Author Archives: sunshriek

Little one with half my name

When you were born,
perhaps gripped in your tiny hands,
or tucked in the folds of your knees,
you brought the spring.
Maybe you breathed such warmth
with that first shout,
the earth relaxed its hardened shell
to let new life break through?
Or with a stretch,
your perfect limbs conducted
orchestras of augur birds
to chase away the cold.
For when you yawned, I saw
attending clouds change mood
and pillow-fill the sky for you.
And with a sigh from unspoiled lungs
the winds around fell silent, hushed.
And many winters melted from our hearts,
when you were born.

February 2010

George, don’t do that.

I’m working on a poem for my new poetry group, an intimidating bunch that meet in the National Theatre’s Olivier bar on a Friday night. This week, we’re looking at humour in poetry – Dorothy Parker and Michael Donaghy, so I thought I’d work on my own little piece. As it turns out, I’ve been much inspired by a couple of other teacher-poets. Notably, Joyce Grenfell (pictured) whose recording ‘George, don’t do that’ is one my Dad bought for my mother when she qualified as a primary school teacher in the nineties. I used to love listening to the cassette while I dried up the dinner plates.
Also, the first poem I learned off by heart:
“Please, Mrs Butler
This boy, Derek Drew,
keeps copying my work, Miss
What shall I do?…” (Allan Ahlberg)
It’s a fantastic book of poems, all about life in primary school which, I’m told, are as true now as they were when we were young.
Which is a far cry from the person in my poetry group who claims his son can recite the entire of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “When the Hounds of Spring” and is only 8.

But he doesn’t go to a Comp.

(For those of you desperate to hear my attempt at teacher humour in a poem, I’ll try and get it up… if it’s ever finished.)

The annual birthday picnic

I have a quite amazing friend, who I haven’t yet managed to fix a blog-name to. She is so much more than her job, so she shouldn’t simply be known that way, and all the other words I can think of to describe her don’t seem to really capture the essence of who she is. She’ll be the perfect wife (if the Journalist ever pulls his finger out and proposes), she’s a grammar school girl, a socialist, an activist, a chef. Superwoman? For the purposes of this post, we’ll call her Birthday girl, though already that isn’t true.

Every year, Birthday Girl invites her many friends to a picnic in the park. She takes the day off work on Friday and spends nearly 24 hours cooking up quiches and biscuits, salads and cake. The Journalist hangs in the background, salivating at the smell; a puppy dog looking for scraps. But Birthday Girl makes him wait like everyone else, smacking his hand with a wooden spoon and sending him out for more chickpeas.
And when we all arrive at the park, hungover – or tired from a morning’s football game – Birthday Girl feeds us with the kinds of food only someone else’s mother would make. Baked with love and seasoned with vintage charm.

Chorus Snoring

A wedding in Exeter bought us to Devon, where we camped for five nights in our mansion tent. I never thought I’d enjoy camping. Not because I’m a girly girl – I’m not – but because I find it really miserable to be cold, or not to have had enough sleep. This week, however, was bliss. To wake up in the morning, looking out over the sea, surrounded by green hills. At night, the only sound a chorus of snoring from canvas homes.

Camping; living in such close proximity to other people, is great writing fuel. Real life is stranger than fiction, they say. More than anything, I was struck by the hundreds of parents in the world who have no idea how lucky they are, and no idea how to play with their kids. It was frustrating, listening to the toddler behind us have to call out for his Mummy or Daddy several times before they’d stop what they were doing (reading the Torygraph, talking about the stock market, measuring the size of their BMW) before they’d acknowledge him. I was tempted, not for the first time, to kidnap the poor boy and take him back to my empty nursery. Where he’d never have to ask more than once for anything.

We were back from the (fantastic) wedding in time to sit out in our sleeping bags, a little merry, and watch the sky – a carpet of stars – light up with the Perseid meteor showers: a yearly occurrence, and one I hope not to miss again. There was something so very humbling about staring up at a vast, unending, sky so full of light. We felt small, unimportant, in awe.

Spooning with Rosie

 

My friends are self-confessed foodies, who’s favourite past-time is to try to outdo one another with incredible dishes made from the very best free-range, organic, non-GM, home-grown ingredients. The fact that I have destroyed my tastebuds with years of Cutters Choice, or that I can only really manage to throw together a chilli con carne, doesn’t seem to put them off including me in the invites, so I get all the benefits of their expertise, without having to spend anytime learning anything. I think that might be what real friends are for.
On Thursday night, we went along to Rosie’s, in Brixton Market, for an evening where Rosie books out all the tables, and feeds her customers whatever it is that she has decided to cook. We sit at church hall tables, on chairs that don’t match. The table cloth (eventually coloured by our BYO bottle of Merlot) is white and doily-like. The plates and bowls look happy together, but aren’t from the same parentage. It is a comfortable, friendly experience. Rosie greets us – a small, blonde bundle of cool – before heading to the kitchen to prepare. When we finish our main course, she asks if we’d like seconds, and brings the boys another plate of chicken, couscous and beans. The food is homely and warming. The wine we’ve brought goes down a little too easily for a school night. The company is near perfect, and I am happy.

Berlin: arm aber sexy

“I still keep a suitcase in Berlin” – Marlene Dietrich

In August, we travelled to Berlin to celebrate the Journalist’s 30th birthday. Berlin. Before going, so many people told me I’d love it, that I started to worry it couldn’t possibly live up to the expectations I had. I did. And so much more. The people in Berlin are just so cool. The graffiti, the run-down buildings, the shops all ooze the kind of couldn’t-care-less that London just doesn’t manage to achieve for all its trying. And it isn’t pretentious. It’s friendly, welcoming; it allows you to feel cool, too.
We didn’t spend a lot of time seeing the sights, instead using our time to drink and eat in the company of friends, and wander the streets taking photos and pointing out those things that people who live there probably no longer see. We did, however, go along to the Jewish Museum, the architecture of which far outweighs the information you might find in there. A beautiful -awesome – building. The Garden of Exile is one which no one should miss. A spiritual experience. I wanted to sit in there for hours and write and write and write.

We rented bikes to cycle round the city. Ten of us, in a row; cars giving way, pedestrians patiently tolerating our hooligan ways. Adults should cycle with their friends more often, I was reminded of my teenage days – the freedom, the silliness, the wind in your hair as your friends do wheelies up front, hold each other’s hands as they cycle; go off road down grassy slopes near crashing into one another.

Simple fun. Life should be more full of it.

My Beautiful Friends… or Why turning 31 isn’t so bad

I’m not always a great friend. I spent a lot of time inside my own head; my demons are loud and easily persuade me that everyone in my life merely tolerates me, and that no one actually enjoys my company. “Quite right!”, I think “I don’t like me much either”. Which is why, when the people I secretly love (but can never tell, in case they reject me), do something kind, something thoughtful, I can’t easily find the words to thank them appropriately.
This birthday, a year I was hoping would pass by unmarked as I hurtle towards my mid-thirties, my Beautiful Friends clubbed together to buy me the vintage typewriter in the photo. Not being able to carry it all the way to Berlin, where we happened to be, they gifted me my present in the form of riddles. “What has many letters, that can’t be sent?”, “What has a ribbon, that is not wrapped around it?”, “What has hammers, but no nails?”, “What has keys, but no door?”.
I’m still unable to put into words just how touched I was by the present, and by the method in which they gave it to me. What a joy to have friends who know me so well, who are so free with their affections, so open with their love. I feel very blessed. I vow to try harder.

Latitude 2010

The poetry tent, the woods, the poetry tent, the hotdog stand, the poetry tent, the poetry tent, the poetry tent.

I’d never been to a festival before. I’ve actively avoided that big festival, the one that seems increasingly red-taped and mainstream. In Latitude, I found a home. As one of my friends said “You’re surrounded by your people”. Sandal-wearing, floatily dressed, dreadlocked, Guardian readers… with little hippy children.

I ate pine cones in the woods, with ferns in my hair. I danced alone in a crowd; talked religion while listening to Swedish girls sing Leonard Cohen; shopped for rainbow socks with the Lawyer; wore flowers in my hair; high-fived teenagers by the fire; got lost and then found; heard some beautiful music and fell in love with a poet.

Why, why, was I not doing this before I turned 30??

Liane Strauss at the Poetry School

For my thirtieth birthday, my lovely husband bought me a ten week poetry course at the fabulous London Poetry School. Expecting a course where I would read other people’s poetry and learn about the great art through them, I was more than a little freaked out to find that I was expected to bring my own work to be read and critiqued. Eek!

It turned out to be a fantastic experience all round, with my first two attempts getting some very positive feedback, with comments like “You *have* to get that published!”. I respected the people in the group, who were not only great budding writers, but also incredible characters – all worthy of a novel written in their honour! Liane was a great teacher and a really inspirational person. But, of course, the inner monologue kicked in and, before the end of the course, having received no real criticism at all, I started to believe that the reason no one was telling me where my poems where going wrong was because they were just so, so awful that they were humouring me, the youngest in the group. So it was a real relief to take a poem in to the final session, a poem I felt wasn’t complete, wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be, and have people give me some really constructive criticism. The bigger relief, I think, was that it didn’t kill me, didn’t cause me to jack in this writing lark for good, didn’t leave me sobbing in a heap… In fact, I felt more empowered and positive about my writing than I ever have.

The photo above is a poem in the act of being drafted and redrafted. I’m going to hold off on reproducing it in its finished form, until I hear back from the publishers. (Not really, but I can dream).

Teenage Consumption

I thought I’d dig out some of my old notebooks and transfer the scribblings and attempts at poetry onto my lovely new machine. So, the wicker chest my parents gave me for my 21st, which has since been carted from every terrible rented flat and house, is opened, and immediately the smell of damp, rotting paper suggests I can’t do the transferring soon enough. I can’t bear to throw them all away, but the myriad notebooks and diaries (all of them incomplete) are beginning to lose their magic and become dishevelled, yellowed, decaying.
At some point, as a teenager, I decided to record all my poetry in one little notebook, a pretty little tome, covered in chinese silk. It is here that all the beliefs I might be holding (that my best writing years are behind me) are destroyed. If it weren’t bad enough that the majority of my work is bemoaning the loss of affections from a boy whose name I can barely remember [that’s a lie, he’s a friend of mine on facebook], the rest has clearly been written with a significant amount of help from a thesaurus. The callous sand? The lavish wind? The brooding sea, that suckles like a baby at your breast?
It was about this time (Spring 1995) that, along with a long unrequited crush on aforementioned boy, I was reading a great deal of Thomas Hardy. The Brontes, also, figured high on my reading list. And that must be where this twee little thing came from:

The Murderer to Her Childhood Love
I love you. You love me,
but we can never love each other.
Yet I know the pain you feel,
when you see me with another,
because i have felt it too.

But do not fret my darling, do not cry
for we will be together when we die. (April 1995)

Others, some written during my holiday in Italy (holidaying with friends in Italy as a teenage girl – and what do i write? Utter drivel) are even more cringe-worthy. And yet. Did I not decide here, to just write and not judge? To not edit, reread, delete? So. A new angle:
Teenage me was a real cutie. I want to reach back in time and give her a gigantic hug and tell her to pull herself together and love herself more. Which is the advice I’d give any of my students today.