Pink

Removed as a courtesy to The Interpreter's House who have published this poem in Issue 49 February 2012 (on page 42) - please see http://www.interpretershouse.org.uk/

Candlestick Press have requested "Pink" for their short book of verse to read at funerals, due out June 2012.

You live on, little one.

Missing

I missed you by a quarter of an hour.
I should have hurried through my morning shower,
missed eating breakfast in the sleepy sun
or read no emails, or replied to none;
denied the summery procrastination
of that prettier route to my destination.

I miss you from the house when I arrive –
everything silent that was once alive.
The nurses meet me at the stair. Their kind,
practised updating powerblasts my mind.

I miss you from that waxy, sleeplike face.
Your thin hands curl without their living grace –
no mischief – tickling doctors, climbing trees
or treating dollies for your own disease.
It's you with self subtracted. And I wail
till my throat hurts me like a swallowed nail.

I'll miss your heart, the things forever not –
the family, the life you’d yet to plot,
the cure you’ll never find – the future star
that cannot now outshine the one you are.



Requiescat Naomi
31 August 2005 – 15 July 2011

Review: "English Slacker," by Chris Morton

I first read this book in draft on the Great Writing forum. It was something out of the ordinary run of amateur writing, and although at first I found it a difficult read, every time I saw a new chapter posted, I had to go and read it. And for a woman of my age to read the first-person narrative of an 18 year old youth, and then go on reading it, it must have something. I'm just not sure what.

Chambers, the narrator, has just finished college in his home town of Bracksea. The tale wanders apparently aimlessly, somewhat like Chambers' own life, through events both past and present over the ensuing summer. Although cannabis, tobacco and alcohol feature very largely in the story, Chambers is an oddly endearing lad, without much ambition or devilment in his makeup. It's laid-back and chatty and colloquial, and it's also very small-town England. There's only routine swearing, no rampant sex and almost no violence. There isn't even, apparently, much of a story. And yet...

This is really an exploration of the as-yet-undefined brain of adolescence still going along with a me-and-my-mates approach to life. Chambers, recalling his formerly joined-at-the hip friend Colin, puzzles over what is reality and what isn't - especially when his reality is constantly distorted by artificial "enhancers."

I won't spoil "English Slacker" for you by revealing what the crisis turns out to be... or how it does turn out to have a narrative after all.
ENGLISH SLACKER is written by Chris Morton, and published in softback by Punked Books. 188 pp, UK £7.99, US $15.99. ISBN 978-095331728-8

Acting by Numbers!

Aargh. The scream. The Who. The cast list.

Yes, it's the Channel 5 Saturday night CSI stuff from Miami. Computers that work all the time, every time, at huge speed. Actors whose facial expressions indicate nothing more than boredom throughout. After years of watching (at least that's what it feels like) alongside my husband, I only know one or two of the characters' names. I wonder why.

The CSI series gets more and more formulaic. The boss. The geeky one. The slightly wacky (or seriously creepy) medical examiner. The square-jawed leading male. The forensic ladies who turn up for work in designer jackets and can run in high heels as fast as their male counterparts.

And then there's The Sunglasses of Justice, also known as He Who Walks On Water. On the command ONE, turn the body sideways to camera. On the command TWO, swing the head portentously to look at camera. On the command THREE, put on the sunglasses. On the command FOUR, pronounce the one-liner to start the show:

"SHOULDA GONE TO SPECSAVERS."

Ga ga

So the telephone-head is coming to Carlisle. And Foo Fighters too. The BBC's Big Weekend has booked them for a musical thrash in May.

Big deal. Neither of them appear to know where Carlisle is. No surprises there though: a session musician once told me that the rock'n'roll life is not really a passport to world travel but to endless airport lounges. As the BBC have actually hired Carlisle airfield to accommodate the 5000 cars that are expected, the GG and the FF will probably leave none the wiser.

I gained this insight into the world of pop while doing some work for a client on site, in a warehouse with radio background. They've run through Radio 2 and Radio Cumbria and this week it was Radio 1. A curious choice really as there didn't appear to be any appreciation of the output. There was no singing along or shouting abuse at phone ins as there was with Radio 2 or Cumbria. I suspect they were just accepting the background noise of whatever somebody else tuned in the time before.

I hadn't heard Fearne Cotton at work before. The skill of gently drawing out guests, a la Parkinson, seems to elude her. Her "interview" with the Foo Fighters this morning consisted mainly of her talking over, down or through them with closed questions that only elicited Yes or No answers, and bragging that she had been the very first DJ to play their new single. For God's sake woman, shut up already!

Oh well, next week I shall only have to deliver a few copies of a web-based CD catalogue to the warehouse, so I won't have to spend any time with the radio. And with luck, when the Big Weekend occurs, I shall be washing my hair and quite unable to attend.

Pony Books rule!

I was looking for something else (as I usually am) when I ran across Jane Badger's book web site here: http://www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk/ It's full of reviews of all the books you read as a kid and you wish your mother hadn't thrown away. I am delighted to find that one of mine features there - Against the Odds - with a well-written review. It even provides a glossary of all the Welsh phrases I sweated over with my Teach Yourself book.

Jane Badger's page observes: "The book itself is an excellent read: Sue Millard has alas written no more pony books ... She writes a very good blog."

My thanks for the blogging praise. My problem, reflected by the phrase "no more pony books," is that although I have in fact got 3 horsey fictions tucked away waiting for homes (agents? publishers?), I can't find anyone with the balls that J A Allen had, when they tried to revive the genre in the 1990s. When they were taken over, the junior "pony book" fiction was one of the first bits of their stable to be discarded.

Is there a prejudice against horsey backgrounds? There are times when I wonder how many gritty, single-parent inner-city stories our kids can actually take. Or swoony pre-chick lit, or kid-wizard-saves-the-world epics. "Pony books" are not necessarily about posh kids, however privileged the backgrounds of some of the mid-20th C novels may have been. It isn't even about haves vs. have-nots, or rural vs. urban. It's about valuing and caring for other living beings, even if they don't happen to be human.

Anything to do with horses and ponies demands a down to earth attitude to shovelling shit, a robust sense of humour and an awareness of the need to make choices. Do I buy a new electronic device, or a load of hay? Do I go to that party, or sit up with the foaling mare? Even, do I sell the pony because I can't afford to keep her properly? Responsibility, hard work, dedication, thinking about another living being rather than about oneself ...

Perhaps we could achieve a little more light and shade in junior fiction by reviving the "pony book" genre.

Horse Sense

I am getting bored with Natural Horsemanship, Thinking Riding, Horse Whispering and all the other commercial titles that are being sold to us to manage horses in the 21st century.

Look at it this way.

Horses are large, herbivorous quadrupeds who like to live in herds, and are domesticated by man.
Cows are also large, herbiviorous quadrupeds, ditto ditto.

Do we see gurus setting up seven-step programmes selling tips for Cow Whispering? Hm? Why not? The difference, as I see it, lies in the human perception of the two species. In the English-speaking world, we do not eat horse meat. We ennoble the horse. We publish anthropomorphic stories – books, films, cartoons – in which horses can not only talk, but detail their biographies and contribute to human business. Nobody makes films titled Black Mooey; National Big-Ears; Cowbiscuit, or My Mate Muckytail; or advertises tuition in Natural Cowmanship or Thinking Milking … We ignore the fact that horses, like cows, don’t work the way humans do.

The difficulty for horses is that the “me-and-my-horse” approach draws people into the equine relationship who may not have had any experience of handling large, herbivorous animals. We keep them and handle them to a very large extent as pets, rather than as working animals. We also try to do things with horses which will reflect upon ourselves and our abilities. Horses are thus an extension of the human personality, a delusion which I doubt they share.

When horses don’t respond to human behaviour in the way we, their owners, expect, we seek ways to solve the “problem” by changing the bitting, saddlery, shoeing, or feeding, by sending the horse to a trainer, or by adopting a fashionable training technique. Only very occasionally do we think of changing our own attitude! A well known bitmaker once said something like, “Of twenty bits I make, nineteen are for men’s heads and one for the horse’s.” I think this could well be said of all the alternatives to traditional horse management that are being sold to the horse-owning public.

Now before you rush to your keyboard and cry, “But you can’t want me to treat my horse the way they treat cows! Darling Dobbin is too precious to be killed and eaten!” let’s not be extreme. Just because I am cynical about New Horsemanship doesn't mean I am in favour of sending ANY animal thousands of miles, alive, in a crowded wagon without water, feed or rest. I’m all for improving the lot of the third-world horse. I’m not advocating or condoning cruelty, or decrying kindness. I do, however, think that for many “pet” horses the application of a little experience, common sense and observation would often be kinder and cheaper than So-and-So’s latest salesmanship.

Even the best new methods will not turn a horse into a dog or a cat or a substitute human.