Death is only the beginning

I’m not a big fan of anniversaries. The ones you want to forget, you remember. The ones you want to remember, you forget. 

And so it was I found myself wide awake early this morning exactly a year to the hour since my mum, Sheila Hartman, was attacked in her care home bedroom by another resident. Beaten about the head and body with a walking stick, the images of her dying from her injuries in hospital later that same day were still so sharp in the gloom it was as if they were were being projected onto the bedroom ceiling. 

So why am I sharing this? I don’t want your sympathy (although thank you again for your abundant care and concern when if first happened). No, I am writing this less as a grieving son and more as a journalist who wants to highlight a number of issues.

Slow justice is no justice

Firstly, the wheels of justice turn painfully slowly. Operation Vectra, the name given to the police inquiry, has been closed. No case could be brought against the killer because she was, like my mum, living with the consequences of dementia and unaware of her actions. (And in any case she too has now died aged 92. We sent her family our condolences and assured them we bore her no ill will).

But the inquest won’t be until mid December at the earliest. The CQC (Care Quality Commission) is still contemplating criminal action against the provider, HC-One. Central Bedfordshire Council’s safeguarding adults board hasn’t yet appointed a reviewer – or if it has I haven’t been told. And all the while the lessons that might be learned from these various inquiries to keep other vulnerable people safe are delayed – although to be fair to HC-One they’ve already made significant changes to staffing, training and management following their own much swifter internal investigation led by Nick Moor at Niche Health and Social Care Consulting. I thank Julie Kerry, HC-One’s chief nurse and director of quality, for allowing me to contribute to this review. That notwithstanding, the way we look after older people as a society – especially those living with dementia and other challenging health conditions – is woefully inadequate and needs reconfiguring. Which bring me onto my next point…

Broken system

Whilst there are some fantastic providers out there, the way residential care is delivered generally follows a broken template. Poorly designed or badly converted buildings. Person-centered care delivered too often in name only by too few staff who are almost always overworked, underpaid and undervalued. A two tier system of fees where residents who can afford it pay as much as £1500 a week – twice that of those who can’t and whose bills are settled instead by cash-strapped local authorities. Byzantine corporate structures where it’s virtually impossible to tell who the ultimate beneficiaries are of the eye-watering sums of money the biggest operators generate which allow sceptics like me to believe that too much emphasis is placed on shareholder profit at the expense of stakeholder loss. It’s a sick kind of financial balance sheet that can lead to threadbare and soiled bedsheets. 

There’s got to be a better way

I’m not suggesting a revolutionary change. But let’s create space in the sector for the sort of innovation in the built and human environments promoted by Roland McMorran and his Maracuja Club. Places where older people (and staff for that matter) actually want to go rather than dread. Because for now I hear too many people say, in all seriousness, “I’d rather you shot or smothered me than put me in one of those homes.” I guess it all comes down ultimately to what value we attach to older people. Whether we see caring for them as an investment or a cost and who picks up the tab when an individual can’t pay their own way for whatever reason. So my third point follows on from this…

Invisible people

We fetishise youth. The media worships youthful good looks. Look at what happened to my former BBC colleague, Miriam O’Reilly, deemed too old for Countryfile. That was more than 12 years ago yet older people remain largely invisible on our screens. I can’t help thinking if this had happened to a child, for example in a children’s home rather than a care home, the case would still be making headlines and there would be calls for a Sheila’s Law. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve not been vocal enough. Or that the majority genuinely believe older people are like batteries to be tossed out with the rubbish when they run out of juice.

Let’s wake up. There is no elixir. Short of dying young, old age is inevitable. And while the steady increase in life expectancy (now flattening out) over the generations is largely good news, what’s less good is that the number of years we can no longer live independently is increasing too. So let’s plan for it properly. And have a debate about what we really want in our final years. I can’t see the Club 18-30 and Centre Parcs generations being satisfied with the current set up!

Finally what have I learned and how have I changed personally in the past year? That I might have enjoyed a career in the legal profession instead of the media. I had no idea there was so much satisfaction to be gained from poring over Supreme Court rulings in cases like Jamieson and Middleton

That I no longer have the stomach to shoot the rabbits that plague our garden in non-myxomatosis  years. 

That as humans we get worked up about the silliest of things. Sad as the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree is, it’s only a tree. Totemic, I understand, and perhaps, therefore, something to mourn when the wider loss of habitat and species is, paradoxically, so vast as to be nigh on invisible. 

And the final lesson? That going for a long walk is a good way of helping red hot anger metamorphosise into a cooler determination. Wave if you see me. 

From journalist to poet

The “words on a line” world premiere

Yup, calling it a world premiere may sound hyperbolic. But, technically at least, it happens to be true…

So here I am in full flow (rapture the photographer, Fabio Barry, called it) belting out one of the poems I read to a packed house (more hyperbole) in the Secret Garden behind the Castle Bookshop in Ludlow on August 5th.

Links to each poem below.


I am indebted to my poetry coach Pele Cox for getting me this far. The journey has only just begun.

Rehearsals with Pele at the home of Stephen Cox RA.
When you can’t find a lectern during rehearsals use a squirrel trap. Simps!

The hare

A little loose. Like a soft toy
sewn on where it’s lost it’s stuffing. 
Magpies showing 
zero respect

You sketched our field
with straight line speed.
Sent my blood coursing,
bounding. The hearts’ pounding
now stopped. In a beat.

A car I think. 
A scrape in the verge.
Your final form neverlasting. 

All this at Easter. No resurrection. 
No headstone. No graveside grieving. 
But a single tulip, this reedy
stem outstripping the long grass to
a mouth wide open.
Screaming. 

Before the petals 
dropped. 
And the black and white leaves fell from the lung trees 
clacking and hopping. 
The lung trees over the rhubarb patch at the bottom of our garden.

Words on a line

One way or another I’ve been writing for a living for more than 40 years – first as a cub newspaper reporter on the Reading Chronicle; then as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC; and now as a budding poet taught for the past two very intense years by the poetry coach Pele Cox, a former poet in residence at the Tate and the Royal Academy.

But you can’t call yourself a proper poet until you’ve stood up and read your work in front of an audience. So I thought it was about time I did just that! And on Saturday August 5th in the intimate little space that is the Secret Garden behind Castle Bookshop in Ludlow you’ll be able to judge whether it was a sensible decision.

With readings from a small selection of my poems, anecdotes about the process of ‘becoming a poet’ and with the help of literary giants such as Dylan Thomas and Michael Donaghy, I’ll be exploring the literal landscape of the Shropshire countryside together with the emotional landscapes of memory and loss.

Tickets are available direct from the bookshop.

Coronation

Union flags and bunting.
The Kings Head.
A telly on the wall
And a row of mugs
Raising glasses.

Bottoms up, no shilling (coronation bitter £4 a pint)
But press ganged by the Daily Mail
All the same. Toasting two crowns.
Heads of state wearing uneasy smiles. And ermine gowns 
That would look better on stoats.

Buttoned up to their necks in it
Plastic caped crowds dripping long to rain over us 
The gloss taken off by a guilt-edged prince. 
No sweat, he’s hidden behind his sister
Feather hats off to the seating plan. 

Placards in the back of an old van. 
A sick Transit (gloria mundi).*
Serried ranks of #NotMyKing unsaluted. 
And ties that bind
Us to a past locked on tradition. 

Traitors mate. Sedition. 
Pageantry. It’s what we do. Britain at it’s best. 

Captured for posterity on countless mobile phones 
by the I-was-theres swearing oaths
Of obsequence. 
While the megaphones are silenced
By the defenders of the faith in blue
Uniform thoughts
Blue blood

And all of this because 
An accident of birth. 

Zadok the Priest.
Welcome to the King’s Head, Judas. Your shout! 
But you can’t handle another round and shuffle out. 

Dragooned.

Outside now. Uncrowned. Bare skinned for the flypast. 
A robin wearing military red. Two medal-ribboned goldfinches.
A wagtail conducting this anthem in an outdoor abbey
Not just for today but everyday. 
A pigeon clapping wings
And somewhere in the distance a peacock on his throne. 

________________________________

*Sic transit gloria mundi is Latin for thus passes the glory of this world. 

I was interested to read An Unexpected Guest, a poem by the poet laureate Simon Armitage to mark the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III. This is my poetic response in the spirit of the anti-laureate (a role I think should be established)!

After the plough

Ring rolling in a Bedfordshire field. 
Breaking up the heavy clods
And leverets. Blind to the danger. 

I stopped at first. Got down from the tractor
To shoo and scatter. 
At first. Too many of the sods 

Harrowing. The clatter
Flint on iron drowning out the sound. 
What now in the bottom corner

On the heaviest ground?
Fur gloves with missing hands 
And broken fingers. Pointing.

Too few the gods
Seed on the land
Grown houses. 

Two smiles

Tying up loose ends, you said
All crow’s feet and beak. A confiding bird
Perched by your desk pecking
At the keyboard when I walked in.

That smile still startles I swear it’s you
Spin sad to find myself window shopping for one not two.

The harvest of a lifetime. Paper bales laced up tight
Treasury tags. Twin bars bright
Conjoined. Green twine. The ties that bind.

It’s all here, you said. Hand atop the sheaf
Palm down, an oath. No testament, your will:

Accounts.
Policies.
Pensions.
And a note for your mum so she’ll know what to do.

Thank heavens for paperclips and staples, you said.
Coming round. Post stroke words.
The cubicle reflating. Breath held now out
Laughing as you confuse a comb for half a crown.

Ends frayed but held.
Your brain rewired. Wild hair combed.
Forward to post decimalisation.

Ten more years. I wondered how many times you subbed your copy.
Newspaperman to newspaperman
Before I wrote your obituary perched at your desk
In your study. Your hand writing.

The letter to mum. For Sheila: to be opened when I’m gone.
And two smiles becoming one.

Not the 8 30 News: Episode 10 – the end of Season 1 the name’s Bond, Jennie Bond, one

In the week that BBC reporters are told to be more “sweaty and dirty” to earn the trust of viewers, Not the 8.30 News reports live from the gym.

A Roald Dahl-inspired revisionist history edition in which we give Putin the magic finger, tell Brexiters to get clucked and say goodbye to the greasepaint and wigs until series two.

First screened on the Big Live Breakfast Burrito – the only way to start your business Thursdays over on LinkedIn Live from 0745 UK time when series two begins later this year…

Not the 8 30 News: Episode 9 – the John Craven Cottage Chinese spy balloon one

In a week that saw the Americans shoot down several more Chinese spy balloons over the United States, RAF fighter ace, Sir Keir “Biggles” Starmer, attempts to shoot down a number of bloated blimps flying in UK airspace.

Plus the former (In)Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, is toast – literally!

And soon-to-be-gone Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, seeks new movie roles alongside Jeremy Corbyn.

All this and more on the Internet’s slowest growing but most talked about satirical show.


First screened on the Big Live Breakfast Burrito – the only way to start your business Thursdays over on LinkedIn Live from 0745 UK time most weeks.

Not the 8 30 News: Episode 8 – the Anne Diamond Geezer power cut one

With the appointment of Grant Shapps as Minister for Energy Security what could possibly go wrong? Turns out quite a bit…

On the Internet’s slowest growing satirical skit thingy this week, a bull called Boris who spends his time sketching his namesake from cow pats.

Plus when you call Elon Musk a Satanic Goatsucker why you probably won’t be seeing this on Twitter.

Chief Twit, Elon Musk.

Liz Truss and John Cleese vie for the worst comeback since Lazarus.

Liz Truss as Polly. “Don’t mention the short-lived premiership…”

What Buffy the Vampire said to shamed ex-Labour MP Jared O’Mara. And speaking of drug abuse, what licking little squares of paper does for stamp design. Off with his head!

The new King Charles stamp. First class!

First screened on The Big Live Breakfast Burrito – the only way to start your business Thursdays over on LinkedIn Live from 0745 UK time most weeks.