writing and writers – Page 126 – don't confuse the narrator

red weather, rainbow weather

The weather continues high on the list of conversation topics in the UK: in the last few days, I’ve seen snow, sleet, hail, rain and wind.

Right now, listening to the wind worrying and wuthering outside my window, and knowing this area is by no means the worst hit, I’m really not in the least surprised to hear that the Met Office has issued a red alert for high winds.

Still, in the midst of all this wild weather, we have had a few spells of utterly glorious sunshine. Unsurprisingly, then, we’ve also had rainbows.

A photo snapped through a rain-dotted window can hardly do justice to the one I saw this afternoon, but it will serve as a reminder.

And of course, the Bible tells us that that is precisely what the rainbow is: a token of the covenant between God and earth, a reminder that “the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

This may be hard to believe, given the recent flooding, but there is a certain comfort in re-reading the part of the story after the flood has resided, when God makes the promise to Noah:
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afterwards

empty house
dust on the dressing table
cobwebs in her hair brush

yet more weather

reindeer plush and daffodils — Looks like rain, dear

No one who lives in the UK needs to be told that the weather continues unabated, and I can’t be the only one who’s thinking that surely now February is here we might expect some proper winter weather rather than all this wind and rain.

The phrase February fill dike came to mind. Googling it I found this article from the Guardian two years ago, which reports that “southern, central and eastern regions […] are teetering on the brink of drought”. It also says, somewhat surprisingly, that February tends to be one of the driest months of the year.

Not wanting to get political, I’ll just mention that I was told as a child that “bad governments bring bad weather.”

Well, whether drought or flood, we seem to have been having bad weather for years. The poem below was written in January 2001:
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new year, new thoughts

A few years back, I wrote the post what’s in the poem, where I said that I didn’t like how poets tend to use an explanatory “blurb” between pieces at readings to tell the audience how they should understand the poem rather than giving listeners the chance to respond for themselves.

This week, though, I attended a poetry reading by Michael Hulse and saw just how well that inter-poem blurb can be used.
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positively logical

It’s not all fun spending a week in a house with a pedant whose current reading matter is the biography of a logical positivist (or that of any other philosopher, perhaps). I was told yesterday that describing someone as “a good poet” was meaningless, it was a value judgment, that what I was actually saying was, “she is a poet; hurrah!” (As opposed to “she is a poet; boo!”)

Guard dogs — No dogs or other animals - clustered or otherwise - were harmed in the writing of this post

We did however manage to see eye to eye – or was that hear ear to ear? – when the news was on the other night, reporting on a disease affecting dogs in the UK recently. The disease remains unidentified, but the reporter said that some progress had been made after vets observed clusters of dogs dying all across the country from the south west to the north east.

It is probably sad but true that in the course of their work vets observe animals dying. But to observe clusters of them dying and not take action – as opposed to noticing the clusters of reported dog deaths – seems heartless. I think any vet who did so would be a bad vet and deserve to be booed.