oooh, I’ve come over all pastoral.

oooh, I’ve come over all pastoral.

So its… THE NOMADIC POET BRIEFLY AT REST
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Hi there.
Well its three short/long varied weeks since I wrote the last blog.
And I’m a third of the way around the world from where I wrote the last one, Vancouver. About to hop far further round the globe: to India, for five or six months
And Boy, Jesus and his Brother, am I still tired. [Though my girlfriend says I should stop going about being tired all the time, cos its boring, so from now on I will asterisk out all synonyms for *****.] And I’ll be ***** until we find an Indian beach or hillside to come to a long halt on.
So its Camberley in Surrey. Very England. The parental fold. The house I grew up in. Whitehill Close. Number 38. Early 60s, weatherboarded, brick, detached.
With a bright Autumn day outside. Clear pale-blue skies lined with Heathrow’s vapour trails. Bold sun on the yellows golds and greens of the leaves… the fallen scattered on the lawn awaiting the rake… and those still up in the Silver Birch trees in the back garden .
Not bad at all.
Though it’s been pretty grey and grim and dismal and autumnally English for most of the over-active week here.
And I am ***** still.
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So, since the last posting I’ve been in London Ontario [more below], Winnipeg to reunite with my sweetheart Priscilla, Dauphin Manitoba, Brandon Manitoba, Calgary with Priscilla’s brother Clinton for the first flurries of impending snow, here at Camberley [via Gatwick], Henley, Oxford, Long Wittenham on the Thames in Oxfordshire, Wittenham Clumps , my brother Chris’s at Finchampstead in Berks, Farnham Surrey with some spins along the yellow- green- gold- and red-leaved country roads towards Hindhead and Elstead, my brother Tim’s at Teddington on the outskirts of London, Worminghall in Bucks, and now I’m back here… before London tomorrow to try and get our visas for India as fast as possible… and then, hopefully, India within two weeks. Hyderabad, I reckon.
We saw a lovely sunset behind the Harwell Nuclear Power Station from Round Hill… one of the Wittenham Clumps… a very old iron-age fort south of Oxford above the Thames… and I doubt Harwell or maybe any other Nuclear Power Station ever looked so good… broad beams of yellowing sunlight from above the silver-cream clouds.
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So, it’s been slow, or at least much slower than the 110 quick-slow-quick-quick-quicker days of full-on energy which preceded it. And I am ******, ********, recovering, getting ****and zest, maybe just beginning to regain zeal and zap before the next throw of our bodies out into the world.
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So, blimey I’m still *****. More ***** than ever before. I mean, I’m 47 and I feel it. The summer of full-on fun and serious hard work is well behind me, I have my bags of stashed booty, I am **********-out, and I am kinda quiescent [*********?]. Am *******my *****ish head. Am rediscovering TV. Am examining the growing web of crow’s feet around my alarmingly sunken eyes. Am eating tinloads of my mother’s cake. Am listening to BBC bloody Radio 2. Am walking over the fetchingly purpled heath… the heather and straw and bracken of my youth is all still there in the Armyland over the back of where I grew up.
And it’s business as usual there. The beagles barking in the distance. The gunshots going off in the further distance …there are army rifle ranges in the woods because the woods are connected to Sandhurst Army College … which is only a mile from where I now sit.
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So I didn’t originally intend to keep this blog going … but… Deborah Wilson from CBC on Vancouver Island suggested it… she is the mighty helpful one who’s sorted this first-ever blog for me up till this point… and I did have a great time writing all the stuff below… and I’ve now had the prerequisite instruction from a teenager [my nephew Eddy Rolls, who turned 18 today]… so I’ve learnt the very simple process of posting a blog on Google… and I’m away.
Let’s see where it takes me.
I plan to write it for a year… Or 16 months… A year or so in the life of this performance poet… This English geezer who quit having a stable home 43 months ago and has been wandering ever since.
Oooh, I’ve come over all pastoral, I have.
Oooh, it’s all gone a bit peripatetic, it has.
Oooh, I’m reinventing the enduring tradition of the wandering poet, I am.
Oooh, I’m just like they ever were, I am… The wandering minstrel poets of yore… But with aeroplanes. And no stringed instruments.
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Cos a number of people have said, your life is pretty unique so why not tell the story?... And they’re kind of write, I mean right: in some ways of looking at it, the world is its diversity and the world is its limits. And part of the fun of being in the world is getting the full range of that diversity, knowing about it, reading about it, even reading a blog about it. And part of the fun of being in this world, being human, is learning about the limits…
So here we go.
Not that I’m at a limit. Life could be much more extreme in many ways. But whatever… I never meet anyone who does what I do… So…
Here we go.
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Cos that’s me. Making a living, yes a living, as a poet. Without teaching. Without selling anything. At all. Not one single thing. Not the slightest demi-atom of paper or ink... Just performing. And making a decent living doing it.
I mean I’m not wholly flush, though October is the flushest month… But neither am I starving. Or skint. Not even in early June, which is when the cash starts to roll in again.
And all this whilst having no home, or base, or stable life. Or possessions, much. Or home city.
And no essential possessions. I mean I now have a laptop. But if I lost it I could buy another one. And I have three or five shirts I like. And a pair of DMs I like. But it could all go. Easily. So, like I say, no essential possessions.
Whilst doing pretty much what I want. Going where the whim takes me, us, apart from the four months of the year when I am very seriously nailed to the fringe trail across Canada.
Which is the most fun.
Wnd which is where this blog started.
And where it will end. Next year.
After Vancouver. The end of the pastoral trail. The annual cycle. The year’s nomadry.
The life.
Here we go. I hope you enjoy it.
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