FiftyFiveCountdown

This is the last weekend before I turn 55 and its amazing how quickly it has come around. And I suppose I am thinking, well this is it then, into the last third we go. But its been a blast thus far, though no reason why it shouldn't carry on as such. I still do all things I did when I was thirty and forty and indeed fifty so... anyway something very strange happened last week. I don't write poetry, its just not one of my things and yet having written one for my Inaugural Address the National Association for Writers in Education published it - which is remarkable because the Journal is read by some of the best writers I have ever come across. Philip Grose and Bob Hull, for example, and so it would be silly not to publish it here too, while I am still young enough not to care what the critics think - lol, young enough:

Mind yersel’ Jonah

It wisnae a trawler
wi’ a net an’ a hold
fuo o’ fish dryin’ in salt

Nor Para Handy’s puffer
puggie fou
o’ Isla’s best malt

It wisnae a twisted wreck
wi’ a hole in its deck
unco fou o’ bones an’ brine

Nor an auld clipper
carrying tea frae the east
wi spices an’ silks sae fine

Naw this wis somethin’ ither
Somethin’ mair muckle a’ the gither

nowt a mere man wid sail

And ah said, “Mind yersel’ Jonah
for she’ll swallie ye hale
yon bloody great whale… "

The poem was a reflection - me thinking about the time when I first heard John Lennon’s album, Imagine, I was sitting on the dock of a bay… in Oban in the West of Scotland. It was 1971, I was sixteen and instead of studying for my ‘o’ levels I had been hitch hiking around Scotland. The songs from the album were wafting out of a little yacht moored nearby. The owner of the boat saw me and shouted over – he said he was taking a trip to Isle of Iona, did I want to come along. Well – can you imagine? And to cut a long story short, later that day, with the tape still playing on an 8 track loop – remember them - we were sailing round the Isle of Mull toward the Sound of Iona when I saw something so unbelievably incredible. Out of nowhere this huge whale rose to the surface alongside us and spouted water high into the air: Can you imagine? You see stories go on and on...

A good friend sent me this link and I love it - Tim Minchin: