Breakfast over, I dart secretly down the stairs to a
basement bedroom and swap the dirt-brown boots
for Sunday’s best shoes laced riskily down one side.
As weighty as a small animal and tied by orange cords,
my designated school footwear is no good for chasing
girls, or better still getting caught in the playground of
eight year olds running around for that uncertain touch.
Foregoing galoshes and ear-muffs too, this is the
chrysalis discarding for early flight, a couple of years
ahead of when my friend from the house next door
walked across our room, both of us dressing up – as
the saying goes – she awkward in found high heels and
my instinctive wings fluttering as I looked and traced
innocent calves taking on unexpected curves, unlaced.

One from a sequence of found poems based on two extracts each from individual British novels in the timeline ‘history’ of that canon:

View

partial vapours rolled
through the blue tinge
of air
and lost in waves of
floated landscapes
along the river
from north, and to the east
frowned with forests
veiled in clouds
and lost again in the
mist of distance
to the south, on the west

exhibiting awful forms
sorrowfully corrected

the margin of repose

Thinking

First
they are beautiful

stored with ideas

ever ready to
escape error

necessary to the form
of the world within

necessary equally to

the pleasure of
thinking

counteracted by
the languor

of relief, stored in

uneasy sensations,
pleasure –

the necessity of thought.

Ben Zephaniah’s typewriter is on display at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

To much laughter
from the hundreds of
sequinned costumes,

finding Birmingham
is being tapped out on
Zephaniah’s typewriter.

Ascending Everest keys
he writes poetry
type type typing away

[his rhythm at the age of 22]
troublemaker type type
typing away into the reading

in hometown front rooms.
Learning the history of black,
sequins reflect light on

man and Country
inside a case of glass,
how Columbus discovered

Birmingham much to the
laughter of costumed
people, still listening.

A typewriter honoured
with its own writing,
smiling through the glass.

Today
at the beginning of this new year
we are driving to the seaside and
there at the side of the road is a
sparrow-hawk that will
not move, so we have to swerve
to avoid.

Walking on the promenade,
three sandpipers
are there too, and in
thirty six years visiting
we have only ever seen one,
yet this trio are darting in and out
among us and all
the other people.

Surely it is a sign
that we know our birds.

Originally posted 19th October, 2014:

Nebraskan Observer

I’ve written before about the witty and acerbic writing of Jay Rayner for the Observer Magazine, and do so again now as I rather enjoyed his restaurant review Belly Laughs in today’s edition, laughing out loud myself at one point, though this isn’t the first time reading his work.

I have been prompted by two particular references/portions: the first because I recently ate at a harbour-front restaurant in St Ives and on the dessert menu there was an item titled [not exactly sure] something like Apple and Custard?

which then mentioned other apparent options within this, or so it seemed. When my wife ordered this I did ask if she wanted the custard – pavloved by that question mark – to be snootily informed by the waitress that this was a ‘deconstructed’ dessert and therefore custard wasn’t an option to discard, having also been educated by her that the apparent options were in fact the constituent parts of the ‘deconstructed’ whole.

Not watching many current cooking programmes, I wasn’t aware of this familiar literary term having acquired a newish culinary meaning, though I’m sure Derrida is fully up-to-date and pleased [having deconstructed his death in 2004]. Therefore, feeling just ignorant since, I was bolstered to read Rayner today mocking the term somewhat by writing of a dessert, There is also a “deconstructed” vanilla cheesecake, which, as too often, is code for “We couldn’t be bothered to make a proper cheesecake.” A cushion of whipped vanilla cream lies under a landslide of shattered digestives with a few berries in mourning.

Sweet, if you’ll excuse the pun.

The second is the following portion [I won’t say it….] which could/should also appear in my ‘Nebraska’ series of posts, and reads, The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat.

A beastly reference not to everyone’s taste, if you’ll excuse the extended pun – and the restaurant being reviewed is called Beast. No need to deconstruct any further.

Originally posted on 11th August, 2013:

Jay Rayner’s restaurant review in today’s The Observer Magazine excels in his trademark linguistically elaborate denigration or praise – this one entirely and wittily and devastatingly the former – and as a fan of good writing I am commenting on this here.

Take this opening salvo that sets the scene for this restaurant’s initial visit by Rayner and now consequent, imminent demise: It occupies the back room of a hotel for businessmen, dreaming only of an in-house movie and a handful of tissues, and feels like two hours of death by PowerPoint, presented by a lifestyle trends consultant who once went to Hoxton.

Other gems within the overall demolition are these two, The least offensive of the main courses is the crab, baked in the shell under a Cajun mayonnaise gunk. It looks like a hefty sneeze into a shell, after a long swim in the sea to clear a cold; and then this, a tube of breast and a reformed leg, clumsily coated in bright orange crumbs the colour of the cast of TOWIE.

I have written before and elsewhere of my high regard for Rayner’s witty restaurant review writing in The Observer Magazine. The witticisms reach their zenith when erring on the caustically critical climb, but he is also a graceful appreciator of what pleases. Above all, his creativity in expressing both pain and pleasure is boundless, as well as relentless, especially with the former emotion.

An additional part of my significant liking is for the man himself because of one particular encounter. Briefly, and some years ago now, an A level English student of mine wrote an exceptionally gifted ‘mock’ restaurant review as part of a writing unit exploring language registers and genre. Using Rayner’s work as exemplar, her creation was outstanding: linguistically rich, especially in its articulate, elegant and creative use of an apt semantic field, and comically brilliant. Rayner could not have bettered it himself.

As he freely and generously acknowledged himself. To support their creative writing pieces, students had to present an accompanying critical commentary. Having previously sought and obtained feedback from exemplar authors themselves to inform such commentaries, I therefore took a chance on contacting Rayner through The Observer to request the same for this girl’s stunning work. To his tremendous credit he responded with a letter full of genuine, effusive praise for her writing. And it was the unreserved, richly glowing expression of that praise that so pleased, and impressed.

In today’s review of The Holy Birds restaurant in London titled Divine Retribution, Rayner is as usual on fine form. You can and should read the whole here, but I will quote a snippet that, as always, had me smiling as I read,

The room in front of that kitchen is orange. Very orange. It’s like they’ve broken Donald Trump down for parts and used them to kit out a dining room. There’s an orange counter, orange dangly lights and orange banquettes, plus various bits of midcentury modern furniture and wood panelling. If the art director on Mad Men had got completely off their tits on Fanta and then set to work, it would look like this.

I may later add the two previous references to reviews I have posted before, but it is always best to read his current work, and I look forward to next Sunday. I will never forget his thoughtfulness in writing so fulsomely to my former student. I am sure there are very many who wouldn’t be bothered to do so.

I read a Facebook posting recently, shared by a ‘friend’ [all I mean is this was an indirect receipt], where the original writer was chiding another who had tweeted about the tragedy of so many ‘stars’ dying in 2016, with – though I can’t recall exactly – a quite familiar emotive exhortation to the effect that the year should fuck right off. The critical riposte to this was a reminder that the woes of 2016 do not really compare with any of the Second World War years. Of course, this corrective was/is absolutely and importantly true.

But I still thought it rather sniping. Rude, in fact. I understand the frustration after hearing so much sentimental brow-beating about the death of celebrities this year, mainly musicians but also others. Like millions, I have felt that pain on both sides of the expressing.

We don’t need to go to any historical wars for the counter to this focus on 2016 and its celebrity passings. Aleppo today will suffice and there are many other contemporary touchstones of colossal despair. I tried to capture my thinking on these realities in this poem posted yesterday.

My reason for writing now is to post a link to The Guardian editorial on this same ‘debate’, a sensible observation that doesn’t seek to excuse but instead explain the tendencies. Read here.

2016 –
enough is enough
you can have no more,
neither of the two Beatles,
no one from the Stones – two of them
still adding to the living-pool –
not Joni
not sweet sweet James
not a single one from CSN&Y
even with their internal enmities,

some of the above teetering
on edges before,

nor Roy nor Yusuf nor José
still strumming their
lives,

and this doesn’t mean the New Year is
no holds barred
a free-for-all
another continual consumption.

You’ll still have Aleppo –
the whole of Syria, in fact – and the
Mediterranean will have its thousands
plunging from these places,
just as easily taken.

There are
earthquakes
storm
wildfire
hatred
famine
disease
natural causes
law enforcement
suicide bombing
simple shootings
all those competing gods

the
list
is
endless

so who will sing about these?

Whose lyrics will set death to music
if you take all of the good ones away?
Even those who mainly sing about having sex?
These human things,
adding.

It’s only natural
and I don’t mean dying
that we can get the balancing awry
remembering the famous,
those who have shaped our lives.

How many loved ones
were once in the world
this year?

In so much loss
there is little surprise
it is the memory
of the [www]celebrated
that survives.