Drought Thoughts

I recently had my first proper rural trip away since my hip op, staying in the Yorkshire Dales for a week. I mention it because it inadvertently tied into what I've been working on recently, writing wise.   

An erstwhile sailor and hydrologist, I often write about watery subjects, but recently I’ve capsized that to explore “drought thoughts” as a poetry project – researching and writing while adjusting to life with severe arthritis. Drought was officially declared in the “Rainy City” of Manchester where I live the same week that my name went on the waiting list for a hip replacement, so it seemed appropriate to tie in this personal experience of creaking, crunching bones with the driest summer since 1976, when I was growing up on the Wirral Peninsula, a kind of island. That was last May (a year ago!) and I’ve since really enjoyed researching “drought thoughts” – from “dry-bathing” in the UK’s only desert at Dungeness before I ground to a halt completely, to charting the progress of Haweswater’s lost villages flooded to supply Manchester’s drinking water slowly resurfacing as the reservoir dropped. I’ve been thinking about daylighted rivers and winterbourne waterways, limestone and sandstone, the moon and tides, and the sun, responding to the recent “Helios” installation at Victoria Baths, where I was writer-in-residence, and the “Phoebus” print commissioned by Liberty for the Festival of Britain from the sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe, who lived and worked down the road from me. 

(Here's me with "Phoebus" on my actual first trip involving stopping elsewhere than my own house – at the amazing Women In Print exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, and on until 21 June if you're in that neck of the woods; highly recommend.) 

Being Yorkshire born, of course the "Drought Thoughts" project led to me to giving a certain amount of time to dry stone walls, even getting in touch with the Dry Stone Wall Association (“lunky” was a particularly chewy word they proffered when I asked about terminology), so Yorkshire was top of my list for an escape t'country. I was rewarded with many delights including St George’s mushrooms and willow warblers warbling and bright yellow patches of cowslips and a robin singing from his spot atop an erratic and a wee hatched blue egg fallen from a hawthorn tree just coming into bloom and conversations with blackbirds and goldfinches and sightings of oystercatchers and buzzards and hearings of curlews and owls. I managed to go off road and my health app told me: “So far this year, you’re taking more steps a day than you did last year.” All good. I even managed to climb over a few dry stone walls, and I gave up on a few as well, but either way, it all fed an overall good disposition – as well as into some new poems. 

And how excited was I to go up a valley for other stuff (a craft brewery and an exhibition) and come back with a totally dry riverbed?!!!! The pebbles looked like potatoes scattered willy-nilly as if from a burst shopping bag, just dropped mid-flow as the waters of the River Skirfare disappeared underground, leaving a bright white scar, the likes of which I am all too familiar with. I'm so glad I shouted over to a farmer, despite a sign at his gate that clearly stated “No Idiots”. He told me it's because of a fault and that if there’s a sudden and sustained substantial rainfall, the river returns, bombing it down the dry channel like a tidal wave, or a bore. Quite the sight, he told me. I don’t think he thought I was an idiot as I excitedly explained my presence peering over his dry stone wall and apologising for interrupting while he fed the chucks. Then again, maybe he’s since replaced the sign at the gate with one that reads “No Poets”.

Anyway, "more water for the Wharfe, more words for the poets" as someone (me) once said, and I've just finished another poem, about this karstian wonder. It's another new poem for the upcoming performance slot I've secured at Didsbury Arts Festival later this month to premiere some of the new poems. I'm really looking forward to sharing some of the new work, and if you enjoyed my special DAF commission “Flight Patterns”, which fed into my most recent Wainwright Prize-nominated book “Wanderland”, or indeed if you liked my concrete poetry shown at last year’s inaugural Didsbury Open, then “Drought Thoughts” may well be up your street! Join me as I transform landscapes into soundscapes on Saturday 27 June, 5pm, Emmanuel Parish Centre (Upper Hall). Tickets on sale now here. (Thanks to James for the fabulous flyer!)

Constantin's Colonne and concrete constructs

Yesterday marked 150 years since Constantin Brancusi was born in a Romanian backwater; looking at Glearth, the same kind of ribbon settlement in which I was pulled over for speeding en route to a wedding in Transylvania. This was the final leg of a very-long-and-not-without-its-adventures drive from south Manchester to Sibiu, without a proper map. As you do.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Brancusi's work and should the Centre Pompidou reinstate his studio reconstruction upon reopening (scheduled 2030), I can highly recommend a visit. I was so taken with my first and subsequent trips that I often take it upon myself to create concrete poems in the shapes of his sculptures. Here's 'Colonne Sans Fin', from my pamphlet Using Language, which just came up as a FB memory – three years ago, lovely Invisible Hand Press editor James and I were finalising cover designs, garnering quotes and proofreading.

I've modelled 'Colonne Sans Fin' next to a photo in my Brancusi book of one of the Endless Columns in situ at the 8 Impasse Ronsin studio in Montparnasse (long gone, and replaced by a morgue; I've checked). Legend has it Brancusi twisted the arms of mates including Man Ray to help him lug a tree trunk back to Paris from the countryside so he could turn it into one of the columns – the next two slides show a column in the garden of a rich patron and some of the columns in the Pompidou show a couple of years back. That was a hot day – there's a selfie on my camera roll and I look like I've melted.

Anyway, bon anniversaire, Constantin, la multi ani! By coincidence, I've been working on some more concrete poems and sculpture-inspired pieces this week. The stars must've aligned.

Decades, dates, David Bowie and me

There's been a lot of coverage to commemorate ten years (yesterday, 10 January) since the death of David Bowie, and the concurrent release of his final LP Blackstar (on 8 January, his 69th birthday). And rightly so: it's a great album; he was a talented multifaceted artist. I'll admit, it took me a while to accept him into my early listening life after taking strongly against much of his 80s output (let's not talk about collabs such as Under Pressure or Dancing In The Street), but luckily that was eventually rectified and I'm as big a fan as any of Space Oddity and Life On Mars and even songs unrelated to any celestial set-ups. 

But I don't usually blether on here about such things as who and who I don't lean towards musically – and there's a reason why I'm doing it now: in order to open up a tiny crack and shed a little light into my world beyond reading and writing. Four weeks ago tomorrow, I had my right hip removed and replaced with a foreign body that it is claimed will make my life better. In the month since the hip op hippety op don't stop the boogie, I'll not lie, my life has been a very long way from better. Who knew pain like this could exist, and also how many types of pain there are? 

We won't dwell on this, nor on the absolute inconvenience of not being able to do the most mundane things like putting on socks, nor the realisation that dropping things on the floor is actually more commonplace than house sparrows or terrible second series you've waited so long for, in vain, the unforeseen inability to take in any written words beyond a couple of teeny Insta posts and one easyread article in Vogue (about Chanel here across the Channel; they assumed the punning half-rhyme was enough to hook a feature on), the downright discombobulation at the concreteness of two steps forward and one step back. (Pic is of me on one of my last trips out before the procedure, a sunny winter's day on Castlefield Viaduct.)

Anyway, the op was a week before my birthday, which is two days before Christmas, so at least I'd stocked up on nice biscuits and booze-tinged truffles from the Aldi middle aisle before checking into the hozzy (Trafford General, birthplace of the fabulous NHS). Small wins. Since you ask, I turned 54, like the famous New-Yorkaise studio where David Bowie was a regular. Ah, yes, so the Bowie thing. Well, ten years ago, on Saturday 9 January 2016, I was in a cab with Blackstar playing over the tinny speakers and the driver pretending not to be in panic mode as he drove an inflating me a short distance to Manchester Royal Infirmary where I was superspeedtriaged and rushed through to A&E and pumped full of antihistamines and steroids and dragged back from the edge of anaphylaxis and all the rest of it. 

Exciting stuff, but what has this to do with total hip replacements? OK, just before the festive season of 2015, I'd been shown the results of an X-ray, having presented at my GP – not for the first time – with shocking pain in my right hip. As with the previous presenting occasions (one of which was during a period involving me having to make my way up and down the stairs of my house in Chorlton – so we're going back a long time here – on my bum), the X-ray showed significant-but-not-significant-enough erosion of my old bones thanks to arthritis (thanks, Arthritis). The doctor was very sympathetic and advised ibuprofen as ideal for next time I found myself in discomfort or anticipating being on my feet all day or undertaking other such physical jerks. The morning of Saturday 9 January 2016, David and I were sitting in our flat's kitchen, planning a trip out to recce possible places for moving to while eating breakfast (boiled eggs and soldiers, orange juice and coffee, since you ask – plus, of course, the magical antiflammatory I'd been advised). 

Five minutes or so later, I was saying I didn't feel so good and was having a little lie-down, with Pushkin Cat lying on top of me purring while David Googled "anaphylactic shock". It was Leap Year. On 29 February 2016, I asked David to marry me; this one's a keeper, I thought. Later that year, we moved, on Brexit vote day. We'll have been here ten years this summer. We tied the knot up the road from here on Saturday 29 February 2020 and had our honeymoon in a springtime Paris, making it out on the final Eurostar before France went into confinement, and the UK announced lockdown effective 26 March. There's always a date-related story, isn't there?