Shipshaped

 I mentioned in March that I was compiling a book of uniformly square photographs of Southampton. In the end I made two slightly different versions: one in the "magazine" format, cheap enough to post out on spec to local galleries, and another, more expensive, as a conventional paperback book. Here it is, in the "book" version, which includes a final family history page not present in the magazine (click the central circular device for a full screen view):

I've given it the title "Shipshaped". Non-native speakers may not have come across the expression "shipshape" before, which means "neat, tidy, with everything in its proper place", as on a well-ordered ship. In this case, however, I've adapted it to reflect the way this city has been formed (or can be seen to have been formed) by its maritime aspect, whether directly, indirectly, or in imaginary ways.

As always, it is now available to buy on my Blurb bookstore here, either as the magazine or as a super-cheap PDF. Don't all rush at once... 😀

Shakespeare's Birthday

 

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend;
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set
And you in Grecian tires are painted new;
Speak of the spring and foison of the year:
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear,
And you in every blessed shape we know.
    In all external grace you have some part,
    But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

Sonnet 53

Note: "tires" means "clothing", as in "attire", and not the sort of tyre / tire that goes on a wheel, amusing as that might be, and "foison" means "an abundant harvest". "Every blessed shape" is hard  to read without a smile, too, for fans of minced oaths. Settle down at the back! And, yes, that final couplet is deeply ambiguous, open to multiple readings... Is "like" a preposition or a verb, for example? Are "you" a "constant heart", or not? Ah, you're such a big tease, Will!

The Sun Rising

My memory is pretty good – unusually good, in fact, by most standards, although not freakish or photographic – although I realise that this is not necessarily a Good Thing: forgetting can be a form of healing, after all. Like anyone else, though, I do forget plenty of things, too, although there are clearly degrees and levels of forgetting, ranging from "Nope, sorry, don't remember that at all" to "Wow, yes, how could I ever have forgotten!". For example, I had sort-of forgotten about my close encounter with John Donne, whose "metaphysical" poetry I had been introduced to and studied during the intensive extra term of cramming at school that led up to the Oxford entrance examinations in late 1972. But a recent mention of his poem "The Sun Rising" in the comments on another blog brought it all flooding back with an intensity that took me by surprise. Wow, yes...

That poem, published in 1633, plays with the conventions of a genre known as the aubade, poems in which, typically, the arrival of dawn means it is time for a couple in bed to part, presumably because they can't risk being found together, and not because one of them has an early train to catch. To a romantically-inclined eighteen-year-old boy like me, yet to share a bed with anyone, it was an intoxicating preview of what, with any luck, lay ahead in my not too distant future.

It occurs to me now that I had been primed to appreciate this poem in particular by the song "Wond'ring Aloud" on Jethro Tull's 1971 release Aqualung, an album on which I knew every note, word, and inflection of every track with the intimacy that you only ever really acquire with the favourite recordings of your adolescence, played time after time in your bedroom. I knew little about poetry then, but it felt as if I already knew everything about rock and pop. Even now, hearing that song for the first time in decades (and in particular the line "Wond'ring aloud, will the years treat us well?") gives me an emotional jolt that hot-wires seventy-year-old me directly to seventeen-year-old me, and awakens all sorts of long-dormant memories, feelings, and faces.

So here is Donne's poem, in the original spelling as I first encountered it in Herbert Grierson's classic anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: 

                    The Sunne Rising

         Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
         Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
         Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,
     Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
     Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.
 
         Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
         Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
         If her eyes have not blinded thine,
         Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
     Whether both the Indias of spice and Myne
     Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.
 
         She is all States, and all Princes, I,
         Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,
All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie,
         Thou sunne art halfe as happy as wee,
         In that the world's contracted thus;
     Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
     To warme the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

"The rags of time"... "Nothing else is..." Wonderful. But I also remember waking early one summer morning, actually but awkwardly sharing a very narrow single bed, and declaiming some Donne – quite likely this very poem – only to be told in no uncertain terms about the appalling one-sided sexism of male so-called "love" poetry. Huh? This was something neither Donne, Tull's Ian Anderson, or even Joni Mitchell had prepared me for. I don't think the expression "male gaze" was current then, but this was definitely a case of "Welcome to the other half of the world; I'm no state, and you're not my prince, poetry boy!" Hmm, point taken; think I'll go and make some tea...

As it happens, that woman was the woman I can hear talking on the phone upstairs just now. I'm pretty sure she won't remember that morning forty (fifty!) years ago, but I do, and I acknowledge it as one of those important moments when your complacent view of the world is turned upside down and given a good shake. I had a lot of complacent views in those days, some of which were rather worse than merely complacent and which I remember only too well. Although, mercifully, however much our own cringeworthy moments may haunt and torment the memory, it seems we rarely recall those of others. "Nope, sorry, don't remember that at all..."

So I'm pleased to report that the years have treated us reasonably well, and if nothing else I have learned that some people are not in the mood for poetry first thing in the morning when that busy old fool, the unruly sun comes streaming in through windows and through curtains to call on us, yet again. There are no metaphysical kings congregated in this bed. And I'm still making the tea every morning...

Easter 2024

As advertised, we spent Easter in mid-Wales, a habit we broke last year for only the second time in something like forty years. I can't even remember why, now. Perhaps someone else had booked our usual rental, and we couldn't be bothered to look for another? Perhaps we just felt like a change? Whatever, life in the Marches went on without us. While we were away several pubs, shops, and restaurants changed hands or went out of business, yet more farmers seemed to abandon the idea of raising sheep, and someone had taken the trouble to put up some 4G masts, with the result that, miraculously, we were able to ignore our phones because we wanted to, and not because they were unable to detect even a hint of a signal. I suppose that last, at least, counts as an improvement.

I decided to try something a little different with the photography this year. Apart from the fact that my partner's walking capacity has been curtailed by a mild but prolonged case of "long Covid", after a bit (whatever fraction of forty years constitutes "a bit") you do start to repeat yourself. We did manage to get out when the weather allowed, and I experimented with long-lens shots (mainly using the crazy zoom built into the Panasonic TZ70), as well as with a 60mm supplementary lens for the iPhone. Naturally, this led to a higher number of "misses" than usual – never has the old adage that "you can't beat physics" seemed more appropriate – but also some interesting "hits". I will probably have some things to say about this in a future post.

Despite the fact we've been using the same cottage for quite a few years now, I had never explored a nearby church which is, like a lot of ancient places of worship in "Celtic" Britain, situated on top of a mound with a churchyard full of very old yew trees. I've probably mentioned this before (and, let's be honest, after sixteen years of blogging there is very little that I haven't mentioned before, and probably more than once) but the prominent, treeless mass of upland known as the Radnor Forest is alleged to contain within it the last dragon in Wales, sleeping away the centuries. Surrounding the Forest in an apotropaic ring are four churches dedicated to that Satan-stomping archangel Michael: Llanfihangel Cefnllys, Llanfihangel Nant Melan, Llanfihangel Cascob, and the one near our cottage, Llanfihangel Rhydithon. [1]

The legend states that the dragon will awake if any of the four churches were to be destroyed. Now that's what I call an insurance policy (or is it extortion with menaces?). Like so many parish churches, though, the original structure at Llanfihangel Rhydithon seems to have been replaced or at least extensively remodelled in the 19th century; I wonder if the dragon might have stirred in its sleep for a moment then? As the door was locked when I visited I couldn't check out the interior, so I picked my way carefully around the jam-packed churchyard, which is still in use, and where there are some lovely 18th century tombstones with "vernacular" carving and lettering (all in English, none that I could see in Welsh).

Easter in Wales is all about the unpredictable weather, of course. In the past we've had snow, dramatic inversion fogs, and blazing sunshine – sometimes all in the same week – but this year we had the classic British springtime "sunshine and showers", although some of the showers were rather heavier and longer-lasting than any "shower" is supposed to be, and the sunshine rather fleeting. Oh, and there were strong, gusty winds, which (partly) accounts for the softness of some of these photographs.

Something our Bristol flat and this mid-Wales cottage have in common is elevation: the flat is on the fourth floor of a block perched on the edge of the Avon Gorge, and the "cottage" (actually a barn conversion) is tucked into the NW shoulder of the Radnor Forest. At both locations this means that you can see the next wave of weather coming in from a distance just by leaning out of a window: it's one of the reasons I have come to like using a long lens in this landscape. What? Oh, relax, you hair-shirted landscape puritans... I'm not aware of any law that says you can't do landscape photography in your pyjamas...

1. Llanfihangel in Welsh is the equivalent of "St. Michael" (but, no, Marks & Spencer did not label their own-brand apotropaic underwear "Llanfihangel" in Wales). Quite why an angel gets to be a saint, too, is an interesting question, but we of Baptist heritage do not trouble ourselves with such stuff. It is curious, though, that a high-street retailer could use that name as a brand on their very mundane (but very reliable and comfortable) lines of clothing without protest from the saint-importuning community. Maybe M & S socks and knickers were given a free pass in an encyclical? (De Subuculis Soccisque, perhaps?).

Post 2K

We are now back from our traditional week in mid-Wales, with its usual mixed bag of weather. I'll be posting something about that soon, for sure, plus some photographs. But first...

I sometimes refer to mid-Wales as the Land the Internet Forgot. Which is not entirely fair: the fact that our favoured cottage rental has no WiFi might have something to do with that impression, after all. But the complete absence of any sort of phone signal had always been a challenge or a blessed relief, depending on the nature of your needs and your susceptibility to the pester-power of email. So it was a surprise, to say the least, to find that this year a one-bar 4G signal was frequently available indoors, occasionally swelling into an intoxicating second bar. So on 3rd April I was tempted to take a quick peek at my blog stats, and I noticed a figure that immediately made me take a screen shot.

Check it out: can you see it? No, not those sixteen disciples followers: I have no idea how they got in, as I thought I'd shut that door quite firmly (I am, after all, just a very naughty boy). And, no, not those viewing figures, either, which are surprisingly high, but almost certainly in large part the record of visits by various robots and fleeting drive-bys from people looking for camera porn. No, it was that number, near the top! That's right, you've got it: 1999 posts.

Which means that THIS is post number TWO THOUSAND.

As an instinctive contrarian, I thought it would be a suitably low-key – not to say meta – use for this anniversary post simply to mention the fact that it is an anniversary post, and leave it at that. What, you expected there would be cake? Fireworks? A specially-commissioned piece from a prominent contemporary composer? If so, I suspect you haven't been coming here for very long, have you? Or, as people like to say these days, have you met me?

TBH, this satisfyingly round number should really have been racked up a few years ago. When I started blogging in 2008 I was aiming to post something nearly every day. I kept that up for a while, but subsequently my efforts seemed to stabilise at around a dozen posts most months, with a break during the summer. Then, latterly, I started to slow the pace to about 1.5 posts every week. This was partly due to declining energy on my part (and a sense that I had started to repeat myself), but also because some regular readers were complaining that they couldn't keep up and were letting posts go by unread. Noooo! But, point taken. After all, even the likes of Marina Hyde only publishes a couple of times a week.

Anyway, there it is. Two thousand posts. Who'd have thought it? No wonder I'm feeling tired. Just think, though, if I'd put  all that effort into writing fiction I'd have completed ten utterly unpublishable novels by now... But I'm pretty sure even most published novelists don't chalk up 7593 comments, or 20,000+ reads in a single month, however illusory most of those reads might be. I'll take that. And I should offer my sincere thanks to those of you who have been stopping by to read my ramblings over the years, despite my efforts to discourage "followers" (how did they get in here?). Here's to the next thousand! (Really? You do realise you're seventy now? Ed.)