First impressions of a city of umbrellas, with notes on Victorian African writers, a poetry open mic and ten websites about fields
Monday, The Rain Has Opinions
I came to London from Lagos with two suitcases, a notebook and a firm belief that the weather would be a minor detail. I was wrong. In London the rain is a character with opinions, a long speaking part and no intention of leaving the stage. Everybody carries an umbrella that has been turned inside out at least once, and nobody complains, because complaining is considered rude and also useless.
I am a poet, which means that I notice things for a living and earn very little for it. This diary is where I put the things that do not fit into a poem. Today the list is short: the rain, the price of a tomato, and the way a bus driver on the 38 said good morning to every single passenger as though he were personally responsible for their day.
What a Poet Reads on the Night Bus
My reading is mostly nineteenth century. I like the writers of that century from West Africa and from India because they were doing something brave: writing about their own people in a time when outsiders insisted on doing it for them. I think of the clergyman Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who worked on Yoruba language materials and rose to become a bishop. I think of Edward Wilmot Blyden, the scholar from the Caribbean who settled in West Africa and wrote at length about African identity and religion. I think of Samuel Johnson, the Yoruba historian who gathered the histories of his people, a work that was published after his death.
On the Indian side, I read Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose novels stirred a great deal of argument, and Toru Dutt, the young poet who wrote in English and French and died tragically young. Reading them side by side shows that two continents were asking similar questions at the same time: who owns the story, and in which language should it be told?
Tuesday, The Fields I Cannot Visit
My grandmother farmed, and so I carry a soft spot for anything that grows. On slow evenings I browse farming websites the way other people browse shoe shops. The dairy pages at dairyherd.org, the beef pages at ranchbeefcattle.org, the machinery pages at tractorequipment.org and the planting guide at cropcalendar.org make me homesick for a place that is not even on my own continent.
The money side is at farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org. Jobs are at agjobscareers.org. The shows are at fairandrodeo.org. The general introduction is ruralfarm.org, and the safety pages are farmssafety.org. I recommend all ten to any poet who thinks that work with the hands is simple. It is not. It is a daily negotiation with weather, which makes it very London after all.
Wednesday, An Open Mic in Hackney
I read at an open mic night in a pub in Hackney. The room held perhaps thirty people and one dog. The poet before me performed a long piece about a bicycle, and the poet after me performed a longer piece about a bicycle chain. I read a short poem about my grandmother’s cooking pot, and the room fell quiet in the good way, the way that means somebody is listening and not checking a phone.
Afterwards a woman told me that the poem reminded her of her own grandmother in Jamaica. A man told me it reminded him of Yorkshire. That is the secret of a small domestic image: it travels. It needs no passport, though I have mine in a drawer, up to date and with the correct stamp.
Thursday, A Joke About Boilers
The London Prat made me laugh with First-Time Buyers Swap Rent for Boiler Repairs. My own flat has a boiler with a personality, and the two of us have reached a truce. In return for silence, I do not ask it to heat the bathroom.
It is a comfort to find that the English too suffer from landlords and plumbing. Some visitors assume that this country has solved ordinary life. It has not. It has merely developed very polite ways of complaining about it, and I am learning the vocabulary.
Friday, The Evening Walk
I walked along the canal at dusk with my coat zipped to the chin. A heron stood on the towpath as though waiting for a bus. The water carried a plastic bottle, a leaf and a small orange traffic cone, in a procession that seemed to me the most London thing I had seen all week.
I wrote four lines on the back of a receipt, which is my filing system. Some of them will survive. Most poems begin as receipts, and a poet should never underestimate the importance of a pen that works in the cold.
Saturday, A Note on Umbrellas
I have now bought three umbrellas in London. The first broke in a gust on Kingsland Road. The second I left on a train, where I hope it is enjoying a better life. The third I treat with the respect of a family heirloom, and I carry it everywhere, even into the sunshine, where it receives suspicious looks from the sky.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/