Fritillaries

On April 16, 2019 By Mick CanningIn Fritillaries, UK, wild flowers16 Comments

022

The Snake’s Head Fritillary – also known as the Frog Cup, the Guinea Hen Flower, the Chess Flower, due to the remarkable patterns on its petals:

022a

The name Fritillary, in fact, derives from the Latin fritillus, meaning dice box (which were formerly chequered). Also known as the Chequered Daffodil, the Chequered Lily, and the Leper Lily, since the flower shape resembles the bell once carried by lepers.

We saw and photographed these beautiful but scarce wild flowers exactly five years ago today at Iffley Meadows in Oxford, which is a well-known spot for viewing them.

Review of Devil in the Wind by Frank Prem

On April 13, 2019 By Mick CanningIn Australia, Devil in the Wind, Frank Prem, poetry, Review9 Comments

44440062

Like Frank’s previous book, Small Town Kid, this collection of poems tells a story of rural and small town Australia. But the similarities between the two books end there.

Whereas the previous collection was a celebration of boyhood in Frank’s hometown, this is an account of the dreadful bushfires of February 2009 that swept through parts of Southern Australia, the area that is home to the author, killing 173 people and leaving a huge area a fire-blackened moonscape.

The poems are a mixture of first-hand accounts, from those who ran desperately from the flames, saving what they could and suddenly terrified at the unbelievable size of the fire and the terrible speed the flames moved at, from firefighters who fought the flames like small companies of soldiers attempting to halt the progress of an overwhelmingly large army, until they literally dropped from exhaustion, from the fire-spotters, and from the frightened friends and relatives trying to raise loved ones down unresponsive phonelines.

In many ways, this is a very difficult book to read, although it is important to do so, especially for those of us fortunate enough to have never had to live through events as terrifying as those described in its poems. It is full of raw emotion and naked detail, traumatised victims and quiet heroes.

At times, I found it essential to look away and take a breather, much as the firefighters had to do, as the emotion became just too much for me.

Poetry is an immensely personal art form. Even when the subject is neither the poet nor the reader, intense emotions come through. Presented in this form, these accounts are shocking. I cannot tell whether they would have felt as shocking had they been prose, but the sparse brevity of the language confronts you almost aggressively, defying you to ignore what they say. Each one seems to scream ‘Listen to me! Don’t you dare turn away until I have finished!’

It is extremely rarely that I would suggest a book should be required reading, but I genuinely think Devil in the Wind should be and is unquestionably a five star read.

Aggie

On April 7, 2019 By Mick CanningIn abuse, attitudes, comment, poetry, writing12 Comments

Aggie sits smile-chuckling at nothing much on TV today.

She’s made her shopping list,

And tidied her room.

She cried a little when Patrick called her stupid,

But she seems to forget him when children’s TV comes on.

It’s on the television screen that life makes sense to her.

Aggie, did you put that food in the waste?

No! Aggie is a good girl! Large-eyed-scared.

I smile easily. Soothingly. Of course you are, Aggie.

The same ritual every evening. But I wonder

Just what happened in that huge, rambling institution

She called home.

It’s then I think, for the hundredth time,

Of the pages in her file, the report from the hospital,

By the doctors and the clinicians,

With their tests and scans and

‘I can find no evidence…’

By all accounts a normal child,

Who, just after the war

Got into trouble.

She was sent away for her own good!

A cousin, sharp-spiteful,

But who refuses to say any more.

None of my business, or of yours!

‘There is evidence of a number of fractures,

The upper left radius, several ribs,

The right fibula, particularly poorly healed…’

Have you seen my baby? Asks Aggie, suddenly.

What baby’s that, Aggie?

Distracted-distant.

I have to do the medication, right now.

I’ll talk to you later.

‘There appears to be no reason for her disability,

No birth trauma, no accident,

No diagnosis…’

It’s Aggie’s seventieth birthday, tomorrow.

What would you like to do, Aggie?

Do you want to go somewhere?

Aggie nods.

There is something she’d like to do,

But the words won’t come and the more she tries,

The harder it seems to get, and so

She gets distressed, and cries and runs off

Slipper-slapping to her room.

The door slams.

‘Aggie spends a lot of time crying…’

The New Viking

On March 29, 2019 By Mick CanningIn poetry, Vikings, writing27 Comments

Untitled-TrueColor-01

Long, long ago, (although not in a galaxy far, far away) I posted a poem about Vikings which was called, astonishingly, Vikings. (It can be found here should you wish to re-visit it.

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek follow up.

The New Viking, a Reformed man

He brought death and terror to these Saxon lands,

Taking iron and fire to fearful hamlets,

But he was defeated by a woman,

A yellow-haired woman, soft and pliant.

And now the screams of battle are the

Bloodcurdling cries of infants.

He beats his sword into a ploughshare,

And grows rows of turnips and cabbages.

His axe cleaves firewood.

Maybe he’ll name his house ‘Dunplundering’.

He no longer lives within sight of his beloved sea,

But he watches trees ripple in the wind;

An ocean of billows topped with brilliant green spume.

Casting long shadows in warm sunlight,

These immobile giants roaring and sighing,

Desperately attempting to free themselves

Of their earthen shackles

Feel uncomfortably close to home.

Those northern winters still call him.

The fire, the mead, the fighting,

The tales of monsters and warriors.

Hamstrung by instinct

He shifts uneasily, guiltily, on his chair by the hearth.

His sword fingers twitch and tap and he

Looks for reasons to pick arguments

With his neighbours.

Anything would do.

Restless Wind

On March 27, 2019 By Mick CanningIn poetry, travel, writing16 Comments

107b

Some people need the familiar,

Finding in it safety and comfort.

But some see it as a constraint,

Suffocating them like the walls of a prison.

And the same wind that blows

Through both their houses

Causes one man to close his door,

While the other throws his wide open.

The Weald of Kent and Sussex

On March 26, 2019 By Mick CanningIn photo essay, photographs, travel, UK30 Comments

South East England is my area. It is where I was raised and, other than a few years spent abroad, it is where I have lived my whole life. In particular, the Weald and the Downs. Not so much the coastline, which has never particularly attracted me, but the hills and valleys, the woodlands and rabbits, the hidden crags and open downland, the land of streams and foxes and badgers, birds and villages and butterflies.

039a

On the Sussex Downs

There is a curious fact about the wooded areas of South east England, which is that there is more woodland, covering a greater area now, than was the case four hundred years ago.

032a

Back then, South East England was the industrial heartland of Britain. This was before the discovery of the coal seams of the North and the Midlands, and the various factors which would eventually lead to the greatest impact of the Industrial revolution being in those areas. Instead, the modest iron deposits of the Weald were mined and worked into firedogs and nails, cannon and cooking pans, as the wealth of words such as hammer and forge in place names still bear witness.

037b

Huge numbers of trees were cut down to feed the fires of these forges, and huge numbers also for charcoal burning, for building, and near the coast the great Kent and Sussex oaks were in huge demand to build the large number of ships the navy demanded. But then from the mid eighteenth century onwards, industry began to shift northwards.

Despite the pressures on the land for building and for farming in this crowded corner of our crowded island, there is actually more woodland now than there was during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And that is not something that can be said of many parts of Britain or, I suspect, many parts of the world at all.

010a

The Weald is an area whose underlying rocks are sandstone and clay, which means that the unimproved soils are inevitably either light and sandy or thick and claggy. In some parts there are old sunken tracks known as ‘Summer Roads’, so-called because they became impassable in the winter months, when they might have had a foot or more of thick, wet, muddy, clay on their surface. When these were in use, journeys between villages that might take an hour or two in summer, could became almost impossibly long during the winter.

037x

At the moment, all everything in the news seems depressing and unpleasant and so, this post is an indulgence. Just a smattering of information, and a few photos of places I love, largely to improve my mood.

Spain 2

On March 20, 2019 By Mick CanningIn Spain, travel, walking, writing23 Comments

It was after posting my series of poems ‘The Old Way‘, last week, and also mentioning that I’d almost completed a very long poem on a very long bus journey, that made me think of travel again. Not that that is unusual, of course. I’d nip off on another journey at the drop of a hat if I had the chance, but for the time being we can’t afford to do that.

But, I am planning to publish those poems and a whole lot more, plus a few short stories, in a book some time later this year, as well as the Indian novel I’m currently editing – A Good Place. Two book in one year! We’ll see how that pans out…

But…Spain. Mallorca, this time, to be precise. Mallorca is the largest of the Balearic islands and lies in the Mediterranean Sea about a hundred miles east of the Spanish city of Valencia.

If you were to do a Google search for Mallorca (Go on, now I’ve mentioned it you can’t resist, can you?), you would be forgiven, looking at the results, for thinking there was nothing on the island other than the city of Palma, beaches, swimming pools, hotels and night clubs.

And you would be very wrong.

Certainly, there’s plenty of that if you want it, but there is also the rest of the island, which measures approximately fifty miles by forty miles, and contains some surprisingly big hills and mountains, small villages and towns, orchards, fields and woodlands, hiking trails and Roman and Moorish remains.

img20190320_11402114

I’ve only had one visit there, and after flying into Palma I took the train up into the Tramuntana, the range of mountains on the north west of the island, to the little town of Soller. From there I walked up into the mountains themselves and spent the next couple of days just wandering around and exploring, sleeping overnight in a stone refuge.

img20190320_11394102

Luxury holiday accommodation at about 2000ft.

But there was a lot of rain arriving, and I retreated back to Soller for the remainder of my week, finding a room in a cheap backstreet hotel and spending the days exploring the lower hills and villages, and some of the coast nearby.

Lots of rain arriving.

img20190320_11421944

View from the window of my other luxury holiday accommodation in Soller. Lots of rain still arriving.

img20190320_11302033

But it wasn’t all rain. There were lots of little villages to explore…

img20190320_11410230

Farms, and hills to wander around in…

img20190320_11311220

img20190320_11332135

img20190320_11414759

Village church

…and lots of bread and cheese and fruit and wine to enjoy. Not that you need to see a picture of that.

Spain 1

On March 18, 2019 By Mick CanningIn Spain, travel, walking26 Comments

I’ve been to Spain a dozen or so times, although I’ve never posted about it before.

I’ve been there as a tourist / traveller – the words are interchangeable, and where one stops and the other begins is very much a matter of personal taste. Some travellers would be highly offended if you referred to them as tourists, yet the Oxford dictionary defines a tourist as a person who makes a tour, a traveller, esp. for recreation. It is a snob thing, really. Many travellers like to think of themselves as being too serious to be a mere tourist. Perhaps it has a lot to do with that word tour, with the inference it is an organised thing, probably by a travel company, and probably full of holiday-makers who need to be guided around these awkward foreign places and told what to see and do. A Package Tour, perhaps. And so also that word recreation.

And I can be as guilty of that snobbish attitude as the next traveller. I can think of a number of times when I’ve been travelling and said ‘I’m just going to be a tourist, today‘, when I’ve felt like a day just wandering around a place and taking photographs and sitting in cafes.

Mea culpa.

I’ve also had the pleasure of going to Spain numerous times as an instructor with a group, and spending a week taking people canoeing, walking and climbing. So, all that and getting paid for it, too. Pretty fortunate, actually.

If you have ever read the book As I walked out one midsummer morning by Laurie Lee, which is the follow-up book to Cider with Rosie, you will know it is the record of his journey on foot through Spain in the 1930’s, just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It is a truly marvellous book, and well worth anyone’s time reading it, but I mention it only because I wanted to do something like that, and so my second visit to Spain was to spend a couple of weeks walking in the hills and mountains in the South of the country.

I flew into Malaga, I walked out of Malaga.

Heading north, the walker quickly gets into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain chain that extends for a couple of hundred miles parallel to the south coast of Spain. And for the best part of the next two weeks I worked my way first Eastwards, and then Westwards back to Malaga, avoiding roads wherever possible. I slept each night on a hillside, or in the corner of a field, or anywhere else convenient where I could lay out my sleeping bag away from town or village.

img20190318_12020089

img20190318_12030670

As a journey, it was not without its difficulties – finding water was frequently a problem. Passing through villages there would inevitably be a tap somewhere I could fill up my bottles (and myself; I rapidly learned the thing to do was to drink as much as I possibly could when I found a water supply!), but away from any habitation it was a lot harder. Many water courses had dried up and I had to take every opportunity to fill up.

img20190318_12103098

img20190318_12092043

But as a way of seeing the Spain that few casual visitors see, it was unrivalled.

img20190318_12045312

When the Arabs conquered part of Spain in the early part of the eighth century, they created water courses known as Falaj (which can still be seen in use in many countries such as Oman and Iran) to channel water over long distances. This one is still in use now in the Sierra Nevada.

img20190318_12075705

Morning View…

img20190318_12111452

…and a dusk photo at one of my wild camps.

The Old Way 6

On March 15, 2019 By Mick CanningIn creative writing, poetry, The Old Way, travel, writing19 Comments

Poem #6 of 6. The end of the journey.

155a

The Old Way 6

When the square sails of the invading Romans

First appeared over the horizon,

This path was already ancient.

When the first sword was forged,

When the giant stones were placed

In mysterious alignments,

This path was already old.

Only when the great ice giants

Relaxed their grip on the land

Were these paths young.

These are paths to tread reverently,

Mindful of those countless others

Who also once passed this way.

Friend, take your place on this journey,

You are in fine company.

The Old Way 5

On March 14, 2019 By Mick CanningIn creative writing, poetry, The Old Way, travel, writing13 Comments

Poem five out of six.

054

The Old Way 5

The Old Way now rises,

Leaving the rich damp soil behind

And attacking the ridge.

It becomes a wound, a scar,

A deep, dry incision in the chalk.

It runs up beneath the shelter of ancient trees,

Their roots knotted and matted beside the path,

It passes a mound, faintly visible in the turf;

The ghost of a cottage, if buildings can become ghosts.

Although is there any reason why they shouldn’t?

If they die abandoned, deserted and unloved,

After long years, perhaps only their sadness remains.

There are other ghosts here, too.

You might tell me it is only in my imagination

That I hear the plod of hooves, or

Voices speaking in strange tongues,

That I hear the creaking of cart and harness.

But I have heard them.

I know that we are walking in the footsteps of giants,

And giants do not fade away readily.