Poetry

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true, and the link between them cannot be avoided.

Juan Carlos, ex-King of Spain, behaved foolishly in relation to money and sex, and so his decision to leave Spain is sad, but justified. That seems to be the view of most moderate people outside Spain who are not ill-disposed to the monarchy. But it is it right? Certainly Juan Carlos’s foolishness was real, but his imposed exile (it is not really voluntary) to the Dominican Republic is not a punishment for a crime: there has never been any legal process. It is a partisan political act which is bad for the unity of Spain. Juan Carlos’s exile was forced on the current King, his son Felipe VI, by a weak prime minister, the Socialist Pedro Sanchez.

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.

Every Christmas I find I am living in the past. I blame my father. He was born in 1910 — before radio, before TV, before cinema had sound, so he and his siblings made their own entertainment at Christmas. He brought up his children to do the same, which is why my unfortunate offspring have a Christmas that’s essentially a century out of date. There are three elements at its heart: board games that end in rows, parlour games that end in tears, and party pieces performed around the Christmas tree. I owe my very existence to my father’s love of board games. As a boy, his favourite was a game of military strategy called L’Attaque, invented in France in 1908.

Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time — a rise of more than 10 per cent for the second year running. According to Parisa Ebrahimi, the poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, one reason for the trend is that poetry is no longer the domain of the white male. This may be true, but how has it happened? Part of the answer is Instagram. Designed as a social network for sharing photos, recently the app has been adopted and adapted by writers — few of them white, many of them women — who, rather than selfies and sunsets, post snippets of verse known as ‘Instapoetry’. And a handful of these Instapoets have become hugely successful.

I walked in out of the rain, dripping, and sat down beside the fire on the primitive high-backed settle. ‘Is this OK?’ I said to the guardian. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to sit on the furniture, none of which is original,’ she said. She was a small woman in her fifties, radiating an attractive combination of reverence and humility. The log fire smoking quietly in the fireplace was a wonderful, essential touch, I thought. The slow tick of a grandfather clock and the rain squalling against the windows emphasised the silence of the cottage parlour. The cob walls, painted the colour of diluted pig’s blood, were a yard thick. There was also a dresser, an oil lamp, some plain old wooden chairs and a small round table. On the table was a violin.