A Scruffy County
6 February 1990, Tuesday, Ampthill/Glasgow
Back to Glasgow on the bus1.
Grown tired of paragraphs what begin with ‘However…’
Bedfordshire2
A scruffy county. Difficult to love
but worth loving as anywhere is worth
loving if you can love it well enough.
By this I mean that, as I recently
have come to think, that one must love and hate
a place, a person in almost equal measure,
one’s love imbalancing the scale in its own favour
but only just. Ampthill, the place where I
grew up, I hate so much that I can hardly
love it. But I know that, at base, I do.
This other poem took several weeks, but it’s dated today —
I’m thinking of all those things I carried
with me all the way across
America, and never once used.
The cigarette-lighter which, although
I do not smoke, I took in the hope
that it might provide an introduction or a prop,
but never found opportunity and courage
concurrent, and so failed to use.
The broken yoyo which
I really don’t know why I took –
unless, perhaps, this story, told me by
one of my cousins explains my whim:
He was sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka,
outside the beach hut he was renting
for practically nothing, toying with a yoyo
and its snapped string, when a stranger
walks up and gives him a new string
with the sole comment, ‘Never
travel without ’em.’ But I can’t be sure.
And the Swiss Penknife, so ostentatiously useful
that it’s an embarrassment to actually produce it
at a moment when it would be of use.
This is when the little rationalist in me opines
‘In certain circumstances, which were just
as likely to occur as those which did,
you would have used all these things,
and used them all frequently.’ ‘But….’
the one I cannot find the correct name for –
the little fatalist, romantic – whispers
‘But you didn’t.’ And, ridiculously, persuades.
I believe this second voice
as I’d believe a handsome, old
writer if he’d told me that one
can sharpen a pencil much more efficiently
with a penknife than with a pencil-sharpener3.
I remember reading my big pale blue-spined copy of In Remembrance of Things Past. On the journey back to Glasgow, I took a chunk of around a hundred pages out of it. When I open Proust now, I think of the large windows of a National Express coach and the darkening A74(M).
As far as I can recall, I wrote this somewhere north of Birmingham.
Are you nostalgic for objects you still possess? Young-Toby has written poem after poem about cups, chairs and apples. They’re sort-of paintings, sort-of preservatives. What do we get to keep? From this time, apart from the notebooks, I have a gothic revival chair, some cassettes mixed in with all the other cassettes, my copy of Keats’ poems and a print of a yellow art deco lady that hung on my nursery wall. My oldest possession is a teddy bear. Yet the obvious thing to say is, these words — transferred from notebook to laptop — are exactly the same as they were. What we lose is the reason we wrote things. We get other reasons, which seem more important. I’m more likely to write a poem now about a tree than a chair. I try to describe the objects that enter my language more precisely, so they could be picked out of a line-up of five supposedly identical objects. It’s not that I expect the poems to last much longer, but they’ve made it this far. They outlasted the Swiss Penknife, which was retained at Hong Kong airport in 2003 when I forgot to pack it in my suitcase and the scanner picked it up.