The Big Live Breakfast Burrito is perhaps the weirdest show on the Internet. Hosted on LinkedIn and restreamed live to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter plus a heap of other platforms in theory in should be unwatchable. But somehow its compelling mix of what one viewer called “unstructured nonsense” works. Or at least I think it does. Although I would say that because I’m an occasional contributor! Here I am channelling my inner newsreader and making my first attempt at satire. Let me know what you think. Even if it’s rubbish. It’s the silence that kills you.
Black Hole
Bloodless skin too tightly drawn for lips. White. Like supermarket chicken. A row of teeth along the bottom curve. None along the top. (You lost those long ago.) And that moustache that grandmas get And tickle when you kiss. It’s four. Trying to remember that last conversation for company. Except we didn’t know it was going to be the last conversation. Not then. The detail’s faded. And without that to cling on to we’re drowning. A black hole. Pulling everything In and out All this framed from your broken boxer’s nose to your chin By The Mask of Sorrow (you liked that film, the one starring Douglas Fairbanks. Or was it Tyrone Powers?) Held in place by a loop of lawn green elastic. Stretched. But not yet snapped. Out and in To breaking point. What does a fractured skull look like? I’d take a picture with my phone and send you. The police officers standing at the head of your bed have. For “evidential purposes.” One in uniform. The other in plain clothes. A detective. Made them feel sick. My italics. My mother. Smash all the mirrors. They have no use anymore. Let’s have some bloody dignity here. Yes bloody. In and out. Contusion That’s the word the doctor uses. That and depressed fractures of the orbit. Dr Murray. David. I like his trainers. Why do I notice them when he’s telling me your eyeball has dropped into the place where your cheek bone used to be? Look up from the Nikes. Neanderthal. Yes that’s the look. And with the head bandage a touch of Mother Teresa. Confusion. And out “You can talk to her. She can probably hear you.” “Pick a fight with someone your own size next time Mum.” As bright as the fluorescents. The nurse gives me a strange look. Pity or disdain. She knows what I’m thinking. I think. And I’d like to have her. In That was a performance. Privacy now. Blue curtains drawn. Neat pleats. You’d like them. Voices on the other side. On this side whispers. Through the orange neck brace to your blood-flaked ear. The roar of the ocean inside a seashell. Cromer beach. Drowning out the beeps. Can you hear it? I want to cry. Like the last time I saw you crying. When dad died. But I can’t. Him telling me to be strong. So I tell you that you are loved and list your children and grandchildren one by one. Eight names. Living. Breathing. Without your spark none of this. None of us. And out Let me hold your hand. It’s warm under the giant bubble wrap blanket. Dying this way is a numbers game. I’m an expert at this now. I’ve been here four hours. A screen. About the size of that telly you won from the competition on the back of the Kellogs Cornflakes box. But in colour Top row. Green. Waves. Listen with mother. The shipping forecast. Tyne, Fisher, Dogger, Heart Rate. 105. falling slowly. In Second row. Yellow. 100%. Gold star. Tollington School for Girls, East Finchley. Top of the class. Except the oxygen machine is doing your work now. Cheat. And there’s a picture with your exam results. An X-ray showing your lungs are half full of fluid. Or half empty. Whichever way you look at it. And out Bottom right hand corner. Smallest font. Two numbers. In red. Blood pressure. Shannon, Sole, Systolic, Diastolic 45 millibars falling more slowly. And in Numbers. You were breathing too quickly when they brought you in by ambulance Morphine Now we’re counting the seconds between the breaths. It’s up to four. We’re in Italy. (That holiday you wrote about in the diary we’ve just found. The first family holiday after dad died). We’re on the quayside. There’s a gentle breeze off the land. Scented. Filling the sails of the night fishing boats. Such small boats. Such a huge ocean. Slip the mooring. And out We watch until she’s safely over the horizon.
Poetry as therapy. This is a work in progress, still raw. It’s been thoughtfully and lightly edited by my poetry coach, Pele Cox, and her fellow poet Sally Read. Between them they have offered invaluable support and knocked off some of the rougher edges. I am indebted to them for this and I have no doubt we will do more work on it together in due course. But for now I thought it important to post the piece while the events that prompted it are still fresh.
Many of you already know the circumstances and have very kindly reached out to offer your support. But for those who don’t, it’s about my 88-year-old mother, Sheila, who in early October was beaten by another resident in her care home and died from her injuries in hospital a few hours later.
Read also…
Cloud lines
We live on the lower slopes of Titterstone Clee Hill in South Shropshire. Our house straddles the ever-shifting boundary (sometimes less than a vegetable patch wide) between what is shrouded in mist or cloud and what is clear. Between the seen and the unseen. Between what is perfectly rendered by the eye and imperfectly remembered by the mind’s eye. This is the space that many of my poems spring from.
Kite
The Hill: you, me, and dad
wearing the green jumper
that still smells of him.
The kite: an orange lozenge
of ripstop nylon
skin tight on a wooden cross.
Me: running fast
enough to take off
but bound by string
to earth.
Your laugh sticks in my throat.
I cough to clear it
but it’s in my head.
The kite lifts a little
Then nosedives through its arc
and lands
with that whipcrack you hear
out of sync like
summer lighting. One spark and
This whole dark scene
Silvers for a second
And is gone
Blacker than before
The thunder.
News coverage
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.
My life in words – in words
I was asked to be a guest of the inimitable Eric Doyle on The Crux Cast which is streamed live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. If you’re interested in what makes me tick – and fancy a bit of a hoot – here’s an insight into my lifelong passion for words. Pull up a beanbag, pour yourself a drink….
Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas
My poetry coach, the wonderful Pele Cox, has asked me to commit this poem to memory. It’s proving to be a tough gig. Not least because the last time I learned lines was probably as Friedrich von Trapp in the Parkfields School production of the Sound of Music back in the early 1970s. I had to dress in lederhosen for that role. For this one I’m not sure what I’ll wear. Something Welsh maybe?!
It’s a beautiful poem by the way. I’ve reproduced it below from my copy of Dylan Thomas Selected Works.* I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to do it justice. I’ll keep you posted on this pilgrim’s progress.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
- Published in 1976 by Book Club Associates with the permission of the Trustees of the copyrights of the late Dylan Thomas.
A birthday poem
I was asked to pen a birthday poem to celebrate the first anniversary of The Big Live Breakfast Burrito – perhaps the weirdest, most eclectic but nonetheless wonderful LinkedIn live you’ll ever see. Follow the Burrito link to see the reading in context. Here it is with captions in not-so-splendid isolation.
Lost in the woods – a Catholic shrine
This is a story that resonates with what is happening today. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio Norfolk and features an interview with my good friend and former BBC colleague Conal O’Donnell.
It’s the extraordinary story of Paul Hoda’c who fled to the UK during World War Two after his native Czechoslovakia was overrun by the Nazis. He settled here and as reminder of both his faith and the forests of his native country he built a Roman Catholic shrine near Dereham in Norfolk.
Here Conal explains how his own family is connected to the strange story of the shrine in the woods.
