May 1, 2004

April 27, 2004

  • As I sit here composing this for my Clowne site, Miles Davies solo-piano-works on my CD player. I think how different my life is to my grandfather’s.



      My grandfather was a big jazz fan, though for most of his life there was little he could hear. There were the soft whites like Glen Miller and Frank Sinata and the cosy “n******” as they were then called, (without either rancour or of course hate). But it was at the end of his life when he was brought a gramophone and he heard for the first time the music of Charlie Parker and his like, that he was really with his own.

    I remember him, pipe in mouth, nearly crying that he had never heard such beautiful music before and now he was dying and will soon hear it no more.



    Unlike him, I am not sat by a cooking range drinking beer, but in central heating and drinking flavoured-tea. He would have thought me a royt cissy.



    My grandfather was a railway signal-man, I loved visiting him in his box. It was a serious trespass offense, and I often had to hide from his superintentent. If I had any empathy I would have known that my grandfather’s boss knew I was hiding in the little alcove.



    I was fourteen when Oliver Cuthbert died. I lost more than a grandparent, I lost a friend, someone who used to tell people I ha’ gumption (common-sense, a big compliment in the Derbyshire coal-fields). And that I will go far.



    We used to go for walks you know and he used to point people out in his Renishaw village. “There’s old Mrs. —-

    She hab 22 baiens, only four lived to be grown-up and all four died in war. Aye lad, thou think ye’s hard-up, what ab’t her, 22 children and none been alive for her old age. She’a my age, looks 100.”



    Such stories later became my mainstay in the newspaper industry.



    Funny, I didn’t start out to write about my grandfather, but about the time I lived in Cyprus. Another day perhaps.



    —

    The Clown From Clowne.



    ________________________

    My Grandfather outside his Railway House.











     

April 25, 2004

  • Before I get to the big things, Little Egypt’s comments in the Lord Pineapple’s comment-box strike me, an athiest, once again, people sitting waiting to die. It’s nice if you can pretend there is something there afterwards, not that the thought of living forever strikes me as all that special, but there is a feeling it’s not all just a waste. sadly it is.

    Everything that lives must die, it is part of reality, we were nothing before birth, so why be arrogent and say there is something after death?

    I am here waiting to die, the joys of my life is over, I have half of a brain, a lousy job (I used to have a good job. BTW, funny how certain people stop eMailing me when they realise that I am poor. Have they no compassion?) I can’t drive anymore or even have sex, I am fat old and lonely, and yet I carry on, spurred by the fact when I die so will my memories of those who died before me, my mother, my father, my six-year old daughter, friends, work-mates, all people with more love than in their hearts you can imagine, all passed away. And I hold a part of each of them in my mind, and when I am gone, that something will die too. So for them alone do I live on.

    ______________________________________

    Now for some serious stuff.

    Freedom and the Press.


    The media in the United Kingdom is only “free” when the government and it’s bogeymen wish it to be so.

    Newspapers need firms to advertise, firms give money to the government, criticise a firm or upset a government and advertisers pull out. The only papers that do try to get away with the truth are the alternative lifestyle press, and years of trashing such papers and sueing them and raiding their offices have forced them all to the wall.

    I once had a lot of my private papers taken away merely because I had troubled someone high up in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and asked them awkward questions about an army-led killing.

    A reporter who was convinced that the Lockabee plane-bombing was orchestrated by the CIA had his children picked up from school by the police who tried to get them to say that their father abused them.

    And a reporter from another coal-area newspaper found proof that some of the so called scabs were not strike-breaking but going in to wreck the coal-faces and pit-heads, so when the strike was over the coal miners would be laid off. The reporter was knocked over by a hit and run driver whom the police seemed rather uneager to search for, and at the reporter’s funeral, his house was broken into and the only things missing were his notes and the “proof”.


    Do not ever think that because you can vote, you live in a free society, because you do not, freedom is an illusion, I know, I WAS THERE.

    —

    The Clown from Clowne.
    ___________________________________


    I wish I had the money to go back to Scotland.



    “Over the sea to Skye”

April 22, 2004

  • Thankyou everyone, I will be reading your blogs this weekend. Term has started again and that means work rather than blogging, but I’ll get around even if not from so many of my various blogs.


    Was a good Easter, took my grandson to a railway heritage centre, Thomas the Tank Engine was there plus an Easter egg chase. There was also a magician for the kiddies, the man asked for someone to be his assistant. Patrick (aged 5) is like me, loves the limelight, he got there first. Have photos but my brother has them on his computer and not sent them to me.


    Also went to Coventry Cathdral to recite my poetry, I and two others entertained a large crowd plus visitors to our poems. I recited the Rev Toby’s and Tiffy’s. The Bishop there is going to put Tiffy’s “The Star” into a chruch magazine. I did not say I was an athiest! (photos on film, will come on someday)


    Where would you go if you had a time machine and could visit just one place in it? I thought about that, and whilst not being a train-spotter, I think I would pick a large railway centre in 1906, perhaps in Derbyshire, where I will also collect postcards of the county.


    I am all for closer ties with Europe, because if greedy millionares and racist newspapers (like Murdoch’s rags) are against Europe, then it HAS to be a good thing! Illogical, but such people MUST have something to hide.


    Got a lot of controversal stuff coming up in this blog, but far too knackered tonight to write it all down.


    So friends and spanners tonight, come back in a few days, and read things that the spooks (Home security) will not want you to read.


    But for now. Next dvd to watch “Black Books” Series one, next book to read Yann Martel’s “The Life Of Pi” and music playing at present is Bela Bartok’s String Quartets.


    Love you and leave you and visit you on Saturday, take care and don’t let the bed-bugs bite.


    Where and when will YOU go (one place) if you had a time machine?


    TTFN Terry.


     

April 20, 2004

  • I do not blog much at all, I put poems on blogs, but it is not blogging. This is blogging.


    I seem to have the English Reserve when it comes to washing my linen in public, though I also prefer to put all of my emotion and feelings into poetry.


    My views will not please all of you in any case. I am a pacifist who thinks that Bush went to war to please the religious right and to secure the oil. That has lost me good friends here like Robbie Caudle, but it can not be helped. I have seen death, more so than I pretend. I might have been a small town reporter but that does not mean for example I have not been sent to Bosnia, I have seen a child dying without I knowing the language to comfort her, I have seen a woman hanging from a tree after she was raped. I have seen it all, and it’s not like the pictures back from Iraq or the body-bags that arrive home in American darkness, mostly of poor southerners, never rich people.


    I have seen a lot, but I still do not blog. I have known people that would (if they were alive now,) have been great bloggers. My father’s father for example, he would have loved this, a self-educated railwayman who was an expert on many subjects and whose photographs are today selling for hundreds of pounds.


    Then there are the people I have worked with, just names to you, Gordon Griffiths, William Hardiman, Roger Sylvester, people who were clever but forgotten. People whom could have wrote best-sellers if they had only been given encourgement.


    With two exceptions, your pride of guns and (some of you) your obsession with God…I adore you Americans, I adore your culture, your jazz, Hollywood… and I hand on my heart say that  American poets are far better on the whole than British ones.


    To mention only those you may (or should!) know: ee cummings, Creeley, Frost. Lovell, Alice Walker…Oh I could go on forever, I know few English poets as important or as brilliant.


    But as for your God, don’t make me cuss!


    As for you Brits here, well, we share the same hearts, and some of us love fags and faggots and spotted dick without being gay!


    I will try to blog as in blogging rather than as in poetry here more, I will visit around, but not much.


    And do not expect me to be anything but truthful, this blog is not based on some other personae, but is about ME ME ME!!!

April 13, 2004

  • “The Poet As God”



    (sic transit gloria mundi.)

    _______________________



    Van Gogh splashed paint on a canvas. Stephen Hawking scratched time on a blackboard, Mozart wrote music in his sleep. What then a poet with mere words?



    The journey is in the thank-you, the grammer of the intellect, the speech that was first wrote down to give people orders and to collect taxes. These are words. This is what silence is not, it is words. Even if it is in the hiss of a swan or with the hiss from the birth of the universe or even if it an embrace of God, however unlikely that may seem…It is words.



    These are words, the pottery of orders, the tools of commerce. These are the words, the very same words that a poet should use.



    Sometimes the poetry comes first, in the drum-beat of the heart, in the horn of the pulse, in the fiddle of the breath, then people learn to speak, to understand the words that has always been there since the beginning of time. For all languages are translations, translating the concept of the universe and moulding it into something that we may call culture or even genius.



    It is up to us poets to unravel this translation of what we name and show what lies beyond the names, beyond this planet where most of our words become meaningless. For what is a daffodil to one who has never seen a flower?



    A poet, a true poet rather than one only interested in pleasing others with cute little rhymes and perfect scan, a true poet, (who nevertheless is not immune to the lure of the connecting sound of the song, or the length of the breath silently reading aloud the twinkle of the stars, for the universe itself exists on such a beat of song and a breath of eternity…) that can catch the fish in the sea only by asking the right questions. The poet that stops and asks the way.



    That is why poetry is wrote more than read. It is easier to write in hope of finding these answers that will catch the fish, than to read poetry by those whose fish-catch is but a rotting stinking mess of bones. Words stripped of flesh, as if life itself will not be so. For we will all be mere bones, and then just more dust, filling up the void that is left in an expanding universe.



    Entropy. The second law-blah blah. A void can not be, for what is dead must fill the spaces between the living, like bones bleaching on dug-up graves.



    But not all dust is the same. A poet must know that, Not all dust is the same. Some catch the fish, others the universe. There will be plenty of dust, words wasted in dreary soaked up magazines, poems put on forums because it is so easy to type, poems by all poets for their first few years of life. For poetry is so easy to write, so easy that people think that is all there is to a poem, it being written down on paper, without none of the screams of the universe, the symphonies of dreams, or the pigments mixed up in blind rage.



    But for the poet to be God, he must realise that poetry might be easy to write, but that does not mean that it is easy to capture something more than a cliche of thought.



    That is why I write fictional poetry, it is NOT fictional of course to the personæ I use. I can be 100 people, each of them searching for God, each of them whispering the same words, and by doing so, each tries to paint pictures in their hearts, music in their ears and quantum physics in their brains. Write what the universe would mean for each of them, their own personal dust, their own catch of fish, each of them trying to be God in a dying universe.



    sic transit gloria mundi.



    —

    The Clowne From Clown.

     

April 8, 2004

  • The Shawthraite well-dressing ceremony.



    Every first-Sunday in August, rain or shine; I take a possee of Christians, tourists and most of the village who can get up in time to the Mompesson well. Named after the vicar of nearby Eyam in the time of the plague. (see http://www.cressbrook.co.uk/eyam/ for more information).

     


    I kneel down in front of the arch-shaped well, and I bless it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Then I put on a piece of natural clay in the chalked-in outline and add a purple violet petal. This is on church plate (silver) and handed to me by the leading alter boy (or girl).



    Still on my knees, I bow to the well, (struggle to) get up, and move as a line full of people place petals, leaves and twigs all on the well, and supervised by the artist of the well or their rep.



    Some of the more famous wells like Tessington, get in grand artists of tapestry or art. (Last year Tideswell tried to get Tracy Emin!) In the ninety-seventies, wells were designed by among others, Andy Warhol and Gerald Scarfe, (and even a local poet Terry Cuthbert!) These days they are more often designed in the local school by the art teacher and her class.



    Rather than explain more fully what all this well-dressing means, I can do no better than give you another web-link.

    http://sinfin.net/welldressing/welldressing.html (see, other places do it differently).



    Rev. Toby +

March 30, 2004

  • Potted bios.



    Tiffy Witherington.



    Tiffy, real name Taffy, (she’s Welsh) owns a small pub in Hoddesdon just north of London.

      She was given the pub by her uncle as he considered she was the best person to run it. This broke off relations with most of the rest of her family, but she enjoys running the pub and is behind the bar most evenings and indeed most lunchtimes.



    Tiffy has been twice married, both times to no-gooders. She has a daughter aged 23 and a son aged 26, the latter whom she has not seen since he was 18.



    Like the beer she serves, she can be bitter or mild or full of honey. She is warm and friendly and laughs a lot, but deep inside her 46 year old body she is ridden with depression and she is slowly drinking herself to an early grave.





    ____________________________



    The Reverand Tobias (Toby) Trontby.



    He is one of these vicars who seems ageless and a lot older than one supposes he really is. Young at heart though, and fit, he has been in the parish of Shawthwaite (and hamlets) for 23 years. Ficticious Shawthwaite, (based on Castleton, though of course not on the vicar there!) resides in the rolling hills of Derbyshire Peak District, and has a population of about 3,000.



    The Rev Toby (as he is known) will do anything for anybody. No family of his own (his wife died in a car crash not long after they were married) he considers the whole village his family. Not very religious, and one of those C of E “fudgeberts” who do not believe in the bible and only half believes in the divinity of the Christ, he nevertheless is loved by the deeply religious as much as by anyone. Not for him “one-day-a-weeker” he organizes all aspects of village life, from the cubs and brownies to the Old A.P.’s trip to Blackpool and Skeggie. He is the first person anyone in need turns to, he is counseller, therapist and listener to the lonely.



    Of course he himself is very lonely but does not show it.



    ________________________



    Sophie Lucy Morgan (aged nine)



    All good ficticious children from tintin to Bart Simpson does not age, nor will Sophie. Fiction of course she is, though based on my own daughter Rachel (who herself is very clever and had poems published at 8, including in a Brownie magazine), in a way Sophie’s view of life is my own, because in reality I am the eternal child always at odds with the world.



    Sophie’s two main friends is nine year old Emily, (a twin, and although Sophie and the other twin, Emma, does not get on very well, the three are often together:) and Elgar, a ten year old black boy whose brother is constantly in trouble with the police, and who himself smokes reefers.



    The other people in her life is her Mother, kind, thoughtful, loving, but a little too wrapped up in herself to understand her child, her four grand-parents, each one subjects of poems, the mother’s mother tries to bring up Sophie to be a little lady, not something the tom-boyish girl wants. Then there is her father and “HER” she sees every other weekend. “Her” or her father’s “bit of stuff” and Sophie hate each other’s guts, and doesn’t the reader of her poems know it!



    Another of her friends is the Catholic Priest who tries unsuccessfully to hide from the child and yet feels something for her, who, like all my personae (except Bob Smartass) is deep inside, very lonely. Despite her age and sex, Sophie is an alter girl and most things else in the church which is situated right next door to Sophie’s house.



    Finally there is her school on some rough estate in Oxford (though not based on any actual estate). This school is like all RC schools full of religion and hyprocisy.



    Only two of my personae are religious, Blinky-Head of the Sarahs’ and Sophie.



    For in a way, both The Rev Toby and Sophie see Jesus in the same light, far far removed from The Passion Of the Christ, more of “Away In The Manger”.



    ________________________

    More potted bios to follow. (including Lord Pineapple’s)



    —-

    Terry Cuthbert.

March 20, 2004

  • One user name that never caught on was on use on a short-lived online poetry forum. He’s not missed. btw, this came to light researching my pages for bad poems by none-me poets. This one IS me.


     


    The Poems Of Larry Potter (No Relation)



    Polly, Polly, Polly,

    You are so very jolly

    The way you eat a carrot

    My beautiful Polly Parrot.



    You eat shivers in your claws

    Right over the tropical fish tank,

    Poor Auntie Annie nearly fainted,

    Thought you were eating goldfish,

    THANKS!



    —

    Larry Potter (no relation)



    Note: “Larry Potter (no relation)” was his full signing on name at one poetry site, Larry’s poems are so utterly bad that Bob Smartass’s new site of “Crap-Poets” could have one or two of his, here is another on his Auntie Annie and “Polly Parrot” (Yet another Auntie/Polly poem mentioned that the last owner called the parrot by that unoriginal name, I, Larry Potter (no relation) wanted “Ermertrude”)



    Auntie Annie

    Threw the book

    When Polly Parrot

    First said “fuck”



    I had taught him well,

    “Clever Bird!” I said:

    Auntie Annie was so in shock,

    I really thought her dead.



    (no harm in hoping)



    —also…

    Polly Parrot

    And Auntie Annie,

    This one

    Ran and Ranie.



    They hated each other,

    That’s a fact,

    But Polly died the day after

    Auntie’s fatal heart attack.



    the only comment that got was “thank God!”



    (Notes by “Other ff  % 243 Poets” web-master Terence Cuthbert.)

     

    —-

    Added Note


    You should read some of my blogspot sites, I have so many that I’ve long since lost interest of adding them to the pages of my “blog pages” site.


    I have “hypergraphia” (look it up!) a symbol of my form of autism.

March 11, 2004














  • ff % 243 presents a (mock) review of “Sophie Lucy Morgan, Aged 9″ A booklet  of poems by Sophie Morgan (Pineapple Press)

    This book of poems by a small child is quite heart-warming. Sophie writes about what she sees. She is brutally honest, not yet having learnt what we all take for granted, the variety of human life.



    —



    “And the snow turned into rain”

    I read that line to Nanny on the phone and she replies

    “Better than snow turning into ice”



    Nanny is very old and falls down a lot.



    —



    To a child, fear strikes deep, but relief comes as quickly, here is Sophie:



    —



    The twins and I

    Thought the man was following us,

    He was…



    But only as far as the estate pub.



    —



    Sophie can be a madam who likes things done “proper”, here is one of her many poems to arrest this fact:



    —



    I found out that there are a lot of people

    Who eat their boiled eggs

    Shelled and squashed up in toast.



    But I don’t like it,

    Anyway I got a bit of shell stuck in my throat.



    I told Mummy that she has to buy me an egg-cup today.



    —



    Sophie is not always PC, children rarely are, but her fall into cliches about people are always innocent and are totally without malace.



    —



    Elgar’s brother

    Does not get up to go to Court.

    Says he can’t be assed.



    The police arrests Elgar’s brother

    Throws him into a van.



    I says to Elgar’s mother, that I am sorry,

    And she says to me,

    “Fuck him child, he bring damn shame to my fam er ly”



    Elgar’s mother swears a lot

    Cos she’s black.



    —



    Sophie warns about taking well-meaning advice from grown-up’s, as in this poem:



    —



    “When John is nasty to you”

    Said Father Mcileney to me

    “Count to ten before you say anything.”



    I tried that out,

    But I only got to five

    When John then hit me

    And made me cry.



    —

    But my final poem shows how much she is loved and how much she loves back.



    —



    Mummy wrote on my banana

    Not to forget to bring

    My PE kit home

    With “PS I love you!”





    I kept the banana skin

    Until it went all black

    Then I cried.



    —



    Review by Dr. Peter Lovindale.



    ————————————————



    Sophie is of course (like the book) fiction, but her view of life is not unlike mine, even at my advanced age. For human follies and their charms still amaze me. I stereotype, but also in pure innocence and without malace. I like things done the proper way, and I was always a sucker for daft advice…



    And oh, my mother (even when I was married) wrote messages on my banana-skins for me to read before eating the fruit, for I forget things, to me it’s “out of sight, out of mind”



    —

    Terry Cuthbert.