Writer's Journal (exercise): The Road Home

It’ll be wet today, and I’ll take the long way back as I took the long way here. This means roadworks and going slow, but I don’t want to slide around the hills and bends of Clothiers Creek Road in this wet. Hopefully it won’t be pelting down as it was on the way over. The road home is one I’ve driven so often in my 20 years in the Caldera that it’s very familiar. Now that I do all the driving, I know it well. I like the bit where I approach Murwillumbah, and know that home is close, especially on days like this, or late afternoons/early evenings as it will be by the time I get there. Evenings to be all cosy inside, with hot food and armchairs, TV and hugs. The road home is good because it ends in home. The road out is good too because it takes one out. Both are great.

This became a cut-up poem posted at my poetry blog, The Passionate Crone. 

Writer's Journal (exercise): Friday Night Drinks

Friday night I rush home after a long day in Pottsville. I usually have appointments before WordsFlow, and go shopping on the way home. So I don’t feel like cooking. It’s usually BBQ chook, instant mash and frozen peas, with a bit of fake gravy out of a packet. And wine. A bottle of cheap red on the way home, shiraz or sometimes merlot. Andrew isn’t allowed to drink, being diabetic. Even when he has just a smidgeon, it’s bad for him, and his blood sugar shows it. But he likes Zero Coke or Lemon, Lime & Bitters.

I don’t really like the taste of wine any more, I just like the effect. I’m a really cheap drunk these days, and two glasses is more than enough, small gasses moreover.

Sometimes I hanker for a good Scotch, which is way out of reach financially now, but if I had one I think I mightn’t like it after all. My tastes have changed so much.

And all those liqueurs I used to love — would they seem heavy or sickly now?

I can’t afford to drink too much anyway, when I have someone to take care of. And there is me to take care of as well. So a couple of small glasses of red with dinner do me very nicely on a Friday night ... and a Saturday night ... and a Sunday night. I finish the bottle all week, and next Friday I get me another.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Obama the President

Oh how ecstatic I was when that happened. At last, I thought, America had come of age. And I liked him so much, and his Yes We Can slogan (reminiscent of that other favourite, It’sTime!) Yes we can do this, it’s time for a radical change.

But it hasn’t turned out like that.  

‘What chance have they given him?’ someone asks. I don’t know. Couldn’t he have closed Guantanamo? Or am I being naive?  

Anyone, of course, has to be better than George W Bush, or that dreadful Palin woman who at one stage thought to run against Obama. So he started well ahead. And he is so personable, and his family so attractive. And he has a brain, unlike George W and some others. And he doesn’t play around like Clinton and Kennedy, or if he does it’s very well hidden. And he’s a Democrat.

He ought to have been the Messiah some of us expected, but in truth he seems a bit weak. And also a damn sight more warmongering than anticipated. What good, really, did killing Bin Laden do? A great propaganda victory perhaps - but the sight of him and Hilary and co all sitting around watching it on TV, like murder was a GOOD thing — that was chilling in its banality. No I don’t say Bin Laden was right or good, or anything but a mad, megalomaniac fanatic. But still. I was brought up to think two wrongs don’t make a right. Those values seem long gone now.

This became a 'cut-up' poem posted at my Passionate Crone blog.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Family Meals

The nursing home prided itself on home cooking. Not much like any cooking that has gone on in any of the  homes I’ve lived in. It was not brought in from outside, but cooked on the premises, and they did have roasts on Sundays, which I guess is a traditional family meal. But the vegetables were mashed to a pulp — for the oldies I suppose, with their dentures. I have dentures, but I can eat my veggies without having to make them so soft.

I was looking for fish on Fridays, but they didn’t seem to have that tradition. No Catholics in the home? Or did they think everyone must have lost all track of time? But if that, why roasts on Sundays?

At first Andrew said, ‘The food here is fantastic.’ A few days later it was: ‘I don’t want to eat their crap lunch!’ And after another few days, ‘Oh, they seem to have improved their cooking.’ In fact it was quite nice food but there was an awful sameness.

At home we have stirfries and grills and crockpot meals, things unheard of in that nursing home. Are the elderly considered so conventional?

Writer's Journal: My Story (exercise)

My story should be told, Billy said — or at any rate my mother’s and father’s stories and my grandparents’. I come from a fascinating background, the stuff of soap operas at the very least. I always mean to write it, but time goes past.... I think the  only way it will happen is if I put it in poems. But could I include the necessary detail there? Worth a try, maybe, Perhaps if I do it like a haibun, only not about travel — that is, a mixture of poetry and prose. Marge Piercy did that in her memoir, Sleeping with Cats. But there wasn’t that much poetry. I would want lots, with only little linking paragraphs of prose, Oh wot-the-heck, no, let’s leave the prose out. Well, maybe just tiny notes, little more than chapter headings?  The thought of doing it in verse makes it seem more possible, more interesting to me to write it. I could have different forms for different characters ...

Writer's Journal (exercise): Out in the garden where we planted the seeds, there’ s a tree that’s as old as me

and I’m always embarrased and disappointed at what a scrawny little thing it is. Evidently my Mum and Dad didn’t know at the time that it would be so slow-growing. It should be lofty, a giant, don’t you think? I should be able to gaze up at it and say proudly, ‘This tree is as old as me, just think!’ But now, I stand beside it while they tell visitors, ‘We planted this when she was born. And I cringe. It is gnarled and twisted. It is never going to be lofty and spreading if it lives to be hundreds of years old. It’s a crab apple, a miserable thing with nasty little fruit. I hate it. ‘Why did you pick that to plant for me?’ I asked them once. ‘We thought it would be so lovely when it was in blossom.’ they said. It has seldom blossomed; when it does they are scarce. The only good thing about that is fewer of those nasty, shrivelled, dark so-called apples which no-one could ever eat.  I so hate it when they refer to me as Blossom, their pet name for me. 

When I grow up, I am going to get my own place and I am going to plant a tree in  honour of my dear parents. What will it be? What’s most poisonous? Perhaps oleander. That has wonderful blossoms, but you better not touch.  When they ask me why that tree for them, I’ll say, ‘I wanted to return the favour’.

Writer's Journal (exercise): In a Pigsty

In a pigsty here I lie

looking up at the sweet blue sky.

Mud is heaven too for me

I wallow freely, happily.

I eat the scraps, and I enjoy

being hand-fed by the farmer’s boy.

When the sun goes down at night

I sleep the sleep of the just and right.

What a lucky pig am I

safe and cosy in my sty!

Writer's Journal (exercise): What if we came all this way and missed it?

Well personally I couldn’t give a damn. See I didn’t come for that, I came for the ride, and now that we’re here I like what I see. It’s a gorgeous planet!  You mob reckon it’s dying on ya? Well maybe, but it’s not so far gone yet. Time to stay for a bit of a visit, and enjoy what’s still on offer. The rest of our mob, they’re a bit pissed off because the stuff they wanted to study has been corrupted. Well, not my fault if the time coordinates were off by a few centuries; I didn’t pilot the ship. I’m happy enough to arrive at a time of aeroplanes and toilet paper and the internet. It’s quaint! And not nearly so primitive as those earlier centuries would have been. I like this air too, and the oceans. My adaptor kit made the conversions very easily and now I can function here just like one of you. Too bad about the rest of ’em, mooning about, complaining that they’ve missed it. What’s so great about a virgin birth anyway? Two a penny where I come from. It all depends on your point of view. Apparently the planet needed saving or something. Looks to me like you’ve done all right for the most part.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Paddleboats

I love all kinds of boats, always have, and I’m very happy aboard any kind of craft.

When I lived near Mildura as a schoolgirl, I first saw paddleboats in the flesh so to speak, and they took my fancy in a big way; but it wasn’t until years and years later when I was grown up and married and living in Melbourne that I finally got to go on one.

We made friends with some people Mum knew, when we were visiting Tassie, and they had the idea. The ‘we’ I speak of was Bill and me, husband number 2, to whom I was married for 27 years. He was a boatman, an abalone diver with his own boat, and had a skipper’s licence, so he insisted he had to drive the thing, that he was reqired by law to do so. There were seven of us on board, Mum and Bill and me, and two other couples. There were a few ructions about Bill wanting to be skipper all the time; the other blokes didn’t see it his way. Mum soothed him down so he let the others have a bit of a go. But he kept muttering that he’d be to blame if we ran into trouble. We didn’t of course.

It was interesting to me to see Sunraysia as a visitor — that place where I spent two years of misery finishing school and suffering a stepmother from hell. At the time of our paddle boat jaunt my dad was in an old folks’ home, suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. We took Mum with us to see him. They had managed to be friends after their divorce, but my stepmother was fiercely jealous of Mum. So the visit was a sneak expedition. It was sad for her to see him like that, but sweet for him to get a visit from his true love. I’m glad we did it. Also we met friends of friends up there, including a woman who reminisced about my stepmother, who had been her hated schoolteacher. That pleased me very much. 

I liked the pelicans along the river, and I liked lazing on the top deck and writing poems.

Writer's Journal (exercise): My Favourite Song

There’s a few, but the one that comes first to mind is Summertime from Porgy and Bess. Why? I don’t know. I just love that combination of words and music, and the idyllic happiness and love the song conjures up.  For a woman who regards herself as not very maternal, I’m a sucker for babies. Even now, when I am far too old to be clucky and certainly don’t want the looking after of infants, I make eyes at strange babies. Babies are the best flirts!

There was one at the chiropractor’s this morning. He had huge, deep blue eyes and he was obviously happy, gurgling and smiling. I caught his eye, beamed and said, ‘Hellooo!’ and he beamed right back, and we did things with our eyes, peeping and hiding and smiling again. Then another woman came in, a young woman, who saw the baby, made eye contact and pulled a wonderful face at him. He turned to her and beamed even more radiantly than he had for me. I was so jealous!  His Mum meanwhile dandled him on her lap, and chatted to her friend without for a moment losing awareness of her son.  

Happy babyhood, isn’t it a lovely thing? And I love the fact that it’s a tender dad who sings that Summertime song, I grew up when dads weren’t allowed to be tender. Luckily mine was.

Writer's Journal (exercise): On the paper

It was tricky trying to retrieve it with the traffic whizzing past, but I just had to. It was extraordinary that the piece of paper  was still lying there in the middle of the road; must have been dropped not long before, or maybe it had already blown from somewhere else. One folded piece of A4. What could it be?

Well, I scrunched myself against the side of the car as horns around us tooted, and scrambled back in during a break in the traffic. Then I unfolded it. No! It was all in dense markings, sort of like hieroglyphics or something. Geometric shapes anyhow, covering it from edge to edge. Some were repeated in patterns … yes, it appeared to be a kind of language, but not one I could read. When I turned it around and looked at it from every angle, some bits appeared a bit like the spaces in crop circles — you know, concentric rings and all that, with lines between them.

Meanwhile  John was driving, and going mad with frustration.

'Well, what the hell is it then? Aren’t you even going to read it to me?'

'I wish I could.' I said. 'I think it was dropped by space people or something. I think it’s a message from the Great Beyond, but I wish they’d learn English.'

'If they did,' said John, 'Probably no-one would believe them. Who can we take it to for translation?'

Damned if I know! One of those UFO experts perhaps? Pretty though, isn’t it?'

He stole a glimpse.

'Looks a bit of a mess to me.'

That night I set my intention to discover the meaning in my dreams, and to remember it afterwards. Never did that before but it seemed like as good a possibility as any. Both ways I was in for a surprise! You’d never guess!

Writer's Journal (exercise): No Talking

I tried it once, fior 12 hours. We were at a retreat. We had to keep verbal silence for the last part of the afternoon and on into evening, bedtime, wakingup in the morning, showering and dressing, breakfast, and reassembling for the first meditation session of the day. Even for so short a time, it was damn difficult. Everyone was very serious about it, however, moving about slowly with heads lowered, staying in their own space, as the head guru called it, trying not even to meet each other’s eyes.

I dare say it was supposed to throw one into one’s inner being, but it only made me more curious about the other people; more focused on them and what they might be thinking and how they were reacting, and what I could tell about that by watching them – surreptitiously of course. We were supposed to have said everything we needed to to the other people the day before, prior to beginning this exercise, so as to be complete with them and have nothing interfering in the energy of the group meditation. But I was bugged half the night by a thing I had refrained from saying. I rushed up to the person just before the morning meditation began, and whispered it hastily. She nodded gravely, accepting the communication, but the head guru’s husband shushed me and, frowning, gestured to move me on.

After the meditation, though, he and his wife pulled me aside during tea break to comment on the remarkable surge of energy they had (clairvoyantly) seen me project when they asked for healing to be sent out to the world. I was surprised. If you break the rules, can that still work?

Writer's Journal (exercise): What shall we do with the drunken sailor?

I remember my Dad’s friends chanting that with wicked grins, then stopping. Apparently the rest of the verses would get far too dirty for children to hear. I liked my Dad’s friends. They were cheerful blokes, his work mates, his drinking mates, our neighbours. There was a culture of blokiness that seem to produce good cheer. Or maybe it was that it was a relatively affluent period, after the Great Depression and the Second World War. There was a feeling of security, comfort, warmth, optimism, all will be well. Those men seemed so certain about everything. I guess they weren’t really, but they gave that impression to us little kids. And they were good men really, kind and polite (except of course in their rude songs).

Writer's Journal (exercise): Let’s Not Write

Let’s not write about truffles and steamers and old-fashioned farms

let’s not write about dreams and aspirations, adventures and alarms

let’s not write about anything much at all, 

but kick up our heels and run down the hall

out into the sunshine to shout and play

before the afternoon quite fades away.

Let’s not write, let’s not read, let’s not operate computers

let’s not even think about maidens and suitors,

let’s not write with pen and ink, let’s not write on paper in books,

let’s not keep pecking at the keys like a lot of old chooks,

let’s just abandon Aileen and Eddie, Cheryl and Helen and Marie. I’m ready

to skid across the floor and dash out the door

into the wide fresh air, so balmy and heady.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Sport / Embarrassment / Punch

Sport

I’ll give you sport, Sport! Australians care far more about footy and horse racing than they do about literature. In the old days of the Poets’ Union, we used to have fantasies about writing football poetry and finally getting attention and making our fortunes. However, football and poetry seldom mix, so we never did, not any of us as far as I know. Except Tedd Wotsisname who’d been a fampus footballer (Aussie Rules of course) before becoming a poet and actually tryig to make a living at that. He had to write prose as well, and start teaching it too, no money in poetry — as cliché, that’s too true.

Sport! Not for the likes of a little, fat, short-sighted, short-winded kid like me. It wasn’t until I was 22 that a doctor looked at my tonsils and said they must have been leaking poison into my system for years and that I’d probably been short-winded as a kid. So THAT was why I used to come chugging up the strait stone motherless last, a mile behind the other kids, whenever we had to run races.

Had to, that was it, Phys Ed teachers became my ideas of torturers. I‘m sure some of them were mean on purpose. Or maybe they thought I was being helpless and uncoordinated on purpose. 

Just like the ludicrous answers I used to get in maths ... but that’s another story.

Embarrassment

It did me out of a wonderful memory once. How old was I? About 9, perhaps. I was wearing a nightie that had a tear in the back, and when Mum came to get me out of bed and introduce me to the party guests, I refused. I didn’t want anyone to see the hole in the back of my nightie. Mum was flushed, I recall, and exited; probably everyone was a little tipsy by then.

Mum and Dad were in the Launceston Players, an amateur theatrical company, and the party was for the local thespians and the visiting members of the Stratford on Avon company. Leo McKern is one name I recall, and oh, many others, but I forget them by now. They were world famous; I have all their autographs still. She wanted me to meet them in person. They won’t care about your nightie, she said, but I thought they would laugh at me, and so I didn’t go.

I must say, though, it hasn’t scarred me not to have met these luminaries in person. I did get to see them act; my parents took me to all the theatrical events. That was worth more to me than being paraded before them in their everyday selves.

I was very embarrassed when I saw Dame Sybil Thorndike playing Medea. She was so convincing that I couldn’t stand the horror of what she was saying, and squirmed in my seat. I was maybe 13 then. All she had was words, and her delivery, and they tore me to pieces.

She threw the first punch

It landed fair in the middle of my throat and winded me, and that was the end of that fight.

I didn’t know why we were fighting in the first place. But apparently I had mortally offended Merren, who until then had been my close friend, and she demanded restitution. Lots of the other kids were onside, and said I had to do it, for my honour. We were 16-year-olds in the second-last year of High School. It was arranged that we’d all meet after school to stage this bout, this duel, whatever it was.

There we were on the old gravel path behind the school, hidden by hedges. She and her supporters were lined up on one side, me and my pals on the other. I was glad I had a few pals; i was fairly new to this school, and indeed to this town. Someone asked offciously, in a booming voice, if I would apologise. I said I didn’t know what I was supposed to apologise for. ‘All right,’ said this adjudicator person, ‘Then you have to fight.’

We stood awkwardly, in our school uniforms, not knowing how to begin.  While I was still wondering, she stepped forward and threw the first, last and only punch.

I gasped and wept.

‘Are you satisfied?’ said the adjudicator to Merren. She declared she was, and we all broke up and straggled off to catch our buses home. We never did become friends again and I still don’t know what I did.

Writer's Journal (exercise): The Watch

My grandfather wore a fob watch. It was silver, it was big, it was round, and the case was carved with strange symbols. I supopose they weren’t strange; perhaps they had pattern or meaning, maybe they were even words. But when I was little, they looked like arcane curlicues, magickal and mysterious. He wore it in his pocket on a little chain. His waistcoat pocket, that is. He always wore a waistcoat under his jacket, and over his shirt. He would fish the watch out of his pocket by the chain, click open the case by the little snib thing at the bottom of the circle, and look at the face, which had large, black Roman numerals. He did this several times a day. It had a formality to it, this slow series of actions, a deliberateness. Time was obviously very important, and the knowing of the time.

How I loved that watch! I coveted it. I hoped my Grandpa would leave it to me when he died. Not that I wanted him to die; he was my great companion who told me stories and went for walks with me, pointing out the shapes of the hills, the colours of flowers, the kinds of trees we passed. He was in a sense my playmate, only we didn't play games, we played with ideas and shared experiences of the world. That was when I was little, of course. When I got older, he wrote me letters on his typewriter; long letters about all sorts of things much too old for a little girl to understand, like politics and art — but I did understand and reply. He also gave me many of the books I grew up on, for birthdays and xmases: I read most of Dickens and Dumas as a child, and the Bronte sisters too, all presents from Grandpa,

He did die, when he was over 80, and he didn’t leave me his watch. I don't think he had any idea that I’d have wanted it, but in any case it would surely still have gone, as it did, to my Uncle Ian. He left me his typewriter, because everyone knew I was going to be a writer when I grew up — in fact that I already was one, even as a child. It was a big black Remington and I loved it. I still see it in my head without even trying; and I can still see his watch too, and him taking it out of his pocket to look at the time. I always wear a watch myself except in bed or under the shower. Not for me the New Age disdain for telling the time, the leaving off of watches.  I know that time and the telling of it is very important.

Like so many, I am writing my memoirs, or at least bits and peices that may become that if I persevere and do enough of them. This too is a way of telling the time, and telling about my times, and my Grandpa’s times, and my Grandpa himself. Strange, he wasn't my Grandpa — as my cousin who was his true granddaugher was keen to remind me — only my step-grandpa. I didn’t care, nor did he. To him, my Mum was his daughter and I was his grand-daughter anyway.

That cousin was a child of his only actual daughter, and she loved to claim that true inheritance. She must have felt insecure in some way, I realise now, but at the time I just thought she was being nasty. (Well, she was.) Late in life, she had a lovely studio portrait of Grandpa copied, and gave copies to her sister and brother but not to me or to my other cousins who were also his step-grandchildren. For years I begged her to give me a copy; she always swore she would but never did. She’s dead herself now and I could ask her widower, and he probably wouldn’t have a problem with giving me a copy at last. But after all, I don’t need it. I was the oldest grandchild, the one he took for walks and wrote to. He probably did that for all the rest too, but that's beside the point. The point is that I need nothing to remember him vividly. I don't even need a copy of that studio portrait. My parents got a copy at  the time, and I can see it just by thinking — a white-haired man, dark-skinned and smiling.

Interesting, that dark skin. I often wonder of he was Anglo-Indian too, like my Nana, even though they met in England. He went back to India with her after they married and that's where Aunty Franki, my cousins’ mother (my Mum's half-sister), was born.

‘My cousin’ I say, as if she was the only one. She was the sibling cousin.

Writer's Journal (exercise): The Emerald Ring

I remember the emerald that Mum used to wear, a big square cut emerald in a ring on her right hand. Her left hand was for the wedding and engagement rings. She was a woman of taste, my mother, and wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing rings on every finger as her daughter now does.

I loved that emerald ring! So did she. We used to look at it together, at the way it caught the light, at the way it was cut with a sort of double edge inside the gold setting. We were both upset when one of those edges got a chip. Even then, it was many years later that I realised my mother’s ring was glass, and that she must have been well aware of that all along. But she used to call it ‘my emerald’ and I knew that dad gave it to her. I now have a different interpretation of the way she smiled when she said  to her friends, ‘My emerald,’ flashing the ring. They would have known too, of course, and openly. It was a little joke between them as they agreed it was a beautiful ring. It was. I can still see it now, that deep green — and the size of it. A real emerald of that size would have been worth a great fortune.

My mother’s opal ring was real enough, but it was a doublet, two pieces of opal stuck together. It was deep blue and green. I liked fire opals best, still do, but Mum’s opal was very beautiful. She didn’t wear that often; it lived in a drawer. She always said she would leave it to me, but one day when my Aunty Kathleen was admiring it, Mum had a sudden fit of largesse and said, ‘Here, have it.’ Years later she said, You wil leave it to Rosemary, won’t you?’ Aunty Kathleen did, but by then it was not what it had been. No-one told her she shouldn’t put it in water. With a doublet, that changes the glue so that it shows through and ruins the look of the stone. I still have Mum’s opal ring, but I don’t wear the poor, pale, discoloured thing.

I wonder what happened to the emerald? Perhaps she threw it away after she and my dad divorced. She could have had real emeralds in her second marriage, but she went for diamonds instead. She left me her three-diamond ring which she was so pleased to have bought in Singa[ore for much less than she believed it was worth. It is an impressive ring, but when I wanted to raise some money recently I found that I couldn’t sell it. No-one is buying diamonds that size now. They are quite big, but not big enough.

All in all, I think the great big green glass ring was probably the best value, in terms of the pleasure it gave.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Un-Australian

Well, that’d be my Mum for starters. Migrated from India with her family when she was 15.  She was Anglo-Indian, not dark-skinned, so people heard her accent and not only the English bit — she went to boarding school in England from the age of 7. People still ask me sometimes if I’m English. I must have absorbed something of Mum’s way of speaking. And yet she lived in Australia from the age of 15 until she died at 83. She said that in Austraia she was taken for English, and when she went back to England on a visit, everyone said how Australian she sounded.

When did she go from being a foreigner to being an Aussie? Oh yes, I suppose she and her family got naturalised and all that; she was certainly an Austraian citizen. But don’t some of the other nationalities who come here get naturalised too? It still doens't make them Aussies in the eyes of their critics.

We love to have peoople to hate for their difference. I remember when I was a kid, it was the I-ties. Now they are old stock, many gneerations here.

I always say I’m dinkum cos I was born here — but I don’t drink beer or tea, don’t bet on the Melborne Cup, prefer poetry to sport, and don’t profess to be Christian.

Writer's Journal (exercise): The Getting of Wisdom

Boring book, I thought. Didm’t see why it was such an Australian classic. And the movie wasn’t much better. The only intersting thing about it was when my stepsister told me it was based on PLC in Melbourne, where she went to school. She was another boarding school child like my own Mum. Anway, she didn’t seem to have got much wisdom from going to PLC. My stepmother later sent her to a finishing school with a domestic emphasis, called Invergowrie. There Merrie learned how to drink and smoke, and how to wear thick tights under your long evening gown in winter (they had to dress for dinner, you see).

Not much wisdom to be got there either. Mind you, I wasn't much wiser with my State School education. I was unwise enought to ask Merrie to teach me how to smoke so that I could be sophisticated. Took me 30 years to kick that habit. I don't suppose it made me look sophisticated anyway. It's very hard to bring that off the way they did in the old movies — even when I used a long  cigarette holder and smoked Black Russian Sobranies. I now rather think I probably only looked silly.

The getting of wisdom, I think, has to come with time and experience. If I’ve got any, it arrived by dint of growing older and having stuff happen to me, and having to figure out ways to deal with it. 

I doubt if school is the place where you find it. You get information, some if it useful.

Writer's Journal (exercise): A Time to Dance

That’s when I’m all by myself with time to spare. I love to dance, but apparently I have no sense of timing, no rhythm. I never knew that when I was little and used to dance in front of the wireless. My parents must have been too kind to tell me. But later I discovered it all right; other people told me. So I dance alone, not on a dance floor if I can help it. Sometimes one can’t help it; there are dinner parties and things where you pretty much have to if you’re asked. ‘I’m a really bad dancer,’ I used to say discouragingly, but some men aren’t to be put off. ‘Oh you can dance with ME.’ The only one of whom that was true was my first husband, Don. He had cups and medals for ballroom dancing and could make even me look good and even feel good some of the time. Only he knew how hard he gad to work for that and what a relief it was for the poor man to occasionally have a dance with someone who know how to do it.

But dancing alone is great. I put on Janis Joplin very loud: Mercedes Benz and Me and Bobby McGhee and go for my life with a broom a partner, or maybe no partner at all. I sing along too, loudly under cover of the even louder music, and no matter that I can’t sing in tune either.

Everyone can dance, say people who can, and everyone can sing. But just the other day when I was singing along to something and thinking I was getting it right for once, Andrew said plaintively, ‘I wish you could sing in tune.’ Not half as much as I wish it, dear!

I love to sing almost as much as I love to dance, In my next life I might decide to be a singer or a dancer or even both. But would I swap for being a writer? Not on your Nelly! In poetry I can find rhythms, and create song. Well, true I write free verse or syllabics most of the time, but still the choice is there.

Many poets in fact liken the act of making poems to dancing. Myself, not being a natural dancer, I see it more as a form of sculpture. It’s about separating out the poem from the stuff around it, the blank stone if you like, or the empty air, or the babble of other miscellaneous words. I am babbling now. Time to dance; I need it soon. Haven’t danced in ages. Unfortunately Janis is on 33rpm; I’ll have to find a CD.