Poem of the Week

Dublin
Louis MacNeice

Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.

This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.

She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.

Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.

The Pubs Around Nunhead: 20 - Rye Hotel Re-Opens

One pub shuts and another reopens. 

Or at least it appears that the Rye Hotel has finally re-opened, after some time. 

Mixed reports are reaching TANH, from 'It is really Pukka!' through to 'A bit like a Harvester and the staff are still quite uncertain.  Not trained up yet.'

We will investigate further in due course.

Bloom

... And it is fair to say we at TANH are very much looking forwards to this year's Bloomsday, with a full day event on Radio4.  Look at the Beeb Website.

Serendipitously, I went out and bought a new copy 2 weeks ago (Foyle's on the S Bank), and am really enjoying the re-read...

Ray Bradbury

I must by now have seen or heard half a dozen obituaries for Ray Bradbury , who sadly died last Tuesday at the age of 91, but not one of them has mentioned the short story I thought was his most well-known: 'A Sound of Thunder'.


That's right, it is the time travel, dinosaur hunt, butterfly one.  Read in schools across the land.  But not a mention.

But, of course, and rightly, lots of memories of Fahrenheit 451, The Silver Locusts, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked..., the Day It Rained For Ever, etc.  Just no Thunder.  Strange.

I can see I'm going to have to go on a rereading splurge.

Poem of the Week

Inglan' Is A Bitch
Linton Kwesi Johnson

W´en mi jus´ come to Landan toun
Mi use to work pan di andahgroun
But workin´ pan di andahgroun
Y´u don´t get fi know your way around

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no runnin´ whey fram it

Mi get a lickle jab in a bih ´otell
An´ awftah a while, mi woz doin´ quite well
Dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah
But w´en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clack-watchah

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
No baddah try fi hide fram it

W´en dem gi´ you di lickle wage packit
Fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit
Y´u haffi struggle fi mek en´s meet
An´ w´en y´u goh a y´u bed y´u jus´ can´t sleep

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
A noh lie mi a tell, a true

Mi use to work dig ditch w´en it cowl noh bitch
Mi did strang like a mule, but bwoy, mi did fool
Den awftah a while mi jus´ stap dhu ovahtime
Den awftah a while mi jus´ phu dung mi tool

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
Y´u haffi know how fi survive in it

Well mi dhu day wok an´ mi dhu nite wok
Mi dhu clean wok an´ mi dhu dutty wok
Dem seh dat black man is very lazy
But if y´u si how mi wok y´u woulda sey mi crazy

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
Y´u bettah face up to it

Dem a have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly
Inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
Fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
Now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no runnin´ whey fram it

Mi know dem have work, work in abundant
Yet still, dem mek mi redundant
Now, at fifty-five mi gettin´ quite ol´
Yet still, dem sen´ mi fi goh draw dole

Inglan is a bitch
Dere´s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
Is whey wi a goh dhu ´bout it?

Top Five Regrets

I'm not sure quite what I make of this - it is a Guardian report from a few months back on a palliative care nurse who has recorded her 'Top Five Regrets of the Dying' in a blog and book.

They include a range of different wishes, including:

"I wish I hadn't worked so hard" (every male patient) - which is more about not giving all your time to work and spending more with family, children etc, and

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

But the piece does, I have to say, come across as a highly sentimental piece of writing. It grates badly.  So while I can see and agree with what is being said, the manner of it is a real barrier. At least for me.

Autonomous?

Another item of news that we missed here (partly due to the Jubilee) was the departure from HP of Mike Lynch.  This against a background of HP shedding a reported 27,000 staff worldwide.  Lynch was the only named individual to leave the company (that I saw).

Famously, Lynch founded and grew Autonomy - a software company specialising in high-end search tools built around Bayesian mathematics - to become one of Britain's most successful high-technology companies.  He was notoriously proud of being British, and there were always rumours that Microsoft had offered him shed-loads for the firm and that he had always refused.

A few years back, I went to their offices, in an industrial park just outside Cambridge, to see if they could help us at the Museum.  They had a certain flavour.  Each meeting room was named for a different Bond villain (I think we were in the Goldfinger suite).  As I was leaving I noticed the fish tank behind the receptionist's desk actually contained pirhanas.  'Yes, Mike makes the least successful salesman each month fee the fishes,' joked my host.  He was apparently very proud of Bond as the home-grown, Brit super-agent, and wanted to make a point about the British being competent and world-class at some stuff.

Anyway, HP eventually bought Autonomy last year for £7bn.  The rumours are that the entrepreneurial small-business culture in Cambridge clashed horribly with the international corporatism of HP.  And that lots of high-calibre people have already left the Autonomy part of the business - and thus Lynch's departure was unsurprising.  Also speculation about how long the Autonomy part will exist as a separate arm before being fully merged in.  All a little sad, I guess, although Lynch has left with loads of dosh and an apparent intent to invest in and to build more innovative British firms.  We shall see.  Perhaps he'll turn up on Dragon's Den.

On the same day as the HP announcement, Jonathan Ive became a 'Sir' for his work on industrial design.  Most famously of course, he was the key designer for a lot of Apple's i-stuff.  So the shiny look and feel that people love about the Apple products is attributed to his work.   Well done, of course, but - probably unfairly - it feels somewhat superficial to me by comparison with the Autonomy software.  And of course, although a hugely successful British industrial designer, he ended up working in the US to gain that success.