Distressed Fairy

I admit to being a touch smug. When the assistant reached for the carrier bag and whispered to her colleague that my purchaser was ‘that world famous artist, you know the one, always in the papers’ I began to feel that the weeks of cardboard cartons and stockrooms and shelving displays had been worth it after all.
Expectation is an interesting thing, don’t you think? Christmas is always a time for anticipation, for children and adults alike to speculate what might be in those brightly wrapped and beribboned packages. Who of you can resist the temptation to pick up a gift from under the tree, to squeeze it or shake it in some attempt to guess its contents? For most of us it’s the reverse, of course. Every gift is wondering what it’s like on the outside of the paper: who will unwrap us and whether we’ll be…

Like many a 50s baby, I grew up with The Beatles. Back then I preferred baby-faced Paul McCartney but later came to realise Lennon was the musician who gave the band its edge. Harrison and Starr were both brilliant musicians, and McCartney is a strong singer, player and songwriter, but without Lennon in the mix, there wouldn’t have been enough alchemy to make that fresh, cheeky, tender and original sound. Lennon was a troubled boy with a difficult background, a rebel, someone whose creativity was multi-faceted. He seemed to be finally settling down with Yoko and his second son, when he was unexpectedly shot down in New York by a random, unstable fan. The shock waves went through all of us who’d followed his career, shock and sorrow as profound as when Kennedy died, when Diana was killed.

A few years ago I visited the homes of McCartney and Lennon…

Mermaid

In her flat above the harbour
she picked crab shells clean
as bones, left taps to run,
opened her tail on corduroy
after her kids, cod-eyed and concertina
cartilage lipped, had fish-tailed off to school.

Out of her element, her bones scraped
under her scales and her skin hung
like bat wings. She was mummifying,
becoming a freak show mermaid,
a tiny dried out effigy; a mackerel tail,
a pin-bone rib cage, an oversized baby-skull head.

Nimble fish came in shoals, in flashes;
the sun spinning over in a bait ball.
They pushed suckered tongues through
paper skin to bleed the salty blue
of mermaid blood. They took the pain
of being dried out. And she swam
back and away over the harbour wall
back to her swimming dream-time, back
to the weightlessness like a water birth.

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‘Mermaid’ was first published in Wendy’s pamphlet, Lapstrake (Flarestack Poets, 2015).

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Wendy…

Chris Herbert was serving in Iraq when his right leg was blown off by a roadside bomb.
Here’s what he has to say about anti-Muslim racism:

Getting frustrated by some people expecting racism from me, because I got blown up. Yes. A Muslim man blew me up, and I lost my leg.

A Muslim man also lost his arm that day wearing a British Uniform.
A Muslim medic was in the helicopter that took me from the field
A Muslim surgeon performed the surgery that saved my life
A Muslim Nurse was part of the team that helped me when I returned to the UK
A Muslim Healthcare Assistant was part of the team that sorted out my day to day needs in rehabilitation when I was learning to walk
A Muslim taxi driver gave me a free ride the first time I went for a beer with my Dad after…