By: Blonde One
Last night I went to the magnificent Great Hall at the Dartington Estate to listen to a modern day, self confessed troubadour. As you know I like literature in general, but I especially like poetry and I am particularly fond of the poet Simon Armitage. If you don’t know his work I recommend looking him up. He has recently walked a large section of the South West Coast Path whilst ‘singing for his supper’ each night. After every 10 miles or so he would spend the night with a wiling host who in exchange would receive a reading from his poetry collection. Armitage has written a book of anecdotes and poetry based on his trip and he was at Dartington to talk to a small audience about his travels. He claimed that he wrote or recited a word for every step he took and treated the audience to some of those words from his book Walking Away. He talked of many of the quirky things that he discovered and conducted a survey along the way of the ‘back bedroom’. He described most of them as being full of precious things from a life gone by. I think that’s true of my spare bedroom too. Apart from the duffel bag in various states of pack/unpack it contains memories in abundance of Little Miss Blonde’s childhood, gone but not forgotten family members and all manor of trinkets that I can’t bear to throw out.
I think Blonde Two and I should one day do a similar walk and ask the lovely locals to let us sleep in their back bedrooms in exchange for a reading from the Blonde canon. What would we find I wonder?
Back in the old days, when I could be bothered with the technology, I recorded one or two of my own sonnets and posted the recordings on what was then Works Well (Tone Deaf’s predecessor). After a little while I gave up, the problem being that I believed – and continue to believe – that I would never hear anything enlightened, witty, charming or instructive delivered in a West Riding accent. Simon Armitage, born a mere stone’s throw from my own home town, suffers from the same ailment and appears to have overcome it, although I have a struggle during the first two or three lines of any poem he recites. I am trying to imagine him calling in here (in Hereford) for a night’s lodging and paying for it in the way you outline. There’d be a severe risk that one or the other of us would think we were being parodied. I think I’d resort to a couple bottles of red from the south Rhone.
You and Blonde Two never refer to your accents which causes me to assume both are toffee-nosed. If so it’s clear you won’t know what on earth I’m talking about.
Roderick, I have no idea what you’re talking about!!!