Birthdays, Age and Tightrope Walking with Larkin

I had a birthday this week-end, I have no problem with birthdays they roll by whether you want them to or not so I like to embrace them as an increasingly familiar old friend. Twenty was wonderful, thirty was wonderful, forty was fine, fifty was interesting, sixty my next one I shall encounter with a zero will bring a bus pass, heating allowances and best of all I anticipate the feeling of empowerment that I have earned the right to not bother about what people think about me. If truth were told ( and truth is not always best told but probably less damaging that untruths told in the long term) I feel that at fifty –eight ( pause whilst I have to recalculate from last year). It would be a lie to say I did not care how others perceive me, that way lies slight madness and those blouses you find in shops that cater for ladies of a certain age. You know the ones I mean, tiny paisley patterns, maybe with trailing things that can be tied in bows at the neck. I still squeeze myself into jeans that are a triumph of corsetry over breathing and have T-Shirts that have slogans on. I was once told by a very glamorous perfumed and couturier bedecked lady that no woman should ever wear T-Shirts saying anything past twenty-five, unless it is a small discreet designer logo and then only if the designer is expensive enough. This woman was obviously wrapped in silk pashmina as she exited the birth canal and her mother probably only broke into a slight glow throughout labour.

I have little dress sense, no glamour ( as defined by afore mentioned designer woman), I often manage to achieve an effect through sheer serendipity, sometimes in the tumble of the drawers and wardrobe an outfit comes together by some strange law of permutations of what is nearest to hand. It must be a bit like the probability of winning the lottery, now and again you may win a tenner ( a near decent outfit) which makes you feel that a jackpot win( bloody great) is not totally impossible. At 6’ 3”( I’ve lost an inch along the way somewhere) you tend to get noticed when you enter a room, if you then add to that clashing colours and items of clothing from various decades that would make the words ‘an interesting mix of styles’ seem overly generous….. then you have a statement but in my case more of a exclamation ( probably best described by an exclamation mark).

I watched a couple of programmes on TV this week designed to cater to the over sixties. Gok Wan managed to persuade a lady over seventy to wear only iced buns for a photograph by calling her angel and ‘my darling’ every other sentence. In the other programme some doctors revealed the joys of the older body falling apart. Age is a bit of a bugger; it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Of course life is always about balance; the balancing act just gets a little more difficult as you get older, the wire a little thinner, you have to put your glasses on to see where you are going and the drop is a tad more daunting and you wonder if that slight twinge as you walk across the abyss signals a future hip replacement.. Of course I wouldn’t say I was as pessimistic as Larkin though and birthdays, any birthdays should be fun.

PS, The photograph at the top of the page was taken by my friend Martin Figura, a professional photographer and poet. I asked him to take photographs of my mother's bungalow a week after she died and then a few months later after it has been cleared. This may seem macabre but the photographs I knew would be strangely beautiful and continue to remain very poignant for me. You can see more here at his web site with a shortextract from an explanatory text I wrote to accompany the work.

Stephen Dobyns, Happy Birthdays, In-coming Season and The Yardbirds

I have just received a copy of a collection of poetry I ordered from the States by the poet Stephen Dobyns. I came across him by accident when a friend Facebooked a link to one of his poems (see Facebook does have uses over and beyond knowing that someone you don't know that well, if at all, is eating biscuits, running in a half marathon or generally mooching). I sat down and read the collection, ‘Mystery, so Long’, this morning after I got back from the farmer’s market in town, where I chatted about the joy of fat marbled beef with the farmer who lives three miles away who breeds beef cattle, commented on the delights of a cheddar mustard and ale cheese made by a cheese-maker four miles distant and bought fresh baked wholemeal bread from a local farmer who grows his own organic wheat and mills his own flour that his wife bakes into glorious loaves the smell of which wafts from the stall and sits on your shoulder whispering, ’ buy me, you know you want to’ . I wandered home probably repellently smug in the knowledge that I had purchased food with such a low carbon footprint. I sat down to the indulgence of lime and elderflower cake (cake making lady just up the road) with a cup of sweet Colombian blend ( I managed to block out the thought of its carbon footprint and mutter the mantra of ‘it’s fair-trade coffee, it’s fair-trade coffee’ to hold on to the smug mode for just a while longer). All this and a good poetry collection to read was a small corner of heaven on a dull fen Saturday.

I had not heard of Dobyns before and it is always a pleasure to explore a poet I wouldn’t normally come across. Dobyns manages to make that conversational style of some American poetry look easy and yet it is a skilled craft which requires more than prose chopped into lines. He tends, in the poems I have read so far, to stroll through life as if it is a huge stage set for the theatre of the absurd and the wry asides seem totally at home with concepts of orang-utans shitting on stage at concerts to liven up the proceedings for those not already into classical music, talking dogs, a parrot attached to a man’s shoulder as he hurries to the city day after day. Dobyns seems not so much part of any surreal school of poetry but grounded in how people really live yet within their lives such things are happening which only the absurd can perhaps depict, such things are happening which makes them unique even in the seeming hum-drumness of their days. Here are a few of his poems, Yellow Beak, It's Like This and Over a Cup of Coffee, see what you think.

I can feel autumn coming in fast now, autumn is a season I love. It is not so much an end of summer but a beginning of things winding into themselves. Dark nights in front of fires. I am not a hot weather woman I like bright cold days, piles of leaves, thick bacon sarnies in front of old black and white films on the TV whilst the wind and rain busy themselves outside. Today is the Boos birthday, I am sure I hung on into September so I could push her out into a world that smelt of autumn, no summer baby for me. A September baby is always one of the oldest in the class in the English educational system, an August birthday consigns you to being one of the youngest. There are always perks to be had in being just that bit older, well that is what I tell myself when my young dentist who I had a conversation with this week whilst my mouth was full of iron mongery and sucking devices, revealed that she can’t even remember Take That first time around let alone that Jimmy Page was in The Yardbirds.