Happy the man who dreams his purpose plots his course to achieve that very goal marches to the beat of his own drum and pity one forced to follow roads laid down by parents’ aspirations but I drifted into adulthood with no pressure and no direction and took many turns along the way slowly grew into the man I am Though I am old with wandering
Love life is the companion to work the superficial couplings of youth conducted with more vigour than sense reaching the sunny uplands mid-life settling into a career I thought would last a lifetime, a love to match but people carry pasts within them like hidden rocks in a calm ocean and accidents deflect one’s passage Through hollow lands and hilly lands
To know another is a life’s work the unity of coupledom is illusion, we travel parallel at best, learning the geography of roads built across bogs of trauma always ready to gently subside and mire a person in buried past and paths are hard to find in a slough of despond and she has lost her way I will find out where she has gone
Looking back at the path I followed there is more coherence than I thought skills grown and transferred in work and life and love too, so much surer than in youth and all the scars and breaks accreted are the medals of experience and trying not to look toward the end but focus on the roadside flowers the next generations we began And kiss her lips and take her hands…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographiesthat begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Marmite has become a word that is shorthand for “Love it or Hate it” since the strong-tasting, quintessential British contribution to spreads/food ingredients divides the room. It is yeast extract and is made from the yeast that accumulates at the bottom of beer brewing tanks and if you ever have the good fortune to smell a Marmite, collection tanker passing, you will know the truth of this! As well as eating it on toast, I like to spread it on the toast for baked beans which can be bland but is transformed by the addition of marmite…
Music
Music pervades and has always pervaded my life to such an extent that I am not aware of its centrality but from the few records that my parents possessed (including a 78 rpm record of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes), to learning the violin at school, to progressively listening to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline on a valve radio to the ease of access that Spotify and You Tube give us to much of all recorded music, I love not just the music but the musicology – the family tree and genetics of music. I gave up the violin for the guitar and the guitar for the ukulele (more of that later), I have sung in choirs from Mozart’s requiem to Dylan – I can’t imagine living without music. On the days when I go to work, I listen to the morning news radio but on the way home I listen to music…
Two musical games of my own invention that you might enjoy… 1. Music Associations Ideal on a long journey – you play word association but with the title or a line from a song and anyone can challenge a player to explain the connection and if all the other players agree that the connection is valid, the challenged gains a point but if the challenge fails then the challenger loses a point. an example of the chain might be:- Heart like a Wheel – Little Red Corvette (cars have wheels) – Little Red Rooster – Wake up in the Morning etc. Connections could be word associations but they could be deeper – composer, covered by the previous singer – the possibilities are endless…
2. Hit or a Miss(Juke Box Jury) Juke Box Jury was an early panel show on British TV in which the host, David Jacobs, played the latest pop songs to a panel of guests who were then invited to vote it – Hit or a Miss! With a group of friends, two people at a time play three random songs from a playlist of their own favourites one at a time and everybody else votes on each song as Hit or Miss and the winner is the one with the most hits. Each person may choose the starting song, but then the playlist must be set to Shuffle for the next two songs. My music choices are so eclectic, I couldn’t possibly choose favourite music but to give you a taste, here are three pieces from my largest playlist on Spotify chosen according to the rules of the game…
Sweet Dreams – Bettye Swanne Breath Again – Åsa You Do Something To Me – Sinead O’Connor
Well, with 71 hours and 9 minutes of music to choose from – those surprised me too, especially the second choice but that’s the fun of the game!
Murals
This mural was designed by the Irish designer of religious art Desmond Kyne for whom I executed several commissions – since he was in his eighties, he could never have painted this. St. Joesph’s Church, Keelogues, Ireland, had been completely refurbished and Desmond designed the mural and the altar inset which he made with a secret technique that has sadly disappeared with the late artist.
Desmond Kyne and I at the installation of an earlier project where I made the Rereredos which houses Desmond’s icon. The Rererdos is a frame that allows the icon to be taken out and paraded around the parish on religious holidays. You can see some of the same religious elements as in the mural – the descending Dove motif and the flaming Holy Spirit…
My signwriting days will have to wait till the letter “S” but following the car accident which broke my hip in 1999, I was unable to work up ladders in the way I did before and although I started teaching part-time at Sligo Institute of Technology, I also got a couple of mural commissions which I did with I did with my friend Rob Forrester. They were possible to do using lifting platforms or cherry-pickers, obviating ladders. In fact one of the first important jobs I did after moving to Ireland was a mural for a bookshop called The Winding Stair after a poem by the Sligo poet, WB Yeats. The owner already had a successful shop of the same name on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin and had been waiting for some years to get suitable premises in Sligo. Kevin gave me considerable licence in designing the mural, and it served as a great advertisement for me which everybody knew. Here you can see a news item on RTE – the Irish TV, which features a much younger me painting the mural…
Memories – A Poetic Interlude
House with No Plan
The plan of my mind palace does not exist I haven’t tried to master my memories in that way but instead I wander through the corridors opening doors not quite at random and relying on my innate sense of direction to find my way back out of the labyrinth.
So sometimes I arrive in pleasant pieces of the past and sometimes in rooms I would rather not visit their contents not yet come to terms with or understood in the scheme of things
Nobody else can follow me here so I needn’t draw the map out with notes in the margin “Here be monsters!” only I need to know the rooms best avoided or put on the long finger to explore yet sometimes my mental map lets me down and I find myself lost and shivering, stuck in the darker places searching for meaning
