In Wordsworth Country - 'A Leech Gatherer from Outer space'

As part of a remarkable charitable project, Vik Bennett at Wild Women Press has organised a calendar to raise funds for research into type 1 diabetes - her little boy Django suffers from it. Vik and her partner Adam are currently preparing the launch, and a pre-publication offer is available. 

Female poets ranging from Wendy Cope and Penelope Shuttle to Monica Alvi and Pascale Petit have supplied poems for free, and 14 male poets in the buff, combining with professional women photographers (who remained clothed), have supplied images for more than a year's worth of months.

I took part - collaborating with photographer Claire McNamee - and a shot of me (taken just off one of Wordsworth's favourite walks in Grasmere) will appear in the calendar, across from a poem "Porridge" by Angela Readman.

I'm attaching a short account I wrote of going on the shoot in Cumbria.  Also, I promise that although my naked disporting wouldn't exactly set the bracken on fire (though my kids laughed and said it was ok) there are enough aesthetically pleasing and charged images in the other months to suit a variety of tastes. Poems too.

Check it out - and do order one.  It is in a very worthy cause!

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The Grasmere Shoot: Recollected in Tranquillity

Meeting up with Claire McNamee was a pleasure from the start, and a relief – especially when you have never met before and somebody else (however sweet, careful and sympathetic) has arranged the pairings.

Anyway, Claire’s motto at the outset (conveyed by email) was “no fuss, no muss” – and that was fine by me. And so it turned out.  Claire is droll, dry, sharp, professional, with a great sense of humour. The day before the shoot we went to scout out Greta Hall in Keswick, which is splendid and evocative. There was Southey’s desk, and stairs and corridors up and along which everybody – Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Ruskin, de Quincey and Uncle Tom Cobley and all – must have puffed and toddled, in various states of inspiration, confusion or undress.

The opium bed (which takes up half a room, and was intended also as a kind of throne, lounge and office for whatever zonked potentate had originally occupied it) was a temptation, but not really on.  Nor were the other numinous, but interior locations. I was set on being outside, and so was Claire. There was a tree house, and a river right next to the Hall, which came briefly into the reckoning, but with the promise of lots of people (including resident guests) around and about next day we thought to look further afield.

The location we were searching for turned out to be right next door to our hostel in Grasmere.  Claire spotted it after dinner when she was out for a puff and a short walk down the road. Lancrigg, which was also a favourite spot for the Romantics, now features a hotel with a fine vegetarian restaurant. It is surrounded by extensive grounds and gardens, and it was here – when things were a touch wilder and woollier – that Mr Wordsworth would come to ramble, composing as he went. Much of the Prelude apparently was shaped up on these walks along the steep and undulating heavily wooded paths. Claire came back intrigued. Though we didn’t know of the Prelude link at that point, I was soon hooked too. Especially when we took a quick recce in the gloaming, and saw the possibilities.

Once we got back to the hostel I said, “Okay – I’ll knock on your door at six”. So that was it. Next morning we set off just after the hour with Claire’s gear – not a lot beyond her little classic Leica – and quietly skirted the front of the Hotel, hoping they wouldn’t mind our taking this short excursion through their elegant demesne in the interests of art – and charity!

The location, at the top of one of the main long paths was mostly determined by the best available light: cutting through the trees to a little bracken-filled clearing. A few shots, all at F2 for half a second, were taken of me partly obscured in the bracken patch. In the one we chose for the calendar I look like the Old Man of the Woods heading for his breakfast – not all that scary, but not all that attractive either – though it has a kind of bemused intensity about it.  When I stepped out clear of the bracken, and struck a few more obviously primate poses, things went from bizarre to perverse, perhaps; anyway, I laugh to recall Claire’s final words of the shoot: “More gorilla!”

Whether many get to view the actual print to be auctioned at the launch I don’t know.  However, the figure in it may be best described as luminous – extra-terrestrial even – a kind of Leech Gatherer from outer space.  A ghostly premonition or sublime missing link, with its ‘entirety’ (a lovely euphemism in vogue with the younger male conspirators in the project) no more than a wren or sand-martin popping out of a shadowy nest.

The whole process only took us half an hour, and once I got tidied up, and we gathered the gear, we wandered back down the path again, past oaks and beeches and massive conifers: plenty big sequoias and Douglas firs. I scouted around in vain for metaseqoia glyptostroboides, the “Dawn Redwood”, thought lost and only part of the fossil record, but rediscovered in China in 1944 and brought to the UK as a popular ornamental for just such locations as this.  However, there was an old fish pond, filled by a beck trickling down, and a couple of stages below that some lawns and gardens attractively laid out, occupied at that hour only by floppity bunnies out for snacks.

Back into the hostel, having discomposed no-one except ourselves, we found the others down for breakfast and we settled happily in to eggs and bacon, coffee, toast and marmalade, pretty confident that the job was complete to that point, and as a result – “no fuss, no muss” – we could take it nice and easy for the rest of the day, no matter what uncanny images might later be visited on this unsuspecting world.

Alexander Hutchison

Festival and Future on Arran

Festival and future

It’s been quite a week, here on Arran. The annual McLellan Arts Festival has seen an Opera Gala, a performance of the Mozart Requiem, a night of archive film about Arran and a poetry get-together featuring Alexander Hutchison and five local poets. 12 post-grad opera students from the Royal Northern College of Music have been here for master classes with their tutors. Multitudes have been handsomely fed by two inventive Arran women, one of whom in fact is Dutch and the other Latvian. We’re nothing if not cosmopolitan.

Robert McLellan was an Arran-based poet and playwright whose centenary sparked the first festival, with such success that it’s gone on ever since.  This year, the outlook was grim. Grants were receding like a balding man’s hairline, and the only option was to see what we could find from our own resources. Poets were no problem. Arran is full of poets. It’s quite possible we’ll start getting poetry tourism, in the same way that people go to Ailsa Craig to look at the gannets, with the advantage that poets are for the most part quieter and less messy. There’s no shortage of musicians on the island, either, and there are countless artists and crafts people. The Royal Northern College is ‘part of the family’ as one of its tutors lives here. And of course, there is the interested public. We had not expected that 200 people would cram into Corrie Hall for an evening of historic Arran film, or that the Community Theatre would be packed solid with people eager to listen to operatic arias. Astonishingly, when one island resident heard of the local fund for a dreamed-of grand piano, he came up with the total cost, and the festival was enhanced by a gleaming black Kawai.

Arran has the huge benefit of oddball people who are willing to chip in their ideas and abilities. Cash isn’t the point – we are here because of the island itself. Last winter in the icy, treacherously sloping Co-op car-park, a woman turned with a contented sigh from gazing at Goat Fell, white against a blue sky. ‘Aren’t we lucky!’ she said. Yes. We all share that contentment – but what makes it active is the input of Arran’s people. David Cameron was perhaps feeling his way round some such concept when he first dreamed up his Big Society catch phrase. Arran’s society is not big – just 5,000, fewer than in the average mainland town. Paid jobs are in short supply, so a lot of people are self-employed. The average income is ludicrously low if you discount retired residents who have had a well-paid career elsewhere, but our terms of success are not cash-based. Values balance in a different way. Time and transport are given freely. Petrol is £1.50 a litre on Arran, but we share cars whenever we can, and in return for work and constructive imagination, we enjoy a cultural life that would cost a fortune on the mainland.

The Government evidently sees Britain’s population as an element in the notional balance sheet, (now deep in the red) and encourages us to purchase goods. Nothing much else about us matters, which is why all forms of social support are being withdrawn. All the Arran people I know dissent from this view, since it is obvious that cuts leave people with nothing to spend. We dissent, too, from being corralled into mindless obedience, and from an education system that increasingly encourages unthinking conformity.

Here, of course, lies the government’s central paradox. On one hand, they are all for free enterprise and self-help. On the other, they dislike the expression of opinion and dissent, as we saw from the hysterical response to the foreseeable London riots. We are supposed to be enterprisingly obedient. It’s a tautological impossibility, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Neither has the understanding that independent, maverick thinkers are likely to be the best survivors when it all goes wrong – which it will. Oil is on the way out, and the current desperate scratching around in shale and tar sands won’t help for long. The Scottish government knows this, as its sustainable energy programme shows, but Westminster continues in its purblind way, as though kerosene-guzzling air transport will always be on hand to bring us cheap food from all over the world. Sooner or later, it won’t. At that point, we are going to need self-reliant people with a good grasp of practicalities and an independent outlook. Our children need to be learning right now the skills of intelligent imagination and ‘out of the box’ thinking – but the Coalition is keen on the box. Its restrictive corners creep closer every day. As a small example, students at the West of Scotland University are not allowed to put paper notices or announcements on the boards in the communal areas. Electronic boards are provided, since they do not mess up the architectural concept – but nobody reads them. The same is true, to our exasperation, of the tourist board in Brodick. No hand-written flyers allowed – they make the place look untidy. But untidiness is part of the great compost-heap of entropy. It is a direct expression of feeling and ideas, and without it, we are belittled. Wordsworth knew it all those years ago when he railed against restrictive schooling. ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy.’

Arran, so far, maintains a sublime indifference to the official box. High winds and rough seas can stop the boats and cover the roads in snow, and do so at their own sweet will. They impose a discipline that is broader and more fundamental than any notional prison-house. Long may it last.

Alison Prince