nostalgia – Page 7 – don't confuse the narrator

back to school

I’m far too old for school myself and have no children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, etc. – in fact, I don’t think I even have any neighbours with any of the aforementioned minors – and I haven’t been a teacher for a couple of decades. Despite this, my email inbox is full up with Back to School promotions and special offers.

I’ve been visiting my aged mother and this morning, long before I would normally consider it a civilised time to have a conversation on a Sunday, I found myself caught up in a discussion of yesterday’s unseasonal weather, school holidays, and the fact that mothers must be glad if the children are going back to school tomorrow. I think the implication was that it must be hard to keep children entertained when they can’t go outside and play.
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things forgotten

It’s quicker and easier to look things up online than in the weighty volumes of the Oxford Universal Dictionary over on the bookshelf, so I’ve just found the definition of “apostrophe” on dictionary .com and it pretty much sums up this blog:

a digression in the form of an address to someone not present […]

After all, you who are reading this are not present, and that first paragraph is itself a digression: I intended to start here at the Old School House –

– and continue by commenting that when I wrote yesterday’s post apostrophising and being (dia)critical of the local school leavers’ fête and the sad inadequacies of modern education, I had forgotten that my original idea was to write about St Swithin’s Day, which had passed unremarked the day before.
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memories

Yesterday I was busy choosing poems to read at an event at the local bookshop, so didn’t get round to updating the blog. I had a reading slot of between 15 and 20 minutes and spent all afternoon trying to create some kind of coherent ‘set’.
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case closed

In fact, not just a case, but a whole lot of baggage.

It was an old case, although, given the weather, not a cold case.
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no way back

I went to an open mike evening the other day. It was supposed to be in a fairly spartan room above a pub, but the bookings had got mixed up and the SWP were there before us, so at the very last minute the venue was changed.

Tempting though I thought it to opt for politics in the here-and-now, not poetics in some unknown and distant there, others were keen to stick to the original plan, so the readers and their audience relocated.

The new venue was a basement room, although the décor was altogether too decadent to make me feel like an underground poet. The Trotskyists might have liked the wall colour, but I’m sure the spit-and-sawdust pub setting suited them better.

I say “basement”, but I suppose in fact ground level was lower at the back, or there would have been no windows downstairs.

Not that we could access them.

It seems that the world of discovery that lies “through the arched window” is out of bounds. I wonder if the square and round windows are similarly barred.

Once more, then, I find “you can’t go home again.”

Even little ted looks rather worse for wear.