An Unreal book of Real poems

For S76

This book - Staying Alive - almost fell off the the top shelf off the poetry section as I walked passed it. From the enigmatic picture on the front to every syllable of every poem within it, you are drawn to have to own it. Usually I take ages looking for a book and now I don't buy as many as I used to, it is normally even longer but this took seconds to decide on. It is by my side and burning to be read further. This coincides with a visit to the very church illustrated in the previous entry. I was travelling home and in order not to arrive too early, I stopped off at Hanley Castle to have a quick look at my old school. It being half-term, I didn't want to go wandering around the buildings themselves so I walked around the church instead. It was a very murky and damp Autumn afternoon but something drew me to the path which we used to follow for one of two reasons. Either we had been sent off on a Cross-Country Run through the murk for no purpose other than to appeal to the sadistic sense of humour of the PE master or we were supposed to be counting flowers and insects in the water meadow at the bottom of the hill which sloped away from the Church (To the right in the picture below)



(From The Worcestershire & Districts Change Ringing Association)

I have written a poem about this but it is not available to me at the moment. So the old phrase - I will post it when I can - comes into force. The weather during these excursions to document the various life in the water meadow, was always good. Well it would have to be quite dry otherwise we would have been washed away by the stream in flood. I don't know how this seemingly pointless exercise came to be such a strong memory. Maybe it is because it was so quiet. I was obviously very lucky to be so close to such a beautiful place. I would assume that most schools could not boast a real outdoor laboratory.

I wrote this last year :-

The whole world is white in my eyes; a complex detonation of particles, Charmed and Strange, disintegrating and covering everything around in bright alien colour. In this, the calmest place at the calmest time of year, the sun has been lost in this love forever, forced to cower in this brightness. The trees still shake in the warm breezes that come over the hill from the Churchyard and the stream we crossed to reach the field still flows gently under the ancient wooden bridge.

We are here to count flowers and insects. Our teacher has given us all wooden squares to throw onto the meadow grass and now we have to detail how many different species we can find within it. But I cannot count. The algebra we spun through our minds to paper only minutes before has deserted me and I can count ‘one, two and many’. Usually I can think in five dimensions and now I can’t even count. And I don’t know why.

I think it was a vision of a visit to the field but in the Summer. I don't really remember the non-descript (No-Weather) days, just the very cold and very hot days. Our lives are defined by the extremes, the hot and cold, the happy and sad but not by the normal, boring middle ground, the treading water days. I remember the nervousness of the exams, the euphoria of the last days of a Summer term or the extra-ordinary days of visits or of trekking through the Country. One winter day when we were duue for a mock Chemistry exam, I cycled to school through an blizzard which got worse and worse. I managed to get there to find that none of the busses had arrived and that the whole school was closed. I was unable to cycle home and was faced with waiting the whole day until my Father could come and pick me and my bike up. Those of us who had made it spent the day wandering from house to house calling on people we knew and being given cups of Hot-Chocolate and Marshmallows. It was grey and dark but with the snow all around quite breath-takingly special. I returned to the village and was given lunch at the Three Kings Pub which is just behind the photographer and to the right in the picture of the Church. I still owe them for the lunch. Eventually I managed to get to a friend's house in Upton-Upon-Severn where my Dad picked me up.

I don't remember in any detail the days of crushing boredom when I arrived at 7:30 and had to wait for an hour before anyone else turned up.