Author Archives: helenboden

classes of 2012

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The summer of 2012 saw, inter alia, the 25th anniversary of Edinburgh’s South Side Community Education Centre. As part of the celebrations, the writing and art groups mounted a joint exhibition in the centre cafe on the theme The South Side 1986-87. 

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ODYSSEY by Iain Matheson

She comes to a standstill at the corner of Hill Street. The bus had been prompt, she had been late. By the timetable there’s not another due for half-an-hour – too long to wait when she has just this one day to see the Edinburgh sights. She wants to walk but doesn’t know the way. She picks a boy to ask but he’s already gone, poking furiously at a screen in his hand. An old man passes, bent double, his life’s belongings in a dozen plastic bags, his momentum unstoppable. She flags down another man carrying a banjo.

‘Excuse me please, I’m looking for Blackford Hill, do you know if I can walk there?’

Banjoman stops, stares into space. Finally his eyes close; his head makes a slow rotation, once to the left, once to the right, back to the centre. His eyes reopen and meet hers.

‘No such place.’

Banjoman’s voice resonates as from the foot of a mineshaft.

‘Oh dear, are you quite sure? I saw it on a map and thought I’d like to go there.’

‘Tourist maps. This is the only map you need.’

Banjoman props his instrument against the marbled wall at the corner of Hill Street and unbuckles a rucksack. He labours inside for almost a minute till he produces a coloured, crumpled sheet. He stretches it loudly between his hands to flatten it, then beckons her. At the top, florid green letters declare,’The Southside’. She looks for a moment and says,

‘Yes, I’ve visited some of these places today, McEwan Hall… and the birthplace

of Harry Potter. Now, if you could show me which road to take for Blackford Hill…’

‘No such place.’

Banjoman’s phrase, repeated, combines fate and triumph. He points to the map.

‘That’s all the places there are. It’s a map of the world.’

She looks at him, bewildered, she says, Sorry? although she knows she has heard correctly. A map of the whole world.

‘But what about the castle?’ Once more the slowly shaken head.

‘Or Princes Street – I’ve been there!’ A raised eyebrow joins in the motion.

‘What about the roads at the edge of this map – they can’t just stop?’

Banjoman’s head changes tack; now it nods, the same, slow, reptile’s move, once up, once down.

‘But what happens when people leave The Southside?’

‘They don’t leave.’

‘And how do other people get here?’

‘There’s no other people.’

‘What about travelling to work, going on holiday, buses – where do the buses go?’

‘All in people’s heads.’ The nodding head now comes with a smile, lips closed.

‘So – so there’s really nowhere else? Just  – The Southside?’

Banjoman becomes animated, he raises an eyebrow and smiles and nods, all at once.

‘This is quite a shock. Do you think I could keep this map please?’

‘Take it, take it, I’ve plenty more.’

Banjoman nods twice to settle the matter. He struggles back into his rucksack, picks up his banjo and rejoins the flow of Southsiders on Nicolson Street. She stares at the map in her hands, appalled and secretly thrilled. Bowmont Place, Bernard Terrace, Middle Meadow Walk… singing inside she sets off to explore, the whole world at her feet.

*       *        *       *      *     *     *

As usual there were many creative writing activities at National Galleries Scotland. Shortly after the re-opening of the splendid Portrait Gallery I ran a five-week creative writing course on portraiture and character, which was repeated in the autumn.  In August cartoonist Malcy Duff and I collaborated for the third time on Text & Image, a course that looks at the history of combining words and pictures, then introduces practical exercises on interpreting writing as drawing and drawing as writing; illustrating writing and captioning images, and presenting text as image. Experimentation is encouraged, and we also include some sound poetry, creative reading and performance.

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This time we were based out at the modern art galleries for two full days, and able to use the wonderful resources of their archive, including artist’s books by key figures of twentieth-century art, as well as the temporary Picasso and Modern British Art and Munch exhibitions.

It is always a delight to work with Words on Canvas, a group of very talented writers that meet fortnightly at the Galleries. This year some of us also participated in a collaboration between poets and craft makers on an exhibition for the Pittenweem Festival, Fife.

In August Southsiders and WoCers  joined to give a well-received reading at the Captain’s Bar, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In the summer I was invited to lead a series of four monthly workshops at the Hermitage of Braid, to produce textual art for its newly-reclaimed walled garden. Given the sort of summer we had, or rather didn’t have, we were incredibly lucky to be able to work outside on all four occasions, three of them in pretty good weather.

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Juliet Wilson, who blogs as Crafty Green Poet, wrote a haiku which can be read by clicking the link.


BRAIDBURN SYMPHONY by Olga Wojtas

I take my seat and listen

To my left, the bass throb of the waterfall

To my right, the soft rippling through rocks

Stereophonic streaming

The pizzicato of jogging shoes

A scherzo of children’s giggles

The faintest fluttering of leaves

A yap

A yap

A yap

Fortissimo barking

Chorus of apologies

The faintest fluttering of leaves

The bass throb of the waterfall

The soft rippling through rocks

I wrote the following poem to mark the occasion.

Braid

On the Occasion of the Writing Workshops for the Walled Garden, Summer 2012

June’s birdsong is all but washed away
by the shout of the Braid in July
in a hurry through the Hermitage today
on its course along the lower side of the garden wall
to the shore of a firth making scarce more noise.
Out in the North Sea it mingles  via the Humber
with the waters of  Spen and Calder which  return
to the burn that stitches the Pentlands to Portobello.

This is not the Water of Leith but of remembrance.
Above it all this sort-of summer sits a new Parnassus
on  the top-most terrace  where we are  inspired
by  coast-bound stream and   breeze along the Braid,
whose water, like the brook Derwent at the bottom
of  Wordsworth’s childhood garden, is ‘boxed’  but not here
‘stripped of his voice’, two centuries and thirty  steps  below
along the  southern edge of  an Edinburgh plot.

And if like that, could this not also be
the forest pool by which a goddess bathed
as a bewildered hunter chanced upon her and gawped;
or the bank where a visitor from across the Pond
planted lily of the valley with her betrothed
in memory of their first meeting here;
and  a perpetual memorial to the  woman  who tried
to rescue her dog in a spate like this and was drowned?

The rest of the work produced is available to read in a folder at the Hermitage Visitor Centre, and some of it will find a permanent home in the garden, alongside sculpture and other artworks.

I always enjoy participating in others’ workshops. In March I joined a session led by Ken Cockburn to mark World Heritage Day. To tie in with this year’s theme, the Roman legacy in Scotland, Ken devised a series of writing walks on the seven hills of Edinburgh. I went on the one on Salisbury Crags. Ken’s account, and poems by myself and other participants,  can be read here.

Elsewhere in 2012, I had wonderful holidays walking and writing in Swaledale, Yorkshire; and sea-bathing and eating in the south of France.

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Scar

On the slant of Kisdon Hill
the song of a robin sears the whole air
substantial as the drystone walls
that   brand the fields of Thwaite austere
and  project their shadow on the meadow
– here  angular, rectilinear, there
in  a random,  crazed geometry –
while underground levels invisibly divide
the land’s inside into seams and veins
directed at the artery
of this damaged country.

Yet along the inroads to the moor
stones from smelt-mill and lead-mine
crumble and return to screes
on the sides of  Surrender’s* shallow valley
and in  the steep ravine of Gunnerside Ghyll
where land formed from human hand
and the structures carved by nature
resolve in mutual cohabitation.

* The Surrender Mining Company is one of several that operated commercially  in Swaledale in the eighteenth century. ‘Surrender’ is also a legal term internationally associated with the handing over of mining rights and land.

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The former trip took place in the mini-heatwave at the end of March and the latter in the season of Alpine storms. In between the two, I watched more sport on TV than I ever thought imaginable. It started with the Tour de France, which I discovered on ITV 4 for the first time. Cycling + scenery = my kind of sport. Catching the mountain stages live in the afternoons was what I imagine playing a video game is like. Vicarious thrills, vicarious holiday, vicarious summer. The Tour was, of course, followed by the Olympics and Paralympics.  I overcame my initial cynicism to treasure the winning smiles of Nicola Adams, the first woman to win an Olympic medal for boxing; Katherine Grainger,  the rower who finally took gold after three games’ worth  of silver, and Adam Hills on Channel 4’s The Last Leg. The night after it was all over, Will Self, interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, remained unconverted: ‘the Selfs are not welcome at the court of King Coe’. Airing that, then, was maybe an editorial misjudgment on the part of Newsnight.

On t’medals table
if Yorkshire wer a country
it’d ‘a come twelfth.

ring cycles and the appreciation of opera

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This morning I got a postcard from Scottish Opera, advertising their upcoming production of Massenet’s Werther, and claiming that ‘having joined us for 2009’s Manon, we know you appreciate a good French opera’. I’m not sure that they are qualified to comment on my appreciation with such certitude. I’m not actually convinced of my connoisseurship of ‘good French opera’. Cheeses and chocolate, maybe.

Radio 3 similarly claimed proprietorial knowledge of audience tastes when it broadcast Wagner’s Ring Cycle at a rate of an act a day over Christmas ‘for those of you for whom the prospect of the whole thing is too daunting’ – or for those who don’t enjoy  having too much on their plate, or something, as though it were  a turkey and plum pudding dinner. At least on previous outings of this occasional tradition of offering a Ring Cycle by installment over the festive period, the BBC  had the decency to present it as a concession to those not embosomed in twelve days of nuclear-family jollity, rather than to those of short attention span. A Ring Cycle, like a Test Match, is best savoured  not in bite-size chunks or edited highlights. It’s like a slow sea passage, a continuity experienced at the pace of its own unfolding. That, bah humbug, being said, there is something to be said for hearing it in a range of atypical formats, and the act-a-day version is not an uninteresting one. We can listen to CD recordings in ‘real time’ (actually, I rarely do) or attend a live performances if we can afford to do so. The radio schedule can offer something other to these, and intriguing.

The strangest Ring Cycle that Radio 3 has presented in my time was when it broadcast the whole 17 or so hours  one Easter Monday a few years ago. I contemplated the prospect of waking up to the birth of everything at the beginning of Das Rheingold, and set my radio alarm, but I slept through the quiet opening bars. I cleaned the kitchen floor during the colloqies of Loge, Wotan and Alberich later in the preliminary opera, but I started to follow the text during Die Walkure. By the time I made some dinner at the end of  Siegfried I was mesmerised; by Act II of Gotterdammerung I’d entered an altered state of consciousness and disorientation, no longer certain which recording I was listening to, or whether I recognised themes because I knew them, or because I’d heard them earlier in the day, rather than earlier in the week, which would be the case with a conventional performance, or at some point earlier in my life.  Afterwards  I ranted a bit over drinks and meals – I think this was before blogging took off – that this was silly, because it was unperformable. But even at the time I appreciated the opportunity radio gives to experience these strangenesses, just as I quite like snatching an hour or so of The Ring between feeding and visiting times  at Christmas.

It’s now ten years since Scottish Opera’s own magnificent Ring Cycle, which remains the cultural highlight of my life so far. We saw each of the individual operas rolled out over a three year period at the Edinburgh Festival, before transferring to Glasgow, before the whole cycle was put together in 2003, first in Edinburgh, then in Glasgow. Prior to the searing final performances at the Theatre Royal in November, we were able to sit at home and listen to  Radio 3’s  broadcast of a cycle that we’d attended, where we were among the enthralled audience, recorded in Edinburgh a couple of months earlier.

Even 2009 seems quite a long time ago now: I think I was impressed by Werther, but I can’t really remember.  2013 will also see  the centenary, and bicentenaries, of the births of Britten, Verdi and Wagner respectively, so I shouldn’t be short of performances and broadcasts  of good operas that I do appreciate.

midwinters

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each December day
the sun describes a low arc
over Capelaw Hill

Well, at least it did at the beginning of the month. For much of December 2012  lack of light made living in Edinburgh seem like living in an episode of The Killing. This is my third winter on this edge of town. For the previous nine years I lived in a fourth-floor flat with a view to Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. There were many times when it was tempting just to sit and gaze out of the window, and some times of year when it became a ritual simply to do so: on midsummer evenings when light lingered long; and especially in December, when the sun would rise between Arthur’s Seat and the Crags, over whose flank it would describe a low arc before setting behind one of the spires of the South Side – where  I stayed for the  six years before that.

I was born in midwinter, on St Lucy‘s Day, the shortest day in Scandinavian tradition and some calculations of the Julian calendar,  when, according to John Donne, ‘the world’s whole sap is sunk’. A more optimistic take is offered by  George Mackay Brown’s poem ‘Seven Stars for Lucy’, in Voyages (1983). Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘Lullabye for Lucy’,  a setting of another text by Mackay Brown, celebrates the birth of the first child in thirty-two years in the depopulating valley of Rackwick on  Hoy, Orkney, where Max had made his home. With its reference to plants, lambs and ‘the brimming / Dance of the valley’, the imagery of the poem is more vernal than hibernal, but it’s a grand song to set you up for going out to mark the passing of another year.

According to family lore,  snowflakes fell on my face when I was first brought home from hospital early in the new year.  I have a vague memory of the existence of  a photograph posed just before I was swaddled into the back of my dad’s car, but maybe that’s just a picture I invented to accompany the story.  I was a winter child, and adolescent, and young adult; I adored the pale clarity of the northern winter light, and I never felt the cold. When I studied in Newcastle in the eighties, I did wear a coat  for an evening out, counter to local tradition, and occasionally felt a bit chilly in the flat when we couldn’t afford to turn the heating on, but I rarely complained. On the other hand, I had very poor tolerance of heat. In summer I lurked in the shade, a Niles Crane of a thing in high-factor sunblock and UV-protective clothing. Until I had a course of acupuncture and went into reverse. I discovered sunbathing, and just how bloody cold the east coast of Scotland can be in the winter. In the last decade, I seem to have achieved more of an equilibrium. All seasons, and the changes between them, are now sweet to me. It’s now January 2013, and, temporarily and thermally at least, what TS Eliot called ‘midwinter spring’. In my wee garden on the fringe of the city with a view to the Pentland Hills,  I’m well placed to partake of seasonal shifts and observe and write about their reversals and vagaries. I grew up in a location that could similarly be described as both suburban and semi-rural; it suited me, and I’ve come full circle again.