COYFGR
My seat was down the front, right by the pitch,
With a view right out to open fields, new leaf trees,
Scudding clouds, a grand sky horizon, and two billboards
That tried to send their message down to the New Lawn:
‘Neil Carmichael, A Better and More Secure Future’,
But David Drew was oblivious to this as he walked around the pitch,
As was Dale Vince, applauding the manager at the end,
After the news came through that Macclesfield had only drawn,
And so this team from the little market town of Nailsworth,
Was definitely through to the play-offs.
The afternoon was a great reminder of why football still counts:
The awards to the women’s team denoting some equality of status,
The name Ecotricity, the union jacks in green,
The banner referencing Martin Luther King,
The ground on a street called Another Way,
The vegetarian cuisine in a meat free zone,
The minute’s silence remembering the fire at Bradford City,
Broken only by the sound of a solitary aircraft flying high above,
The boys walking around, rattling their buckets:
‘Any spare change for the youth teams?’
When it’s like this, I can like football again.
See you Wednesday.
COYFGR
Category: Events
WITHDRAWN: An exhibition by Luke Jerram, Leigh Woods, 18th April – 6th September
‘Informed by conversations’ with seafarers, scientists and marine specialists, ‘Luke Jerram has created a new engaging installation for Leigh Woods’, so as to provoke questions about climate change.
‘Visitors will discover a flotilla of fishing boats which have mysteriously arrived in a woodland setting high above Avon Gorge … The scene immediately prompts questions – how did the boats arrive here and what previous voyages have they been on?’
I am especially looking forward to seeing The Tempest there, staged by the Butterfly Theatre, July 11th – 17th.
Walking through Leigh Woods, on a blossom bluebell Sunday,
Along a primrose path from Paradise Bottom to Davy Jones’s locker,
We discovered five beached boats within the coppiced forest:
Gloria Jean, Joanne Marie, Martha, Seahorse and Grey Gull,
All marooned on the bone dry, tinderbox, cracked earth of a covert
(Like so many Anthropocene marine fossils),
Vessels that once rode the foam flecked tides of time,
Far beyond the confines of the Avon Gorge,
Wheel and rudder high above Bronze Age sunken forests,
Writing a wake for each Great Flood’s chronicle,
With a spring tide song of the sea, a siren song in the leaves,
A maritime threnody, recounting long lost worlds:
A shingle-shape of submerged churches, merchants’ houses,
Quays, wharves, inns, alehouses, pilgrims’ paths, abbeys,
Cowled ghosts, cursing sailors and bleached bones,
A tidal daily meal for ravenous crabs and eels.
Along a primrose path from Paradise Bottom to Davy Jones’s locker,
We discovered five beached boats within the coppiced forest:
Gloria Jean, Joanne Marie, Martha, Seahorse and Grey Gull,
All marooned on the bone dry, tinderbox, cracked earth of a covert
(Like so many Anthropocene marine fossils),
Vessels that once rode the foam flecked tides of time,
Far beyond the confines of the Avon Gorge,
Wheel and rudder high above Bronze Age sunken forests,
Writing a wake for each Great Flood’s chronicle,
With a spring tide song of the sea, a siren song in the leaves,
A maritime threnody, recounting long lost worlds:
A shingle-shape of submerged churches, merchants’ houses,
Quays, wharves, inns, alehouses, pilgrims’ paths, abbeys,
Cowled ghosts, cursing sailors and bleached bones,
A tidal daily meal for ravenous crabs and eels.
And over there, amongst the hearts of oak, flies Ariel:
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.”
And there, amongst the forget-me-nots, stands Prospero:
“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Swing and Clare Walk Recollections
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I walked down to Stroud Valley Arts through Rodborough Fields,
Medieval ridge and furrow still just visible in the April evening light,
Cracked earth and shallow stream talking to me with John Clare’s voice,
Lamenting the past and fearful of the future –
And so along the industrial archaeological edgelands of Stroud,
To John Street: ‘Where its only bondage was the circling sky’.
Twenty or so of us gathered here, to discourse on Captain Swing,
Mechanisation, new technology, loss of jobs in the here and now
(As well as the autumn and winter of 1830),
Blandscape, enclosure, the poetical legacy of John Clare,
All the while listening to the ska sound of ‘The Guns of Navarone’,
In a typically Stroud post-modernist mashup.
We then processed to the Swing/Clare film at the Brunel Goods Shed,
Thence to the River Frome, via blue-brick Midlands Railway,
Discussing Clare’s anthropomorphising of landscape,
Pondering on the palimpsest implications of wood anemones,
Until Captain Swing letters were left by Capel’s Mill,
And the sky blazed red in Sussex in the winter of 1830
(Whilst all the while the dogs frolicked cheerfully in the water).
Readings of Clare were collectively shared, hedgerows were dated,
Tolpuddle’s legacy was juxtaposed with that of Captain Swing,
The history of allotments and common land was pursued,
Until we ascended to the peak of Rodborough Common,
Where Clare’s incarceration within the asylum,
And the possible causes of his madness were portrayed
Through presentations, performance and readings,
As the sun set red across the tide full River Severn.
Dogs played, toddlers played,
As the red light silhouette shift
Changed us all to a band of gypsies,
At Helpstone, in 1830,
While John Clare read to us,
Gilded by the glowing sun.
And the tricks we played with time.
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John Clare and the Captain Swing Riots
John Clare and the Swing Riots
A poetic and historical walk and talk with Stuart Butler, Johnny Fluffypunk and Bill Jones,
Tuesday 14th April 6-8pm
SVA, 4 John Street, Stroud GL5 2HA
Starting at SVA John Street followed by the Goods Shed with an explanatory, contextualising talk from Stuart Butler and Johnny Fluffypunk. The walk will then proceed along the banks of the Frome to walk up through Rodborough Fields to Rodborough Common, with poems in the landscape from Bill Jones et al and more historical context.
Miniature Museum of Museums by Tara Downs and Bart Sabel
Miniature Museum of Museums
Take the imagination of two Blakes,
Add the wheels and cogs of Newton’s physics,
The electric magic of Frankenstein –
Then secrete the Stroudwater cloth mills,
Within the shadowed drawers of a table;
Take a metaphorical orrery,
Together with a canal-side lock gate,
Alchemize with the music of the spheres
(The delicate harmonies of the cosmos),
Hide this puzzle within a conundrum –
The Holst is then greater than the sum of its parts:
A Lilliputian curiosity
To entrance any curious Gulliver,
On a voyage through reason, time and space.
“Non-fiction uses facts to help us see the lies.
Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.”
See: A book that changed me: Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality, by Aminatta Forna, the Guardian, August 20 2013.
Try and make a trip to Gloucester or Stroud or Cheltenham, as this delightful artwork makes its way across the county through the spring and summer. Tara and Bart ‘s ‘interactive desk’ ‘invites visitors to explore their intriguing inventions through touch, sound and movement’. ‘Ingenuity’ is the ‘connecting thread’ for the three museums in this Friction Project. Fact and fiction: but which is which?
Captivating, ingenious and entrancing; both cerebral and sensual; something for every age group and interest. Don’t miss it!
Stroud Goods Shed, January 10th 2015
It’s an atmospheric railway station
At Stroud, at night, slipping into gas light time,
And it’s a great venue, Stroud’s good shed,
Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
Built back in broad gauge 1845
(Where was the stone quarried?
If time could run backwards,
Where would the goods shed go?),
Inter-war legend still proudly proclaiming
To passengers to Paddington:
‘GWR STROUD STATION
EXPRESS GOODS TRAIN SERVICES
ONE DAY TRANSITS BETWEEN IMPORTANT TOWNS’;
But inside, you can still scent the ash and steam
And still hear the clangour of the wheels and points,
While outside, the tail lamp of an express
Disappears into the Stroud valleys’ darkness,
With only the signal lamps or weavers’ candles
To stipple the damp winter gloom of the past;
But tonight, Jack Wimperis has rekindled the shed,
With a 3-D scintillant refulgence,
A dazzle of artful light that sends railway
Timetables spinning into a vortex
Of illumination and bright colour.
And I swore I saw, over there in the corner,
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, himself,
Top hat, fingers in his waistcoat,
Smouldering cigar,
Smiling a gentle smile of approbation.
Keep the Home Fires Burning Friday October 24th at the Subscription Rooms
Keep the Home Fires Burning is an innovative performance bringing together community choirs, local actors, musicians and dancers to remember Stroud’s role in the First World War. Written by Stuart Butler, the performance follows the history of the war using songs and articles from the Stroud News and Journal to highlight what was happening on the battlefield and at home in Stroud Town.
The performance, directed by John Bassett from Spaniel in the Works Theatre Company, highlights the changes that the war brought to the Stroud area. Keep the Home Fires Burning offers a dramatic and sometimes humorous look at how war changes the everyday lives of the people of a town, the sacrifices that the Stroud District made and the importance of remembering those who lost their lives.
Suitable for ages 7 and above.
Performance features Whiteshill and Randwick Community Choir, members of Nailsworth Silver Band and local actors and dancers
Tickets £ 7.00, £ 5.00
Box Office: 01453 760900
Friday 24th October at the Subscription Rooms
Rodborough Fields and John Clare Day, July 13th
Rodborough Fields and John Clare Day, July 13th
Living in Stroud, with common land all around
The hilltops above Stroud’s Five Valleys,
And living in a county with Royalty’s
Seal of approval, chocolate box second homes,
And reverence for quilt-work field hedgerows,
It’s easy to forget the novelty
Of this seeming, traditional landscape;
It’s not always easy to re-question
The picturesque ecology of a hedge,
To reframe the cultural meanings of ‘Olde Englande’,
And rant instead about enclosure’s wrongs,
The loss of freedom, and liberty to roam,
The criminalisation of wandering;
John Clare helps us feel this transgression,
He gives voice to the ‘village Hampdens’ –
Anonymous toilers in field and home –
He rescues them from the witheringly
‘Enormous condescension of posterity’:
‘There once were lanes that every valley wound –
Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;
Each tyrant fixed his sign where paths were found,
To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground;
Justice is made to speak as they command;
The high road now must be each stinted bound;
Inclosure, thou’rt a curse upon the land…’
Laurie Lee Walk from Slad to Whiteway: June 7th
As we walked out on our Laurie Lee walk,
Discussing moments of peace and war,
In an inter-textual – meta-textual
Wander from Slad to Whiteway,
We tripped through the harmony of landscape
And the poetry of past and present cartography:
No blue line motorways or red and yellow roads;
No pale blue tourist signification;
No black lines of railway tracks,
Cuttings, embankments, viaducts or tunnels;
No red square and circle railway stations;
No bus stations, power lines or pylons;
Instead: footpaths, byways and bridleways,
Past names such as Steanbridge, Redding Wood.
Catswood, Driftcombe Farm, High Wood,
Dillay Brook, The Scrubs, Famish Hill,
Sydenhams, The Camp, Calf Way, Wishanger Farm;
And all the while whilst we walked through woodland,
The tumbling waters of springs all around:
What euphony there is in the vowels and consonants
That litter our landscape with their litany!
What secrets of etymology and topography are revealed,
When we tramp the land rather than drive the road,
When we disconnect the sat-nav and navigate
By ancient tracks that connect our ancient springs.
Liminal shrines: those strange, trickling gateways
To mythopoeic underworlds of mystery,
(Or Limestone, Fullers’ Earth and Cotteswold Sands),
Quicksilver mercurial alchemy,
A continuous flow of constant change,
One sip of which will switch your sense of time
(Drinking rainwater that dropped who knows when),
Like star-shine from ancient constellations,
A laughing trick all that slakes and comforts,
Yet mocks the tension of the present tense,
A spring-tide clock whose hands revolve backwards,
With messages from another aeon.
John Clare: 150th anniversary of his death, Tuesday May 20th
Centenaries abound where ere the sun doth his successive journeys run: Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, World War One, my dad … but Tuesday May 20th marks the 150th year since the death of John Clare.
‘JD’ pointed out in the Guardian on Saturday that there is only one national event to mark this day; ‘JD’ adds that ‘this marks a falling-away from the Clare revival’ of some ten years ago, when Jonathan Bate’s biography praised Clare’s credentials, and not just as a working-class poet and as an opponent of enclosure.
We recalled this yesterday, when walking around Wotton: we gazed down into the vale at the quilt-work pattern of hedgerows, discussing the rule of thumb for the dating of a field hedge: one species of tree or shrub for every hundred years; many of our hedges were planted in the 18th century when the big, old, open fields of medieval times were, so to speak, privatised.
So why not commemorate John Clare with a walk on common land on Tuesday? If you have no common land close by, then find an interesting hedgerow, perhaps. But a common might be best because …
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.”
When you find your spot, we could do worse than read these lines of Clare’s about enclosure:
‘Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song
But now all’s fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet’s visions of life’s early day
Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars – flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots – these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease
Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost
Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again –
Nay, on a broken tree he’d sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile
Sometimes with cowslaps smothered – then all white
With daiseys – then the summer’s splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o’er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy’s eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky
These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.
George Monbiot thinks that July 13th should be designated Clare Day – John Clare was born on the 13th July 1793, and Monbiot wrote in the Guardian on the 10th July 2012 of Clare’s eventual incarceration in an asylum: “But it seems to me that a contributing factor must have been the loss of almost everything he knew and loved. His work is a remarkable document of life before and after social and environmental collapse, and the anomie that resulted…John Clare, unlike Robert Burns…is a poet of the day. So a Clare Night…does not feel quite right. I’m not going to wait for anyone else. As far as I’m concerned, 13 July is Clare Day, and I’ll be raising a glass to celebrate and mourn him. I hope you’ll join me.”
Further grist to our mill comes from psycho-geographer Miles Coverley , who has pointed out how the Game Laws, enclosure and the privatization of public spaces such as common lands, resulted, in effect, in the criminalization of certain habits of walking. Walking could become defined as trespassing, when once it was merely an act of wandering. Thus, the 1824 Vagrancy Act defined a rogue and a vagabond as “every person wandering…lodging in any barn or outhouse…any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself.” This Act followed statutes that had existed since the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt and the attacks on the poor instituted by the Tudor Poor Law.
Coverley mentioned an article by Donna Landry, “Radical Walking”, in which she tells us that “The ambiguity of walking can be traced to its association with vagrancy, the quintessential social crime in late sixteenth century Britain.” With this in mind, why not take a walk and have a night under the stars as an act of radical recreation and re-creation? Intone the following lines of John Clare’s as an explanation for your saunter:
“Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky…
Inclosure came in and trampled on the grave
Of labours rights and left the poor a slave…”
Flaneurs of the world unite on May 20th and July 13th: you have nothing to lose but your miles, furlongs, yards, feet, inches, and, of course, your chains.