The Partisan

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
This I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often,
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends,
And some of them are with me.

With me right here tonight

An old woman gave us shelter,
Kept us hidden in the garret,
Then the German’s came;
She died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on;
These frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from these shadows.

Les Allemands e'taient chez moi, (The Germans were at my home)
ils me dirent, "Signe toi," (They said, "Sign yourself,")
mais je n'ai pas peur; (But I am not afraid)
j'ai repris mon arme. (I have retaken my weapon.)

J'ai change' cent fois de nom, (I have changed names a hundred times)
j'ai perdu femme et enfants (I have lost wife and children)
mais j'ai tant d'amis; (But I have so many friends)
j'ai la France entie`re. (I have all of France)

Un vieil homme dans un grenier (An old man, in an attic)
pour la nuit nous a cache', (Hid us for the night)
les Allemands l'ont pris; (The Germans captured him)
il est mort sans surprise. (He died without surprise.)

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from the shadows.

I say, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from the shadows.

 

------

Should there still be anyone still playing darts and croquet out there who once looked for this.

Four

 

The room was full. They were all there to listen to a chap talk about gladiators. But before it began someone called out my name. I was surprised, but I did not allow myself to become excited. I guessed there were others in that room whose names had also been called out and checked off a list just to see if they were there.

The lady who had sold me the ticket for the event was so lovely. “I told you she’d be too modest to say anything,” she said.

The festival organiser was there and smiling. “You shouldn’t have paid for your ticket,” he said. “Have you come alone?”

The person who’d been sitting next to me looked hopeful as if I might claim back his ticket too, and then crestfallen when I confessed that yes I had come alone.

I was given a refund and then told that I’d won the short story writing competition.

I was thrilled.

“Oh dear,” the organiser said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

I could have hugged him. I could have hugged everyone in that room. I was delighted.

“Just look surprised when they call your name out,” he said.

He points me out to a curly-white-haired-woman and I stand up to say hello. I get her mixed up in my mind with a woman I met the previous year as I gabble about how pleased I am.

Then the gladiator man begins his talk, and I’m aglow, but also nervous I will have to go to the front at the end of his talk and look surprised.

At the end of his talk when Rome is sacked and burnt, he calls my name and I step forward. He is a lovely person. He surprises me by picking out an obscure section of the story as if it was the main event. He is sweet about my description and I step back and listen and after his kind words he returns the story that I’d posted to them. There is applause and I sit down. People are now getting up to get their books signed by gladiator man.

The curly-white-haired-woman comes and sits next to me. “It’s not finished you know.” She had a school ma’am imperious voice.

I have no idea what she is talking about, then I realise she means the story. She goes on to criticise it at length. You don’t make enough of this or that. The ending was disappointing.

I try to take it all with a good grace. I am all “I see,” or “Oh!”

I’m disappointed. I wanted her to say I really liked this bit, or the turn of phrase there. I wanted her to be enthused with what she enjoyed but it is not to be.

I had been told that the gladiator man was the judge. As her criticisms continue I glance in his direction.

“I was the judge,” curly-white-haired-woman declares, as if reading mind.

“Oh,” I say.

Once my bubble is well and truly deflated she leaves, and I’m left wondering why my story was chosen as the winner if she felt like that when they have hundreds of stories to choose from in such competitions.

I thank the festival organiser again. He is in conversation, but I am desperate now to know something and unfortunately I rudely interrupt.

“How many entries were there?” I ask.

He blinks, “Four,” he says.

“Four!”

It seems it wasn’t well advertised. I only knew about it because I saw someone win it the previous year.

“Four,” I laugh.

But for my hollow victory I won £100.

Hologrammed Neanderthal

 

My passport needed renewal. My heart always sinks whenever I have any forms to fill in. I trundled dejectedly to my local post office and joined the queue. There are always people doing the most difficult lengthy transactions if ever I join a queue. This day was no exception. There was a man with many parcels of varying sizes that all needed to be weighed before any stamps could be issued. A man who moved with infinite slowness as he eased each parcel from his sack his parcels destined for the far corners of the galaxy. Eventually, I was there at the counter and asked for a passport form. “We don’t do those here,” I was told. He rattled off a long list of those post offices that did, all many miles away and then he shrugged his shoulders.

A day or so later I went to the town centre post office. It is a universal truth that if ever I am trying to get any kind of form that there must be obstacle after obstacle placed in my way. This time the main post office unbeknown to me was undergoing renovation. This meant that part of the building was cordoned off and a queue snaked out of the post office and away down the street. Everyone was in that queue; people of all nationalities, women with monstrous buggies, men from Timbuktu, grannies without teeth, and all languages being spoken except English. All had mobile phones in which they were informing the entire world in broken English that they couldn’t do x y or z as they were stuck in a long queue for the post office.

Added to this it was also bitterly cold. The queue moved at a pace slower that the widening creep of the Atlantic Ocean.

Madness set in very quickly.

They have a voice that tells those nearing the counter which window to go to. Its sing song repetitiveness rather than giving hope that you are getting closer always makes me want to run. And there is the tension. If you don’t step off smartly in the direction of ‘Cashier number seven, please’, you feel some of the mob behind you might give you a quick impatient prod.

The precious form then sat on the table for several days before I could steel myself to fill it in. I found it easier than I feared, and happily realised that I didnt have to have my photos countersigned after all.

I dash off to the local supermarket and sit on the cold seat of the photo booth. It is full of a man and a woman’s sing-songy automated voices. Raise the seat, close the curtains, and align your eyes. Pay £5. Then snap, snap, snap, snap.

I now have to choose the best one. They are all true likenesses and all absolutely hideous. I plump for the last one. A cross between a Neanderthal and John Prescott; realising all too late, that it also has the stretched sinews of a turtle’s neck.

It bears no resemblance to my previous passport photograph at all. I’m guessing it will need countersigning, but I take a chance I put in the envelope together with the cheque for almost £80 and then lick the seal.

It doesn’t stick.

I have to dash back into the supermarket for sellotape. Then I finally put the envelope in the post.

I’m expecting them to write back and say kindly, ‘This cannot be you. Please take more authentic pictures at once and then get them countersigned.’

But they don’t.

A week later there is a courier at the door.

‘Sign here’ He has my new passport.

It is beautiful, other than a rather sickly maroon colour on the cover and a frightening picture of someone purporting to be me on one of the inside pages. There are wildlife scenes on the different pages and holograms over my photo.

But it is here, and I can cross another worry off the list.

And I am utterly delighted!

World here I come!

The Spaghetti of Poetry

 

Poetry is a language I do not understand as I can not tune into the words, nor their meaning if ever it is read aloud.

There was a white haired man a professor from the university. A man easily annoyed by latecomers and the bright chirrups of ringing phones who was about to read his work out in the central library. He was trying to entertain, and no doubt his dragooned loyal students found him so. But for me it was all patronising silliness that left me cold. He was a man who thought himself to be still attached to the threads of his youth, but he was threadbare and his jovial behaviour had a hollowness at its core.

I watched and tried to listen but all I heard was the word ‘doorknob’, a word he failed to turn; and he left unopened once again the door of poetry for me.

We were led into the bowels of the library a grim place of yellowed paint and thick pipes where amid the clutter in a room some were about engaged in writing a collaborated book in forty-eight hours. They had, when I chatted to them; though at that time they were more interested in quiche and unwrapping other plates of food from their cling-filmed covers; little idea as to the genre, the main character or where their story would go.

Behind them was a shelf on which was written the label ‘embargo’ perhaps that would be the place to put their book at the end for I could sense how it was being pulled apart before they’d even written it and that it was like so much cooked spaghetti that was falling from a pan each pulling upon their own strand.

I guess as well as poetry I don’t ‘get’ the collaborated novel either. Or more likely I just don’t ‘get’ anything.

Singing Bowls

 

Once more I ventured into the town centre and into the Guildhall for the annual Tibetan flag raising ceremony. The numbers of people there seem to increase every year.

This year I sat right at the back which I guess was a mistake as the guest speaker this year Mr Thubten Samdup had a very soft gentle voice. I caught like floating fragments perhaps only every tenth word and I closed my eyes trying to piece the pieces together. I was left with a feeling that this was actually the message, that the Free Tibet movement was fragmentary and as ineffective as fragments of paper being blown by stronger winds. The speaker sighed as if he was disillusioned and tired. Peaceful protest, supportive words our very presence in that hall had amounted to nothing. Though again I have to say I could not clearly hear his words so perhaps I was mistaken.

I also got the impression that there was a fragility about the Dalai Lama and a heard the warning that he would not be there forever. This I can now see was a warning precursor for the announcement today that the Dalai Lama is to set aside his political role and concentrate upon the spiritual. Mr Thubten Samdup had obviously known that this announcement would be made and had been preparing the ground.

What it does mean though is a frightful experience for a child perhaps as yet unborn in Tibet when he is declared the new Dalai Lama after the present one dies. What incredible stresses he will be placed under. I can only hope that by that time China will have become a truly gracious country and will have ceded autonomy to Tibet.

The highlight for me as always were the singing bowls. Though, again by sitting at the back I could not fully appreciate their long sounds nor see how they were made. I always get the sensation of high mountains, snow, sky burials and great birds wheeling overhead when I hear these sounds that seem to come from a primordial primitive past and stretch into a future devoid of entropy and flat-lining into eternity.

The problems besetting Tibetans was highlighted yet again as they struggled to raise the flag giving time for the poem we had heard to resonate even more about how a mother struggling to flee Tibet over the mountains left behind a daughter in the snow who had waved her goodbyes. This as the flag finally waved in the air.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9420000/9420775.stm