Oxford

Journalists refer to Oxford and Cambridge as if those two towns and their universities were solely devoted to grooming our future rulers, as politicians, bankers or executives of the global corporations which control our lives. I don't know Cambridge very well, but I often visit Oxford. Of course it has the dreaming spires and the amazing mediaeval buildings I love to wander through. But it is also a productive centre of the British motor industry, or should I say used to be. The old Morris works at Cowley, later Austin Morris then British Leyland, BMC etc etc and on it went into decline like the rest of British manufacturing industry. But now BMW (oh dear, BMW, bombed by members of my family turning in their graves), BMW are expanding production of the Mini in Oxford. Danke BMW!

On a recent visit I saw a notice saying, "Domino's delivers pizzas anywhere in Oxford until 5 am seven days a week." Well that should get those £9000 a year students' brains stimulated. Do they do that anywhere else - London? I don't know, don't eat pizzas at any time, certainly not at five am.

Confusing place, Oxford. I was in the White Horse in Broad Street, having a small libation after a lecture at the Bodleian Library. I escape to the Bodleian from time to time, the oldest and most venerable library in Britain (tell you about it in a later blog). The White Horse makes a change from the Warrant Officer in Higham Hill Walthamstow where I usually drink. But of course I don't know anybody in the White Horse Oxford. It's a bit crowded and I'm conscious that I'm occupying a corner of a table for six. So when a man asks me may he sit at my table I say yes. He's big, menacing. I say yes, please, welcome.

He's overweight, or as the current fashion prefers, he's obese, seriously. He is fat faced and sweating, wearing a well creased and very worn shirt, obviously unwashed, open to the waist, diplaying his fat hairy belly. He also wears pseudo camouflaged trousers and large tarnished brass rings in his earlobes. You might generously describe him as a slob. He sits down with two pints of Guinness. Of course I wish I had said no to him sitting at my table, but I would not dare. He is built like Giant Haystacks - remember Haystacks on Saturday afternoon TV wrestling? Then a small, dapper, immaculately dressed gent, spectacles, suit, stiff collar, college tie, gery hair, distinguished looking, joins him. Smart dapper gent raises second pint of Guinness and says, "Thank you Sir, cheers!" Toff calls slob Sir, so who is this guy at my table?

They proceed to discuss in loud upper class accents the criteria for University entrance in such a way that I realise the posh man in the suit is going to make some important decisions for the youth of our country, only if they meet with the approval of this open shirted sweaty slob with Guinness foam all over his top lip. But that's Oxford for you. And the slob does speak with a beautiful accent, and I bet he has a suit when needed. Our elected leaders are inclined to say you should not despise a regional accent, when what they really mean is a working class accent. I agree. So I suppose it is just as reprehensible for me to be put out by a man dressed as a working class slob speaking in a cut glass public school Her Majesty (Princess Elizabeth) in 1947 accent, especially when it is clear he is making important decisions about our vulnerable young people. Rubbish of course. Who cares in what accent he makes the decisions as long as they are the right ones. In fact I had a similar experience in The Village Inn in Walthamstow. You really must not judge people by their looks or clothing. This man wore muddy boots, looked like a builder's labourer. I walked past him as I went to the bar to get a drink. He was reading Euripedes in the original Greek. I thought he must be Greek, but Euripedes was ancient greek. He wasn't Greek. He spoke to his companion, sounding like a person born and bred in Walthamstow. Later I discovered that the Village Inn at 4 pm is a favourite haunt of teachers. I shouldn't have been surprised. Passing the school nearest to where I live I noticed all the children were in smart uniforms, but the teachers were dressed like scruffy louts.

The next table became vacant. Three Japanese pounced on it appearing from nowhere. Oxford is overflowing with Japanese tourists all pointing enormous complicated cameras at everything in sight. These were Mum and Dad and daughter. Daughter spoke perfect English. She read out loudly from the menu, "Beef and Ale Pie," then translated it into Japanese. Mum and Dad nodded OK. Fat slob at my table was saying, "Sorry professor but I cannot possibly sanction that."

Then Japanese Mum at the next table but facing me, put her enormous handbag on the chair opposite me. She pulled the chair away from my table towards herself. Daughter said to me, "I'm so sorry." I said, "That's quite OK, I don't need that chair." Daughter jabbered away in accusatory Japanese to her mother, then she turned to me and said, "Thank you Sir, but I have explained to my mother that someone else might require that chair."

Japanese Mum took her bag off the chair, rummaged in it, and brought out a beautiful gold and jewel encrusted gadget, which she clipped on to the edge of their table, then hung her very large bag upon it. It swung there securely. She looked at me and beamed and said, "My daughter is not aware of technology." I smiled and thought what a splendid old lady.

Left the pub to walk to the station and back to Walthamstow. Long blond haired girls on bicycles swing by along Broad Street, unattainable when I was a student decades ago, certainly unattainable now. Not that I want to attain them. What a relief to be free of all that effort to impress, the need to cajole, to conquer. Lovely to go home to my lifelong wife, my reclining chair and my garden in dear old Walthamstow. Good night.

FRINTON

There is a poem in the Morning Star about Frinton Golf Club, so here is my poem about Frinton generally. Most of my family enjoyed their holiday there, but this is how it seemed to me.



FRINTON

There are no dogs in Frinton,
no ice creams, no cycling, hardly any
buses; buses are vulgar, so by decree
all buses drop you at the Boundary.
There are some gulls of course, not raucous,
for unseemly noise is not allowed
so seagulls clamour silently.

Retirement homes and swathes of grass
mowed tidily, and seats adorned
with tasteful plaques in memory -
"He died upon the greensward
after a fine day's fishing" far beyond
the beach huts serried row on row.
The back rows though more private
are considered less genteel.

Wandering north of Frinton, seeking countryside
I wondered why they dropped industrial containers
along a headland, but of course as I approached
I saw that they were beach huts, supplementary
beach huts. I presume you cannot possibly
have superfluity of beach huts.

There are careful cries of children
in well bred sunshine, rushing slowly,
digging circumspectly, dancing courtly,
throwing gently, catching,
wading in quiet water to the waist,
a little jump with each miniscule wave,
breasting the ocean in a fledgling way,
and the butterflies upon the greensward
as fine as any in the world.

The wind farm on the far horizon
is the future, but remote enough
to not disturb a cup of tea
in a beach hut contemplating
leviathan propellers on the sea,
in a resort where seagulls dare not scream.


Norman Andrews, on holiday, Summer 2011.

Curtains.

Sitting in my local pub, not talking to anybody, just sitting at the bar listening to the conversation around me, I heard the following:

"I'm 69 years old. I've lived in a hostel for single men for the last ten years. Done time in prison before that, so I've never expected much out of life. This hostel was so cold and my room was so far from the loo that I used to pee in a bottle rather than go along the corridor in the middle of the night. Then after 10 years on the waiting list I suddenly got an offer of a council flat, well Housing Association, same thing. It had central heating, warm, lovely. I just love it."

The friend he was talking to said, "I saw you got your flat. I could see you through your window. Ain't you got no curtains?"

"Well, I've only got nets and of course you can see through them if I've got the lights on."

Someone said "Can't you get a grant from the Council for proper curtains?" and he said, "Yes probably I could but its such a hassle, filling in forms and being interviewed. I just don't want to tell some clerk that I can't afford curtains."

I had a sudden thought. I phoned my wife and asked her have we got any spare curtains. Yes she said, we've got a boxful in the cupboard upstairs. I told her why I was asking. She knew where I was and said See you in ten.

She arrived with this big bag full of very good quality curtains we had abandoned over the years. Why we have to keep buying new curtains is beyond me. She asked me to point out the cutainless man and she went over to him, never having met him before and said "Would you like to choose some curtains for your new flat?"

He looked her in astonishment, then realising she was serious, and real, he looked carefully through the selection and said, "Thank you Darling, can I have these?"

Then he said "Oh my God, I don't know how to hang curtians. I havn't got a stepladder." Dave the Decorator and John the Roof both said "Don't worry, I'll put them up for you." That's the sort of pub it is. I rushed in there one Saturday afternoon and Tony left his pint to rush round and stop the leak in our washing machine, in the middle of a football match!. I think it was Dave who hung the curtains.

On the way home, my wife said "That was better than giving them to Oxfam."

As always, I agree with my dear wife.

Why Do I Write Poetry?

People in my local pub have asked me Why do you write poetry, or even Is it true you write poetry? Yes I do, and I assure you that writing poetry is not incompatible with drinking in pubs. I have done both for more than sixty years.

When I was ten our English teacher said to us today just write anything you like, whatever you find interesting, write something about it, but it would be nice if somebody could write a poem. So I wrote "Ode to a Bubble" and to my astonishment it was published in the school magazine (edited by our English teacher.)

            Oh Bubble
            Spectral sphere
            Do draw near
            For if you veer
            Suddenly or wobble
            Oh Bubble
            I'm afraid
            You'll burst!

Not exactly Shakespearean, but that was how it all started. I continued to write poetry secretly for the next 60 years, during which time I earned my living in various ways, as a cook, barman, hotel manager, publican, commercial manager of Motorcycle News and Angling Times, shopkeeper (prams and baby goods), Co-Op milkman, manager of betting shops. Then at the age of 41 I decided to be sensible and qualify as an accountant. Being over 40 it is difficult to get a proper job, so I became a lecturer in Accountancy. After a few years I was so overwhelmed with people asking me to help them sort out their tax problems, I had to become self employed as an accountant, which I have remained for the past 36 years and guess what - throughout this whole life's odyssey I have scribbled poems into a succession of scruffy notebooks.

It never occured to me that my poems might be published. But one day on a whim I decided to join the Poetry Society and I went along to an open mic session at their headquarters in Covent Garden. Apart from the fact that they meet in central London to read poems to each other, I discovered that poets are very much like ordinary people. It was bit like venturing into a mental hospital and discovering that the inmates were as sane as the people outside. I started going regularly.

On my third visit, as I paid my OAP reduced entry fee, Niall O'Sullivan the poet who runs the open mic session asked me "Will you be reading?" "No I don't think so thank you," I said, though by then I had found sufficient courage to arrive with two poems in my inside pocket, though not enough courage to volunteer to read them.

Then the following week, in a rush of bravado, I said yes. I sat in the second row and thought to myself "Have I gone mad, what am I doing here?" I listened to the poets who read and thought, here we are at the headquarters of the Poetry Society (of GREAT BRITAIN), surely these must be eminent, established, probably published poets, so what am I doing here?

Then Niall announced "And tonight we have a virgin reader, Norman Andrews." I'd have been a bit sad to still be a virgin at 75, but he was right, I was certainly a virgin reader of poetry in public. So suddenly there I was, microphone in hand before a sea of expectant faces in a darkened room. There was no escape. So I just did it. The clapping seemed reasonably enthusiastic and afterwards in the cafe upstairs a couple of people said "I liked your poem about...." as I was recovering with a glass of wine. I recovered quite a bit that night, a very friendly place the Poetry Cafe.

That evening changed my life. I joined the Waltham Forest group of poets known as Forest Poets, who meet monthly at the Rose and Crown in Walthamstow, where I have had my poems constructively and helpfully criticised, occasionally praised, and I have made some good friends at a time of life when many people retreat into the sad and lonely cocoon of home. I get leaflets through the door inviting me to the Over Sixties Club. I do not wish to drink tea and play bingo with a load of wrinklies (even if I am one).

Since I said Yes to Niall O'Sullivan who invited me to read at the Poetry Society, I have now read poetry in public on 33 occasions, and on a few of those occasions the public has actually paid money to listen to me. And I am honoured to have twice stood on, or in front of, the Poetry Society's giant knitted poem (knitted by about 800 women and a couple of men - see Guinness Book of Records) where I have reminisced about Dylan Thomas then read the knitted poem by him "In my Craft and Sullen Art."

At the age of seventy seven, I write at least one poem every week, though some of them will not be read till after I have gone, So there!

Return to Blogging After a Year's Absence

My last blog was May 2011. Sometime after that I had trouble publishing a new blog. I reported the problem to Google, the proprietors of Blogspot. After I had answered a number of questions, they astonished me by declaring that I no longer had any access to "Normanandrews.blogspot.com" because the answers I had given had caused them to decide that I was not Norman Andrews. After a few more fruitless attempts to correct the situation, I gave up and, thoroughly disillusioned, ceased to be a blogger.

Today, out of curiosity, I accessed my old blogspot, silent for a year, and here I am. If this works and gets through to my readers I will start blogging again.

No point in saying any more, it may never spin out into the ether!

The Thames Path

The Thames Path goes all the way from the Thames Barrier to way beyond Oxford. I am unlikely to walk all of that in the years left to me, but I am having a go at covering the London end. I do as much as I can in a day, then go back another day and set out from wherever I got to on the last trip.

Before I started the actual Thames Path, because I live in Walthamstow, I decided to walk from Higham Hill north Walthamstow, down the River Lea to the Thames at Limehouse Basin. You start by crossing Tottenham Marsh where birds of prey hover, then suddenly dive into the long grass and rise with a small creature whose life has been snatched away without warning. I am glad to be human and in England. There are large parts of the world where humans are similarly snatched into torture and oblivion without warning.

This route takes you past the Olympic Park and I believe they have developed the waterway so that some of the heavy building materials can arrive by barge. But none of that had started when I did the walk. Swans were nesting and nurturing cygnets on the accumulated debris which had grown thick and permanent due to to the lack of rivercraft causing the locks to be rarely opened and used.

Before Tottenham Marsh, I walked beside the Northern Relief Channel, which is a deep and wide concrete lined watercourse which takes all the storm water from the streets of north London down to the Thames. Sometimes it is full and a rushing torrent, but recently it has been empty, its dry concrete bottom baking in the hot sun, so that all the green algae has dried up and died. After heavy rain, when the channel becomes a river, there are coots and moorhens on it, diving and fishing and frolicking. How do the coots and moorhens know the channel is full of water? And how do they get there? You never see them flying.

Anyway, I've done Greenwich to Tower Bridge, past Boris's tilting glass lump of an office to the South Bank, Chelsea, as far as Battersea Park, where the Thames Path moves inland through depressing streets, which caused me to give up and have lunch in a tiny pub in a south London backstreet. Home made beef stew and dumplings, and cabbage and mash. Wonderful. The food was cheaper than the beer and a hundred times more nourishing. Sent me homeward snoozing on the bus and then the tube.

But next day back to Battersea Park, westward towards Putney. As you walk westward the aircraft heading for Heathrow get lower and lower, larger and larger, and more and more noisy. Chelsea Bridge to Hammersmith, miles of expensive blocks of flats overlooking the river, their names commemorating the industrial past they have replaced, Molasses House, Calico House, Ivory House, all parts of Plantation Wharf. Now there is a hotel with a helicopter landing pad on its roof. Battersea Reach is a construction site with a huge billboard with a picture of what they are building, and to tempt you to fork out astronomical sums, they tell you the site will be a new benchmark in sophisticated city living, defining riverside living with style.

And now we are in rowing country. A voice through a loud hailer jolts me upright. "Come on now. Chest out. Head up. Shoulder blades together." I strain my elderly bones then realise it is a coach in a motor launch following eight fit young men rowing. And there are joggers, dozens of them, male and female, all shapes and sizes, large and small, young and old, all races and religions; a young vicar in a dog collar and trainers and later a lady, presumably muslim, in a tracksuit and close fitting headscarf; then a very elderly lady, I think even older than me, shorts and tee shirt, walking at such a speed that she passed me and was out of sight in ten minutes.

I drink bottled water when I'm walking. There are no public toilets any more, but great joy, the Ship at Chiswick had a notice which said "Toilets open to the public" then in smaller letters "During business hours" then in large letters "CLOSED." It was eleven fifteen. Presumably they opened at twelve.

I enjoyed a heron standing tall and still, ignoring the world, watching the river at Wandle Creek. Wandle Creek must have been a busy waterway in fairly recent times. It has traffic lights where it joins the Thames, but now muddy, undredged, deserted except for the heron. He doesn't need traffic lights.

The Rocket at Putney Bridge was open and to my great relief has magnificent toilets. It was a while before I realised it is a Wetherspoons. They win awards for the quality of their toilets. The Rocket is a very posh Wetherspoons. It has dark wood panelling, quality wood furniture, deep pile carpetting, comfortable armchairs and free copies of the Guardian, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. Our nearest Wetherspoons at Chingford has the Sun and the Daily Mail.

Passed Harrods Furniture Depository and on to Kew, then Richmond where I came to rest at the White Cross, a riverside pub with real food, a real fire, and a notice outside which said "This is a football free pub." It was busy.

Another day I'll do Richmond to Kingston. I doubt I'll ever carry on to Oxford, beyond the reach of my trusty Freedom Pass, but who knows?

Thank you dear readers, see you soon.

Old Age

Old age, how boring! Well, it's not boring if you happen to be old. Writing a message in a birthday card for my father in law who is 90 years old, I was about to write congratulations. Then I thought why am I congratulating him? Is it an achievement? Has he done anything to get to this advanced age, or has it just happened in spite of anything he may have done, or not done? Should I say to him well done for surviving?

My friend Langford is older than me. Though I would probably have personally avoided the possibility, Langford splendidly fathered a child at the age of sixty-five and has allowed the boy to keep him fit ever since. But Langford's father died aged only forty and when Langford was thirty-nine we all had to emotionally support him and buy him reassuring pints of bitter and assure him that there was no significance in the fact that his father had died so young. He was not convinced and was in a state of high anxiety until well past his fortieth birthday. He desperately needed to be forty-one.

At the time I thought how silly, but recently, in the last few weeks of my seventy-fifth year I felt just as Langford had done. My father died at seventy-five. Would I survive? I am now seventy-six and can say "Cheers Langford! you are seventy-nine and I am still seventy-six, and we have both lived longer than our parents."

You hear people boasting, "Would you believe I'm 83 years old?" Of course I believe it if you say so, but I assure you it is no particular achievement. It just happens, and no, it does not depend on whether you have led an abstemious, frugal and pure life. I should know because I have survived after many many years of overindulgence in this, that and the other. If you are fortunate enough to reach an advanced age without dodderiness or illness, then all you can do is give thanks and carry on.

If unfortunately you are struck down with some debilitating physical condition or just illness and senility, well that's life and you have to live with it. No choice. And if you are lucky enough to survive and to grow old and live a full life into your seventies and eighties, please don't boast about it. Be assured you have probably done nothing to deserve it. Just enjoy it.

Having said all that I am sure you can increase your chances of survival by keeping your brain active. Don't give up and sit in front of the telly. Do stuff. I write poetry and this blog and novels. Some people garden and grow things. I am convinced that exercise not only keeps the body going, but by pumping oxygen around the bloodstream, keeps the brain alert as well. I abandoned my car ten years ago, easy for me of course because I have a Freedom Pass giving me free travel on any form of transport within Greater London. Whichever government thought of that one must have been mad. It means loads of us pensioners will carry on for years, certainly those of us who use the Freedom Pass to get us out on to the London Loop, a fantastic network of footpaths around the outskirts of London. Epping Forest. Walk in the forest which is just as you imagined it in your childhood, then stop and put your arms around the smooth bole of a venerable oak. Then have lunch at that pub near Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge. Their lamb cutlets are juicy and exquisite.

I wonder what I should do for my 77th birthday coming up soon? Suggestions on a postcard (as they used to say) but now a text, an email, or a message on Facebook.