day diary. Great notebooks these are, with their own index and brought each Easter at considerably less than half-price from an old mate who is the manager of the diary-making firm.



    Sheltering under a hawthorn tree (I can tell by the seeds), I realise I have to give up this reportage and head back down into the small friendly town.



    I stop at the Folly pub and drink a pint of West Berkshire Brewery malt.



    End of the sojourn, after which it was the usual, library, fish n chip shop, and so on. The one big interest in the town is one of the poet laureattes came from here, building himself the large manor house behind the church.



    Henry James Pye was no Wordsworth. Sir Walter Scott summed the man up as “respectable in all except his comtemptible prolificy”. King George lll penned “What? Why? Why more Pye?” and the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence” was a satire on both the man and his style of verse.



    (From) Faringdon Hill by Henry Robert Pye.



    No steep accent* we scale with feverish soil,

    No rocks alarm us, and no mountains foil.

    But as we gently tread the rising green

    And large and more large extends the spacious scene.

    Till on the verdant top our labour crow’d,

    The horizon is our only bound we vow’d.



    (* ascend)



    —

    Terry Cuthbert.