The X Factor

Even with the coal fire lit up,
hissing a little with smoke and flame,
the tiles near the mantle-piece
were cool for hand or forehead.

The plain cut-wool rug was an island
in the sea of lino. The little poker
with the sharpish tip - dig it in
a steaming coal vein - a satisfy jet,
bright but quickly dead.

Over at the dining table - well, only
for Christmas and special occasions,
- my brother and the Da acted out
their respective parts. Tonight we have

The Coalfield of England. Northumberland
anddurham was my favourite, all one word
of course. And Yorkshire. And Kent, being
the Garden of England was green.

But the high drama was when trains
puffed along the track, one just seven
miles faster than the other and how long
would it take the bath to fill when

the tap was doing so many gallons
and the drain was emptying pints.
All of this, a little pause for effect,
and then the whole point of the exercise:

Let x equal the answer! Oh occasionally
a or b acted as understudies, or y placed
a supporting role. But x was your real
man, Host, Saviour and slicker than
the Holy Ghost.

So let x equal the almighty
or we'll be sitting round for infinity
and the fire will have long gone out.

Buried In A Blog

Last night, in the small hours,
I lay awake for a while trying
to sketch out a poem in my head.
The title would be something like
Buried In A Blog. Maybe in years
to come, archaeologists will dig
in the ruins, whatever those ruins
may be, unearthing objects of
possible interest. Bits of bone,
coins, some metals. Does vinyl rot?
That led me to remember Keats's
Ode To A Grecian Urn. What is our
equivalent? What would be on it?
And what of Truth and Beauty -
not to mention fame, influence, money.
And how famous or not is Robert Hooke?
Why is/was he over-shadowed by Newton?
Make a poem of that lot? Hmmm...

Gender on a spectrum

This article in the New Statesman caught my eye.

If you want, you can read it here.

Someone asked why the article caught my eye.

This is my reply:

I try to look at the headlines from BBC and Guardian, for instance. I respect both of those institutions for what they are, but they are very mainstream. So I have The Register, New Scientist and New Statesman headlines on my Google homepage.

The Gender On A Spectrum line caught my eye. I like the idea of a spectrum - as opposed to, say, a line or a fixed point. There is probably not a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow - maybe the rainbow itself is of more value than bits of metal.

That took me into the first paragraph of the article. I too distrust the word "weird". Vaccination, flight and long distance/wireless communications are "weird". And the idea of "discomfort" as an incentive to learning - yes, I find that interesting. Maybe the start should not be "Are you sitting comfortably?"

Gender, sex, spectrum? I grew up in Ireland at a time when there was little information about sex. One of the first informed conversations I had was with a friend's mother. I must have been about 9 or 10 at the time. She had some sort of social worker role in Dublin, 20 miles away. She described to me and one or two others how she had visited a convent in Dublin where the nuns looked after pregnant girls and put their babies up for adoption. However, the convent had a large room upstairs out of the way where the nuns had accumulated a number of youngsters no one wanted - and no one knew what to do with them. These children, over 10 of them, were of indeterminate sex. They were fed, physically looked after - but no one wanted them, recognised them, or knew what to do with them.

The woman in question insisted to the nuns that she was unhappy - and demanded that she should take one of the children home for the weekend with her, to spend time with her family. He had a boys name, and to us he was a young boy - about 8 or 9. I only saw him the once, though I believe he spent more than a few weekends at home with my friends family. And I was aware that there was a bit of a 'row' going on about what was happening to the other children.

For this and other reasons, as an adult I worked with children 'on the edge' - through behaviour, abuse and other circumstances. Fortunately, being on the edge, I have only dealt with relatively small numbers - though sometime the number has gone into three figures. But I try to counter the tendency to pigeon-hole children/people. I like the idea of positioning people on a very large map of mankind.

Similary I currently look to debate as an shared exploration on a spectrum of ideas rather than on a yaa-boo posturing from set points.

Does anyone out there have anything to say?