2013 – Page 5 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE DEEP HEART’S CORE

Poems by heart. Should we?

The heart is the love symbol, the main machine, the organ that runs everything. It creates the rhythm we hear as soon as we hear anything.

Badum, badum, badum, badum. Life, life, life — that’s what the heart says (iambically). We can learn by it in French and English, but not, so far as I can see, in German, Spanish or Italian. But that’s just the idiom. A good idiom, though. ‘Learn by heart’ strikes me as a whole lot more appealing than auswendig lernen.

Michael Gove famously thinks children should learn poems by it. Badum, badum, badum, badum. Should they? Shouldn’t they? Do we care?

According to a Guardian poll in June 2012, 42% said yes, 58% said no. Michael Rosen, in whose interests it might be for kids to learn poems by heart, especially his own, says (as any worthy poet should) that making it compulsory smacks of ‘government diktat land’.

The thing is, people do learn stuff by heart. All the time. They learn what they like, and frequently it’s rude. My other half, who has no time whatsoever for that thing I call ‘poetry’, has a substantial repertoire of disreputable verse and memorable sayings. Last night, I was cooking and he padded into the kitchen behind me silently, making me jump. ‘You crept up on me!’ I said.

‘I crept into the crypt, crapped, and then crept out again,’ was his rejoinder. He learned this as a wee boy, and the words stuck for life. Some of the things he remembers are too rude to share. But others . . .

Do your balls hang low?
Do they waggle to and fro?
Do you get a funny feeling
When you’re hanging from the ceiling?

This is the sort of thing teachers might want to stop kids reciting. But kids learn all sorts of things off by heart, all the time. They learn advertising jingles, words from songs, rap, rubbish. Stuff that sticks in the head and won’t come out. Teachers want to control what sticks. It’s not a question of what we remember. It’s what we can’t forget.

The BBC still has 15 compulsory poems on a web page dating back to 2009, when they did a learning poetry revival. I don’t know whether they actually arrived at a UK Child Poetry Recital Champion, though that was the plan. However, the 14 compulsory poems, though doomed by the word ‘compulsory’, are not half bad. I found I knew parts of all of them (by heart), except Grace Nichols and Ben Zephaniah: but theirs are great poems too. I should love to have known ‘Alligator’ and ‘Talking Turkeys’ when I was a kid.

I don’t know whether learning poetry as a kid does you good. I do think chanting and repetition are fun, especially with gestures and actions. And if you did learn, say, Belloc’s ‘Matilda’ as a child, how could you not want to share it as an adult?

Does learning poems turn people into poets? No more than learning songs makes you into a singer songwriter.

But should you find yourself making poems, you learn most about the art from the poems you know well. And learning poems as an adult, if you’re a poet, is an excellent idea. You get inside them that way. You feel how they work. Badum, badum, badum. You pace them out. You learn their sound secrets.

Don Paterson says, in one of those aphorisms of his, that ‘a poem is a little machine for remembering itself’. Some of them are tricky mechanisms. If you try to learn one and find yourself in serious difficulty somewhere around the middle, often it’s because the machine is short of a valve or two. On the other hand, some poems are all too easy to learn. What you learn from learning them is how to be slick, quick and empty. It’s better to be rude.

For what it’s worth, I think poets should learn some of their own poems. By heart. If you do that, it’s a kind of test drive. The line you can’t get – why can’t you get it? Usually because that line’s not ‘right’. So re-tune the machine.

Besides, when you read – if you do read – to an audience, knowing a couple of the poems by heart means you can use your voice as an instrument. You’re not reading. You’re offering the sound and meaning, syllable by syllable.

One of the BBC’s 15 ‘compulsory’ poems is Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1892). Someone told me Yeats began to resent this poem because it was so widely known (a bit like Alastair Reid feels about ‘Scotland’, or Jenny Joseph’s ‘Warning’). Either way, you can tell, when you hear him read it , that he had it by heart, had it like a song. I never consciously learned it but I know most of it. When I do anything with particular deliberation, I think to myself I will arise and go now. And whenever I hear bees in the garden I think of the ‘bee-loud glade’. It’s the same sort of phrase as ‘crept into the crypt’ – utterly satisfying.

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ taught me about the power of the short line, the emotive power of falling back from a long lilting phrase to a short one. The middle stanza drops back from (line 3) ‘There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow’ to ‘And evening full of the linnet’s wings’ (line 4). It’s a lovely movement and the linnet’s wings are lovely, if not quite as good as the ‘bee-loud glade’ in the last line of the opening stanza.

But that’s the point. The poet is saving himself. He’s going for the full whammy in his last line, which repeats the rhythmic pattern of ‘bee-loud glade’ in a line a whole syllable shorter. A magnificent last line. A line to provoke a sitting ovation. Let’s hear it for W B Yeats:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

THE AWFUL TRUTH

In December, there were 77 submissions or, in the end, 76, because one turned out to be the same one twice.

Reading and responding took all of January, between completing Chapter 7, designing new flyers and negotiating with the bank. The standard of the poetry inside the envelopes was horribly good. Horribly, because the likelihood of my offering to do a publication becomes more and more evanescent, even for good poets. I can only do so many.

Some poets make their first approach with little awareness of how it does (or doesn’t) work. It’s not their fault. A well-known poet has recommended they approach me (they will tell me who this person is) and they hope the endorsement will make a difference. It doesn’t make a difference.

I read each submission carefully and write things in pencil on and around the poems. As time goes on, I get less polite. I know I’m dispensing liberal doses of disappointment. Who wants to be a professional disappointer? The awful truth is that what I really want them to do is buy the poetry I have already published, not give me more of the stuff to market and sell. (It is so hard selling poetry. They have no idea.)

And yet, I love the poetry I have published. I really do. My enthusiasm isn’t feigned. Who would not want more things to love?

So I read the poems. Do I love what’s in front of me? How much do I love it? Do I love it enough to add it to the already impossible challenge in front of me?

Probably not. It’s the same for everyone who reads poetry. For every poem you love and copy out, there are hundreds you can live without.

Even as I scribble insults about the poem’s punctuation, sentence structure, mixed metaphor and line breaks, I know my view is just one view. But it’s a very particular one. Out of all the new submissions, I may offer to do a publication for one. I can’t afford, in time or money, more than that. (I can’t even afford that.) It has to be one that’s not only strong, but also as different as possible from anything I’ve done before.

And still there are a whole set of people here with individual poems I like very much. I’m glad to read them. In response to some of them, I could write pages, although lack of time prevents that. I hope some of my responses may prove useful to these people and perhaps win them opportunities elsewhere (the pamphlet competitions are useful in developing sets of strong work, I think, irrespective of winning).

The breakdown this year was as follows:

Already HappenStance subscribers, so know at least a bit about the press	Non-subscribers	First submission	Currently working on a promised publication, so sending poems towards that	Second, third or more approach (this normally means I have been encouraging)	Men	Women
45 (c 60%)	31	48	10	18	35	41

Number of new firm offers made: 1.

Not everyone makes an approach hoping I’ll do a pamphlet (it helps to know people’s ambitions). Some just send a dozen poems for feedback, which is fine. Many of them are now wonderfully professional: they have read the submission guidelines and followed them, and the dos and don’ts, so there are no immediate barriers.

So far, I’ve published more men than women, and I would like to change that. However, I getmore poems from women than men. I don’t know what conclusion to draw about this.

I don’t make publication offers on first submission. I might express an interest or a strong interest. Sometimes I tell poets they’re so good they don’t need me: they should be winning a competition outright. Some of them go on to do just that. It helps if people know my antipathy for villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, ekphrastic poems, ‘after’ poems, and dedications.

I am presentation-sensitive. I prefer single spacing (it’s in the guidelines). I prefer a size of font similar to what I would put in a pamphlet (roughly a 12 in Word) so I can visualize the poem on a page. I like the name and address of the author on each sheet. I expect the font to be consistent: all 12 poems same font and same size. (Often poets present their work dramatically differently from page to page.)

Some poets have interestingly graphical pieces with elaborate spacing patterns and designs. Mainly they present these on an A4 sheet, forgetting that books or pamphlets work to A5 (some presses use a larger format; this one doesn’t).

Increasingly, I have submissions from poets who have just finished, or are in process of finishing, MLitts or PhDs, for which they have completed a set of poems. These have been praised and now they want to publish them. Oh dear. I would look at a set of poems differently were I assessing the achievement for that particular person than I would when considering them for publication. Getting things published is not the same as writing them well. Writing them well comes first – of course it does – but after that, there’s more. Have any of the poems appeared in good quality magazines? (I expect this.) Has the poet started to build a readership? (I don’t mean their tutors or fellow students.) Has the person thought carefully about pamphlet publications and how they work? Why does the person want to be published at all?

And so I go on to dispense various kinds of disappointment. I am increasingly nervous of the phenomenon I call ‘Contemp Po’ and so I flag it when I see it. Every age has its own Contemp Po features, tricks that seem innovative at the time but quickly become passé. We absorb these features unconsciously. (Every age also has poetry that is timeless: it could work in any age and for any reader.)

When we write poetry, we instinctively reach for something that makes it not prose, a register or a method that confirms for us: This is a Poem. Some people find it in formal conventions (rhyme and metre); others find it in a particular rhythmic vernacular (writing in Scots, or a local dialect). There are many ways.

The ‘line break’ is the major indicator of ‘poem’ for those writing free-ish verse, but line break alone is unlikely to suffice. Sensitivity to sound patterns is just as important. By this I mean assonance (vowel sounds echoing each other), and also the sound trail through vowels and consonants. I don’t want to make this technical, but in the simplest sense, the lines don’t always sound ‘right’, whatever ‘right’ is for that particular poem.

Sound is not everything. There are deaf poets who write beautifully. But they become attuned to something else, some other features that make the text ‘poem’ and not ‘prose’. And besides, deaf people hear through their feet, fingers and toes: rhythm patterns apply.

Here are the recurring Contemp Po features I notice most. I flagged these in a last time round but I have added a couple, as well as an example at the end of the How and The Way feature (new!):

Features of Contemp Po

lots of ‘I see’ and ‘I watch’ and ‘I feel’ and, worst of all, ‘I think’
disappearing subjects (verb with no ‘I’)
lots of poems in couplets
‘arty’ layouts , space instead of punctuation
poems based on extended metaphor (sometimes it works)
over-mixed metaphor (over-wrought, crossed logics)
a lot of cross-stanza enjambment
numerous colons and semi-colons.
poem a single sentence which gets lost in the middle
poem based round clauses with no finite verbs
sentences starting ‘And’ and ‘But’
first few lines dead (no bite)
title steals thunder of the best (last?) line or phrase
disappearing articles (‘the’ and ‘a’)
many ‘as’ sentences (see blog 26.05.2011)
poems constructed round a set of imperatives
anaphora structure (eg each line begins ‘because’)
the last word of the last line is ‘love’
the word ‘yet’ flags an epiphany (resist! resist!)
the word ‘for’ meaning ‘because’
lots of thens, followed by suddenly
weird line breaks
a rhyme at, or very near, the end
line breaks on ‘significant’ word like ‘break’—see above
no punctuation, and then some suddenly arrives
the ‘leaning verb thing’ (see below)
the ‘how’ and ‘the way’ clause repetition (see below)

The leaning verb thing:
There’s a tendency to write lines where two or more verb clauses are each appended to the same subject, often towards the high point. This is now as ubiquitous as scattered ampersands were in the sixties. For example:

She reaches for her pen, scribbles a few lines,
wonders why the world hasn’t colluded, hasn’t collapsed.

The ‘how’ and ‘the way’ thing
Here’s another regular pattern. In fact, the pattern can be useful until it starts to look mannered. It may one day look as mannered as ‘up and spak an eldern knicht’ and ‘o’er the wall the sun doth sink’:

He saw and took note. How she touched each leaf
on the trailing vine. How she stopped a second
beside the stair. How the light on her hair
glimmered. And later the way she paused
outside the greenhouse. The way she held
the key lightly, like a talisman. The way
she turned it slowly in the lock

MIGRAINE AND THINGS GOING WRONG

From a creative point of view, it can be more interesting when things go wrong.

There’s wrong and wrong, of course. I don’t mean the kind of wrong that’s clumsy or inept. But maybe the kind of wrong where the idea or the method gets away. That’s interesting. I like the sort of poem that has a mind of its own for example, and seems to do something the poet didn’t (apparently) intend. Sometimes I like poems that go wrong better than poems that go right.

This is perverse, isn’t it? But there you go. A pun there already. We celebrate mistakes instinctively. We make them the root of our jokes. Where would we be without jokes?

I took the HappenStance Story Chapter 7 to the printer on Monday. I was in a rush, as usual, and so was the chapter. I mentioned this to Robert at Dolphin Press. Printers don’t check for proof-reading errors but I got an email message later from Liz (the other half), about a graphic and another small point: And on page 9 he wasnt sure if it was a typing error or not but on the 3rd line it says poets over 4 should that not say 40? Let me know’.

Yes, it should have said 40. Here’s the context: “The majority of manuscripts I receive are by poets over 4. In fact, 40 is pretty young in my terms.” But isn’t it a wonderful mistake? I did correct it (thanks to Robert) but I was so very tempted to leave it. Mistakes make good stories.

The Bank of Scotland, about which I wrote recently, has still not unmangled the mistake they have made with my account. On Friday, which was day 21 of my not being able to pay cheques in, I reached a stage of mild fury. I had tried to get hold of my Relationship Manager, had been promised a call, had not had the call and had insisted on speaking to what I now know is called a ‘team leader’.

In the olden days, banks had managers. Now they have relationship managers, and their bosses are team leaders. Does this sound like banking to you? Nope? Me neither.

Interestingly, though, one of the relationship managers (all the ones I have spoken to have been articulate, charming, young-sounding men, who are clearly not managers, but minions, and my heart goes out to them) was able to give me a date. ‘Chris’ could see an indemnity arrangement, made on 25.05.2005. That was it. That was the permission to pay cheques in to the name ‘HappenStance’.

However, although the indemnity arrangement is recorded, the nature of that arrangement is not noted. Back to the drawing board. Chris told me that talking to a ‘boss’ (the team leader) would not do any good. How right he was. I insisted anyway. I never insist on talking to bosses. I wanted to mark the fact that this was now a crisis. I wanted someone to scribble down, ‘Customer insisted on speaking to Team Leader’.

The team leader, it was, who made me enraged. He was not rude, oh no. He jabbered jargon which I started to write down but it came so thick and fast, it was impossible. I had suggested I would complain. He said something about ‘making an official complaint that highlighted the official areas where the complaint applies’. It wasn’t even English! All he needed to do was listen and say ‘there, there’.

I wish there were solutions to this nonsense. This is not banks making huge monies at our expense. This is huge organisations who are victims of their own systems and frequently employing people with no authority to take meaningful action or, in the team leader’s case, no skill with human beings.

Another mistake then. Another mistake, another story. We haven’t reached the end yet but soon I will ask people to send money in paper notes in envelopes and I will keep the stash in the tea caddy. The risk of burglars is far less than the risk of the bank putting the whole business out of business.

Anyway, back to the migraine. It has been a migrainey week for me, though I’ve had much worse. I’m interested in migraine and what’s going wrong in the brain when they happen, interested enough to have read Oliver Sacks’ book on the subject (and it’s one of his hard books, not one of the readable ones). Sacks loves the excitement of malfunction. Often he demonstrates how it leads to creative perceptions you couldn’t get any other way.

Every weakness opens us to strength. I am on number 56 of the 77 poetry submissions. (Next week I expect to have finished and report back). I have become, I realise, mainly a disappointment disseminator. This seems such a negative function, so fraught with guilt and responsibility and neurosis, that I frequently don’t like myself much.

On the other hand, the nature of disappointment is fascinating and, in some contexts, funny. I’m reminded of Nick Asbury’s Disappointments Diary, which I think so masterfully funny. Not everyone would agree of course, but I’m persuaded the friends to whom I gave it will share my view. On the promotional page, you can see one of the page headers: ‘Genius is 99% perspiration and you’ve mastered that bit’. Poetry becomes so intense, so delicate, so personal. What on earth are we doing when we write it? I don’t know. I never did know. I just find it interesting that people do it, that I do it. We are all mad probably.

Back to migraine. Lots of poets have migraine. I do wonder whether the best poems aren’t a kind of disruption of the brain. I think poetic form, whatever we mean by that term, can introduce disruptions that make something unexpected happen. Something unexpected should happen in a poem, shouldn’t it?

I wrote about Paul Lee in November 2011. Paul died before he was supposed to. He and I both had migraines and both wrote poems. We both even wrote poems about migraines, and swapped notes about this at one point.

In Us: Who Made History, Paul’s posthumous collection from Original Press, there is a marvellous migraine poem. It incorporates ‘the verb thing’ (one of the ‘flaws’ I keep going on about) but it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a strength out of weakness. I’ll stand by that.

Migraineur

I will know light as camera flash
and breaking glass. Your consoling touch
will hurt, my flesh a ripe fruit bruising.

Noise will be a steady crescendo,
taste a meld of metal, eggs and bile,
smell a constant brink of gagging.

I can tell you that scotoma is a drift
of soot flakes across your vision,
a vision that fractures and scintillates

with an aura that bathes the world
in St Elmo’s fire, shot with blue or yellow
lightning flashes.
………………………This is not understatement.

There is also the fever and chills, like flu,
the nausea and vomiting. And the pain –
ah, yes, the pain – that mocks analgesics,

resists agonists: pain like a billiard ball
potted behind your eye, a red-hot toad,
a pyramid of razor edges and needle points.

My doctors shuffle their drugs,
discuss my triggers.
…………………….A healer once suggested
that migraines assuaged my need for pain.

NO NEWS IS SLOW NEWS

I have only just reached 29.

That’s to say number 29 out of the 77 December submissions, and this is too slow for comfort. So no blog writing today, only writing scribbly notes on people’s poems between pencil sharpenings. (I have sharpened two whole pencils to oblivion).

There will be feedback on the process in due course—another couple of weeks yet.

Meanwhile, Chapter Seven of the HappenStance Story is just about ready to go to print. If you’d like a copy (we sold out of Chapter Six) and you’re not a subscriber, here’s your link.

We have no snow in this wintry corner of Fife—at least only a powdery dusting. Rather disappointing, even for grown-ups. Also no word from the Bank of Scotland. Please forgive me if you’ve sent a cheque in the last fortnight. I can’t pay them in. I can only sit and look at them. If the situation persists for another week, a new account will be opened.

Meanwhile, the last word is with Robert Nye’s poem ‘Winter More’, included in the HappenStance pamphlet anthology, Winter Gifts, right back at the beginning, in 2005.

WINTER MORE

When it was Winter what I saw
Was not enough for my heart’s claw.

I wanted the North Wind to blow
Like God the Father shouting No.

My heart was greedy for pure cold:
I wanted icicles of gold.

I wanted Taj Mahals of ice
And no mere Arctic could suffice.

Winter extreme, Winter complete
Was what I longed for in my heat

To reach an absolute North Pole
And know in body and in soul

Some more-than-polar vertigo,
The truth of snow on snow on snow.

This was my secret lust and lore:
I always wanted Winter more.

WHEN RELATIONSHIPS GO WRONG

I have a Relationship Manager.

Everybody who does Business Banking with the Bank of Scotland has one, though I’ve never had to contact mine before. But I did this week, and we had a long chat.

‘Something has gone wrong with our relationship,’ I pointed out. ‘And the bank has caused the problem. Not me.’

We all know there are two sides to everything. And a problem shared is a problem halved. I still can’t, however, pay any cheques made out to ‘HappenStance’ into my business account. This situation arose nine days ago and is still some way from being resolved. Everyone knows it’s hard to stay in credit if your sales product is poetry. It’s even harder when you can’t pay cheques into the bank.

I’ll give you some bankground—I mean background. (As I write, it’s just started to snow. The Pathetic Fallacy rules OK.)

Just over a week ago, hoping to save myself a bit of time, I popped into the bank in St Andrews (not my home branch) to pay in the week’s cheques. The teller looked worried. ‘What does it say here?’ she frowned. ‘Is this word Happen . . .?’

‘HappenStance,’ I said helpfully. ‘It’s the name of the business.’

‘But the name of the account—’ she said ‘—is Helen Beaton trading as Helena Nelson.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Helen Beaton is my passport name. Helena Nelson is my penname. I’m a writer.’

‘But the cheques are all made out to . . . er . . . HappenStance?’

‘Yes, that’s the name of the business. There’s an Arrangement for cheques to be payable to that name.’

An ‘Arrangement’ is what the bank originally called it. I paid £30.00 for my Arrangement seven years ago, at the same time as all my order slips were printed saying ‘Please make cheques payable to HappenStance’.

She frowned and stared at the screen of her computer. ‘I can’t see any evidence of that Arrangement,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to see a manager for some advice.’

With that she disappeared and was gone for a considerable time. The woman behind me sat down in a chair provided for that purpose. I leaned on the counter and tapped my fingers.

Eventually the bank lady returned. ‘We have phoned the bank in Glenrothes,’ she said, ‘and they’re going to phone back. Could you hang on a little longer?’

I had been in a hurry to start with, which was why I made the mistake of going into the St Andrews branch. So I declined her offer and said I’d call into my own branch on my way home. She wasn’t pleased with me. She thought I thought she was being difficult.

But it wasn’t personal. This has happened before. The last time was a few years ago and it was in my home branch. One of the tellers had stared at the screen and said she couldn’t see my Arrangement and had had to go for help. One of her colleagues had then done something, and she could see my Arrangement after that.

So I was pretty confident that when I got to Glenrothes, all would be well. I was wrong.

Nicola Excellent in Glenrothes (they don’t have second names on their badges but customer ratings instead) could not have been nicer. In fact, she was excellent. ‘The problem is,’ she explained, ‘I’ve checked as well, and I can’t see any evidence of your Arrangement.’

‘How did you see it before?’ I said.

She looked blank.

‘I paid in cheques last week,’ I said. ‘How did you see it then?’

Perhaps I didn’t ask this precise question because I don’t recall that bit being answered, and I now know, after reading Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations, that memory is not a question of accessing a factual store of information so much as a creative act. We did, however, discuss whether the changeover between Bank of Scotland and Lloyds might have had some dire consequences for my Arrangement, though that was not recent.

Worst of all, Nicola confirmed that she couldn’t pay my cheques into the account either, and since it was late Friday afternoon, she wouldn’t be able to follow up with Business Banking until Monday.

Nicola is excellent. She telephoned me on Monday afternoon, with embarrassment in her voice. ‘I’ve spoken to one of the relationship managers,’ she said. ‘They have checked both systems—the current one and the old one—and they can’t see any evidence of an Arrangement having been made.’

I was tense. Were they about to charge me again for a new Arrangement?

‘What we can do,’ she said optimistically, ‘is change the name of your account to HappenStance. It takes a couple of days but I have a form here and—’

‘But will I still be able to pay in cheques made out to Helena Nelson?’

‘Er . . . no, you won’t.’

I explained why that would prove inconvenient when it came to self-assessment at the end of each financial year, not to mention all the BACS payments. Then it occurred to me that poor Nicola was very much in the role of middleman. If I had a Relationship Manager (as all the business banking marketing documents continually reassure me) I should talk to them myself. She gave me the number and I promised to let her know what they said.

So I finished cleaning the bathroom and did a bit of weeding, while I thought precisely what I was going to say.

It took a long time to get through to a Relationship Manager because of switchboard problems. I timed it. Fifteen minutes.

This brings me back to where I started. I told Stuart (relationship managers don’t have second names) that our relationship was foundering, and explained why. He put me on hold (a painful metaphor in relationship terms) while he scanned both systems, the present one and the pre-Lloyds one. When he returned his voice was bleak. ‘I can’t see any evidence of an Arrangement having been made,’ he said.

‘It was made in 2005,’ I said, ‘and since then I’ve been paying cheques made out to HappenStance into this account every week. That’s seven years’ worth of cheques. And up to now the tellers seem to have known there was an Arrangement.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Our system has just changed. Before they wouldn’t have seen it on the screen, but now they do. So they wouldn’t have known HappenStance was the wrong payee.’

‘But surely someone would have checked?’ I said. ‘Could I have been paying in cheques to the wrong name for seven years without someone noticing?’

‘That does seem unlikely,’ he said.

I pictured him with furrowed brow. I didn’t say anything because sometimes silence, in relationship problems, is the best bargaining tool.

‘There is one thing I could still do . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I could contact Blurdeblurgh (some place in England) for the archive, and go through it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Every paper you actually sign is kept, and they go into a box in Blurdeblurgh. I can search through it for evidence of the document you signed to put the Arrangement in place. You did sign something, didn’t you?’

I’ll stop replaying our conversation at this point because life is short and the snow is getting thicker. It transpires that if Stuart can find physical evidence of an Arrangement, he can reinstate it.

If Stuart can’t find evidence of the Arrangement, it’s no longer possible to have business accounts where cheques are payable to anything other than the name of the account. Should that happen, he is going to think carefully about other ways around the conundrum. He muttered about ‘possibility of two separate accounts’ at one point.

It may take a little while to get the box. Inside the box there will be documents dating back to 2002, when the account was first opened. I feel for him.

Stuart has my home number and my mobile number for Relationship updates. I’m thinking of changing my FaceBook status to ‘It’s difficult.’

Yesterday morning I had a circular from Business Banking offering me a preferential loan to expand my business.

GET STEAMING NOW!

There are undoubted benefits to steaming broccoli. However, I prefer stamps.

In the last accounting year, I spent £1998.83 on postage. When I buy stamps now I never spend less than £100 at a time, usually double that. There is far more value in our house in postage stamps than there is in cash (attention, burglars!)

In January 2011, a large-letter stamp (second class) cost 51p. A second-class small letter (or Christmas card) stamp cost 32p. At the time of writing these two stamps cost, respectively, 69p and 50p. My Christmas mailshot of 300 large-letter envelopes this year cost £330.00, except some of them went to Europe and other continents, so it was more like £350.00. This time last year the same process would have cost £70 or £80 less.

Nevertheless, the Royal Mail tells us “stamps are excellent value for money”. That excellent value is further enhanced, if you use them twice (I wrote about this in January 2011 too). I am certain more and more stamped envelopes are arriving unfranked. This means you can steam the stamps off and use them again, or preserve the envelope, put a label over the address, re-address it and re-use. Some people just cut off the piece of paper with the stamp on it, and stick that piece of paper onto another envelope. I’ve seen it done, but it seems blatant.

“Stamps are the simplest and most convenient way of paying for postage” says the Royal Mail on its website. My post office does not agree. They tell me they are urged to use the pre-paid labels wherever possible, rather than using stamps. One can see why. You can’t re-use a pre-paid label. You might be able to steam it off, I guess, but it contains the ID of the post-office from which the mail was sent, and the date. Just occasionally, someone sends me what they think is a stamped, addressed envelope with one of these labels on it. My post office tells me this is not valid. So . . .

Last week, my daughter and I met for a cup of coffee and while we were chatting I involved her in steaming. I got out my collection, made during Christmas and the previous couple of months and we did the watery business and laid the spoils out to dry. We lost a few, but ended with an aggregate value of nearly £60.00. Not bad, eh?

But wait a moment. What about the submissions pile (pictured last week)? I hadn’t even investigated that pile of envelopes, or opened any of them. Out of interest I went through to see how many unfranked stamps were there too. There were 77 submission envelopes in all, nearly all of them A4 in size. Of these, about 25 had been labelled at a post office, and were therefore no-hopers. But that left 52, of which no fewer than 22were unfranked. This is brilliant. Each possesses at least one large letter second (69p) and many have up to £1.50 in stampage. Thank you, poets!

So Scrooge here, who was due for a visit to the post office tomorrow, has been able to delay this for a while. The process of carefully removing the stamps (we used the vegetable steamer, though I have to say, floating them in a dish of boiling water works just as well) is strangely pleasurable and reminds me of picking brambles, mushrooms or wild raspberries. It’s the food-for-free feeling.

On the other hand, I was conditioned when young with a horrible sense of lawfulness. I have always had a suspicion this was illegal. So I have done a bit of research into this and . . . I don’t think it is. The Royal Mail tells me, helpfully, that

“stamps without a specified monetary value are described as Non Value Indicator (NVI) and are typically First and Second class stamps. These do not have an expiry date, therefore can be used regardless of the length of time you’ve had them. Stamps with a monetary value also do not have an expiry date and can be combined to make up the value of postage required.”

Nothing here about not using NVIs twice. It is like cryonics: these stamps are not necessarily dead. They may NEVER expire. I wonder whether a stamp could be used more than twice? This thought reminds that last week I steamed four first class stamps (£2.40) from an envelope where they had been previously affixed on a piece of paper cut from . . .presumably another envelope. I wonder whether there’s an optimum place on the envelope where it’s least likely to be franked? Or even sorting offices that are more advantageous?

Is this the criminal mind at work? Or am I just an innocent at large? An ebay search for ‘unfranked stamps’ comes up with 640 results. You can buy used stamps that have escaped the franking machine. The issue here seems to be that some sellers may slip in a stamp or two with tiny indications they aren’t virginal. You have to watch out for that. Such stamps are naturally cheaper than properly unused stamps from the post office. Nonetheless, in auctions they are often selling for up to ¾ of the original value. Not that cheap, then. And if you steam them yourself, you can get them for free.

So why is the Royal Mail not bothered about this? I can only assume it’s because most people can’t be bothered to get steaming. Or perhaps most people don’t write and send letters any more. Or perhaps the post office labelling trend has prevented the harvesting of unused stamps from packets and large envelopes, where the dividends are greater.

I wonder what will happen when our mail becomes “digitally enhanced”, the next new thing. Digitally enhanced mail will be scannable with a 3G phone (one of which I thankfully do not have. Why ‘thankfully’? Read on). The Royal Mail says very odd things indeed about this project:

“Combining state-of-the-art technology with history and heritage enables people to link from their post to a company’s online content, such as a website, video or Facebook page, in seconds.”

I don’t see where the history and heritage comes in, except as useful alliteration. More to the point, I wonder why one would want to travel to a website while opening envelopes. I must be missing something. Yes, they go on to say:

“People receiving the digitally-enhanced post simply scan the mail with their 3G phone to start an online journey.”

It all makes sense. Of course, you would want to start an online journey as soon as possible. It’s a way of getting out and meeting people. A sort of free travel. All you will need is the free Digital Space App (my partner, who knows nothing whatsoever about computers and doesn’t even like them knows about Apps now. They have entered the vernacular).

This passport to your online journey is what the Royal Mail calls a “solution”. I could launch into a whole other rant about business use of the word “solution”, but I will only remark that the accent here is on solving things in the Sherlock Holmes way, not on dissolving them in a steamy sense.

But actually the word ‘solution’ is doubly appropriate because the solution in question is embedded in “a digital watermark”. This “enables marketers to integrate their print and online materials without the need for barcodes or QR codes.” Digital watermarking is a solution “launched” (please visualise a ship at this point, and some champagne) by something called the Royal Mail’s Door to Door unit, in partnership with Digital Space.

Steaming stamps is an allowable form of resistance: it is the small person’s symbolic action in the face of solution-oriented organisations that say they care. Your New Year’s resolution for 2013 should be to retain suspicion in the face of ubiquitous inroads by digital marketing mentalities. How can you trust a website that says: Got a question? Need some help? We’re here to tell you everything you need to know”?