Kathleen Jones's Blog, page 38

Singapore Airport - and the Consumer Conundrum

For the past few days I've been travelling long-haul, wandering around between flights in the consumer cathedrals that are airport departure lounges.


This is conspicuous consumption, by bored, travel-lagged people, buying things they don't need simply to pass the time, or lured by the 'tax free' label.  It's all very glitzy and overpowering.  It left me feeling guilty and thinking a lot about the carbon miles that drive our lifestyles.


Singapore Airport is definitely one of the world's top airports for comfort and shopping.  I wandered around looking at expensive things I couldn't afford to buy and certainly didn't want and then spent some quite time in the butterfly garden trying to reclaim my soul.


There's also a roof-top open-air swimming pool fringed with palm trees.  But, having picked up a copy of the Strait Times, it was probably a good idea not to go out there.  The air quality in Singapore - front page news - was so unhealthy that elderly people, pregnant women and children were recommended not to go out in to the grey pall of pollution haze that shrouded the city.

Singapore on TuesdayHazardous micro particles had reached 153 micrograms per cubic metre.  The safe level is 55 mpcm. In  June the level had reached 400 mpcm.  The Strait Times blamed pollution from neighbouring countries and forest fires in Sumatra (some deliberately set to clear forests for agriculture).  Singapore has introduced laws which allow it to seek compensation from its neighbours for the pollution, but I can't see how they can be enforced or how they will have much impact.

The truth is we share our air around the world and we're poisoning each  other and ourselves.  It makes me feel guilty to be here, boarding another jet that will spew more toxic particles into the atmosphere.  Like everyone else I'm torn, because if I don't travel I won't be able to see my daughter and grandchildren, yet I'm aware that our addiction to travelling is harming the world they will grow up in.
On a really bad day ......One thing I really don't understand is why we tolerate things that are clearly intolerable.  We are living in cities where the air is too dangerous to breathe, yet people aren't out on the streets protesting, or even doing it from the safety of their homes.  One Singapore resident is quoted as saying 'the air is stuffy but we have to get used to it because we are surrounded by countries with a lot of forests and this haze will not go away.'  Another resident, a mother, says 'it's ok so long as the PSI doesn't go above 200.'   It's clearly not ok.  Where has common sense gone? Why are people walking so obediently and quietly into this?

I boarded my flight.

Tuesday Poem: Remembering the Trees

As I'm currently somewhere in the air heading for New Zealand and unable to blog, I hope no one minds if I share the poem I wrote last year in New Zealand.  It's one of the poems from the new collection I'm putting together, Sea, Tree and Bird, which has a strong environmental slant.   This poem was featured on Ink Sweat and Tears for National Poetry Day last week. The other featured poet was Canadian Clarissa Ackroyd.  Click here if you'd like to read her poem too.

Remembering the TreesKauri Forest, New Zealand, 2013

It takes time to grow
a continent of rock, rooted
in ocean.  Time
to grind and sift
a handful of soil for a seed
and two thousand rings of dense grain
packed into furniture, floor boards
a Whare, a house, the shaft
of an axe. . .

© Kathleen Jones




Why not hop over to the Tuesday Poets main hub and see what the other members are posting today?

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Making it real - models and maps by Kathleen Jone...

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Making it real - models and maps by Kathleen Jones...: My favourite childhood books are the Moomintroll series written by Finnish author Tove Jansson. She was an artist and she illustrated her ...   Read More

Chaos in Capezzano Monte!

This is a picture of chaos.  I'm packing to go to New Zealand, leaving tomorrow via Milan and Singapore, arriving some time on Wednesday NZ time.  Somehow I have to get a month's worth of clothes, books, notebooks and assorted paraphernalia into one suitcase and a carry-on.   It's spring in New Zealand, which can mean 4 seasons in one day and makes it difficult to choose what to wear - you just have to take everything!   The reason I'm going is in this photo -


my little Kiwi family.  And I hope to see some of the many good friends I've made during the years I've traveled backwards and forwards researching the Katherine Mansfield biography.  I'm also hoping to see one or two areas of NZ that I haven't  visited yet.  The country is so beautiful - ocean, mountains and lakes, glaciers and fjords, volcanoes, and the kind of beaches they use on travel brochures to make you ache to get the sand between your toes.
Kaikoura bay
But I'm leaving behind my Italian home just as autumn is beginning to mellow in.  This is the piazza today, at the end of the tourist season, when we have it all to ourselves.


There's a wonderful Rumanian busker who sits on the corner of the piazza - he's so good people sit on the duomo steps just to listen to him.   He's probably an illegal immigrant, but his music enriches people's lives.


Neil isn't coming with me this time - apart from the cost of long-haul airfares, he's hard at work in the studio at the moment and can't afford to be away for a month.   So there's a mixture of excitement and sadness.

I don't know how much time I'll get for blogging, but I'm hoping to share as much as I can.  Wish me luck - the number of trains and planes I'm traveling on in the next few days multiplies the Murphy's factor by at least a hundred!*


*Murphy's Law - if it can happen it will!  

Tuesday Poem: Pascale Petit - Blackbird

When they locked me
in the cellar

and told me to count
slowly to a hundred,

each number
became a blackbird's feather

and all the darkness
sang

through the keyhole
of my yellow beak.

© Pascale Petit
From 'Fauverie'  published by Seren Books Sept. 2014


This week is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom.  It is also the publication date of Pascale Petit's eagerly anticipated collection 'Fauverie'.  This collection does not disappoint - it's brilliant, moving, hard-hitting. I feel very privileged to have seen an advance copy.  For more poetry from Fauverie and a full review of the collection, please click over to the main Tuesday Poem hub where it is being featured.   And please check out what the other Tuesday poets are posting through the links on the sidebar.


PS - 'Caracal' from Fauverie is the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' chosen by Carol Rumens.

  Fauverie, published by Seren Books, Sept. 2014

"The Fauverie of this book is the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. But the word also evokes the Fauves, ‘primitive’ painters who used raw colour straight from the tube. Like The Zoo Father, Petit’s acclaimed second collection, this volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, while Paris takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals. Transforming childhood horrors to ultimately mourn a lost parent, Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species. Five poems fromFauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize and the manuscript in progress was awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts.”

Autumn Leave-taking

It's time to leave and drive back down across Europe.  We're taking it slowly, so it may take a few days to cross France and Switzerland and then make our way down through Italy.    Neil's sculpture is now properly installed in its new home in a garden opposite John Clare's cottage and the car has been given a clean bill of health for another year.



Hard to leave home when the trees have just begun to burn on the river bank, but we have to get back to Italy before I fly off to New Zealand next weekend.  I feel like a migratory bird, taking wing across continents, following the swallows south.


Nice news before I go though - just been emailed to say that Ink Sweat and Tears are featuring one of my poems 'Remembering the Trees', next week (Oct 2nd) for National Poetry Day, and Flash Fiction Magazine have accepted one of my short shorts (3 sentences!) for October 9th.  Yay!!!  Makes me feel better about being rejected by Bare Fiction.

Tuesday Poem: Cliff by Jennifer Copley

She and her sister stand at the top, looking down.
They can see the sea, the lighthouse
and the salt-walled church.

She and her sister think what it would be like to jump –
long hair, brown dresses,
tumbling into the giant water.

This morning they sat in church,
heard the story of the pillar of salt
and how Lot lay with his daughters.

She and her sister became aware of a shuddering
along the pew, a straightening of spines,
a pinkening of their father’s ears.

Always they dread Sundays – the motherless day –
left to the will of God, the will of the wind.


From the collection Sisters: © Jennifer Copley
Published by Smokestack Books
Buy it here . . .


Who are these girls?  Why are they standing with their backs to the camera?  These questions appear on the back cover of Jennifer Copley’s latest collection ‘Sisters’.  The answer is that both girls are dead – for this is one of the ‘post-mortem’ photographs taken by Victorian photographers for grieving parents.  Often, when loved ones died, the family didn’t have a photograph and they were desperate for some memorial.  It seems bizarre to us, as well as ghoulish, to think about the dead bodies being dressed and then propped up on frames in a photographic studio to be pictured as if they were still alive.  Sometimes their faces would be over-painted to resemble the living, but if the photographer wasn’t skilled at this technique, a view was chosen that portrayed them asleep, or avoided showing the face.

Jennifer Copley became fascinated by this photograph in particular and began to think about sisterhood and death.  The poems in the collection explore both, as well as other complicated family relationships.  They have been described as ‘urgent, visceral . . . not for the faint-hearted’.

The motherless sisters stray in and out of fairy tales – Snow White and Rose Red, Hansel and Gretel – grandmothers, mirrors, apples and trails of pebbles feature in their lives as they make assignations with dubious boys (who might or might not turn into geese) and walk in the dark woods.  They dress up in their mother’s clothes;
‘Watching themselves in the mirror.
One drowning in a long pale dress.’

They fantasise about imprisoning their drunken father in the spare room and grinding his bones
‘a little at a time
into their gravies and stews’.

And then one day ‘there is no more us’.

One of my favourite poems, at the end of the collection is called ‘There’s Another Graveyard’ which was a prize-winner in the Bridport Poetry awards in 2010.

‘far more overgrown, brambly at the edges.
Sheep step across the threshold
liking the taste of this grass.
Our grandmother brought us here.
It was like a jar of quietness with a lid of sky –
the only place where you never cried.
She’d crochet, sitting straight-backed
against the wall, while I hunted four-leafed clovers
and you made grass and dandelion pies.
They say there’s no sound when someone crochets
but I can remember the rasp of wrinkled fingers
against wool, the sucking of teeth as a corner was turned.’

Sisters by Jennifer Copley


This is an unusual collection by a very accomplished poet who has published 6 collections, had poetry included in the Forward Prize anthology and set for GCSE exams.  She won the Ottakar's and Faber's poetry prize in 2006.  Jennifer Copley lives in Cumbria, where she was born in her grandmother's house in Barrow in Furness.  She has a wonderful website at www.jennifercopley.co.uk



The Tuesday Poets are 28 poets from all over the world who share poetry every Tuesday.  We take it in turns to edit the main Hub.  This week's editor is Helen Rickerby, who also edits Jaam literary journal and she's chosen an unusual  poem by New Zealand poet Anahera Gildea.  Click on the link to take a look at the poem and see what other Tuesday Poets are posting.   http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com 

Monday Music: Happy in Tehran

It is illegal to be Happy in Tehran - particularly if you want to dance to the Pharrell Williams soul hit.
A group of young men and women were sentenced to 91 lashes each and six months imprisonment - the latter fortunately suspended.  ‘All were convicted of vulgarity and illicit relations’ and the women for dancing with their heads ‘illegally bared’, and for ‘jumping and jiving with the men’.  Apparently one of the judges described the video (which was uploaded to YouTube) as ‘pornography’.
The New York Times has some good coverage of this which you can read here.....

Eric Poitevin: A Hundred Men

On our way north from Italy, we called into LAM - the Museum of Modern Art at Lille in France. This  particular exhibition, being staged for the centenary of  World War I, was one of the highlights of the trip for me, and a welcome rest after spending 12 hours in the car driving yesterday and another 4 hours this morning.


In 1983, photographer Eric Poitevin, who studied at the School of Fine Art in Metz, had the idea of photographing a hundred veterans of the 1914-18 war.  He was influenced by Roland Barthes' work on photography - Image Music Text - looking at photography ‘not as art, but as evidence of what was’.


The Hundred Men, without names or any other identification, are lined up on the walls of one big room.


There are farmers and butchers, priests and teachers, members of the bourgeoisie, all side by side, in a moving record of a conflict that also killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of their compatriots and millions of others.
The photographer, the photographed and the exhibition!
Outside, the landscape is scattered with cemeteries where foreigners who came to fight and die were laid under identical white stones. Under the soil of Picardy is a root crop of bone and shrapnel.  The place-names slide past the autoroute like movie subtitles - the roses of Picardie, Vimy Ridge, the marshes of the Somme. . .



My own grandfather lost his health, his sanity, and almost his life in this landscape.  Like most of those who fought, like these men staring benignly at the camera, he came back changed both mentally and physically.
My grandfather in his private's uniform in 1914. He was a sergeant when invalided out.
The LAM museum houses one of the best collections of modern art in Europe.  Barry Flanagan’s ‘Boxing Hares’ stand in a corridor, perfectly framed by the window.



I particularly liked Daniel Buren’s stained glass shed, which you can walk around, like being inside an illuminated Rubic cube. It had a wonderful, calm feeling.





And there’s an extensive sculpture park outside where you can walk and picnic in acres of countryside.  This is Picasso’s Angel with Outstretched Arms.


The Channel Tunnel tomorrow and then northwards through England and East Anglia!

Started early - took the car ....

It's time for the annual trek back to Britain through Europe so that our English car can get an MOT and be in the UK for the one week a year demanded by our insurer.  You would think that the European Union would be able to standardise such things as MOTs wouldn't you?  In Europe a car is certificated for two years before having another check, but in England it has to be done every year and they don't recognise MOTs done in any other European country.  Crazy!





So, tonight was the last night in the Piazza for a while and tomorrow the alarm clock has been set for an 'extra presto' time to begin the long drive north.  Planning to stop somewhere in southern France the first night and then make for Lille to visit the museum of modern art there before diving under the Channel Tunnel.   Possibly Cumbria by Sunday afternoon. We're not planning to break any records!  Our car is getting quite elderly and needs nurturing.  No internet for three or four days probably, as we're staying in cheap motels, but hopefully back on line on Sunday. Fingers crossed for traffic and weather and the car!