a poem about dog poo

For World Poetry Day, here's a little guerrilla poetry on the towpath. I'm sure you can work out the back story!

(Boat Teenager just saw this and said "the best kind of passive aggressive sign is that made in poetry". So there you have it.)

otter madness

The lights were on at the Fisherman’s Rest
but nobody was at home;
for their halves of mild had added a zest
to the anglers’ habitual moan-

“Oh what shall we do with the otters, me lads?
They’re a-coming on over to here
and swamping our culture. It makes me so mad
that they’re threatening all we hold dear

with their sinister plottings and otter cabals,
and something has got to be done!”
Forthwith these stout fellows marched to the canal
with rat poison, snares and a gun.

They stalked through the reed beds as bold as you wish
intent their foul deeds to perform
and they swore every otter that ever ate fish
would regret it’d ever been born.

then a cloud hid the moon, and from deep in a culvert
a whistling forthwith was heard,
and a patter of paws quite like those of werewolves, that
would make any sane person scared.

’Twas the otter apoc’lypse, aquatic disaster,
an Armageddon of Tarkas;
there was crunching and chewing, and screams, then at last a
great stillness of bones and old parkas.

And everyone swore, as they passed down the pound,
that the place was now cheerful enough
how the miserable sods with their rods weren’t around
-just the wild creatures, doing their stuff.

An otter was killed by rat poison at Marlborough, Wiltshire - I wrote this after the story was posted up on the canal Facebook group and an angler complained that the otters were getting out of hand and needed controlling- we're faced with an 'aquatic disaster', he said. He was given short shrift....  it was an important reminder that you should be careful about mentioning when and where you've seen otters. Because there are some unpleasant folk around.

the voice on the hill

Tucked in the early mist, the hill was softly snoring to the distant woodpeckers' drumming. A line of three roe deer crossed the field, stepping daintily and with the occasional scamper, nervous at being in the open even with half the world still asleep. When the sun appeared over the ridge, it suddenly lit the kingfisher perched opposite my window, so that it blazed startlingly blue. It seems unfair that the blueness of kingfishers is brought into question - jug jug to dirty ears, I say.

The kingfisher up in that tree
Has no time for philosophy;
No longer by the dawn obscured,
It seems entirely self-azured

Presently the anglers set up their little lunar landing craft and perched on the side of the canal, working hard to disprove Donne's claim that no man is an island, and grudgingly nodding or ignoring me as was their wont.

Jack Labonowski was at work on his wood lathe. This sort of work is called 'bodging', you know. Jolly nice anyway.

Cold though it was, the sun was bright and warm to the touch. And the towpath has completely dried out, so the weekend walkers were able to keep to the path without having to detour round the puddles; even the ones in unsuitable footwear seemed happy enough. Presently, a party of sensibly (and expensively) attired folk descended from the woods opposite, backlit by the sun so that they were all haloed. Passing as they did across the path of the earlier deer, they reminded me of the ghostly walkers in Sorley MacLean's Hallaig

Back through the gloaming to Hallaig
Through the vivid speechless air,
Pouring down the steep slopes,
Their laughter misting my ear
And their beauty a glaze on my heart. 

...except for their voices. They boomed, in that confident middle class way, deep and sonorous as an ensemble of alpenhorns. Ah, Wiltshire.

distant drummer

The Bradford Flight (total locks: one) is border country; above it, the broad sunlit uplands of the upper Avon; below, the steep wooded valley that carries the river down to Bath and Bristol. And it is a frontier of the mind, separating out the more adventurous boaters from those few who prefer to keep their bimbling within the environs of Bath, and view Trowvegas as a Tudor seafarer might view Samarkand or Far Cathay, an impossibly distant place where strange folk do strange things.

We'd been as far as Seend, where the canal is closed while the bridge is being repaired; we'd struggled through ice to get back down to Semington; we'd kept watch for the barn owls that ghost the meadows in the dusk, and the roe deer that merge with the russet stubble in the dawn, their white rumps standing out like the smile of the Cheshire cat. The buck's new antlers were there, still in velvet, where, on our outward journey a few weeks back, its head had still been bare. Coltsfoot is in flower. The chaffinch has polished off its spring song, and the greenfinches are making snoozing noises. The seasons are spinning faster as we approach the equinox.

Now we dropped down through the lock to tithe barn, close to where the storms had rocked a big ash tree and caused a rockfall. The tree was down, and Jim and I scrambled up the steep slope with chainsaws, through the brash, slicing up the trunk and loading it into an old sailing dinghy to transfer it across to the boats. Hard going, but now there was a great pile of wood on Eve's roof, and Netty's foredeck, and the towpath too. We broke out the Famous Grouse, and celebrated.

I made a quick dinner of corned beef pasta and sat, too tired to go to bed just yet. Outside, a most spectacular sunset was developing. I popped out a couple of times to admire it, and the perfection of the layers of trees and fields receding towards it. Then it was blotted out. The prow of a boat right next to my bow had appeared, silent as the dusk. On the towpath was a strange silhouette, a tiny figure with a long tall head, like the Mekon or possibly the Alien off that movie.

It was Bongo George, in his rasta hat. 

Nothing could have kept me awake that night, and as I slid into deep sleep I heard the sound of not-so-distant drums.

Next morning my neighbour was keen to move as quickly as possible. "He doesn't move for a year," she said despairingly, "and then he sticks himself right next to us!" 

The other neighbour was even more forthright. "I'm a better drummer than that," she said, "and I'm not a drummer."

We loaded up the wood, and fired up the engines. Down at Horse Field, there was a huge space for mooring. A space that only endless bad drumming can create, and that we occupied gratefully. I pulled the engine kill toggle, and peace reigned.

 

up in the air

Jim arrived with a great bag of climbing gear on the back of his bike. "I thought I'd do that willow," he said. "And you could take some pictures."

Jim has an informal arrangement with the local canal people; he takes out trees that represent a potential problem or danger to the canal and towpath, and their users. It saves them admin and bother - the canal volunteers can't move without a risk assessment and piles of hi-vis safety gear - and he gets firewood. I sometimes help, too, because I like doing that sort of thing. The willow was a pro bono job because the timber is pretty useless for burning, and not much use for anything else, unless you want to make a cricket bat.

"I said five years ago I'm getting too old for going up trees" said Jim. He's three years younger than me, but I didn't mention that. My younger self would have thought it surprising that people pushing towards 60 years old should be scrambling around in trees. But then my younger self was ageist.

He clambered into the harness and leg spikes, and we went to the willow tree whose bough was overhanging the towpath. Space's boat was underneath it. "He's a late riser, is Space" said Jim, knocking on the boat's roof.

Space emerged, blinking in the noontime light. "I'm moving in a few hours," he said. "You can do it then."

"Sorry, Space, got to do it now" said Jim. "We won't even touch your boat."

"If you do I shall be very annoyed," said Space, retreating into the dark fug of his boat.

Jim scrambled up through the ivy, dislodging a squirrel's drey that showered twigs down on him and looking more like the Green Man with every move. Having attached a rope high on the trunk, he swung down onto the limb that was sticking out over the canal, and as he lopped off sections of it, I swung them down to the ground. Space and his boat remained unsullied.

And then we had a glass of whisky and I drew Jim's picture. 

plain words

a slight adjustment....

In my school days, I was conscious that the essays I wrote were always very short, and wondered if perhaps I should fluff them out a bit to increase the word count and add some heft to the pages.

 Then I read Sir Ernest Gowers' Complete Plain Words and, for good measure, George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Both texts were hugely influential on my attitude to language; I have always aspired to write in a way that both these chaps would approve of; simply, and clearly.

So it was a bit of a rude shock to find that this blog has been subject to a Manual Action by Google (bear with me, please, these are terms that I am fresh to, as well). It has been rendered invisible to search results using Google, because

pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Most worrying. Had I been hacked? I changed my passwords, and hunted through the blog. No obvious messing around had been going on.

I joined the Google webmaster forum, explaining what had happened, and asking for advice. A respected member of the forum replied

Your content doesn't seem to make sense, almost gibberish or poorly auto-translated. Here's an example:

Such a long, still autumn was bound to come to blows eventually, but I was grateful for it while it lasted; the mild, still days succeeding each other, as the woodlands’ colours insensibly varied and deepened; olives, russets and deep scarlets that slowly turned to ochre and umber. In the thinning woods that overlook the cut, the stars can be seen at night; the fox barks, the tawny owls call to each other in the half light, and a single cronk announces start of the heron’s day shift. 

http://dru-withoutamap.blogspot.com.br/2015/11/rough-winds.html

Why should it be indexed?

maybe the problem's in here?

It's a bit dispiriting when your carefully-chosen words are read as gibberish, obviously. With some further discussion and input from other contributors, the commentator (not a native english speaker) accepted that what I'd written was at least not nonsense...

I've requested a review of the blog from Google, though as there's nothing that I can see that is wrong, I am worried that they will confirm their previous judgement.

Interesting times. As a canal dweller, I do use some words that are specific to my environment, such as cratch, or... actually nothing else comes to mind at the mo. But you get the picture. Lots of subcultures have specialised language, and it's a lingo that may be incomprehensible to an outsider.

And I sometimes write and even publish poetry; a sort of writing that is perhaps (or can be) different from everyday patterns of language, but one where every word has (or ought to have) an important job to do. As with my prose description of autumn, cited by the commentator above; the language may be dense, but it is hopefully coherent.

I have also written instruction books. The one I was most pleased with was a guide to the engine room systems of the ferry Havelet, written with the aim of saving time explaining things to new crew members. That was used as part of the company's ISO 9000 quality management certification... a good manual should have something in common with anything else well-written; it should be luminously clear in its meaning.

I started blogging eight years ago, because I wanted my own little soapbox, after having had lots of other people write about me, both personally (as a result of my prosecuting a successful employment tribunal against P&O Ferries) and more widely, because of my identity as a trans woman. It is very frustrating having other people say silly things about you without having any means of reply, let me tell you.

Since then, I've written and done some things that I believe have been useful, in LGBT politics, press freedom in the context of Leveson, local politics (ah, the Tesco riots!); I've even shown you how to fix a toilet. Oh, and poetry! And publishing it! And more widely, hopefully, I show that trans people have got more to them than simply being trans. And we have and deserve a voice in the world. Nothing about us without us, and so on.

It's a salutary thought that there should be such a gulf between what I intended to convey, and how it was received by someone appointed as the arbiter of that which is deemed valuable and worthwhile.

maps, storms, pictures

The map of the Kennet and Avon Canal's West End has been selling like hot maps.... it's also available in my Etsy shop, should you like one; both on A4 and A3 sizes. 

The storm have been making life lively on the canal; I must write about that soon, but just now I'm on the hop, piggybacking wifi and catching up with admin, as you do. Here's a picture I've just done for my nice canal neighbours...