Learning by rote

I hadn’t learned anything by rote – apart from my bank PIN number – since playing Friedrich Von Trapp in the Parkfields School production of The Sound of Music. And that was back in 1972. So when my poetry coach, Pele Cox, asked me to commit to memory Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas I wasn’t even sure I could do it. Running to 467 words over 54 lines and six verses, it was certainly longer than the script for my stage debut (and, as it turned out, finale). Plus, a 61-year-old mind was surely going to be less malleable than that of an 11-year-old used to reciting his times tables to teachers armed with knuckle-rapping rulers?

But it turns out I needn’t have worried. It took time – nearly two months in all (although I reckon I could have done it much quicker if I’d been able to commit to it full time like, say, an actor doing it for a living). And it took discipline – reading each line again and again and again… Probably more than 100 times in all.

That repetition was instrumental in cementing the words in my memory. But to give those words voice and to imbue them with something more than their narrow semantic meaning required me to occupy the poem and, therefore, by extension, the poet’s head. This, of course, sounds like pretentious twaddle! So let me explain…

I don’t mean that I read the poem in a Welsh accent (although I did) or that, like Thomas, I occasionally combined my task with alcohol (although I did). I mean that I strutted around my own garden from “under the apple bough” to the “lilting house” listening to the “tunes from the chimneys” and watching my farming neighbours in their “hay fields as high as the house.” Each time I walked by the brook that flows “all the sun long” at the bottom of the lane I declared (to any passerby who cared to listen) that “the Sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy streams.” Every swallow swoop was a reminder of the “loft by the shadow of my hand.”

Being inside the poem in this way helped me both to learn it and to feel it. If at any point a word or line was lost I could, in a very real sense at least initially, look for it. Not in Fern Hill in South Wales but in my half-real, half-imagined recreation of that landscape in South Shropshire. I am “blessed among stables” and realise this process might have been more difficult had I been living in South London.

So what have I learned from the exercise – apart from the obvious – and was it worthwhile?

That my brain isn’t as knackered as I feared it might be.

That poems – or certainly good ones – are like onions and can be peeled back layer by layer to reveal things you miss in a single, cursory reading. Forgive the crass metaphor but for me it’s not unlike the difference between a one-night-stand and a lasting relationship. The superficial may be gratifying – beautiful even. But intimacy – spending longer with a person, poem or poet – is revelatory and ultimately so much more rewarding.

One such reward revealed to me by spending days on end with Fern Hill is that eventually you can move beyond the words (like a couple of old lovers sitting in silence) and hear in that quietness the “breathing” – the rhythm, tone and cadence – of the poem. That musicality is one of Thomas’s many gifts.

But I guess the biggest lesson is that to achieve anything remotely close to the mastery of language demonstrated by Thomas I must spend as much time living and breathing my own poems. Anything less will make them superficial.

Being a newsreader is boring

Let me start with a confession: I wasn’t a very good newsreader. And I didn’t do it for very long. But I did it for long enough to learn that (a) sitting around all day reading somebody else’s words from an autocue isn’t a proper job and that (b) despite appearances, the news doesn’t change very much – it’s essentially the same old stories being told and retold over and over and over again. Ad nauseum.

So I jumped at the chance to write and perform my own skit on The Big Live Breakfast Burrito – quite possibly the weirdest LinkedIn Live show you’ll ever see.

Here I am playing the role of an end-of-the-pier fortune teller – a worryingly camp cross cross between Gypsy Rose Lee and Jack Sparrow. You can be the judge of whether I’m as lousy at script-writing and acting as news reading. But I don’t think you can deny I enjoyed myself!

Thank you to Mrs Uridge for her lipstick (clearly she didn’t apply it) and for the blouse and bling which I have, of course, returned.

Little Rocket Man

A lot has been made of Jeff Bezos’s short jaunt into space: whether he might have spent his money more wisely; as world leaders gather for COP26 what impact his venture might be causing the environment; even what constitutes “outer space” given that he barely crossed the Karman line (the not universally-recognised end of the Earth’s atmosphere); and that 60 years earlier – the year of my birth and hence my interest in these things – the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, went three times further in Vostok 1. So I’ve been doing some maths.

Now maths wasn’t my strong subject at school (I famously resat my maths A level having gained a D first time round and subsequently got a U which is why I’m a journalist and not a rocket scientist)! What I’m saying is please do check my working out and tell me if I’m wrong. But if I’m right then…

Given that astronauts have been to the moon and back I decided to use the distance to the moon from Earth as my reference point. That’s 384,400 km give or take. Bezos’s New Shepherd capsule reached an apogee (maximum height) of 106 km. Dividing 106 by 384,400 and multiplying the result by 100 gives you the percentage of the distance Bezos got to the moon – a meagre 0.0275754% of the way.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine such a tiny percentage of such an incredibly long journey so I looked for an equivalent here on earth and settled on London to Leeds at 272 km as the crow flies. And here’s the stunning part. In comparison to the Apollo moon shots, Mr Amazon’s space flight was the equivalent of setting off for Leeds from Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square and getting no further than the north side of the square – just 75 metres – before turning round and coming back!

A bit more maths for you to check: I’m told he’s spent US $5.5 billion on the Blue Origin venture so far which means, in effect, that each of those 75 steps towards the National Portrait Gallery will have cost him an eye-watering US $73.3 million. Cheaper to walk Jeff. And better for the planet.


Image credit: Chuck Bigger/SpaceNews

Juji

Juji is a mynah bird. Caught up in the evacuation of Kabul along with a young Afghan girl and carried to freedom in a cardboard box, this is quite simply the most moving and beautiful story you’ll hear for a long time. Please do listen.

Credit: BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Photo credit: Xavier Chatel

A Shropshire Symphony – winter

Taking pictures forces you to look at the world more carefully. You see things through the viewfinder that you might miss with the naked eye. And yet more detail resolves itself in the taken image.

So it is with recording sounds. You hear things through the headphones that might otherwise be lost in the background noise. The squeak of freshly fallen snow under foot. The scrunch of that same snow after a hard frost. The splashing of drips. Drips becoming trickles. Trickles becoming streams. Melt water tumbling over stones. And listening back, the source of each sound can be clearly “seen.”

Ears have eyes.

Crunch, scrunch, slosh… the sounds of a lockdown winter walk.

Ridiculously pretentious I know, but like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, The Shropshire Symphony will eventually have four movements. You can listen here to the Spring movement I recorded during the first lockdown in April 2020.

A Shropshire Symphony – spring

From early morning geese to late night owls via a blackbird serenading from his perch in our cherry tree, all these natural sounds were recorded over the four days of Easter in our garden near Ludlow.


To my way of thinking there is little or no separation between sounds and words. The best words are visual – in the sense that they readily conjure up a mental image. Sounds do the same. So I hope you can “see” the source of the sounds in this composition with your ears with the same vibrancy I first saw them with my eyes.

“You can see the dags” – my top ten Strava ride names

Let’s face it cyclists aren’t a very creative bunch. Or certainly not if the names they give their rides on Strava are anything to go by. A quick and dirty tally of my activity feed over the past few days looks something like this…

Morning rides – 9
Lunchtime rides – 5
Afternoon rides – 11
Evening rides – 14
Night rides – 1

Original names are few and far between. There’s one airing the grey matter but given the rider’s a psychologist it’s a tad too obvious. And as for evening pootle and a few hard efforts (you know who you are), you didn’t buy £10k’s worth of carbon fibre racing machinery between you to take it easy for god’s sake! Show some self respect. I think I’d prefer plain old evening ride to those two.

It’s not like we don’t have the time to think up original names. I mean we have enough for drinks stops and cake stops and more cake stops and toilet stops and yet more cake stops. And if we’re riding in a group we’ve got time to talk about stretch lycra, salbutamol, Bradley Wiggins, and to ponder the eternal question: to shave or not to shave. So surely we can spare a few moments to to come up with something that sums up both the ride and our personalities? Here’s my top 10 creatively named rides which if they aren’t on Strava yet damn well should be. Please add yours in the comments box at the end.

  1.  You can see the dags from here
    A ride name that must have originated in the Antipodes where the word dag refers to the dried faeces clinging to the wool on a sheep’s arse. In other words, unshiftable without a 200psi pressure washer  – a bit like grit on a chain. You can see the dags from here is taken to mean that the rider has had such a close encounter of the turd kind (a variant of the name) that he or she could actually count the individual dags. Other variants popular with Northern lad and lasses who do most of their riding on unfenced, upland roads include: smell the lanolin, as in “t’ little feckers were reet close ‘r kid I’ll swear y’ cud smell t’ lanolin;” and lambs to the slaughter aka silence of the lambs where, as the names suggest, the gambol doesn’t pay off, you roll over a hyperactive, day-old ovine and kill it.
  2. Fish in baby oil
    As in, as slippery as a fish in baby oil. I’ll confess this was actually one of my rides. Pride, they say, cometh before a fall and it certainly did in this case. On what would otherwise have been my plain, old evening ride, I attempted to impress two young ladies out walking their dogs, by cycling through the ford barring our collective way, rather than taking the footbridge as they sensibly did. In a splash my tyres lost their grip on the algae-slicked cobbles. I took an early bath. And they had an early laugh.
  3. Up sh!t creek without a pedal
    Water and bikes clearly don’t go together. I lost nothing more than my pride in the preceding ride. This rider clearly lost one half of his drive train. Sh!tty because one tends not to carry spare pedals on most rides. Inner tubes, yes. Tyres even. But pedals, no.
  4. Miner’s lamp
    Pot holes are a pre-occupation (and an occupational hazard) for most UK-based cyclists. Particularly as our dear, non-cycling leader (she prefers walking barefoot through corn fields apparently) is preoccupied with Brexit and not running the country by fixing roads, the NHS, the economy, housing, etc. Such is the scale of the crisis that this and the next two entries are, unapologetically, variations on the state of the roads theme. The Miner’s lamp ride is assumed to draw it’s inspiration from the brass safety lantern, invented by Sir Humphry Davy, carried by miners to illuminate the darkest recesses of the deepest mines. There is, however, a school of thought, which suggests it’s not an ironic reference to the depth of some potholes at all but rather a corruption of “I’m a stupid bugger I went for a night ride minus lamp and had to turn back.”
  5. Speleologist
    Clearly a ride taken by an educated cyclist because speleologist is simply a posh word for a caver – troglodytes who get really worked up if you don’t know the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. Apparently stalactites hang down and you can remember this because they have to hold on tite to the ceiling. Blah, blah, blah. The ride name is widely considered to be another reference to the ridiculous depth of potholes – especially after last winter. But there are some who think it originated from an eye-watering peloton accident where the lead rider braked too hard and the following riders disappeared down a black hole.
  6. Canary
    The state of the roads really must be getting to people because this is the third ride in my current top 10 concerned with potholes. It goes something like this: “if they get much deeper I’ll have to take a canary on my next ride to check for methane.” Like so many rides, there is a possible alternative origin: that the rider was dressed from neck to knee in bright yellow bib shorts and vest and was greeted with the cry “canary” by his fellow riders and sundry motorists. Actually scrub that alternative because, if it was true, the ride would’ve been called Tweety Pie or just plain Twat.
  7. Granny rings
    Not the interpretation you might expect, which is why I’ve chosen this one. Turns out the rider wasn’t in the hills and constantly selecting the small gear or granny ring up front. No, the ride was stop start for a different reason – his actualgranny rings him during the ride to ask if he’s seen grandad who’s got a touch of Alzheimer’s and has gone walkabout yet again. This proves to be a bit of a dilemma for our cycling grandson; does he quit the ride and miss the cake to join the search or hold the phone into the breeze, mumble that it’s a terrible line and that he can barely hear, before making a superhuman effort to get back on? Surely the best solution would be to sign gramps up for Strava, strap that spare mobile to his slippers and follow his perambulations on Live Track?!
  8. Disco inferno
    I’ve a strong suspicion this ride was named by somebody who, like me, grew up in the Seventies. “Burn baby burn it’s a disco inferno” were lyrics from a 1976 hit by an American outfit called The Trammps (yes, with two mms). My hunch is that somebody was grinding up a big hill – definitely not in the granny ring (see above) – and was feeling the lactic acid building up in their legs. You can well imagine their inner voice “ooh the burn baby burn it’s a disco inferno.” Not quite shut up legs but it takes all sorts.
  9. Let them eat cake
    There’s always one ascetic* who sips only water at the stops and sucks on lettuce leaves when everybody else tucks into slices of carrot. Carrot cake that is. He gets back 4kg lighter and 6kg smugger than when he set out and chooses a ride name that really sums up his approach to life, cycling, the Universe. He doesn’t know it (until now) but his fellow riders have an alternative name for the ride that does just that: tosser.
  10. The perfect ten
    If anyone I know calls their ride this, I’ll run them off the road next time I’m on four wheels and they’re on two. Any ride name with the prefix perfect in it almost certainly wasn’t anything of the sort. It’s a sure sign the rider’s straddling something that’s worth close to the price of your house. “I’m telling you (they’re always telling you even if you don’t want to be told) that was a great ride mate. Fantastic wheels those Zipps. And the skin suit, wow, definitely shaved a few seconds of my KoM. I’d say it was the perfect ten.” You want to punch him on the Rudy Project Aero Helmet, but, before you land the first blow, think better of it and instead cycle as fast as you can – without Zipps or a skin suit –  in the opposite direction. With a bit of luck the quick getaway will allow you to steal his KoM. What, I hear you say? The perfect ten?

So you’re on notice: if you don’t at least make an effort to rename your ride I won’t unfollow you but I will withhold that kudos.


*Ascetic (noun) – one who leads a life characterized by severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence.
Synonyms: austere, self-denying, abstinent, abstemious, non-indulgent, self-disciplined, frugal, simple, rigorous, strict, severe, hair-shirt, spartan, monastic, monkish, nunlike, boring (I made this last one up).

An open letter to Bradley Wiggins

Dear Bradley

Like many MAMILS (middle aged men in Lycra) you are the reason I got back into cycling forty something years after hopping off my Raleigh Chopper when I gave up my paper round as a 16 year old. I loved your lamb chop sideburns. I loved your Northern deadpan. I loved your taste in music. But most of all I loved the fact that a seemingly ordinary bloke could be extraordinary. It gave this not-terribly-sporty ordinary bloke, who got picked last and then reluctantly by the captains in a game of playground footy, something to believe in. You could call it a bromance. My wife did. There are three of us in this marriage she said, only half jokingly before buying me some eye-wateringly expensive Team Sky kit and a Wiggins Number 1 tee shirt for Christmas. That’s true love for you.

So I’ve had your name bobbing up and down on my buttocks for the last four years. As mobile billboards go I’m the first to admit it’s not been the most striking advertisement but all the same I want my money back plus interest (or rather Mrs Uridge does). Seriously. They were sold to us under false pretences. Plus the logo wasn’t terribly durable.

But there’s another altogether more valuable contract that you’ve broken if the DCMS select committe report is accurate: the notion that just about anything’s achievable with the application of hard work, dedication and attention to detail. You encouraged me (and countless thousands others) to believe in that approach. I applied it when I cycled 3,000 miles across America in three weeks. I applied it when I cycled in your Tour de France tyre tracks over the Alps from Paris to Nice. I’ve applied it for the last three years trying (in vain) to get an age group podium in the Storm the Castle duathlon in my home town of Ludlow. Fifth, I think, is the best I’ve done. And do you know what? I’d rather come fifth for the rest of my life and know that I’ve done my best than come first and know that I’ve done my worst. Because that’s ultimately what crossing an ethical line is: doing your worst not doing your best.

So slink off into the shadows Bradley. I’m sure you won’t miss me. I sure as hell won’t miss you. If you find yourself short of friends I’m sure Lance Armstrong will take your calls.

For what it’s worth I had my suspicions. Bromance, romance. They’re not so different. You get the feeling you’re being cheated on long before the confirmation. But when it comes the evidence you “crossed an ethical line” – or rather the highly suspicious lack of evidence that you didn’t – still sickens you to the core even though you’ve moved on and re-partnered (in my case to that nice Mr Froome).

I’ve just listened to what you’ve said in your defence. I’m not convinced. There’s lipstick on your collar so to speak and you can’t or won’t explain how it got there.

Yours unfaithfully

Richard Uridge

PS If you’re wondering why I’ve sent this letter in a Jiffy bag…

PPS One or two pedants have pointed out that the select committee report doesn’t accuse you directly of cheating – only that your team “crossed an ethical line.” And nor do I. Like I said, part of your appeal is your plain-speaking. I’m sure you’ll understand the difference.

SODA FOR MILK

Where were you when the child was crying, mourning a loss not yet hers, but near, an inevitability?
Were you safely tucked away in a cocoon of comfort, one where ignorance could be a justifiable excuse for your indifference?

Etchings of fear lashed across her face, as though a mad man had taken a machete and crisscrossed it with an instrument designed purely for her pain.
Pain so emotional it rendered itself physical upon her body.
That tiny body is a vessel upon which the detritus of an entire region is transported.

Salty tears slid down a well-worn track.
They seemed to know their path, their destination, a knowledge instilled through repetition of this same activity, day after day, till they reached a well unable to be filled.

Relentless pain of the emotional kind is a special sort of beast.
It weakens the mind but not always the body, and the body is our instrument with which we broadcast our state of being to others.
If the emotional is invisible to those observing us, then our pain, fear and desperation all goes unknown, and the suffering, it continues, shrouded by the okay-ness of our physical bodies.

Why are some chosen for a blessed life, and others born in the gutter and forgotten?
By just the luck of a nation, a parent, a situation, we thrive, drown or die.
That soda for milk, that fear for joy, what life is this to live?

Those children of the mountains, they form part of the landscape.
But it’s funny because eventually, the mountain relinquishes that inky chunky matter that is the lifeblood of Appalachia, hungrily clawed from the belly of that land.
But the mountain will never release these children, they are stuck, their permanence in this land ensured forever.


My daughter, Rose Keating, wrote this after watching a Diane Sawyer documentary called A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. You can watch it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8ZfIYAYsgA