Lockdown's creative surge continues

The lockdown brings with it plenty of difficulties, but there can also be opportunities – not least to think about things. 

I’ve already explained briefly here that for me, it has produced an entirely unexpected creative burst, as I have found myself writing poetry for the first time in decades.

In the last couple of days, remembering old family photographs uncovered when clearing my parents’ home two years ago this summer, I found that a couple of the pictures made me want to talk about them.

Or to put another way, I felt that I wanted to write about some of them, to build a picture in a different way. The photographs themselves will be included, because this is – hopefully – one thing complimenting another.

Before

Snow-dumped fells blur

Into snow-filled skies;

Drifts arc up from the road

Like a pitted bobsleigh track.

She stands in the middle distance,

To the bottom left.

Perspective,

deceptive,

has a black hedge tower over her,

Drawing the eye

and accidentally lending the shot

                        good composition.

The slide was colour but

Winter and time have leached that.

Blow it up and there is no trace

of a smile

in the smudge of a face.

Booted, with feet turned out

(Later, she’d say not to stand that way).

Stockings beneath a dress or skirt,

She relies for warmth on a big coat,

collar up

And hands hidden in gloves or overlong sleeves.  

Her hair is tucked away, queen-like, beneath a scarf.

Further off, two men in caps

            clear the road.

It was December ’62 and

The snow that had snowed

            would be followed by plenty more;

And, just a few days later,

            By me.

23 May 2020

The Duchess

Unexpectedly for me at least, the lockdown has produced a surge of creativity that I did not expect.

For the first time since my early twenties, when the results were predictably embarrassing (little experience of the world combined with a restricted worldview, given the restrictions of my home life), I have been writing poetry.

For the moment, I’m grouping what I write under a general banner of Lockdown Lines.

They are not all about the lockdown, but they have all been written while I am in lockdown.

I have posted a few already. This is one of those that is not about the coronavirus, but is about a lady who was in the bed opposite me when I was in hospital two years ago.

No notes or anything like that were taken at the time, but I have never forgotten the incidents I describe below. The section about what her past might have included is entirely from my imagination: all the rest really happened.

My father had died just a week before I went into hospital – a key cause was dementia. Perhaps that’s why Doris remains so clearly in my mind.

The Duchess

Swaddled in zebra-stripe velour she dozes,

Lunch barely touched on the over-bed table.

“Doris,” the time-starved nurse had pleaded,

“You must like fish and chips” ...

As though not eating was entirely a choice.

Broken hips will heal in time once reset;

A mind tick-tick-tocked into the past is gone.

Her son sits beside her, head bowed low;

There’s nothing to say and

He makes no move to disturb her 40 winks.

Next day, Annie and Joan urge her to “Get up!

“Try out your bionic peg!” they cackle.

I call out that the physio’s not here

And at last a nurse comes,                 

Bringing an end to impending disaster.                     

Doris, Doris duchess of The Dolphin,       

Known in the Duke’s Head but never in the Florin;

There you’d sip a stout or a port in a storm

Laughing with the girls and singing until dawn;

Around the Joanna you would croon a bar or two,

You could smoke like a trooper and tell a joke so blue that

You’d set the crowds ahowling and make a sailor blush

But you were always a lady and never just some lush.

On the bedside cupboard there is a bottle,

Gaudy plastic full of liquid pinky red:

‘Cherryade’ or so the label claims.

Hardly a Cherry B,

Never mind a stout or a port (in a storm).

In the middle of the night Doris demands

“Boy! Boy?” Querulous, tremulous and lost.

A nurse tries to calm her. Soothing sounds.

At last she drifts again ...

As though not sleeping was entirely a choice.

27 April 2020

Ten by Eight

Ten by eight is a monochrome film sheet;

Ten by eight is the perfect picture size;

Ten by eight is a Barbara Cartland photo

Ready framed for Grandma – what a lovely pink surprise.

Ten by eight can be a snappy silver snare drum;

Ten by eight can be a model scene of war;

Ten by eight could make a decent garden shed

Or an urban chicken coop with an automated door.

Ten by eight is the size of the patio

Measured in steps – well at least it is in mine.

All around the dryer and the plant pots and the deckchair

I wend my merry way when the sun sees fit to shine.

Say it’s 26 steps for a solitary circuit,

I’d need just under 400 laps in a day

For the gadget on my wrist to spark digital fireworks;

This is lockdown athletics in a most surreal way.

In the private carpark through a gate from the patio

The space measures out at 50 steps by 10;

That’s 93 laps, give or take a little,

To keep up my steps and my mood approaching Zen.

Ten by eight can be the size of a certificate

Stamped and signed and emblazoned with your name;

Will I feel like a winner at the end of this marathon

Or just like a pawn in some dumb god’s game?

1 May 2020

Corona Nightmare

I have started to dream about COVID: or rather,

I dream about Hancock’s half hour.

Where deer-like in the face of the headlights,

Politicians draw straws to cower.

Will today bring forth more pretty numbers

Or some badges they’ve hammered from tin?

Yet another promise on testing, maybe?

Though this spin has all long since worn thin.

Nurses may still need protection,

But Matt swears he’s doing his best;

That panic-bought gowns are all turkeys

Is no proof all his pledges go west.

In the wild, weird world of my dreamscape,

Ministers dine on roast swan,

Toasting the news that care costs

Will have fallen when COVID has gone.

It’s the blow on the chin that Johnson

Had mused that the nation might take:

Any sense that he’s now saddened by it

Is like his fluffed hair – a fake.

Yet still there are so many people,

Whipped on by parts of the press,

Who remain convinced by his bluster,

Unseeing his role in this mess.

At long last the dream starts to fracture;

Reality pours into my mind:

What a time it is that we live in,

When such idiots govern the blind.

8 May 2020

Understandings

‘COVID is our Spanish flu’ is a cliché for our times, and                     

When I think of that

and I think of you        

I feel a guilty relief that I need not stew,                   

Sat here, two hours away,

Fretting about lockdown and Dad and you,

Worrying about just what to do

and how.

But each time I think like this, I start with a mistake.

I’m thinking of you in those last few weeks,

at your frailest;

Exhausted,

Even before sentence of death.

The frailty was not weakness.

You had the strength to demand: “How long?”

Shocking the nurse who’d been sent

to beat about the bush.

I’d warned her before that you were a little deaf.

Not gaga, I said,

And still with a core of steel.

After checking you really wanted to know

(You weren’t sure but told her to go on)

She gave you … “a few months”.

You took two weeks.

Dad was upstairs in another ward,

Raging after his missing razor and demanding

You stop everything to fetch it.

On trips to the house to check the mail and

firefight the finances,

I watered your Japanese maple.

Lying there, you asked me once,

Dryly and half rhetorical,

How long Dad would outlive you.

A creaking gate, he’d creak on a while

I tried to joke.

I wish you’d told me what you

Must have known or guessed.

But why would you have,

When your pride had stopped you before?

You’d had enough and

Slipped away with as little fuss as possible;

Not yet cold when I removed the gold studs

I’d bought in ’81 for your birthday.

In February just gone,

Before we got to know the new coronavirus,

I read your copy of The Secret Garden.

A new edition in June ’42,

Published just right for your 11^th birthday.

A plate inside shows a giant tulip

rising from a bomb site.

“Can spring be far behind?” it asks.

Your mother and father were in their teens in ’18,

Old enough to fear that year’s flu.

Spring’s grotesque and deathly climax,

blooming over the final months

Of the war grinding to a halt.

COVID-19 reminds me of that book plate

In moments when I fear the future too;

Of course there’s going to be a tomorrow:

the only question is …

What will it look like,

when finally it hoves into view?

Were you afraid that morning when you left us?

Gone so quietly, as if just stepping through a door;

Would you think my fears now out of all proportion,

Or is fear always a base note of our being,

Even if we have a steel core?

3 May 2020

On the third anniversary of Mother’s death

The Doctor will see you now

Having seen the 1967 Rex Harrison Doctor Dolittle in the cinema as a child (it was the same year as Disney’s first Jungle Book), I was – at the very least – curious about the latest film with Robert Downey Jr in the titular role.

What would it look like with CGI at its present level; would it have an environmental message; and  what would Downey Jr be like in his post-Tony Stark career?

Based – loosely – on the novel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, from Hugo Lofting’s series about the eponymous doctor, it opens with him having withdrawn from any form of public life after his wife has died.

But Queen Victoria needs him – because she’s ill – and Stubbins, the teenage son of a family of local hunters needs him, because he’s accidentally shot a squirrel while trying not to shoot animals.

It is not staggeringly original, but it doesn’t really suffer from that.

While Stephen Gaghan’s film never feels howlingly original, it is superbly well executed and has enough laughs (and one big emotional moment) to retain audience interest.

If I could talk to the animals was the most famous of Leslie Bricusse’s songs from the ’67 film. It was the daydream of every child – and judging by the children in the audience today, little has changed, even without the song.

There’s really no message other than ‘be nice to each other’, ’family is what you decide it is’ and don’t be bad to animals (a message I first learned from Sheri Lewis and Lamb Chop many centuries ago).

But not everything has to have Big Messages.

The cast is a joy. Forget the faux furore over Downey Jr’s Welsh accent – the accent is unexpected, but a) why not? and b) it doesn’t get in the way of anything. And his characterisation doesn’t have the smugness of Ironman. 

In support, Jim Broadbent as Lord Thomas Badgley, Michael Sheen as Dr Blair Müdfly  and Antonio Banderas as Rassouli, the king of pirates, have huge fun as panto baddies.

Harry Collett is a charming Stubbins, while Carmel Laniado as Lady Rose (one of Victoria’s maids) also turns in a delightful, gutsy performance.

But there are stars aplenty in the voice cast, including Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Octavia Spence, Tom Holland, Ralph Feinnes (taking a leaf out of George Saunders’s books as a tiger named Barry) Selema Gomez, Marion Cotillard and Frances de la Tour.

It all rather reminds me of Peter Rabbit – the sequel to which lands soon.

Far from a classic is is, but it’s still perfectly enjoyable light entertainment for the end of a working week. And that is not a case of damning with faint praise.

Kani and Sher provide meat for the mind

John Kani and Antony Sher

It’s South Africa, 25 years after the death of apartheid and the birth of the Rainbow Nation. Successful classical actor Jack Morris is struggling to learn his lines for the eponymous role in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Interrupted by the doorbell, he is horrified to discover that the carer/nurse that he was expecting from an agency is actually Lunga Kunene, an elderly black man and senior nursing sister.

But why does he need a carer/nurse? Because he has stage four liver cancer. Can he live long enough to perform Lear? Can he stop seeing Kunene as all black people?

Kunene and the King is written by South African acting legend John Kani (the first black Othello on stage win South Africa in 1987, and also T’Chaka in Marvel’s Black Panther), who also plays Kunene in this RSC production, which has been seen in Stratford upon Avon and Cape Town before arriving in London’s West End.

Now, just to be clear, in 1985, after appearing in the anti-apartheid play Sizwe Bansi is Dead, which Kani co-wrote with Athol Fugard, he received a phone call saying that his father wanted to see him. On the way there, Kani was surrounded by police, who beat him and left him for dead. His left eye was lost in the incident and he now wears a prosthetic.

Kani is more than qualified to give lessons in what apartheid meant – and what its legacy means. He's lived it. And he is scathing, for instance, of Jacob Zuma’s corrupt governance.

At approximately 96 minutes – with no interval – this is a short work, but while it has plenty of laughs, it’s also full of enough intensity for double that time.

In some ways, it feels simplistic: yes, yes, yes – we (the white West) know about this! Don’t labour the point!

But any simplicity is superficial. There’s real meat here – on a number of levels. The clashes of culture, ‘othering’ – and not one by any one group alone; the universality of Shakespeare; the fear of mortality …

This is a deceptive work by Kani – a work that is utterly apt not just for South Africa, but (like the Bard’s works) for everywhere and perhaps particularly in these fraught times.

The work relies on the strength of the actors playing the roles in this two-hander. At first, you think that Kani seems physically constrained –  until you understand that the character is all buckled-up self-restraint: he’s seen the worst behaviour of both white and black South Africans in the fight to set his country free and subsequently, and is fighting against his own anger to be a good human being.

His has been a life spent constantly struggling within himself to be humane and to bolt down the rage within against what he has seen and experienced.

It is a superb performance.

Opposite Kani is his South African compatriot, Antony Sher, as Morris. And Sher also turns in a simply stunning performance as someone struggling with his place within history and against a dreadful disease. Neither of the men are flawless – but neither are evil either.

It’s on until 28 March. There are still tickets available – and I recommend it.