D'oh!

I'm in that odd state still, where you have just got back from another country and still feel a little like a visitor in your own life. You compare everything to where you have been, miss the salad bar, the tea, and everything seems to ba made of plastic again. There just seems to be so little wood, and everything seems a little grubby and ordinary. Last night I was sorry to miss a gig in Liverpool, because I did myself an injury. The official story is that I slid on the ice in Finland and my hands have been swollen and painful, gradually getting moreso ever since. This seems alot less Mr Bump and clumsy than the truth, it also sounds more beleiveable. The truth is the morning after I returned from Finland I heard the postman knock at the door. It was dark, and I was wearing slippers 3 sizes too big for me, I ran to the window to gesture to him to hang on a sec while I found the keys, and on the way there tripped over the furniture I had forgetten I had rearranged. Banged my chin on a stool, twisted weirdly, and felt like my hands were lobsters ever since. The parcel was infact for next door.

So yesterday I had that sick child in the summer hols feeling, kept thinking of all the things I was missing due to my foolish hands. I kept thinking about Jo Colley and Kate Fox who had gone to Liverpool, and even though I decided they would probably enjoy the gig better without me (had more time to read more of their own poems), I was sorry to not be there and find out if some people in Liverpool might like my work. I started to worry a little about seeming unprofessional, and also that these two poets who had previously been my colleagues but also friends might talk about me and decide negative things. ( Always seemed like that at school, you'd have a day off sick and when you got back your friends had decided they didn't like you afterall and were off giggling in corners someplace together.) Given I had to stay home, I then started to think about the Tom kelly and Kevin Cadwallender gig and was sorry to be to miss that too. All these stupid thoughts from sheer clumsiness. My hands are a bit better today, but they still aren't right.

Actually I don't like to look at my hands. They are big and ugly. They are not nice birdlike creatures that can flutter into any formation at a compliment or a smile. They are hands that do not have tapered fingers that can play piano or reach for a small scone. They will never twiddle with a pearl necklace. They are more like mans hands, big, fat, hands that lug stuff and scrub. There is a scar off a swiss arm knife that disobeyed when i was trying to open a bottle of wine 10 years ago, and a scar that matches on the corresponding finger opposite that happened when I was cutting a slice of bread. On the backs of my hands are scars from playing chicken at school. I never lost, but the scars wish I had. Inside my finger there is red sore patch from a blister made holding a paint scraper.

My hands don't get alot of my attention, except now they aren't themselves, when I am forced to look at them, and ask do they look right? Is that bit swollen? I can't take my eyes off them, and am suddenly grateful that even ugly hands are so essential. What they do makes them seem less offensive, but I have to take to take it easy on them until they feel like my hands again. So less of this typing- any ideas of things you can do without using your hands?

shades of blue

I could hardly keep my eyes open, but the snow wouldn't let them close. while a young woman with a bag made on an anvil watched Cinderella on her lap, a man answered a mobile with a ringtone he thought defined his personality, the snow kept on snowing, and the day showed itself to me.

Postcard from Finland

Finally Finland. A trip that was talked about for a year, and now I am here. All those trips to shops in quest for thermals have paid off.Actual snow. The sort of snow that seems like the snow you only saw once or twice as a child, but this time I can actually bend my arms. All day I want to bend down and touch snow, lay my palm in it, to check I am still there. The snow doesn't really melt when I touch it, but it crunches a little, acknowledges my presence in the smallest way. Trees stretch themselves across the ground in shadows, maybe they feel the same, all that snow has made them feel small. I am staying in a little wooden house, today chopped a tree. The girl we were supposed to meet is unwell and in hospital, and I can feel myself worrying, wondering if she is Ok, if us poets arriving are the cause of alot of stress. Hope we can meet someday. I hope we aren't a burden to her husband who must be worried about his wife, but he makes us at home. I am staying in her house, looking around at frills she made for the curtains and trying to feel her here. Little Gingham ruffles, red handles on the drawers, a smiley homemade birthday card covered in wallpaper and opening into a photo of her smiling and holding the cat like a baby in her arms. The girl that made the card lies in a little white bed, and we cannot make her smile. I was unexpectedly made to remember all those times I have been unwell, unhappy, unable to do things, and Im not sure I want to. A face of mine I can only see in a Finnish lake,because it has to be hidden. I do not try on the missing poets black glittery jacket I notice, but i do touch the hem.

But many of the things that could have gone wrong sofar have been Ok (touch wood, I am still here.) It is always a worry, because you are arranging to meet people you don't know too well, and are never sure what they think really of these odd English poets, but the Finns have been very good hosts. We didn't get lost finding the hostel. Kalle Ninnikangas unexpectedly came to meet us, and was a wonderful host showing us roundTampere. We have been made welcome in a little wooden house, and been initiated into the love of logs. (They break up the day, you chop them, splinter, carry them from place to place, stoke the fire, make more logs.)

Things seem more cruel here, necessary to survive, and I wonder if I'd been Finnish if I would be more sturdy, all weathers, that comments people make and don't make would fall to the ground all around. Instead I am an Englishman in Finland. It is beautiful here. I am trying to stay on the diet, and finding it hard because I don't speak the language. But I can't worry about that when I am here too much, it is all business, getting from place to place, squeezing things in a case, being polite, trying not to slip on the ice.