Wilderspool Causeway

Half a Thought for Hamish

She was talking to me under the radio,
under the Saturday food programme
guests cautioned against innuendo

who went for humour in unlikely combos
while eyes sank lower above the wheel.
If anything can combine, list anything.

In two hundred yards, bear left to turn right.
The Plough is above in the day’s sky
and before us as an implausible roundabout

where the first exit to St Alban’s
requires a turning to the right
on a roundabout within a roundabout

way of saying: ‘You may end up
in Hemel Hempstead against your will today.’

She was talking to me under the radio
joke intonations that dip in the sentence
under the aeroplane fuel of Bedfont.

Are satellite voices mixed with your app
for air traffic, so we don’t know if we’re u-turning
or the approach is clear for a Colnbrook landing?

She was talking to me under the radio
traffic reports we could have predicted.
Driving down South Africa Road today

at ten-to-three is best avoided,
as is Caversham Bridge and Reading
from every direction: the Radio Berkshire

traffic report should just say ‘solid’ or ‘problematic’
so Mandy can relax with a coffee.
She was talking to me under the radio

overlay of mumblings. Were we really
now having to travel up through Barnes
only to be stranded on the Chiswick Eyot?

She was talking to me under the radio
talk on Western Sahara. In the sirocco winds,
body and face covered entirely, wearing sunglasses,

there’s a garbled chat in Moroccan Arabic,
but it’s hard to read the body language.
Beyond disorientated, off the ait

now the sun has lost its midday reference
at the zenith to a dusk of shallow silence,
the voice is one of clear direction

removed from a disordered palimpsest.
‘Follow the Beverley Brook to Mayflower Wetlands’
is as sharp as it gets above the radio background

phenomena of scrambled contexts.
Would you call it fate, now, or the universe,
a divine nudge, random voice or inner compass?

It’s a signal received and another tuned out,
waves modulated one end, receiver adjusted
at this. Now within the radius wheel beams

something extra speaks from up above
in low earth orbit or over the ground
from a random tuning in

to waves beyond our line of sight
amplified from distant radio horizons
and we seem to know the way to go

as voices emerge by Heston, Bagshot,
Hangar Lane, Sunbury and Handy Cross,
The Plough again or Seven Stars,

Ravenscourt Park, and we find a way again
through interference, stranded time on ice
behind our goal in Gretzky’s Zone

and cross-multiplied voices under the radio.

You have the shells that we picked up
from the beaches we walked on
on those rainy summer days
down near Barafundle Bay.

My problem with The National Trust:
I feel my thoughts have been greenwashed.
A ranger’s bland deep gold and green
says to me ‘It’s all been seen.’

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times we were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
on Hastings waterfront.

In the frost you found a bird
on a branch above the brook
and in the yellow of its wings
there was a flight you hadn’t seen.

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised.
A café and a run
at Romsey, Ganger Farm.

In the crematorium grounds
sculpted gardens radiate out
from all those parallel rooms –
is there a ferryman en route?

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
at Boscombe in the sun.

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
on Hastings waterfront.

For Peter Robinson

With all that brickwork, a shed ablaze
and also, through intersecting lines,
the sky at the far horizon,
there’s a gift for the burning bush
observed through rain-smudged glass,
in writings on negotiated walls
or in the voices of students on their way to class.

I once overheard you and Iain Sinclair
among porticoes on London Road.
It was something about the architecture of hospitals.
Do places retain a memory of pain?
In building anew, what do we remove?
Your eyes roam through famous and common land,
find what makes a town distinct

on the margins: gasometers, factories,
an odd inland gull, people on unique trajectories,
made new or strange by weather, politics,
light catching off glass by the Oracle offices
as though fire radiates across the valley
from a business park and cobbled together
nature reserve or gesture by Sonning.

Then the pause, the interregnum:
thoughts of Liverpool and stations in-between,
a life transplanted and re-planted
as a now quite utterly unique breed
in a Thames Valley influenced by the Far East
seen through a lens of past industry
with modern trade on credit seen for what it is

and mainstream media interests
less significant than the cracks on the road,
geese proliferating by Kennetside
road ends, salvaging moments
against the currents of memory
in fleeting cloud glimpses and aphorisms
converging in time and halting,
as you said, but only for now,
in the grounds of abbey ruins.

Margins of Reading – a poem by Alex Saynor for Peter Robinson

(i.m. Gareth Richards)

From the embankment of the Thames
by wind-ruffled waters and still Mildmay oaks
we’d watch and wait, alert to the newness of the day,
for cousins’ single-mindedness and strength in boats

to emerge from a mid morning heat haze
from a stream off the Brocas, before a hopeful search
through indescribable scents in charity shop doorways
for Ben Shermans and deleted Pulp albums

incongruously nestled by Sir Christopher Wren,
suit jackets and glasses that looked like Graham Coxon’s.
I can still hear you through the dictaphone
breathing stories Jarvis could have taken on

and, before Shazam, ‘I think last night…’
was lost in broken fragments, endlessly reconstructed
before Steve Lamacq played ‘Your Ghost’ on the evening session
and we could piece it all together on Maidenhead Road.

On your dad’s bookshelves, seventies brown and mid-orange
framed the bearded head of the ‘forgotten Spurgeon.’
We were doubled up unaccountably,
or perhaps because the book was also forgotten

soon to be unforgotten, reforgotten and unreforgotten.

Now we have our sad allotted nights
in our own configurations of time and light
taking form in the mind’s private dark rooms
to imagine you on stage again in Camden,

on the deserted streets around Caledonian Road
or after trademark fried chicken in Highbury Fields.
Saying prayers on the streets of North London,
it was the individual he loved and not the group.

To a zealot’s ‘Community goes deeper than friendship’:
‘So you’re not a great friend, then.’

And he’d take the foolish things to shame the wise
as with baffling knowledge of Pokemon
tour dates became proxy wars in village halls
as Gareth’s base stats and anti-metagame

switched advantage to the weak or despised.
And he’d remember the praise, but he’d remember the slights
through long Essex days and deep Penzance quiet.
Hurt and joy combined in the eyes
but for all that wonder, he’d forgive every time.

Report on club website – champions!

Written by me, uploaded by Coach Pete

https://www.wefc.club/news/u13-rangers-v-winnersh-barbarians-2703962.html