The Telegraph has helpfully published a list of the top thousand most polluting postcodes for carbon emissions. I am quietly proud that my leafy suburb is up there, though at 25.5 tonnes per household per year, it lags behind top-of-the-league Rickmansworth's 36.42. It's all down to the affluent middle classes, apparently, what with the 4x4s, people carriers (so essential for the school run with Mellors and Jemima), barbecues and forren holidays.
Reading through the list gave me a little frisson of gratitude that I didn't live in the other places, which may be unfair, but there is something about some place names that say to me, 'Don't go there!' And then I went to my big book of poetry and read this
Barton in the Beans
For comfort on bad nights,
open out a map of Middle England
and sing yourself to sleep
with a lullaby of English names:
Shouldham Thorpe, in gentle sunshine,
Swadlincote, in a Laura Ashley frock,
Little Cubley, running with weak tea,
Kibworth Beauchamp, praying on protestant knees,
Ashby-de-la-Zouche, saying 'Morning',
Wigston Parva, smiling- but not too widely,
Ramsey Mereside, raising an eyebrow,
Eye Kettleby, where they'd rather not talk about it,
Market Overton, echoing with the slamming doors
of Cold Overton, where teenagers flee every night to their rooms,
screaming that from Appleby Magna to Stubbers Green
they never met a soul who understood.
They never met a soul.
At Barton in the Beans, the rain says Ssssshhhh...
Joanne Limburg
I love place names. I used to know someone who lived in Weston-Under-Penyard. Gloucestershire has lots of lovely names. Then if you cross over to Brittany;Pleslin-Trigavou, Plorec-sur-Arguenon, Plouzélambre - all food for the imagination.
ReplyDelete"Swadlincote, in a Laura Ashley frock" I can see that
It's the "Hope to follow Julie" that always bothered me in this hymn...why Julie? Why is she so special?
ReplyDeleteThere's lots of PL sounds in Britanny, isn't there? -maybe it's from the dripping of rain.
ReplyDeleteI think Julie's got the compass, Liz. Or the chocolate.
The children used to refer to Brittany as Ploucland.
ReplyDeleteAmerica has been sometimes mistakenly called a melting pot, and Limburg's poem beautifully illustrates some antecedence for the process. Keep the good poems coming, Dru---"upside down in cloud" has become a serial big blog of poetry for me.
ReplyDeletePloucland is good, Anji. It feels very different from the non-Breton bit of France. I saw it mostly from the sea; my first sighting of Brittany was rounding Finisterre and running along the coast to arrive at St Malo at dawn, one very stormy night. There were buoys and lighthouses flashing everywhere. It's a very rocky coast. There's a nice description of it in the Franklin's Tale
ReplyDeleteThen on the grass she'd sit again
And piteously upon the sea she'd stare,
And say, with dull sighs on the empty air:
"Eternal God, Who by Thy providence
Leadest the world with a true governance,
Idly, as men say, dost Thou nothing make;
But, Lord, these grisly, fiendish rocks, so black,
That seem but rather foul confusion thrown
Awry than any fair world of Thine own,
Aye of a perfect wise God and stable,
Why hast Thou wrought this insane work, pray tell?
For by this work, north, south, and west and east,
There is none nurtured, man, nor bird, nor beast;
It does no good, to my mind, but annoys.
See'st Thou not, Lord, how mankind it destroys?
A hundred thousand bodies of mankind
Have died on rocks, whose names are not in mind,
And man's a creature made by Thee most fair,
After Thine image, as Thou didst declare.
Then seemed it that Thou had'st great charity
Toward mankind; but how then may it be
That Thou hast wrought such means man to destroy,
Which means do never good, but ever annoy?"
Perhaps more of a jambalaya, Larry, where all the bits are still distinguishable? Thank you!