W. Terry Fox Cheshire's Longest-Serving Poet Laureate

StringFing's ChristmasFing

2011-12-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

YAY!! It’s Christmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!!

StringFing’s ChristmasFing
Wednesday December 14th
Holy Inadequate, Etruria

with guests
Lynda Fox, percussion, and blooz boys
Pete Latham & Chris Bingham

8.30pm start. Bring yourself along. You deserve it!

***
Hey, hey, go merrily on your way,

Terry

***

AREN'T LIBRARIES BRILLIANT?!!

2011-12-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Saville is dead.

I met him just once, back in the 60s. Saville was on the upward curve of his rainbow then. I was playing a gig with the New Vaudeville Band in Manchester (Belle Vue?) where he was how’s-about-that’ing on the turntables and being ultra-enthusiastic about the utter crap he was playing – much the same as I was on the piano.

A local story about your man Saville is that he was the guest celebrity who officially opened Mow Cop and Mount Pleasant Village Hall on 20th May 1965. This is the version of events that was passed on to me:

Saville had been a wrestler and wrestled on the same circuit as a wrestler resident of Mow. When it came to discussions about the official opening of the village hall, the good-natured Mow dood said, ‘I’ll see if I can get my mate Jimmy Saville to do it for us.’ Brilliant! Saville was big time and would do the occasion proud and, it was hoped, for free.

When it came to the day, Saville allegedly charged them a fee of £200 (evidently his agent had insisted). Two-hundred notes! - and they were notes then - a whopping amount of money in those days. To give you an idea of how much: Lynda and I bought a house around the corner from the village hall five years later and paid £950. It’d had taken the Village Hall committee six years of hard work to raise the £1500 for the hall. That’s a rate of £250 a year . . .

The Village Hall Committee was naturally disappointed, not to say financially embarrassed. ‘Never mind,’ Saville allegedly said, pausing to drag on a cigar the size of a toddler’s arm, ‘I’ll send you the latest Top Twenty records for you to play on your social nights.’ The Committee waited eagerly for the records to arrive.

They’ve been waiting forty-six years. They’ll never get them now.

***

The Right On! night at Congleton library was ace. Mike Drew staged an excellent show of poetry and song - voices speaking out against political exploitation, injustice and persecution.

The poetry was the absolute business, with contributions from The Nomads, Phil Williams and that shining star of the Cheshire Poet Laureate Scheme, John Lindley.

The songs were provided by yours truly, Dave Wedgebury, Dave Dove, Andy Stubbs and Phil Maddocks. As Phil remarked after the early evening sound check, it’s amazing how five singer/acoustic guitarists, inspired by the same coterie of predecessors, can come together on the same night and play songs on the same theme and be so different one from the other:

Dave Wedgebury with his Bob Marley-influenced high tenor voice; Dave Dove with his smooth West Coast approach, Andy Stubbs with his in-your-face Anglo-American proto punk, high-energy vibe; Phil Maddocks with his sophisticated English balladeer approach and me . . . er . . . whatever, I don’t know, none of the above, I suppose . . . me with my bag of rough n ready homemade songs, erratically performed.

The audience was up for it and receptive to the cause and to the individual offerings.

'Twas Right On! right enough.

***

I was on Red Shift Radio on Tuesday promoting the Poetry Party taking place at the Alsager Library on Friday December 9th with Angus Varley the library manager.

We were interviewed by Simon Newbury whose is a fine photographer with his other hat on. It was a good interview. I read: Homage to Cheshire, Talking Blues and Heathery Weathery Hill.

Angus read a couple of monkey poems written by his brother. I mean, they were about monkeys. I’m not suggesting Angus' brother is a monkey. Though, on the other hand, we are all brother and sister monkeys according to Mr. Monkey Darwin, ain’t we?

Simon liked the imagery of my Homage to Cheshire and asked if he could use it for a series of new photographs. I was quick to agree to the collaboration. Delighted actually. Simon is so good in the old art of light and shade malarky and I’m looking forward what he comes up with. I’ll keep you posted.

Why not come along to the poetry party? It’s a sort of open mic night for poets. I’m hosting it and I know that we have some very exciting poets coming along. There’ll be lots of lovely stuff for the poetry fan and there will be refreshments too.

Libraries are shaping up to be the most happening of places. Make sure you support your local library.

Those in government, local and national, who propose the closing down of public libraries (how stupid, how sinister a suggestion that is) ought give up their own private libraries by way of example.

And yes, David Cameron, that means both your books, even the one you haven't finished colouring in.

***

I’m going off for a swing in my rubber tyre now.

Hope to see you at the Alsager Library Poetry Party on the 9th.

Please take care of yourselves and everyone you meet,

Terry

***

WRITERS BLOG

2011-11-07T01:56:00.000-08:00

I do understand the whole blogging bag, really I do. You’re suppose to blog up gigs and stuff you’re about to do, aren’t you? - so people can come along if they want to. Soz.

BUT blimey, mates! blogging is taking time out and I get so busy doing stuff I have little time left to post anything, and no mistake.

My last blog was on August 9th. It seems like I were only a bit of a lad back then in those olden times. A callow youth with an optimistic smile on his spotty face, blissfully unaware of the cruelties of human existence that lay in wait for him . . .

. . . like finding out there are people who go around calling themselves poets when they clearly don’t know what a poem is and who should be prosecuted under the trades description act. I can’t name names for legal and social reasons and, sadly, they’ve no idea who they are.

I do write blogs in my head, though. And that’s where they stay most of the time. It ain’t my fault that communications technology is so ill-advanced that we still have to use computers and phones and things instead of being able to think stuff out to people.

The necessity is there, so get inventing mother . . .

***

WARNING: This posting will be long and rambling cuz, like the man said, I haven’t got time to write a shorter one.

***

WTF?

Not previously given much thought to my initials. They were just the first letter of each of my given names, that’s all. Then the glorious short-handing of cell phone texting came along and re-invented their meaning altogether. I now like them very much indeed, not only as my initials, but also as my waking thought for each day.

***

PASSING ON THE KNOWLEDGE

I’m back teaching again at MMU Cheshire and loving it. Some triffick students this year.

On the down side, the whole uni vibe has changed to become a more-muted, more-restrained, more calculated gig since fees were introduced.

Fees!! What liberty that is!! Undergraduates, in my view, are academic apprentices and should be paid for studying just like any trade apprentice.

Tuition fees have turned the whole uni Creative Writing experience into an extension of compulsory education with classes getting more and more prescriptive.

A digital wedge is being driven between teaching staff and students with the increasing use of computerised interaction – paving the way, it seems, for turning the whole thing into a correspondence course.

Anyhow what ain’t changed is the students are ace and it’s a pleasure to be working with them.

***

HEYMAKER TAPES

This in reply to Phil, one of the founder members of the Danger Mouse Rally Club, who kindly got in touch with me in search of recordings of Heymaker:

There are some out there Phil. Unfortunately, I don't have any as I tend not to keep hold of any of my past stuff. Rightly or wrongly, I suppose I see it as merely leading up to what I am currently doing. I am obsessive, but I am not a hoarder, and people borrow stuff from me and I don't get it back or I probably haven't bothered to get a copy for myself in the first place.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to hear some of my old tracks. When I occasionally do, though, I'm disappointed and immediately want to do it again only better.

Can anyone help Phil? Please let me know.

***

MOW COP – LIVING ON THE HILL

Philip K. Leese’s book of the above title is out now, and jolly good it is too! You’ll find it on sale all around Kidsgrove. I couldn’t get along to the book launch so picked up a copy from Bargain Booze in the Rookery.

Among his glorious, painstakingly-researched anecdotes and facts of life on ‘The Hill’, Philip has kindly quoted from my Village Verse collection. It’s curious, ain’t it, how a writer becomes part of the history of what they write about?

Philip and I have both approached our writing of Mow Cop in a celebratory way. The indigenous people of Mow are a rare breed. People are, after all, products of their landscape. Mow Cop is a unique place.

Philip is kind enough to express regret in his writing that he did not have enough space to print my Heathery Weathery Hill, so here tis folks:

HEATHERY WEATHERY HILL

Are you never quiet and still
Heathery Weathery Hill
Where leaves riot in the thrush-loud wood
And seeds burst green where the hay bales stood
And out of the byre cattle spill
Heathery Weathery Hill?

Are you never quiet and still
Heathery Weathery Hill
Where the sun beats in the lark-loud sky
And the hyssop bows as bees hymn by
And moths at dusk dance at the sill,
Heathery Weathery Hill?

Are you never quiet and still
Heathery Weathery Hill
Where the Ferguson ploughs a gull-loud rut
And old leaves slop in the gutter’s glut
And the waters rush to Moreton Mill
Heathery Weathery Hill?

Are you never quiet and still
Heathery Weathery Hill
Where the fox trots in the owl-loud night
And lanes are lost in drifts of white
And the wind through the castle tower blows shrill
Heathery Weathery Hill?

***

STRINGFING

StringFing is having some excellent nights at the Holy Inadequate on the second Wednesday of each month. We’re there this Wednesday (9th Nov). Come along. It’s a great pub. We’re working on a Christmas Special too for December 14th.

***

KPA

I played a cool gig at Keele University’s Postgraduate Society bistro in September. Spike Crossley, the incomparable manager of said venue who’s revolutionised the place and brought it out of the 1950s into the 21st Century, staged his first beer festival there.

He brought in shelf upon shelf of firkins of guest ales – firkin marvellous! (well, you were all thinking that, weren’t you?).

The place was crowded and I was jammed up in a corner with my SM 58 and my J-45 going through my Marshall AS50, having a great time knocking out the songs.

The noise of happy real ale drinkers was awesome. Half way though my first song, I thought no one was listening and that I was in for an introspective evening. Not a bit of it, doods. The response was more than gratifying and I ended up having the best time and extending my set by half an hour.

***

Talking of the AS50 Marshall acoustic guitar amplifier, when I was carrying it out of the KPA I noticed the handle stitching was coming away. I phoned Marshall to get the price of a replacement: £21.76 plus postage plus fitting.

That strikes me as relatively a touch expensive for a handle that clearly is a design weak point since the amp’s fairly new and I’m needing a replacement already. I told the Marshall sales person, ‘I really need this handle, but I’m going to have to sell the amp to afford it. I’ll get back to you.’ Well, it amused me, anyway.

***

SEAN CANNON & POTTERIES FOLK CLUB

Jason Hill – folk legend – phoned me: would I support that wonderful Irish singer and member of the Dubliners, Sean Cannon, at the Potteries Folk Club on Friday 28th October.

Who wouldn’t want to do that? Ah, but I was scheduled to have a practice of some Alf-Alfa Ceili Band tunes with blues maestro and mandolin picker Pete Latham on the same night.

Why don’t me and Pete do the gig together? Excellent! And excellent it was. Sean was his usual self. In other words: top drawer, effortlessly beautiful singing of a whole range of traditional and contemporary folk songs sewn together with Sean’s humorous introductions.

Here’s one of Sean’s jokes:

A consultant was showing a new intern around a ward where there was a whole lot of mumbling and talking going on. The consultant led the young doctor over to the first bed where the patient was lying with his eyes closed mumbling: ‘Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what panic’s in they breastie . . .’ The consultant looked at the patient’s chart and moved on.

In the next bed a patient was anxiously declaiming: ‘Ye banks and braes and streams around the castle o’ Montgomery! Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, your waters never drumlie . . .’ The consultant looked at the patients chart and moved on.

In the third bed, its occupant was practically screaming, ‘How lang and dreary is the night when I am frae my dearie . . .’ The consultant looked at the patient’s chart and moved on. For bed after bed the patterned was repeated.

When they came out of the ward, the young doctor asked, ‘What on earth is going on in there?’

‘Oh,’ the consultant replied, ‘that’s the serious Burns unit.’

Me and Pete went up together and took turns with our offerings. A bottle necking blues from him, a homemade song from me, and so on, turn and turn about. It worked well. We were a nice counterpoint to each other. I wouldn’t mind doing a whole night with Pete like that.

***

Goodness me, is that the time? I’ve got to sort out some material for my new class. I’ve been given a second year Culture and Popular Music class to teach in addition to my Creative Writing classes. We’re currently working on the origins of the blues. Celtic music is scheduled for our attention after the blues assignment. Culture and Popular Music, eh? - what a brilliant subject to be lecturing in, doods. I’m a lucky geezer, to be sure.

***

RIGHT ON!

Just got time to tell you about another upcoming gig:

Congleton Library’s Mike Drew is presenting an evening of live music and poetry celebrating the right to speak out ‘featuring Phil Maddocks, WT Fox, Dave Dove, Dave Wedgebury, John Lindley, Andy Stubbs and others’ on Wednesday 16th November, 7:30pm – 10:00pm. There’s a bar on and tickets are £6.50 or £5.50 with a library card. It’s going be right on right enough.

Gotta go. Tra-ra. Keep safe,

Terry

LYIN' POLITICIAN BLUES

2011-08-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Hi blog buddies, we were having a bit of a sing song round our gaff the other night and Rob got his camera out for this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwm4WlIQjsk

Seeya later,

Terry

MICK SOFTLEY

2011-07-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

StringFing had a good time at the New Inn last night. Not so many people came along this month as schools have broken up and we’re into the big holiday season, but there was well enough for a good time.

Many of you will be aware of the name of legendary singer/songwriter Mick Softley.

Back in the days of the St. Albans beatnik music scene of the early 60s - a motley and loosely assembled crew consisting of the likes of Mac Macleod, Pops Kerr, Henri Harrison, Donovan, yours truly, Maddy Prior and a dozen other guitar strumming (piano strumming in my case) musos coming and going – Mick Softley was the guv’nor; the godfather; the standard to reach for.

His rambling ways and roving eye, his biting politically aware songs, his anarchic attitude were the bench mark.

The main model behind the music was perhaps Jesse Fuller, an American one man band who played guitar alongside a large homemade bass guitar type instrument played with his right foot and a lo hat played with his left foot. On a neck harness he carried a mouth harp and a kazoo. Have a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM62iL_Gh2g

Fuller’s San Francisco Bay Blues, a one-time favourite of Mick’s, spawned a lot of new and similar songs from the St. Albans ravers.

Mick, though, was our local role model: a terrific singer, guitar picker and writer, an accessible dood who was living the life.

After the Cops and Robbers had brought about Donovan’s fame (and not in the fanciful, self-aggrandising way Don likes to tell it), Donovan recorded a couple of Mick’s songs (from memory they were: Gold Watch Blues and War Drags On), but, in my view he didn’t pay him the dues he should have done.

Anyway that was then and this is now. And now, Mick lies in a bed in a Northern Ireland hospital recovering from a severe stroke.

I had a phone call last week from Gladys, the lovely lady who is looking after him. Gladys says Mick is doing well, but it’s a long hard road he’s travelling on.

While I was thinking about him, I thought of how, in the days I remember him best, he would have relished the latest political shenanigans and how he might have responded to them in song.

So, I came up with one myself: Lyin’ Politican Blues. StringFing played it last night. Twice, by request, in fact.

It’s a rocky bluesy jazzy 12-bar vamp in the key of F. The audience joined in on percussion and singing. It was a joy to be a part of.

We did it to try to send a good vibe across the water to NI to speed Mick’s recovery.

Here’s the song:

LYIN’ POLITICIAN BLUES

Woke up this morning switched on the news
Gotta tell ya people I got the blues –
If it doesn’t make ya larf, gonna to make ya cry
Why does every politician think they got permission to lie?

It really doesn’t matter which way ya vote
Conservative or labour, or even if ya float
When ya cross is on the paper, God knows why
Every politician thinks they got permission to lie

Black is white, they say without a smile
Half a millimetre, it’s a country mile
Stick em in a pot an’ boil the friggin lot, say I
Why does every politician think they got permission to lie?

There’s a house on the river, a den of thieves
Their lyin’ ways bringing Britain to its knees
They wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the eye
Why does every politician think they got permission to lie?

I saw a politician, his face all creased
From living in the pocket of the chief of police
Polish on his lips from licking Murdoch’s shoes
Yeah, an’ that’s why I got these Lyin’ Politician Blues.

***

I hope it worked. Get well soon, Michael.

I’ll blog off now and catch you later. I've got a form to fill in.

Terry

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TWIZZLEBIRD

2011-07-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Twizzlebird Creative, the Chester-based web design and branding partnership completed their first year of business on July 8th 2011.

CONGRATULATIONS AMY AND DAVE!!

And what a year it has been for them! Their talent and capacity for creative work is awesome.

They moved up from Bristol to settle in the beautiful Chester, launched their business and hit the road running with their empathetic attention to their client’s needs and up-to-the-minute grasp of contemporary design and technology.

They have been gathering speed ever since, leaving a continuing succession of very happy clients in their wake.

A vested interest has to be declared here: Amy is our lovely, lovely daughter and Dave is her lovely, lovely partner. Two nicer people have never walked the earth and they are both unfeasibly gifted. They have integrity too – a rare combination.

Talking about Amy like this recalls what Jackie Turpin once said to me about his daughter, Gina: ‘I know I shouldn’t boast about her,’ he said, ‘but I can’t help it cuz she really is great!’

Keep flying high Twizzlebird. Here’s to your second year. XXX

***

StringFing is playing at Keele University Postgraduate Association Club this Sunday afternoon as part of a grand reunion day for past students.

Fingers crossed for the weather as we hope to be playing outside. People are coming from all corners to be there. Can’t wait.

Travel safe, one and all,

Terry

MAKING HEY WHILE THE SUN SHINES

2011-06-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

For your barn dance, for your wedding, for your ceili or social get-together, book The Woodlanders:

The Woodlanders Country Dance Band - locally produced, matured over a great number of years. The farmer’s choice.

What a fabulous time we’ve been having, mates!!

We were down in Chebsey, a small village near Cheadle, on Saturday night to play for a wedding ceili: great people, beyootiful setting.

Steve Share called the dances for us – triffick job as always – and started off appropriately with Lover’s Knot and took the wedding guests through his pantheon of moves: the like Nervous Breakdown, the Cumberland Long Eight, and the Holmfirth Square. Yee-ha!

The Woodlanders came storming southern-slow and rocking: Speed the Plough, Curly-Headed Ploughboy, Jumping Joan, Bacca Pipes Jig, Salmon Tails Up In the Water, Winster Gallup, Harvest Home . . .

Have a long and happy life together Jenny and Chris.

***

Late night, early morning cos, next day The Woodlanders was the band in the street at Congleton Food and Drink Festival.

It was Jo Money and her Congleton Community Projects team who set up this celebration of victuals various and delightful. Jo’s events always have a tang of party and Rio about them, a vibe reinforced this time round by glorious Brazilian-type weather.

Congleton High Street was closed to traffic and lined with stalls selling cheeses and ciders and wines and breads, ice-creams, the soon-to-be-side-lined-back-to-kids-parties-cuz-the-market’s-been-saturated-and-it-was-only-a-fad-anyway cup cakes and other assorted tongue teasers.

The aromas of korma curries cooking and Gloucester Old Spot sausages getting sizzed in family-size frying pans wafted past the music tent where us four happy trad musos were laying it down in the shade.

We played sets from 11am through to 4.30pm and had more enquiries for future bookings than we could possibly play.

***

Off with the corduroys and oak leaf hat, and on with the suit and tie: Monday was the finals of the SG World National Poetry Competition for Schools.

This competition is in support of Whizz-Kidz, the charity that supplies wheelchairs for disabled kids to give them the opportunity of more independence.

As Cheshire’s longest-serving poet laureate, I was invited to be the poetry judge and charged with selecting the nine worthy finalists from the post bag of hundreds and hundreds of poems.

This is the second year running that I have had the privilege of being involved. It’s the hardest kind of work for a poet geezer to do, I reckon, to make judgements on the work of young writers. Having said that, it is also immensely rewarding. The decisions to be made are many and complex.

The event was held at the Manchester United Football ground at Old Trafford, Manchester.

The theme of the competition this year was: Our Wonderful World. The winning poems are posted on the SG World website. I’ll give the link later on in this blog.

Steve Floodgate of SG World and his team organised the event with immense skill and imagination. He’s a really warm and amusing presenter too.

Steve recruited Sam and Mark of childrens’ TV fame to assist with the presentation. Nice guys. The kids loved them.

What prizes the young writers were given too!: X-Boxes for each of the finalists and flat-screen TVs for the winner in each of three categories.

The judging panel consisted of Arnold Haase CEO of SG World, myself, Ash from Whizz-Kidz, and Sam and Mark.

One young finalist (he’s five) didn’t end up winning, but I wanted to give his poem special attention here. His parents were pleased to give me permission. I’m showing you Josh's work for its utter visual charm and because it’s a great illustration of how an unconscious non-standard use of English can regenerate the meaning of a word and recreate a sense of discovery and wonder.

The young poet’s name is Josh, and here is his poem called Our Wonderful World:

In our wonderful world I can see
Leydeybords is spotty.
In our wonderful world I can hear
Birds sigig.
In our wonderful world I can smell
Fish and chips. meyk me hungry.
In our wonderful world I can feel
Leaves are spotty.
In our wonderful world I can taste
Ice scream is joosey.

***

SG World do a wonderful job raising the profile of poetry among young writers. It is a privilege for me to be invited to work with them on these projects. I am grateful to them.

Here’s the promised link to the SG World website where you can see a scan of Josh’s poem and those of all the other competition finalists.

http://www.sgworld.com/

I had to say a few words to the young writers and their assembled schoolmates and parents and teachers. SG World commissioned a poem from me too. It’s site-specific and occasion-specific and a bit of a performance poem so it might not come off the screen as well as it could, but here it is anyway:

WHEN I WAS NINE AND TEN AND MORE

When I was nine and ten and more,
The thing I spent time longing for
Was to be the hero of a football cup:
To be hugged and kissed and lifted up,

And, swaying and bobbing proud,
Be run around the football ground
On the shoulders of my team,
Each one his eyes agleam,

Shouting, ‘AIN’T HE G-REAT!’
He’s not scored one, he’s scored eight!!
This magic, gifted demigod’s fate
Was to hand us victory on a plate.

     No one’s ever seen such play!
     History has been made today.’

Will they never cease, this fevered crowd,
From chanting long and chanting loud,
From terrace and director’s box,
‘There’s only one Terry Fox’ . . .?

An odd, odd dream, I must confess,
For a boy whose sports prowess,
Was little less than,
Well . . . a mess.

When I kicked a ball, it made no sound,
But slowly rolled along the ground
And stopped, a mere spit away,
Till Mr. Rolf felt bound to say:

     ‘The beautiful game’s not for you.
     Find another thing to do.’

I now play games inside my head,
Kicking words around instead.
The goals are different, to be sure,
But the thrill’s the same if you score:

Tackling stanzas, knocking them clear;
Bending them like Shakespeare;
Running them from the half-way line,
To a perfect finish at full time.

As all you young poets know,
There’s glory in a phrase’s flow.
Some folk are born with a life all set
For putting ‘em in the back of the net.

     At the end of the day, I’m excited,
     By the nouns and verbs of Words United.

***

Here's the Woodies at Congleton Food and Drink Festival 2011:

Keep smiling and piling on the sun bloc,

Terry

GOD BLESS ELVIS PRESLEY

2011-06-17T03:07:00.000-07:00

Anyone calling at the New Inn in Derby Street Hanley will immediately gather that the landlord, Les, is an Elvis Presley fan.

There are more pictures of the legendary American yodelling dood on the walls of the New Inn’s back room than I have ever seen outside of books on Elvis Presley.

StringFing played that room last night as one of its regular 3rd Thursday of the month gigs there.

After StringFing had set up, we were having a drink and I was looking at the Elvis-covered walls and thinking, ‘I bet this is exactly what the inside of Les’s mind looks like,’ when who should walk through the door but . . . John Lindley.

Soz to all those of you who thought it was going to be Elvis, but he really is dead, you know.

John Lindley has a permanent open invitation to come along on StringFing nights to read for us - he’d be welcome anyway, of course. But, until last night, he hadn’t been able to get there. He’s a busy guy, John; much in demand. He would be. He’s more than a little bit good at what he does.

After StringFing's first set, in which we included a version of Matty Groves - we like to include one traditional song each time out - John did just one poem for us. And John being John, it was exactly the right poem in exactly the right place at exactly the right time: a new poem of his, a long, long poem: God Bless Elvis Presley.

I haven’t checked the title so, for all I know, John might call it something different, but that’ll do for me. That is certainly the refrain of the piece and, I tell you, it is a tour de force of writing; a magnificent, secular hymn to life and love; to earthly struggles and to triumphs of the spirit. John’s reading of it was inspired and inspiring. Breath-taking stuff.

Our audiences have been fewer these last couple of times at the New Inn. We’ve been hammering it a bit locally, and it’s start of the holiday season and those factors have had an effect on attendance. Those of you who didn’t show up, though, missed a treat, several treats, in fact.

We were one lucky bunch of doods gathered in that room.

Next up, Pete Latham played for us.

I’ve heard Pete a lot of times over the years and I don’t do the blues thing myself anymore, but when I did do it, I lived and breathed it as a self-taught blues and boogie piano player, there at the birth of the British blues.

I cut my musical teeth at the feet of its founding fathers: Alexis Korner, Cyril Davis. I’ve played with British blues legends such Tony McPhee, Eric Clapton, and John Mayall as well as some of the world’s greatest exponents like Screaming Jay Hawkins, Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker. I know what I am listening to. I know the difference between the phoney and the phoned. Pete's always good, but last night, Pete Latham played beautifully; BEA-U-TIFULLY.

Pete’s laid-back rendition of How Long Blues, was the tenderest, most soulful exploration of the riches of that song since Leroy Carr recorded his version of it on Vocalion Records in 1928 with Scrapper Blackwell. I take my fedora off to you Pete.

As if all of that was nay enough, my Lynda had contacted a mouth harp player, Purcy, via FaceBook and he came down to the New Inn as well.

Our great friend, wine expert/bluesman/singer-songwriter and all-round thoroughly lovely bloke, Jimmy Gillespie, invited Lynda and I to his recent birthday party at the Leopard in Burslem. There was much music making. There always is around Jimmy. Purcy was amongst several mighty fine harp players there. It was good to see him again.

Purcy is a sharp-dressed fella and a mean, mean harp player. He and Pete had an immediate blues-brotherly rapport and knocked us out with some of the finest blues wailing ever blues wailed round these ‘ere parts.

I can’t leave out Adam and Emily either. They were at the top of their game. They always are outstanding, ain't they? They are recognised as having raised the bar for the playing of Anglo-Celtic traditional music and its off spring.

For the record, to correct what I sometimes hear said, and sometimes see in print, Adam Fenn is neither my mandolin player nor is Emily Tellwright my cello player. They are both their own people in their own independent right with complex musical lives of their own. I am fortunate that they both agree to include me in their continuing musical adventures.

My thanks to Adam and Emily. My thanks to Pete and Purcy. My thanks to John. My thanks to Les and Yvonne of the New Inn. My thanks to everyone who came along to listen last night.

Uh, huh, may your gods bless you each and all, and to paraphrase a line of John’s poem: God bless Elvis Presley, and God bless God too if God exists.

Till next time, travel safe.

Terry

ADOPTION MATTERS SONG

2011-06-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to post in my blog the song I wrote for Adoption Matters North West. Toebrt filmed this in my writing room for YouTube. Hopefully StringFing will record a version of this later in the year. We will definitely be performing it tonight at the Holy Inadequate, Etruria. Come along and sing along. Tra-ra. Terry

OBEY NO CLOCKS

2011-05-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

When Dean posted his kind comment on my previous blog – thanks for that, Dean - I was reminded once again of how lucky I was to have taught Creative Writing at the MMU.

At my graduation in 1997, John Singleton (RIP), then head of Writing, asked me to come back in the new academic year and take some classes for him. I remained a part-time member of the MMU Writing team for the following dozen years.

I was happily employed by Keele university too, on and off, but my heart is in the Manchester based institution where I spent my own student days.

The money the two unis paid me was well enough to pay the bills and the hours were such as to give me time for my own writing. Sorted.

As a student, my eyes had been opened to a million new ideas as well as confirming, to my great relief and vindication (and with all the necessary back up data), conclusions I had already drawn that were out of step with the people I had been surrounded by up until I took my place at that hallowed seat of learning.

‘My’ students were a constant, life-affirming inspiration to me. You simply cannot be around such bright, gifted, funny, profound, kindly, enthused younger people for any length of time without being immensely rewarded.

In all those years I can count on the fingers of two fingers, the students I’d rather not have met – that precise number of fingers being appropriate, you will agree.

The two exceptions were both equally talented and equally obnoxious people. I haven’t troubled to follow their subsequent careers, but no doubt, in the way things often are, they have done well for themselves.

Apart from those two fading shadows, I am immensely grateful to each one of the thousands of students I have had the good fortune to work with in all those years. Thank you each, severally and all.

***

On the music front: StringFing is playing the Etruria Canals Festival on Saturday 4th June between 12 noon and 5pm.

We are delighted to be sharing the gig with multi-instrumentalist and top performer Andy Casserley. Andy specialises in music hall songs. Right up my street, doods.

My old grandfather, William Theodore Palin, could knock out a music hall song or ten on the old Joanna.

He never had a music lesson in his entire life, my old Bampa. For him, rules were for fools in schools. He demonstrated that there are other kinds of music from the music schools of hard knocks whose pupils obey no clocks and follow the sounds of their own worlds and the rhythms of their own hearts.

Picture me old granddad in our best room, sat at my mum’s creaking Broadwood upright with the bad yellow grin, jacket off, waistcoat buttoned all the way; watch chain hung with rugby medals glinting in the light from the candles in the brass sconces on the mother-of pearl inlaid front board of the piano; silver armbands holding his shirt sleeves away from his pounding fingers: bass and chord/bass and chord/bass and chord/twiddly bit . . .

‘I’m going to sing a song for you this evening
I’ve been a lovely singer since me berf
And when you hear my lov-e-ly notes aringing
You’ll say I got the finest voice on erf

Before the king I once appeared and when I sang, he loudly cheered
He said to me, ‘You really are a marvel, of singing you have really got the knack’
And from his scarf he took a diamond tie pin
Smiled at me . . . and then he put it back.’

That’s a fragment of the first song I recall hearing him singing at the ol’ ivories. I don’t even know what the proper title of the song is, and what’s written above is all I can remember of the lyric. Maybe some of it’s misremembered. I can’t say for sure.

What I can say for sure is something that I will never ever misremember, and that is the sheer human joy of his performances; their cavalier rawness and audacity; his indomitable don’tletthebastardsgrindyoudown sense of humour. His whisky and tea breath. How I loved that man.

Hey if anyone does happen to know that song, please let me know.

***

StringFing is starting a new regular monthly gig at the Holy Inadequate, Etruria – 1st Sunday of each month – on 5th June.

StringFing will be playing its existing regular gig at The New Inn, Derby Street, Hanley, on the 16th of June

The Woodlanders are down in Chebsey on 25th June and the main band at Congleton’s Food and Drink Festival on the 26th June.

Alf-Alfa is out on 3rd June.

I have the pleasure of helping to judge the SG World Schools National Poetry Competition Finals later on in June, on a date to be arranged. I am preparing my short list from hundreds of entries – more than ever this year. A hard slog, but hugely interesting and entertaining.

Lynda and I have been invited to a couple of parties as well.

Festivals, pub gigs, barn dances, poetry competitions and parties, June is, as they say, busting out all over.

Have a good one.

Terry

TALKING OF RELIGION

2011-05-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful month April has been! Spring has fulfilled its promise. May is usually my most favourite month of the year, but it really will have to go some this time round to beat April.

Lynda, Phil Johnson and I are going along to play a few tunes at the annual Seed Swap at Astbury Mere on the afternoon of the 8th of May. I love this event. The planting of seeds is such an optimistic life-affirming gesture. It’s comforting to think that there are some people left who believe in respecting and nurturing the earth instead of putting it under concrete and tarmac and paving blocks and hideous housing.

Talking of the earth and growing things, The Woodlanders played a great Young Farmers gig last night. It just don’t get much better than a farm barn dance with great people, a great repertoire of traditional English tunes, an ace caller (Steve Share is among the best in the business), and a band of mates – me, Lynda, Phil Johnson and Neil Hulse.

And talking of religion which we weren’t, but we are now: me and Lynda went to Barthomley to have a look at the church there and have a jar in the White Lion. The church is dedicated to an 8th century saint, Saint Bertoline. History has it that during the civil war, 17 local people took refuge in the bell tower, but were smoked out by the Kings Men and slaughtered on the spot. They cut the throat of a minor (under 21), John Fowler, inside the church on the bell tower floor. Also in the church are brass plaques commemorating the local dead of the 1st and 2nd world wars. This collection of facts and artefacts begged an obvious question, and a walk around the graveyard prompted the following song:

WHERE WERE YOU, ST. BERTOLINE?

Where were you, St. Bertoline
In their needful hour -
The seventeen, St. Bertoline
Driven from the tower?
Where was: the bolt of thunder
To bring the King’s Men to their knees
When John Fowler bled under
The bells of Barthomley?

And where were you, St. Bertoline
At Ypres and the Somme
For Joe and George, St. Bertoline
For Harry Jenkinson?
Where was: the angels gathered round
Singing ‘Peace be unto thee’
When the rattling guns were mowing down
The boys from Barthomley?

And where were you, St. Bertoline
For Edwin Farrington
For Reg Holland, St. Bertoline -
Plunged into death so young?
Where was: the hand born of your will
To pluck them mercif’ly
From Hitler’s rage, to this green hill
To age in Barthomley?

Where are you now St. Bertoline
At this thoughtful hour -
By the stream, St. Bertoline?
In the breeze that blows the flower?
Do you nightly stalk the nave
Your head hung ashamedly
For all you never did to save
The boys of Barthomley?

Where will you be, St. Bertoline
When the new war comes -
When buckles gleam, St. Bertoline
At the thumping of the drums?
Ah, let me guess! – same as before:
With this useless company
When the next cruel war comes begging for
The blood of Barthomley.

***

Adam Fenn says I only write miserable songs. He’s quite wrong, of course. It’s only just that they mainly are.

Happy May days,

Terry

HEYMAKER AT BINGLEY HALL

2011-04-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

Chris Ellis, our old buddy, ex-Radio Stoke DJ and Etruria Garden Festival musicians' manager has requested stories from Stoke bands for a publication he's editing. Lynda asked me to tell him about Magnum's PA at Bingley Hall. I thought I'd post it here too. As I was writing it I thought of a much more interesting thing that happened that day which I will post in a few days or so when I have more time.

By the way, StringFing is on Radio Shropshire (96FM) on Sunday 17th April on Genevieve Tudor's rather excellent 2-hour folk programme.
Here's the Magnum story:

Heymaker (me, Lynda, our Jack, Phil Johnson and Mickey Gibson) was booked to play at Bingley Hall, Stafford as part of a 12-hour rock extravaganza staged by the Motorcycle Riders Association, Top of the bill was Magnum with Wishbone Ash snapping at their heels and a whole host of biker-proven, biker-approved below them. Bingley Hall is a big venue, and by that I mean B-I-I-I-I-I-I-G. Magnum had ordered a 32K PA which was to be used by each band in turn.

Just to give you an idea of the unusual magnitude of that number of Ks: If you were staging a gig on the moon and wanted the people of Mow Cop to be able to dance along with the music, you would probably go for a 31K PA. In other words, the 32K ordered by Magnum was more than slightly overkill even for Bingley Hall.

When we did our sound check in the afternoon, I walked on stage, plugged in, drew the bow across my fiddle and it seemed the whole of the London Philharmonic Orchestra struck up with me. It was awesome, my doods, awesome.

Heymaker went on fairly early in the day by arrangement as we had a gig to play that night as well and had to get on the road in time. We played our half-hour set (hey, went down a storm too), drew our money and went off to our next gig. Job done.

We were, I'm told, one of the few bands to actually get paid out. I forget what the problem with the money was, but I know it was nothing to do with the MRA itself.

I’ll always remember, though, what a massive, massive a sound we got that afternoon of rocking pleasure. However, when Magnum turned up to do their sound check, they said, ‘What the f***’s this? This ain’t no 32K!’ Their people checked the rig and the jolly rockers were right. It was only a mere 30K (!) Magnum refused to play until the 2 missing Ks had been brought in.

I never had a chance to meet the band as we had to leave for our next gig. So, if you ever meet Magnum, ask them for me why they felt the need for such a huge PA. Mind you, you’ll probably have to use sign language.

Gotta rush orf now to a poetry seminar.

Tootle pip.

SAM PLANK: DIAMOND GEEZER

2011-03-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

At four minutes past midday on Monday 21st February 2011, there took place, at the Swan Bank Methodist Church in Stoke on Trent’s mother town of Burslem, the farewell to the local radio icon Sam Plank.

Sam, less commonly known by his given name of Terry Hilton, was an old friend of mine – an old friend of so many people, in fact, that the Swan Bank church was cram packed full. You had to be on the family’s guest list to get inside.

Loudspeakers were set up to relay the service to the crowd of people that the church, large as it is, wasn’t big enough to hold. Potteries folk had lined the streets to pay their respects to Sam as the cortege wound its way from Hanley along the streets to Burslem.

One of Sam’s trade marks was that he had worn a red scarf when he was out and about his outside broadcast work and it was one of his requests was that everybody attending the church should wear something red. So, suited in a dark blue double-breasted pinstripe, I booted up in my red doc’ers and stuck a red silk handkerchief in my top pocket for good measure.

Sam’s son wore Sam’s actual red scarf; pastor Ashley Cooper, the minister conducting the service, wore a set of red trainers (I have to say this was a sight reminiscent of Tony Blair wearing those getting-down-with-the-kids jeans); there were women and girls with red roses in their hair; some mourners wore red scarves similar to Sam’s; Joan Walley (MP, Labour, Stoke North) wore a string of red beads.

Joan gave a speech that struck absolutely the right tone being both amusing and very moving.

The one hymn, How Great Thou Art! was chokingly emotional even to this non-believer.

You know, in truth, I didn’t know Sam that well at all. We had bumped into each other professionally several times over the years and he had interviewed me for his Radio Stoke and Signal Radio programmes. But, such was Sam’s sincerity, charm and charisma he immediately made you feel that you were not only a friend of his, but a special one at that.

I was Sam’s last interviewee an Signal Radio. The topic was my book Battling Jack. Sam asked proper good questions and read out parts of the book beautifully. He had incredible empathy.

To me and many others the hugely popular Sam Plank was the voice of Stoke on Trent. But, through his programmes he also gave a voice to many, many other people who otherwise would have remained unheard.

He took up their issues with councils and corporations and more often than not won the day for them. It is well known that having Sam on your side was at least half the battle in resolving a problem. There was love in the room on Monday right enough.

Sam fought his illness with great bravery and without self-pity. Huge condolences to Verity and her family. Lynda and I are thinking of you.

What can be said when some one like Sam Plank is lost to us?

Well from me, I reckon the very least Sam deserves is the highest personal accolade I as a southerner can give him:

PLANKY, MATE, YOU WERE ONE DIAMOND GEEZER.

PITY THE POOR POOR PIG!!

2011-02-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

Hey, BIG GREETINGS either and several; eachly, both, one and all.

As usual I’ve been up to too much to get a new blog written earlier. I’ll try to catch up a little bit even though life's still hectic. I wanted to post the true history of the The Canalsiders Ceili Band too, but that’ll have to wait till later.

StringFing did an unusual gig, back in early January, at Gorton Monastery for Adoption Matters North West. The event was the grand finals of a poetry competition on the theme of ‘Belonging’. There were a huge number of entries. Some good uns an’ all.

The judges were: Joy Winkler, John Lindley, Jim Bennett, Copland Smith, Gill McEvoy, Carol Fenlon, Elizabeth Burns, Sarah Hymas and yours truly. We had poems from Joy, John, Jim, Copland and Carol. All excellent wordsmiths.

I was the link person for the event – introducing everybody and stuff. StringFing played a few English traditional dance tunes while the folks got seated.

The short-listed poems were read by the guest poets and the winners announced. I presented the top scribblers in each region with their prizes.

I was commissioned to write a song for the event on the theme of ‘Belonging’ Here’s the lyric:

WE BELONG TOGETHER

All across the world
In every land is heard
Voices of dissent and division
Whoever it is you serve
However your heart is stirred
Whatever your race or religion:

You and me, we’re family
We belong together
You and me, let’s all agree
We belong together

You may not be free
They may call you enemy
And use their guns to defeat you
Such bigotry fails to see
We are linked inextricably
From pole to pole, through and through

You and me, we’re family
We belong together
You and me, let’s all agree
We belong together

You’re stumbling along your rugged road
With your pockets full of stones
You’re hitting the wall; you’re ready to fall
You’ve never felt more alone . . .

When you’ve been hurt by love
You may think the worst of love
You may think love pure invention
When we’ve been cursed by love
In our thirst for love
Remember our true connection:

You and me, we’re family
We belong together
You and me, let’s all agree
We belong together.

© W. Terry Fox

If you want to hear the tune I came up with too, there’s a rough version of me playing it on me Jack Jones in our back bedroom via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZG3-KOgaIw

Now you can see why I have Adam and Emily making music with me. On the day, StringFing did the song twice and the whole audience sang along to it. I love it when people join in.

The event was master-minded by deWinter PR and Marketing of Chester. If you ever get a chance to work with them, do so. They are a dream to work with.

I’ve got a photo for you: StringFing playing Pity the Poor Poor Pig at our Xmas do at the New Inn, sent in by our buddy Chris Malkin:

Where’s Emily? you may well ask. Chris couldn’t get her in the shot cuz of the crowd at the front, so here’s Emily playing the tune on a long-previous occasion:

We usually play this instrumental piece after we have handed percussion instruments out to our long-suffering and highly rhythmic audiences. And, of course, as well as putting them to work on tambourines, bells and shakers, we get them yelling out the refrain:

‘PITY THE POOR POOR PIG!!’

‘What is that all about then?’ I’m commonly asked by the uninitiated - that is to say that I am asked often. I’m not inferring that the people who ask me the question come from a inferior class than wot I does for I doubt there is one. If so, it’s probable they have't learnt to walk upright yet.

Which reminds me: The great Charlie Mingus (RIP), jazz bassist and composer extraordinaire wrote an autobiography with a classic, unbeatable, down-trodden class reference in its title: Beneath the Underdog. How about that?! Awesome.

Which Mingus reference reminds me: Hey Anna, thanks for posting your comment and for your good wishes. It goes both ways, mate. I really miss teaching at the MMU.

Which in turn reminds me: I heard Jo Bell’s jacked in my old job already. One term, Jo? What the hell can the students be like this year? They seemed harmless enough when I met the new intake briefly on Mow Day. You never can tell though, with students, eh? Come to think of it, hmmm, there does happen to be a fire extinguisher in every room . . .

Which reminds me – the student ‘riots’ (should it be ‘police or state riots’?) which seem so long ago now thanks to my fecklessness over blog writing: I reckon that young geezer - as senselessly reckless as his fire-extinguisher-over-the-balcony action was - is now paying the price for everybody who dared to dissent.

Be warned, next time, my protesting students and friends of equal opportunity and education for all, behave impeccably, max up your numbers and pile on the political pressure. Governments are like spoilt kids. You’ve got to handle them with care before you can get them under control, otherwise they just kick off in tantrums and manage to sidetrack the masses from the real issue being contested. Hand in hand with their close friends of the print media, of course.

An example of how to do it might be Egypt. We’ll have to see how that turns out.

Back to Pity the Poor Poor Pig: I wrote it when I was idling around on a guitar in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. I got so into the licks I had to reboil the kettle a few times before I’d got the tune nailed and could reward myself with a cup of Rosie Lee.

The resulting tune is a kind of boogie, but then again it has a kind of shuffle beat. It mostly feels like a Cajun groove to me, and when ever I think of Cajun music I think of a woodland glade with a row of musos (the word row has an interesting ambiguity in this context) sitting along the trunk of a felled tree going diddy-diddy-diddy-diddy on squeeze boxes with someone beating out 'dinner’s ready' on a big triangle. In the right hand corner of this mind picture, a sacrificial pig, slaughtered and gutted, shaved and impaled in the prime of its fat pigging life, is slowly rotating on a spit over an open fire.

The hog roast is a cliché of Louisiana swamp music along with dungarees, baseball caps, moody splay-toothed alligators, mango trees, and a kind of French nobody bothers to speak anymore.

Plusly, Cajun music has an infectious, hypnotic beat. Great to dance to, but, hey, what a shame a piggywig has to die every time the two-steppers put on their tartan shirts for a shindig.

My Lynda is a vegetarian. I am as well, a bit. Hey, I wonder if they have swine bars down there in Cajun country for the upwardly mobile?

StringFing has done its first New Inn gig of the year. Lots of our lovely StringFing mates were there so it was a good audience in spite of a number of people kept away by the freezing fog. We were fortunate to have as a guest muso the one-and-only Chris Bingham on mouth harp. Most people know Chris as an outstanding jazz funk bass player he is. Not so many know that he is a fine blues harp player too.

Sharing a couple of numbers with us also was our inimitable blues bro Pete Latham. If there’s anyone who spends more time thinking about music than Pete, it’s someone who never goes to sleep. Pete is a wonderful musician. He has eclectic tastes and a vast knowledge of blues and folk history.

Me and Pete go back a long way, but we lost contact for a few years (I think of this period of time as Pete’s wilderness years lol). We’ve been sessioning a few Alf-Alfa tunes together recently – him on mandolin, me scraping the fiddle.

Check out Pete via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_nHYoFIdiE

Good ain’t he?

Right, I’ve got other stuff to get up to now.

Ta-ra.

ROBBIE WILLIAMS

2011-01-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

Hey, Xmas have been an gorn. Hope yours was a happy one, and while we are about it, a very happy and peaceful 2011 to you an yours, my ducks.

We had our Jack to dinner on Christmas Eve, went over to Amy and Dave’s for dinner on Christmas day, and had Marion, Jane, Graham and Katy over for drinks an stuff on Boxing Day. Oh the lovely yuletide mulled wine warmth of it all.

My Christmas poetry gig with the Congleton Choral Society was cancelled ‘due to bad weather’. Ironically, they forgot to let me know and I found out when I arrived smoothly and on time at the venue for the afternoon rehearsal. Wha? Bad weather? But, I’ve got here all right. How do you explain that then? They graciously gave me my fee, but missing the gig gave me a, ‘Now where have I put that drink I was half-way through?’ feeling that I couldn’t shake off for days.

On Christmas Day we had our jolly seasonal telephone call from Cyril Lawton, The mighty bearded one of the golden days of the Bridge Street Arts Centre.

Cyril and I have a chequered history – we had a fight soon after we first met. My fault really. Cyril is a sly mover and after a sophisticated ‘play dead’ ploy by him, I came a rapid second best (I’m crap at the noble art anyway) and had to have a gash over my left eye stitched up at Hartshill A&E.

That Friday night at the A&E unit was a vision of hell: lads by the score with broken limbs, slashed faces, some with axes and bottles sticking out of their heads, and all with Madam Alcohol to thank for it. My newly-humbled self included. Ah, the sad sad wreckage of that woman's followers.

The nurse reckoned I was at least the 500th person that night to have sustained their injuries ‘falling down the stairs’.

As I say, I’m useless at fighting, to which my blacked eyes, split lips and six stitches clearly bore testimony. But, strangely, those injuries gained me something of a reputation for being a hard nut. Huh? Thankfully this reputation was short-lived for I’d be completely unable to live up to it.
Since those misguided drunken fisticuffs, and in the course of hundreds of gigs, Cyril and my family became firm friends. It was great to hear from him on Christmas Day. Cyril asked me if I had seen Robbie Williams on TV recently when the ol’ Stokie songbird mentioned Bridge Street?

Robbie reckoned, in his teens, Bridge Street was a source of top and inspirational music for him. This cleared up a small mystery for me: Lynda was chatting to Robbie in the Mill Hill Tavern one night and Heymaker came up in the conversation. ‘I used to go and see you at Bridge Street,‘ Robbie told her.
‘Gerroff,’ Lynda said. ‘You’d have only been about 14!’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Robert cheerfully.

There seemed to be a ring of truth about it: he knew exactly what the Heymaker line-up was and the sort of stuff we played then, but it was hard to credit that he was down Bridge Street at such a young age. I suspected a wind-up. In Robbie's parlance: you're joking me.

‘He was a good kid,’ Cyril told me. ‘I used to let him sit in a corner and watch the bands. Heymaker was number one band there and he saw you a lot.’

We didn’t become mates with Robbie until the early days of Take That. Our Amy was in their target age group and was totally captivated by them as were her mates.

In the dim and smoky past, I had worked in bands on the same bill as Robbie’s comedian dad, Pete (aka Pete Conway), in various working mens clubs and later had been hired by him to play gigs for his staff when he was at the Valiant’s Social Club.

Lynda’s memories of Pete are of when he was in the same short-hand and typing class as her, both studying for their future careers – Lynda’s as a secretary and Pete’s as a policeman. Yes, a policeman. Lynda said Pete cracked jokes the whole time and had them all falling about laughing. He never did wear the blue helmet. That is to say, he never became a policeman.

We did the pub quiz at the Tavern with Robbie one night. There were a dozen or so teams and we came second – second from last, that is. Rob knew more about 60s music than I did and I was there at the time. Then, again, that’s what they say about the 60s, ain’t it?

You have to give your quiz team a name. Robbie chose ‘The Nomads’. He’d just come back from a social trip to Glastonbury with M People and was full of inspiration for the gypsy life. He was to storm Glastonbury with his own gig not long after. And then he stormed in the wilderness for a bit, and now he’s gone full circle, singing with Take That again. Amy’s over you now Robbie. Sorry dood.

We’re off to play the Stoke Hornpipe with Greg and Kate’s team at the Glebe tonight.

Be of good cheer,

Terry

HEYMAKER

2010-11-29T02:29:00.000-08:00

The voluminous misinformation floating in the ether about various bands I have been in or have co-founded over the years never ceases to amuse me. I often prefer the mythological accounts to the actual happenings. However, I thought I would do a few brief real histories just for the record, starting with the above named and moving on to Cops n Robbers, Oatcake Billy’s Ideal Band, Boneshaker, et al in later postings.

Here we go then: Once upon a time me, Lynda and Jack moved into an old cottage by the Trent and Mersey canal at Church Lawton. Lynda and I had bought the place from Paul Atterbury – he of the Antiques Roadshow.

Up the dirt track from that little house and across the main road stands Red Bull, or ‘Bottom Bull’ as it was then known locally, there being another Red Bull higher up the same road. The Bottom Bull being the closest boozer to us became my local and I went across for a swift pint of Robinson’s most nights of the week.

In those days the Bull was run by an Irish guy called Colin Meany who provided it with a great juke box which was particularly well-fed on Friday nights by the perfumed and sharply-dressed hoards who were downing a few cheap uns priming themselves for their forays into the night clubs of Hanley and Sandbach. I first heard ‘Sultans of Swing’ on Colin’s juke box so I reckon that’d place these events circa 1979.

Soon after we arrived, The Bull was taken over by an ex-policeman from Manchester, John Higham. A right character and no mistake, enraged or chummy by turns of an inner switch that few understood the workings of. John, in a friendly mood, put a jazz band on in the upstairs function room on Friday nights and switched off the juke box.

Around this time, Lynda bought half a pony. No, no, no, she’s vegetarian. The pony was very alive and, unfortunately, very kicking. Its other half (which I preferred to think of as the back half) was owned for by our sister-in-law Marion.

No sooner had this palomino yearling with the golden body and white flashing mane been installed in the field we rented that ran alongside our garden, than Lynda discovered, to our great delight, that she was pregnant. But, this meant that I was now in charge of her half of the pony. Ooops.

You see, I have a cattle phobia. No really. This is to say that in snnnn pite of my first two jobs being labouring on farms, one of which was a dairy farm on which I helped with the daily milking, I have a cattle phobia.

Yeah, OK, I know horses aren’t much like cows in many ways, but sadly my cattle phobia was generous enough to embrace the family of the noble steed too. Needless to say embracing a horse was absolutely the last thing wanted to do however pretty our prancing little ‘Sunny’ might have happened to be. And deceptively cute he was too.

Oddly enough, me and Sunny got along all right. I learnt as much as I could about horses from books and from horse people and, of course, from Sunny. I broke him to the bit, lunged him, drove him in long reins around the field and along the road. We had a great time, man and horse. I could back him up for as long as I wished just by putting one finger on his nose and gently telling him, ‘Back up. Back up.’ I was no longer afraid of horses.

Then the cute little prancing b*****d broke my shoulder blade. But that’s another story.

In the evenings after tea, the extended family would share in the training and grooming of the pony. Finally, I’d put a hay net up in his stable for him and swan over to the Red Bull for my customary jar. I had my own pot behind the bar which the bar man would pull a pint into as soon as he saw me crossing the road.

Landlord John Higham was suspicious of me at first. Well, I did go over there very obviously having had recent dealings with a horse. I was told later that he asked Ken, one of his regulars, about me. Ken said, ‘Terry? He’s a bit of a gypo, but he’s all right.’ which is one of the best reviews I’ve ever had.

Not only did John allow me to carry on drinking in his pub, but he also picked me up most days from Kidsgrove station in his beautiful, royal blue, old-style Rolls Royce. OK, more accurately, he picked his daughter up at the end of her school day from Kidsgrove station and if I happened to be on the same train as her he’d give me a lift too.

On one such occasion we were purring along the Congleton Road when John asked me, ‘Know of any good folk bands?’
‘Why? What have you got in mind?’
‘That jazz band I’ve got is taking the piss, he said. ‘They’re turning up later and later and they keep asking for more money.’
‘What, exactly you looking for with a folk band then?’
‘I dunno, something like a four or five-piece group to knock out a few tunes and a few songs. I’ll give ‘em a fiver each and free beer.’

I told Lynda about John’s enquiry as soon as I got in. Should we put something together for him? Lynda was well up it and suggested we brought in Adrian and Sheila Crosbie, our mates from Oatcake Billy’s Ideal Band. A perfect choice. I’d been playing the fiddle for a few months and Adrian had been showing me how to go on with it.

The plan became this: Croz and me on fiddles – master and apprentice - Lynda doing her magic tambourine and percussion, Sheila playing sparkling hammered dulcimer. We would play tunes from the English fiddling tradition interspersed with traditional English folk songs for 3 x 30 min sets every Friday night upstairs at the Bull. Sorted.

We asked our Jack if was interested, but he was playing lead guitar in a punk band at the time and said, ‘Nah. Sorry.’ He did agree, though, to play with us until we could get a replacement rhythm player.

Having a juggling with countryside names and morris dancing terms, I came up with the name ‘Heymaker’. I went over the Bull and told John I’d found him just the right band for his job. We started there on the following Friday.

We had Jack turn the treble right up on his guitar to get it to sound more like an acoustic banjo and away we went. Lynda did most of the singing. I did a couple of songs and so did Sheila.

Talk about an instant success! Blimey, we ended up pulling such crowds that John thought he might have overdone it. We loved it. A hassle-free gig in our own locale. I have to say it’s the only gig I have ever had where I transported the gear to it and from it by wheelbarrow. Happy days, doods.

Things never stand still do they? In time we added a bass player and a drummer and got a bit louder and more electric. A predominance of bikers began showing up in our audiences – something about our particular take on music had caught their imagination. John Higham, however, wasn’t happy with this new clientele and would insist they took off their leather jackets if they wanted to come in to see us. Neither they nor we were happy with that.

One New Years Eve at the Red Bull, John hired Heymaker to play for their annual ticket-only Fancy Dress Party. The turn out was a-mazing. Everybody took the fancy dress theme seriously, including grumpy Old Harry next door who decided to come dressed as an angel complete with large wire-and-net-curtain wings. 1981 it was.

Our Amy had been born early on in the year before. I’m her dad and I’m bound to think this, I suppose, but she was the most wonderful little person ever to grace our planet and still is. She was barely two years old and sat there with her eyes wide open with wonder and a great big smile lighting up her face watching Micky Mouse dance with Lady Godiva; a cavemen dancing with a fairy princesses and Old Harry the angel lurching around with a pint in his hand and his halo slipping of his head.

Lynda was doing fewer vocals now as her time was monopolised by looking after our Amy who, for the first year of her life wanted only her mother and nothing but her mother. Lynda was terrific with her too. But it meant that the majority of the vocals were being done by me. Not my original intention. I’m no singer so I thought I’d better write a few songs that I could handle reasonably well: If Yer Working Class, Nellie, Justice For the Lads – that kind of thing.

Heymaker rapidly went all-electric. Our previous New Orleans-style and superb drummer, Cyrano Slater, left because he didn’t want the burden of having to remember the arrangements we were now dreaming up and we replaced him at Jack’s suggestion with the equally wonderful rock drummer Kevin Thompkinson. We brought in Tufty, one of my workmates at Simon-Hartley’s on bass guitar.

Croz and Sheila had bowed out during these changes preferring to continue along their acoustic path. Our Jack had opted to stay with us now that Kev was on the drummer’s stool and we were playing rockier material.

Jack and I set about writing some new material together. Our first writing collaboration was Sunshade Smiling Friday. I wrote the lyric and Jack come up with an appropriate chord sequence and Heymaker collectively hammered out an arrangement.

I hate doing recordings. I’m too erratic to be able to play though a whole piece without one error or another, but I do have an old tape recording of an early version of this song and Jack’s lead playing on it is awesome.

Anyway, back to the New Years Eve gig: I joined in with the fancy dress taking the easiest way out by going as tramp (being half way there already in those days). I stuck an old top hat on my head to complete my ‘Gentleman of the Road’ image and went across the Bull to front the band. When our mate Pete Carter saw me, he gave me some instant advice, ‘You should wear that top hat all the time, Terry. People’ll know not to take you seriously when you're wearing that.’ (!) I took his advice and my top hat became a Heymaker trademark.

Heymaker and John Higham had a amicable parting of the ways. Me and Lynda continued to do a bit of acoustic stuff for him and we brought in Eoghan O’Riley to play melodeon and tin whistle with us, but Heymaker was now homeless.

I called in to the Bridge Arts Centre in Newcastle under Lyme one evening - then run by a big friend of the local folk scene: Cyril Lawton. I asked Cytil, ‘Got any spare nights?’
‘You can have Mondays,’ he said. Simple as that, doods. And thus Heymaker found a new home at the Bridge Street Arts Centre. Monday nights, Heymaker nights, became Bridge Street’s biggest night of the week. More happy days.

Soon after moving to Bridge Street we had that little bit of luck that all bands need: Two biker friends from the Red Bull, Jackie and Bill, were getting married and called round to our cottage to ask if Heymaker would play for their nuptial celebs.

On their wedding day it turned out that the girlfriend of Bill’s best man was a journalist for the biker mag Back Street Heroes. She raved about Heymaker and wrote a short review bigging us along with a photo and published it in the mag.

Before you could say, 'flog my hard-tailed hog', Bridge Street was awash with bikers and Heymaker became bike rally favourites along with Chrome Molly, Engine, Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts and other such distinguished biker bands. Happy happy days.

In honour of our new friends I wrote the song Back Street Heroes:

Knights of the MyWay code,
Famous in the back rows
Back Street Heroes

Lords of the high roads
Kings of the gypoes
Back Street Heroes

Doctors of Philosophy
Wizards of metallurgy
Back Street Heroes

Defy the law of gravity
Ride the wheels of destiny
Back Street Heroes

Back street hero and heroine
May your wheels forever spin
May you ride ever free
May you live this life righteously

Who is there who would not be
Among such nobility?

Do you know, apart from the DangerMouse RC John Clucas Memorial Gig we played in 2007 after a long period of inactivity, I can’t remember how Heymaker ended?

Heymaker just slowly disintegrated, I suppose, having served its time. That happens with bands sometimes. Everybody gradually drifts off into other things.

Heymaker’s line-up for the John Clucas gig was:

Me, vocals, electric fiddle
Neil Hulse, telecaster
Phil Johnson, bass guitar, backing vocals
Mickey Gibson, drums, backing vocals

Heymaker’s most-gigging and most-enduring line-up was:

Me – vocals, electric fiddle, tin whistle
Lynda Fox – vocals, keyboards, tambourine, bodhran
Jack Fox – rhythm/lead guitar, backing vocals
Phil Johnson – bass guitar, backing vocals
Micky Gibson – drums, backing vocals

We were best when aided and abetted by Winky who provided us with great off-stage sound mixing and awesome lighting.

Heymaker’s drummers have been:

Cyrano Slater
Reg Banks
Avron White
Kevin Thompkinson
Pete Coppard
John Carol
Micky Gibson

Our bass guitarists have been:

Tufty from Simon-Hartley
Trevor Pinson
Phil Johnson
Steve West
Steve from Stone
Jack Fox
Sam Mawby

Other regulars have been:

Eoghan O’Riley – melodeon, tin whistle
Adam Fenn - electric mandolin, tin whistle
Geoff Walton - electric bouzouki, electric guitar

Backing vocalists (dubbed "the Heyettes" by fans) have been:

Jane Woolley
Eve Woolley
Lisa Nicklass
Sue Shepherd

Biker Simon Billings (R.I.P) joined us on keyboards for a series of gigs when Lynda was not able to be with us.

***

So that’s how it was folks: Heymaker was co-founded by Lynda and me way back in 1979 and lasted – with short and long gaps – until 2007.

Our most requested and best-remembered songs have proved to be Jack’s and my collaborations: Rhythmic Habits, and Sunshade Smiling Friday and my songs You’ve Got It All, Be My Violin and Back Street Heroes.

The story is told, o readers, the story is told.

We got the sad news today of the passing away of our one-time bass player and backing vocalist Steve West. Steve went on to find success as solo singer/comedian Steve Chicane. Rest in peace, mate.

Here's thanks to all Heymaker friends and fans throughout its history. It was righteous, wasn't it? The band is gone, but the songs live on in StringFing.

Travel safe,

Terry

CARYL PHILLIPS - THE FINAL INSULT?

2010-10-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

One of my students has just sent me a message:

Look who's coming to the MMU. Caryl Phillips
22 October, 2010, MMU, Geoff Manton Building, Manchester
Novelist and Yale University professor Caryl Phillips. Talk and questions.

***

Having gratuitously decreed (in spite of protests from more forward-thinking minds than theirs) that I'm too old to any longer be a member of their teaching staff, the MMU have added insult to injury by following this up with the hiring Prof. C. Phillips to come to the MMU in Manchester as a special celebrity writer and academic.

***
For those of you new to this blog, Caryl Phillips is the bloke who (shall we say) leaned so heavily – without acknowledgement - on my book Battling Jack for the text to the Made in Wales section of his book Foreigners that I thought his publishers, Random House, would be as shocked and disgusted as I was when the similarities were pointed out to them.

I truly thought that they might panic when they concluded that if Caryl Phillips had done produced his writing in this way on this occasion, then perhaps this was the way he had always worked. ‘Wow!’ I thought they would think, ‘This puts the whole canon of Phillips’s work into question!’

NOT A BIT OF IT, me old chinas. NOT A BIT OF IT

In the course of my protestations, Phillips’s legal representative at Random House actually warned me that I was making statements ‘injurious to Mr. Phillips’. 'Hmmm,' I thought at the time, 'that ain’t quite the same as saying the statements I'm making are untrue though, is it?

The upcoming MMU event is so close on the heels of dear old Jack Turpin’s funeral that it is especially upsetting to his family just as it is to me.

FOR THE PURPOSE OF ACADEMIC ENQUIRY ONLY I’ll give you an example of the textual similarities which have caused the upset.

Please note that BlogSpot though perfectly fine for blogging has certain limitations of presentation which prevent me from laying out the following text in the precise positions they hold in their publications. The statue inscriptions, for instance, are centred in the books. You would be advised to look at the published books to get the full weight of similarity.

Here is my text, in Jack’s voice, from Battling Jack published in 2005:

“. . . There was me brother, middleweight champion of the world, the man who’d brought about the twentieth century’s biggest upset in boxing, in his moment of triumph, standing 8 ft 6 in. tall, on a 5-ft stone plinth. On the bronze plaque below his feet:

In Palace, Pub, And Parlour,
The Whole Of Britain Held Its Breath

I thought to meself, ‘You’ve done a marvellous job there, Terry. That’s just right.’
Underneath that it’s got:

Celer Et Audax.

Latin for ‘Swift and Bold’ – the motto of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps who me dad fought with for the freedom of all British people, . . .”

*

Here is Phillips’s text in the Made in Wales section of his book Foreigners published two years later in 2007:

“. . . In 2001, exactly fifty years after Turpin shocked the world and defeated Sugar Ray Robinson, an imposing 8’6” statue of Randolph Turpin in boxing pose, on a five feet high stone plinth, was unveiled in the centre of Warwick. On the bronze plaque below his feet are inscribed the words:

In Palace, Pub, And Parlour The Whole of (sic) Britain
Held Its Breath.

And beneath this ‘Celer Et Audax’ – Latin for ‘Swift and Bold’ – the motto of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps with whom Turpin’s father served during the First World War . . .’

*

To me, that not only sounds similar, it looks similar too.

This posting by someone called Dave appeared on the Leamington Guide website on 19th October 2008, 12:37 am:

‘. . . i (sic) went to my local library to see what this "Battling Jack" was about... where in this book does it state that it's "non-fiction"? there is a book by Caryl Phillips titled "Foreigners" that she (the ‘she’ Dave refers here to is Jack’s granddaughter Lydia) should read as there are passages identical to that in Batttling Jack so who copied who? . . .”

I think you’ve got your answer, Dave.

Now then, I wrote Battling Jack in Jack’s voice because not only are Jack’s life and Jack’s life stories his own intellectual property, but my aim and intention was to recreate for the reader what it was like, in my experience, to spend time with Jack as his audience, friend and confidante.

Here's something for Mr. Phillips, his researcher, his Random House editor and his Random House legal team:

When I asked Jack what he thought were the proportions of Randolph’s statue, his estimate was that the bronze figure was 20-ft high and stood on a ten foot plinth.

It was clear to me that his perceived exaggeration of the size of the tribute to the brother he loved was a psychological measure of the huge love and esteem he held his brother in.

Jack straightway realised his own fairly wild over-estimate of Carl Payne’s creation and modified it to, ‘Well, no, I should say it’s about 8’ 6” for Randolph and 5 foot for the plinth.’

I left it at that.

My belief is that a reader of Battling Jack with any empathy and intelligence at all will quickly catch on to Jack’s vibe and instinctively know when Jack is exaggerating and when he is not. Just like you would do if you had actually met up with him for a chat (which Prof. Phillips has not).

Mr. Phillips is apparently not such a reader as Mr. Phillips is repeating Jack’s exaggerations as if they are fact and is repeating them in his own voice - the voice of a sober academic, a now Professor of Yale University. Doh!

The real measurement of Carl Payne’s bronze stature is: 6' 7" from the top of the stone plinth to the top of Randolph’s head. The plinth is 4-ft high at the front and 4 ft 2" at the back.

These proportions have long been known to me. Carl is a family friend. I was in at the beginning of his statue commission and followed it all the way through. It is through my involvement with Carl's commission that I met Jackie Turpin.

Adrian Bush, President of the Randolph Turpin Memorial Fund, decent fellow that he is, climbed up on the Warwick statue on a rainy day recently to verify these measurements, so: Doh! again Professor.

Ah, but there are many other examples of similarity between the two texts that I will not bore you with here.

During the course of my written exchange with Prof. Phillips, he claimed that Randolph’s two elder daughters are happy with his Made in Wales section of Foreigners.

I spoke to them both at Jack’s funeral – and wonderful women they are too, Randolph would have been really proud of them – and told them I had been in communication with a friend of theirs, Caryl Phillips.

‘He is no friend of ours,’ I was quickly told by the first daughter in tones that left me in absolutely no doubt of her sincerity. The second daughter came in with, ‘In fact we are very cross with Mr. Phillips.’

They went on to describe how Caryl Phillips had published things they had told him only in confidence and did so even after they had secured a promise from him that he would remove them from his final text. Doh! yet again Prof.

So, Prof., if you are reading this, and I hope you are, have a good gig at the MMU on the 22nd. You will easily recognise the Geoff Manton Building: It’s 4,078’ 9 ½” high standing on some 867-foot stone steps. Mind how you go.

***

The inscription on Carl Payne’s statue of Randolph, by the way, is a line taken from my song, Champion of the World, my personal tribute to Randolph’s great achievement in 1951. Come along to a StringFing gig. We often include that one.

***

Got to shoot off now. I promise a happier posting next time about an old mate of Lynda's and mine showing up at my National Poetry Day gig.

Tra a bit,

Terry

X-FACTOR: EX-FACTOR

2010-10-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hooray! I’ve finally been cured of my need to watch X-Factor! Hooray, hoorah, and hooray again!

I had been compelled by its magnetic ugliness for far too long.

X-Factor is staged with the sole aim of producing a TV show with money-makingly high ratings and hugely profitable spin-off merchandising opportunities.

Its participants are pawns in a giant game of chess. On one side of the table are the ever-hungry Mr. Cowell and his cohorts, and on the other side is the ever-hungry British TV-viewing public.

As every chess player knows, you have to sacrifice a few pawns in the pursuit of every win (and occasionally a queen, Lynda suggested when she read this).

Some of those taking part in X-Factor Chess might happen to receive benefit – even great benefit - from occupying the board, but, make no mistake, that is NOT the point of play. The point is, of course, the cheque, mate.

Embarrassingly, a couple of X-Factor victims have been students of mine from the MMU (you know who you are, M and D. Well no, sadly, you don’t, do you? You wouldn’t have done the X-Factor in the first place if you did).

But, ha!! No more shall I succumb to its guilt-inducing shows that have had me chuckling at its exploitation of the mentally ill.

No longer shall I have to hang my head in shame after finding myself laughing along with the bullyboy’s gang as the spotlight is turned on the next deluded one to be shoved out to croak and squirm under the hot, panting breath of the judges, and the cold, unforgiving eye of TV cameras.

Never again shall I have to witness the false bonhomie of the X-Factor's unenviable pontificating panel to whom fame and money are never enough; to whom the prospect of getting old is so terrifying they have themselves surgically disguised as younger people.

CUE: StringFing playing the intro to Somewhere in the Night

ENTER: The GRIM REAPER. He speaks from deep within his hood.

“Ah, but inside yourselves, my starry-starry doods, inside yourselves you are older than ever before, and so it goes on and on and on and on like that until you are mine.”

Curtains close as the skeletons in the cupboards of past X-Factor contestants sing: ‘Somewhere in the night violins are playing / The melody lingers, but it won’t be staying’.

If you can’t live with death, you can’t live with life, I say (Oooops! There wasn’t a faintly pleading quality to my voice just then, was there?).

How has this cure of mine been so dramatically accomplished?

How have I, apparently magically, been released from enslavement to my hideous and boorish tippex-toothed master?

I’ll tell you how:

he has brought Sharon Osbourne back in,

that’s how.

Once glimpse of her, one note of her voice was the combined emetic and enema this patient needed. A single moment of chain-shattering (yes, the resonance is intentional), unutterable horror, then: CURED! Wonderful!

Now then, I wonder if there are any crane flies handy that need their legs pulling off?

Tra-abit,

Terry

Jo Bell. Have a Go Jo, Come and Have a Go . . .

2010-10-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

Hey ho doods, turns out that they have finally given the Year 1 poetry strand of my old MMU job to Jo Bell. It’s Jo’s first venture into higher ed tutoring, apparently, so all good wishes to her from me. I’ve met Jo a few times and she looks young enough not to have to tread in fear of the MMUC's ageist policy – for a year or two anyway :-)

ON A NEW YEARS DAY

People have been asking for the lyric to this song of mine about the Sneyd Colliery Explosion in 1942.

This event, although belonging to what feels like an entirely different world, is still in living memory. I recently met a fella who was a 17-year-old lad at the time of it and remembers it well as well he might. He escaped the tragedy as he worked a different shift to the victims.

I know I told the story of the Sneyd disaster in an earlier blog, but did not (in so far as I can remember and I'm feeling far too idle right now to check it out) actually post the words, so here they are:

ON A NEW YEARS DAY

He who dares cut the coal, old pitmen say,
On a New Years Day
Has a wife make his snappin’, a widow take his pay
On a New Years Day

Bomber planes are flying, back to work it is
On a New Years Day
Sally stop your crying, give me one more kiss
On a New Years Day

The winding wheel is turning, the cage at the drift
On a New Years Day
Collier lads and Bevin Boys start their morning shift
On a New Years Day

At the Banbury Crut jig a rope begins to fray
On a New Years Day
The air is choked with powdered coal, the coal tubs runaway
On a New Years Day

The first down-coming tub scrapes up a spark
On a New Years Day
A coal dust blast rips apart the dark
On a New Years Day

At the pithead wives are waiting in sorrow and in grief
On a New Years Day
Their silence only broken by words of disbelief
On a New Years Day

Collier wives and Bevin Boys and boys in soldier suits
On a New Years Day
When bells ring out for war, we are all recruits
On a New Years Day

When the names are numbered, the roll of honour called
On a New Years Day
To the spoil heaps of the battlefields add fifty-seven more
On a New Years Day

© W. Terry Fox

If you want to actually hear this song sung, come to see StringFing at the New Inn, Derby Street, Hanley, on the evening of Thursday, October 21st. I have promised to put OANYD into our programme. Come down anyway even if you don’t want to hear it sung. You’ll be among some of the finest people walking this whole round earth – excluding the band of course.

May your steps be light and lead you along the road to happiness,

Terry

NATIONAL POETRY DAY

2010-09-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

Hey, like I said before, on NATIONAL POETRY DAY – Thursday October 7th 2010 – I will be giving a reading at NANTWICH LIBRARY on this year’s theme of HOME.

This means I will be reading poems of my nearest and dearest, and reading from Village Verse my collection of poems about my beloved Mow Cop.

The event will begin at 2pm and extend for about an hour.

You will be made most welcome and I am looking forward to a good time there.

I just wanted to remind you to come along.

***
Each year for the past five years, on the Friday of Fresher’s Week, along with my Writing colleagues at MMU Cheshire, I have had the joy of taking the new intake of Writing undergraduates to Mow Cop and Mount Pleasant Village Hall to give a short talk on the history Mow Cop and to read them some of my Mow Cop poems.

We then all troop up to the top of Mow to have a look at the places the poems have been about. The students take notes and then we all pile off back to the village hall for them to do some writing of their own.

It’s all to do with having a larf, facilitating them getting to know each other, and to remind all us writers of the importance of a sense of place in our writing. It is always a pleasure and good fun to boot and this year's do (Friday 24th September) was no exception.

It was a particularly poignant occasion for me seeing as ‘ow I’ve been forbidden any teaching on campus any more. This year’s students are a great bunch – more of them than usual too – and I really really envy my colleagues teaching them.

Only me and Julie could make it up there this year. I managed to seriously mis-direct the coach driver by taking him up the wrong road for a coach and getting us stuck. The driver was a top human being – stoic and patient – and with great skill, managed to bale us out of the predicament I had placed us in with a 1,000 point turn and a bit of pavement scraping.

The photo was taken on an earlier Mow Cop expedition by my friend and colleague Heather. One of the figures is known locally as: The Old Man of Mow.

***
So get along to Nantwich Library on National Poetry Day if you possibly can.

In the meantime, may all your roads be smooth, well-lit, safe and wide enough; may all your loads be light.

Terry

Replies to Messages

2010-09-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

This is a first: 2 days blogging on the trot! Told you it was becoming an obsession. Soon I'll only have time for writing my blog which will, of course, consequently be mainly about writing my blog. Just wanted to say:

Angie from Neston: Thanks, mate, I'm glad you like StringFing.

Paddy: Email me about your poetry evening. I'll make it if I can.

Robert from Stoke: Thanks Robert. I'm really pleased you like StringFing. May your lum reek too me old sunshine.

The Tortoise and the Twizzlebird

2010-09-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

You know that old story about the tortoise who was mugged by a gang of slugs? When the police interviewed him afterwards they asked him to describe exactly what had happened. The tortoise said, ‘It’s difficult to say, really. It all happened so fast.’ Well, that’s me and this blog. It’s difficult to say what’s been going on in my life as it all happens so fast.

I told the above joke when StringFing went to Neston Library up on the Wirral near Parkgate. Some jokes come to my mind and I hear myself telling them over and over. It must be cuz I'm a dad - comes with the territory. I love the people on the Wirral and I'm particularly fond of Neston Library and its staff.

Parkgate is the scene of what must be the biggest heist in history: One dark night, some Welsh geezers tip-toed over to Parkgate and nicked the River Dee. If you don't believe me go to Parkgate and have a look.

***

Way back to my last entry, the world had just lost my mate Jackie Turpin. I promised to post what I said at his funeral:

FOR JACK

He was not a boastful man, John Matthew Turpin Senior, Battling Jack. When he spoke to me of his professional boxing career it was to tell me how good his brothers Dick and Randolph were, or to tell me something to make me laugh.

When he told me about his service with the Royal Navy in the Second World War, on a destroyer ploughing through the Arctic seas guarding the Russian convoys, it was to tell me how brave he had NOT felt in the face of the horror of it all . . . and to tell me something to make me laugh.

When he spoke of his post-professional boxing career it was to tell me how good his son John Matthew Turpin Junior was; how good the amateurs were he selflessly trained; how proud he was of his wife, Bet, his daughter Georgina, his granddaughter, Lydia, and, of course, to tell me a tale that would make me laugh.

I met Jack in 1998 through my involvement with Randolph Turpin’s Memorial statue as a friend of the sculptor Carl Payne. For me it was as if someone had opened a door and let in a small whirlwind. Me and Jack got on instantly.

The influences that shaped him go way beyond his mother Beatrice’s stately Leamington Spa and Warwick back streets, far across the sea to that land of his father Lionel – three generations out of slavery – in the then ‘British Guyana’ in South America and from there to the golden sands and talking drums of West Africa. I was so affected by Jackie Turpin I wrote a book about him.

He was a better boxer than he ever said he was. He was a better trainer than he ever gave himself credit for. He was a better brother, husband, father and grandfather than he ever measured himself to be. He was a better friend than he ever imagined he was.

He once told me I was like another brother to him - a feeling that was reciprocated for Jack became like the older brother I never had.

John Matthew Turpin Senior, the little featherweight with the heart of a giant, Battling Jack, was, is, and will always be a hero to me.

***
As I explain in my last blog the MMUC HR TWATS have flatly refused to employ me as a lecturer anymore (lets hope they think me also too old to be sued). I’m glad to be free of the yoke in some ways – it allows me to refer to them as TWATS for a start - but I have to say, though, it’s coming up for the new academic year and I’m feeling the pull of the campus. There is something utterly brilliant about teaching poetry, creative writing, writing for performance and journalism that is out there on its own.

StringFing is my big fing now, with Adam and Emily. I call our music Folk Beat. It’s a synthesis of all the music I have ever put my mind and fingers to from the 60s beat scene through skiffle, blues, N.O. Jazz and traditional Anglo-Celtic music. It’s folky electro-acoustic stuff with an edge. It ain’t no faux-pure bollix, it struts its influences.

We have started a new residency at The New Inn, Derby Street, Hanley, Stoke on Trent on the 3rd Thursday of the month. It’s a big, warm, comfortable pub with well-kept beer and friendly hosts. We had a great time there last week. We’re there next on Thursday 21st October. Come along and join the merry throng. People will only talk about you if you don’t.

***

Our Amy and her partner Dave have launched their own web design business:

http://www.twizzlebird.co.uk/

They have created a brill website for my Woodlanders Country Dance Band. Have a gander at it:

http://www.thewoodlanders.net/

They are busy helping companies in the North West make the best use of the internet with their Twizzlebird Creative hot designs.

***

I had a nice surprise tonight in the form of a phone call from my old mucker Henri Harrison. I love Henri. We go back a long, long way. The Cops n Robbers was Henri’s band and we did a lot of well-documented cool stuff with that outfit, but we played music together before that – New Orleans jazz.

Henri was gigging in Watford the other evening and bumped into an erstwhile great mate of Lynda’s and mine: the inimitable Johnny Johnson. Johnny is a great singer. When Lynda and Johnny and me were knocking around together Johnny played 12-string guitar and sang solo. He can switch from a soul number to a music hall song in a flick of his plectrum and do them brilliantly.

Johnny’s got a six-piece band now, Henri says. Johnny always had a big repertoire of jokes, guaranteed to make you laugh. Oh yeah, I remember his paintings too – wonderful! Of all the geezers I know, Johnny is the more comfortable in his skin. I wrote a song about him once called, ‘Johnny Walks Easy Down the Street’. I’ve no idea now how the song went anymore. I just recall writing it and what the title was. I wonder if he remembers it?

***

National Poetry Day is on Thursday 7th October. I’m doing a gig at Nantwich Library starting at 2pm. The theme this year is ‘Home’ so I’ll be doing some of my Mow Cop poetry and some poems about my nearest and dearest. It would be triffik to see you there. Please come along if you possibly can.

Hey that wasn’t bad for me: only a matter of weeks since my last posting rather than the more-usual months. I’m getting almost obsessive with it, aren’t I?

Yours truthfully truly,

Terry

Hey Doods

2010-07-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

I'm just no good at regular stuff, innit? - 5 months since I posted anything on this site. Thing is, too much happens all the time for me to be able to separate anything out for special attention. The passing away of me dear old mate Jackie Turpin, he of Battling Jack fame, has got to be one exception, of course. The nature of Jack's illness meant that anyone beyond the periphery of his absolutely nearest and dearest faded from his vision, so he was lost to me a while before he died, but all deaths are sudden and each death of a loved person is a shock. I spoke at his funeral and I will post (at a later date) what I said in his honour.

Another couple of exceptions are: The MMU Cheshire has finally binned me on age grounds

TWATS!

I was touched by the reaction of the staff and students towards the refusal of the management to renew my contract and I shall miss the Creative Writing team and the students shed loads. Our Amy and Dave are moving and will soon be a lot nearer to me and Lynda - YAY! As the result of a triffick collection of writing the staff and students did for me as a leaving gift, I am back in email contact with my old friend and teaching colleague, Heather. She is a top person and an awesome writer with great clarity of thought and expression. She is also humourous and kind.
Anyway, I'm off out. Here's a new song:

DOWN ON POISON FARM

On Poison Farm the crops are in
The fields are stripped; the yields are slim
Let the Harvest Home begin
Down on Poison Farm

The cock won’t crow at the break of day
The five-bar gate is crumbling away
The scarecrow has been scared away
Down on Poison Farm

Slates are falling from the roof
The horse has gone and cracked his hoof
The milkmaid’s in love with Beowulf
Down on Poison Farm

The wind blows cold over the hill
On the ploughboy strung from the window sill
Time is all there is they will not kill
Down on Poison Farm

Once there was . . . on a May morning - g . . .
Once there was . . . when small birds sing - g . . .
Once there was . . . in the grrreen rrrushes o . . .
Once there was . . . in the long, long ago - oh . . .

The milk’s going sour in the can
Peter Pan said to The Elephant Man
There’ll be no more bread – the mill’s got jammed
Down on Poison Farm

The cornfield crows are ready to fly
Mr B is keeping his powder dry
With an odd look in his one good eye
Down on Poison Farm

Farmer Brown went to town
Looked the pretty girls up and down
Got caught with his trousers
Down on Poison Farm

Trouble an’ strife, the farmer’s wife
Cut off his tail with her carving knife
You can see such things every day of your life
Down on Poison Farm

Once there was . . . on a May morning - g . . .
Once there was . . . when small birds sing - g . . .
Once there was . . . in the grrreen rrrushes o . . .
Once there was . . . in the long, long ago - oh . . .

The setting sun is sinking fast
Your silhouette’s sharp in the shadows cast
If they had a flag it’d hang half mast
Down on Poison Farm.

© W. Terry Fox

Keep having a larf. See you later.

Terry

Coincidences of Geography and Time

2010-02-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

A young singer-guitarist got in touch with me, via my landline, a few months ago: ‘Are you the Terry Fox who played Vox Continental with the Cops n’ Robbers in the sixties?’ The fella who made the call was Adam Coxon and, as that particular co-incidence of geography and time has had it, we live in the same area.

I imagine Adam, who is a big fan of 60s music, must have initially been prompted by simple curiosity perhaps just wondering if any of us had actually survived. The ‘Cops n’ Robbers’ (named after a Bo Diddley song as many rhythm and blues bands were then) enjoyed more excess than success – in terms, that is, of the gauges that are commonly used to measure success which are, I suppose, celebrity and money. Truth is the whole experience ended up permanently bending my brain somewhat, but I had a hell of a laugh along the way.

The ‘Cops’ did some of those young-dood things rock songs are made of and made and spent a whack of money, compared with factory wages, in the process. We recorded a couple of half-decent tracks, wrote a couple of half-decent songs, played some fantastic gigs, made a couple of lame TV appearances, hung out with, jammed with, supported, partied with, topped the bill with some now-legendary people and were the UK backing band for two of the greatest blues singers in the world: Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker. We also launched the career of a then skinny little folk singer called Donovan.

Back to the present. The long and the short of that initial phone call is that Adam started coming along to StringFing gigs. So, last Sunday night, Lynda and I thought it was time we returned the compliment and went to one of Adam’s gigs. He was playing at Blakey’s Café Bar in Newcastle. And what a nice surprise, all-round, it proved to be. It happened it was St. Valentine’s night and the music was suitably lerv themed and could have been dodgy and sentimental, but oooooh nooooo, give the young man a big hand, every song was good and edgy and made his own through the strength of his performance.

Adam’s got a proper voice, you see. He’s one of those people fortunate enough to have been born with a good voice and has developed it further - utterly unlike me, of course: born with an ideal voice for a mime artist and a face for radio - and he’s a neat guitar player too.

He opened with Sam and Dave’s, Cupid (and hey, if you’re not acquainted with these two soul men, then be getting on to it. They were the model for the Blues Brothers, don’t you know?). Adam did Ella Fitzgerald’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a fabulous version of Willie Nelson’s Crazy (my favourite song of the night), Arthur Alexander’s Baby It’s You, and a stack of other good stuff. Terrific night. Nice venue too. We’re going to see him there again.

I’ve been feeling sad for Woody Guthrie lately. I have just read Joe Klein’s book about him. Woody got us all playing guitars and blowing mouth harps fixed to neck harnesses (I made mine from a wire coat hanger. Some doods had proper ones). I’m talking long about long before there was any awareness of Bob Dylan over here. He was such a brave man, Guthrie was. He suffered a cruel illness, Huntington’s Disease, that made him old too young and killed him at 55. He left a unique legacy to the world.

I have reworked the chorus to one of his most famous songs to make it more appropriate to us Brit. islanders:

This land is your land and this land is my land,
From Scotland’s high land to Cornwall’s low land;
From Milford Haven to the Norfolk waters;
This land was made for you and me.

I’m working on a couple of verses to go with it. I will be singing it next time out. Woody understood people and knew what they were going through and told it like it was.

Take it easy, but take it.

Terry

Jackie's Jacksy

2010-01-27T02:06:00.000-08:00

I’ve got to tell you this: me and Lynda have got a friend called Jackie. That’s not it. There’s more: Jackie is a little unusual. Some might call her ‘eccentric’, ‘weird’, ‘off the wall’, ‘barmy’, ‘loopy’, ‘howling at the moon’, etc. Not me though, I hasten to add. I wouldn’t be so bloody rude.

Jackie is texting-mad and writes multitudinous texts with inventive txtspk abbreviations, as senders of copious txts tnd 2 do. Jackie is also obsessed with her health and insists upon keeping her friends up to date with the latest manifestations of her extensive and exponentially-increasing range of afflictions with detailed and highly descriptive lists of their symptoms - omg gr8 swt smlz of amonia bld in we hosp 2moz. The many recipients of her messages – and believe me, that example is a mild one - quickly learn to avoid reading them at mealtimes.

Most of us have put a bit of weight on over Christmas, haven’t we? I know I have. Nearly a stone, in fact, and all I did was slob around for three weeks eating ten platefuls a day more than a sty-full of Wessex Saddlebacks. As a result of my sustained gluttony, when lying on my back on the couch, I have the body profile of Mow Cop.

I have long been an admirer of John Betjeman’s verse. With the paunch I’ve got at the moment, stick a straw boater on my head and I could go out as a convincing tribute act. ‘Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, I can hear from the car-park the dance has begun . . .’

Back to Jackie: She put on some w8 ovr xms 2 and texted details as to where the extra poundage had distributed itself, including, w8 4 it: ‘2lb on my rs’. Two-pounds is an extraordinarily precise amount of gained weight. So precise in fact that it could only be arrived at by careful measurement.

Which begs the question: How the hell did she weigh her arse?!! And, no, I’m not asking her. I have neither the required courage nor strength to bear the consequent images.

t2yl

Terry

Of Teddy the Cat and Caryl the Professor

2010-01-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Anybody who knows my lovely wife Lynda will know that she loves animals dearly, especially cats. She used to breed cats at one time. No, you’re right, clearly she didn’t, they used to breed themselves, but she governed the genetic engineering side of things.

A sad occasion was visited upon us when we lost Teddy, a beautiful Sealpoint Persian tom (Did you know cat people refer to cat genders as ‘girls’ and ‘boys’. How surreal is that?). Poor Teddy was hit by a car as he was running back home across Congleton Road South by the Red Bull Pub.

Tom cats that are left ‘entire’ do have a tendency to wander further from home than neutered toms and Teddy was no exception. Even though we had a 5-acre field alongside our house for him to cruise about in, he preferred to go a-courting miles away.

As you might imagine, Lynda was deeply upset by Teddy’s demise. Later that day, she paid a routine visit to her mum in Goldenhill. As soon as her mother opened the door she noticed her daughter’s stricken face and tear-reddened eyes. ‘What on earth’s the matter, duck,’ she asked with great concern, holding out her arms.
‘Teddy’s been killed,’ Lynda told her. Her mother nearly fainted on the spot, but managed to stagger inside and collapse on the sofa.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked in a feeble voice.
Lynda was surprised by her mother’s reaction as her mother had never seemed all that fond of cats, but she went on to explain: ‘A car hit him as he was running across the road.’
‘Oh, no! Oh, no,’ her mother wailed.
‘I suppose it’s my fault,’ Lynda reflected after a while.
‘Your fault?!!’ asked her mother, absolutely aghast.
‘Yes,’ said Lynda, miserably. ‘I should have had his balls cut off.’

It was at this point that Lynda’s mother realised that Lynda must be talking about Teddy the cat and not Lynda’s marathon-running older brother Edward.

***

You remember that author, Caryl Phillips, I mentioned in my last blogging, the one who people keep telling me has ripped off chunks of my book Battling Jack for Part II of his book Foreigners published two years later (he is currently denying this and claiming that although Battling Jack was an ‘important and useful source’ which was regrettably omitted from the acknowledgements, anything more than this is co-incidental!!)? It turns out Mr Phillips is a professor at Yale University. Tut, tut, tut, professor.

I’ll keep you informed of any progress in my challenge of Prof. Caryl Phillips’ use of my work.

Are there any other authors out there, I wonder, who believe that Prof. Phillips has made similar appropriations of their work? If so, please let me know.

In the meantime have a keentime one and all.

Adios,

Terry

Caryl Phillips Plagiarist?

2010-01-19T00:23:00.000-08:00

There's this geezer called Caryl Phillips. According to the cover of a book of his that I have in front of me right now, he was born in the West Indies and brought up over here. Mr Phillips is a writer who enjoys great standing in the literary world - a Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship - that kind of thing. The fella is a fellow too, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

There is a picture of him. He's a good-looking dood, 40-ish, clean-shaven all over his face and head, well, apart from his eyebrows. The photo is a head and shoulders shot. Phillips is posed sideways-on to the camera, but with his head turned towards it. He is currently looking straight at me. Straight into my eyes. I have to say I see no guilt there. No haunted look. Nothing shifty. In fact, he does not look in the least bit like a charlatan or shameless word thief.

In 2007 Mr Phillips had yet another book published (he has many to his name), a book called Foreigners. It is divided into three parts. Part II of the book is called: Made in Wales and is about Randolph Turpin, famous fighter, brother of my dear buddy Jackie Turpin for whom I wrote the book Battling Jack: You Gotta Fight Back. Battling Jack was published in 2005, two years before Mr Phillips book was issued. Remember that and pass it on: two years before.

A while ago I was alerted to a posting on the internet written by a guy who had read the two books mentioned above and asking the question: 'Who has copied who?' One by one the telephone calls and the emails came: 'Hey Terry, man, some bloke's ripping you off' . . .' etc, etc.

My friend Kenny Jervis who has made an ace, as yet unpublished, documentary about Randolph phoned: 'Terry, I just bought a book called Foreigners by a bloke called Caryl Phillips. Have you had a hand in writing this? No? Kin ell! You'll be bloody furious! I'll send it to you when I've finished reading it.' He very kindly did. And, yes, I was and am 'bloody furious'. Mr Phillips, his researcher and his publisher have denied plagiarism - denied that Caryl Phillips has taken my work and passed it off as his own.

Why not see what you think? Find a library with Foreigners on its shelves. Sit in there with your purchased copy of Battling Jack. Have a look at, say, page 156 and 157 of Foreigners and compare it with page 266 of Battling Jack. Plagiarism? You decide. Let me know.

Mr Phillips' book has cast a shadow on my integrity as a person and as a writer. Hardly anybody bothers to look at the publishing dates of books and because yer Mr Phillips is such a literary giant, guess who people think is a copyist?

An irony is that I spent three years talking to Jack, travelling down to Warwick every week to record interviews with him, and researching and writing his story mainly because he and his brothers have been exploited for years by people making money out of their names and fame and I wanted to give something back.

I had not, prior to meeting Jackie, any intention of writing an extended work. I am a poet. I write in short bursts and then have a think about it. A single sentence can keep me occupied for weeks. I am very glad I had the opportunity to write a biography, of course, and in the light of the way Part II of Foreigners has been written and Mr Phillips walking so tall and admired through Bookland, and all that, I should have to consider myself a natural at the genre.

Jackie Turpin and I are co-authors. His stories, my writing. The writer and the fighter - the poet and the pugilist. I did the writing, Jack led the life. When I consider that a lot of Jackie's life consisted of exchanging gut-thumping blows with strangers in the boxing ring, I am happy with the arrangement.

I love Jack. He once told me we are brothers and that feeling is reciprocated. Kindred spirits. Same angst. Same sense of the absurd. All this stuff with Caryl Phillips is being kept away from Jack at the moment as he gets more upset by these things than I do (which is saying something). But his family and close ones are distressed by it, insulted by it. We want justice. I am going to take it all the way.

I had a phone call last night from an old co-conspiritor of mine from uni, Dave Woods. Back in the day we were both Writing students on the same course. These years on, Dave is not only a writer but an actor and radio presenter too. We used to have some bloody laughs. I remember him inventing a character called Muriel Muriel. It killed me for weeks that name. He lives up in Scotland now. Great to hear from you Dave.

Well, I got work to do.

Tra-ra. Go steady. Say hello to Muriel Muriel. Whoa, a last minute thought occurs: My Lynda suffers from insomnia, a legacy from a past illness. Insomnia is debilitating and distressing. It might help her out, perhaps, if Mr Phillips lets us know how he sleeps at night.

Terry

On Ice With Strings

2010-01-07T03:30:00.000-08:00

Jack Frost is having a right laugh, isn't he? Ain't he just. The cold-hearted, light-fingered old git has gorn and spangled everything. Above (and below) is a faux toe Lynda took of our summer house a couple of days ago. Since then, the jolly Mr Frost has danced all over the snowfall in his white-spangled pointy shoes and dressed it in diamonds. It now looks like summat Queen E would wear on her head at one of her balls (I use the word advisedly).

As you can see above (and above), StringFing made it to the Coachmakers last night and played to a much-depleted but absolute quality audience. We did Please Don't Drop Your Bombs On Me as promised, but the guy who requested it was another dood kept under house arrest house by the treacherous insurgents Ice and Snow. We'll be keeping the song in the set for a while so, liberated from his incarceration by the prophesied soon-upcoming army of sun beams, he will hear it next time round.

Oh, I have had to go back to sticking the W. in front of my name. There is simply too many references to the Canadian hopping hero to conveniently find the far far fewer references to the British shuffling non-heroic me. So it's the plus the W. for everything I do, but I won't be prefixing StringFing with my name as it's listed in the personnel in all publicity.

In the fotie of StringFing are two stalwart geezers who like real ale and real music too much to be kept away by a mere bit of weather. The camera flash has lit the room up more than it really was and the sustainable pine forest Jason has created on the joanna ain't usually there. Other than that, and a few dozen people, that's how it mostly is. Come along. Go on. You'll feel all the better for it duck.

May you become horizontal only when it's your own idea.

Terry

Chilling Out

2010-01-05T05:59:00.000-08:00

All of Mow Hill is white and fluffy. What's been going on? A downfall of our downfall, that's what. I had to cancel our StringFing practice. The slippy slidy snowy drifts gave me no choice. Ain't it pretty, though? he asked from the haven of his big comfy chair by the radiator in his writing corner.

Actually, this particular radiator is not all that efficient and my toes are bloody freezing. So thanks natural forces for the pretty pretty snow, but it can go away now. I want the roads clear for our gig at the Coachmakers tomorrow night.

I have a poetry competition to judge and a load of marking to do for uni. The cancelled rehearsal has given me time to start doing it. Oh joy.

The photo is StringFing at the Coachmakers last year. Last year . . . Doesn't time whizz along? It only seems like a couple or four weeks ago.

Don't forget to feed the little bird doods. They're struggling.

Be safe,

Terry

Turning Over A New Year

2010-01-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

Well here it is: New Years Day.

Ruth said to me, ‘Will you be saying two-thousand-and-ten or ‘twenty-ten’?’
‘Oh, two-thousand-and-ten. It’s a number, after all,’ I said
‘Yes, and ‘twenty-ten’ sounds so American,’ she said. I agreed. Then she said, ‘Ah, but we do say, the Battle of Hastings was in ‘ten-sixty-six’ don’t we?’ Call it what you will, this day milestones a new year for us islanders. Let make it a good one.

Under its new banner (Literally. I sewed and painted it myself), StringFing will be doing On A New Years Day at the Coachmakers, in Hanley, this Wednesday evening. It is 68 years since the explosion at Sneyd Colliery that took 57 lives. It was deemed unlucky to cut coal on a New Years Day. The miners broke their rule cuz in 1942, most of the world was involved in war for which coal was essential.

We will also be doing Please Don’t Drop Your Bombs on Me – a personal plea to the owner of any finger hovering over a big red button primed to trigger a nuclear bomb. Of course, I use it as a plea of restraint that includes anybody who has any bad intentions towards anybody else.

Seen from my window, Mow Hill is coated with a heavy frost right now. It is a misty morning. The sun has lit up all the east-facing windows. I can just pick out the castle in the deep greyness of what looks like a range of distant and brooding mountains.

Now I ain’t the Cheshire Poet Laureate any more I'll have a bit more time to get on with organising the completion and delivery of my Village Verse collection. I have set my sights on the middle of the year. We'll see. I've been trying to get it off the ground for yonks. If it ain't one thing holding it up it's another. Usually me not being able to raise the printing costs.

The night before last, just as me and Lynda were about to unscrew the top off a bottle, we had a call from Sheila to say Jim Eldon was over for a few days and asking about us and would we come over to the Swan, in Acton, for a session. It was great to see Jim and Lynette again. He was in his usual engaging form: his warm and gravelly voice over a scraped fiddle; quirky, individual, and right on target in. A proper ‘now’ version of the tradition.

Jim's music is part of a homely, home-spun, make-and-do tradition that I pay into. Nothing to do with academies and museums and dusty archives and intense and privileged education and training. It’s the result of a people after a long day’s work, taking their fiddles down from the hooks on the wall and grabbing a melody from the air and raising their voices to life. Wonderful. A lot of playing and singing was done, years ago, during the long, dark agricultural winters when the work was less. I was pressganged by a captain of industry when I was a kid and, consequently, spent most of my working life in factories. But it was an urban version of the same thing. As I think I have posted earlier, my first job was weeding kale fields (a line of kids working their way through an endless crop) but, the farm was doomed for redevelopment and the job was concreted over and factories grown where the pastures and crop fields were.

A wake of controversy always follows Jim. A lot of people can’t get a handle on his range of material: He’ll do a sea shanty followed by a song he wrote last week followed by Rockin’ All Over the World. Wake up you people! that’s exactly what the tradition is, does, and always will. EG, those Morris tunes that are often held up to be the epitome of the tradition – Jockey to the Fair, Constant Billy, etc – were all popular songs. Wake up, wake up! Or at least pipe down and listen.

Me and Croz recorded an album with Jim in . . . Croz, I google, thinks it was around 1979, but I am pretty sure it was a few years later. Yeah it was. I remember Amy, then a little girl, running out to give me a hello cuddle when I got back from one of the recording sessions. It must have been at least the middle of the 1980s. Jim and me were on fiddles and Croz was on the cello. I remember when we were trying to decide which version of Soldiers Joy we’d play. There was the more widely-known version, a cool, very different take on it that Jim had discovered and a version I had invented. We decided in the end to string them all together. Check it out if it’s still around. The album is Jim Eldon and the Sharpshooters.

At the Swan the session was in full swing by the time we arrived. Some of the musos I knew, some I didn’t: Jim fiddle and voice; Croz fiddle and melodeon; Sheila English concertina; Bryn (?), guitar and great songs; a guy from the Boat band on melodeon (sorry, dood, don’t know your name. Ace player, though); an older guy with a good voice; a younger singer and box player with a good voice; Lynette, tambourine and dancing feet.

Me and Lynda made our contribution on tambourine and guitar. Ee, it were gradely. Yeah, and we did the lot: trad tunes and songs, some not-so-old songs, and some with the ink still wet on their pages.

‘Trad’ singers have always done the songs of their forbears along with the songs they have written themselves and the new songs of others. Some of the early folksong collectors used to complain that the singers whose repertoires they were archiving kept wasting their precious recording time on non-traditional material. The tradition ain’t one solidified, frozen thing. It’s ever-changing and circling around. What's new today is traditional tomorrow. The tradition is what Jim does and what StringFing does.

I’m off the have my first breakfast of the decade. Look out for yourselves and for everybody else you can give a helping hand to.

Terry

ROBERT JOHNSON AN' ME

2009-12-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

He’s singing Last Fair Deal Gone Down. Every song the beautiful slender-fingered man ever recorded is mine for my delectation on 2-CDs. It’s been a great Christmas. I got some new boots too, so I’m all set up for the New Year. Lynda’s asleep and the house seems to echo emptiness now that Amy and Dave have gone back south.

I’ve acquired the body shape of Mr Pickwick. My old frame has suffered some major dietary abuse, over the past few days, in the form of whiskey, whisky, gin and cakes and cakes and gin and whisky and whiskey, but my much-depleted finances reassure me that this bloated frame will only be temporary. Just as well. Another few days of it and I’ll have to use a mirror to see which shoes I'm wearing.

The addition of the fabulous Ms. Emily Louise Tellwright on cello to Adam and my music-making is official and the way it is from now on. We are rambling 3-dom road, doods. ACW and me half-heartedly called ourselves Up to Scratch at first – you have to tag your product. We are now called: StringFing.

Emily told me that she met a fella from Heymaker days who has requested we do Please Don’t Drop Your Bombs On Me when he comes to see us at the Coachmakers on Wednesday January 6th. Yeah, oh yeah. Thanks dood. I’ll be pleased to do that song again. Especially now we are graced with the cello. There was a group of soldiers who turned up at the Arts Centre whenever they were on leave – I’m talking 1980s here – who always requested that song and sang along with it knowing the words as well as I did. I was curious about that. It’s anti all that stuff. They said, ‘But it’s about NUCLEAR war, man. No soldier likes nuclear war.’ Fair do.

Meant to tell you a while ago: my friend Liz Almond has another collection of poetry out. She is gentle and wise. Her new collection is called Yelp. Give it a read or four or five. It gets better with rereading like all good poetry does. Yelp is, as is said, available from all good bookshops. Liz was my personal tutor at uni. Read her poetry and you will know how lucky I was to have her as a mentor.

January’s issue of Cheshire Life has given half a page to me and my poem Homage to Cheshire. It rounds off my two years as Poet Laureate for the county. It’s the end of the scheme too. I suppose I could carry on calling myself Cheshire Poet Laureate until such time as the scheme is revived and I am officially replaced. However, enough is enough.

Although the people in the Cheshire Arts Service who inherited the project from the remarkable Liz Newall did not have her vision, commitment and flair and basically did bugger all that was positive beyond handing me the crown and a smooth handful of dosh (for which I am honestly grateful), the appointment has been brilliant for and to me. My 2010 diary bears testament to it’s ongoing benefit as the poetry gigs are rolling in. Once I sussed the lack of support I just got on with it myself and made it happen.

A few weeks ago, I hosted the awards evening of a poetry competition on behalf of de Winter PR for Adoption Matters North West at the Bank of America in Chester – have I mentioned that? I can never remember – I also delivered Mending Nets, the poem Adoption Matters commissioned me to write. I met two terrific poets there: Gladys Mary Coles and Jim Bennett. You should check them out. Terrific people too. Both of them are characters. Famous around Merseyside. You have to be good to be noticed up there. Jim’s into English trad too. Like me, he makes music as well and has a CD due to be launched soon. Google it, why don't you?

Jim noticed that I wasn’t (as he delicately put it) ‘widely published’ as a poet and very kindly mentioned me to a good man in the publishing business who connected me up with another good man who expressed interested in my stuff. But do you know what? I let it go, doods. I had a bit of an epiphany.

I ain’t an ambitious sort of a geezer – except when it comes to playing guitar in front of an audience when I am often a little over-ambitious – and I know I should push myself more in order to cement meself into a more comfortable position, but I can honestly say that I am happiest when I am doing my stuff locally. Community above celebrity every time, mates. Communal riches above personal wealth. That philosophy don’t always seem so groovy when my small harvest of food is being carried down the conveyor belt towards the great yawning gob of a Tesco till. It’s the creed I got, though, and it’ll do for me. Are you all right with your packing, sir?
Yeah, I would like more gigs as StringFing, more gigs as W dot poet-fella, more gigs as the Woodlanders Country Dance Trio (yeah that’s a threesome too these days) and more gigs with the other combos, assortments and liaisons life has fitted me up with but, above all, I’d like them to be local.

As far as the future publishing of my poetry is concerned, I will do it myself. That way I will have full editorial control. Never again will I allow myself, if I can possibly escape it, to be in position where someone like Ms. Sherman of the Arts Service can interfere with my text.

On the subject of publishing, me and Dave Wright went up to the Old Man of Mow and the castle yesterday. Dave took some more of his black and white photos for our Village Verse project – his foties, my pomes. Mow is my favouritest place. Inspires me every time. It’s got a unique and special vibe. Anyway, with luck, and provided I can get the gold together, 2010 will be the year Village Verse actually gets printed. Mind you, we’ve been working on it on and off for about eight years so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Reading Village Verse and talking about Mow Cop is a gig in itself. I have done it a couple of times. The last one being at the beginning of 2009 for the U3A, Alsager Civic Hall. I love doing it and I plan to use Dave’s photos from the collection projected on the wall for future Village Verse gigs.

Hey, Robert Johnson has loved in vain and gone silent until tomorrow. I must get some sleep too. May no hellhounds get on your trail.

T.

AHAY!!

2009-12-23T04:50:00.000-08:00

At last! for a while, and for some weird and undiscovered reason, I couldn't access my blog to post a new entry. But, thanks to the magikings of the remarkable Dave Wright, I am now enabled so to do. I haven't got time right now to write now. In the meantime:

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL MY READERS

AND MAY YOU BOTH HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR

Terry

Down on Watford Farm

2009-09-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, how are you? Lynda and I went down to Richmond in the capital city for a couple of days to stay with Phil Colclough. And captial it was. The weather is a whole pullover warmer down there. The Thames was looking magnificent - more beautiful than I remembered her. We went to Watford to see my skin and blister Marlene. We had seen Marlene in Llandudno earlier in the year when we all met up for dinner. It's well ages since I saw Watford town, though, and it's every bit as crap as I recall. I had to meet Phil at Watford Junction station. I walked there from my sisters - it ain't far - and I cut down the Bridle Path. Well it used to be called the Bridle Path. I don't know if it still is. Wow! what a dodgy walk that was. It's amazing how from another place you look when you step off your own manor. Loads of predatory doods about giving me the evil eye. I'm paranoid at the best of times (thank you Father Kif and Mother Skunk) but walking the back alleys of Watford brought it all back home. When ever I had a panic attack in the old days, I used to roll another spliff. What a mistake that was. I only use strictly legal drugs these days: the ones prescibed to combat high blood pressure, and also alcohol. Alcohol must be Ok, no harm at all. I mean, if it was dangerous in anyway, I'm sure it wouldn't be allowed. Weed must be far worse cuz it's banned, surely to goodness, innit?

Phil was on good form and Lynda and I had a great time. The big prize for me was the voices. When I told Amy that she asked me, 'The ones in your head or the ones outside?' Happily, campers, I mean the voices outside. The buzz of conversation in a Thameside pub brought nostagia home to me on a truck. Man, I could have basked in it for a week or two. The voices of the land that nurtured you must shape you in some way. It's funny cuz Watford, apart from triggering off some vague and uncomfortable mental state did nothing else for me.

My Watford, the Watford of my childhood: jumping off haystacks, crouched down weeding kale fields for 9/- a day (big big money, believe me), climbing trees, catching adders with a forked stick, fishing, falling in the river . . . just does not exist anymore. The first farm I worked on - a dairy farm - is now a housing estate. The entrance road to it is Cow Lane. But, as Seasick Steve says, 'That's all right. I ain't the same as I used to be either.' I miss it, though. There is something about working on the land that seems to make more sense of life. It seems a proper thing to do - something not based on airy fairy bollocks and bullshit. Although, I suppose it is literally based quite a lot on bollocks and bullshit, and fairies feature quite a lot in agricultural folk lore too. You know what I mean though, don't you?

It was good to see Phil and my sister too.

Songs of the Triassic Sea, my cycle of four lyric poems has been handed in to Spaces and has met with their approval. Great. A pleasure and a relief. It was so enjoyable to write. I wish I had commissions like it all the time. It ended up as a film script with a running time of around 20 mins and I am hoping to raise funds to get the film made. In the meantime, Ian banks is bringing his vid camera down to the Coachmakers, on the first Wednesday in October, to record parts ii) and iii) - Ram Your Spike and Winsford Town. These will be posted on YouTube and be the basis, hopefully, for attracting the funding for the full film.

Gotta go. It's National Poetry Day on Thursday 8th October and I've got loads to sort out.

Hope life is treating you.

In Stoke: Tez. In Watford and London: Tel.

That Which Is Owed, etc

2009-09-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

How now, folks?

A while back, I explained that Anne Sherman of the Cheshire Arts Service had stubbornly refused to let me have page proofs of my poetry collection ‘Somewhere in the Night’ and the ‘Homage to Cheshire’ anthology that (allegedly) I edited. In consequence, textual mistakes were allowed to go to publication. The result was two or three broken hearts and one extremely naffed-off Cheshire poet laureate.

It became apparent on its publication why Ms. Sherman had held the page proofs of my collection from me: she had made extensive, unsanctioned alterations to the text of the notes I had attached to my poems.

In my book (pun intended) for one to interfere with another’s intellectual property is an unforgivable arrogance and a literary offence second only to plagiarism. The ‘Homage’ anthology suffered along with it because Ms. Sherman could hardly have given me page proofs of the collective work whilst holding back the page proofs of my own work.

I made a promise to the offended ‘Homage’ poets that, by way of a small compensation, I would post their poems on my blog in their correct form. For my own peace of mind – and please forgive the indulgence - I will also post the original text of the notes of my collection. And this process, my dear blog-eyed mates, I will spread over time but starting right now:

Apologies to ANGI HOLDEN. Angi’s poem should have read:

OVER COTTON MILL FIRE
A monument at Over St. John’s Church, Winsford,
commemorates the victims of The Over Cotton Mill Fire:
28th October 1874.

Solemnly figures crowded the Wheatsheaf
as spinners described the friction fire:
a single stray spark had caught the cotton slub
consuming the mill in a hilltop pyre.

Before the Coroner witnesses told
how a young woman burned, snagged by her shawl;
how, trapped four floors up, a girl flung her babe
to the crowd, then jumped. Both died in the fall.

They dug out the bodies of five more spinners.
So where, asked the jury, should the blame lay?
A community shattered; families made homeless;
three-hundred workers without jobs or pay.

No water was kept in buckets at loom-side.
But, said the coroner, none was to blame,
though a portable engine, kept on the premises,
might have helped willing hands douse the flames.

Friction from pulleys ignited loose cotton,
filling each stairwell with smoke as fire spread.
Cause: Accidental, the coroner recorded
against each of the names of the Over Mill dead.

Erected by public subscription, a monument
which shows how the value of life was so small
at a time when bosses were powerful, mighty:
this common grave by a churchyard wall.

- Angi Holden

I must warn you, dear readers, that I am doing my very best here but I am dyslexic and it is quite possible that I will present new errors as well as correcting old ones. Angi's poem in 'Homage' is punctuated differently and the last two stanzas are run together. Be sure to let me know if there are any errors in this representation, Angi.

Now a quick bit of justice for my ‘Somewhere in the Night’ collection:

My commissioned poem ‘QUESTION FOR WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY’ had the following foot note:

‘- Commissioned by the CCC for Friday 6th June 2008, World Environment Day. Not quite what was being sought from me, I think, but there was no way I could overlook this ludicrously self-defeating project initiated by a mayor of San Francisco.’

Ann Sherman deleted this and inserted in its place:

‘Commissioned by Cheshire County Council for
World Environment Day 2008’

I suppose my notes above only make sense if you know the poem. You can find it here in an earlier posting.

Hey, I feel better already.

I road tested two of my ‘Songs of the Triassic Sea’ with Adam at the Coachmakers last night – Ram your Spike and Winsford Town. I was pleased with how they went. It’s always good to do new material. Next month, hopefully, we’ll be doing them with Emily on cello.

Also next month (first Wednesday in October), Geoff Walton has promise to bring his bouzouki along – and play it, of course – and Martin Waters is going to play some flute with us. I can’t wait. I wish we played there every week instead of every month. You must come along. You’ll enjoy it. It’ll be an all-too-rare chance to hear Martin play.

There must be some discerning landlord or landlady of a good Cheshire, real ale pub who is up for paying me and Adam to gig there on a regular basis? Mid-week, we can easily be bribed with a few quid and free ale. Get in touch. Don’t waste another moment. You know it makes sense: Folk music (traditional and new), lyric poetry set to music, audience participation, invited musician friends coming along to take part, great, great atmosphere . . . need I go on? Well, get on the phone, then.

Alex played a good set last night. He sang, ‘Pretty Saro’, a trad. American version of an old English ballad, and three Macedonian folk songs. It’s terrific how music and the human voice in music can transcend language. Some old mates showed up at the gig, too. Always a pleasure.

OK. I’ve got to go now and sort out some poems to read as part of a concert that the Congleton Choral Society is putting on at Congleton Town Hall in October.

Does anybody remember a song of mine, 'The Numbers Game'? I don't have a copy of it. I know it opened with the words: 'The world abounds with trouble / it's the melancholy truth / nothing can be done about it / not a thing that's any use / somebody picked a number / too far back to blame / now we're running in decreasing circles / in the numbers game'. Adam likes the song and says I keep writing things that remind him of it. I often recycle my own material (tho' mostly intentionally) so it wouldn't surprise me. It would be nice if someone out there has a recording of it.

Got to go. Cheerio. Remember: take it easy – but take it.

Salt of the Earth

2009-08-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

Lynda dropped me off at the church to say goodbye to John. We had a bit of diffulty finding the place. It's a rough part of town. A few yards from St. Benedicts, I didn't make way for another motorist quite as fast as he thought I should have done and he wound down his window to snarl something I didn't catch that ended with, '. . . you fucking werewolf.' It made me smile at the time (from the safety of our car) and I thought, 'Yeah, well, I suppose I do.' What a thoroughly unpleasant chap, though, what?

John would have been proud of his children. Mary gave a terrific eulogy in her father's honour. Her description of her dad's character described exactly the man I knew. Those two things don't always match so perfectly. It goes to show what a genuine bloke John Waters was.

As always with funerals, there was a comical dimension. Look, landmates, I'm not a catholic - I ain't anything as far as religion is concerned - and I was hoping to slip into the back of the church where I wouldn't intrude or stick out like the proverbial swollen thumb. But, when I got there, the church was packed out. A tribute to people's regard for Johnie. I heard the usher say to a woman in front of me, 'Are you going up stairs?' She said, 'No.' and went off into the church. So I said to the fella, 'I'd like to go up stairs, please.' He looked puzzled, 'You want to go upstairs?' he asked. 'Yes,' I said. He asked me again, 'Upstairs?' I said, 'Yes, please.' He said, 'Do you know it's for the choir?' I'm glad he questioned it. Anyway, I ended up on the right-hand side of the church right up the front. I felt mega uncomfortable.

My social plight was compounded when I realised that the usher, had neglected to give me an order of service booklet. This was, no doubt, because it had thrown him so completely off key having a complete stranger - and a werewolf, too boot - asking if he could join the choir.

The opening hymn was announced which everybody read from their booklets. But, hey, The priest had also given the number of the hymn in the hymn book, a copy of which I had picked up on the way in. Fine, except the words in the hymn book were different to the lyrics in the booklet.

The mass was of a high kind with three men in robes and a robed altar boy ringing a bell. As the service went along, I was able to lose myself in the ritual and the smell of the incense and the intoning of the priests and the singing of the choir and congregation and their calls and answers and the poems of the scriptures. A real sense of peace came over the place.

There were tears, of course. The death of a loved one is painful. Like I say in 'Talking Revolution', nobody really ever wants to die. Even those couples who buy one single and one return ticket to Switzerland would prefer to the ill partner to be well again and get two return tickets instead. If you are distressed enough, and there is no turning back the clock, death can appear as sweet release, that's all.

Mary's moving tribute to her dad made me very glad I went. There is a great comfort in religion for believers.

Emily came round today to put some cello on two new pieces of mine. Have I mentioned this new work I am doing? I really must start reading my own blog. Ian Banks of Atoll-UK, on behalf of Spaces, has commissioned 6 artists, of which I am one, to respond to Cheshire's Weaver Valley and Winsford Waterfront regeneration.

Ian is a top geezer to work with. He is helpful in the utmost without ever trying to get you to conform to an agenda of his own. So many of these commissioners (and, unfortunately, you don't know who you are) try to turn you into themselves-as-artist. Not so, with Ian. Consequently, he gets a better result from everybody.

My way into the Weaver project was through an article I read that explained Cheshire's salt deposit is the remains of a triassic sea. In other words, 250 million years ago, Cheshire was ocean. That's fascinating to me - the Cheshire salt is the cinders of a burnt up sea. I did a couple of field trips, talked to people and did a load of rooting about in museums and libraries and, under the title of 'Songs of the Triassic Sea', I have written 4 lyric poems, each set in a different epoch of the Weaver Valley and Winsford Waterfront:

i) The Ballad of Old Salt (phantasy of pre-history and the spirit of the sea)
ii) Ram Your Spike (a worksong/shanty of open pan salt making)
iii) In Winsford Town (a contemporry pastoral)
iv) Over and Under (a prophesy foretelling the rebirth of Old Salt)

The first is a dramatic monologue which I am still working on. The other three pieces are finished so far as the text is concerned but I have some musicical settings, and that's what me and Emily were putting together. I am hoping to road test ii) and iii) individually at the Coachmakers before I schedule a special evening performance for the complete work.

Phil Johnson dropped in today, too. We ended up playing some English dance tunes: me guitar, Lynda tambourine, Phil mandolin, Emily cello: Jenny's Reel, Tiger Smith's Jig, Speed the Plough . . . The rafters was ringing, doods. What a dandy way to spend an afternoon. Lynda baked some currant scones and brewed up lashing of tea. And that's what I'm gonna do any minute now - have some more of the ol' fruit of the Beko oven courtesy of the Tambourine Lady. Just in case you are getting the wrong idea about my domestic life, please note that I cooked tea tonight.

I'll post the Songs of the Triassic Sea lyrics as soon as they have been officially presented to Ian. It wudna bey rayt, as they say in Stoke, to do it beforehand.

I've started reading David Copperfield again. It'll go nicely with the cup of Rosie Lee.

Oh, yeah, before I shoot off, Tatton Park, RHS show: Cheshire Life have done a little feature on it. My mugshot made the online version, but they must have thought it a vision too far for their more-sensitive hard-copy readers cuz it was cut from that. Here's the link: http://www.cheshirelife.co.uk/main-menu-gardening-gold!--197897

Oh, yeah an' all, Shooting Stars is back on the telly. See? Life ain't all bad, are it?

See you later, folks.

Life At Both Ends

2009-08-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

Talking of Bobby Bonehead aka Curly the Caveman and a few other akas, as I was last time: Trawling through my book shelves looking for Ted Hughes 'Pike' poem (an exemplary text for a lecture on the 'eagle eye of the poet' {Auden???} that I was sketching out), I chanced upon a 1980 diary which I'd kept because Amy was born that year. I leafed through it for reasons of nostalgia and the sort of curious enquiry time generates and came across this entry:

January 10, Thursday
Bob Coppard for bodhran lesson - 8.30

8.30 being the time I arranged for the callow youth to turn up, not what he paid me cuz I didn't charge him anything. I feel that I have played a large part in his becoming a children's entertainer. Sorry kids. Did I tell you that Rob and I were working in effluent treatment at the time? Tis true. You'll get nothing but the truth here, ain't that a fact?

Back to the more-recent past. I had my meeting with the Dean of MMU Cheshire - one Mr. Dennis Dunn - re the continuation of my associate lectureship there. We got on well from the outset in a ducking an' dodging sort of way (Asked had I come to berate him or to sort things out? I said, 'Well, yes'). In absolute fairness to the good Dean, he expressed surprise and dissatisfaction at HR only permitting my employment to be continued until Feb 2010 and said he would address the matter that very afternoon and get it sorted. He was as good as his word and I now await a contract for the whole of the 2009/2010 academic year. Our meeting settled down quickly and we discovered that we had a few views in common. More on this when I have signed the contract.

Some very sad news: Dear old Johnie Waters has passed away. John was a terrific bloke. A kind and gentle man and an absolutely fabulous flute player. He was from Sligo and a founder member of the Green Velvet Ceili band along with Jack Baynes, Jim Sweeney, Frank Preston and the rest of the boys who had moved on or who I knew less well. I don't know exactly when the Green Velvet was formed. I remember seeing them playing for a dance at the Holy Trinity Church social centre in the middle 1960s. I had popped across from a friend's flat in the same road to buy some fags and stayed to listen for a while. They played 'Black Velvet Band' and then a couple of reels I didn't know the name of. Of course, I didn't realise at the time what a big influence they were to become on my life a decade later. Charlie Ferguson (later known as Chris Ferguson) from Bangor, NI, another wonderful flute player, introduced me to the boys.

I met Charlie at Jason Hill's folk club at the Sealion pub in Hanley. Under the influence of Robin Garside, a folk-singing friend of Lynda's (they went to the same art school where Lynda was studying painting under Arthur Berry - that's a funny expression, ain't it. What an image!). Robin lodged with us at our house in Mow Cop at one time. I had started to play the tin whistle. I thought I could play it OK and did a couple of gigs on it with Robin. Then I heard Charlie and realised I couldn't play it all. Hearing Charlie was like all your records coming to life. We became good mates, Charlie and I, and he taught me to play the tin whistle properly and to play the bodhran. Thing was, where the bloody hell could you get a bodhran from? We're talking donkeys ago here - pre the Chieftains and all that.

To be a fan of Irish trad in those days was rare and regarded as quirky. It wasn't even cool to like it in Ireland at that time. Coming home that same night as I had met Charlie, me and Lynda were heading for the bus stop with Jason and Becky. I was so utterly drunk. Becky stepped out in the road in Hope Street without looking properly and nearly got run down by a knobhead in a car that was going too fast anyway. The knobhead blasted his horn and, startled in my drunkeness, I reeled back out of the way against the window of Chatfield's music shop. There in the window was a bodhran.

The next day, I wondered if I had merely dreamt it. But it turned out that Denis Chatfield had been having a clear-out of his stock room. The drum had been ordered by a Keele student some years before and never collected. So, thanks to student apathy, I was fixed up. It cost me £3.50 and wasn't a very good drum. I later learned to make my own bodhrans and made dozens of them. Now and again, I used to see bands on TV using one of my drums. I don't have one of my own make anymore. Anybody out there got one I can buy back? I've given up making them now. It's too time-consuming. I've been working on a big tambourine now for about two years and it's still only an unfinished frame and when you understand that the frame pre existed as a garden sieve you'll see how feckless I have become with the making.

I bought the bodran on the Saturday morning, Charlie showed me how to go on with it on the following Tuesday evening and we played at Jason's Club on the Friday. We played everywhere after that. Everyone who heard Charlie play wanted to hear him play again. We played with Dick Gaughan, Nic Jones, Tony Hall, the Rev. Kenneth Loveless, that geezer from up Newcastle . . . oh gawd . . . Vin Garbutt, that's it, and loads of others I won't attempt to recall right now as it occurs to me that I need me breakfast and a long cup of tea. I do remember we played for the Keele Rapper side, too. Do they still have one? There is something special about the drum and tin whistle or flute playing together. The interplay of rhythm between the two is endlessly variable and exciting. The two instruments can be clearly separately heard as they interweave. Chance has a magical input too. Well, it does when the whistle player is as inventive as Charlie was (RIP). Charlie had a very NI style - lots of tongued notes like the 'tight' piping of NI pipers.

At different stages of time and on different stages, come to that, I played bodhran, tin whistle and piano with the Green Velvet Band. Terrific music. As good as it gets.

Johnie taught me so many tunes and encouraged my playing. He did the same for dozens of others. His son, Martin, is a flute player of awesome capability and the beautifullest tone in the world. His daughter, Mary, as a young girl was extraordinary on the tin whistle. She had a way of playing that was quite unique - great rhythm and individually creative ornamentation. What a family! I lost touch with John some years ago. John, Martin and Mary and Jack played at my 40th birthday at the Red Bull in Kidsgrove. Lynda arranged it all. After chucking out time, a bunch of us went back to our cottage by the canal (We'd bought it off Paul Atterbury who is one of the Antiques Roadshow presenters. He, or his Mrs, Avril, took all the light fittings with them and the ceramic fittings from the bathroom). A few people brought bottles of wine. Thing was, me and Lynda didn't drink wine at the time, it was something that only ultra sophisticates did, and we had no wine glasses. But, on the other hand, we did have plenty of egg cups. I have an enduring image of Avron White, an American drummer living in Stoke - a very cool dude in a white suit and shades - standing there in earnest conversation with Biker Bill, drinking merlot out of a Winnie the Pooh egg cup.

I will be saying goodbye to Johnie on Tuesday.

Is This Some Kind of Record?

2009-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Hey, two weeks on the trot! Is this some kind of record? Well, yeah, it's a blog . . . You really are a mentallist when you start interviewing yourself, aren't you? Politicans do it regularly.

Guess who came marching into my living room on Tuesday, after an absence of 15 years?

Lynda and I invited Emily and Rob (Emily always calls him Mr. Cochrane) round for lunch and a chat. Lynda cooked a beautiful veg curry with cauliflower cooked Japanese style - as shown to her by Hisami a world ago. We ate in the garden, it being a glorious sunny day. I say 'ate', 'scoffed' is probably the more-accurate verb here. We came back indoors, after scoffing a few of Lynda's homemade scones with strawberry jam, to play some music. I say 'scoffing', but 'eating' is probably the more-accurate word here, as we were all slowing down a bit after the curry.

Emily plays the cello. Lynda practically swoons when ever she hears the cello played well and was looking forward to some Elgar but, as soon as Emily got her cello out, I got my accoustic guitar out. I had been waiting for this opportunity. I played Emily an English reel which she learned in the blink of an eye. We started to run through it together. By the time we had gone a couple of times round the tune Em was playing seconds as well as the melody, being the terrific muso she is. It was sounding soooooo good. Emily's musical background is ideal for the onbeat cool of English dance music. I decide to switch on the ol' recorder to let her have a listen to how good she is. We were just hitting in to the second A part, when in he walks:

Rob the Bones. I say, Rob the bloody Bones.

In 1985, Geoff Walton, Rob Coppard, Adam Fenn and me, were recruited to play at, and promote in the lead up to, the 1986 Etruria Garden Festival. We were separated from the other musos and thrown together by Baz (RIP) because we all played folk stuff. As it was, Rob had become a minor celebrity (which reminds me that, a couple of years before that, Arthur Scargill had figured in the musical life of my family. But, of course, he was a miner celebrity, not the same thing at all).

Rob the Bones' celebrity was due to his appearances on the Ester Rantzen show, 'That's Life', as a bones player. There was a competition, as far as I can recall, to find out who was the best bones player in England. I don't remember now why it was deemed so important to know that. Anyhow, I don't think Rob actually won it, but he did capture the interest of a lot of people in along the way. He is terrifically good at bones playing - two-handed and everything. The role of Geoff, Adam and me was to play music to showcase Rob. That is why after we had to briefly consider Geoff's 'Bodran Bodran' and 'The Friendly Pebbles' I hastily came up with the name: BONESHAKER.

We turned out to be the only musicians hired by the Festival who were more interested in making music than getting pissed, smoking dope, and aimlessly jaming over rock riffs for hours. I am not saying we were not guilty of any of that. I am just saying organised music was our priority. Consequently, when it came to crunch time, Boneshaker was the only band that had got an act together. It followed that, initially, at least, we got all the gigs - all the live promotions, all the radio gigs and all the TV. We were literally on one or the other at least once a day for weeks. We did the lot. Local radio local to us and in far-off towns. We did Woman's Hour on Radio 4; Folk On 2; that worldwide programme; early morning TV programmes; daytime TV. Our favourite was Saturday Superstore with Keith Chegwin. I loved doing that cuz not only did i like the programme, I got some goody bags to take home to Amy who was 6 at the time. We gigged with a whole motley crew at the Etruria Fest: Bob Holness; Grot Bags; The Yetties; etc., etc. And laugh? I laughed my bloody head off. We played at the front gate; in the African Village, in the Japanese Garden, on the train - everywhere - And, oh, yeah, we featured in a channel 4 documentary called, 'Stoke in Bloom'. The whole thing was a blast.

So in walks Rob the Bones. The music stopped. It was helloes all round and me and Rob began doing that, 'Do you remember when . . .?' thing that ain't very nice for other people who weren't there cuz as the memories come flooding back, you start talking in short hand to each other. So sorry to Emily and Rob and Lynda but, come on, 15 years . . .

We talked about the time when we had both started working at the same factory: Simon-Hartley in Etruria. Rob was a young apprentice, I was a bit older and was brought in from Manpower to sort out the design and implementation of some financial incentive schemes (don't get me started on the belief of most management that the working class are only motivated by money and need to be supervised at every momentor else they will swing the lead. Whereas the middle classes are both naturally motivated and thoroughly trust worthy . . . )

Me and Rob got talking at Simon-Hartley and found we had some musical interests in common. Rob told me his ambition was to learn the ol' Irish drum - the bodhran. He had mentioned it to the right geezer, of course. I showed him how to pit his patters on the skin of a murdered goat that had been stretched across an old wooden riddle. For free, mind you.

BUT

does he mention this on his web pages? Does he mention Boneshaker and his initiation into the world of gigging and getting paid for it?

NO HE DOES NOT.

He mentions Greg and the Boatband, as well he should, but of his old Boneshaker buddies?

NOT A WORD.

I'll give you his link and you can check it out for yourselves. I have emailed him about it. It'll be mildly interesting to see how long he takes to put that right.

Here's the link:http://www.robcoppard.com/

He's into loads of entertainment stuff these days and has developed and expanded his skills as you will see. It was great to see Rob again. Thanks for taking the trouble to track me down, dude (Through this blog, as it happens). And Emily, we must pick up where we left off asap and can you owe Lynda some Elgar, please?

I had my meeting with the Dean of MMU Cheshire re their HR teams heinous ageist policies. I will tell you about it as soon as it is diplomatic to do so. Suffice to say, the situation, allegedly, is to be moved moved forward. Time will tell and so shall I.

This is great news: James Harker, a bright, hip, thoroughly nice, talented, MMU Writing student, having completed an extemely successful first year as an undergraduate, has been awarded the editorship of the student magazine, PULP. The post could not have gone to a more-worthy or more-capable person than James. Where have the students mags with real edge gone? It looks like, with James' appointment, at least one of them will be coming back. All the best, James. You will be missed at uni.

All the best, too, to you, who read this, and all the best, too, to you who do not read this. So long as you are compassionate, respectful-where-appropriate, human beings with good intentions, I wish for a long, pain-free life to you all. May each one of us be sustained by enlightenment.

Laters.

Is Anybody Out There?

2009-08-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's so yonks since I got around to writing this, ain't it just? Last night, I played the Coachmakers in Hanley (what a great little boozer it is and they're gonna knock it down, the tow rags, just like they knock everything and everyone down that's any good) with ACW Fenn, mandolinist to the blissful, and he nagged me about failing to keep blogging. I am self-evidently NOT a natural born bloggist. Is it possible to be a 'natural born' at any such construct???

Writing in a blog about something that I have just done seems fairly irrelevant to me. I mean, why would I care? It done and gone. Even more, why would you care? The only justification would seem to me is if it was used as a creative vehicle in poetry or prose - which certainly could happen with a blog although I doubt that I am committed enough, or bloggist enough, to pull that one off. Come to think of it, I don't think I have read any blog that has pulled that one off. Come to think of it, I don't think I have read any blog.

It was my intention to keep a meticulous account of my days as Cheshire Poet Laureate. Coffee has that effect on me. It makes me think that you and I are different people altogether. I only drink tea now and my plans for myself are far more realistic. I will no longer keep up the pretence of writing a continual coherent narrative. I shall only post what ever falls out of the ends of my fingers on the qwerty. Actually, mine is not a qwerty any more, but a qwfty. It's turned Welshy through wfar and tfar.

What I shall attempt to do very soon is put things right with a few poets who contributed to the 'Homage to Cheshire' I allegedly edited. Anne Sherman of the Arts Service steadfastly refused to allow me to see the page proofs of the CCC publication (and more of this later in connection with my collection 'Somewhere in the Night' which I disown as being unrepresentative of my work). Consequently, there was no proper proof reading or final editing carried out. Naturally, errors got though - which is exactly what showing page proofs to authors and editors is designed to prevent. Some of the errors originated with me, some with the printer or whoever(?). They could have all been put right before publication had A.S. observed the usual courtesies and procedures. I apologise to the offended authors and hope to publish their poems in corrected form on this screen any day soon.

There is a whole big ageist thing going on with MMU Cheshire and me, too. Grey is the new black, don't you know? I will give you the low down on all of that. I have booked an appointment with the Dean on Tuesday morning, to get stuff said to me, face to face, instead of having rumours and facts whispered to me in corridors and encoded in doublespeak and liptrick in emails. I am happy to tell you straight away that my students, unasked by me, have been wonderful in their support of my cause. They really have been fantastic about it. And, so too, have been members of the Writing staff. It is in gratitude and respect for them as well as for myself that I determined to see the thing through and hopefully bring some integrity and commonsense back into play in the thinking of the MMU Cheshire policy-makers.

But, right now, I have remembered I have a few cans in the kitchen. NOT in the frig, you understand? Why the hell would anybody want to drink icecold ale? All right, in Oz you would, but you'd want to drink it inside the frig there, wouldn't you?

This blog, you and I, have officially lost out to three or four speckled hens. Adios.

APPY NOO YEER

2009-01-11T02:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a long, long time (again) since I updated this B-log, ain't it? I always mean to keep up to speed but it seems to need an outside influence to actually get me round to doing it. This time it's a posted comment from 'Anonymous' reminding me of Heymaker and those Bridge Street Art Centre days - well nights, then - and asking for the words of Weird Sisters.

One time, we had gone on stage at 10pm for our second set. We hit the groove, the songs were flowing like booze, the solos were drawing circles in the sky. We were just rolling out the ending to Weird Sisters when Cyril, the top geezer who ran the place, leapt up on stage waving his arms and shouting: 'That's it. Finish! Finish! Enough!' I said: 'Oh, come on, man, one more?' His eyes popped out of his hairy old face, and he screamed: 'It's two o'clock in the fucking morning!' No stamina, some people.

Good to hear from you Anonymous.

WEIRD SISTERS

When the full moon shines
On the village green
And ancient chimes
Strike 13 . . .

Weird sisters
Weird sisters

Did voodoo do
This trickery?
Magic weed?
Psychomancy?

Weird sisters
Weird sisters
Weird sisters
Put this spell on me

Round and round
The cauldron go
In the poisoned
Entrails throw

Mandrake root
Briony
Valerian
Rosemary

Weird sisters
Weird sisters
Weird sisters of the night
Put this spell on me.

© W. Terry Fox

Travel safe.

National Poetry Day

2008-11-10T00:26:00.000-08:00

OK, it’s a day set aside by someone, sometime, to be a poetryful day up and down and across the islands we are living in and not forgetting that landload of poets joined to us by the Irish Sea.

As is usual with these sorts of occasion, it’s a good or bad thing depending on who’s doing the celebrating. In as far as I meet as many students who have been put off poetry at school as I meet who have been engaged by it in those brutal seats of unlearning.

I instinctively rebel against any suggestion of national co-operation on 'special' days. I think, ‘Right, if next Thursday is National Poetry Day for the British nation, I shall make it my own National Non-Poetry Day.’ However, one of my obligations as Cheshire Poet Laureate is to come up with, and deliver, an event for NPD. So do it I did.

Lynda and I had a prior-arranged short but long-awaited holiday scheduled - an extended weekend break in the Land of my Fathers. We were to set off in the late afternoon of NPD. This meant that an evening performance (other than one to an audience of newly shorn sheep, a ginger goat, some heart-meltingly-pretty flop-eared rabbits and a few hens on an isolated Welsh smallholding) from me was out of the question. And anyway NPD ain't about me it’s about poetry.

I was talking to Amy one evening on the telephone. She told me that the month of October was Family Learning Festival. So, hand in hand with her wisdom and experience with kids, I designed a project that would cover both celebrations.

Right from the word go as CPL I wanted to do stuff for schools as web downloads and I sketched out a few projects in lieu of finding some support from the CCC. To my great and continuing disappointment there was no spark of interest shown by them. Then, through a chance meeting at a poetry performance I was giving at the launch of a library’s new educational DVD , I found an interested person.

Hey! Not only was she interested but she told me that she would copy anything I sent to her boss who was more directly responsible for what went on in the county schools than she was. Wonderful!

I whizzed off a couple of sketched-out projects and awaited their response. But

NOTHING. NOWT. ZILCH.

I left it for a decent interval (two or three weeks) before emailing them again. But again

NOTHING. NOWT. ZILCH.

And I still haven’t heard a word from them.

In spite of that brickwall, I was convinced it was the way to go. One little project can reach hundreds and hundreds of people in one fell swoop, far out-classing me mumbling my humble rhymes and reasonings to a cohort of converts in some October library.

After a bit of thought the Skwigmaroo Project was born for NPD.

1) I rang round until I had got 28 Cheshire primary schools interested. I emailed them a copy of my Skwigmaroo poem (ref an earlier posting) and invited the children to take a copy home and read it to their families, and do a drawing of a skwigmaroo underneath the poem. This was to fit in with the aims of the Family Learning Festival and my interpretation of this year's NPD theme, ‘work’.

2) The children were then invited to invent an animal of their own and to make a poem about it. They were also invited to email their poems to me for posting on a notice board at the MMU, Alsager.

I have since been phoning round the schools trying to find out how many children actually took part but it is proving difficult: schools are busy places and messages aren’t always being passed on to the right people; those who say they are going to phone or email back often don’t etc. BUT on the figures I have collect so far AT LEAST 500 children took part and it might easily be in excess of a 1,000.

Inevitably, fewer children went as far as making a poem and emailing it to me but nevertheless I received poems about all kinds of invented animal:

the Trumparoo
the Dolpharoo
the Crickaphin
the Dog-belly-cat-head
the Skwigglepig
the Boxeye
the Darter
the Geyco . . .

to name but a few!

I held one more event for NPD too. I, and a group of my 2nd Year undergraduate poets held a read-round at the uni. It was terrific. Some read their own poems, some read the poems of well-known poets like Stevie Smith, Edwin Brock, WB Yeats, and Roger McGough. They all read beautifully. It was fantastic to hear such a range of accents and to hear poetry read with such warmth and insight. Uplifting stuff. Above are the photos I took. Seeya soon.

2008-10-16T02:57:00.000-07:00

ALL RIGHT, AWRIGHT, ALLWRITE . . .

You do not have to remind me, I am well aware of what a feckless lanky, bog-eyed scribbler I be. Too busy to write my blog when ever I have thought about it, and failing to bring it to mind when I could have managed a quick peck or two on the qwerty.

Do you do this: think about writing something, or to someone, carry on composing the piece/letter/blog in your head – you may even go back over it to do a bit of revision and editing – and when you’ve got it finished in the Writing Room of your Mansion of Grey Convolutions, you forget all about it cuz you’ve then got the feeling that the job has been done and dusted?

I do the above daily. Years can pass without me physically writing to a friend or relation. They feel neglected but, in fact, I have been in regular touch with them by my one-way mental mail that has a nice bright red post box but no collection service as yet. It’s not an explanation that goes down with any great success, though.

Come to think of it, I did have a go at writing this blog a few weeks ago. Yards of it I wrote, straight onto the page, then, inexplicably, lost it in the ether. Computers are reckoned to be sooooooooooooooooooooo clever but they are thick most of the time. And how they try to talk to you!! Bog off! You are a machine. I paid for you, and if I want to, I will pound you to pieces with the wheel end of my office stool. Now stop talking and get on with that simple task I set you.

We had a friend once, Graham Thorley (R.I.P), who was a genius. He could do anything. He was taking and printing his own colour photos before most people had heard of them. He made all the equipment to do it and, in some instances, made the tools necessary to make the equipment with. He had a motto: ‘Anything man-made can be made by man.’ Meaning made by him, naturally. And he could. He did. He made his own computer. His computer was a bit brighter than the average. It was far in advance of anything available commercially. Graham was a terrific artist and designer too. Like I told you, the guy could do slutely anything.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuutttttttttttt, anyhow, with the help of programmes and posters, Lynda’s power of recall and a few stills harvested from the whirling montages of my mind, I will endeavour to piece together the events that fill the chasm opened up since my last entry, on 13th July 2008, by my extreme lack of blogness.

‘making a nOIse in libraries’

The making a noise ‘tour’ was in support of a fortnight when people with visual impairment were especially thought of. Poets are in their element here, of course, with poetry being essentially an aural/oral medium.

I took a small PA system to library after library in Cheshire, and performed my poem ‘Words’. It’s a piece that takes about 51/2 - 6 mins.

I chose the late opening hours of the libraries I went and performed the poem 2x in the hour if the late opening was one hour and 3x if it stayed open for two hours. I loved it. There were not many people about in a lot of them. Those that were there viewed it largely in a detached and bemused way. One or two people came on purpose to hear me – great - but it wasn’t really about that. It was about its surprise value and its celebration of the spoken word. What I did get – I this is the best reward – was loads of emailed requests for the poem: individuals who wanted a copy for themselves or to pass on to friends and lovers who’d missed the performances; writing groups who wanted to discuss it at one of their meetings, and a nice lady who wrote to me weeks after and offered me a gig to perform it as the opening gambit of the new year of the University of the 3rd Age at Alsager Civic Centre.But more of that later.

My first nOIse gig was at Congleton public library. Mike Drew there is a cool guy and really into what I was doing. He took a few photos – I’ll stick one of them on here in a min – and asked me if I would consider coming back to do a longer set on a Saturday morning when there would be a max audience. I’d be happy to do that. I’ve got a collection simmering away on the back burner that would be ideal. It’s a collection of poems and lyrics, a bit political and with a bit of angst. I’m calling it: ‘IT’S MY SHOUT!’ It’s built up of my roots pieces like ‘If Yer Working Class’ (Yes, yer muvver should’ve told you the way the system works/’Ow they love to be living off yer sweat, grabbin’ all the perks/From the cradle on, they take yer best, then make you obsolete/If yer working class yer on yer arse more often than yer feet. Etc. You get the idea). And poems of private pleasures like ‘Rhythmic Habits’ and ‘I Want You’.

That’ll do me for now. I’ll try and import that photo. Tootle-pip.

Oh, the only photo I can find is of me and Lynda playing in the Coachmakers. That'll have to do for now. I told you computers were thick. T'ra again.

OOH AR, OOH AR

2008-07-13T11:29:00.000-07:00

I've done my visit to the village school - a beautiful little place set in a cosy little village on the Cheshire plain, in sheep-farming country. The children were a delight, the staff welcoming and pleasant. I really enjoyed my morning there. Here is the pirate poem I mentioned in my last posting:

PIRATES

Call me Jolly Roger, mates!
Jolly Jane and me
Are the fiercest jolly pirates
That sail the jolly sea.

We wear jolly black eye patches.
Our parrot, Jolly Jones,
Wears a jolly hat that matches
Ours with the skull and bones.

We wave our jolly swords and talk
In a jolly fearsome way.
Along the jolly plank you'll walk
If you don't do as we say!

Pieces of eight, shiver me timbers!
We'll soon be off to Spain
After eating our fish fingers
And if it doesn't rain.

All aboard! Anchors aweigh!
Ooh ar, ooh ar! we shout
When jolly me and jolly J
Go pirating about.

Please don't look so jolly worried,
It's just pretend you see.
Real pirates are jolly horrid,
Not like Jane and me.

The children clapped the poem without being asked and went on to write their own pirate poems. The whole school had turned out in pirate costume - including the teachers. Yo-ho-ho. Great. Too often teachers think they are above that sort of thing but not these good people.

It reminded me of that old old thing with school uniforms where so often the teaching staff proclaim all kinds of benefits of school uniform yet never wear it themselves. How two-faced is that. I hate school uniforms. I think they contribute towards intolerance of difference. Some say that it gets around children sulking a begging and fussing and fretting to get the latest trainers. Well, I've got an idea: while they are in school, why not educate them out of being such avid little consumerists and slavish followers of fashion?

I did another poem from my minute but growing repertoire of poems and rhymes for the young:

SKWIGMAROO

Have you heard of skwigmaroo?
They come from Cheshire, mainly from Crewe,
Dress only in red or three shades of blue,
Secure their beaks with a silver screw,
Fix their wigs with peppermint glue,
Put all six feet into one big shoe,
Paddle The Cloud in a pink canoe,
Laugh like a drum, sing like a zoo,
Say nothing at all when a poem won't do.
There's none such fun as skwigmaroo!

I rarely use exclamation marks but I seem to dip in the bag for them with the children's stuff. I think jolly uncles must keep a few in their waistcoat pockets.

In answer to another question from a reader of this blog: Yes, unless otherwise stated, all the poems posted here are (c) 2008 W. Terry Fox.

One last observation: There are no men on the staff of many of the primary schools I have visited. What a shame it is that we have become so tainted as a society that a man can find it too problematic to say he wants to work with young children. It leaves a gap in the early stages of a child's learning that I am sure cannot be good for them or society at large.

I'll tell you about my 'make a nOIse' in libraries gigs next time. In the meanwhile, take good care and read some poetry.

T.

Writing In The 19th Century

2008-07-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

Our gig of contemporary songs at the Coachmakers was well-received. BUT they wouldn't let us go without Adam getting his low whistle out (now, now) and us playing 'Women of Ireland' and the 'Tarbolton' reel. It'll be a mix of traditional and contemporary from now on. Makes sense cuz that's where we're at, really - oh 'cept Adam has a penchant and great ability for bluegrass. Seems odd to me. Like going about in fancy dress. He says it's 'tuning into the zone'.

Well, swash me buckle!

I am invited to a little village school to read some poetry to the children and to look at the work they have been doing for the National Year of Reading. They are having an Arts Week with a pirate theme so I thought, 'Methinks perchance I shall write a small poem for them.' I have never written for kids before. Even when I was going to school with kids I didn't write for them. None of the kids I went to school with would have understood what I was on about. I set about writing and an odd thing happened: the writing kept coming out in a strangely archaic form with highly 'poetic' inversions couched in stilted, self-consciously 'correct' diction. I can only think that I was projecting my own childhood reading experience (Tennyson, Wordsworth and similar other caped prosodists) onto my own writing. It took me ages to shake it off - if I ever did. I'll post the pirate poem after the school visit and you can judge for yourself. T'was weird most utterly, dear reader my dear, by my beard, forsooth, most weird.

Nowt but the real thing

A few people have asked if Lynda cast the ceramic likeness of my boat race in the mask photo. Absolutely not. Everything she does is created by her own magic hands from a big blob of raw clay. Amazing to watch.

See you later.

making a nOIse in libraries

2008-07-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

Hello bods. A peasant poet would be a cool thing to be. I don't find urban life attractive at all. Mind you, me and Lynda are lucky as we are on the semi-rural edge of the county. But, having said that, those red roofs are slowly creeping up the hill.

Lynda took the photo that now graces my blog. It's my promo photo for 'making a nOIse in libraries' fortnight. I shall be performing my celebratory poem 'Words' at Congleton (Thurs 10th July 6-8pm), Alsager (Frid 11th July 6-7pm), Macclesfield (Mon 14th July 6-7pm), Bollington (Tues 15th 6-7pm) and Sandbach (Wed 16th 6-7pm) libraries on their late nights. Lynda sculpted the face I'm holding out. She did a portrait head of me when we were in Mow Cop and put in the garden and the face fell off. 'Words', by the way, takes 5 1/2 - 6 mins to perform so I shall be doing it twice on the one-hour nights and three times on the two-hour nights using a small PA and without a formal audience. Come along and give it a listen while you're choosing your books.

Me and Adam are at the Coachmakers tonight. We're doing an entire evening of our own stuff ie. no trad material - just to break the mould. Good ale there. Can you believe it is going to be knocked down? I can. The Stoke on Trent council, in my view, is more than irresponsible. some of these transactions need looking into. It's commerce before people every time. Preferred ways of living are sacrificed to the gods of the bank vaults owned, usually, by people who live nowhere near their bloody developments.

Be fortunate. Be wary. Ta-ra

Hey Nonny No, A Blogging We Will Go

2008-06-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hey up, youths and lasses, ow at?

Since my last blog: I emailed my World Environment Day poem to Anne, of the CCC, ahead of the day and waited to get some reaction but ................................ NOWT, my mates, NOT A THING.

I was hoping to raise a bit of debate with this one because, as I mentioned in a previous blog, I suspect the WED thing to be another bit of double-talk - SINCERE apologies to all well-meaning people involved and to W E Day itself if I've got it all wrong. Trouble is, as far as I can see (and maybe that ain't very far cuz of all the pollution that's about), the people best placed to save our planet from further damage are the very people who have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are and therefore LIP SERVICE is what one tends to get, I think. And that's a worse thing than these people doing nothing at all cuz they seem to be kidding us into believing they are doing something to clean their shit up and address all the anti-life stuff they do, mainly but not exclusively, in the cause of capitalism, when the fact is they are very probably not.

I mean, be serious for a moment, capitalism is, by its nature, abusive because it relies on profit being generated by giving a lower than a true or proper market value for 'goods' received and for people's time.

So, with all that in mind, my commissioned offering for World Environment Day was this:

QUESTION FOR WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY:

Do colour me green and forgive me if I
Ultracrepidate, but how many city mayors,
Precisely, does it take to fly from around the globe to
Luxuriate in San Francisco conference suites
In the cause of collectively forging a path towards
Cities greener enough to compensate at least
In so far as the environmental damage incurred by flying
To San Francisco city mayors from around the globe
Is concerned, in their much-publicised pursuit of
Environmental policies engendering advance, in
So far as city mayors can, on World Environment day?

W. Terry Fox

Those of you with a keen eye will see at once that this is an acrostic (I know, it's all right for me, I planned it). None of you will fail to notice that the eleven lines go all round the world and disappear up their own jacksy.

Ultracrepidate? Yeah, what a great word! Chambers Dictionary has it: 'to criticise beyond the sphere of one's knowledge'. Don't get many chances to use it although it could probably be used against me several times a day.

BUT, NOT A BLOODY WHIMPER, boys and girls. Evidently the commission 'collapsed' (and before my poem not after it). What that means I am waiting to have clarified and hope to let you know.

Anne of the CCC, she under whose wing the Cheshire Poet Laureate shelters, has effectively gone part time. A pity because it must mean less time available for this CPL. I thought I could feel the rain.

While on the subject of CPL's: a former one, Jo bell, www.bell-jar.co.uk/4598/18801.html is a friendly sort of poet who is kind enough to give me a mention now and again (she and the other formers share a dressing room under the name of 'Bunch of Fives' and good they are too, I've been and gorn and taken meself out to see em at Keele university - that seat of learning in Staffs what I taught at once: Short and Sharp - Writing The Short Story; European Classics in English Translation; Detective Fiction. It all seems like someone else. Weird - but my Google Alert tells me she has got SUMMAT WRONG that I would be lacking in my duty if I did not correct. Jo has stated that I am to be Cheshire Poet Laureate only until March 31st, 2009.

HEY NONNY NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

Jo is right in so far as I am officially contracted by the current CCC up until the end of March. This is because that is the last possible date they can contract me to. After that date, a new structure of local government is going to be introduced for Cheshire. My position in this is, to me at any rate, v. v. and v. interesting.

Two possibilties exist and, mates of poesy, these are they:

Possibility 1) The new regime will choose to maintain the CPL scheme, in which case I will remain as the Cheshire Poet Laureate until the end of December 2009 - a full two years.

Possibility 2) The new regime will decide to let the CPL scheme go, in which case I will remain as the Cheshire Poet Laureate for the rest of me wrinkly life.

I've just got time to tell you about the Congleton Garden Festival: Fantastic! Soopadoopa weather, bundles of nice smiley people, great organisation, a neat day altogevver.
Midsomer Murders without the slaughter/Just William without the annoying little prat.

If you want to make your own, the ingredients are:

Congleton Park
Lovely English Summer's day
Striped marquees, white tents and blue tents
Flower arranging
The WI
A Lord and Lady (Wilbraham) to open the proceedings
Refreshment stall
Bouncy castle
Music over a PA system
Gardener's Question Time
Art Display and participation
1,000s of visitors

Me and Lynda shared a tent. She did 'Play with Clay' (I ain't the CPL for nothing) and worked non-stop all day from 10am to 4pm with the kids, getting them to make all kinds of stuff from yer actual old mother earth. Wonderful. Working clay in this way seems so theraputic. 'Naughty' kids got chilled out within minutes and all the kids were blown away with what they did. Lynda is BRILLIANT with them too. I would have had them all lining up to attention, policed by a few bouncers before I felt I could cope. Lynda knows just when and by how much to guide them by. Result was, they ALL had a terrific time - loose and creative and free. A woman with amazing qualities.

Lynda also had a small exhibition of her own work that attracted a lot of attention. Nice photo of her with a couple of her pieces in the ol' Chronicle.

I did 'Grow a Poem' - visitors to the tent added a couple lines each to an on-going poem; 'Plant a Poem in Your Garden- - a suggestion that gardeners should put some poems in amongst the flowers, either their own or their favourites of others, with examples; 'e.poems' - visitors could choose a poem, from a folder of my poems, that they wanted emailed to themselves or a friend. I also had 'Dance of Fools' sale. Everything was a hit. I had takers aplenty for everything. I was so glad to have been part of it. Well done Congleton Community programme and fanx Jo Money.

Hey, must make time for a couple more things: Went to former CPL John Lindley's book launch at Congleton library on Monday 16th - the day after the Garden Fest. What a turnout! The room was packed and John gave a knockout presentation. Naturally, I bought a copy (John bought a copy of my 'Dance of Fools' at the G. Festival). It's good, very good, very unusual - poetry/social history/entertainment. Cool. John always gets it right. His new book is called: 'House of Wonders'. Get a copy. Mind you if, like me, you haven't got much money then buy a copy of 'Dance of Fools' instead.

Amy tells me that her 'Twizzle Bird' collection of limited edition prints is still selling steadily. Wonderful, eh? They were only originally going to be on show for the Bristol Arts Trail. Then proprietor of Massala asked to retain them beyond the Arts weekend and they've been selling ever since. Me and Lynda are the proud possessors of a hedgehog one.

Bub bye.

Up In The Summerhouse Adoing Of Me Blog

2008-06-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

Yea, I'm up in the summerhouse adoing of me blog. I see that I haven't got around to posting anything since 12th May. That is the date on which I emailed Anne of the CCC to see if any progress had been made on my website. I had a couple of circulars from her (to me and the exCPLs) about different poetry things going off in the county but nothing about my website. I emailed her again last week and got a reply. I evidently misunderstood and the CCC are not prepared to provide a website but will provide a web page for my 'Homage to Cheshire' project for 2009. Setting up a website is not a skill of mine nor do I have the dosh to pay someone else to do it so I guess that knocks it on the head. What I will do is post poems up on this site.

This misunderstanding between Anne and I resonates with my theory that people are generally more interested in poets than they are in poetry. My paymasters, the CCC are patently no exception. Their website carries a picture of me (courtesy the Sentinel) and some quotes from a statement I made about my stance in poetry but not a single line of my writing. Odd, ain't it? There is, of course, another dimension to this with it being the CCC: I am paid by them, presumably, out of public money. Do the public not have a right to see what they are getting for their tax? Anyway, I will start putting that right with immediate effect. Here is my first commission for the CCC - an extra to my five core commisions. It is my poem for Holocaust Memorial Day. The Memorial Day took the form of a very moving event at the Ellesmere Port Civic Hall.

Ishmael, Jacob, Rachael and Anna . . .

Ishmael, Jacob, Rachael and Anna,
Joseph, Miriam, take back your names.
By cyanide, rifle or strung from a scaffold,
By disease or starvation, you died just the same.

They brought you by train, huddled and herded,
Truck-full by truck-full, galloped and whipped;
Skittish and squealing, prodded, curse-worded,
Tethered, shorn, branded and stripped.

They beat you and took your young from your caring,
Weighed-up and yoked you and put you to work,
Or culled you for slaughter, wild-eyed and flaring,
Piled carcass on carcass to rot on the dirt.

Ash from the chimneys falls like snowflakes,
Clogging throats, blinding eyes.
Gas chamber doors slam on new intakes,
And emptied of angels loom Auschwitz's skies.

Ishmael, Jacob, Rachael and Anna,
Joseph, Miriam, take back your names.
If your deaths are to be worth living,
Never must we kneel to tyrants again.

***
(I pronounce the names Jacob and Joseph as if they begin with a Y)
***

There you go then. That was my first commission and that was when I felt the difference between writing a poem from your own musing that you may later decide to put into the public arena and writing a purpose-built poem designed for public consumption. I have become much more tolerant of the lesser poems of others (I mean in comparison with the main body of their own work NOT in comparison with anything I've done!) in a similar position - Tennyson, Motion, etc. It has also given me insight into Shakespeare's brand of rhetoric. I felt it was a big responsibility trying to be a kind of spokesperson for others whilst keeping within the frame of my own beliefs.

Lynda and I had tea with Ron and Jill Milne, on Saturday - in this summerhouse, in fact. They are great friends of ours and happen to be well-read, articulate people with a great sense of humour and who are unafraid of speaking their minds. It is to them I sometimes run when I am in doubt about something I have written. They always have something apposite to say. Their comments sometimes hurt a bit but they are never unkindly meant nor are they ever able to be dismissed. It is to them I went when I had drafted my Holocaust poem. They always get what I am doing and are able to nudge me back on path if I stumble off. I am still unsure about the last line of my Holocaust poem. It's a bit heavy-handed. It worked in performance, though. And that's what I mean about the difference between public and private poetry.

Hey, I'm really glad I've started putting poetry up on here. I was playing into the hands of my own theory, wasn't I?

I've been out with the Woodlanders Country Dance Band a couple of times since my last posting. They really have got it all going on. I love English traditional music, especially when it rocks a bit. The caller for the recent gigs has been Linda Westrup. I had heard of her over the years but never actually worked with her before and she is terrific to work with. The dancers love her. She's got a really nice calling voice not at all like the screech of others I won't mention. She introduced a couple of innovative dances of her own. The tradition lives on. I just love getting a chance to play guitar and fiddle all night. The Woodlanders is the best dance band I have played with to date and that really is saying something. It took me two days to come own off the last gig.
On the 22nd May, there was the 'unveiling' of the Footprints project mosaic at Alsager library. The children who had made the mosaic under the direction of artist Su Horrell came along and so did the young poets I had worked with at Excalibur school. It really was a fine and pleasant day and the sculpture looks good especially from upstairs in the library looking down. There were a few speeches and I read the poem I had been commissioned to write. The Chronicle took photos and did interviews and BBC Radio Stoke came along and did interviews too. I found the radio interview strange. The guy with the mic kept looking away from me after he had asked a question. He perhaps was preoccupied with something techinical. I am used to interviewers at least pretending to be interested and it put me off to the point where I completely forgot what I was on about and dried up. I kept giggling to myself about it afterwards but I think he was annoyed - maybe he thought I was nuts. Mind you, that's a good thing about being a poet, the stereotypical poet is a half-crazy dreamer and you can get away with things others can't.

Here's my poem for the Excalibur Primary School / Alsager Library project:

FOOTPRINTS

At Alsager where four roads meet, the traffic beats
its changing rhythms on tarmacadam and plate glass

To the west, the rumble and crash of falling masonry as
a university campus is laid bare, for more shops and more houses

where generations read environmental science, art, music, philosophy,
got drunk on new ideas and fell in love with the world;

yellow classroom huts where hares nested in the gaps below
and boxed each other in the madness of springtime;

small copses where pirate squirrels swung through the rigging
of tall trees on swashbuckling winds;

where, in the dreams of old farm hands, mixed herds still graze
on clover-rich pasture and hectares of wheat still stand tall in the crop fields

and horse pairs snort and blow as they put their muscle to the plough;
where the farmer's own fathers, fathers cut clearings in the forest for homesteads.

On a small green island by the public library where four roads meet,
a sweet and gentle offering by children of the Excalibur Primary School:

industrial and domestic scraps of our time - circuit boards,
broken cups and toys - encapsulated in a giant figurative footprint.

The traffic murmurs a prelude to the carbon surge of eventide.
Cherry trees with chain-sawn arms hold pink blossoms out to the sun.

***
I've just thought: the line breaks of these poems will be destroyed by the format of the posting. They will overrun and get tucked under the next line. Oh well. I should tell you that the Alsager Rotary Club helped finance the Footprints project.

In between these two commissions I did another for the National Year of Reading, 2008. It's due out on a poster soon too, I hope, as there's only half the year left already. I'll post that one up next time and also the commissioned poem I have written for World Environment Day (June 5th) that I have a feeling will go down like a concrete glider - not perhaps the best expression, as a concrete glider might be looked upon rather favourably by the WED people as an alternative to the aeroplane. I am also working on what to do for the Congleton Garden Festival of 15th June.

When I went to Alsager library they had four banners which, as I recall it, were to do with Freedom and Liberty, Getting Away From It All, Crime and Punishment, and the Second World War. With Gayle Hawley's permission (Alsager's every-friendly, ever-helpful, ever-keen librarian), I stuck up some poems in response to these banners: Black Ivory, A View Of Mow Cop, Wayward Women And Fallen Men, Ballad Of An Owd Sowjer. The banners are left in a Cheshire library for a month and then moved to the next library in the county. When the guy came along to collect the banners for the move, he asked to to take my poems along with them which I was delighted to agree with, of course. So now, my friends, I am on tour and with no on-the-road expenses, no dreary miles to beat along and no seedy hotels needy to catch some respite for my old grey weary head. How good is that? Ta-ra.

The Twizzle Bird and Other Stories

2008-05-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

I knew that writing this blog would be more than I would get around to doing most of the time and the length of time that has elapsed since my last posting rather proves my suspicions about my motivation. But, blimmin' ink, dudes, I've been busy. In no particular order: this weekend just gone, Lynda and I went down to Bristol to see Amy's exhibition at Massala - part of the Bedminster Arts Trail. Here's the link so that you can get a flavour of what she was showing.

http://www.sbaweb.co.uk/arts_trail_2008/artists_a-z

Eight, short-run, limited edition prints from mixed media originals. Wonderful stuff. I know where I want to go for the cover of my CPL collection (nepotism or not). It's nice to be honestly able to say that I would have be knocked out by these images even if I did not know who had produced them. There were a few poets in evidence in Bristol too, doing good contemporary writing and some ceramicists and painters using text in their work to good effect.

I had a gig with Adam at the Coachmakers last Wednesday evening. We were going to do a couple of poems but some older blokes came in and were singing along to the songs so we kept the sets pretty much to songs they knew. There was a real sense community going on. That's a great thing about the English and Celtic song tradtions, they belong to everybody and there's a great sense of belonging in them.

Adam told me he thinks my previous posting about the lecturer I had a personality clash with sounds 'bitter'. Well, yeah, it is. My family was going seriously without for me to be at uni and if it wasn't going to work out for me, I would have been putting them through hardship for nothing. It also shows that Adam is probably a nicer geezer than me and doesn't hold grudges like I do. I don't mean to.

As part of the Footprints project I have been commissioned to write a poem for, I went along to the Excalibur school to help the young poets there with their pieces for the project. 'High five' to them all (this seems to be their preferred way of celebrating achievement). They were so hard-working, immaginative, uncompetitive, supportive, charming, engaging, sincere and funny. They wrote some excellent small poems on the subject of recycling and reducing our carbon footprint and preserving the planet. They also came up with this:

'DON'T BE A FOOL, BE RECY-COOL'

We should put them in charge of the world for a while or at least ask them what they want of us. After all, what's good for them is good for the world.

While I was there I met Sue, an old mate of Lynda's and mine from back in the days of the Dragon Fair and the Butterfly Fair at Rode Heath. Me and Lynda were playing folk rock with Heymaker, Sue was a fire-blower, juggler and assorted other circus skills person - part of the Steve and Jan's unique Hole House Farm entourage. These were such resourceful people. They would make a night's entertainment of the highest quality out of whatever was around them at the time. I once helped provide the music for a shadow puppet show they put on. Me on fiddle, Matt on melodeon. The shadow puppet characters we cut out from cornflake packets and taped onto withies. The shadow screen was a bedsheet (borrowed from one of the mobile homes of their endless mates) stretched between two sharpened stakes driven into the grass. The light came from rags wrapped round the top of another stake and soaked in paraffin and driven into the ground. For added bite and humour, many of the characters were recognisable as friends and family of the crowd. We have all put our minds to more conventional employment since then but Steve and Jan's formidable invention has left its mark in a good way. Sue's sense of theatre, people skills and heart-warming inclusivity are in high profile in the preschool centre she now runs. Steve and Jan went to Australia to live, years ago now. It's funny cuz Steve always looked Australian and now, I suppose, he is.

Joyce of the CCC has come up with three Braille copies for 'pAUSE fOR a pOEM' which I find really exciting. They look so arcane and magical. I can't proof read them, of course, but I'm sure they're fine and dandy. It's a big step closer to getting that show on the road, as t'were.

Lynda and I have signed up for the Congleton Garden Festival weekend. Lynda will be doing her clay magikings and getting the kids to have a go and I am planning a garden-related poetry installation and some inter-active poetry. More about that next time.

I should be working on my poem for Footprints but I somehow can't. I have also been commissioned to write one for World Environment Day. The two things overlap too much in my head at the moment. My first reaction on hearing about WED was: World Environment DAY? DAY??? - shouldn't it be that every day? The WED people have been going on about it for years with a different catch phrase for every year. Does this kind of profiling really do anything, I wonder? Or are the copy writers sitting at their office desks coming up with smart things to write about recycling on their recycled paper while the earth rots around them like Nero of legend and his ol' violin? The solution to all this poisoning of the planet is so simple as well. To give just one example: The use of cars is bad for the planet? OK, stop using them then. Sorted.

I did a poetry workshop with a reading group at Shavington school. They were great young people. We played around with some rhythm strings to get in to the meanings of rhythm and then they came up with poems about where they live. There is a lot of stuff poet folks are doing that deserves a more-public profile. I want to get what they are doing up on my official website as soon as it is in existence. I've emailed Anne at the CCC to progress it but I've not heard anything yet.

Sneyd Colliery Explosion, 1942

2008-04-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Grahame Shrubsole, head of MMU Cheshire music faculty, turned everything round for me when I was a student. My first year as an undergraduate was really exciting. To be among people who took music and writing seriously was mind-blowing for me. My creativity doubled over night. I was lucky, too, in that I had been in factories for most of my working life and I had a highly developed work ethic. I worked six times harder than the majority of students I met and for seven times as long. Alas, the music part of my degree took a dive in the second year. I was taught by a different bloke and we did not see eye to eye. He awarded me what I felt to be (an still do) unjustifiably low marks for everything I did. It was difficult to take from a guy whose own experience was severely limited and whose own compositions were lamentable. He was exciting himself with ideas that I had shunned as passe when I was fourteen-and-a-half. The only good thing about him was that he was incapable of irony. I mean, he really didn't get it at all. Here's a quick example: One day, he was drinking from a novelty mug that had something mildy blokey on it. He plainly thought this accoutrement made him look like one of the guys. I forget what the slogan was - something tossy like: 'Tea? I'd rather have a beer'. He was making a show out of drinking from it, drawing attention to it. I flattered the child in him by nodding towards it and saying, 'Nice mug.'
'It was given to me by a grateful student,' he told me.
'Leaving then, were you?' I said.
He didn't bat an eyelid even though I must have had a right sly look on my face.
'Yes,' he said.
'Thought you must have been,' I said.
But apart from the occasional small victory like that, he brought me down. I was disenchanted and, after two years of studentship, seriously out of money. Amy will confirm our low financial status. We had peas on toast for tea one day. I took a year out then went back. For my third year I had Grahame as tutor. He is a musicologist - a man with an awesome knowledge and experience of music. He is respectful of everybody and can communicate even the most complex of theories. He understands muliplicities of musical traditions and knows how to push the envelope in the 21st century. You can imagine my delight when he so generously offered to arrange a song of mine (blimey, there's a pun there, as will be seen) for male voice choir.

The song came about because Lynda saw an article in the Sentinel about a local mining disaster, showed me and I wrote a song about it and started doing it with Boneshaker. When my biography, Battling Jack, came out I was giving a reading at Kidsgrove library and I had the pleasure of meeting a man who had worked down the pit in question at the time of the disaster. His interest in the Turpin boxing family had brought him to the reading and we got chatting during the interval. This man's son, I found out, sings in a local male voice choir and it gave me the idea that my pit disaster song and therefore a significant piece of North Staffs social history, could be part of the repertoire of a local men's choir that has its roots in the social life of the local coalfields. The man's son thought the idea was a good one but explained that before a choir master could make a decision about it the song would have to be aranged in four parts: two tenor, two bass. I went to Grahame for advice . . .

I had a meeting with Grahame today and he played me some of the musical sketches he has made for the arrangement and they are fantastic. I was prepared to have to compromise, as is often the case with collaborations but, to my huge delight, his ideas are both empathetic and innovative. It has lifted the project to another level. I can't wait for the next move.

Adam has posted our Up To Scratch version of Owed To Paddy O' on our MySpace page today. Have a listen to his playing of the low whistle. You will agree it is everything I claimed for it. I am one lucky geezer.

Owed To Paddy O'

2008-04-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

I did my second recording session with Adam today for my 'pAUSE fOR a pOEM' installation. We put the music to 'Owed to Paddy O''. Me on guitar and Adam on low whistle. What a soulful sound he makes on that thing. A single note played the way he plays is enough to send shivers up your spine. His timbre and vibrato reminds me of a hero of mine in my New Orleans Jazz days: the clarinet player George Lewis. Have a look at and a listen to George on You Tube playing Burgundy Street Blues. A different kind of music to Adam's but the same life vibe. I'll get the Paddy O' track posted on our Up To Scratch MySpace page. It qualifies because we have been doing that poem on our duo gigs.

Joyce of the CCC has agreed to do the Braille copies of the installation poems, which is brilliant. I was intrigued by Braille. How did it work? I knew that the black squiggles on the page that we interpret as sounds were changed into bumps but in exactly what way I could not imagine. It turns out (if I have understood Joyce correctly) that there are two kinds of Braille: 1 & 2. Braille 1 has an arrangement of bumps for each letter. Braille 2 is similar but has some short cuts built in. Some commonly ocurring parts of words - like 'ing' for instance - have a single collective symbol representing the three letters. The effect of the transcription on my poems will be that the line lengths will be much extended - perhaps one line becoming two lines - but the all-important line breaks will be preserved. My pictorial poems will lose their shape but that hardly matters as that element is an addition rather than essential to the meaning. I've been asked why I am doing an installation for blind people? Well, I'm not. I'm doing an installation for everybody. I'm just trying to make sure visually impaired and blind people aren't left out. I am well pleased with how it's progressing. I've even found time for a couple of new poems. They'll stay on ice for a while and I'll have another look at them before I release them into the wild.

I bumped into Alaa, one of my uni students, by the sarni shelves in Tesco. My teaching was cut short this year as reported. I didn't realise how much I missed the students and the Writing workshops until I spoke to him. They are such good people and talented writers with such goodwill towards other people and their work. Roll on the new academic year.

I heard yesterday that some venues have been holding back from inviting me to do poetry gigs because they thought that I was still recuperating from the road accident I was in. The happy fact is (happy for me, anyway) is that I am up and running and up for anything as of yore. So thanks for the consideration but bring on the poetry gigs. I have the words. I have the desire. I have the motor . . .

My poem, READ / A / BOOK, commissioned for the National Year of Reading is to be sent to not only all Cheshire libraries but to all Cheshire primary and junior schools. I have sent in the photo Lynda took of me reading to an amusing tree to be put on it. I thought if it is insisted my picture's on it then it would be made more tolerable if there was a smiley tree in it too.

FLASHBACK: Friday Jan 18, 2008

2008-04-14T03:16:00.000-07:00

My official take-over as CPL from Jo Bell, CPL 2007. The gig was at Neston Public Library on the Wirral. Neston is an amazing place - a seaside with no sea. Where there was once sea, there is now grass. It's brilliant, especially when the wind blows the grass into waves. Ironic. I do like to be beside the leaside . . . It got silted up through lack of use. Time and tide wait for no man.

The library has just celebrated 100 years of existence. 'Neston Free Library' originally. What a social innovation that was! Books on free loan to the working classes. Many a kid chucked out of formal education early must have furthered their studies there. How many horizons did it widen? How many future trade union leaders did those shelves foster?

It was a good gig. Lynda and I enjoyed Jo's stuff. Lynda said she thought Jo's voice had a compelling, sophorific quality that suited her work well. I agreed. Jo read first as the out-going poet then I read as the in-coming one.

There was a bit of a mouthy geezer in the audience who shouted at me in the Q & A session we had at the end when I inadvertently attempted to answer a question addressed to Jo. It turned out to be John Gorman (ex Scaffold with R. McGough, M. McGear). The last time I'd spoken to John was on the set of Ready, Steady Go! in 1965. He was with Scaffold, I was with Cops n' Robbers. Obviously, I had more reason to remember him that he had to remember me (check out McGough's 'Let Me Die A Youngman's Death'. He does some terrific stuff).

A discussion arose about 'modernity'. It came out of the fact that I often use rhyme in my poetry. Someone suggested that rhyme might be a thing of the past and, if you want to be modern you won't employ it. I was surprised. I hadn't thought about it much - never seen myself as this thing or that thing, modern or otherwise. I'm not consciously trying to belong to any club or society or movement so it has never been an issue for me. I'm lucky enough to be able to rhyme or not rhyme at will (ie. lucky enough to have spent a lot of time reading, had good mentors and to have been free to work hard at writing). I use rhyme when it feels right to do so and prose poetry when ever that feels right. Perhaps it's probably more to do with rhythm than rhyme because rhymes have got a big elbow when you use them staccato fashion and a more-gentle nudge when you use them legato. What I love about as well is that it brings attention to the rhyming word pairs and you can build up some extra images that way. I don't think I could I be without rhyme all the time. It wouldn't feel natural. Nature rhymes. Have a look around you.

A young guy at Neston suggested that maybe the use of rhyme was so retro it represented a new modernity. Take your pick. My compatriot in San Francisco, Jack Hirschman, now in his seventies, doesn't use rhyme as far as I know. Jack is a wonderful wordsperson. One of the beat generation, a socially aware poet. Maybe that approach to writing is city stuff. Metropolitan - hums of the city. It was great to hear people discussing it all.

When I did some gigs in France, the hosts labelled me: 'W. Terry Fox (GB) Folk Poete'. I think I like that. Yeah, I suppose that is what I am, a folk poet. Two of my favourite poets, Thomas Hardy and John Clare were rhymers. They, like me, were also folk fiddle players and lovers of traditional folksong. Maybe that's where the rhyming comes from.

The people at Neston - in the library and in the town - were exceptionally friendly and pleasant. Lynda and I hope to go back there soon.

'Dance of Fools' Review

2008-04-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Congleton Chronicle has given my 'Dance of Fools' collection a terrific review. Big thanks to 'JAE'. I had not realised I was so preoccupied with the inevitability of my own demise until I read this piece.

Chris, who runs the 'Room at the Top' cafe in Congleton (his menu is ace with loads of vegetarian options which pleased Lynda. There are newspapers put out for customers to read, art installations, etc. It has some of the Bohemian vibe of the Soho coffee bars in the early sixties) has kindly put 'D of F' on sale there. A donation to his pet charity, the RNLI, will be made for each copy sold. I made a weak joke about climate change and the fact that I was concerned there wasn't a life boat within miles of where I live, which prompted Chris to tell me that there was once a lighthouse in Congleton. It was built to warn motorists of a notoriously hazardous bend in a road. The lighthouse was switched off during WWII for obvious reasons and became redundant when the road was made safer. It apparently remains in history as the only ever inland lighthouse.

Better news on my 'pAUSE fOR a pOEM' installation: the CCC are sorting out the braille transcriptions for me. I am really encouraged by that. Which reminds me: when I was planning this project, I thought having my poems transcibed into braille would turn reading them into a tactile experience (you know, "feel the poem"). It seemed a reasonable proposition to me until I spoke to Colin Antwis, Secretary for Chester National Society for the Blind, who said as patiently as he could, 'No, Terry. It's just reading!'

Cheshire Poet Laureate 2008 / 09

2008-04-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

My aim is to keep a running notebook on my tenure as Cheshire Poet Laureate.

The trouble with diaries, logs, journals and blogs, as I am just finding out, is that they take time to write. The more you write, the less you have to write about. This blog was organised for me by my long-time mate Karl who is a pro software engineer of the highest order and should not have been bothered with such a lowly task. But he did it in 2 mins flat whilst eating his tea so I don't feel too bad about it. I am three months into my laureateship and I will back date my notes, sometime, to cover the beginnings.

Today I have been recording 11 poems for my 'pAUSE fOR a pOEM' project. I have been doing this with Adam who I make music with from time to time.
Ref: www.myspace.com/scratchsongs
Naturally, there will be music with one or two of the poems. My 'pAUSE' project is intended to be a poetry installation in a museum or art gallery and to be inclusive of the hard of seeing and of blind people. I have experienced some mild official resistance to this so I will have to go it alone. You can be hard of seeing in more ways than one, can't you?

Had a phone call this evening about 'Footprints' - an environmental project in Alsager involving the public library, mosaic art and young people's poetry. I'm up for it. Sounds great. I'll tell more when I know more.

hello world

2008-04-09T12:35:00.001-07:00

how's it going?