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Tag: Kathleen Jones

Words by the Water 2

The sun, happily, reached the north west on Sunday, so since then we have been able to sit beside the sparkling lake – which has now returned to its proper bounds – enjoying the peace. The snow on the mountain tops has still not disappeared, so I imagine it’s still pretty chilly up there. The only sounds are the rattling woodpeckers, the lapping of gentle waves and the honking of many geese. Sometimes the geese take off in noisy panic in the middle of the night – but we are certainly not short of sleep in this deep peace.

Michael Rosen 1 reducedThe first speaker at the Theatre on the Lake on Sunday was Michael Rosen who was talking about his book ‘Alphabetical’. This was hugely enjoyable: both informative and highly amusing. The session got quite noisy as the theatre kept erupting in laughter; but in between the hilarity he presented many gems he had discovered in the course of his research. The ground covered ranged over the Phoenicians, The Grimms Brothers, Beowulf, Yiddish and the Beaker people; and such was the enjoyment all round that Michael was not able to stop, nor the audience to tire, so he ran well over time. I tried to resist buying his (rather expensive) book, but when I saw a signed copy still sitting on the book stall the next day, my resolutions melted and it is now taking up room in the van.

Charlotte Higgins 2 reducedI had heard Charlotte Higgins lecture before, on Boudicca, so went to her session on ‘Under Another Sky: The Romans in Britain’. Quite a bit of the presentation was taken up with information about the archaeologist and scholar Robin Collingwood, who was born in Coniston, and Edward Williams Byron Nicholson, the librarian at the Bodleian Library at the beginning of the twentieth century. Charlotte also talked about, and showed slides of, the Tullie House helmet discovered in 2010, which is now in the Crosby Garrett museum. Unfortunately, because single bronze items were not covered by the Treasure Act of 1996, the helmet was privately restored before being put on the open market; and even to someone with no claims to expertise in the period, it was pretty clear that the restoration was something of a catastrophe.

For my dose of poetry for the day I went to the reading by Don Paterson: ‘A Life in Poems’. Don Don Paterson croppedis a good poet, with a great flair for rhyme and a facility for sonnets and ballads. His strong Scottish accent allied to the soft acoustics meant some gems were missed, but it was an interesting and varied reading. I think Don probably revels in the image of a ‘grim Scot’, and there were not many giggles in the hour. His description of Dundee as so awful that in the competition for City of Culture it ‘lost to Hull’ did, however, raise a few laughs. He does not want to write in Scots as it is a dead language; and one charming piece of information I brought away with me was that there are 63 words for ‘coughing’ in Scots.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Lakeland poet Norman Nicholson, who was born in Millom and lived in the house in which he was born for his whole life; so Sunday evening was taken up with a celebration of his life and work. Kathleen Jones has written a biography of Nicholson, ‘The Whispering Poet: A Tribute’, to coincide with this anniversary, and the talk with which she introduced the event was fascinating and charming enough to persuade anyone to buy her book.

Kathleen Jones 1 reducedKathleen showed the influence of Methodism on the poet’s development, the part played by various friends and relations, the effect of the two years Nicholson spent in a sanatorium when he contracted TB in his teens, and his passion for the environment and what would now be called ‘green issues’. After a short interval, Neil Curry, a local poet and friend of Nicholson, gave a reading and a talk for a further hour, with more information about Nicholson. Given that we’d already had nearly an hour on the poet, this second talk could, perhaps, have benefitted from being a little shorter – though Currie offered us plenty of interesting material and it was good to hear some of the poems.

The evening finished with a video extract from a 30-year-old South Bank Show on Nicholson which showed Nicholson reciting some of his poems — not to mention an extremely young-looking Melvyn Bragg introducing the programme.

Ewan Clayton 1 reducedI attended only one event on Monday: Ewan Clayton, the calligrapher, talking about his book ‘The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing’. An enthusiastic speaker with a wide range of experience and expertise made for a fascinating lecture which covered handwriting, Xerox, typewriters and fountain pens. Among the nuggets I brought away with me were the following: in 2012, there were 6.1 billion mobile ‘phone subscribers; 14 million bic pens are sold daily; fountain pen sales increased by 50% last year; in the light of recent security breaches, typewriters, instead of computers, are increasingly  being used for top secret intelligence; and it’s predicted that in 2017 50% of all computers will be tablets. Ewan was optimistic about the future of handwriting, and suggested that we should be using all the tools at our disposal, rather than favouring one or other.

A at Castlerigg 3 reduced

Then it was off to enjoy the more active delights of a Lake District bathed in warm sunshine. We walked up to the Castlerigg Stone Circle, which is reputed to be the oldest stone circle in Europe, dating from over 3000 BC. It is certainly beautiful and has a wonderful atmosphere, set on a round flat plateau and encircled by mountains.

If you look carefully, you’ll see the snowy peak of Helvellyn peeping through from behind the other hills.

Castlerigg stone circle 3 reduced

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Digital communication and social media

I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and enjoying Facebook for longer; so I thought I’d offer some personal reflections on the various forms of digital communication and social media.

First, an admission: I am not, and have never been, much of a telephone person. I don’t like ‘phoning people, because it seems rude to interrupt what they’re doing just because I want to grab their attention; and although I always love to hear from my nearest and dearest family or my best friends, other ‘phone calls can be irritating if I’m concentrating on work or enjoying leisure. Also, we depend on so many cues when we talk to people face to face. We see whether they are smiling or looking fierce, we detect love or coldness in their eyes, we notice if they are giving us their full attention or tapping away at a computer at the same time. All these cues are, of course, absent when our only contact is audial. I like to be able to put out my hand and touch the person I’m talking to, if the mood takes me.

Overheard (Poetry Society)

Mobile ‘phones, of course, compound my reticence. I do possess a mobile ‘phone (or a handy, as a German friend calls it), and occasionally I turn it on; but most people find me unsocially unavailable most of the time. Those who were present at my reading at the Poetry Society AGM last Autumn may recognise this photo.

Even worse than calling someone on a mobile ‘phone is texting. I deeply dislike predictive text, and find myself challenged to the point of exasperation by trying to find the correct keys to give me the punctuation I want. I am also saddened to see young people unable to lift their eyes from their mobile ‘phones, even when stepping out into busy roads or meeting socially.

Fortunately it is possible to send text messages by Skype, using a normal computer keyboard, so I do occasionally send a text to someone’s mobile by this method. Speaking of Skype, I am more than happy with this wonderful mode of communication. It gets round several of the difficulties that result from the lack of cues mentioned above, and it has absolutely transformed the accessibility and relationships of people separated by distance.

I can remember my first astonishing experience of faxing. I was in the IT department at the university when I needed to sign a contract with one of my publishers. I had a conversation with them on the telephone, then watched in amazement as the contract was spewed out of the fax machine before my eyes. It really did seem like magic in those days before all the wonders of digital communication made us blasé. But faxes, of course, had a restricted life, as new technologies tumbled over each other, challenging us to keep abreast of the developments.

Social media explained for blog

I took to email like a duck to water. This was so much more satisfactory than telephoning without knowing how convenient one’s call was likely to be to the recipient. It was like leaving a message in their pigeon-hole at work, and trusting that they would deal with it when it suited them. Strangely, I think I had one of the first emails in the country: I was editing a journal at the time, and immediately saw the potential for publishing the articles I received, without having to re-type everything. I’ve still got that original email address, though I use some others as well, for different purposes.

In the nineties I was travelling all over the world on business, and wanted to keep in touch with my elderly mother. I therefore acquired a second-hand computer for her and set about teaching her how to use email. She must have been one of the first grey-surfers in the country, and as it was all so new and different from other forms of communication, it was quite a challenge to get to grips with it. I remember her bafflement when she finally succeeded in sending a message, and then found that it was still on her computer – ‘so it couldn’t have gone!’ I was very proud of her internet prowess, and wished there were more websites for her to visit. She would have thoroughly enjoyed the infinite possibilities for surfing that we now enjoy.

Turning to more recent social media, I have to admit that with some of them I am as much at sea as my mother was with her early incursions into emails. The two that for some reason leave me completely cold are Linked in and Twitter.

LInked in

All sorts of people invite me to be Linked in with them, and quite often, rather than offend them, I comply. That tends to mean that I am connected to all sorts of people on Linked in, whom I don’t know and am never likely to meet. This network seems to pride itself on offering some sort of business advantage, but I think there are better ways to share business ideas and contacts.

Twitter

But even worse than Linked in is Twitter. In a rash moment I accepted an invitation to join Twitter, and I know that millions of people swear by it. I am assured that it is an essential publicity tool for a writer; but I have to admit that, even after several exploratory incursions into the Twitter-realm, I still don’t get it. Apart from the fact that so many of the tweets appear to be completely inane, there is the huge practical problem of superfluity. Apparently the idea is to have as many Twitter contacts as possible, but that means
a) that there will be a constant and unstoppable stream of tweets arriving into one’s system and I certainly haven’t got time to read them all, and
b) no one is going to have time or inclination to read what I tweet either.
I’m sure that my sparse visits to Twitter (maybe once or twice a month) do not constitute the correct way to treat this miracle of mass communication; but the only way to see even a fraction of the tweets that are posted would be to leave it on all the time, which would mean one was constantly interrupted and would never get a decent day’s work done.

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Next up the hierarchy of digital communication is Facebook, and here we come to a form of social media that, once I’d got the hang of it, I found I really rather enjoyed. It is an easy and enjoyable way of staying in touch with friends and family; but it has also turned out that many  of my Facebook friends are poets, and through Facebook we inform each other of publications and publishing possibilities and share some of our work. I enjoy some of the humour that is shared on Facebook, and also turn to it to keep me abreast of the news, particularly the news that isn’t considered important by the mass communications industry. The groups within Facebook are useful for selecting who one wants to share material with, as not everything that is posted is of interest to everyone.

Sometimes people send or accept friending invitations and then are never seen on the site again. I can’t help wondering what happens to them. Is it that they read the posts but are too shy to share anything of their own lives, or do they join and then think better of it and abstain from these jolly gatherings in the market place?

Possibly the most enjoyable of these media is Blogging, because while Facebook allows posts of more substance and interest than Twitter, a blog can be quite an extended communication. Because the blogs are longer than the quick messages that characterise the other media, it’s not possible, or advisable, to follow too many. I’ve just looked to see whose blogs I follow most assiduously, and find that they are all, like myself, writers. I suppose that’s why I find them interesting. They include Anthony Wilson, Jo Bell, Kathleen Jones and Elizabeth Stott.

These reflections are, of course, entirely personal, and I mean no disrespect to those who, for instance, enjoy Twitter or use Linked in for their business interactions. And then, most of you will probably agree that at the end of the day the best social interaction is to meet someone for a walk or a drink and talk face to face.

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