Rain and Ruins and Reigning (by sarah)

Found Poems of the Concrete - The Priory

The city landscape is multifaceted and layered, within this city, the one I chose as home - there is industrial wealth rotting from the victorian glory and areas of decay a few decades in the making - fixed with memories and longings and a hope that transcends it all making it ripe for a rebirth - Tudor houses stand in grandeur around 1920's colour and glaze - we choose which story to tell - there are new glass and glitz buildings calling to the business minds and all of it is beautiful overlapped and intwined.

There are the very rocks beneath - housing stories far older than this city - than this kingdom - than this land itself - within the rocks - stories telling of different landscapes. And then there is the religious blanket that settles on this region and gave it life and industry in the middle England of old. There is the Priory and the tales that it's remains have to tell.

St Oswald's.

Golden stone arches whispering of times long forgotten and a majesty of realms, calling for exploration but first there is the semi silhouette of something more modern and yet still older than many countries can claim - a building that stands sentinel as if guarding the religiocity of the region - though weather it practices the same as the foundations as they would suggest it was something else. An evolution of Faith? A changing and growing with the times and peoples and rotation of the Earth around the Sun. It is none the less a church and is full of the patience of ages with a name of mother and of guardianship St Mary's.

The sky is a leadened dead weight that sucks the colour and definition from this built and ancient landscape, ice waters threaten but there is no storm in the roll and twist of those clouds - though there is a strange glare of light that hurts the eyes if focus is attempted. The clouds seem to phase out through the stone windows as if this world and that observed world are not quiet in alinement reminding you of tricks for meditation of doors to December and cats eating themselves and strange impossibilities that contort the mind until they do indeed become possible and you think of travel between such worlds and laugh at the riduclious idea and move on.

Or rather back, stepping further and further away from the stones and the window so that more of the decaying structure is visible as for a moment it was as if the halls had become whole once more and the collapse of centuries had fallen away. The wind whispers songs that bounce of the stones and get lost in the cracks and weathering. Little ideas are hiding in the chinks - maybe one day they will be found and listened too but not this day because you are too caught up in the stone work itself, and how it forms around the windows, and how the windows are indeed more of an absence of a thing than the thing itself.

And they mark that this was once a room, once a living breathing space, where people where and thought and become nothing but bones and memories and shadows and shades that may still lurk in the cracks and dips of this ruin. Little fragments of the before can be found when you look hard enough - and up close to these old old stones that sing of the multifarious lives that they have lived, hallowed halls of Warrior Queens and monks sending the hopes of a people to the sky god and always the gentle hum of the city around you to remind you of the place in time that these relics now inhabit. Not everything is stone, more perishable things hide in plan sight.

Time seemingly flows around this place, condensing and stretching at odd intervals and you stand in the middle observing yet another window and imagining the glory of the ground it would have stared out upon and the tapestries and drapes and trappings of various ages seem to drift across your sight, a reminder of harsh climates and cold stone walls - churning memories of the places you have lived before of brick and stone and wood and block and how each of these domiciles felt. Of those that leached heat and those that retained it. Even the canvas you slept under in the garden as a child, a surplus of the second world war so heavy and thick, or thin metal that shifts and quakes in the driving rain so loud it becomes the mind. People have been living their lives for a long time in many ways and at many levels of comfort, but these halls would unlikely have allowed you to become old. The thought is a shudder of sensation as if ice has been packed into your bones and is still expanding pushing out the marrow and splitting the core of you.

And though you can feel the tragedies of the human condition piling up through the fabric of histories you feel the tug and the pull to investigate further - to fall down the rabbit whole of archaic intrigue and to explore these words that are at once the same as our own and so completely alien that they burn the minds eye if left unfiltered. Blood or no blood, and the mer slight possibility of holy relics - of a person fragmented and normally falsified - can do little to damp your curiosity and besides someone told you it was built wrong to house such things - there is an elegance here that draws you ever onward into it.

A storm churns reminding you of legends older than the building though not older than the cut blocks that make it up and certainly not older than the stone that was quarried from dead seas that hide in Cotswold Hills. But still the cycle of stories push at you, as if trying to summon thick mists like dragons breath to hide the roads and red bricked buildings that surround.

Happy Day (by sarah)

Yesterday was pretty varied - I went to Laptop Friday Gloucester which is a local business networking/co-working etc... thingy, they were setting up a great creative business workshop run by Louise Jenner, I made price tags out of colouring in sheets for my arty stuff and put it out on display in Cookes, Coffee & Curios including Wiggly Pets 🙂 I took photos of yet more funky architectural features I found in Gloucester including the guano crying Hermes from the post office and the lovely concrete moulding and mosaic stuff behind Sainsburys, I then worked on some illustrations (sorry can't share they aren't for my own stuff so aren't mine to share!) and went to find/look at books - in the Medieval times books used to be so precious that they were chained down - the book I wanted to look at about medieval stuff is out of print... so was metaphorically chained down and I was very lucky to get a look at it 🙂 Thanks to my friend 🙂 - also the books I requested had come through so I now have a little light reading to do! Then it was kids off to drama and Al making daal soup for me whilst I sorted out all the bits for my stained glass kids workshop idea (spoiler - it doesn't involve glass but did involve going to Office Outlet) <3

Brexit Breaking (by sarah)

Brexit breaking, where was the plan?
If we were going to leave it had to be quick and decisive
now we're in a muddle of no mans land -
sinking in economic quick sand.
Companies slinking or merely clinging,
some just blinking out of existence

The economic news of the last few weeks has not been brilliant - with companies in administration and large ones at that - caused by the weakness of the pound since Brexit and yeah they've blamed the pound not Brexit and the idea of Brexit itself is not the issue - the issue is that this country had no plan, and has stalled and fannied about and that indecision is causing harm. Financial stuff hates uncertainty and that is exactly what we have.

Now the third largest company is relocating to Rotterdam after 100 years in London and I can only see more of this happening until we have nothing. So I wrote a poem - it didn't start out as a poem - it was a Facebook update to accompany this mornings news but it became a poem.

Ruins and Rain (by sarah)

As part of Mothers Day Alaric took me for a walk around the ruins of St Oswald's Priory here in Gloucester - I realised that I had not explored it properly and he decided that that needed to change - in general I like exploring old buildings and plan to do it a bit more this year including more Cuddly Histories as well as the science. This was only part of our walk which also included the industrial run down bits but I've separated them out for now. These photos are not meant to be academic though I really do want to study them more as being a geologist I kind of want to know the full story of each and every stone!

If you want to know more about the history then go here (actually the lovely website I was going to link to seems to have disappeared so I will try and do a write up on the blog at some point), also this year is really important for the Priory and there are going to be all sorts of things happening in and around it this summer due to one of the founders Aethelflaed!

Serious check this woman out - warrior queen and all sorts!

Now to the photos - I am putting them up here as I know several people want to use them for art projects (me included), you are welcome to use them to draw from - if you use the actual photos this is fine for non profit works (though please still credit me) but could you please talk to me for anything else. 🙂

You can see larger version of the photos by just clicking on them - there will also be a prose-poem type thing at some point but for now this is the photo dump for us artists to be getting on with 🙂

p.s. it kept raining hence the title!

Form more images to draw from you can look through the archive on this blog or check out some of the stuff on my photo and images blog, or look at my Flickr.

A Struggle A Head (by sarah)

Last night we had our worst parents evening yet... it was pretty much as we expected. Mary is lovely, bright, mischievous and struggling except in maths. She loves outdoor learning and has brilliant comprehension levels when things are read out to her.

The school have her as a focus kid for reading but due to cut backs and things they no longer have the teaching assistants and can't give her anymore without depriving the other kids. We are reading with her at home though I don't think the school actually believes that. We've had to stop Jean pointing out what books she was reading at the same age - our not so small little bookworm is struggling with just how different her sister is to her.

Mary also throws her books at me and gets in a rage and informs me that she has no homework and hides her spelling sheets.

She is 7 yrs old and the gap between her and her peers is starting to widen - this is where the self confidence drop could happen and it has taken us ages to get her settled in school because she is a high energy bouncy child. Also stupid bloody SATS is coming and the emphasis on exams and results and testing testing testing is there and it makes me so angry (with the system not the school).

Mary is often giving up her playtime to read - she gets distressed when I tell her at home that she should play in the garden why it is light before homework because she feels the pressure of it but again she is miss bounce so she needs to get ride of all that physical fizz in order to sit and focus. Neither me nor the teacher think giving up playtime is good as it's soul destroying - I was that child sat inside yearning to play.

I look at some of her work and I can't work out what is needed - I don't know what an imperative is... I have a degree from one of the best universities in THE WORLD. Does she really need to know that now? Wouldn't just getting her writing clearly and coherently be best? The curriculum is stifling.

Again the teacher suggested we do bedtime reading with her were we read to her but we already do that - or rather Al does that - due to the head injury I couldn't and so I tend to tell her stories. It's not every night because sometimes it gets too late but it is most nights.

I don't know how to help - she won't sit down to do the booklets like Jean did, she is not a bookworm though she is thirsty for knowledge though she has come to like books in a way that she hasn't before recently - I set up the indoor "fire circle" for stories and had some spoken/improvised and some read out stories over Christmas and we go to the library once a month to fortnightly where she spends ages with the picture books (yes the ones for toddlers). Sometimes she reads them to us, sometimes she makes stories up from the pictures - I was still doing this at 10 yrs of age - I couldn't read properly until I was 12 and already in secondary school and the social implications of that are... not nice.

But I am at a loss as to what to do? Teacher friends and family - suggests are appreciated.

Her teacher suggested that we get up earlier and doo reading then - but we are a) not morning people any of us and b) we already get up at 6 and Al is often struggling with tiredness so to be honest I think earlier mornings would probably make it unsafe for him to drive - Mary often has to have a run around before school and goes to breakfast club not for breakfast but so she can be brighter and more with it at school.

She has never been able to drink or eat cow milk so it's not like I can cut that out and I know that is something that often improves things for kids in her situation.

In her written work both numerical and letter based there are reversals and transportations and not just in one axis - there are Ps where there should be ds and her numbers are often mirror images.

I've asked the school to look into dyslexia - I have dyslexia, ADHD and dyspraxia where the dyslexia is extremely bad. She is still considered a bit young for the tests and things as dyslexic tendencies are thought to only become properly differentiated from general childhood learning mistakes etc... after 8 years of age - I am worried that the damage will already be done if we wait until 8. The school are being very supportive including Mary's odd take on clothing she will and will not wear :/

I debated about blogging this - but part of the problem with these situations is that they get hidden - I know people worry that it could harm a Childs future employability if this sort of thing is shared but really that comes down to something that needs to be drastically changed in our society. If just the suggestion that someone might have had learning difficulties is enough to stop them getting a job then this country really needs to look at itself. And if she does have dyslexia then hopefully she can be supported through the education system - though with the current government I am doubtful of how long there will be support for.

The biggest problem for kids with learning difficulties like this is the confidence crash - this is something I really really hope to avoid but she is in many ways a very shy child anyway. Being dyslexic myself I find it really hard to help her - I can't tell her how to spell a lot of things and we end up looking things up in the dictionary. I have already introduced Scrabble which was a big thing for me with spelling and we are still using the board that my nan gave me. She loves the game - I think she might actually have won the last family game - destroying Al's theory that I always win it. I've given her my little spell check machine that my cousin Ivan gave me when I was doing my GCSE's to help - it has some spelling games and things on it too. But again these are things I have already done - what else is there?

On the plus side she spent her last round of pocket money on an actual chapter book which she has been "reading" in bed - it's a sparkly kitten type book and is actually quiet thick - there are some pictures in it at the beginnings of chapters and things. I hope that the love and want of books will work the same magic on her as it did for me - she is a very clever little engineer and loves puzzles and designing and drawing and is always winning things for her ballet.