Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and Writing Britain at the British Library

A few weeks ago, I finally went to the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition at the British Library. It was in its final two weeks, so my friends and I got in just under the wire. I knew that I couldn't miss it, as I'd had this exhibition earmarked as one of my cultural highlights of the year for quite some time. Concentrating on the importance of place and landscape in British literature, Writing Britain featured so many of my absolute favourite books and writers that I wondered if I had been personally consulted on the exhibition and then fed memory-loss pills so that I would forget all about it. (I am not sure in what scenario exactly this would take place.) From Susan Cooper to Kenneth Grahame, from a Heart of Darkness graphic novel to a letter to John Betjeman complaining that the order of the stations in his poem 'The Metropolitan Railway' was wrong - this was very, very much my cup of tea.

Broadly, the places and movements featured in the exhibition included the following: rural Britain; the gradual vanishing of rural Britain due to the Industrial Revolution; industrial landscapes such as the coal mines of Wales and the Midlands; wild places such as the moors, and their interactions with humans; sacred places; London; the suburbs; rivers; and the sea. London is, as always, primarily a place of darkness, but a remarkably varied one, from Gautam Malkani's Londonstani to the original title for Eliot's The Waste Land, "He do the police in different voices", to Conrad's pre-Le Carré and Orwell vision of The Secret Agent and a city haunted by terrorism. The suburbs are both homely and threatening: the Metropolitan Railway invited middle-class commuters to embrace "Metroland", but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, the suburbs are often settings for dreadful crimes (one of the manuscripts featured was 'The Retired Colourman', where Holmes investigates sinister doings in Lewisham.)

Many poets appeared in Writing Britain. Ted Hughes's collaboration with Fay Godwin, Elmet, was there; 'Belfast Confetti' by the wonderful Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson; a video about Simon Armitage's Stanza Stones project, which carves poems into the natural landscape of Yorkshire; Wendy Cope, Sean O'Brien, and many, many others. Also featured was the much-loved poem by Edward Thomas, 'Adlestrop', in manuscript and in a recording read by his wife. Here is the poem:



ADLESTROP (Edward Thomas)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


'Adlestrop' gives me a strange feeling of looking in on - almost interrupting - something I find moving but don't entirely understand. I can't help wondering if you have to be English to entirely grasp its emotional import. It was written around the start of World War I - which killed Thomas, like so many others - and there is a sense that he is seizing a quiet, simple moment in the English countryside and storing it away, later to imbue it with even deeper meaning. It has also been pointed out that all the young men of some villages were wiped out in the war, and Thomas may have wondered what the fate of this place and its people would be.

I do think that British landscapes, whether urban or rural, are a palimpsest; their own self-contained beauty or terror, with the human traces which have defaced or celebrated them continually overlaid. I've said before that I tend to see places through a lens of literature and art, and this is particularly the case with Britain. Some of the landscapes are spectacular in themselves, but they tend to be understated, and not technicolour, like some other parts of the world. When you know about the great works of art or the acts of human endeavour that they have produced, the terrible or beautiful events and the echoes that they have left, these places have a hundred times more meaning.

The painting is The Hay-Wain by John Constable, one of the greatest of English painters, though I've always found it much easier to love JMW Turner.

A Year In Blogland

...But the weeks go by
Like birds; and the years, the years
Fly past anti-clockwise
Like clock hands in a bar mirror.

-Derek Mahon, from 'Dream Days'


For the record, I am not writing this entry while nursing a drink, whatever the above quotation may make it sound like. I did, however, want to write a brief entry noting that it's just over a year since I began blogging. (October 4th was the anniversary date, and serendipitously, that was also National Poetry Day.)

This seems like a good moment to say thanks to those who have supported the Facebook page, too. For those who have not yet seen it, I always post links to the blog entries there, but I also post quotations, links to poems I've enjoyed, poetry-related articles and news, and so on. Any "likes" from Facebook users are always much appreciated.

I'm quite surprised that I have managed to write so much over the course of a year, and I am even more surprised and pleased that a good many people seem to have appreciated what is mostly just me rambling about some poems I enjoy and how they remind me of bits of my life. It has been quite gratifying that I've been told both by some who are far more immersed in the poetry world than I am, and by some who wouldn't usually turn to poetry, that they have liked the blog.

Being a past-master in the art of procrastination, I have occasionally wondered if this is all just a grand exercise in putting more important things off: writing my own poetry, for instance, and other even more essential aspects of life... For many years I've had a hard time deciding if I am more of a creator or a curator, and the evidence would tend to suggest the latter. But I can't quite decide. If I were only more organised, I could get everything done and probably with ample time to spare.

I also wanted to say that I very much invite suggestions for what you might like to see on the blog. I think I am going to be diversifying just a little more over the next while, but the format is probably going to stay about the same. I do think that I could stand to branch out in my subject matter...the dominance of Dead White Guys on the blog is somewhat alarming.

Thanks for reading!

National Poetry Week (Why Not?) - 'Bright Star' by John Keats

BRIGHT STAR (John Keats)


Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.


This poem has, I think, already been over-posted this week for National Poetry Day's 'Stars' theme, but to say it's overexposed is a bit like saying you shouldn't visit Paris or Prague because they are touristy. Anyway, I think that the effects of National Poetry Day should carry on for at least a few days.

'Bright Star' is probably one of the most beautiful poems ever written. The final lines mirror the opening section; first the poem depicts the faithful star watching tenderly over the almost-personified earth, and the second section depicts the poet's feelings for his beloved, far closer than the distant star and our planet.

Keats was only 25 when he died, just a little older than Keith Douglas. Again, I wonder what he could have gone on to achieve, given that very few can rival what he had already written at a young age.

I loved Jane Campion's 2009 film Bright Star, which depicts the love between Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), and concludes with the grief-stricken Fanny reciting the poem after receiving news of Keats's death. It is a very quiet and lovely film, romantic but very believable. Keats and Fanny have contrasting personalities; he is friendly but shy, while she is more outgoing and flirtatious. They don't fall in love instantly and the sad facts of Keats's poverty, and the illness which is to kill him, constantly intrude. For me, it was a relatively rare romantic film in that it was about real people but I was able to believe that this might actually have been how it was.

National Poetry Day: 'Stars' by Keith Douglas

Milky Way photo by jurvetson. Used under Creative Commons license



Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and this year's theme is 'Stars'. (It also happens to be a year to the day since I started writing this blog, but I think that may be a subject for another entry.)

Landlocked and lightbound in London, I don't see as much of the stars as I used to growing up in a small city/large town in Canada. When I am back in Canada and I see Orion (generally, the only constellation I really recognise...) and its attendant stars, a pang strikes me. I remember travelling to Australia and New Zealand and being confounded by how different the night sky was. Everything was in the wrong place (actually, I'd noticed that even on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico) and I could see the Southern Cross, which really was thrilling. In recent years, I have been stunned by the wash of stars across the sky in the Sahara and in the Western Desert in Australia. They were like sand and they made the sky white.

Stars can signify so many things. They tend to lead me to thoughts of the smallness of human beings and the overwhelming vastness of the universe; questions of faith and eternity. They can also instill a feeling of loneliness, or give life to striving and attainment. It is very much dependent on the context, like so many things.

I have chosen Keith Douglas's poem 'Stars' for this National Poetry Day. I noticed that the National Poetry Day website had featured this poem in one of its suggested lesson plans for teachers and students, but I had been thinking of writing about it for some time and this is the perfect moment.


STARS (Keith Douglas)


At first I thought that this might be a poem reflecting Douglas's experiences during World War II in the deserts of North Africa, but it is dated 1939 and he did not go to the Middle East until 1941. It seems that the hills he describes in this poem are English and that he was a university student when he wrote it. The poem is dedicated to Antoinette, with whom he was at Oxford and who was either a girlfriend or someone he pursued (I'm not quite sure about this.)

Poets often seem like prophets (or perhaps they are, at least occasionally) but this seems especially the case with Douglas. I could be projecting onto this poem but one could easily assume when reading it that he had already gone to the war. (Of course, whenever the poem was written during the year 1939, everyone knew that the war was coming or that it was going to last for some time.) He writes of the stars as a vast army "marching in extended order", as "comrades". It's easy to imagine the starry army above reflecting a human army below, and soldiers seizing moments of peace amidst death and darkness.

There could be something a little whimsical about this poem - "greetings of ethereal officers", and so on - but the final lines undercut it: "Yes, we look up with pain/at distant comrades and plains we cannot tread." Although Douglas was to write finer, more accomplished poems - he would only have been 18 or 19 when he wrote this - this is one of his truest and most distinguishing marks, and one of the hardest to bear: his brutal, unflinching honesty. When I read those lines I wonder at his state of mind. Knowing that his own death was coming, and soon, is a theme throughout his poems. It's hard to know if it was some sort of death wish, or just a stern realism about his situation, or something else. There is something in the conclusion of this poem that bears out Ted Hughes's comments on Douglas, in his introduction to the Faber Collected Poems. Hughes speaks of a "passionate, fatalistic outlook ...the gallantry a cool acceptance of the worst possible fate. The source of the stage-lighting of this whole performance is, perhaps, that thing difficult to face - a vision of his own early death, his own death already foresuffered."

I am still trying to figure out why Keith Douglas's poetry blew my mind so comprehensively when I started reading him about a year and a half ago. This really does not happen to me often with such speed and force, not since my teens. Hughes's introduction to Douglas touches on some of it. "The dominant component of Douglas's line," says Hughes, "suggests a masculine movement, a nimble, predatory attack, hard-edged with a quick and clean escape." I have a liking for poetry with a certain masculine and muscular quality to it, which also has something to do with my love of Louis MacNeice, among others (see "Manly Men" for more details - I should probably have a Manly Men tagline.) But I found this comment from Hughes's essay particularly haunting, as it reflects something that I quickly came to feel about Douglas: "The music is familiar and intimate, like the inner voice of one's own voice, yet a desolate sort of music, closer to the crying of a bird than to the massed organ tones of great abbeys audible in [Wilfred] Owen." This is spot-on. When I started reading Douglas, there were aspects that felt so close to my own perceptions and experience (and this in the work of someone whose life was very different from my own) that I couldn't understand it, and still don't entirely.

Anyway, I have departed from the original idea of this entry, the National Poetry Day theme of 'Stars'. There are a lot of great poems on the subject out there. This one is by a poet who, I suppose, fulfilled some of the star-related clichés about burning out rather than fading away. I am very glad to have discovered Keith Douglas, as sad as he sometimes makes me feel.

Have a great National Poetry Day!

"This Is an Alien City": Amy Lowell's 'A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.'

This is another painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw, depicting Chelsea in London. I think that you can expect to see Grimshaw at least occasionally on this blog when I write about London.

I'm still browing and reading through London: A History in Verse, edited by Mark Ford. This anthology really does capture the spirit of London - its events, places and people - across centuries. It is the dark and the light; I wonder if any other city has so much of each. Unified and scattered, sinister and exhilarating - I think London's poetry may carry its essence even more so than its art or photography, for instance. (But then, I would think that...) What fascinates me is that certain themes seem to flow down the centuries and recur so frequently. These include the city as a brooding, dark personality made up of tiny fluttering voices; the underground nature of London, whether that's the actual London Underground or its hidden and lost rivers; and the use of names, its streets and squares and boroughs, with an almost totemic power.

2012 is by some reckoning the 100th anniversary of the Imagist movement in poetry. This enormously influential movement, which helped to launch modernist poetry, concentrated on "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." Its early proponents included Ezra Pound and T E Hulme.

Another poet deeply involved in the Imagist movement was Amy Lowell (1874-1925). She was a highly prolific American poet (and businesswoman) who moved between the US and the UK, working to promote the Imagist movement in American poetry. She is now perhaps best known as a critic and anthologist, and as someone associated with more famous figures, but her poetry is wonderful in its own right and is recognised for its variety and sensuality.

This poem, 'A London Throughfare. 2 A.M.', is a bleak portrayal of the city, very closely observed. This is the city as state of mind, reflecting isolation and radiating hostility. It is easy to imagine that under similar circumstances, another poet (or even the same poet in a different frame of mind) might see the scene as beautiful. The fact that Lowell sees the distant moon as a friend, and the city as alien, is very telling.



A LONDON THROUGHFARE. 2 A.M. (Amy Lowell)


They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another,
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city:
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

Kim Moore's 'The Rabbit and the Moon': Revisiting Watership Down Yet Again

A couple of weeks ago, Inpress sponsored a Poetry Garden at London's Southbank, to celebrate their 10th anniversary. This included readings from various of their poets, but I totally failed to get out of bed in time (ie. I got up really, really, really late) and missed the readings. It was still pleasant to drop by, though, and see the tables of poetry books and the Poetry Bouquets, featuring real flowers adorned with quotations from Rilke (appropriately) and others.

I ended up buying Kim Moore's pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves. It was quite prominently displayed as she'd been reading earlier, but the title drew my eye, and when I had a peek inside I realised that I was likely to enjoy it. I later got in touch with Moore and asked if I could reproduce one of the poems on my blog, which she kindly gave me permission to do.

Moore is from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire, and the imagery of many of the poems is distinctly northern. When I read 'Sometimes You Think of Bowness', I remembered my visit to Windermere and Bowness in the Lake District, some years ago. Most of that weekend the weather was good, and I was quite taken with the Lake District's beauty; a bit like north Wales, but softer. It rained when we went to Windermere and Bowness and a picture of that afternoon came back to me through these lines:


[...] but mostly you think of the people, drawn to water,

and how it looks in the rain, as if the very shops
are made of water, of ducking into a doorway
and carrying the smell of rain inside.


The title poem, 'If We Could Speak Like Wolves', has the muscular power of the creatures it describes:


[...] if a mistake could be followed
by instant retribution and end with you
rolling over to expose the stubble and grace
of your throat [...]


It builds and builds to the payoff at the end; this is not just a stunning portrait of wild animals, but a picture of a relationship "more simple than marriage." The poem works as a kind of slanted nature poem, but the final lines make the reader see it all in a new light.

I loved 'The Wolf' as well, which populates the reader's mind with dark, archetypal images from what seems to be a particularly sinister lost fairytale. 'The Ferryman' goes back to the figure of Charon, who has been much written about, but I found the fusion of modern and mythological imagery especially strong; the dead "sit on chair-shaped rocks,/as if they can still feel the shunt/of the tube", and some carry mobile phones. Again, the ending skilfully calls everything which has led up into it into question, and makes the revisiting of this ancient theme more than worthwhile.

Inevitably, I really loved 'The Rabbit and the Moon'. Kim Moore said she was very pleased I had picked up on the fact that the imagery was drawn from Watership Down; my old obsession, how could I not spot it immediately? She'd been drawn to the cartoon especially, as a child, as I was to the book. This poem weaves in the book's themes beautifully, almost as a travelogue with perspective shifting from humans to animals.

(The painting featured on this entry is, of course, Dürer's famous image. I know that it is actually a hare, but I had it in my mind to go along with this post and it wouldn't go away.)

You can purchase the pamphlet on this link, from The Poetry Business: http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/shop/792/583/If-We-Could-Speak-Like-Wolves-Kim-Moore



THE RABBIT AND THE MOON (Kim Moore)


Let me tell you the story of a high, lonely place
where sight and sound carry with the pylon
that gives its shadow to the hill, and the farm
many fields away, and the long straight road.

A bird calls kehaar, kehaar to the moon
and trains are falling, falling into the night.
The black rabbit waits outside the caravan
and come morning, the booted feet of gulls

will be telling us to leave, but if we stay,
the dogs will lie like rugs at our feet.
Somewhere, there are other rabbits, and a river
to sail away on. Somewhere, there's a boat.


Poem © Kim Moore, 2012. Used by permission.

Justin Wiggan's 'Our Moment Has Come': Apocalyptic Inner and Outer Landscapes

Artwork © Justin Wiggan, 2012


I haven't actually met Justin Wiggan in person yet, but he is a friend of friends and in recent months we have been occasionally corresponding about publishing-related matters. (I'm pretty sure he thinks I am more of an expert than I actually am.) Working as a visual artist, sound artist and writer, he strikes me as one of those people with the enviable capacity to perceive the world in an endless variety of artistic mediums.

Justin gave me permission to reproduce one of his poems, 'Our Moment Has Come', on my blog, and it appears below, along with his biography and artistic approach in his own words. I had to wait a little bit before I realised which poet his work reminded me of; it was Edith Sitwell, author of 'Still Falls The Rain' and 'The Shadow of Cain'. The latter had an enormous impact on me when I stumbled across it in university. Sitwell wrote about events such as the London Blitz and the use of atomic bombs in language which was apocalyptic, violent and perceptive about the two-edged nature of scientific progress. To me, Justin's poem similarly evokes a poisoned earth whose physical symptoms indicate the moral and emotional decay of society.


OUR MOMENT HAS COME (Justin Wiggan)


A decade after killing by fire, lightning and gravity,
The power of the permanent plague has been observed by soldiers and scientists,
In legendary forests broken and discarded.

Here they study dead fathers cloned,
Here they discard the map of their youth, a youth sacrificed on black needles in slow streams.
Their dogs howl and bark with nose-bleeds at the transmission of a delayed and promised light.

The "Wish Machine" holds them dying in a finite part of the lower order.
These greatest scholars deny the sun across the sky,
These greatest scholars deny the phases of the moon,
These greatest scholars deny the swing of a pendulum,
And the beat of a heart.

Their guilt is dragged through meadows,
As rain falls where a ceiling once was.
Their dialogue is crippled, and cannot walk unaided and falls to the floor.



Justin Wiggan was born in Burnley, Lancashire and studied Fine Art BA at UCE. He works in a variety of guises, predominantly as a sound artist with Darren Joyce as Dreams of Tall Buildings, and also as a visual artist. Wiggan is currently completing his first book of poetry, Of Bulls and Mathematicians.

The works are artefacts and documents of his reaction to the shouts, screams, shrieks, wails, hoots, howls, death rattles and sobs that are all soaked up by his surrounding unfinished structure of space. His body of work engages with swollen cityscapes, human moral struggle, and discovering the links between the internal tourist and the external explorer. One cuts the path through conviction and belief, the other gnaws on the path for convenience. These investigations embrace a sense of evolution and eradication of a problem that goes way beyond cultural breakdown, addressing the problem with an end of a system.

Our culture is reduced, our hands are tied.

Wiggan employs a method of "encasement", a writing philosophy developed from cut up techniques, where the text is generated on the meaning of the title and mapped out via research and shaped organically. This method allows the rich meaning encased in each word to dominate the narrative of the piece at times revealing shockingly solid truths through chance. He is fascinated by the noise in the reader's head.

More of his work can be found on these websites:

www.dreamsoftallbuildings.com
www.cottoncandyhousefire.tumblr.com
www.justinwiggan.moonfruit.com

 Poem and biography © Justin Wiggan, 2012

Green and Pleasant Games: Blake's 'Jerusalem' and the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics

JERUSALEM (William Blake)

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games ran from late July until early September. It is hard to believe that it is all over, and equally hard to believe that everything went so well; I don't want to say "flawlessly", but some have definitely said so. The forecasted transport apocalypse didn't happen (in fact, it tended to be weirdly quiet away from the venues) and most everyone had a jolly good time. In fact, we all beheld the extraordinary spectacle of the British gushing uncontrollably about the awesomeness of their green and pleasant land, their people, and especially their athletes. I was less surprised when this happened during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, because Canadians can be pretty gushy about Canada anyway, but the default for the Brits is usually self-deprecation at best about Britain.

At the start of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, a boy soprano sang Blake's 'Jerusalem', in its famous musical setting by Sir Hubert Parry. This was utterly predictable and still very moving. 'Jerusalem' is taken from the much longer Milton a Poem, and describes a story wherein the young Jesus Christ visited England. There is no historical basis for this story, but it is a beautiful poem and piece of music. It is time for me to admit that I first came to it through Emerson, Lake & Palmer's version, during my prolonged progressive rock period in my teens. I still hear Palmer's mad drumming in the background.

'Jerusalem' is a piece very beloved of the British, or at least the English. I have been present when it's played or sung and it offers a rare glimpse of naked emotion in the English, as well as being rather mystical and somewhat bonkers. These were qualities that also came to the fore during the Games - Britain performed extremely well in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. Although poetry's voice was heard in various ways during these Games - modern poems scattered around the Olympic Park, glimpses of verse during the Ceremonies - this old poem by the great and strange Blake still represents the spirit of the Games, to me.

I spent both the Olympics and the Paralympics either quite involved, or rather detached. It seemed as though I was either in the thick of things, or catching glimpses from a distance. The Torch went right past my window in south London on a day when I was at home, and that was quite exciting. Also predictably, these were mainly Horse Games, for me. I managed to snag tickets for both Olympic and Paralympic dressage, both of which were cheap and utterly irresistible. The Olympic dressage was at Grand Prix level and was extraordinarily beautiful and skilled - these horses are the Cadillacs of the equine world. Here is Britain's Carl Hester on Uthopia, part of the gold-medal-winning team:

The Paralympic dressage featured riders with a variety of disabilities, generally involving inability to use their legs or one side of their body, due to spinal injuries, cerebral palsy and so on - one rider was actually born without legs. Here, the wonder was at watching an extraordinary sympathy between horse and rider under difficult circumstances, although the movements were less complex than in the Olympic competition. I found both events very moving, in somewhat different ways. Here is Britain's Natasha Baker on Cabral, the gold medallist:

I also went out with a friend to Box Hill in Surrey to see the women's cycling road race, which involved walking 45 minutes up a fairly steep hill, getting rained on, dodging a thunderstorm and then broiled by the sun, cheering our heads off for every competitor, and generally having a very fun day out.

As far as detachment, I don't have TV at home, so I missed a lot of the coverage. Still, I enjoyed some events on big screens set up in public places, including near my work, and there was a generally festive atmosphere. I'm not that devoted to most summer sports anyway (a lot of Canadians prefer the Winter Games and I fall into that category). It was also particularly nice to see how cheerful, helpful and obliging virtually all the staff, volunteers, police, military, etc involved in the Games were. I really feel that post-Games London could benefit from trying to keep at least a bit of that spirit going.

In a sense I was relieved when it was all over, as I tend to worry about issues surrounding security; perhaps overhyped like all the other negative aspects. On the other hand, now the autumn and winter are stretching ahead and looking darker every day. I think I need to ensure that the coming months are filled with things that are important, fun, or both.