Danceswithcats

Tag: Isle of Wight

I Cannot Wander or Dawdle
It is exhausting, this life. I do it because I love my mother and I want her to be safe and free from fear, but it is a form of imprisonment. I do not have the space to work, or think or dream.

Every respite is ruled by a ticking clock, a time by which I must be back. I cannot wander or dawdle. I must keep to the timetable, do my assigned activity and return to duty.

Nothing I do, apart from housework, cooking, shopping and companionship, is complete. When I pick up the book I’m reading, I don’t remember where I am. This post is a muddle, because it’s made in grabbed moments, tied together from separate half-hours, rather than written as a contemplative day of absorption.

However, thanks to my sister, I have a weekend off from caring for my mother once a month. Very kindly, she agreed to extend that weekend this month, to allow Amanda and me to go away for a few days, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. She arrived late on Wednesday and extended her stay on Sunday morning to make us lunch. For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel I was rushing to get back.

We booked a place to stay far enough away to feel we were having a holiday but near enough that we wouldn’t sacrifice two full days to travel. Amanda bought an electric van last year and had it converted to a mini campervan earlier this year, and she wanted to try it out, but I didn’t want to be camping, so we found a place on a booking site, Martha’s Retreat,¹ that would give us scope for some picnic trips.

Martha’s Retreat was, at first sight, a little disappointing. The yard was a bit of a dumping ground, with a horsebox and a rotting JCB spoiling the illusion of rural idyll. The cabin was great – lovely, in fact, but the paddock behind was overgrown with scrub and dead cowparsley, and other mysterious uglinesses. It was rush hour, and the B road that the farm was on was busy. I was tired, though, and hungry, and not yet unwound. Gradually, I took in the paths that had been mowed into the field, the seating area with a wood burner in the middle, the messages of greeting and the extras scattered throughout the cabin. I began to relax.

On the first morning, I took Hazel out early, into the paddock, and, while she chased smells and celebrated the misty sunlight, I picked blackberries to go with our cereal.

We had toast with our second cuppas and then we lay in, something we used to do at least once a week, but something that has been rare for a long time. On other weekends off, we have been trying to fit too much in to the one day I’m at home and Amanda’s not working to allow us to waste a morning on books and breakfast in bed. Hazel loved it as much as we did.

No rush to be anywhere or do anything.

I’m reading Marjery Allingham, her second Campion Novel, Mystery Mile, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, so opened an LRB² and read several articles in a row; a luxury I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. I recommend the one on a calvinist writer’s view of Genesis,³ the review of three books by Celia Dale, who appears to be a writer of Ealing greyness and gallows wit,⁴ and Josephine Quinn’s review of a book about the Antonine Plague, which may have been the worst pandemic in human history.⁵

We’d missed the owner on the day we arrived, the Wednesday. We’d stopped in Southampton for lunch at Thrive⁶ and he had to go out before we arrived. When we did bump into him, on the Thursday morning, after we had finally got ourselves together from our epic lie-in, he was as warm and generous and quirky as his hospitality suggested and we talked for at least an hour, getting the story of his life, of the JCB, of his Bentley that poked out of one of the sheds in the yard.

It was one of those conversations where everyone is being equally chatty. Our mutual enjoyment was palpable. After an hour, we began to joke about our collective volubility and, eventually, we called a halt, so Amanda and I could go and get lunch and Trevor could get some gardening done.

Our evenings were equally contented. There was no wifi, though there was a TV/DVD and a library of soppy films. On the Thursday night, our second night there, we watched Music & Lyrics, an old favourite we saw at the flicks when we were first together. The fact that the disc was in the cabin seemed serendipitous.

On the first night, though, we just let the place seep into us, and the awareness of being free sink in. We’d bought a boxed salad at Thrive and we ate it on the reclining sofa in the last of the fading dusk, and then pulled the curtains and sat with just the spotlights from the kitchenette, in shadow, Hazel curled between us, and had the best conversation we’ve had in a very long while. For once, we weren’t planning or trying to solve things; we just shared impressions and feelings and savoured one another.

The red dot shows the approximate position of Martha’s Retreat.

On the Thursday, after our long chat with Trevor, we had tea in the gardens of a museum, wandered around the town a bit and then, finding nowhere that fitted the venn diagram of dog and vegan friendly for lunch, decided to buy the makings of sandwiches and an easy supper and head back to Martha’s Retreat.

Holiday fully underway.

Is there any better afternoon than one spent on a bed with a book, your lover and your dog? We are not good at sharing the tea-making duties: Amanda has a greater tolerance for empty mugs than I do, so I was up and down a bit, but I read some more articles and dozed a bit, and Amanda dozed a bit more and it was all just very.

Our trips out were more hectic. Amanda likes to fit things in to any journey to the mainland, so we had to post some parcels at an Evri depot on the Thursday – there are none on the Island – and visit a couple of campervan places on the Friday. Wimborne Minster is a lovely town, saved from being swallowed by the Bournemouth conurbation by the A31 which blights its outskirts, as the A14 blights Bury St Edmunds. Unlike Bury, Wimborne Minster is surrounded by protected SSSIs and woodlands and has retained a certain beauty.

All the comforts.

On the Friday afternoon, after one of Amanda’s shop visits, we parked up in Holt Woods, in the car park that sits between the edge of the forestry commission plantation and the moorland that is run by the National Trust. I’d made sandwiches and we had a lazy picnic in the van. It was a success. Small as it is, the van is big enough for me to stretch comfortably in the reversed front seat while Amanda and Hazel have the setee/bed bench thing. Dog walkers and horse riders came and went and we spent a comfortable couple of hours enjoying the quiet, before travelling in search of a campervan place,⁷ where Amanda bought an awning.

That evening, I had the feeling I remember from the last day of the school holidays: a sense of gloom. It needn’t have been, really. We still had all of Saturday, as Charlotte wasn’t due to go home until Sunday morning, but the anticipation of heading back, leaving this little hideaway, weighed on me.

Amanda went to bed early and I stayed up reading for an hour or so. I lit the woodburner, which was decadent but lovely, and I was at peace.

Hazel, after adjusting to our being in separate rooms, came and joined me, lying on the hearth under my feet, until after I had fallen asleep and the fire had lost its warmth, when she got up in a huff and went through to Amanda. I joined them, I assume, because I was in bed in the morning, but I don’t remember it.

We got home mid afternoon on Saturday, stopping at Waitrose to buy buns and salad. We had an early supper of burgers and oven chips and went to bed to catch up on the last of the most recent series of Dr Who, which we both found disappointing. We’d watched a couple of the other episodes on an earlier weekend off and had loved them: Ncuti Gatwa and Daisy Miller are wonderful together and the writing has recovered this series, but the double bill finale was a bit all over the place and only just saved by the acting. Still, it was a nice ritual.

And, Sunday morning came. I was expecting to be early out, so Charlotte could catch a morning ferry, but when I texted her to say I’d be with her at nine o’clock, she suggested she make lunch for us. Gratitude was unbound. Another morning of lazy tea and dog walk, and then we were back at my mother’s house, feeling okay about it, because we were the guests, for once.

For the first five years or so of our relationship, Amanda and I travelled a fair bit, both in the UK and in Europe. Indeed, one of the reasons I took up cycling to work, and became a cycling enthusiast, was to free up money for holidays. We went to Barcelona, Paris, Gent, St Austell, Northumberland and to festivals in Cornwall and Suffolk. We had fun.

Then came my father’s illness, then his death⁸ and then my mother’s increasing dependence, and life seemed to close in and become unrelentingly serious. Now, it is as restricted as it has been in all out time together: we actually live apart and I spend my time caring for my mother and she spends her time working and managing the dog and our house, that we really don’t want to give up.

This trip might seem a small thing, and this post a “what I did in my holidays” rote exercise, but it is a holding on, a contributory element in the miracle that is the survival of our marriage through these years of never being first priority in our own lives. I want to preserve it, for the winter, so that I can look back and remind myself that we can have some freedom, some respite and some mutual enjoyment and congratulate us for the fact that we are, somehow, hard as it is, making this work.
September 6, 2024

Amanda, Campervan, Dogs, Dorset, Isle of Wight, LRB
Winter, At Last
Cowes cycle-path, this morning.

It seemed as though it would never come. Only a couple of weeks ago, in late November, I took this picture of blackberry blossom, the brambles fooled into a second bloom by the absurdly warm winter.

The warmth followed several weeks of heavy winds and rain, and the memory of the historically hot summer combined with each successive wave of extreme weather to build a feeling of apocalyptic disorder. The climate disaster we know to be true on an intellectual level is becoming a process we are experiencing.

Our garden this morning.

For the past week, though, winter has settled in, with sub-zero temperatures and a sense, when it is my turn to do the evening dog walk, that snow is an imminent possibility. And it is beautiful. We are unlikely to actually get snow on the Island – that happens only when the cold comes from the East, and this cold air is coming from the North, according to the forecasters – but we have had at least five days of cold, clear air, bright sun, and the most wonderful night skies that have given way to heavy frosts that make the mornings as beautiful as the moonlit, frosted darkness.

The rotting barge in the sun.

I rode into town late this morning to do some shopping, although that could have waited. I just wanted the ride. Yesterday, I’d done my first shift as a rider for the new cargo-bike delivery company on the Island¹, and had ridden the Cowes to Newport cycle path for work. Today, I rode it for pleasure. The wintry, white sun dazzled me all the way to Newport, the late-remaining leaves coloured the barren-looking trees and hedges, and the rotting barge, that has sat in the Medina for as long as I have ridden that path, looked newly-reborn, as if she could heal herself and take to the sea again.

On Wednesday, I tried to take a picture of her on my ride home from doing my teaching prep at County Hall. The view had been utterly stunning then, lit by an almost full moon that reflected upon the water as an ivory glow, the air as still as the moon. A lone bird chirruped in the dark as I struggled to take a steady image. Alas, my Fairphone is a good phone, but not a great camera, and I could only achieve this blurred, but still evocative, picture.
1. https://keert.uk/[↩]
December 10, 2022

Climate Change, Cycling, Isle of Wight
Every Rut And Rock And Root
“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.”John F. Kennedy

A joy I’d forgotten.

I have done very little leisure cycling for several years. I ride upwards of forty miles a week for work and shopping, and the habit of fitting a few hours’ riding into the week simply for the pleasure of the exercise has got lost somewhere.

My much missed workhorse, a great all-rounder.

A part of the problem is that I haven’t had a mountain bike I liked for some time. My last good one, a 2015 Voodoo Bizango,¹ pictured left, was stolen in 2019. I replaced it with the newer model during lockdown in 2020, but it was a dog of a bike: badly specced, twitchy, overspecialised and yet ponderous. It was richly praised² on various websites, which is a testament to the power of a large corporation’s P.R., I suppose: it was a Halford’s brand. However, the previous bike – the one I lost to a bike thief – had been the same brand, and it had been a beauty, both robust and nimble, as well as versatile.

I am a sucker for a bargain, though, and the new Bizango was even more widely promoted³ and not, this time, just by dodgy, fly-by-night bloggers.⁴ I looked at the details a little more closely this time. The previous one had an internal bottom bracket and clunky Sram gearing, and the saddle and grips were unusable, so that I had to spend about a hundred more pounds just to make the bike rideable. The 2022 model has Shimano Deore gearing, the updated, single chainring version of the gearing on the late lamented first of my Bizangos. It also has a Deore bottom bracket and the saddle is pretty decent.

Interestingly, my search for Voodoo Bizango reviews⁵threw up an illuminating situation: the 2015 Bizango – the one I loved and lost – appears most frequently on the stolen-bikes.co.uk site, while there are dozens of the ropey orange-coloured later one for sale on Gumtree, Pinkbike and Shpock.com, whatever that may be. Coincidence? I thinks not, indeedy.

A couple of weeks ago, Halfords advertised a trade-in offer on their own brand bikes. I could have got more for it by selling privately, but I am not confident with ebay and all that stuff, so I took the unloved bike in, received a gift card and ordered the new model. I also ordered a dropper seat post – I’ve been meaning to try one for ages, and the prices have been coming down, so this seemed the time.

Originally, I was to have picked it up this Saturday, but I got a phone call on Thursday telling me they were understaffed, and asking for my forbearance and I got my new bike on Sunday. I rode it home and was a little uncertain, noticing a couple of snags. The cable for the dropper post was far too long, creating a potential noose to catch on branches. Worse, the rear brakes were out of line. When I got home, I tried reseating the rear wheel and centering the brakes, and I fiddled with the handlebar alignment: I don’t blame Halfords for that, as it’s one of those things you just have to fiddle with until you get it right. All the same, as I put the bike in the shed for the night, I had the uneasy feeling I might have, once again, bought a dud.

So, today, I rushed through my various household duties to make time to take the bike out and get a proper feel for it. I left the house at two and was still feeling quite uneasy as I got towards town. The seat post cable, in particular, bothered me, but the rear brakes were still rubbing.

In increasing irritation, I cut short my ride and headed into Halfords to have a whinge. In contrast with the chaos of Sunday, when a small gang of staff were struggling to cope with a horde of customers, it was quiet and peaceful, the cave-like building glowing with the light of a sunny day. I found Sean, who I think is the bikes manager, although they seem to keep their roles obscure, at the bike mechanics’ station and bent his ear for a minute. Sean is a calm character, and effective. By the time I’d run out of steam, he’d sorted out the brakes and was ready to discuss when he could refit the dropper post. As a temporary measure, he folded the loose cable back on itself and tied it with a cable tie. I felt stupid for not having thought of that. He also helped me to get my handlebars sorted out and revived my enthusiasm for going for a ride. By the time I left, I was full of a renewed sense of well-being.

The weather was hot and bright, fairly windy with scattered cloud. I hauled through the Carisbrooke housing estate and turned up the Carisbrooke Road. I had thought to go left at the Castle turning, up over the Castle hill and out to the bridle paths that climb around the hills towards Brightstone Forest. The bike was feeling better though, as if I’d found my fit, and I wanted to get off-road quicker, so I climbed the hill through Carisbrooke, over the horrible Forest Road roundabout, to Nodgham Lane. It’s a hard climb, but the bike is so light and easy that I was quite fresh as I turned off the paved road on to the Tennyson Trail.

The path up to the down is a beautiful, rough, technical climb. Over the years, I’ve done it on full suspension bikes, hard tails, cheap bikes and high-end bikes, but I don’t remember enjoying it more than I did today. I was using my SPD trail pedals and had the mechanism set tighter than I like for off-road riding, so I was a little worried that if I needed to put my foot down fast I would just topple over, my feet still locked into my pedals. It’s a long time since I’ve done that.

Instead, I seemed to be able to find the perfect peddle turn with every stroke, judging the pressure I needed to use for each rut and rock and root. I realised, after having read a hundred bike ‘reviews’ over the last month or so, what a well-balanced bike feels like: I felt the ground through the bike, and found my way forward as an instinctive action. Cycling journalism might seem as though it’s splitting hairs for the sake of finding something to say, but it’s rooted in some real experience.

One of the deeply-channelled paths that are common on the Island.

The path, for its first half-mile, steep climb, is thickly hedged on both sides, often with high banks enclosing it. It is one of the deeply channelled paths that are common on the Island. Eventually, the left hand side clears and the path emerges into the edge of a bank of meadow flower, overlooking the valley across to Carisbrooke Castle. The path levels out here, and I was able to catch my breath and snap up a couple of gears, gaining speed. The gearing is not as smooth as my old 3 x 9 Deore setup, and that may be because it has a clutch on it, to stop chain slap, or it may be because the single chain-ring, with such a wide gear ratio on the rear cassette, forces the chain to make much higher jumps across a much tighter space. However, the range of gears was definitely much, much more comfortable than the orange Bizango.

I was beginning to really push the bike. The path runs through more hedged banks, but is wider here, and undulates between gentle descents and moderate climbs. We’ve had a quite dry summer and the ground was hard and the suspension fork, being new, was transmitting a fair bit of judder into my arms. It’s not the cheapest of forks, but it’s only air sprung in one leg, so there’s a coil that will take a few hundred miles to bed in and become properly supple. However, I didn’t feel that the wheel was bouncing unduly. Suntour fork though it is, it was doing a decent job of keeping the front wheel in contact with the track. I would like to buy a better fork, but I’m not sure it’s a financial priority, and the fork on my much missed first Bizango was also a Suntour Raidon which, in time, became softer and more biddable.

I came to a gate at a crossroads of two bridle paths: the one I was riding – Down Lane – crosses the one that goes to the South, down towards Gatcombe and to the North drops down to the Calbourne Road. I have never turned off here, as I usually continue on to Brightstone, at least, but the path to the right, towards Calbourne, was looking beautiful. I turned right, nearly tipping over as I hit the steep slope up onto the other path, then climbed the steep path to the highpoint shown on the map here: 134m elevation.

Here, I stopped. I’m going to embed the video I took, crap audio and all, because it captures the sense of excitement I was feeling, as evidenced by my incoherent jabbering.

What I’m babbling about is the sight of a bird of prey, plausibly either a buzzard or a red kite, having just floated over me, circling around, checking me out, before it disappeared over the edge of the down. The sun was hot on my skin, the dust blowing in the stiff wind, and I felt as I haven’t felt for many, many years. It’s the feeling that cycling first gave me when I got back into it as an adult, about fifteen years ago, and which I had allowed myself to forget, in all the struggle to keep life going, to do my best at it, to be a grown up. It’s the feeling of what it felt like to be a child: happy, excited, engaged with the moment, in love with life.

It felt like being ten again.

The hill down to the Calbourne Road was insanely steep, and I rode my rear brake for most of it. Nevertheless, I felt in control. It was brilliant to discover that what poor mountain biking skills I had ever had weren’t entirely lost. At the road, I had the choice of heading back towards Carisbrooke on tarmac or hauling myself up that steep hill to head home via the off road route.

No contest. It was a hell of a climb, but I made it, without running out of gears, and reached the peak with some strength still in my legs. When I got back to the gate, I stopped for a drink – I don’t have a camelback at the moment nor does the new bike have a bottle cage fitted, so I had to take off my backpack to get one of my water bottles out, but the rest was welcome. Then, it was back along the Down Lane, heading downhill this time, for a long, bouncing, mile-long descent. The dropper post did its job perfectly: it’s easy to push the seat down with your weight and then stand up on the peddles, and with the saddle out of the way, peddling while standing is much easier. Where the way ahead was clear, I hammered it, but I had to slow where the path wound out of sight, in case of walkers coming the other way. I met no one, though, and made it back to Carisbrooke Road feeling like one of the Athertons.

It was a day of days. A fine way to spend a couple of hours. I will DEFINITELY be doing that again, very soon.
July 4, 2022

Bike Theft, Cycling, Isle of Wight, Tennyson Trail, Voodoo Bizango
Defeat

Last Friday, the day after the election, in a fog of tiredness and sorrow, I went to work, where I dragged learners through English mocks, and fought to believe that anything can make any difference now.

One learner, who manages an incredibly demanding life of balancing the needs of various dependents with a zero hours care job, was late. When she came in, she was, as ever, flustered. She offered her apologies and said,

“I had to get on to the Universal Credit. They’ve only paid half my rent.”

I sympathised and pushed her work in front of her. She completed it in her habitual rush, with her usual betrayal of her intelligence, because her way of coping with a life of overwhelming economic and familial responsibility at too young an age is to do everything in a hurry, avoiding dangerous reflection. We discussed each answer, interpreting how she hadn’t read the questions fully or considered all the options in the multiple choice section, and how, with a few minutes’ care, she is perfectly capable of passing what should be, for her, the formality of this exam. She promised to be early next week, and to take a few minutes to become calm, but I expect she will rush in to the exam room late, pre-occupied by another crisis that she will bravely cope with, as she tries to make the space to better her life.

In the afternoon, she came back for the maths class. I had been preparing for this class for several weeks, laying the ground for nervous learners: it’s the one in which we move from basic calculation with decimal numbers to working with fractions. This is where people give up: they believe that ‘fractions are hard’, and that they have some innate inability to ‘do hard maths’ and this section of the course is always as much an exercise in boosting learners’ self-belief and reflecting on how much they have already achieved as it is about introducing new skills and understanding.

She and my other learner who had turned up – there’s a wave of colds and stomach bugs keeping children off school, and two other women were at home with sick offspring – have developed a friendship that is still at the stage of curiosity about one another. Off-topic discussions, pleasurable as they can be, are a headache for me, as I only get two hours each week to teach a demanding curriculum. I had given them their warm up task – a few questions on what we had covered the previous week – and checked that they knew where they were with it, and I left the room to go to the loo while they completed it. By the time I got back, they were discussing the election result.

I groaned inwardly, and cautioned myself to be like a fly fisherman with a bite: to let it run until I could feel they were tiring and then take control again. A few weeks before, as part of my duty to ‘promote British values’, I had used a voter registration poster in our English class for an exercise on identifying presentational features in a text. At the time, the learner of whom I am writing had asked me my politics and I had explained that I wasn’t allowed to say, and she had responded, after a discussion of why that was sensible for a teacher, that she reckoned I was for Corbyn. At the time, I’d congratulated myself on remaining neutral. Now, as I sat quietly, waiting for my opportunity to get them back on task, she said,

“I was right about you.”

Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)

She’d seen a photo on the local newspaper’s website, in one of the few articles the openly Tory-leaning rag had bothered to publish on Labour’s campaign, that had a picture of a group of Labour supporters gathering for an event in Ryde, smiling, comradely, happy, optimistic. At the back, peaking over the shoulder of the shorter man in front, grinning like a hungover idiot, I was clearly visible.

“You know I can’t talk about it,” I said, shaken.

“Yeah,” she said, “I voted for Boris. I’ve never voted before, but I voted Conservative.”

It was as if she hated me. I know she doesn’t, but that was how it felt.

I haven’t blogged about this election, beyond changing my homepage to a trite meme and linking to a couple of posts I’d heard about through the news. I haven’t blogged much this year, of course, but I did expect that, when the longed-for election campaign happened, I’d be leaping into prolix action, as I had in 2017.

Instead, I’ve been involved, ‘on the streets’, and through the Constituency Labour Party’s own systems. I’ve been the assistant secretary of the CLP for nearly two years, but that has, until recently, only meant being the keyboard monkey for the secretary and chair, both of whom have become friends. Just before the election started, however, the chair withdrew himself from consideration for the position of candidate, having been subject to sustained vilification, including threats to his family, since the last election, and the secretary got himself locked out of the Labour comms system for a mistaken breach of the opaque rules, which have more to do with internal politicking within the national party structure than they do with making the system work.

Thanks to these circumstances, my role became, accidentally, central. Over the last six weeks, I have probably written more words than in the previous twelve months. They just haven’t found their way here. The chair, who had become the new candidate’s campaign manager, told me, late on in the campaign, that his role was taking the fight to the Tories, and my role was galvanising the troops. I hadn’t been told that before, but had simply adopted the job that I didn’t see anyone else doing, or being in a position to do.

Each day after work, once I’d done enough to be sure that I would know where I was for the next lessons, I turned off my work laptop and went straight on to my own computer, where I would often be trapped until after midnight. If the next day wasn’t a teaching day, I would be out with the Cowes and East Cowes branch, delivering leaflets door-to-door, or helping with the distribution of garden signs and posters to people who had contacted the party, asking how they could help. In the evenings, there were many events, most of which were a pleasure: I have spent more time in pubs over the last few weeks than I have for many years.

At first, it was exciting. I was surrounded by people who believe, broadly, in what I believe: that humans are only of any account if they serve the group; that selfishness is a moral and intellectual failure; that the dominant political and economic system is, without question, evil; childish, rapacious and evil, but that elation had, after the first couple of weeks, begun to compete with exhaustion. I did not, however, lose hope, but I began to feel a little let down by comrades whose belief in the coming victory of justice and good sense was tempered with caution.

Two things gave me a different outlook to the majority of people fighting for a Labour victory in this election: my Christianity and my disavowal of social media.

I am not an ardently practising Christian, but I came, through the nineties and noughties, to realise that I cannot escape my faith, and that the arguments against faith that were trendy in those decades, were, in the words of Terry Eagleton, a process of Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching against a system of thought that the neo-atheists wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented. Earlier this year, I joined Christians On The Left. Through the election they have been sending out a daily email, the 2019 Prayer Diary. Written by a theologian who only introduced herself as Hazel, they were wonderfully welcome at a time when I didn’t have the space to read my normal blogs and news for which I receive update emails that, through the campaign, I simply had to delete, to be able to keep up with my inboxes. Each day, though, I read her prayers, and then got on with whatever needed doing.

As for social media, I think my absence from it since July 2017 has given me the clarity to think for myself and to avoid the political panic to which I am prone and which, I think, guided many people in this election. The Tories are crisis capitalists: they thrive on the established P.R. tactic of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). I suspect, without being in a position to offer evidence, that this was the election in which the capitalists realised their technological dream of controlling people’s reactions from within. I may expand upon that at another time, but I think that, accomplished as we in the Labour Party are at using social media to make ourselves feel effective, it means nothing unless the people who own the media are on your side.

Actually, I did rejoin Twitter for the duration of the campaign. It helped me to keep up with events in the CLP, where a disparate set of groups, spread over the largest constituency in the country (by population), were arranging their campaigning efforts semi-autonomously, and were not always brilliant at communicating outside their social media bubbles. I tried to join Facebook as well, but was frustrated. I think my use of Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, coupled with a disposable email address and a phone number linked to a burner SIM card I had no intention of using again, tipped the creepy capitalist bastards off. I’m rather proud to have been blocked by Facebook before I posted a thing!

A facile pretence of utility and ubiquity have made social media essential in politics, and have, I believe, handed the reins of power over to a capitalist hegemony as completely as any other factor in this election. I had set up my home server, after two years of study and trial and error, less than a month before the election was announced, and would have been lost without the calendar, to-do lists and contacts server it hosts, but I was still obliged to use a Google calendar for shared calendaring with the CLP. We need to look at owning our infrastructure, but it’s a hard sell. People who automatically accept the ‘services’ to which they are tied by their choice of computer system and mobile phone have a hard time understanding that they are being used, when they have put so much effort into just mastering the technology that seeks to control them. The idea that it is escapable defeats them, as the idea that all politicians are not the same defeats people who are struggling to survive in an economic system that is tightening around their lives. There is a simple answer (simpler than the route of learning and self-building that I have used), but how many people will make the effort to do it?

Earlier this year, I read Democracy Hacked, by Martin Moore. A couple of months ago, I read, almost in one sitting, the Edward Snowden autobiography, Permanent Record and, just before the election was called, I bought The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which I will now have the time to read fully. If you want to understand what has happened to democracy over the last decade, you need to read these texts. You do not control your data, and, consequently, electronic communication does not, any more, give us a full say in our democracy. We’ve overthrown one tyranny of informational cartels to replace it with another. We need new mechanisms of resistance.

I’m not keen on going into mainstream media’s role in this election. Enough people are already examining that, although I will add a couple of personal observations. Firstly, the full emotional crash of the exit poll was pre-announced by about twenty seconds, for me, by the smirk on the face of Andrew Niel as he talked over the countdown to it. Rattling through his bland script, he looked as though he had a hand stuffed down his truss, so excited was he by the predicted result to which he, I assume, had had early access. If you believe in democracy, honesty or truth, the BBC is not your friend, any more than Facebook is.

Secondly, it dawned on me, as I angrily skimmed The Guardian’s website each morning, that the key figures among its columnists and editorial staff are probably on a lot more than £80,000 per annum and, while they cling to the pose of being ‘of the left’ as their journalistic USP, very few of them will have voted for a party that wanted to raise taxes for the richest 5%. I think their utter betrayal of democracy is a good enough reason to not “support independent journalism” for another year. Let them take comfort from their massive wealth, their second homes and their positions of quisling influence.

There is a lot of commentary on the election leaping out and I haven’t had the heart to try to keep up over the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, we met other Island Labour members in a Newport pub to have a bit of a thank you session, with the candidate, Richard Quigley, a gloriously happy, funny, clever and warm man, bringing his wife and daughter so he could say his personal thanks. Richard has been a pleasure to support in the campaign, as Julian, his manager, was in the last. In the pub, many of us were talking about how we are now facing the very real dread of the last restraints being released from the Tory plunder of our country’s assets. We’re thinking about the fact that we will not be able to afford ‘health insurance’ when the Fascists pocket the bribes from the Yank money and drug industries; we’re thinking about the fact that those of us who are in public service jobs will probably endure a continued slide into deeper and deeper working destitution, if we are lucky enough to keep our jobs. We are finding it harder to think without real, urgent horror of the fate of disabled people, homeless people, people who cannot find legal redress for rape or harassment and how soon it will be our turn to join them. It’s personal. Dying, untreated, of some wretched cancer, or living with pain that would be treatable if we were part of the 5%, now seems like our common fate.

What we are supposed to do, if we follow the advice that we have told ourselves since Jeremy Corbyn first gave us hope, is to pull together, look to one another, and begin to support those people already jettisoned by the Tories’ campaign of exclusion and abandonment. Some people are talking about it, but we all know that the Blairites will try another deluded attempt to drive the party into impotence by reopening the insane whinges they’ve been picking at since they were crushed in 2015. And, pathetic as their positions are, they have The New Statesman and The Guardian behind them, so they don’t have to be right, just shamelessly persistent.

So, I’m looking at my position. If infighting does get a grip, I may decide to not stand for local party office at the next AGM. Over the election, I have made new friends, or deepened existing ones, and the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that, while it is not as powerful as political office, is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics. And, if I convince a few people to see through the lies of the capitalist hegemony on the way, all the better.

One other thing is troubling me; an issue that is like the ticking bomb that fascists love to use to justify their cruelty. If, by some miracle, the vile Bozo Johnson manages to hold together a government for five years, the timeline for installing a government that will meet its responsibilities to the climate emergency before the deadline that scientists now say is the very latest chance to save human civilisation will be halved. We have to stop the Tories before then. We have to. I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.

Let’s get back to my Tory voting learner. I can’t discuss her much more closely than I already have, but I can make some guesses about those things that drive her. Not ideologically racist, she has, I suspect, suffered humiliations at the hands of people whom she perceives as different, and came to the Island, partly, to get away from communities that are in turmoil and have been turned against one another by poverty and poorly resourced and led policing, social structures and political leadership. For her, Brexit seems like a triumph of the poor over the powerful – a reversal of the truth, as it turns out, but if your information comes from social media and tabloids, you can continue to believe that.

For her, also, they are all the same. It’s the FUD lie of lies, that says that politics is pointless and the safest and bravest response is to follow the herd. Political voting is confused with voting for a Love Island contestant, where the outcome is similar to a bet: you win if you back the winner.

In truth, of course, backing the winner in this election has guaranteed that the phone calls she gets, when she says, “Someone after money: they can jog on,” will increase. The waiting time for her Universal Credit will lengthen, the amount she is entitled to reduced, so her debts will deepen; the inadequate working protections she has at the moment will be removed one at a time, until she will be paying, not only for her work travel, but for her uniform, her equipment, and, finally, for the privilege of being employed.

She hasn’t yet noticed, I suspect, that the NHS has been privatised. The fact that ‘Boris’, as she calls him, lied about putting more money into the NHS hasn’t got through to her. They all throw figures around, don’t they? They’re all the same.

When she told me that she had voted Tory, I stared at her for a moment, taking in her beauty, her nicotine-stained front teeth, her bravely well turned out appearance that is testament to her courage, given the hours she works, and then muttered that I couldn’t get into it. It was an uncomfortable moment.

She got on with her work, doing well, grasping lowest common multiples and then comparison of fractions, but the moment must have lingered for her, as well as for me. I realised that, for her, I am part of the body of authority that keeps her working and working and working, denying her the right to gain full realisation of her talents and potential and, by confronting my politics, she was asserting herself; laying claim to a dignity she doesn’t realise I already see in her. She’s not to know that I earn less than her, and that, for all my education, I am as constrained and limited by the political and economic system as she is.

Finally, as we were summing up the learning at the end of the class, she brought it up again.

“It bothers you, don’t it,” she said, reverting to her mannered London speech, which is not how she usually talks to me.

I wanted to channel Jonathan Pie, and descend into a rant that would contain all the frustration and pain I had been feeling since ten o’clock the previous night, when Huw Edwards and Andrew Neil had gleefully pronounced my country’s doom. I stared into her eyes for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. Nothing came.

In my struggle, I remembered Christians On The Left’s prayer email of that morning. I hadn’t absorbed it properly: I’d been too tired and too sad, but one line had jumped out at me:

Be still, and know that I am God

Psalm 46:10

I stopped searching and words came.

“Your vote is your own choice,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you voted. The fact that you have voted, for the first time, is a really good thing. The more people who vote, the more powerful all our votes are. I celebrate that.”

I doubt I fooled her. I suspect that, given the struggles she has and the job she does, she is a perceptive person, who saw how much pain I was in. However, she smiled, packed her bag, and went on to her next obligation, her courage and dignity undamaged by our exchange, knowing a little bit more about maths than she had when she came in.

It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

December 23, 2019

2019 G.E., Isle of Wight, Labour Party, Politics, U.K. Politics
Another Beautiful Day

We had thunder last night, a huge storm that got trapped over the Solent, as they sometimes do, confined between Portsdown Hill on the mainland and the downs on the southern side of the Island. I went upstairs to check on the cat, who was fine, and sat on the table in our bedroom window, looking out at the flashes that lit the sky from East to West. I kept my eyes forward, in a meditative state, waiting for lightning bolts to appear within my view, and inside five minutes I saw several: beautiful, brutal, jagged lines of pure white, linking the night cloud to the horizon like ruptures in the sky.

This morning dawned clear. Last week had given us glorious summer weather, but Saturday had been dull and wet, culminating in the storm as night fell. Today is bright, summery, but with the fresh aftermath of the storm.

Amanda and I got up early enough to take Tia out before getting bogged down in the weekend obligations to family, house and friends. We decided to go to Compton Beach, on the south west of the Island. It’s a bit of a haul to get there, driving through Newport and then on out to the South Coast, but, at low tide, it is one of the glories of living here. Low tide was at 9:15 this morning: we got there at about 8:30, and the sand, peppered with seaweed, rocks and tide pools, and with the chalk cliffs of Freshwater as its backdrop, looked like a setting from a fantasy novel.

We walked eastwards, into the sun, the sound of a strong surf accompanying our lazy chat. Amanda has been taking dog training classes and Tia, despite her limitless capacity for excitement, is becoming more manageable. She sprinted ahead, but came back to us when Amanda called, and ran delighted rings around us when she had received a reward for her obedience. We went further than we had intended, because we met other walkers, and got talking, or Tia was playing with their dogs as we walked, but it didn’t matter. It was Sunday, the sun was out, and we live in a beautiful, beautiful place.

April 22, 2018

Amanda, Isle of Wight, Tia
Beautiful Beast
After a week of news about heavy snow, we finally got our turn yesterday lunchtime. The magic of a fairly heavy snowfall hit the Island and, by dusk, we had a good few centimetres turning East Cowes into a beautiful playground.

“Wochoo lookin’ at?”

Earlier in the week, I walked Tia in Firestone Copse and was checked out by this creature. He was unflustered by Tia’s presence and sat scanning me, hopping this way and that on the branch, until he decided I wasn’t very interesting, and flew off.

The weather then was bitterly cold but dry. The ground in the woods, which has been boot-ruining wet for most of the winter, had frozen to a crisp hardness. Puddles were like frosted windows and streams looked solid, unless the light hit them a certain way, when it was possible to make out the movement of a reduced trickle beneath the ice. My headphones gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and I have been walking without music or talking books in my ears, becoming used to the sounds of the woods. In the eerie cold, even with the slight, distant reminder of traffic if the wind is in the right direction, I have heard birdsong, the creaking of trees, the breath of leaves and cry of birds of prey.

Yesterday morning, Amanda and I took Tia back there, and we had a walk of blissful cold. Work was in the process of being suspended: I was due to go to Ryde for my usual long Thursday, but the weather and travel warnings had made my boss worried and he had cancelled classes. While we were walking, the admin officer phoned and said I should work from home. Even though I had a lot of work to do, I felt as though I were on holiday.

My desk at home faces away from the window, so I missed the start of the snow, but by two o’clock I had done a reasonable amount and got up. Already, the ground was covered with a couple of centimetres and the sky was full of swirling, windswept flakes. I rushed downstairs, put on my boots, coat and gloves and took Tia out for her first ever experience of snow.

It’s difficult to know what she made of it. I don’t think she’s very keen on snowfall, but she seemed amused by the snow on the ground. We walked up to the rec and round it, and I thought that I would take her along to the new estate where we had walked a lot over Christmas, and which had caught my imagination then with its unearthly, film-set desolation.¹However, Amanda phoned and said she’d finished work and would come and join us, so we walked back to meet her. The cold got into us fairly quickly, and so we headed home.

I checked what our house looked like in the snow: I was interested to see how efficient our insulation is – not too bad, it appears. However, I took several photos and was pleased with the results. I have not taken many pictures of our house, and we have been here for seven years now. I put them here for my own reference, as much as anything.

The tosser-tank isn’t ours.

Auto-focus is confused by snow.

The snow lasted until mid-evening, when freezing rain replaced it. This morning was noticeably warmer and, when I took Tia out at 9 o’clock, the freezing rain and slight thaw had made the footpaths treacherous: great patches of glassy rinks covered large areas. There was, though, hardly any traffic: for the first time since I have lived here, I could hear no traffic noise for long stretches, and I walked in the road, through slush.

We headed to the estate, and it was transformed. The snow had not made it any prettier, but it was alive. There were people everywhere, mostly in family groups, with sledges and tin trays, having fun together. I did not, of course, photograph people: that would have been weird, but I walked Tia through the estate laughing and chatting with people having an unexpected holiday.

It’s snowing again now, but lighter. I am going out in a while, to buy my Friday beer. I am hoping for warmth. It’s been nice, but I want spring to start.
1. https://danceswithcats.uk/2018/02/04/sticking-my-nose-in-the-nutmeg-pot/ [↩]
March 2, 2018

Amanda, Isle of Wight, The Beast From The East, Tia
None Shall Pass
Queen of the castle.

I am gradually coming to terms with dog-ownership.((http://An end to)) I still struggle with the presence of a restless and demanding animal¹ in the house and her talent for destruction. This afternoon, for instance, she has eaten the lace on my new pair of vegan boots, for which I have saved for some time. Nevertheless, on the whole, Tia is extremely sweet-natured and is beginning to understand commands and, when she’s not distracted by smells, birds, the cat or other dogs, is attentive and obedient enough. I’ve walked her without Amanda a fair bit, and I am beginning to really enjoy the time I spend with her.

One advantage is that she has made having an English Heritage² membership worthwhile. Apart from Osborne House³, the card gains us entry to Carisbrooke Castle⁴, which is a proper castle, in just the right state of decay.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 , [CC BY-SA 4.0]

It’s a Norman castle, with a high keep and a large bailey that has a variety of buildings within it, as well as a lovely walled garden. The bailey walls are almost complete and you can walk around them, which offers amazing views of the Island in all directions. The first picture above shows Tia, on guard, this morning.

There are fields and outer battlements, mostly Elizabethan and eighteenth century, around the outside, and dogs are free to run off-lead there. We started our visit with a circuit round the outside of the castle and Tia galloped about, inquisitive and gleeful, disappearing into the woods that ring the area before reappearing, with a look of joy, and racing towards me like a happy hare. One of the tricks a dog owner needs to develop is confidence in their animal. I am gradually learning that she will always return. She may wander, but she won’t go far without checking back with me.

After we’d had our gallop, we went into the castle. It was still early and the staff were getting ready for the last day of half-term events. We stopped at the donkey stables, which Tia wasn’t sure about, and then went up to the tea room, which is in a beautiful castle building, nestled against the bailey wall. We sat in the courtyard and I had my coffee and, unasked, a member of staff brought out a dog bowl of water for Tia. I was very moved by the kindness.

We were up in Suffolk for a few days this week, visiting my parents, who were charmed by the dog. Amanda wanted to do various bits of shopping, so on Friday I took Tia over to West Stow Country Park,⁵ which I loved when I was a child. There is a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village there, but it is fenced and dogs are forbidden. However, the park itself is large and contains a lake, made from an old gravel pit, and has several long trails looping through it. When I was last there, fifteen years ago, it was still quite a bare place, with only young trees. The woods have thickened and matured now, and the lake looks quite natural. A river, the Lark, is well-maintained and is the only place I have ever seen otter trail in the wild, although that was when I was in my teens.

Tia and I walked around the lake, on a lovely late-autumn afternoon, with the sun low in the sky. We saw only a few other people and she was in her element. Unfortunately, there is a “dogs-on-leads-only” rule; Bury St Edmunds, being Tory to its very core, seems to be a place that loves rules for their own sake, as I can’t see what harm a dog running around in that large open space could do. However, I am an example of obedience, so Tia didn’t get to canter about, beyond the speed I can manage.

She seemed to enjoy it, though, and I achieved the peace that, as I am learning, a long walk in the company of a dog can inspire.

Yesterday, before we left Bury for the tedious journey home, we went into town to do some last-minute shopping. There is a science fiction exhibition on at Moyses Hall Museum⁶ and various cosplay people were standing outside, wearing Star Wars and Judge Dredd costumes and that expression of defiant embarrassment that cosplay fantasists maintain. I asked the stormtrooper to hold Tia’s lead while I took a photo, but she was unimpressed and failed to pose. The sweet young jedi made up for Tia’s failure. I have a feeling I will treasure this image.
1. Dogs Are Bullies [↩]
2. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/ [↩]
3. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/osborne/ [↩]
4. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/ [↩]
5. https://www.weststow.org/ [↩]
6. https://www.moyseshall.org/ [↩]
October 29, 2017

Bury St Edmunds, Carisbrooke Castle, Dogs, Isle of Wight, Tia, West Stow
Island Prettiness
Amanda and me on the Undercliff path. Photo: Charlotte Kirin

My sister, Charlotte, and Amanda’s friend, Marny, stayed with us this weekend, arriving on Friday night and leaving this morning, Sunday.

Beside the pleasure of a couple of drunken suppers in the company of three intelligent, amazing women, I was reminded by their visit just how lucky I am to live on the Isle of Wight. Yesterday, after a lazy breakfast, sitting in our garden until lunchtime, drinking coffee and enjoying Marny and Charlotte’s demolitions of their respective ex-husbands, we drove to the south coast of the Island and had a walk down beneath the Undercliff between St Catherine’s Point and St Lawrence.¹

The day was clear and bright, with a decent breeze: perfect walking weather. Our guests were dazzled by the beauty of the coast and we rediscovered how lucky we are to live in an area where such beauty is a short journey away. Charlotte had brought her dog, Jasper, who responded to the open space of the beach with the sort of glee only a dog off its lead can project. It was a bit of a clamber to get to the isolated beach, but it was a wonderful outing.

In the photo above, you can see the point that marks the start of Binnel Bay. We walked to just before the Point, and then, thoughts of beer and chips calling, made our way back, before climbing back up the Undercliff Path to The Buddle Inn,((http://www.buddleinn.co.uk/)) where we had a pint in their gorgeous garden.

We drove on into Ventnor for our chips, which was a stage too far for my energy levels, really, but was an experience of faded seaside glory at its most Islandy. When we got home, we ended up collapsed on our sofas, knackered, and I abandoned plans to cook supper, in favour of phoning for a takeaway from the excellent Taste of India² in East Cowes, where Amanda and I had spent a lovely evening last summer.

Jasper, knackered.
1. http://osm.org/go/er9Wdu~tR-?layers=N&m= [↩]
2. https://tasteofindiacowes.com/ [↩]
August 20, 2017

Dogs, Family, Isle of Wight
Going Off-road, On An Impulse
The weather today has been dull and mild, after a week of bright and sharply cold winter days. It has been a joy to have proper winter weather, with low sun and crisp, frost-covered grass.

Brocks Copse Road, with frost on the field

On Monday, I went out early to pick up some paperwork and got to Ryde by about nine. Usually I would have had the trailer on the bike, and have been dragging files and a laptop and a change of clothes, but I didn’t need it for this errand, and the bike felt as though it weighed nothing, freed from its usual burden. It was a good ride over, in glorious weather, cold enough to cause my hands to ache when I got into the warm of the Learning Centre. I collected my papers, did a bit of photocopying, had a cup of tea and headed home.

For some reason, I chose The Sundays for my headphones: Blind.¹ It’s a cheesey album, but it holds memories for me, and I was able to let my thoughts drift back in time as I climbed from the valley below the back of Ryde up to the top of Havenstreet: a journey of about two miles that switchbacks over two steep hills. By the time I reached Firestone Copse, I was riding smoothly and comfortably, enjoying the cycling rather than enduring the journey as I so often do when I cycle for work, when I’m struggling with the weight of the trailer or against the clock. As I passed a gate at the head of a path into the woods, I turned, almost without thought, and rode into the Copse.

Firestone Copse in winter

I don’t recall the last time I rode a bike simply for the fun of it, without being on my way somewhere, with a purpose. I think it would have been about two summers ago, when I took part in a couple of organised events. Since then, my bike has been transport. I’ve enjoyed it, often, but only incidentally.

Well, this Monday, I rode for pleasure. I was probably only in the woods for twenty minutes or half an hour at the most, but it was timeless. I followed that first path until I reached a branch, and kept turning off onto smaller and less well-defined paths, until I was riding down a leafed-over avenue that barely qualified as a track. I remembered a ride in Firestone Copse with a mate, when I had first bought a reasonably capable mountain bike, eight or nine years ago. That had been the Hardrock that I had named Millenium Falcon. It was stolen from our front yard two years ago and I still miss it. Back then, when it was a relatively new toy, Kev had shown me the tracks down to Wooton Creek, at the bottom of the Copse, where a track winds along the shore, in and out of the trees. Now, lost, but in a good way, I supposed that if I kept heading downhill, I’d reach the Creek.

The trail along the creek shore at the bottom of Firestone Copse. Monday 5th December 2016

And, soon enough, I did. Too soon, in fact. It has been a long while since I rode a winding woodland path downhill, jumping fallen branches and skipping over roots and winding around trees and stumps. I didn’t hare it down, but let the hill take me and just kicked the occasional peddle turn to get me over small rises and obstructions. But it’s not that big a wood when you’re headed downhill, and even with all the twists and turns, I had reached the Creek after about ten minutes.

The tide was out, and Wooton Creek, as the name implies, is tidal, so it was largely mudflats. I didn’t see any animals, and the only birds were a flock of gulls resting on the water way out in the creek, but the potential of life was everywhere: I could almost hear the heartbeats, scurrying and squeaks of the life hidden in the landscape. The picture above is of the trail I remember cycling with Kev: It was Summer then, but another beautiful sunny day, and the ground, instead of being covered in fallen brown leaves, shone green with the light through a full Summer canopy. I’m not sure that it is any less beautiful in mid winter, though.

I laid my bike down, got my phone out, and took some photos.

Wooton Creek at low tide

The battery on my bluetooth headphones had died on the ride, and the old, slightly tired pop music had been silenced. I had returned from my memories of another time in my life to the beautiful present; the living peace of the sounds of a wood. Far off, around the bend in this last picture, is an hotel, and beyond that, less than a kilometre away, the main Ryde to Newport Road. I strained to hear the traffic, but all sound was deadened by the blanket of peace that trees lay over the earth.

At one time, I would have smoked a cigarette here; I don’t do that any more, and though I miss it, I was glad to be able to cycle hard away from the shore and up, back through the Copse, without the aches and rattles of a smoker’s chest. Lost, I found a little bit of myself, and when I regained the road, I was travelling with pleasure, for the first time in a while, less tired than I have felt for months, and a fraction lighter of heart.
1. https://uk.7digital.com/artist/the-sundays/release/blind-1180 [↩]
December 8, 2016

Bikes, Cycling, Isle of Wight, Weariness
The Hedge Poet
Two weeks after the event, the Isle of Wight Festival is beginning to feel like a memory, blurring at the edges. It takes on the magic of distance, but at the expense of the vividness of detail. It is a process of solidification, a drying out: experience fades as a side-effect of the preservation of memories.

This Festival was particularly special for us: an unexpected treat and a freebie. We had not intended to go. Back in 2008, 2009 and 2010, the Isle of Wight Festival was a part of our courtship, but it became an expensive chore: too costly; too hectic; too like a Friday night in an alcohol-fuelled high street circa 1999.

Somewhere in that crowd are my wife and my brother-in-law

For two years, we went to the Latitude Festival with my sister and her family. When I was made redundant that became a treat we couldn’t justify, but I know that Amanda regretted missing it. We had seen some wonderful art there, and enjoyed some special experiences: she and my brother-in-law throwing themselves into the crowd when The Levellers played a mini-stadium in a wooded amphitheatre; being surprised and delighted (and relieved) when Adam Ant’s comeback was a joy, rather than the embarrassment we feared; a gig by Dexy’s that was part musical theatre, part crowd-pleaser; John Shuttleworth doing Two Margarines on the Go; Benjamin Zefaniah, amazed by the rapturous audience that filled the poetry tent for his performance.

Half the crowd had studied him for GCSE: there was so much love for him.

The moment that stood out for me, though, was at Latitude 2012, in the poetry tent again, when Mark Grist’s¹performance of A Teacher, Eh? moved us both to tears. I am really just a casual reader of poetry, and I think that was the first time in my life that a poem made me cry. Later, Amanda told me that wasn’t her favourite: she’d seen him the previous year, and was waiting for Girls Who Read.

Anyway, he made an impression. When I got home, I searched for him and found some of the rap battles that had won him a notoriety most poets can only dream of. At the time, I was working in a prison, and was surrounded by rap: I knew some of the crews and a little of the context of spoken word music in London at the time. I had a standard lesson based on how rap was distinct from poetry (a sneaky way to teach metre). I loved the way Mark Grist subverted the subversive, using poetry to undermine the pomposity of rap without dismissing its vitality and beauty – taking on the boastful cardboard masculinity; the sexist, homophobic adolescent violence, and working in a positive answer to what I kept hearing in my learners’; rhymes: the underlying despair.

In February this year, Mark played a poetry group on the Island: Reading Between The Lines, organised, hosted and made unique by the very lovely King Stammers², an Island character and poet. Outside, after the event, having scaffed a cigarette from an innocent bystander, I babbled some appreciative nonsense at Mark as he left the venue. He’d done a good gig: funny and moving, and not acted like the big star lording it over the amateur local poets, but had complemented their performances, varied as they were. I recognised the instincts of a good teacher, and a good man.

Then, early last month, this happened:

I rapidly joined Facebook and posted this:

Which earned this reply:

Our life had been complex for some time, and we were both a little blinded by the fact we suddenly had something to look forward to. I remember Amanda saying, “Something good’s happening!” and I knew exactly what she meant. She works away during the week, so the organisation was a bit three-way, but I found myself talking to this person who had, so far, been a ‘figure’ rather than an individual, and he was really easy-going. It made sense for him to stay in our spare room and for us to drive him down to his gig, and that’s how it worked out.

Thanks to his being an artist, we got an extra armband each, which was a bit of a boost. It meant we could park in a separate car park, from which we got a mini-bus down to a tented bar where beer was normal-expensive, instead of festival-expensive, and where there were sofas and carpets and loos that had wash basins. It also meant that lots of lovely, full-of-life-and-more-excited-than-puppies-when-you-get-home young people, who couldn’t believe their luck to be working at a music festival, were available to help and guide and just be incredibly nice to us. Over the weekend, that tent was our base and turned what could have been a bit of an exhausting ordeal back into a pleasure.

For all the staff’s gorgeousness and loveableness, the bookings side of the festival, for the ’boutique’ (non-headlining) acts, was a bit of a shambles. It was up to Mark to work out where he was playing and when: the staff really didn’t have a clue. I downloaded the festival app and we established where his first set was, and told the staff who, loveably, arranged a lift for us on a golf buggy. Amanda sat in the front with a loveable puppy, and Mark and I perched on the back, enjoying the broken suspension on every bump.

He was a little intimidated by the Bohemian Woods stage: It was a reasonably large amphitheatre, and there was a rock band playing to a decent sized crowd when we got there. We sat and had a few minutes behind the stage and then he went to get on stage, we went round to the front, and in that time, people turned up. Lots of people: a hundred or so people.

And this is the surprise, for someone who doesn’t often go to poetry events: poetry is very, very popular. Mark’s nerves seemed to dissipate with the first cheer to something he said, and he performed for about thirty or forty minutes to an engaged, cheerful, cheering audience. He did the story of becoming a teacher in Peterborough, of being poet laureate of Peterborough and the challenges that entailed. He told the story of defending the most excluded and disengaged students from a further, disastrous exclusion, and how they blackmailed him into doing his first rap battle. He did I’m Really Good at Board Games and he did A Teacher, Eh? He didn’t do Girls Who Read.

The way he talks about teaching is very story-oriented, and he plays it up for laughs, but the real instincts of stage craft, that draw on that teaching skill for his techniques of engagement, and also for his deep-down passion and regard for other human beings, are, I think, rooted in the fact that he taught people who did not want to be taught, and pursued the hardest part of teaching: being on your students’ side.

This was most visible after the gig, when he talked to people who approached him, some of whom he knew and some who simply knew him from YouTube. He was anxious to get to the next venue, and the loveable puppies were not hanging around Bohemian Woods, so we didn’t have anyone to ask. We knew he was due on in only a little while, but he engaged and was humorous, and, when a young man began to recite some poetry to him, he became utterly focussed, waving away my warning about time, listening studiously and responding with absolute positivity. I wasn’t able to hear the work, but I wish I had.

We had a mad dash through the festival crowd, looking for a place called The Champagne Bar, which didn’t bode well. It was an over-priced tent with a casino attached (I don’t think it was for real stakes, but don’t know) with a drinks garden outside, guarded by security men. You could only get champagne or Prosecco and you couldn’t take your own drinks in. Next door to it was a Tia Maria camper van with a DJ booth playing generic remix dance pop.

Again, no one knew anything, so we checked the guide, and he got up onto the little booth/stage inside the tent at the appointed time. This time, he didn’t do his standard spiel. Thanks to the size of the venue, he was able to reach out to the audience very quickly. A slightly suspicious crowd, with some people who had come to the venue to see him, but a lot of people who were just there because they are champagne bar sort of people, was won over by the opening lines of the first poem: he gave the audience the choice of a poem about work or a poem about a dog. No contest.

His second poem was a technical exercise, written with only one vowel. It was curiously formal for Mark; something of a departure and it felt, to me, like a portfolio piece. He also did a poem about drugs that held the crowd in embarrassed empathy: it’s called Nutmeg, and is about a middle class rite of passage we all try to edit out of our memories. The next poem he performed was a depiction of a lairy lager boy trying to pick up your friend in a club, boasting about how hard his mate, Daryl, is and side-lining and ridiculing you in his attempt to impress her, while getting more angry and more rapey as his amorous failure becomes clear. I thought it was a powerful piece of spoken theatre, and it reminded me of some of the young men I taught in the prison, utterly unable to get their heads round the idea that what they wanted might not be a moral imperative to others. Later, as we bought cigarettes, Mark said he worried about that poem; that it was “classist”, and I almost laughed, in the light of the poem he did next: The Hottest of All The Gingers. If any of his poems are likely to give offence, a poem that refers to munching on cinders, cunnilingus and strawberry blonde curls peeking from thongs is the one. Incidentally, this poem has, I think, my favourite opening of any of his works.

He finished, at the request of the young woman to whom he’d addressed Gingers, with Girls Who Read, and I got it. It’s a woman-magnet of a poem: a heart stopper for women who didn’t get out and about as teenagers; women who came into their own at university. I looked round, and men were listening happily enough, but the women in the crowd, Amanda included, had a look you see on the faces of suckling cats: a contentment that transcends earthly pleasure, and bodes very, very well for the man who can inspire it.

Amanda wanted to see Billy Idol, so we walked up to the Big Top, stopping to buy Mark some cigarettes on the way. He was recognised several times and was courteous and patient. We settled outside the tent: I would not have gone into that crowd for anything, and Mark had met some friends from the Champagne Bar who he knew from the ‘circuit’. They were charming. I acted as photographer, and my contempt for iphones was confirmed: they have a second’s delay before making a picture which makes judging a shot impossible.

Amanda joined us, and we enjoyed a small gathering for half an hour or so. At one point, a young man, clearly enjoying something other than nutmeg, approached Mark and asked him to bust some rhymes. He refused, but recited a haiku. It was a good joke, but I won’t write it up. I suspect he uses it as a fallback and I don’t want to spoil that.

Mark had been tired when he arrived on the Island. By this point, he must have been exhausted. We walked up to the car park, through a perfect English summer night, talking about his extraordinary life and his plans. Already, the festival site, its routes and neighbourhoods, felt settled into the landscape, as though they would always be there. We walked unconsciously, lost in our conversation: Amanda, as she often does, became a gentle inquisitor, encouraging Mark to talk freely about his hopes, his plans and his frustrations. At one point, he said he wanted to be a bard; a street magician, and the reference was a shared compass point. The noise of the music behind us was like another world; a strange, persistent, but meaningless activity; as undemanding as a temporary friendship, and as magical.
1. https://www.markgrist.com/ [↩]
2. https://www.facebook.com/KingStammers [↩]
June 28, 2015

Isle of Wight, Isle of Wight Festival, Mark Grist