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THE MIDNIGHT FOLK

I didn’t know it was treasure when I first read it, because treasure was everywhere then.

My sister and I grew up in an old house, a school, and there were books all over the place. And we were given more books: an aunt arrived with The Hobbit, and later The Lord of the Rings. Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was published when I was seven, and he lived just a few miles away. I would devour anything with magic in it, prose or poetry, thin or fat. I was going to write books one day.

Adult reading has, by and large, been a disappointment to me. It is always shades of “nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”. The enchantment is never so complete.

Occasionally I go back to see if it’s still there. Often it’s a mistake returning to books you loved as a child. You see all the creaky bits you didn’t see then. For example, I’m reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence at the moment. For some reason, I don’t think I ever read them all back when they came out—I was perhaps onto older fiction by then, or I was already spoiled by Tolkien.

Reading Cooper now, I can slip back into being one of the children: I knew all about that convention from Enid Blyton. These children always have parents who are elsewhere. They have cooks who bake them delicious provender, especially cake.

Cake must have seemed such a wonderful treat after the second world war when sugar was not to be had. It can never be so good in our times of plenty, but the idea of it persists.

I shall never forget the Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. What a glorious sweetmeat that was to seduce Edmund so! (I have never, since that day, actually met a person called Edmund). But what a disappointment Turkish Delight was in real life. Sickly, sticky, it clung to the teeth in a revolting way. I still think it is only edible in small quantities with strong black coffee.

Back to Cooper. Her plotting is weak. Already I want to scream out and warn the children about the perfectly obviously stupid risks they are taking. It’s behind you! But she sets up a good pace. Her novels mingle safe and scary adults in a fabulous way, though it is clear adults are another species altogether. You would never trust a strange adult – that is one lesson clearly learned. Strange adults can be literally murderous.

But I am trying to get to The Midnight Folk, which is a children’s book by John Masefield, once our poet laureate. It was one of my deepest joys and more of a formative influence than I knew at the time. You can get it new as an audio book but not between covers. It’s not even in the Kindle shop. I know this because I’ve been trying to source a nice copy for a child of my acquaintance.

Fortunately, there are lots of second hand copies and some of them have the wonderful Rowland Hilder illustrations. I didn’t know, back then, that my graphic eye was being educated, as well as my seeing ear. I was learning to love Rowland Hilder and Pauline Baynes and Edmund Dulac (another Edmund – where have all the Edmunds gone?).

The Midnight Folk made me want to learn Latin (and later, I did). In the first chapter the protagonist, Kay Harker, is declining the Latin adjective ‘acer’. He gets stuck with the genitive and guesses first ‘Acrostic, acrostic, acrostic’ and then, in desperation, ‘Acrumpet, acrumpet, acrumpet’. I have remembered this all my life, as well as the first names of Kay’s evil governess: Sylvia and Daisy. “Kay had read a poem about Sylvia, and had decided that it was not swains who commended this one, but Mrs Tattle and Mrs Gossip.”

And this is the thing: Masefield’s writing is full of poetic references. I didn’t pick them up consciously at the time, but when I go back now, not only does the whole thing work for me – I can utterly and completely re-inhabit it – but I see where I started to pick up a sense of rhythm and form and delight. Kay’s governess is, of course, a witch. She is scheming and manipulative, but she has a beautiful singing voice. Here she is –

Mrs Pouncer cleared her throat and began:

When the midnight strikes in the belfry dark
And the white goose quakes at the fox’s bark,
We saddle the horse that is hayless, oatless,
Hoofless and pranceless, kickless and coatless,
We canter off for a midnight prowl . . .

Chorus, dear sisters . . .

Whoo-hoo-hoo, says the hook-eared owl.

All the witches put back their heads to sing the chorus:

Whoo-hoo-hoo, says the hook-eared owl.

Kay’s cat, Nibbins, says “I can’t resist this song . . . I never could. It was this song, really, that got me into this way of life.”

And it was the song that got me into a poetry way of life, without even knowing it. After The Midnight Folk, there was The Box of Delights, which I love too, but not quite as much because the whole experience is too obviously a dream. I got The Box of Delights out of Knutsford library. It was part of me reading my way through the entire children’s section. I had learned by then that other books by the same author were often listed inside the volume. I scanned eagerly for more Masefield, then consulted the card index at the library, and found they had a copy of – The Bird of Dawning. What a marvellous title!

But oh the disappointment, equivalent to the let-down of Turkish Delight, when I discovered The Bird of Dawning was in the adults’ section. It wasn’t a children’s book at all – and I got it out and I didn’t like it. No magic. No enchantment. No nothing.

Much, much later, I came to Masefield’s adult books as an adult and liked some of them very well indeed, especially the autobiographical ones. I also learned that the characters link up: Kay Harker, who is the child hero of The Midnight Folk, is a relative of Sard Harker, the eponymous hero of an adult novel published three years previously (the children’s novel is a far better work). I suspect there’s a lot of Masefield himself in Kay Harker.

So everything leads to everything else — and “Ho, says Rollicum Bitem!”

COVERS

The contents of the three new pamphlets are done. Now it’s the covers.

We are currently juggling graphics. Gillian has been drawing plates spinning, rain raining, anchors, ropes, cups and a horse-shoe (I haven’t had the horseshoe yet). I bought what I think is a lovely new typeface for these covers too, and even a set of graphic symbols for Richie McCaffery, the spinning plate man. For Niall Campbell there have been ropes and horse-shoes. For Theresa Muñoz a variety of sad faces, rain, flowers, hearts. Hers may not be finalized quite yet.

You would think it would be relatively quick, and perhaps it would be, were I better at all the arts I practise. But in fact, I make graphics bigger and smaller, fatter and thinner, darker and lighter. I move letters to and fro, decrease spaces, change details, review the back copy, worry endlessly about kerning and tracking, and whether I can do what I want to do and use the right words to describe it.

By and large, I try to stay simple. If you’re not an out-and-out expert, I reckon simple is best.

I find, as I get older, there’s increasing fascination in individual words – never mind sentences. I don’t count sheep any more at night. I lie in bed and crawl inside a word. Almost any word will do. Take ‘posture’. Crawl up the descender and round the bowl of the ‘p’ and think about plosives and perkiness and the way ‘p’ alliterates with unique satisfaction. The police. Then ‘O’, the white space in the middle like a window – you can look through it, you can pop in and out, and to me it’s a white letter. And actually so is ‘s’ which always has a sizzle to it, a secret hiss in the middle of the word, and it’s white in a different way, a more solid way, like tipp-x. ‘t’ is pale brown and you can slide down the curve of the letter and sit in the foot, lean against it and think a while.

And so on. Except there’s syllables to inhabit too, and the sound texture of the word as it goes through and the endless connotations and ramifications. Soon I’m losture in posture. And then I’m asleep.

AND ANOTHER REASON FOR WRITING REVIEWS . . .

How could I NOT have said this last week?

. . . is to learn. Maria Taylor reminded me and of course it’s true. For a poet-reviewer, you study other people’s poems because you want to learn how it’s done (and occasionally what to avoid).

Gerry Cambridge, whose ‘bio’ paragraphs for poets at the end of The Dark Horse are often a little more unpredictable than some, once described me as “a practising poet”. Wonderful description! It’s like being a doctor, in which case my practice is in Fife. But it can also mean, and certainly subsumes, the sense that regular practice is required, or even that one is only a practising poet. Practising for the real thing, that is.

But part of being a Permanently Practising Poet (PPP) is taking part in your own individualised master-classes. By this, I mean carefully and closely reading work you admire. In this way, the master poem demonstrates its art to you. Sometimes, with superb work, you just goggle because it is so good.

Or you go over and over it, and can’t quite work out how it does what it does, although it still does it (my favourite kind of text).

At other times, after reading and re-reading, you see many interesting intricacies in the pattern of shape and sound. It’s like a first-rate fruit cake. You enjoy it more, the slower you nibble, the more you notice the shape and texture, the fine ingredients.

I don’t want to push the fruit cake analogy, or mix my metaphors too far. There is a limit to how much fruit cake you want to nibble. Also a limit to how much fine poetry you can take in at one go. But that’s as it should be.

Mostly reviewers grapple with mixed work. Some great bits, some wobbly bits, some damned interesting bits. And then the analogy is more like panning for gold. When you find what you think might be the RT (Real Thing), you get very excited and pore over it for ages. And if you think it definitely is, you want to share your find. What a pleasure then, to write about it!

If you think it’s FG (Fool’s Gold), you get a bit narky, especially if you’ve spent a very long time standing in a cold stream with your 14” heavy gauge steel pan (although these days, you can get plastic gold pans). It is this emotion that sometimes leads to impatience on the part of reviewers. But they should know better.

And ideally, there is some gold. It is what the PPP is looking for and it is what the PUS (Poet Under Scrutiny) is looking for too. And it is invariably highly interesting and worthy of drawing attention to, because no one bit of Po Go is like any other bit. So the PPP reviewer tries to learn what makes it what it is, tries phenomenally hard, because if we could only learn the secret, we could replicate it. But by and large, all that can be learned (though this is not to be sneezed at) is something about technique, or occasionally something about lack of it. This is only one of the reasons why poetry is amazing.

And sometimes, that which is indubitably gold to one PPP is dross to another, which is also part of the fun. “What is aught but as ’tis valued,” as Troilus says to Hector (of Cressida).

Speaking of which, a number of Cressidas volunteered their services as Sphinx reviewers last week. I am delighted.

WHAT’S THE POINT OF POETRY REVIEWS?

I must think there is one, because I’ve been writing them for well over two decades.

Many writers and many (but not all) publishers are keen to get work reviewed, and as widely as possible, often on the principle (apparently) that all publicity is good publicity.

Certainly when a book is widely reviewed, one has the impression the work is being read and talked about. That can encourage people to join the conversation (which entails reading the book—hurrah!).

Poetry books are meant to be read, are they not? What else are they for? And having been read, there is necessarily a response.

There are many ways of communicating that response, though. The friends and acquaintances of the poet can talk to the author, send her charming letters, post appreciative notes on her FaceBook wall.

Those who don’t know the poet personally can talk to each other, mutter at reading groups, confer in conferences, natter at chatterfests.

But poetry is a difficult art. It demands (and often rewards) close reading and re-reading. It is literature. It requires a response in kind.

A poetry review offers that response, in writing, and does this artfully. A well-written response to a book of poems can be, in itself, a minor art form. It is not an easy thing to write, not easy to articulate the effect some poems have had. Countless factors come into it, not least a haunting feeling of inadequacy—perhaps because of not understanding the poems, or not picking up the references, or not knowing how to make sense of the levels of form and meaning. Sometimes a reviewer has to put the need to ‘make sense’ to one side, to read in ways she has never previously considered. As I said, poetry is a difficult art.

Nevertheless, some collections of poems stimulate wonderful responses. I have ordered many a book after reading a review—not because the review was strongly approving but because I wanted to see for myself what the poems were doing.

Most reviews of poetry are written by poets. I don’t believe only poets can write poetry reviews but I do think anyone practising this strange art (poetry, no less) should be thinking intelligently not only about what they themselves are doing in the small hours but also what their peers are up to—and I think they should attempt to articulate some of that.

Ah but . . . reviews can lead to clashes and consternation, especially in the age of instant online interaction. In terms of roles, the reviewer, inside her small review page, can say precisely what she wants. The poet cannot answer back. The reviewer is, therefore, in a position of apparent power.

If it is a position of power, it is a vulnerable one. Once a review is published, the author of that review really has stuck her neck out. She has put her mouth where the melée is. No worries if the response to the poems is broadly consistent with what others are saying (there is strength in numbers, and this may help explain the consistency often established in reviews of prize-winning volumes). If, however, the response in the review is radically different from the common crowd, it can be the reviewer who looks silly. Or foolishly brave.

Sometimes poets are upset by reviews. Critical comments about their work feel personal—of course they do. Sometimes they sound personal too (I said reviews can be a minor art form, but they can also be a minor disaster) and once published, it is too late. The neck is out there. The poet is upset. The tweets are twittering.

Many actors choose not to read reviews of plays. Poets can do the same. Or—they can inhabit the attire they have chosen for themselves—words. Words are a means of communication. Communication invites a response. Indeed, without that response, the communication hasn’t occurred.

So writing reviews, organizing reviews, publishing reviews—this is the other side of the process—a necessary and under-appreciated side. It could do with a bit more nurturing (who would pay for an Arvon course on review writing?) but perhaps the dedication creates its own school of honour.

Reviewer wanted. No remuneration (for the most part), no kudos, no ‘how to’ books, no tuition, no annual dinner. Opportunities to misquote, misread, make mistakes and enemies. Apply in writing, enclosing CV, to. . . .

Applicants are still far more likely to be male than female, though (in my Sphinx experience) female reviewers are more likely to return reviews on time and far less likely to abscond. What does that say about us?

[More female reviewers are needed for the next Sphinx review round, which is about to commence. High-risk sports, they say, are increasingly popular. Contact nell@happenstancepress.com if you feel like sticking your neck out.]

DRINKING THE MOON

Some aspects of HappenStance are patient drudgery.

That’s the checking and checking and checking that everything has been done, and finding it hasn’t, and checking again. And getting details in the website and details on the back cover and details to Nielsen and contracts to poets and details on flyers and copyright copies to libraries. Pamphlets in packets and stamps on the envelopes. Parcels to post office. More toner for printer, more paper for printing, more poems to process, more process to pickle. Orders from website, orders through letter box. Weighing the packets, keeping accounts, doing correspondence through letter and email and writing the blog. What a slog.

But actually, it isn’t. This week I’ve been typesetting first drafts of the three new pamphlets. This is a magical process, and a joy. And when you speak to the poets themselves, live and in person, it is an overwhelming privilege and pleasure to be involved in this magical thing we make out of language, this poetry thing. Also it is fun.

Here is a foretaste, a little of each. Richie McCaffery’s pamphlet is called Spinning Plates and here is the second part of ‘Ash’:

…..There is as much ash
…..in a smoked tab as there is
…..in a cremated finger.

…..The finger in question
…..was nicotine stained
…..and prone to point and jab.

…..God had a good long drag
…..on that one, then stubbed
…..it out in a rented ossuary.

That one is terse indeed. In other places he is lyrical, headstrong, windswept. Richie is a great man for words: loves them, soaks them up, collects them in his head like beautiful marbles—and then—watch them roll!

Theresa Muñoz writes simply. Great white spaces open out around her words and phrases, and she crosses continents effortlessly. Born in Canada to parents who hailed from two different countries, her mental location permanently traverses other homes, other countries. Here’s a bit from ‘Glasgow, December’:

…..Something to do with the change
…..in season, something about the early dark
…..and watching people stroll
…..up the flood-lit walk

…..takes me to that morning
…..at home, warm waking
…..in a white-frame house
…..with creaky doors and high windows
…..far from here, far from the roar

…..of buses braking hard in turn
…..and police sirens going off helplessly
…..in back lanes and the hum
…..of cheery rough voices
…..in the crowd
…..getting louder.

And there’s Niall Campbell (pronounced like kneel, not the river Nile), who was born on the Hebridean Island of Uist. Niall’s poems are richly sensuous. In Grez, in France, it “smells impossibly of rain: and “the bowed sky is heavy / with the deep-song of that purple colour”. In ‘Thirst’, the tap water is “almost glacial, wintered, sweetened / by the clear honey of its coldness”. And human senses pick up something not quite of this earth. Here is a bit from ‘On Eriskay’ (also a Hebridean island):

…..What a way to be seen out: confused
…..among the pearlwort and the fallow.
…..Her beach songs, like the recalled taste
…..of bucket milk, inched from her tongue.
…..Dusk grew behind the house. I watched
…..her drink the moon from a moon-filled trough.

That’s what I’ve been doing this week — drinking the moon from a moon-filled trough. Amazing.

CHOCOLATE

I dreamed about chocolate poems on Friday night.

Obviously this is because of assembling poems on that very theme, something on my mind just now. I eat chocolate too, of course, most days. I don’t just dream about it. We’re very hands-on, here at HappenStance.

I’m pleased to say Chapter Six went out to subscribers last week and, as a result, so many orders came back in that I’ve spent the last two days putting things in envelopes.

I am out of stock of Gerry Cambridge’s book but more will arrive imminently. Also being out of stock is great news.

The other happy effect of the sending out of Chapter Six, with its reminder about the chocolate anthology, was a small influx of choc-lit. I have some lovely things and the publication is shaping up nicely.

One or two people have mentioned spreading the word about the search for chocolate poems. The word doesn’t need to be spread. This opportunity, both milk and dark, is only for subscribers. But if you’re reading this and you’re not one, you could be. . . .

I am currently starting work on three new pamphlets. These are by Niall Campbell, Richie McCaffery and Theresa Munoz, all of whom are reading at a showcase event as part of StAnza in March. Watch this space.

CHAPTER AND VERSE

There is a point, in the middle of buying 400 first class stamps at 46 pence each, that you wonder . . . why.

There are answers of course. The stamps are for posting out the annual chapter of the HappenStance Story, which goes to HappenStance subscribers every year as part of the intricate marketing strategy I’ve set myself. As a strategy it is insane, of course. But then anyone who sets out to purvey, to provide, to peddle poetry has to be peculiar.

HappenStance subscribers currently pay £7.50 per year (more if overseas, but really this scheme only works for people in the UK or possibly Europe) and for that I send them one pamphlet of their choice, a couple of mailshots with flyers and new PoemCards during the year, and the annual Chapter. I lose on this, unless they also purchase a couple of things during the year.

The point of the Chapter is to give a bit of the backstory, so the subscribers feel ‘involved’. They are literally involved, of course, because I rely on 20-30 of them purchasing each publication, and by and large they do. (At the moment there are about 220 subscribers altogether.)

Originally I spoke about the publications one by one in the annual Chapter: a bit about the process behind each. Now there are too many publications to do that. Besides the format had got too predictable. So now there is also stuff about the mistakes I have made during the year, the business of poetry, the Sphinx stuff, the money side — that sort of thing. I want it to tell people the things you don’t usually get to know (though there are lots of things, like most publishers, I don’t tell anybody). Quite a few subscribers tell me they enjoy reading it – and they continue to subscribe, so I tend to believe them. For poets who want to get work published, either through me or another small press publisher, it’s educative – I hope.

Recently I got Krax 48 from Andy Robson, who writes to me from time to time, and to whom I quite often send pamphlets. He did not love Chapter Five of The HappenStance Story.

I admire Andy. He is a magazine editor of the old style, cranky and self-driven, and his magazine has been going since 1971. His publication is old style too. Each poem has the title in capitals, then the poem, then the name of the author slightly to the right. All of this is in a bold serif font: probably Times Roman. It is saddle stitched (two staples in the middle) in traditional chapbook style and far too packed with pages to lie flat. It has no page numbers. There are some illustrations, all monochrome, some funny line drawings, all credited, and some black and white photos which may be of the authors of some of the poems.

You’ll find very little information about Krax in this ethersphere (it is only issued once each year). I interviewed him about the magazine in Sphinx 2008 and this is what he said about modern methods:

Nothing has changed since the early days. Production is on a tighter-than-tight budget. We use the equipment we have. Half the fun is trying to imitate time-consuming software effects with scissors, paste and some photocopied image off the back of an envelope. I don’t have a computer, and if I had, then I wouldn’t have time to use it. . . .

I think he may have a computer now, though he still sends hand-written letters, all of which I keep. In the middle of KRAX, there are several pages of reviews presumably by the editor, separately stapled. These are in tiny typeface – probably about an 8, but in a sans-serif, maybe Arial, and they’re separated into sections: Fishing for Freebies, Zine it All Before, To Frisbee or Not To. . . ?, Chat an’ Chew, Chew, Chew the Fat, Homeward Trails. I think Andy comments on everything anybody sends him.

I send him stuff from time to time, though his responses are never what I expect. He praises some things I don’t expect him to like, cordially dislikes things I think he might take to, and is completely consistent in his responses. That is to say: he says precisely what he thinks, without (as they say) fear or favour. I admire this, even when it makes me squirm.

A lot of the time I don’t pass on his comments to authors because they might find them painful. Many of them are, of course, warm comments but that sometimes worries me too. I was cheered that he noticed and liked Alan Dixon’s cover for the Ruth Pitter Selected, for example, and remarked it was the same Alan Dixon who had featured in Smoke. But his descriptive adjective for Ruth’s writing was “jolly”. Jolly? In the middle of Andy’s reviews, I have marked my place with a shopping list that reads ‘Cherries, semolina, parsnips, washing up liquid, butter’. This does somehow reflect the pages I was reading.

Which brings me to the washing up liquid. Andy is warmly complimentary about the final issue of Sphinx but oh dear, when he comes to the HappenStance Story Chapter 5, it won’t wash:

Clearly publishers will find it interesting and be bemused by the priorities and be green with envy at some of the material acquired. Not of much interest to a casual browser, sadly. One for the trade.

But the HappenStance Story doesn’t go to publishers! It’s written mainly for subscribers and they aren’t publishers (with the occasional exception). They’re mainly poets or folk interested in small press ventures. Some of them are actually poetry readers. But Andy’s comment does at least make me think hard. I think Chapter Seven, if there is one, may need to change format. Get different. And it would be useful to have back chapters on the web as downloads.

In reviewing Laurna Robertson’s Sampler, which I’m glad to say he likes, Andy remarks that the Samplers seem to be “a quirk of the press . . . possibly a left-over set from a collection or even surplus submissions for the HappenStance Poetry Cards (a rare breed only obtained on subscription as a perk for collectors). Or simply just pieces that don’t seem to fit with anything else.”

Help! The Samplers aren’t left-overs! They’re brief collections – a taste of the poet’s work. Martin Parker’s Sampler preceded a pamphlet. Eleanor Livingstone’s and Andrew Philip’s came after their first pamphlet: just enough poems for a twenty-minute reading. And the PoemCards, of course, can be had by anybody from the website or by post, although it’s true subscribers get one free with every order.

I must have been mulling this matter for the last ten days or so because now it has got out in this blog. I assume everybody knows what I do and why and how, simply because I’ve written it several times somewhere or other. But these days I am beginning to forget what I’ve already said and where.

Having said all this, I have just saved the original Krax interview as a pdf and it will go onto the new Sphinx site imminently. I recommend Krax although, as Andy tells me in his letter, it has no Scots poets in it this issue – there are plenty of Americans (their state of origin is mentioned) and presumably English and Welsh, perhaps even Irish – why are the Scots not sending?

Krax is not all light verse but the emphasis is often on light, and some of the light pieces in it are well worth their salt. It’s fun to read, and different. It doesn’t compromise. Some poems are by names you know (K V Skene, Christopher James, Alan Dent, Richard Bonington, Richard Titman). Others are names wholly new to me, but I enjoyed meeting their poems. There’s prose too. In this issue a dramatic scene in Athens General Hospital Emergency Room during the 2005 Olympic Games (Roger Freed, Colorado) and a story by S M Bates ‘The Case of the Sticky Wellingtons’. No editorial. I can’t even find the name of the editor in the publication.

Go on – send Andy Robson a fiver for at least one issue. This publication has been appearing for the last 40 years. Help make it 50!

And now I’m back to posting out Chapter Six, like it or lump it! Watch out!

KRAX magazine, c/o 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds LS12 4RR, Yorkshire U.K Editor: Andy Robson: £4.50 ($9) each. Remittances to A. Robson

HARD FROST AND ANDREW YOUNG

I looked out of the window this morning and thought of Andrew Young.

I looked out of the window this morning and thought of Andrew Young.

I had Young’s poem ‘Hard Frost’ off by heart when I was fifteen. Now only the first line sticks in my head, and that’s the line that came to mind as I surveyed the white roofs of houses and sheds, the powdery neatness of the privet hedges— : ‘Frost called to water, Halt!’

When I learned this poem, I didn’t know Young was still alive. I thought all poets were dead. According to the Wikipedia page I’ve linked to above, he got the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1952, the year before I was born. Since 1952 was the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign (60^th anniversary of her coronation next year), he must have been the first poet to get the Queen’s medal. It existed before that – since 1933, in fact – but it was just The Gold Medal in those days, not The Queen’s. Is this interesting? Probably not.

Young was an interesting man, though. He was a Scottish poet-clergyman who started off as a died-in-the-wool Georgian, writing as A J Young. Later he turned himself into ‘Andrew Young’ (1933) when he achieved what he considered his mature style: by this time he was 50. (Ruth Pitter did something a little similar, though she was in her thirties when she abandoned her earlier works).

Young is a nature poet. He wrote an enormous number of poems and I confess I only know a few of them. I love ‘The Stockdoves’, with its magnificent half-rhyming of ‘over’ and ‘lover’ at the end.

Matthias Richter has an interesting website about him and Carcanet has a Selected, which I recommend.

Meanwhile, here is ‘Hard Frost’ (because it is, today, in Scotland, just that, though not such a deep frost or as cold a winter as when Young wrote this.)

…….Frost called to water Halt!
…….And crusted the moist snow with sparkling salt;
…….Brooks, their own bridges, stop,
…….And icicles in long stalactites drop,
…….And tench in water-holes
…....Lurk under gluey glass like fish in bowls.

…….In the hard-rutted lane
…….At every footstep breaks a brittle pane,
…….And tinkling trees ice-bound,
…….Changed into weeping-willows, sweep the ground;
…….Dead boughs take root in ponds
…….And ferns on windows shoot their ghostly fronds.

…….But vainly the fierce frost
…….Interns poor fish, ranks trees in an armed host,
…….Hangs daggers from house-eaves
…….And on the windows ferny ambush weaves;
…….In the long war grown warmer
…….The sun will strike him dead and strip his armour.

Frosty morning in Glenrothes

HAPPY NEW FRAUD!

So off I trotted to the ATM machine to confront reality.

It’s always worse after Hogmanay than you think. You buy extra things at the last moment—petrol and unnecessary whisky and even clothes sometimes in the sales—and the banks cease doing anything for days so the transactions are slow going through.

Still, the mini-statement did give me a wee shock. The balance was MUCH lower than I expected, though the last few transactions were for ordinary looking amounts, the sort of amounts I probably spent last week on food and fuel and so on. Besides, I’ve done this before—spent far more than I really thought I had around Christmas, and there was just about enough left to get me through till the end of January.

It’s only money, I said to myself, mentally slapping myself for the last Amazon purchase the night before. It’s so easy to buy stuff with ‘one click’/ I knew I’d one-clicked twice in the last couple of days. Oh well. . . .

So I didn’t check online till the next day. Blockbuster online? Three payments? that didn’t sound like me. Play.com? Three payments of nearly £45.00 each? Never heard of them. I thought it was a gambling site, but it’s not. Play.com sell everything.

I phoned the bank. The last time this happened to me was four or five years ago and I think it was my Master Card, not my debit account, that was somehow fleeced. But that time it was only one payment to a Jewish Dating Agency in the States, which I noticed when the statement arrived. On that occasion, the fraud people asked me to contact the dating agency to see whether an error could have occurred. I phoned them and they quickly agreed it was a fraud and cancelled my date (or whatever I had bought) and refunded the money. Meanwhile, the bank cancelled the card.

This time the fraud lady from the bank cheerfully announced she was satisfied these transactions were indeed fraudulent. What about the one to Curry’s online? she said.

Curry’s online? I’d never even noticed the one for £239.98. No, I said. I haven’t bought anything from Curry’s.

My debit card was cancelled. Another one will arrive in due course. Meanwhile, the total spent in my name would be refunded on Monday (£492.90!)

But wait a moment, I said. What about this £239.98 in Curry’s? That must be something specific, like a fridge or something. Can’t we track who ordered it and where it went?

We don’t do that, she said. It was probably something electronic, an Ipad or something like that.

I could hear a whole room of Bank fraud people muttering in the background behind her, all of them dealing with fraud reports from bank accounts like mine. Why not? I said.

You are covered, she reassured me, and she told me again how the money would go back into my account on Monday. All I would have to do was sign a very important form to confirm the purchases had been fraudulently made.

Was there anything I could have done differently, anything that might have prevented this happening? I asked her. Was it my Amazon online purchase that got my details hacked into?

Probably not, she said. Amazon is pretty secure, and so are the other online sites you purchase from.

So how did they get my card details? I said. What about all this Bank of Scotland secure business?

I don’t know, she said. It happens. You should be very careful when standing at an ATM. Or they could have got your card details through a shop purchase, something like that.

I thought about all this later. No-one could get the full card details or the security digits on the back from standing behind you at an ATM. At an ATM the thing you have to protect is your pin number. So that didn’t make sense. Someone certainly could pick up these details from a shop purchase—and I had bought a cheap mobile phone in Asda the day before this began. But the Asda purchase didn’t require the three numbers on the back of the card. For my weekly groceries I’m very old-fashioned and I use cash.

I went to the Curry’s website later and read the bit about shopping with safety and protecting credit card details and personal information on line. Everything, allegedly, goes through the Verified by Visa scheme, which indeed frequently annoys me when buying online.

However, during my last two or three online purchases, I have noticed that when the Verified by Visa page pops up, I haven’t had to enter my password details. The page has disappeared again while I’ve been busy looking up the password, and so the sale has gone through. I thought they must have changed the system to make it less intrusive. But perhaps not. What could someone do to intercept Verified by Visa? And would the bank fraud people even be interested, when it would appear their basic job is to determine whether or not a customer is genuine in reporting a theft?

I telephoned Currys and asked them whether they could find out what someone had fraudulently purchased in my name for £239.98 on January 4^th.

Certainly, the man said. Can you give me the transaction number?

No, I said. I didn’t buy the thing. It was a fraud. (I had already explained this).

Well, we would need that, he said.

Well, I’m reporting the theft, I said. Are you interested in fraudulent transactions at your shop?

We certainly are, he said. It will be reported to the police.

But the bank said they don’t do that, I said.

Well, I’m very SURPRISED to hear that, said the chap on the phone.

It wasn’t a profitable conversation. If he had been able to consult his database for what was bought by one H L Beaton using my bank card details on or around the 4^th of January, I would have reported the details to the police. Who probably wouldn’t have been very interested either.

So far as I can see, the theft is probably accomplished by a big organization using sophisticated technology, not an ordinary person in Glenrothes buying six computer games and a new fridge. But it still seems unnerving to me that this can happen, that I can report it the very next day, and that there doesn’t seem to be a way of tracking back what was purchased by whom and where those purchases went.

It’s not surprising this puts people off buying things online, including from my HappenStance shop. Having said this, generally online purchases are as safe as any others, if not safer. At least you can’t leave your card behind when you buy online. And our HappenStance shop security procedures are carefully set up (in fact, what most often puts people off buying online is these very procedures).

Interestingly, on the CIFAS site (the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service), you are advised not to “publish your address, phone numbers, emails, date of birth, place of birth, passport or driving licence numbers anywhere. This includes any sensitive information on friends’ social networking walls.”

Considering how many FB ‘friends’ each week have birthdays flagged on my updates, that message is clearly not taken seriously.

No use getting neurotic about these things, of course. Perhaps it’ll never happen again. I am quite careful about passwords because I heard a programme about it on the radio: you need long passwords if you don’t want them easily de-crypted, mixtures of upper and lower case, numbers and symbols. So that’s what I do. This week, there was a marvelous Savage Chicken cartoon about this. Doug Savage rules!

Now it’s back to writing Chapter Six of The HappenStance Story which is very nearly done. It involves no theft, fraud or double dealing of any kind. Watch the post, subscribers! It will be coming your way before the end of January.

RESOLUTIONS

Okay, the year is new. Let’s get resolute.

I like the word resolution. I’ve always liked it. I like the connections (actually but also in my head) with solving and dissolving, and the fact it rhymes with revolution. Are poets who always write in free verse less aware of rhymes, I wonder? They follow me round like persistent ghosts. (The rhymes, not the poets.)

I also like resolute and dissolute. And involute, come to that. And convolute.

But resolute most. It makes me think of myself as firm-minded, a person able to decide clearly about what is a poem and what is not. I wish I were that person.

Well, I am nearly that person today. Today I am resolute and here are the resolutions:

Get out more. Fresh air and people.
Tell the people I love I love them (another died three days ago).
Agree to take on only such tasks as I can manage.
Complete Chapter Six of The HappenStance Story.
Read more prose. (I could have said ‘read less poetry’ but see below.)
Make only positive resolutions.
Be more grateful for stuff, starting with Merrriam Webster’s Word of the Day, which so frequently enhances my life. It stops me from just using words and reminds me to be amazed by them. Today’s word was incommunicado, which made its way magnificently via Spanish into English. The rhythm of that word is astonishingly good.

And check out MW on resolution. You thought resolutions were a simple matter? Nope. It even applies to pixels. Which means I can end with a photo, sent today by Ron King from Morayshire, where there is at least a view of snow. Get out more. Fresh air and people. Going now.

Picture of snow on the hills, Morayshire