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The Power of Music

24/6/2012

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"Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." William Congreve

In my schooldays in the 1960s, there was still, every day, morning assembly. We sang hymns and said prayers daily – in fact, at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School we sang, throughout the term, seven different settings (if I recall rightly) of the Lord’s Prayer –
my favourite being Crimond.  The accumulated experience of singing and listening together lodged in my consciousness a rich resource of beautiful old tunes that has stayed with me,
enduringly, through all the ups and downs of life since, and contributed, in often subliminal ways, to the meaning of that life. When I am walking along in the beauty of a Kent morning before I start work, looking at the oaks, beeches, ancient hedgerows, at the crows wheeling over their high roosts, at the familiar procession of seasonal growth and decay, I find myself spontaneously bursting into song, or a happy whistle – and the song is nearly always one of my old childhood favourites  - Morning Has Broken, There is a Green Hill, He Who Would Valiant Be, and, most often of all, How Great Thou Art – which surely expresses my personal and deeply felt gratitude for ‘the love that will not let me go’, and all
the evidence before me of that love.
 
I was lucky enough as a growing child to be exposed to other forms of human music-making, as well as the birdsong I’ve always loved so much. My mother bought me records at Christmas and on birthdays – I recall Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, Saint-Saens’ Carnival of
the Animals, and the Beatles’ White Album (11th birthday present!) among others, and at
grammar school there was Miss Mortimer ‘s Friday lunchtime music club, when several rows of girls and teachers sat listening to classical music on the record-player.  My older siblings’ pop-music tastes were wide-ranging, from Cliff Richard, Stevie Wonder and the Beatles, through the 1960s and early 1970s, to Otis, Dylan, Marvin Gaye, the Incredible String Band, The Doors, Cream and Joni Mitchell. 
  
When I first got together with my future husband, he came home one evening for dinner. Dad was staying – over from Spain to do a voice-over for Kipling Cakes – and we put on a record of Welsh Male Voice Choir singing. As soon as they broke into their first harmony,
my father burst into tears, amazing my husband, who had never until that date actually seen a man cry.  I seem to have inherited this trait from my old Dad, and when I first saw the following You-Tube upload of members of the Copenhagen Philharmonic playing Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite on the metro  there, it certainly struck that chord! I hope you’ll enjoy watching this as much as I did.
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Cool running

20/6/2012

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For most of my life I've been sport-challenged.  At school I was always one of the last in the class to be picked for the team. Although I liked rounders and tennis, I found it difficult to see the ball in the sunlight. Years later an optician remarked on my unusually large pupils, and commented that I must find bright sun hard to see in, and certainly most of the photographs taken of me over the years in the summer show me smiling but squinting at the camera. In the winter at my grammar school we were required to wear thick navy knickers over our white ones, and if we were missing the navies, we weren't allowed to play outdoor games. I hated hockey, with that terrifyingly hard ball hurtling towards your ankles through the snow and ice, so I was always leaving my navies at home and hiding in the cloakrooms, huddled round the radiator with the other skivers. I did take part in one sports day, in the throwing a cricket ball event, and came fourth out of six, so no glory there!

At home, a tomboy with two older sisters and five brothers, I enjoyed the robust pleasures of climbing trees, catching frogs and slow-worms, bike rides, and beating each other and the neighbourhood kids up, and in later years I enjoyed aikido, karate, yoga and long walks on holidays, but just lately, especially with a largely sedentary day-job, I felt the need for something vigorous, shaking it all about, and preferably in the great outdoors - so sweaty gyms were out of the question.

Running is something I'd always regarded as a bit too athletic for me, but last March I watched the Tunbridge Wells Half-Marathon runners pouring through Southborough, and was much taken with the sight, and with the sound of all those feet slapping on the road as they ran by. I mentioned this to an acquaintance I overheard talking about running. She told me about Sarah's Runners, a group who run every Tuesday morning and Thursday evening in Tunbridge Wells, and I went along the next week.  There's no long-term fee to pay - you just pay £2.50 on the day for a session. It's exceedingly friendly, relaxed and non-threatening, and anyone can come along. If you're a complete beginner, you'll be asked for some details, given a basic idea of what's involved, and then everyone joins in with some warming-up exercises before heading off round various routes through Tunbridge Wells. Sarah is helped by a number of trained volunteers, keen runners all, who shepherd their group, looking after the stragglers puffing away at the back (yes, that would be me!). If you're new you join the 3 miles walk/run group, and you can gently work your way up from there.

I want to increase my bone health, not damage it, so a good pair of running shoes was needed. Southborough is blessed with a smashing little shop - the Running Hub - where I went along and was given some friendly and expert advice and fitted out with the first pair of white trainers I've ever sported (goodbye aging hippy chic!).

I was hooked from the start. There is something about the body that rejoices when you give it a bit of hard physical work to do - and running along in the open air feels wonderful after a day stuck in front of a computer in a stuffy room. It's also an eminently portable activity. Since I joined Sarah's Runners I have run across fields and through woods, along the Menin Road in Ypres, and last weekend round a Cotswolds village in the very early morning. Not only do you get some necessary exercise for the heart and lungs, and strengthening for the bones, you also gain the aesthetic pleasure of seeing the world around you, and twice as much of it than if you were walking! And lastly, although it's great fun to run in a pack, it's something you can do at any time, most places,  and on your own if necessary. I'm looking forward to some good running years ahead of me, all being well!

www.sarahsrunners.co.uk
www.runninghub.co.uk


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Visit to Ypres

10/6/2012

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On a visit to Ypres this week to view the newly-renovated In Flanders Field Museum, I took the opportunity to visit two of the graves of men from Southborough. I spent years researching the material for my book Southborough War Memorial, and last September led a guided walk round part of High Brooms, where many of the men lived, but it is still incredibly moving and poignant to stand at their graves, in the places where they died. I got up at 6am, and, as I also needed to fit a run in, I ran through the Menin Gate (quiet at this time of the day, of course) and along the Menin Road toward Potijze. There are several small cemeteries here, and in the Potijze Chateau Wood Cemetery lies W Chuter. There are chickens and cows grazing beside the little cemetery, wheat growing, a row of potatoes, and I heard early morning birdsong.  Private Chuter, 2nd Battalion Hampshire Regiment, was born in the parish of St Barnabas, Tunbridge Wells, where my own son now lives. He died on 9 August 1916, aged 19. Among those buried in the cemetery are forty-six officers and men of the 2nd Hampshires and nineteen of the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers lie here, who died in a gas attack on that day.

Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est which describes a gas attack is one of the most powerful World War One poems:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

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A Health unto Her Majesty!

3/6/2012

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I guess it's being born in the 1950s, but when I was little I loved the Queen, the Pope, Winston Churchill and Bobby Moore.  I used to send the Queen poems, and a rope horse I made at primary school, and I always received a crisp white envelope back from Buckingham Palace with a thank you letter sent and signed by one of Her Majesty's Ladies in Waiting. It wore off a bit in the 1960s and 1970s, when I could be seen at school clutching my dead cool copy of the Little Red Schoolbook, but now the Queen once again evokes fond feelings in my Anglo-Saxon heart, like a Mum who you appreciate once you're over your teen years. So this window says A Health unto Her Majesty!

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At Morning Prayers we sit cross-legged

2/6/2012

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I've been meaning to add this poem for a long time - something I took to one of the regular Kent & Sussex Poetry Society workshops. It concerns a somewhat traumatic incident in my early childhood that took place at Mercers' School in Hawkhurst - long since demolished!


Mrs P at the piano, all rouge, nicotine and faded hair
beside her black-bunned Mrs Smith
fierce, upright, a bamboo spear:

One of you has written something filthy in the upstairs lavatory
No-one will leave the Hall until that person owns up.

Silence.

No hand goes up; I can’t be sure, I’m questioning my guilt
but pressure’s building, a red balloon beats against my ribs
the urge to confess overwhelming until
out of my mouth come the words It was me.

All heads turn. Miss White, pinkly flustered, is ordered
to take me to the kitchen, wash out my mouth with soap
and gently leads me through the bacon-scented passage
where, bursting into tears I sob But
Miss,
I only wrote
I Love Maxie, and am saved, for what
she knows, I don’t.

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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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