The last bedroom on the right

There is no past
Remembered
Or future
Imagined.
Just the present.

Tense.

A singularity.

You live in the moment. Very on point as they say.
Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cup
Or shredding tissues in your lap

While I am walking an imaginary dog (the one I was convinced would persuade you to let me have a real one for my 13th birthday)
Searching for something
Like a long forgotten book
Cursing that it’s always in the last place you look
And hearing you laughing
In that slightly hurtful grown up way of yours:
Of course it is! Because when you find it
You stop searching.

Finding something, I say: Remember that time…
…before trailing off.
Both of us lost to thought.


Three years since my mother, Sheila, died after she was brutally beaten by another resident in her Luton carehome. Memories of happier visits before that day are still vivid. It is possible to live well with dementia. But it’s a bastard disease for those who watch the fading of the light.

Augur

Though August’s barely halfway through
The copse is clad in autumn’s hue
Its summer greens now fading fast
And taking on a rusty cast.

Embroidered by the evening sun
The trees from threads of gold were spun
But in the furnace split and cracken
And dieback tips of ash twigs blacken.

Limp limbs hang from peels of bark
The heartwood dry and much too dark.
Blackthorn sloes - peas - shrivelled slim
Won’t stiffen up the Christmas gin.

And conkers spilt from cankered cases
Too small for boys to string on laces.
Once shiny pebbles dulled by dust
The stream bed still, the silt now crust.

Yet though the drouth fires rage infernal
A shoot of green, spring hopes eternal.

Where non-believers pray

Scene one: a cubicle in A & E

For what is death
If not escape
From pain in this world
And promise in the next?

The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.
A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator.

The curtains close to end the scene.
The cast, dressed in scrubs of blue and green,
Exit stage left
While the leaving lady has a costume change
The audience, not expecting this plot twist, wide-eyed, bereft

Scene two: the family room

An anteroom with a bed-come-trolley
A single moulded plastic seat
A crate of children’s toys and, legs and arms in supplication, a plastic dolly.
An Egyptian mummy (from Finchley)
Swabbed and swaddled visual sterilisation.
What you came in bagged for crime scene investigation
Or soiled clinical waste marked for incineration.
You in sweet repose
Beyond caring if you’re wearing (remember what you used to say) fresh underwear in case of hospitalisation.

Me one third of an unholy trinity
Mother, son and daughter
In communion no wine
Just bread white sheets
Dipped in blood which never looked brighter
And the powder blue lid
On a fluted plastic jug of water
Served at side room temperature
From a stack of flimsy see through cups
That don’t resist
The clench of a tight-balled fist
Because we’re holding on so tight
Under the migraine flicker of fluorescent light

(Low hum)

For fear of losing grip
And letting all this slip…

A simple wooden cross
A side table
A bible with an unsticking plaster “do not remove” label
Some leaflets about loss
And a phone connected by a tiny silver rosary chain
To a laminated card: to speak to the chaplain
Press 0 and ask reception

Go on I say
Let’s order up a resurrection
In the family chapel where even the non-believers pray
And laugh in the face of death because all tears are from the same saline dissolution

Drip, drip, drip until the end of day.  

Scene three: a hospital mortuary

The unusually dead are portered to their unmaker for dissection
Pathologists weigh your innards, slice your brain
Sluice your fluids down the drain.
Leaving you unmade. Bits worn. Bits broken. A catalogue of parts.
Coronary sclerosis stilled your no longer beating heart
That and the awful, unstoppable arc
Of an upturned walking stick
In the two handed grip
Of geometry and physics (them and Mrs Clarke)
Her unspeakable role. And your last words: I feel sick
Recorded on a high res vid on the hi viz vest
An end of life jacket. I’ve watched this bit a thousand times, know the rest…

Captains Courageous. Spencer Tracy
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry.

Back at the surface, fighting for breath
Is this what they mean by a living death?
Slabbed and gutted in a different way.
Twisting and turning from the scalpel
But no less eviscerated.

A Shropshire Symphony Revisited

Five years ago it felt like the world had momentarily stopped spinning. The nightly Covid bulletins aside, everything seemed preternaturally silent. Planes stayed on the ground. Traffic halted. And without the usual din of everday life (and later the weekly clap for carers) we began to notice sounds that had always been there but were drowned out by human activity.

I don’t miss the pandemic. But I do miss properly listening to nature. So it gave me great pleasure to dig out this symphony of sounds I recorded in my back garden during lockdown.

Lorca’s Pencil

Federico García Lorca was one of Spain’s finest poets. Assassinated by Fascists in August 1936 soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War his death should remind us of the dangers of fascism as it rises once again, not just in Spain where I’m writing this but across the world.

So here is a poem for World Poetry Day.

Lorca’s resting place has never been found. But the graves of many who lost their lives under Franco have been and their remains returned to their families. I was struck that among the possessions retrieved from the most recently found bodies was a pencil. So I used that as my starting point for this work of imagination. What last words would Lorca’s pencil have written in the hours – at most days – between his detention and his death?

Lorca’s Pencil

Vete a la mierda, Lorca
Fuck you Lorca
Fuck your words
Fuck your poesia
And fuck your queer ways

The pencil cracked more softly than the bullet though hurt me more. The broken end thrust thus in my poet’s eye.

Yet stabbed and shot
To die I worry not
As I had not worried to be born.
This unmarked grave like my fly-leaved crib
Hojas en blanco continuará
Blank sheets to be filled.
Poetry cannot be stilled.
This pencil unearthed will pick up its path:

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.
And I am more alive than ever
My words illuminate the darkness.
My pencil points the way.

Lee mis palabras
Read my words
Remember my words
Recite my words
But never reject them

My unconcealed weapon is truly mightier than the sword (it’s what scared them so and put me here)
Behold this arch-enchanter’s wand
Itself a nothing (to borrow Bulwer-Lytton)
But taking sorcery from my master hand (as he has written)
To paralyse my seizers.
And to strike them breathless
Take away the sword
Freedom can be saved without it!

El futuro es tuyo para escribirlo
The future is yours to write, so
Escribelo bien
Write it well.

Rhayader Reveille

Midnight strikes on the memorial clock
A flame throwing dragon is guarding the flock
While a gunpowder fog glistens and glosses 
The uniform slates and the uniform mosses. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

A window on North Street turned aquarium green
Where a Six Nations turf war bled out on the screen
And all the beers downed are now suds on the glass
As a solider called Taffy’s kicked out on his arse.

The Castle Hotel on a Saturday night.
Over the top lads. One hell of a fight.  
Jones is shot through, guts spilled at ten paces
One hundred years from the pals without faces.

Retching and heaving by the stone-carved platoon
Blood at the feet of the boys gone too soon. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

Nisha, meanwhile, she will not remember
This hen night scene from sometime in… November?
And is missing in action out in no man’s land 
Too many Jägerbombs, four in each hand. 

At the sound of a whistle, she went over the top  
And is now taking cover in Lloyd Morgan’s shop
Pinned down on East Street by the rat a tat tat
Of a security shutter and the hiss of a cat.

And sniping from windows and ricochet words
The bayonet beaks of the flesh-eating birds
A battle dress ribbon, a medal for valour
An ecstasy of fumbling*, no masks boys it’s Calor. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

By dawn the guns are silent 
And a smoke of red kites rises above the carrion
As an Ivor Williams trailer bleats past
Welsh lambs for the slaughter.


These lines were written laying in bed next to an Evans in my hotel room after watching the poet, Atilla the Stockbroker, perform in Rhayader’s wonderful Lost Arc arts venue.

*The expression “an ecastasy of fumbling” is lifted directly from the war poet Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. I thank him, Atilla and my constant muse, Dylan Thomas, for the inspiration and my poetry teacher, Pele Cox, for her gentle and expert encouragement.

The memorial clock tower Rhayader from my bedroom above Ty Morgan’s cafe. It was erected by subscription in 1924 for the men of the area who lost their lives in the Great War. The names of those who died in WW2 were added later. The Castle Hotel’s “aquarium” disco is round the corner in North Street. The Calor gas sign close to where Nisha took shelter is just to the right in East Street.

Not the 8.30 News: the Christmas party 2024 review of the year one

Tin hats at the ready. In this Armageddon-inspired episode our newsreader lands an
an exclusive interview with Prince Andrew who claims he can’t possibly have been with the businessman-come-spy, Yang Tengbo, because he was ordering a Chinese giveaway (sorry takeaway) at Sum Phat Lie’s in Wo-king at the time. He remembers it well because he’d eaten Epstein (sorry chowmein) with porn crackers. Or just 17 as it appears on the menu.

Plus a news of remake of Wallace and Vomit starring the erstwhile Masterchef presenter and Milwall fan Greg no one likes me, I don’t care Wallace who tells us he thought innuendo was a pessary for middle class women of a certain age.

Oh and an update on just how close we all are to oblivion.


Not the 8.30 News is a segment of the Big Live Breakfast Burrito over on LinkedIn.

Inquest jury highlights dementia care home failings in death of elderly woman attacked by another resident as she slept

It’s more than two years since my mother, Sheila Hartman, was attacked by another resident as she lay in bed at her care home, Ridgeway Lodge in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Sheila – mum – was beaten around her head and body with the curved end of a wooden walking stick by 92 year old Eunice Clarke who was also living with dementia.

Although sometimes the wheels of justice turn frustratingly slowly I have no complaints about the thoroughness of the inquest. It examined more than a thousand pages of care records which showed care home staff knew about Eunice’s verbal and physical aggression but that managers failed to act on the information and put a proper care plan in place for her. A plan that would recognise and manage the risk she posed to herself, staff and other residents, Sheila included.

To say it was an accident waiting to happen would be wrong. It was no accident. It was the consequence of appallingly poor care and I’m now working with the care home operator, HC One, to make sure it never happens again. That would be a positive legacy for both women -victims in different ways of the horrible disease that is dementia.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the case you can listen here to an interview I gave to BBC Three Counties radio after the jury returned their verdict.

No time to spare? Want a quick read? You can see the BBC News online version of the story here.

Here’s a link to a compilation of the media coverage of the case.

Swift

First south and west, then north and east, I quarter up the sky.
I’m watching for your sickle wings to scythe across my eye.

I look, I look, then look again and listen for your scream.
But bar the clap of pigeon wings there’s nothing to be seen.

The mewl of buzzards overhead, spirals on upward air.
An aerial feat, though quite a treat, no answer to my prayers.

And still they go unanswered though the grass is growing long.
And the swallows and the martins have joined the heavenly throng.

I love their eaves-slung mudhuts and their lineups on the wire.
But you dear swift, my absent friend, you set my heart on fire.

So I look and look again for gracious airborne crescents.
Vesper flights in evening light please grace us with your presence.

And then you’re here and I thank god for sending you to me
Although I never crooked my neck the vicar’d church to see.

You are my priest of summertime. Your pulpit is the skies.
And when you leave and head back home a bit inside me dies.

The cock cranks north, the wind is cold, your ministry I need.
My neck cranes south beyond the spire I’m wishing you Godspeed.


They’re back! So to mark their return to the skies over Shropshire here’s a poem about one of my favourite birds first written and performed in Ludlow in August 2023.