POEM - Empty Premises

What use

are empty premises?

their damp air, filled up

with vacant potential

awaiting the much delayed arrival

of new dreams

pissing rays of optimism

beaming brightly, with a

pristine clarity unbecoming 

of an imperfect vision

for what this could be

in the future

meanwhile, left entirely abandoned, 

the psychic dust circulates

langorous sirrocos of emotional particles 

floating like dandruff

catching the light

of those past and gone, 

tiny momentos, casually dropped

lingering behind skirting boards 

in the skinned heads of carpet pile 

thoughts cast out into the time being

long since

lathered with lotions of regret

empty premises

bare an inherently despondent face

deeply scored 

with the dry and wrinkled strain of waiting

an atmosphere of loss

swathed in self doubt 

for the passing of joys into despond

hopes fulfilled, then trashed

the stress of dreams arising

and souring

before your eyes

as the heart's tenacity

and persistence

peters out

and the door becomes fully closed

on hope springing eternal.

written December 2023

by Stephen Lumb

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 101 - Dismantling A Shop

27th December 2023

So post Christmas, we have daily been taking apart Cottonwood Home - a shop we have been running for the last four and a half years. We were expecting it to be a bit more emotionally cathartic than it has felt so far. What it has been, has been a relief. We have been more than ready to make this move for such a long time. There is always the chance some relatively minor thing will trip switch the emotional floodgates, of course. Other shop keepers in The Courtyard are currently more upset about us leaving than we are.

Today, it was boxing up the remaining stock and taking it home. There is going to be a period post shop, of us working out how best to store this stock. But this week it really is about getting it moved, and arranging the garage in a provisional way. I imagine we will evolve refinements as we learn what uses the space best.

29th December 2023

There have been points during the dismantling that have caused an undue amount of anxiety beforehand. Hubby got really wound up by how difficult or not it might be to take the shop facia boards down. I lost sleep over how long repainting the outside paintwork would take. None of which proved as troublesome or as time consuming as we were anticipating. I guess these are focuses for the generalised stress that exists around taking apart something we once loved, and put so much of ourselves in. There have been points in the last few days when working surrounded by its chaos and uncertainty the shop space has felt quite overwhelming.

A particular bet noire of mine has been the garage. It so easily gets into a space constricted mess. How will all the stuff still in the shop go in there? Its a genuine concern. But one way or another, we have so far seemed to find a way. A current flurry of worry is over how to store the shop fittings we have been unable to sell. We are most likely going to donate these to The Benjamin Foundation, but they'll have to be stored in the garage in the meantime. How do we do that without completely gumming up the works ?

30th December 2023

Yesterday we repainted the exterior paintwork. Hubby found the correct colour match paint in the landlords store room. It's an old fashioned gloss paint, that even in the Summer would take an age to dry. As we are on the cusp of deep Winter I was concerned about how long it might take. We left the shop door open last night, not wanting to close it til it was fully touch dry. And this morning some of the door is now touch dry, but the windows still have a way to go.

Today will be our last day clearing out and cleaning the shop. Two or three car trips will do it. We are going in early today to do a couple of big car fill ups. Hoping to wrap up by midday. Then tomorrow do a final meter reading, hand the shop keys over, then take the rest of New Year's Eve off.

FINISHED READING - A Deadly Brew by Susanna Gregory

A Deadly Brew is the fourth novel in this popular writer's Matthew Bartholemew medieval detective series. I read the first two in the series earlier this year, and somehow I already find myself out of sequence! But though the characters situation further evolves with each novel, they can be read in isolation.

My feelings about the first two novels in the series, if I remember correctly, was that Gregory. was gradually improving as a writer, warming both to her central characters and period. That she had a tendency to have overly fussy, complicated plots, with far too many red herrings, characters and loose ends to tie up. Often leading to endings that felt a bit like symphonies that don't know how to end cleanly and decisively, so they have several faltering attempts at it. 

As ever, Matthew Bartholemew, is still trying not to get involved in further murder investigations, but finds himself doing so despite his reluctance. In this case, prompted by a series of sudden deaths in Cambridge colleges due to drinking poisoned wine. At first these deaths just appears to be random, but the blistering of the lips, internal organs and the rapidity of death, all point to something more deliberate. The question is why and by whom, and as Matthew's investigation progresses he finds himself, with his unreliable side kick Brother Micheal, being subjected to murderous attacks themselves. As the perpetrators try to halt any discovery of what is really going on.

So how does A Deadly Brew rate in comparison to the debut and it's follow up? Well, I must admit this was a vastly better read than those were. Smoothly and confidently written, the focus of the plot is much better maintained. The scenes set in the Fens in the depth of Winter are shrouded in tension amid the atmosphere of a landscape, which is vividly and well drawn. You can imagine yourself present observing what happens. 

Much more time is usefully employed in the delineation of her main characters strengths and foibles. Any secondary or tertiary figures are effectively, but quickly, sketched as the recognisible 'types' they are. The end of A Deadly Brew still falls a little into the tediously drawn out ending, where you have one plot resolution, followed by another, and yet another. The ending dragged out to no productive end.

One problem in writing any series like this, with your central characters operating in the same place and period context in each story, is ones credulity being seriously overstretched. Far too many convoluted murder plots involving nefarious college officials, and internal rivalry, for one town to easily accommodate without negative comment. 

A Deadly Brew, did better with encouraging you to suspend your disbelief than previous novels in this series. Also, it kept up a healthy pace you were swept along with, so you rarely had time to ponder plot holes or the two dimensional quality to some people inhabiting this world. As a series this is starting to shape up well.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

QUOTATION MARKS - Forms of Beauty

"Outer beauty experienced through the senses

and inner beauty experienced
through the heart, mind and soul
are different things.
They do intersect,
for instance when we feel awestruck by nature,
but we find it much easier
to talk about what 'looks' beautiful
than what is beautiful."

Jonathan Rowson - taken from

The Moves That Matter

Bloomsbury Publishing. 2019

LISTENING TO - False Lankum by Lankum

Featuring in many music reviewers best albums of 2023, False Lankum is a very distinct marking out of territory in the folk music lexicon. Folk songs frequently take as their subject matter the despairing cries of falorn victims or malign perpetrators of murder. For our recognition of the wrong done to them, or done by them. Containing pleas either for redemption or forgiveness of their wrongs.

The stand out tracks on this album - Go Dig My Grave and New York Trader - encapsulate what Lankum have brought to this type of material, both traditional and self composed. In many ways I see in this a reflection of Nick Caves work with the Bad Seeds, I'm thinking Murder Ballards period here. You listen grimly, but grippingly to a brutalised humanity enshrined within the song itself, revealing the tortured soul underpinning it. Each takes you on a musical journey, New York Trader on a horrific odessey on a boat in three movements.

Lankum at their best produce vignettes of heightened sonic melodramas. Songs open with a melancholic or declamatory vocal, then develop further depth and gravitas throughout by the gradual intensification of bass drones, grumbling like suppressed demons underneath the vocal line or jig. As the murders are committed the thrust of this descends into musically even darker, resolutely bleak territory, from which they are rarely to surface.

Now it has to be said, the album could not, and does not, stay at this level of intensity for its entire length. That would be unsustainable, or be in danger of making them sound like a one trick pony. What they do on False Lankum is portray a broad range of emotionally catharsis. Songs that are also gentle, laconic and beautiful elegies to human love, loss and grief. 

Listen to the gentle lilt of Clear Away In The Morning a Gordon Bok song rearranged by the band. About a man returning from a time away at sea. Though he's reluctant to return home, and wants to go straight back out to sea on a new trip. Because his love Nancy will not be there to greet him on his return. She is either dead or left him, the how and why of it is never explained in the song. He can't face a life alone onshore. Is that because he fears living with his memories of loss or guilt? Yeh, it's a song, with more than just a little sadness at its heart.

Quite how far you can push the envelope of this doom folk, without it becoming unbearable to listen to, will be interesting to observe in their future releases. Lankum thought they took it too far on their previous album, so I guess they have already clocked that one and self corrected. Hence the success of False Lankum, which hardly puts a foot wrong tonally. The track listing is so carefully orchestrated, with its three Fugue interludes. So its definitely of one piece, whilst individual tracks are still able to stand alone. This album is quite a significant achievement, by any band, folk or otherwise.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

FINISHED READING - The Moves That Matter by Jonathan Rowson

I know absolutely nothing about playing chess, and have never particularly wanted to find out either. Reading Rowson's experience of actually being a chess Grandmaster, well, it probably confirms my longheld personal bias that chess was never going to be my sort of thing. Though it undoubtedly was his for much of his early life.

All of which isn't to imply that this book was not for me, nor is it for chess aficionados only, it really isn't. It's partly a biographical memoir, partly a meditation on the psychology and experience of playing chess, and partly philosophical reflections and ruminations on how his life and chess through rubbing up against each other, have transformed his view of himself, life and reality in general. 

There are few small fry subject matters here, yet it paradoxically remains easily relatable and applicable nonetheless. This is largely Rowson, who is a very able communicator of ideas, and is willing to be both clear and straightforwardly honest about his own experience, relative strengths and failings. Not simply as a chess player, but as a human being. All of this running counter to the clichéd notions of chess players as aloof, nerdy, unearthly beings, whose lives operate on an entirely different level to the rest of us. We'll, they sort of do, yet they don't.

On one level what The Moves That Matter demonstrates is how chess players have sensitivities, feelings, psychological hang ups, lack self esteem and confidence, as much as the rest of us. They have just systematically developed their one love and their expertise in the game of chess, to a mastery of it's strategy.

One thing I found most notable is how Rowson describes the state of contemporary chess competition, with widespread use of computers in the analysis and development of a chess players strategy. Since a computer programme Deep Blue beat the then world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the advance in the use of them in the world of chess has been inexorable. It has, in some ways, changed the game of chess. Becoming less about two players pitting their own mental capabilities and failings against that of their opponent, and more about the relative strengths of their chess programmes.

Rowson has a plenty to comment on, with regard to the benefits and dangers of algorithms, that are now such a pertinent part of all our lives. His decision to move away from the chess world and to develop another style of life all together, was a mixture of recognising his limitations, his age, his weariness with the peripatetic world of chess, the single minded devotion it requires and unease at where the world of international  chess was heading.

All of which explains, to a degree, why he took a different tack, into the world of social and cultural philosophy. Applying his single minded devotion to that. Rowson either out grew chess or chess out grew him

In a few short chapters towards the end of the book he probes into the nature of beauty, as he saw it through the playing of chess. These were, for me. the most thought provoking sections of the entire book. Even though I found it difficult to comprehend, how any sense of inherent or transcendent beauty might be found within a game of chess. I can see, theoretically at least, that in the absorption of the moment and the delicate intricacy of the moves, a sense for their beauty might arise. Though I have few things to correlate my own experience with the beauty of a game of chess, even though I am sure this state might exists for some.

Jonathan Rowson is currently a co-founder and director of Perspectiva, a publisher and a community thinkers and practitioners researching the current Meta Crisis, and the role interactions of systems, soul and society could play in finding solutions to that. Having first come across him through this work, I found The Moves That Matter instructive in understanding how and why this particular interest has blossomed in him.

CARROT REVIEW  - 5/8

The Moves That Matter, by Jonathan Rowson

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing. 2019.

SCREEN SHOT - Silent Night

Silent Night ( 2021 ) is an unusual black comedy drama. Originally made just prior to the Pandemic. For reasons that become obvious once you start watching, releasing this during the Pandemic would have been more than a bit tactless.

A group of friends from University still meet up regularly for Christmas, even twenty years later. They've all made something of their lives, middle class affluent and protected from the real vissitudes of life.There are old, barely supressed, caustic dynamics playing out among the adults and their over indulged children. Initially this seems a stereotypical satire on middle class privilege and entitlement.

As the film progresses it becomes clear the world they are living in has reached an apocalyptic point. This Christmas the entire world is due to be hit by a storm of toxic gas, that no one is expected to survive. The government has provided 'exit' pills, so people can die without enduring pain or suffering.

The dialogue is quick, witty, bleak and as sharp as nails, as people's essential selfishness has to face the truth of this oncoming doom laden reality. Whilst the adults try to button it all up, ostensibly for the sake of their children, the children themselves are really the most aware of what is about to happen and take charge of their destiny, whilst swearing and cursing like Trojans.

There are some very fine performances in this brilliantly conceived film, set at Christmas time, but not about Christmas. I enjoyed it hugely. One minute it's laugh out loud, the next it has touching moments of real existential poignancy, deeply felt. Both of which it pulls off with great aplomb. Highly recommend.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

THINGS THAT CHEERED ME UP IN 2023

Goodness have we needed to find some solace somewhere, this year of all years. Here are a handful of music and accompanying videos, that have amused or provided joy to the soul, with ocassional dashes of hope and gleefilled optimism.

From its opening through to its ending this video is a gift, that just keeps on giving. Olya Polyakov, once the camera is placed upon her, as the stage fan starts wildly blowing her hair, is well and truly on. Preening at you, with 'come hither' alluring eye contact, and a shameless deploying of flirty stage charisma. Dressing like she's escaped from a low budget Sci Fi epic, she is heavily buttressed. When allowed full reign, her operatic timbre completely inhabits her. She looks for all the world like she's having an explosive orgasm right in front of you. 

The TV presenter grooving in the bright blue armchair can't help but oggle every morsel of her performance. As The Army of Lovers mouth Liberte, Egalite, Maternite without a hint of irony. Its a song that is sheer nonsense on stilts, built out of a sequence of words that rhyme yet mean nothing - But - I Love it - bliss, sheer bliss. I begin every day by watching this.

Now I was never much of a Spice Girls fan. In a sense they were not designed for me, but for pubescent teenage girls. As a social phenomena they signified much more than the music, which is fortunate because the music was pretty consistently dreck. Apart from this one beam of delight, taken by the Whoniverse and handed over to Neil Patrick Harris to camp up for a Dr Who special. One of the TV highlights of the year. Both sinister and scintillating - enjoy.

It has to be said this has been Kylie's year. The breakout summer hit of 2023, Padam Padam had classic dance floor filler written over its numerous song hooks. And once they get their highly polished red nails into you, well there is no rescuing you. Yet another career renaissance, how many more can this woman have?

This was the first warm up track for a soon to be released album, but way back in mid summer. The album, we are still waiting for, but one gets the sense from what they have released so far, that Yard Act and their record company know they've come up with a goodun. The Trenchcoat Museum is full of the usual Yard Act mischievous satire and broad range of characters, with a truly addictive groove going on for good measure. Worth eight minutes of anyone's time.

One might have been tempted to write James Blake off many times in his career. His recent albums having been patchy, with only a few great tracks amongst a lot of thin gruel. But with the album Playing Robots Into Heaven he produced one of his best. Loaded is just one highlight, a melancholic song that is yearning for some form of transcendent love but - where are my wings? They're loading. Beautifully wrought, with a ticking clock like rhythm beneath it, the fateful fall of a discordant descending glissando of synths, brings it all to a crashing end. Classic.

UNFINISHED READING - Hild by Nicola Griffith

As I've remarked in the past, I don't find giving up on a novel easy. I don't believe any one does. You've forked out £10.99 on a paperback and you want your moneysworth. So when I do, reluctantly, but also with great relief, decide to part company with reading a book, it is significant. You've persevered, but this is one novel you will forever fail to finish. This is as worthy of note, of being reviewed and written about, as a finished novel is. So here is one, admittedly partially read, book review.

I bought Hild by Nicola Griffith when visiting Whitby Abbey in the autumn. I thought it might be interesting and informative. Pieced together from no doubt intensive research, though essentially a fictionalised version of St Hilda's eventful life. What could go wrong with that? 

Nicola Griffiths undoubtedly conjures up a whole Anglo Saxon world, one very different in character to our own. This was necessary preparatory scene setting surely? Intially I was taken in by this period detail, until that detail appeared to be all it had to offer, and it became tiresome. As the saxon terms and names multiplied before your eyes, what was previously endearing, turned into stoical endurance.

Hild at the start of the book is a young child on the cusp of her teenage years. From a noble background, her father has been poisoned in some internecine rivalry, the precise details of which her mother keeps from Hild. She is brought into the court of the royal family, as an oracle and advisor to the King. They are all impressed by her natural affinity as a seer and sage, but this also makes them wary of her youthful creepiness, skill and prescience. So far so good. 

But this state of affairs in the novel becomes interminably stuck, seemingly preparing you for something that forever fails to materialise. At least as far as I got. The novel is over six hundred pages long. I persisted until a tad short of two hundred pages in, before I became so utterly exasperated with waiting on the story developing any sense of momentum. 

It pootles along in its slow to lethargic pace, with the same level of detail obsessed, anal energy. As one set of circumstances merges indistinguishably into another set of circumstances. Its as though a painter faced with capturing on canvas a fresh landscape, turns them all into the same muddy grey mush they painted in the last one. There is little story dynamic, little narrative thrust to speak of. I patiently awaited the dramatic arc of a storyline emerging. But I became very bored, by not a lot happening over far far too many pages. 

One of the reviews quoted on the cover is from Val Mcdermid, who at some point must have said it 'really is a thriller'. Well, all I can say is, that quote must have either been co opted from a review of another novel entirely by Nicola Griffith - or - in a desperate attempt to find some favourable quote to put on the front cover, the publisher edits down a sentence that said 'What one could never say about this novel is that it really is a thriller'- or - our Val did it as a favour to a friend, and fellow lesbian novelist - or - Val read something in it that has completely passed me by. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, about this novel bares even a passing resemblance to a thriller. At least not as far as I read. It did not reach out to me, and it maybe I did respond in kind. Perhaps Hild is not the sort of novel I would ever connect successfully with. Something was not right, and it was either me or it.

But, however, I once worked in publishing, I know what happens when an author comes up with a book that's lacking in interest. They become desperate to salvage something from the mess, at the very least the advance has to be recovered. I bet her publisher rubbed their hands with glee when they conned English Heritage into buying a job lot of the paperback edition, otherwise it was going to be instant remainder shop fodder for this dull book.

CARROT REVIEW - 1/8

POEM - The Passing Places

And, as is usual I reach out

I reach over

with the need to know

a need to believe 

to sense

that you are there

it is more than a comfort

more than a palliative to chaos

more important 

than an idle gesture, but an emotion 

the hands are but a flicker of,

a burnishing of the heart's

yearning to not feel alone

an aloneness 

prefigured in the etching

of a body into space

that is a life, my life

and within reach of it

is you, innumerable moments

of another body outside my own

another soul, traveling packed with 

the divisions of our solitude shared

along the traverse

of country roads, narrow as a badger run

with scraped out lay-bys, these arcs 

of passing places, 

then stopping places, 

those places that move me, move you,

that enliven me, that I love, 

that love me back, places painted

with reassuring faces,

places where I rest easier

places where being is not a grind,

an effort not to fall over

into negative spirals, for our time together

has this amorphous diaphanous quality

of appearing to effortlessly pass 

unnoticed, the space
where a ghost should be, but isn't,

cos there you are, alongside the catalogues 

of despondency, when we fly

catapulted back into love

then, I can cheer only you and I on

and on and on, until an imagined point
where the road ahead runs out, or
drives into an eternal passing place

where I lose my grasp of you, and you of I

reaching over with a hand for morning comfort,
an impulse barely awake,  

saying out of the dark 

are you there?
and feeling nothing but cold creases 

on an empty bed, 

perhaps

gone to the bathroom for a pee,

perhaps 

seeking comforts for insomnia,

underpin
these quiet rehearsals of incipient alarm, 

of grief nascent, a waiting place

in which to discover 

how temporary or not, your absence will be, 

til I hear a distant chuckle, your

in the room below

something is amusing you

whilst scrolling through Reddit, and I

cease interrogating the vaults of heaven.

Written November/December 2023

by Stephen Lumb

LISTENING TO - Go Dig My Grave by Lankum

The Morris Dancer of old in me, never really dies. A profound affection and feeling for folk music lives on in my weakening withers and arthritic joints. Whenever I encounter anything that is truly remarkable I am floored and completely blown away by it. And so it has been for me with Lankum. 

Simultaneously keeping close to folk tradition, but pushing it musically deep into much darker and doom ridden contemporary territory. There is a bleak quality to Go Dig My Grave that is mesmeric and magnificent. Like a demon that grips your soul and won't let it go. I am in awe.

SHERINGHAM DIARY 100 - Cathartic Intervals

Cottonwood Home June 1st 2019

9th December 2023

When Hubby and I moved to North Norfolk, this entailed the unravelling of a carefully woven lifestyle at that time. Moving from living in a city, a Buddhist commune and work set up, to one where there was just the two of us, residing by the coast, starting to prepare the ground for opening and running our own shop. This was the driving vision of our venture.

So here we are roughly seven years further down the line, near to the conclusion of the 'running a bricks and mortar shop' phase. And this is also my 100th Sheringham Diary post. It is tempting to overload the oracle of such conjunctions, forcing a significance upon them, on what appears merely a number. Contriving out of it, a moment written in the stars, drawing out a destiny upon the cosmic level of planetary alignment. However, what if even that contrivance is led by them too?

These sort of alignments happen, and no matter the reason for them, perhaps it is actually OK to just roll with them. Christmas itself rests under the eaves of The Winter Solstice, and this was not an accidental placement. So the closure of our business taking place either side of when sunlight ceases its decline and begins its increase. Its not insignificant in its symbolism.

Whenever I previously came to a decisive point in my life, there's often been a sense at the time of inevitability being etched within it. As though the true nature of reality had been waiting, somewhat impatiently, for you to just get on and do this. And so, once the clearance sale and the signs went up, there was a distinct picking up of the pace. The full thrust of the decision began to hit the ground running. So much so that its not impossible to envisage us being able to pack up the shop much earlier. But this may be tempting its fate, so let's wait and see.

11th December 2023

On our way back from Oxborough Hall, to see the Christmas decorations there. stopped off in Swaffham. We discovered a company office that provides individual home care and companionship for elderly and infirm people, called Home Instead, and their byline is - This time, its personal. Which sounds like a gross threat of physical abuse is being offered - 'Don't worry son we'll duff up the old duffers for ya, na worries'.

Then there was the sign by the road that said- Slow People Crossing - the meaning of which shifts back and forth between an instruction to car drivers and a description of how leisurely people traverse a road. I'll leave it to you to decide which.

Cottonwood Home 16th December 2023

15th December 2023

Quite quickly the Clearance Sale has grown thin and wan looking. And we've had to apply constant attention to keep it alive. But this state now signals the incipient arrival of Final Reductions, and the selling off of random bits of shop furnishings. As the shop itself starts to look sparse. It won't be long before we are left just with the stock we are taking forward with us to markets and online.

We have had heartening news. A customer of ours, who herself exhibits in a craft gallery in Blakeney, recommended us to the owner. She came to look at our stuff this week, and really liked us. So from mid Feb we'll be selling our stuff through there. We have currently got four possible outlets to sell our stuff through. All of which is promising.

Also, a woman we know who runs a local yarn and haberdashery shop, came in and asked Hubby if he'd be looking for part time work in the new year. So it looks like he'll be doing 2-3 days a week there. All of which is a bit of a relief on the financial front. To have nearly enough money coming in to manage, without depending on markets or online. Whatever we earn through those being extra income.

It also means we can focus with a clearer head on the matter in hand, of winding up the shop the best way we can. Emotionally, at least, this is sitting a lot easier. Though that process will still, no doubt, have its pronounced cathartic intervals.

16th December 2023

Oh, and another thing. I love Shorts on You Tube, tiny edited snippets, the essential precis, of a considerably more gargantuan, nay epic, post. The carefully chosen wording underneath that leads you to think this might be worth leering over. My current fave is - Handsome Man Devours Burger, it has had 35K views, so surely this must be worth ten seconds of anyone's life time. Click on the Link below.

Handsome Man Devours Burger

QUOTATION MARKS - Talk About This

'Until we start to talk about beauty,
goodness and truth we are stuffed.'

Iain McGilchrist
During a talk at
The Realisation Festival 2023

A HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK - Felbrigg Hall Christmas

 We've done a tour now of Blickling Hall, Felbrigg Hall and Oxborough Hall, and of all the National Trust properties in our area Felbrigg's Christmas decorations win hands down. I'm not a huge fan of themed displays, but if they are executed with imagination and creativity, as at Felbrigg, I won't complain. Blickling's by comparison was a bit flat. Oxborough's was just decorated rooms without any overarching theme, for which they really needed to push the boat out a bit more than they did. But there is something about a stately home done up to the nines, that brings out something of the archetypal resonances in the festivities.

 

QUOTATION MARKS - Structure & The Universe by Iain McGilchrist

'I believe our brains 
not only dictate the shape
of the experience we have of the world,
but are likely themselves to reflect,
in their structure and functioning,
the nature of the universe
in which they have come about.'

Iain McGilchrist
taken from The Master & His Emissary
piblished by Yale University Press 2020

FINISHED READING - Boy Friends by Micheal Pedersen

This is a beautifully composed and gently expressive book. The poet Micheal Pederson utilises all his linguistic skill to create a paeon, not just to this one very special friend, but also to the broad thrust and range of male friendships, past and present. Friendships that have a history both fleeting and long-lived.

For there are so many reasons a male friendship emerges. A lot of it through the sharing of a place and upbringing, the experiences of youth, enthusiasms and interests, or through simply the day to day events of each others lives. And in truth, most good friendships incorporate aspects of all of these.

Pedersen tells you of his close friendship with Scott Hutchinson, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Frightened Rabbit. Though in the book he is never referred to by any name, but only by his fame and the lifestyle he lives. He is also a troubled soul, but the nature of the beast that torments him is never given a name either. The quality of men's mental health, is not what this book is about.

The strength of the book is in the careful taking apart and examination of their friendship at its very best, through a number of significant moments. Times through which they form a deeper connection than previously. Sometimes friendship need to be all about the light hearted joking, the banter, the sharing of experiences, of getting drunk together. But there is also the love they share for each other supportive of their mutual creativity, often simply expressed by being there.

There are times where it resembles a bro-mance, with all its subliminal homo erotic overtones. And it is to Pederson's great credit that he is quite fearless in neither shying away nor salaciously indulging in this. Its acknowledged, but this is only one emotional quality that such an intimate friendship will have, out of a wide and all encompassing range. But Pederson, through making it a significant footnote. is aware not to misrepresent the memory, the lived experience of a friendship.

This book is soaked through with such a deep appreciation for Pederson's friend, and what vigour knowing him brought to his life.  The legacy of it that lingers on. The grief, the sense of loss, the bewilderment that someone he'd been out with that very night, could just disappear, take his life and then be found some considerable time later. That puzzlement moves through the book like a ghost. The why, the how, has no answer, no explanation is found. 

And yet Pedersen transcends the substance of his friends death, by holding him up higher as someone better and much more than his mode of death. Eminantly worthy of being loved, and a superb human being and friend. And the value that this can bring to any man's life. Men are all the better for having a best buddy,, someone they can rely on to be there for them no matter what. Boy Friends is at times a heart-rending read, whilst also being a uniquely pleasurable and exemplary one.

CARROT REVIEW 5/8

A HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK - Being Kae Tempest

If you haven't heard me extolling the quailty of their work before now, this programme on BBC I Player is well worth checking out as a primer into a very significant poet and artist. Uplifting and heartfelt whatever they do, their work holds this massive sense of a creative vision behind it. One that can't help but be inspiring. Kae Tempest gives you hope. Click on the link

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001sxfm/being-kae-tempest

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 99 - Trades & Descriptions

Words, especially words in odd combinations, the one's that amuse with their inherent absurdity, I'm finding interesting at the moment. So here is this week's ' what the hell is that?' 

HYPOALLERGENIC KIBBLE

It maybe the time to be jolly, but it's also the time for too many half arsed craft fairs. We attended one at a local church, which was very much the church bazaar of old, the sort I remember from my youth. The home of the handsewn and acrylic hand knits, anything dog or cat related. They remain unchanged in their naffness. 

Trades descriptions are being blurred. Church fetes have started calling themselves 'artizan markets' as one did locally. This misrepresents entirely what is to be found within. But then you find this at all levels of making, whether that is craft or artizan. There are 'artizan makers' who stock mass produced products made abroad. There are artizan makers whose USP is their 'uniqueness' but then unique can be a dodgy thing to apply to your work, because:-

UNIQUE - means no one has thought of making this before- and in most cases we understand why.

The world economy, as we know it, is still hedging its bets on climate policy, and directly lying about anything that cannot be massaged into a more favourable light. So we have Saudi Arabia loudly boasting about its green programme of innovations and being the host of COP 28. Whilst at the same time advancing a development thrust of petrochemical business in Africa that is off the scale, running in entirely the opposite direction.

Then there was Door Matt Hancock - for it is he - trying to convince the Covid enquiry that he was the victim of a toxic culture, raised the alarm first about the oncoming Pandemic, but was cruelly ignored. If only everyone had listened to him. Despite there being no documentary evidence anywhere else, even in his own book, to support that he was anything of the sort. His testimony was slippery. Even whilst trying to 'set the record straight - repeatedly saying he was trying ' to be clear here' but proceeds to muddy the water further. Its was like watching someone who is a bad liar, but doesn't know it, trying to think on his feet and failing abysmally.

Mini Rishi picks a fight with the six and a half foot tall Greek PM, over the festering sore that is the Parthenon Marbles. The case is fairly clear we bought them from the then Ottoman occupying forces. The Greeks themselves did not willingly sell them to us. Its like us buying stolen paintings from the Nazi's. It was theft, a classic piece of cultural appropriation, not a clean economic transaction. Its a bit like another European country owning the blue stones from Stonehenge. Why not do a straight swap. The Greeks get their original frieze sculptures from us, we get the facsimiles of the marbles the Greeks currently have. This enables The British Museum to have something to put in that huge room, and our culture is not unduly impoverished.

We did our last craft fair of the year, in Sheringham, as part of the Christmas lights switch on. Between the shop and the stall takings, it was a half decent day. But the weather was not, wintry tinged rain awful to be out in. Jnanasalin and a good friend of ours Sam, were the ones out in the thick of it, getting throughly chilled to the bone. The problem with this sort of event is that the Craft Market is an unnecessary embellishment, an after thought, and not the central focus. So it consequently never quite works. It's twice in Sheringham we have got involved on this basis. Never again. 

This coming week marks another step towards the closure of the shop. As we set up our clearance sale. Most of the stock we make will be coming with us. So what will be in the sale is some of the lines we bought in and stuff we don't want to make any more. It feels a more significant point than it at first seems. 

This week I have an idea about how to rejig the garage to make space for shop stands and storage. I hope it works out as I envisage. Currently the garage is in a right pickle and moving anything around is encumbered and chaotic. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, but I have to do something as time is fast running out to get it sorted. Wish me luck.

FEATURE - Upper Sheringham in Fog

 

QUOTATION MARKS - Seeing What Is by Iain McGilchrist

'Water is distinct from ice,
but in the ice cube it is present:
not as a fly might be trapped there,
but in the very ice. It is the ice.

And yet when the ice cube is gone,
the water remains.
Although we see water in the ice,
we do so not because it is there separately,
to be seen behind or apart from the cube.

Body and soul, metaphor and sense,
myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning,
in fact the whole phenomenological world,
is just what it is and no more,
not one thing hiding another;
and yet the hard thing 
is the seemingly easy business,
just 'seeing what is'.

The reality is not behind the work of art:
to believe so would be. as Goethe put it,
like children going round the back of a mirror.
We see it in- through - the mirror.
Similarly, he says, we experience the universal
in or through, the particular,
the timeless in, or through,the temporal.'

Iain McGilchrist
taken from The Master & His Emissary
published by Yale University Press 2020

FAVE RAVE - Army of Lovers - Love is Blue

 Just discovered this recent gem of Army of Lovers on You Tube. Performing in an apparently very tiny TV Studio, the song Love is Blue. Quite apart from the usual suspects camping it up like there is no tomorrow, there is a man in an armchair so close to the stage one might be tempted to think he is part of the performance - featuring the man who enthusiastically nods and taps along in time to the beat. 

If you can bear to cringe and watch it, there is a bit at the end where they try to explain the meaning of the song, really badly. The song is undoubtedly catchy, but lyrically it makes no sense whatsoever, it is drivel that rhymes. But, oh, is this five star stuff.

FILM CLUB - Winter Light - 1963

TRILOGY SEASON
Ingmar Bergman's Faith Trilogy

Rev Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is not a well man. He has dutifully run his two rural parishes for years. But since his wife's death four years ago, his faith and determination to continue have deteriorated, as have numbers in his congregations. We meet Rev Tomas on a day when heavy with the flu, he is holding communion services, with a dead lifeless look in his eyes. Two parishioners, a disillusioned depressive fisherman Jonas Persson ( Max Von Sydow) and his wife Karin ( Gunnel Lindblom) approach Tomas for help with Jonas's suicidal feelings. Jonas returns later to talk alone with Tomas. Tomas proceeds to confess to him a litany of his own doubts in the existence of God, how he feels forsaken and why God's silence he finds so unbearable. Jonas leaves without saying a word, to be found dead later, having shot himself. 

Tomas is numb to any guilt he may feel about his role in Jonas's death. Marta (Ingrid Thulin) is a local schoolmistress and has been Tomas's live in lover. Marta is deeply in love with Tomas, even though this is not reciprocated. She has decided to devote her life to help and support him, despite the cutting rebuffs. Though an atheist, she finds a form of faith in serving Tomas. Whilst Tomas cruelly tells her exactly how repulsed he is by her body, her affections, and that he will never love her. She nevertheless accompanies him to inform Karin of Jonas's death. He lies to her, saying he was unable to change Jonas's intention to take his life. Then on to the church in the second parish, where no one turns up for the service bar the caretaker and the drunken organist. The latter tells Marta to get out before the dust and death of the villages gets to her. But instead she stays, desperately praying for divine help, as Tomas presents the communion service to ranks of empty pews.

Winter Light cranks up the religious angst on his previous film in the trilogy Through A Glass Darkly from 1962. Winter light, is a metaphor here. The light it emits, highlights contrasts, creates harsher edges accompanied by a penetrating deathly coldness. Though it brings a deceptive clarity to ones perceptions, it is essentially brutal and unfeeling in the pared back bleakness of its view of reality. Tomas, in the depths of his turbulent faithlessness, has lost all ability to be sensitive or empathise. He can only think of his own suffering. Everything he says causes further pain to anyone who loves him or comes to him for spiritual comfort. There are indications, even the decline in the congregations has its origins in the burnt out nature of Tomas's spiritual crisis. 

This is a thoroughly bleak film, showing you the emptying out of one man's spiritual mission and moral decline. Marta says to him, how he will 'hate himself to death'.Yet Tomas's punishment is to repeatedly every week, go though the motions of rituals and the uttering of beliefs, he no longer has any remaining feeling for. Martyring himself on the cold steely cross of his own loss of faith.

Following on after Bergman's Oscar win with Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light is shot through out with an austere palette of white outs and grey tones. The church interiors are sparse and unloved, with all their religious statuary damaged, dusty or worn away. There are frequent framings of parralel side heads, turned away from each other and from the camera. Visually, as well as psychologically, cut off in their own world of grief and suffering. Bergman's script does lay out his jaundiced view of religious faith, and does so with a trowel. Though this makes it all the more punchier, it is not subtle. All is corrupted in this particular parish. 

Tulin's monologue straight to camera speaking the letter Marta has written to Tomas, is a master class in the heartfelt portrayal of her character, so independently minded and yet not a free spirit emotionally. She is as much trapped here as Tomas. Continuing to hold out a forlorn hope that one day he will love her. In the same manner Tomas hopes, if he just carries on doing his religious duties, his faith in God will return. Bergman makes it patently clear neither of these things will ever occur. For they are both deluded in what they are placing their faith on. And so we see the immense tragedy at the core of this film made plain.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8