Inspiration? Where?

While we wait to see if another Lockdown is going to be slapped back down upon us - a local food factory has seen an outbreak of "that damn virus" - I've been trying to get myself lively and productive at work and being a bit of an ideas factory to catch up for all the time we've lost.

I'm also trying to get back into other forms of writing other than this nature blog. My way of inspiring myself I've been reading about Wild Billy Childish, the Medway Poet, the inventor of the Stuckist art movement and a Musician of the British Empire.

Billy has been around since 1979, and is a former partner of artist Tracey Emin. He is absolutely prolific and has released around 100 albums and done enough paintings to cover the surface of the moon. Probably. I find people like him, steeped in words and paint, absolutely fascinating.

In actuality, I find his music nearly unlistenable and am not very keen on his paintings. But it is the idea of living a life of nothing but creativity that inspires. He spent 17 years on the dole while doing his thing at one point.

So, after I read, I felt full of drive and zest, ready to sit in front of this keyboard and create Create CREATE.

And of course, it hasn't happened. I went for a run on a very warm evening, and was too tired to do anything other than lie on the sofa.

The literary world cries into its tea.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 06.08.20

Burns Night Haggis Redux

This week, when my sister visited for her birthday, I ended up having haggis (both standard and vegetarian) three nights in a row.

The reason being that my stepfather threw a really rather excellent Burns Night supper for 16 neighbours, and there was an awful lot of haggis kicking around, haggises that just a few days before had been freely roaming the grousey highlands until being cruelly shot for our culinary pleasure.

We had no piper, but an iPad was able to play Burns' "Address to a Haggis" in all its incomprehensible glory to the guests, who then toasted the haggis and my mother with whisky shots I had poured.

I had one and then got a stinking headache straightaway, reminding me why I never drink the stuff.

My sister and I had two more Burns Night suppers of our own when she arrived the next day.

We love our haggis.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 31.01.20

Of Bat and Bats

This has been a very long day of cricket, played against Kirkby Portland 3s in the reverse of last week's fixture which we won rather convincingly.

I've been really looking forward to it, as it was to be played at their outground at Newstead Abbey, haunt of Lord Byron who presumably wrote poems there while hobbling around on his club foot and collecting unmentionable snippings from his lady friends and storing them in lockets.

I had no plans to do the same, merely to do cricketing things as well as I could. Wish I'd had a go at the  poetry.

The ground itself was tiny, the wicket so slow as  to be made of melting plasticine, and the crazy short boundaries edged by thick holly bushes so retrieving the ball after a 4 was hit an exercise in bleeding sado-masochism. We lost the toss - bad move - and ended up being unable  to make much of a breakthrough on the world's slowest wicket. I was off form, jumping too much into delivery, but the pitch didn't help.

No-one else was having much joy either, but we kept at it and fielded well after a shaky start. As did I. They got 212-3, which I didn't think was too bad on that deck.

Then while we had tea, the rain came, and knowing well their own ground, the "oppo" as we cricketers say, were keen to get on with it, rain or not. And so, against what  last week was ordinary bowling, we struggled on a deck that was turning to mud under  our batsmen's feet. We did come off for rain, and we thought that was it, but understandably they wanted to get back out, and much arm waving and concerned looks at  patches of sawdust went on, as lightning flashed above the ornamental lake.

A bat flew out of  our dressing room, and flittered about in the light. So strange to see a bat by daylight.

It was about 645pm, and the rain eased, and  out went went again. It gave a chance for the Saturday Captain, who wasn't actually captain today, to get a very good 50, as opposed to my 1, where I tried to pull a short ball from outside off stump. Ouch.

Well there we go. Can't do well every week. Unfortunately.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 28.07.18

Happy Hedgehog Has Heavenly Haggis

We celebrated Burn's Night yesterday. I got to celebrate it again today too, in leftover fashion.

Haggis is offal marmite, I suppose. People will happily eat liver and kidney, yet choke back vomit on the thought of eating haggis, as if heart and lungs are involved in the production of more unpleasant substances of those aforementioned organs.

I'm the other way round, I will eat haggis but no other organ things. It's the Scottish blood.

Mum insists we celebrate each year, and woe betide me if I turn up in my work gear. Burns is to be respected, even if it was the wrong night. We can't pipe in the Haggis, but I did pretend, and mum has to recite the Selkirk Grace that Burns himself did at a dinner on St Mary's Isle Kirkcudbright. Our home town.

Some hae meat and canna eat
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.


It usually takes her three goes to get all the way through, but she makes it. Luckily it's the Selkirk Grace, and not the rude version of "Coming Through the Rye" that is associated with Burn's night. Burns wrote that one with his diamond ring on the window of a pub in Dumfries, up the road.

Of our two guests, only one was a haggis virgin. He was happy with the whisky, but you could tell he was only pretending to enjoy the mighty haggis, "Chieftain o' thae Puddin Race". His chewing was far too slow.

Our guest was a wuss.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 24.01.16

Stargazing – a Dream of Lighthouses

A number of years ago, probably in the torrid times around my 32^nd birthday, a friend of mine presented me with a book. The cover was a night-time photograph of a lighthouse, rendered in such a way it looked more like an illustration, and the jacket announced it to be: “Stargazing – Peter Hill”.

I thought the cover was a shade twee, and the liner notes, explaining how a boy became a man on the Scottish Lights in the early 1970s, wasn't too promising either, it smacked too much of beards, tatty pullovers and Capstan Full Strength. Nautical cliches rammed down your throat at Cat'O'Nine Tails point

I can't deny that there is indeed a bit of bearding and pullovering in the book, but this is allowed because it is a work of such magic. Poetry, art, storytelling and manual work are described on these extraordinary creations, many of them built out of sheer impossibility by the Stephenson Dynasty (Robert Louis was a relative) on rocks that often barely saw the light of day at low tide – witness lighthouses like the elegant Skerryvore or the famous Bell Rock Light. Countless lives were saved by the characters who worked on these lights; career men, veterans overshadowed by war, those seeking escape, and a keeper who ritually removed all his clothes for the duration whenever he arrived on a light.

And amongst these men was thrown Peter Hill, an art student looking for something new and different to do for a summer; a place to explore the artistic and literary sides of his personality while working out what to do with his life. We read of him learning the ropes on Pladda, a light off the coast of the holiday isle of Arran much loved by Basking Sharks, and how he worked out how to cook huge meals for four hungry men and light the Light without burning all his hair off.

He then moves to Paddy's Milestone, Ailsa Craig, where he hears tales of war from the elder keepers and explores the giant rock where once upon a time all the granite used in the making of the world's stock of Curling stones came from. He dines off fresh crab and lobster, and swims off rocks the size of houses, sketchbook and notepad constantly at his side.

Finally he moves to Hyskeir, an island he finds is smaller than the dot of the “i” that marks its name in his atlas and is strictly run not by the senior keeper, but by the goats that lived there. His final trial in this summer is to survive two days on half a cigarette. Everything out of his system, he goes back to art school and eventually becomes a well known artist in Australia.

How little I thought of this book, cruelly, when it was given to me, since then I've realised it was a gift of the most stunning mile. It is a book for daydreamers, writers, artists and poets who wish they could spend time alone, undisturbed, yet in the company of fascinating, congenial people. It is a book for those who love the sea, and those landlocked surrounded by sterile arable farmland who wish they had a chance to.

It makes me wish I could have done, or indeed do, the same thing – never mind the clumsiness, the unsociability, the utter poisonous of my cooking, for I would learn, somehow, surely – finished my two year my stint looking after the seafarers of the world, and shining welcoming light across the waters, that the sun had painted gold at sunset a few minutes before.

And then clutching notebooks full of words of purple, silver, silk and barbed wire, I would return home, and set the world alight with words. If only, if only.

Copyright Creamcrackerednature 29.04.14