Okay, this is a bit of housekeeping – which I’ll certainly be needing to do after these literary ladies get finished.

Looking for a stimulating, surprising literary activity this spring? As well as entering my first poetry competition for about three years today, I’ve also just updated my workshops and tutoring page – so have a look at what I offer. It’s not usually a complete brawl n my workshops; we favour civilised, friendly critique, we read an eclectic and stretching selection of poems by poets old and new, and we share nicely.

I’m now running my Poetic Technique course independently. That’s the News! Starting next week, we’ll be meeting every Tuesday above the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. If you are looking for a chance to learn more about metrics (versus rhythm) or rhyme (versus other forms of sound repetition) or other ways of creating patterning in a poem – or if you just wonder what the difference is between a Dactyl and an Amphibrach – this is the place to do it. Click the link for more details, and drop me a line if you’re interested.

If you;re not sure, here are some things my students have said.

And here I’d like to remind you that I also offer one-to-one tutoring and mentoring, and an editorial service for manuscripts, ranging from critique and advice to a full edit. I can help you develop your poems into a collection, proofread, line edit, and prepare to submit it.

My students have been published, and shortlisted, and won prizes, with poems started in my workshops.

There. It’s late, and this is a duty post. Well. I say duty, but I would love you to join one of the workshops, or email me about a tutorial. It’s spring! Let’s DO something.

May I draw your attention to my sidebar? It’s blossoming like – well – like it’s spring or something. Books have been bursting into bloom all over Baroque Mansions for a couple of weeks now, and the best thing about it is you don’t even need a vase.

I’m hoping that with so many nice books lying all over the shop, I don’t need much of a blog post, either. The proprietress is trying to catch up on well over a month’s missed activity, and the sad truth is that planting once missed is missed. The blossoms are in full throat. The birds have sprouted. Time has flown, and you can’t throw salt on it and catch it by the tail. So things are still a little truncated as I try to flap a bit extra here. And this week is busy.

Tomorrow is the final class for this term in my Poetry Techniques course at the Poetry School. And in the morning I’m taking part in a panel discussion on using social media etc to build social and brand equity, at the London Book Fair, under the aegis of Salt Publishing. (You can see how my brand equity has suffered in very concrete terms from the fact that this was all being set up while I was ill and out of it. I never sent my photo and bio in. I’m not happy but what can you do, and what cold I have done? Real life trumps all.) Bit of whizzing round the fair doing some networking etc, and then off down to Lambeth to catch my breath and talk about Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Form.

Wednesday the Virgin Media guy had *better* be coming to pick up my set-top box, second time round, or else there will be a set-to. It’s a long story and there is a highly satirical blog post in it if they don’t come. But I’m hoping to be back at the Book Fair if I can.

Except that there’s other stuff I need to be doing too. Deadlines. Oh to be Mary Poppins. Oh to be in Narnia, now that spring is here, and just pop into the wardrobe, do a lot of stuff, and come back out at the same moment you went in, with plenty of time to do the rest of it.

On Thursday, before the first session of the new term of my fortnightly workshop group (yes, the terms are overlapping a little strangely!), I have what I hope is my final post-operative eye clinic at Moorfields. So, in the foreseeable future, then, I will be able to go get my eyes tested for new glasses. Meanwhile, though, there is the workshop! Blessed life beginning again.

On Friday, I’m reading at Hackney’s Tudor mansion, Sutton House, for the Word Factory. It’s Oscar & Henry. I had had dreams of even writing a new O&H poem for the occasion, but ha ha ha ha ha pardon me. While I die laughing. But I will love to read what I’ve got, and other wonderful people are on the line-up too – singer Sam Lee, writer Tom Lee, and Vanessa Gebbie.

Also: the last number of Richard Price’s excellent little one-man mag, Painted, spoken, is now available as a free pdf to download. This is great news as it has my long poem ‘Analogue’ in it. It is from a year ago now, but it’s my only proper work to speak of in all that time, so I hope you like it.

Also: since the departure of fellow N16-based poet Clare Pollard for Peckham, I have stepped into her place as poet in residence at our local N16 magazine. But I’ve not heard when it will be out, so I’ll have to tell you more about that at the time. Nice to connect up the bits of one’s life, though.

Um, and, er, there’s more to say – about the news, and the Big Fat Falklands-Themed Funeral, and how I recently watched ‘Annie Hall’ for the first time in about 20 years, and my aunt in the nursing home, and the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to arrange her affairs, including the sale of her flat – to say nothing of the cooker man, the plumber, my living room chairs that both need re-webbing and the kitchen chairs that are breaking one by one – but I need to get back to work! Life has to resume and go on while we still have the roof over our heads. And while there’s still something to sit on. By this time next week I will with luck be caught up and on deadline and on target and might be able to blog about something of general interest. There are things to show you, galore, that we’ve found in Chiswick.

In the meantime I leave you with a pile of splendid books.

There is a saying that you get the face you deserve.

There’s another saying that you must never rejoice over a death. Martin Luther King wrote in The Strength to Love, ‘No one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being’. In fact, I feel no impulse to rejoice over this death, though I’m finding it harder even than in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. They were treated with stark inhumanity that reduced everyone in whose name it was done, and she lived to 87 completely on her own terms, which frees us to think instead of her life, rather than her death. 

I always thought the famous Is Thatcher Dead Yet website was in rather poor taste. They’re having a very good day today, though, you have to hand it to them:

But even Thatcher was a human being – and what a human being. I’m not going to waste my time and yours rehearsing the bleedin’ obvious, we all know what she was like, whichever side we’re on. One day she’ll be very interesting to read about, the way Henry VIII is.

But the eighties were hell, and because of her it’s been hell ever since.

I used to have to walk out of the room when she came on the news, and now I daren’t turn on the telly at all. (Just as well. In a stroke of luck, my straitened circumstances – thanks to the deregulation she and Reagan bequeathed us, and the inhumanity of the response of her successors – mean that I’ve cancelled my cable television, and the freeview box I’m inheriting from my aunt isn’t yet hooked up.) As Owen Jones wrote two years ago, it’s now going to be like the death of Diana all over again, combined with an eight-week-long Conservative Party Conference. And as I say, I used to have to leave the room, in a complete lather…

I heard the news and immediately went to Facebook, where people are crowing and pasting up pictures of the Wicked Witch of the West and saying Tramp the Dirt Down and so on… A couple of people are saying we mustn’t celebrate a death, and someone says that’s sanctimonious, and others are saying we must dance in the streets. I don’t feel sanctimonious; just very, very peculiar. I’ve clearly internalised something or other.

Her family will be grieving now. They’ll have been going through something like what I am, with the Alzheimers; though of course Mrs Thatcher found conditions at the Ritz most congenial for hers, where we were offered two choices: one nursing home near me and the kids, and another an hour and a half away. No choice of room, and a lot of institutional strangeness and unfamiliarity, which has made it hard for her to settle in, and so on.

But you can’t start going into knock-on effects, because Lady Thatcher would never have been forced to try and manage her own squalor on her own, and there is nothing to be gained by rehearsing the many and great advantages of being rich, which my aunt was never going to be, and it’s not so many generations since people were put in workhouses. She’s in a good, clean, pleasant enough place where the staff are young, cheerful and kind, and she’s gained about 7kg since January just through being fed enough.

And then you think, who’s mourning? Mark Thatcher! God, remember all that? Loan shark, tax dodger, racketeer, vapid playboy – since denied residence in both Monaco and the USA because of his role in the attempted coup of Equatorial Guinea, for which he was both fined and given a suspended prison sentence – so no more coups for you, young man – and evidently he wasn’t exactly moving to be nearer the Ritz to look after his mum. Well, I suppose even he is human and grieving.

So let Mark Thatcher’s children, who are ’being educated in the USA’, mourn their highly influential grandmother, who after all pulled all the strings she could in favour of her family. That’s the meritocracy in action. ‘It’s faaamily, innit’.

The poet monk John Lydgate, of whom Thatcher almost certainly had never heard, wrote in the 15th century:

Odyous of olde been comparisonis,
And of comparisonis engendyrd is haterede.

He was right. And Martin Luther King also said, in the same book as above:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

So enough of that.

But look at that face at the top! We know it too well, we can’t really see it. But it made me jump today. I hope when I’m 85 years old and on my uppers I look kinder, more well-intentioned, at least. If at some point Margaret Thatcher had come to me in real need of some kind – it’s hard to conjure up a scenario, but let’s try – I like to think I would have helped her. It’s just what you do. I’d also have wanted to say, ‘Yes, of course I will. But if you still needed it, you shouldn’t have broken it. Now go sit on the quiet step till I tell you to move.’

I mean, look at that face. All the compassion of Care in the Community, the social conscience of the miners’ strike, the generosity of trickle-down theory – ‘let’s just take what we want, and we’ll tell everyone else the leftovers are as good as a feast’ – and the imaginary thinking behind the defining, apocryphal, saying – ‘There is no such thing as society’ – that she never even said.

The harshness. The stridency. The inflexibility, the rightness, the refusal to listen.

Look at that face. No curiosity about people, about anything really. There never was. Just bags of certainty, and loadsamoney. Well, she did what grandparents have been saying for generations, she stuck like that.

And that’s the crux. Nothing can undo any of it. The council homes are not only sold off, they’re owned in swathes by the sons of the very Tory grandees who changed the law to make it happen. The people who should have been living in them, and their children, are being penalised for needing a place to live at all. Even the local authorities that built them never got the money.

Thatcher’s project was cemented by Blair and his Blairite Blairism, and now these milksop posh-boy wannabes clinging to her neck bow. Cameron with his uni project of the Big Society, about as useless, ill-informed and unkind as Care in the Community before it. Atos, killing the people Care in the Community didn’t reach. Clegg the Milksnatcher with his lies to the students. Gove. Osborne, so thick he named himself after a rich, thick, snobbish, emotionally abusive boor from Thackeray. Iain Duncan Smith; I remember it being said in the eighties that Thatcher’s lot didn’t know the price of a pint of milk, and these guys are her heirs in that, certainly. They’ll be the ones truly mourning her now, they are her true children. And, like the squabbling children of any rich tyrant, they’ll also be strutting a bit, being the favourite, angling for the inheritance, dodging the tax on it…

No, Thatcher being dead doesn’t mean anything, unless it means wall-to-wall unwatchable telly and possibly a state funeral. (The public mood being what it is, the government will probably only realise the folly of that and deprive us of the chance for action.) We’ll all have to listen to weeks of sentimental claptrap and that cast-iron bosom in blue clothing will be all over the place. 

It certainly doesn’t mean we’re all going to wake up and find it was all a dream, and none of it ever really happened. That’s what I eventually realised I was wishing, after hearing the news today. Nothing can make any of it go away. Thatcher’s dead and it’s making me depressed.

Okay, your correspondent is now Back From Being Sick, and her eyes (though a bit wibbly sometimes) are now working. In about a month I can go for a sight test and get new glasses, & for now I’m operating all right.

The main thing is just the catching up, because even the low level I’ve been trying to operate on is hard when your eyes don’t work. When your eyes are tired, you’re tired all over, you can’t concentrate, you just want to sleep. Add into that four kinds of eye drops equalling ten drops throughout the day, and you have a runny nose, blurred vision, and various other side effects (which up until Op#1 on Feb 20th included a flu-like tiredness…). So with all my good intentions, OMG!! @!%*! It’s over a month off sick no matter how you slice it.

If I owe you emails or anything, please bear with me. I’m catching up as fast as I can. I just got the inbox down under 30-to-do for the first time in over a month, and am cracking through it. Deadlines have banked up like snowdrifts. We’ll get through it. Spring is here.

And here, boringly perhaps but necessarily, is a Calendar of My Upcoming Things. Because even while I’ve been lying here feeling stupefied, things have been happening around me and I am about to have a slightly busy few weeks. You or your friends might like to be part of it. Maybe we can all spring into action.

Poetry workshop group

Alternate Thursdays, above the Poetry Cafe, Betterton St, London

New term coming up! There are a couple of spaces free in my fortnightly intermediate/advanced poetry workshop. It’s a small, friendly group, and it meets from 7-9.30pm so there’s lots of space for in-depth critiquing as well as reading a wide variety of stuff, and discussions on submitting, editing issues, and so on. The ‘course’ aspect is very responsive; I can tailor the content to what group members are interested in, working on, perplexed by… Members have been writing for years or are just starting out; some publishing, some not, others thinking about it. It’s alternate Thursdays, starting on April 18th. If you’re interested or have a question, please do drop me a line.

London Book Fair: panel discussion

How to Build Social and Brand Equity on a Shoestring

Tuesday 16^th April 11.30 – 12.30, Cromwell Room, EC1

Part of the London Book Fair’s Love Learning programme of free seminars (though I think you have to be actually IN the Book Fair). I guess what we’ll be talking about will be self-evident to anyone reading this blog! (Har har.) The panel includes my wonderful publisher, Chris, and my wonderful fellow Salt writers Elizabeth Baines and Christina James.

Word Factory #9

Keeping the Flame Alive: Song & Story in Hackney

Friday April 19th*, among the linenfold panelling, at the wonderful Tudor Sutton House in Hackney Central.

This event is the ninth venture of Cathy Galvin (of the Sunday Times Short Story Competition fame, recently won by Junot Diaz), who is working wonders all over town reviving the short story. 

This evening will be a mixed bag of narrative and song (like a proper salon), and I will be reading from the now quite rare Oscar & Henry – and I’ll have the last three copies with me for sale, so try and be one of the lucky ones!

Click the headline for more details and other readers. It will be FUN. My friend Jan says she remembers going to squat parties at Sutton House in the 80s, well before the National Trust got involved, and being amazed how everyone looked after the wellbeing of the panelling. Indeed it is lovely.

7-9pm
Sutton House
2 and 4 Homerton High Street,
Hackney, London E9 6JQ

* My brother’s birthday…

Also, the top floor of Sutton House is said to be haunted by a small dog. I will leave pauses in my reading, and with luck we may hear some scuffling, or a faint bark.

Saturday workshops

I haven’t booked dates, but if anyone reading this wold like to come to a one-day Saturday workshop on the first Sat in May, let me know. It’ll be May Day weekend so I’m thinking of exploring the rich but often overlooked theme of Poetry and Work: what does work mean to us, its language, its imagery, how it defines us (or doesn’t)? We spend as much time there as in bed, or maybe even more, and we so often don’t write about it.

Also, I plan to reprise my Keats-based, negative capability, Poem is a Question workshop in late May/early June. Massively positive feedback and people very pleased with their resulting poems, and a Really Interesting Day. So please let me know if you are interested! I’ll be doing more on this soon.

Tutoring, editing, mentoring

And in the meantime, the Baroque editing, tutoring, mentoring, and manuscript feedback service is gathering pace. New eyes see clear! Better book me now before I get busy.

Okay. I went to this TEN DAYS AGO, and I am only now writing my review. I have excuses – I even have reasons, and very tedious they are too – but here, at last, I am…

Where, WHERE did I go. I went to the good old Hackney Empire to see the English Touring Opera! They were performing ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’. It was exactly one week after having the first of my two cataract operations, and the first time I’d tried to go anywhere at night, with my eye drops and hideous light sensitivity and two different floor levels on the two sides of my head, and kind of flashing colours instead of peripheral vision… More of an adventure, actually, than just going to hear some music.

‘Cosi Fan Tutte’ is slightly controversial, with its premise, roughly, that women are capricious and fickle. Two young men pretend to get called away to war, to test the love of their two sweethearts – challenged and facilitated by an older roué who wants to prove to them how naive and foolish they are. While ‘gone’ they come back dressed as ‘Albanian’ adventurers (this was in the days when Albanian adventurers would be wearing something other than a pair of jeans and a fleece), and woo each other’s lovers.

The role of the world-weary ‘old philosopher’ is crucial to setting the tone of the piece, and I never quite realised it before seeing this production. Because Richard Mosley-Evans (hello, fellow double-barrelled Evans person!) plays Don Alfonso as cheerful, jovial, benign – like, as my companion said, a sort of country farmer. When he says he never knew he had such a gift for comedy, he sounds delighted, not sarcastic as Don Alfonso all too usually is. And he also somehow conveys the notion that, as well as teaching the young men about their lovers, he is teaching them about themselves. This gives a decided few-degree turn to the slant of the piece.

This production, by being cheerful and good natured, by playing up the physical clowning and general opportunities for ham, and by letting the young people seem genuinely young, seems to ask the question: if the girls are fickle, what kind of boy would do this to his sweetheart?  The girls are not acting without provocation. And the rivalry between the two men when one girlfriend has fallen for the opposite, but the other seems not to have cracked, was funny, and smug, and affecting.

In my poetry workshops lately we’ve been talking a lot about drama and narrative and point of view, and ‘what’s at stake?’. This light, nimble production of ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’ keeps what’s at stake right in front of you: innocence and love and the ability to be true to oneself instead of spending a lifetime trying to second-guess the world. Don Alfonso is proved wrong, but not before he’s proved right. But not really right, because it was so wrong… It is said that there’s no redemption in this opera, that everyone is older and wiser; but in this production there did seem to be a gleam of real happiness at the end.

Anyway, the set is charm itself: lots of minimalist cream muslin, and vine stencils, and clever structures at the side that are buildings or gardens or rooms. The few props are well used. (There could have been one or two more – there’s a scene where Dorebella, I think it was, is miming an act of rummaging through clothes, and it struck me that a trunk of clothes would have been great. Surely the costume department has a dressing-up box??)

The costumes are wonderful. Minimal, but so well done. Details like the two heroines’ very C18 shoes, the brocade dresses that nearly match. The two men’s costumes are cleverly economical. I love this. Minimal, yes, it’s a small company, but actually very GOOD. The maid Despina had a different dress, a deep peacock-turquoise, in sharp contrast to the innocence of the others’.

But all this minimalism, what is it for if it doesn’t give the music room to come out? The music was beautiful & clear, light, Mozartian. Laura Mitchell was an emotional, serious, moving Fiordiligi, though not perhaps the kind of voice that I think of as suiting Mozart… Lots of vibrato, lots of Big, and sometimes getting a little tangled up in some of the notes, I thought. (It was quite a fast production.) But she has the range, and her ‘Per pietà, ben mio, perdona’ was gorgeous and moving. Dorabella, sung by a mezzo-soprano, Kitty Whately, was clear and warm, the perfect foil to Fiordiligi’s intense feelings. If girls just want to have fun, ’twas ever thus (as Jane Austen also tells us). 

Toby Girling was a wonderful grounding Guglielmo; his baritone was just gorgeous. Anthony Gregory as Ferrando had a really delightful stage presence, and actually made me laugh out loud a couple of times. It’s great to see someone in an opera who clearly enjoys the physical business of being in the story.

[IMAGE: why is there no picture of Paula Sides as Despina?]

The real standout for me was Despina. I don’t usually think of Despina as the main character of this opera, and all her dressing-up bits, with funny voices, etc, I can find a little annoying. But Paula Sides brought a few different things to this role. First, she’s drop-dead beautiful. I don’t usually say this, but there was a sort of literary sense in which the maid having such an enormous presence did cast an interesting light on the story itself. (Despina’s presence may or may not have been augmented by her amazing erect posture – an announcement before the show apologised for the fact that Sides was performing with whiplash (!?). She acted. She projected. She was the interlocutor. She didn’t feel like a period piece. She provided a new locus for the central concept. She reminded me, at least, that actually, you never really know what Despina thinks. And her voice is stupendous.

It was annoying to be struggling with my eyesight. A bit weirdly vulnerable in the crowds. But I love going to the Hackney Empire. It has the glamour of having been lost and then restored to us. The theatre is so beautiful, London through & through, and designed by Frank Matcham who also designed the Coliseum.  I was reminded (not that I needed to be) that it was in the bar at the Hackney Empire that Peter Sellers was first introduced to Spike Milligan, where they had both gone to see Harry Secombe. Ahhh… Goon but not forgotten…

The new fact of the day on this occasion was that Spike, playing there later himself, described it as ‘a fucking death-hole’.

At least it wasn’t a death-hole for the ETO! Phew. And even I, with my Atropined eye, managed not to trip up the stairs.

The production is on tour now so if you’re outside London you might catch it. I can’t provide you with lore about your local theatre, but I know that if you are in need of a dose of Mozart this production will make you very happy.

Sorry, this is a very utilitarian update. There is more fun and interesting stuff coming up.

I don’t even know how long it is since the Halls of Baroque rang with the sound of new content. In the past three weeks your correspondent has put her Alzheimers-stricken aunt into a nursing home, moved furniture and belongings over there, run a very successful one-day poetry workshop (‘The Poem Is a Question’), had the first of two cataract operations, and been ill for two solid weeks with a racking bronchial cough. I mean really quite ill.

It seemed to be going away after the first four days or so, so the surgery seemed like an easy-peasy option (which is what everyone will tell you about cataract surgery). (This was without reckoning on some of the things they don’t tell you.) Then cough, fever, & frets all came whooshing back within a day or so, with redoubled force. This is what this virus does. You don’t really want to be hacking your guts out every 15 seconds for days on end right after an eye operation.

My voice is a little better now; the cough is a bit better, and no longer feels like it’s about to pop my eye out; and last night I left the house for the first time since my trip to the weekend surgery on Sunday. Hurrah! I’m really quite dizzy, but not sure if that’s the virus or from the eyes, or both.

The eyesight in the two Baroque eyes is so different now – more or less sorted for distance in one, and with its customary strong prescription in the other – that even with the temporary glasses I had to go get (which will change again, of course) my brain is struggling to unscramble the cacophony of information from the two sides. My left-hand peripheral vision just feels like an explosion of undifferentiated colour. The ground appears about 20 feet lower on the left than on the right. And with no spatial/depth perception to speak of, getting off the bus was interesting.

The depth thing should improve after the second one, and the scrambled image thing; but, alas, for a whole month I’m on eye drops (one of three kinds, totalling ten drops a day at spaced intervals) that keep the eye dilated, thus introducing light sensitivity, glare, and of course blurred vision. According to the web, this stuff is given in certain circumstances just to induce blurred vision. So it’s clearly a very successful drug. And once the second eye is done I’ll have it in both eyes.

Er, I think that’s it. I’ve got deadlines, and a review to write here about the thing that got me out of the house last night. It’s International Women’s Day. Hilary Mantel is back in the news, defending herself, and many people all over the place are offended by this or that. Things have happened, been said, been done. By 2100 the earth will be hotter than it has been in 11,300 years, David Cameron was voted down in the EU on bankers’ bonuses, the Huhne/Pryces seem even worse than imaginable, and what else is new.

I’ve mainly been either working on stuff – an interview, a book review, emails – or lying under the eiderdown watching episodes of ‘Northern Exposure’, or sleeping. My eye gets very tired by about 7pm, and doesn’t in fact feel great even now, which is something the literature of doddleness doesn’t tell you. But maybe it’s from the cough.

I haven’t been over to the nursing home since a week ago Monday when we got my aunt settled in – I’ve been too ill – but I wasn’t too worried since she seemed quite happy that day. But I think she was just happy to see us. Apparently she has been all over the shop, paranoid, aggressive, wandering, and the other day smashed all the glass in the doors of the cupboard we took over from her flat. Mlle B went over yesterday and said that my aunt kind of came back to herself while she was there, and by the time she left, she was herself again. She said to Mlle B, ‘Thank you for coming; you’ve made me whole again’.

Clearly she needs us to come over as many days as possible, and she’s now a mere mile or two away…  The home took in all the labels I’d bought, saying they would put them on her clothes; but they said she didn’t really need labels on all her things. Now the new radio I got her – specially customised to be easy to work for people with dementia, which seemed worth £100 for her to be able to listen to music again – has apparently disappeared, and all her ornaments and knicknacks are all out in the open, not in the cupboard, which is in the garage, broken. And Mlle B said that there were nails in the walls but her pictures were leaned up on the floor, not hung up. She obviously she needs as much familiarity around her as we can muster. Taking everything out of the room is not the answer, but there clearly needs to be some dialogue with the home… Today I’ll take over some clean clothes and some (more) labels, and some newspaper to wrap up her more precious ornaments. I did feel that was optimistic; we’ll have to stick to things that don’t matter.

Also apparently her TV wasn’t working yesterday, and I know they have TVs there that they could have put in her room if it was really broken.

In short: something tells me ‘Plus ça change‘.

And something else tells me – that’ll be a survey by Carers UK, via the Guardian – that 22% of adults say their availability to work has been affected by caring for relatives.

And I shouldn’t have got sick.

Last week came the news, which gave me a slight shock, that Jan Ormerod has died. We loved her two books, Sunshine and Moonlight. I read them to numerous children before I had my own, and then read them to mine, over and over: our copies are worn out. The frames that follow this alarm clock one are brilliant, and form a very enduring sort of model in my mind, which comes into play whenever I find myself doing this:

I never realised Jan Ormerod was so young – only 66, now, which means she made these books when she really was young. It highlights how we take the work someone has produced, love it for itself, and often forget to ask about the person who made it.

Rest in peace, Jan Ormerod. And thank you!

Well, this is how things happen. By attrition. Before you know it, it’s happened.

It’s been a long time since the last issue of Horizon Review came out. To be honest, it’s been quite a while since I agreed with Chris Hamilton-Emery – who owned it – that it was just too much to undertake. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, and I had a burning sense of mission about it. But there was no money, which meant there was no time; and with no real reason to do it besides the love of it, I for one came to a point where that wasn’t enough justification. I’d spent a crazy year working in a full-time job, plus teaching the first year of my Poetic Technique course for the Poetry School – which meant spending Sundays prepping, and Tuesday evenings teaching – plus editing Horizon Review, on my own, with no help. It was essentially seven days a week at my desk; I even started getting leg troubles from lack of exercise.

The set-up of the website was such that, also, everything had to be coded by hand, and this was done by interns, remotely, with let us say patchy results. I was spending whole evenings retitling files and organising folders to be idiot-proof for interns who were, every time, brand-new and just learning the ropes.

It was wonderful in some ways, and I did get a couple of great guest editors on board for the fiction after Nuala Ni Chonchuir stepped down. There were all sorts of things I’d have loved to do, if there were time and energy to do them, but this is the crux.

The original Horizon magazine, edited by Cyril Connolly, had a specific purpose, which I felt we could emulate: his magazine was a beacon in wartime, and I felt that ours could be a beacon in the ongoing tussle between poetry factions, the struggle for the arts, the attrition of the cuts. I loved publishing the offbeat, the in-between, the promising and interesting and thought-provoking, the downright quirky and sometimes the very beautiful. I loved that we could take this model and make it more equal across the genders – and I had to make a call for more (and more ambitious) submissions from women. That’s another story. I loved that we transcended the ‘streams’ and isms, that we were read all over the world. I published some really exciting things there, and commissioned some of the most exciting ones of all. I tried to stretch the format, not to thin it out but to make it elastic, to place poetry in the context of artistic and cultural activity.

I loved it even before I was editing it: I found, when I thought about it, that I’d had something in every single issue, and some of my best work was done for Jane Holland’s magazine. But back in the forties Connolly had a rich friend who bankrolled the whole thing, right down to office space in Bloomsbury, payrolls, cheques for contributors, and a secretary. So in fact it is a totally different thing.

Meanwhile the cuts were biting, and nobody really seemed to have the wherewithal to do all that work for free. Least of all me, once my job ended. Once I was freelance - by default, because the savings were gone and Jobseekers Allowance doesn’t help with pre-existing contracted expenses, like your kids’ mobiles – I knew I had no choice but to cut out the extras and concentrate on getting work. I wasn’t a privileged man-about-town protected by doing war work, I was on the front lines, or being bombed out and living in a shelter. I was busy trying to survive.

Eventually it became clear that this was more than a brief glitch.

Salt had moved on, too, literally, to Cromer, and were restructuring their business offerings. Chris agreed that it was a bit too onerous to try to run the magazine on top of everything else. I specifically asked for the archives to remain up, as lots of people (myself included) had published work that felt important in Horizon. This was agreed.

I admit I was supposed to write a few paragraphs (like these) for the Salt blog, but didn’t. It has been a crazy year. Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Well, on New Year’s Eve I had a Facebook message from a writer wanting to know where Horizon Review was, as he couldn’t find his work. He said it was down. I checked, and it was indeed down. The Salt website has had some revamping recently, and who knows. Maybe those pages were getting in the way. Maybe Chris felt that they weren’t getting any traffic. Maybe there was a server issue. But please, dear writer who messaged me. Four accusing messages throughout the evening, all kvetching and all about you, culminating in one at about a quarter to midnight on New Year’s Eve? Demanding that I satisfy you even though I’ve just told you twice that it’s nothing to do with me? Who am I, your mother? And you’re complaining that you don’t get replies from people!

However, this did alert me to the fact that, for whatever reason, Horizon is now down. I’m sorry about that. If I’d known, or had time, or thought about it, I’d have backed it up.

I’m sorry this news has coincided with a period of both ill health and family emergency, to say nothing of pressing work concerns, so once again poor little Horizon was the thing that feel to the side.

You know, I’d love to get it up and running again, at some point – with a little team of people, and maybe some funding. I’d love that. But, for me, right now isn’t feeling like the time. There is an irony, of course, which is that the original Horizon – its work during the War, and that of other little magazines and other cultural and arts activities – provided a direct inspiration and impetus for the establishment of the Arts Council. Yes. The Arts Council was set up partly because of Connolly’s Horizon, because of its vision and the perceived value of its work. If that isn;’inspiring – and if that doesn’t put the acts of the Coalition, and the reasons for our little Horizon having to shut, into perspective I don’t know what does.

So that’s the update. Big thanks to everyone who had work in the magazine, everyone who read it, everyone who wanted to have work in it, everyone who had faith in it, and to Salt for creating it. I’m actually feeling really sad writing this; I think I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. But, like almost everything else, it just couldn’t happen.

One thing I increasingly realise – surprising, since there appears to be so much going on all the time – is that if you can do something at all, it’s a blessing. And if something is done well and is good, that’s a little miracle.

Photo: Max Reeves / Trilobite Olmstead

NO time: but the day after the firebombing of Freedom Press (& bookshop) in Whitechapel, this picture emerges from the wreckage.

Headlines on this day were about:

• Sam Cameron’s father being adviser (what is with this ‘er’, these days??) to Kuwait in its business interests (on the basis that he agrees not to use his insider knowledge from his days in the ConDem government)
• the Earl of Cardigan being a loony tosspot collecting Jobseekers’ Allowance while training to be an HGV driver, and having several court appearances for assaulting trustees of the family estate for selling off paintings
• the Secretary of State for Health’s proposals to abolish the NHS by stealth
• and a piece on how the Chair of the Education Select Committee, who berated teachers for laziness over closing schools when it snowed, was privately educated and then failed his degree.

Tomorrow I’m off to Bangor, Wales, to do a reading. That is the Evans family patch, and it’s exciting to read in the town where my great-grandfather had his last church before emigrating to America. Capel Pendref. I’m pleased to say that my great-grandfather wrote a book, of which I have a copy here – you can buy it online, in fact, if you look it up – called The Healing of the Nations. It was published in 1922, in the aftermath of the Great War. That was a time when people had seen and lived dire things, and the situation probably looked pretty hopeless. In fact, look what was set in train only 11 years later.

Well, the book is largely an exploration of a new, ethical – and Christian, as he was a minister – way of living, based on explorations of the Arthurian legend (and In Memoriam, funnily enough; Tennyson was clearly big in their house). On page 203 he writes, in a way I’m sure he hoped was prescient:

In these days we are passing from one order of things to another, and all times of great change are full of danger and difficulty. Knowledge is every day extending, and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually under the influence of new discoveries. In politics, the conservatives of today are more liberal than the radicals of fifty years ago. The old days of feudalism and slavery are gone for ever, and a more humanitarian spirit is at work. All lives are bound up together.

………..‘A starved dog at his master’s gate

………..Predicts the downfall of the state.’

……………(Wm Blake)

That was well before they started burning books.

I believe the poet Sean Bonney is organising a fundraising gig for Freedom, as well as talk of Donate a Poem for Freedom. Contact the shop for more details, I suppose.

And now: work to do, and then off tomorrow. Solidarity in the Baroque family means the kids are staying here to mind Frank and Chet: we’re all bound up together, and I’ll be doing what I can to get some good pictures of the Evans family estate. In the meantime, apposite William Blake quotes, please.

Here’s an exchange I had today:

Hey Aunt B, let me take a picture of you in your new dressing gown. People have been concerned, so I want to send them a picture of you looking all cosy.

People? What people? Why are they ‘concerned’?

Oh you know – the kids, my  mother… of course they’re concerned, because I said you were in hospital!

Your mother? You don’t have a mother.

Of course I do.

You don’t have a mother. You have a brother. And his name is Kate.

Er – well then what’s MY name then?

Ohhh, I’ve given up asking her.