Tuesday 29 September 2015

From the Severn to the Thames in an inflatable canoe by James Pentney


The post here was written by James Pentney and is a remarkable piece – it involves a lyrical and spiritual odyssey from the Severn to the Thames with an inflatable canoe.
I walked back with Jim, from the Little Chapel at Rodborough Tabernacle, after seeing John Bassett’s and Paul Southcott’s Gallipoli performance, in mid-September. Johnny Fluffypunk was dressed in his customary Great War homage vintage gear and Jim was pushing his bike, clad in an illuminated white hat, under a starry sky and a waxing harvest moon. It was a typical Rodborough scene.
‘You’re a literary chap’, he said to me, ‘have you come across a 1913 book about travelling from the Severn to the Thames, through the Sapperton Tunnel? The last time that was done.’
I confessed that I hadn’t and our conversation turned to Jim’s journey of re-creation and re-interpretation. I asked Jim if he had kept a travelogue. Jim kindly agreed to send me through his record of his watery pilgrimage. It arrived the next day.
 Many thanks, Jim.
Readers, I am sure that you will enjoy this.
Stuart


Cycling down the towpath by the Stroudwater Canal
Pondering how no boat has gone from the Severn to the Thames
Since what’s his name … you know who …
Then there at Attwools by the old A38
   
W-hey  … W-hoo
A knu
‘spelt knu’
A k-blow up knu
In a very fetching shade of blue
And a kn-other knu
With paddles too
It was then I knew what I must do

Not for a hundred years, one assumes, has a boat gone from Sabrina,
the Severn, to Old Father Thames since, you know who. But …

I’ve a knu
A k-rubber knu
Not pea-green, lavender or blue
It’s true, a knu
A k-yellow knu
To paddle all the way is over due

Slipped into the Severn at Framilode

I launched the knu
k-plunk, k-plosh, k-poo
Stuck in the mud I lost a shoe
But not the knu
It’s no longer new
To paddle all the way to London Zoo

And see the gnu
And free the gnu
In the yellow knu there’s room for two
Me and you
Gnu and knu
And then we really ought to know w-ho’s w-ho

Thank you, beaucoup


It was announced war has been declared on rhyme in Stroud
True, no haiku, but a stand up in defense and tribute Michael Flanders


Hailku Hiking

In The Flower of Gloster, one of the last boats to plough the Sapperton Tunnel
and a book dating from 1913, the words of an old boy are recorded.

“My big grandfather … the day the tunnel was opened,
he was walking down the towpath and he met a feller coming along,
and he said to my big grandfather, ‘where are you going my man?’
- to see the king.
‘I am the king,’ says the man and gives him a guinea;
and when he looked on the head on the coin,
I’m dommed if it worn’t.”

That would have been George III on 19th July 1788.

 “My first job” said a volunteer working on the towpath, “was clearing out Joe Price’s workshop. Heard of him?
He was the blacksmith who could hammer metal white hot.
Two of us struggled to shift his anvil and he just lifted it on his own
and he was in his eighties then.”

We are weak shadows.

It was the longest deepest widest in the world they say.
Twenty four shafts linked at the base. 
No record exists of how many died or squeezed into what is now the Inn
between twelve or fourteen hour days of digging out countless tons
of rock and soil by hand.
For two and three quarter miles the tunnel burrows.
Few ‘legged’ it through even a hundred years ago.
We are weak shadows of them.

If? “In the beginning was the word”
Before was there symmetry and silence?
“There are no words in heaven,” a monk at Prinknash Abbey was heard to say.

Haiku uses words
      sparsely and in prime numbers
            that strike a tension.

Haiku disapproves of metaphor and frowns on trying to be clever.
It aims to realize “the eternal universal truth contained in being,”
an aim shared with stone letter carving,
where chasing, chopping and stabbing are terms used for the angle of the chisel.


Tip tap, trace the line
Chip chop, chase the curve
Sharp on diamond crystalline
Tungsten tipped and hold the nerve.
Wet and dry the splinters fly,
Stab to stop
Not quite alone
Between the chisel
And the stone’

 Good fortune led to collaboration with haiku writer and wildlife illustrator,
Paul Russell Miller (PRM), in the setting of his words as poetry in the landscape.
Haiku being a Japanese form often limited to seventeen syllables,
capturing an ‘instant of intuition.’

Among evening reeds
    the young heron’s lunge again
         brings gentle nodding        (PRM) 

Brambled lock relics 
       Tangle tumble to Chalford,
              add to the beauty.

 Chipping away in Gloucestershire on bits of stone,
an earlier project was on the broken slate of a discarded pool table.
Into it I carved ‘Song’ by the composer and poet, Ivor Gurney,
written before the Battle of Passchendaele where he was gassed in 1917
  
“Only the wanderer
Knows England’s graces,
Or can anew see clear
Familiar faces.

And who loves joy as he
Who dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn meadows.”

(For a group early in New Year 2013 I referred to my grandfather,
who was lost in the battle cruiser Goliath on his birthday in May 1915.)

Bells Ring
Decades of mist lift to show the pain opaque in his eyes before he died.
 Was it his father he saw?
“If he had returned, I don’t know how we should have coped,” he weeps.
Downed in the Dardanelles, in sight of Troy,
I have the tattered telegram and the copper medallion.
Isn’t there a First World War song
 Something, something, something to the Dardanelles”?
The name resounds, Dardanelles.
It chimes, tolls echoes as the centenary looms, surfacing to be salvaged.

Scribble on the screen,
Start of a journey’s journal?
Not quite prose or poetry but a record, a log.
Adrift in the dark hours 
as light fluttered snow scattered.
 Where bells ring.

The ex-mayor and local Green councilor spoke of his uncle, a veteran of the War,
being tormented in the months before his death by the faces of those he had bayoneted. The witness made his nephew a lifelong peace campaigner.

As pilgrimage, the haiku hike, the Gurney journey continues in the knu (Ivor Knu)
and on foot.
  
 Ivor’s sonnet, ‘Brimscombe’ needed carving.

One lucky hour in the middle of my tiredness
I came under the pines of the sheer steep
And saw the stars like steady candles gleam
Above and through; Brimscombe wrapped (past life) in sleep:
Such body weariness and bad ugliness
Had gone before, such tiredness to come on me;
This perfect moment had such pure clemency
That it my memory has all coloured since,
Forgetting the blackness and pain so driven hence,
 And the naked uplands from even bramble free,
That ringed-in hour of pines, stars and dark eminence.
Wonder of men had walked there, and old Romance.
(The thing we looked for in our fear of France.)


There are still pines up the ‘sheer steep.’ 
At night the same ‘stars like steady candles gleam.’ 

High in arts and crafts the chapel of St Mary and the Angels is there.
It was commissioned by two nurses from the war.
Together they took holy orders and a community grew around them.
They lie buried together beside the chapel.

Sister Mary Stephen’s welcoming kindness encouraged this prolog, log
and maybe epilog.

Toward the top of the steep, edged into the charred interior of the hollow ash tree,
I finished All Roads Lead To France about Edward Thomas.
In the army he taught map reading and would have grasped at once the glimpse of the Golden Valley spied through the trunk, as would have his First World War contemporary, Gurney.

Down at Brimscombe Port empty post war factories echoed under cracked asbestos roofs. Volunteers and pay-back lads weaved wheel barrows around the mills
to lay ‘type one’ chippings and ‘five mil to dust’ aggregate on the towpath
recreating the gentle curves bordered with boards.

‘When From The Curve’ is another of Gurney’s war poems

When from the curve of the wood’s edge does grow
Power, and that spreads to envelope me –
Wrapped up in sense of meeting tree and plough
I feel tiny song stir tremblingly
And deep; the many bird pangs separate
Taking most full of joy, for soon shall come
The kindling, the beating at Heaven gate
The flood of tide that bears strongly home.

Then under the skies I make my vows
Myself to purify and fit my heart
For the inhabiting of the high House
Of Song, that dwells high and clean apart.
The fire, the flood, the soaring, these the three
That merged are power of Song and prophesy.

Framed in a tar soaked sleeper
The first of Paul’s carved haikus reads
   
What joy to receive
    from each towpath dragonfly
         its dismissive glance

Rebuilt now, the canal meanders around Capel’s Mill and the towering railway viaduct
where new pillars of concrete have been driven deep down.
Cocooned plastic bottles litter our layers of archaeology.
In an oblong of local limestone dumped on the, the broken moulding hint
of a once grander structure read,

       
On the sunlit bed
     one of those silted branches
           casts a pike’s shadow


The miles separating the great rivers join at Wallbridge in Stroud,  
the start or end of the Thames and Severn Canal.
In ‘canal fever’ days there were two companies, the earlier ‘Stroudwater’
ripples on from the new lock gates to the Severn at Framilode.



On the seal of the Thames and Severn Canal Company
Old Father Thames splices a rope with the Goddess Sabrina
‘Tentanda Est Via’ proclaims the Latin motto
- push oneself beyond our limits is the way to live.
The carving of the block at the lock was in time to see the Olympic torch go by.
The stone itself might well have been passed by George III on 19th July 1788.
At the foot of the staircase in the Museum in the Park the scene can be seen in an oil painting with a trow being towed and lines of red cloth draped on ‘tenterhooks’
strung across the hillside.

The Stroudwater drifts on down through ‘Ocean’ near Stonehouse and the Vale.
Why Ocean?
Perhaps because there was a basin wide enough for cargo carrying craft of the Severn,
the trows, to turn. Swans nest in the reeds.
The swing bridge has been replaced but two of the original stones were kept.     
One contrasts the creaminess of Cotswold stone with ‘Devonian’ or ‘Old Red Sandstone.’

    Ocean’s ageless wave
Standing still and timeless here
     In the Old Red Sand

The other stone is local, crumbly and embedded with shells.
The old bridge turned on the square hole in the centre that housed the pivot,
it is capped now with a marble tern carved in low relief to enclose a time capsule.


            Tern
    Turn         Turn
          Return
Here                  Here
 
  Hear             cry
        little Cyr    


St Cyr’s church squats across the water.
Dedications to the infant martyr are rare on this side of the channel.

Beyond, the M5 hums, the old A38 trundles,
the bridges of the Gloucester Sharpness canal swing
and the Severn, Sabrina, the silver goddess, the river nymph, curves.



MONO-LOG  (for 6th September to be performed at Capel’s Mill sculpture ‘In Transit’
I propose leaning a slate with carved monkeys on an A frame against the sculpture structure. The performer holds a chisel and hammer.
Beside him stands a more military looking figure – possibly me)

DISMEMBERED MONKEYS

‘We are just weak shadows

Tip, tap
Up the line.

Mid-summer’s day for me began with relief carving of these dismembered monkeys.   
Dismembered monkeys?

Chip chop,
Chase the curve.

Dummy mallet and chisel in hand, you can find me down along the cut that links the two great rivers.

Sharp on diamond crystalline
Tungsten tipped to trace the nerve.

Stones all have silent stories.

Wet and dry the splinters fly.

A previous carver carved them.

Cut into panels - dismembered,
they clamber over what had been the front.

As birds sang an idea came.
How are we, down here, seen by them?

Above song birds spy
     half remembered monkeys in
           the dappled shadows

Entombed here in slate,
    polished with oil and copper,
         almost caste in bronze.

Stab to stop
Not quite alone
Between the chisel and the stone.

Seen Paulozzi’s giant on guard at Pangolin where bronze is forged?
Sam Freeman made this there. Know him?



(end, then the other one  (me?) speaks ….. )

‘The unit I’m with? Guess.
Ready night or day. Kit packed.
Arctic, tropical, desert, underwater underwear,
Tungsten tipped chisels, diamond sharpened
dummy mallet - best carry a spare.
Few words needed
Drop a syllable at thirty thousand feet and we’ll there.

Lately some scatty poet, Ann Drex we call her,
flushed his last line. She was off on one.
Soiled, encrusted in crap.
We got it back though.
 
So now you know.
I’m with HER - HER
Haiku Emergency Rescue,

No one knows when the next haiku moment’ll strike;
but we’re waiting.’

Prophesy Prophesy
‘ … that Old Man River … ‘
Budda, Confusius, Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes,  Aristotle,  Daniel, Elias, Elija, John the Baptist John the Evangelist John Glen, Jesus, Mohamed,  Geoffrey of Monmouth, Hildegard of Bingham, Roger Bacon, Leonardo de Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Gottenburg, Shakespeare, Newton,  Jenner,  Darwin, Brunel, Morris, Marx, Churchill, Ghandi, Turin, Dirac, Luther, Luther King, Dylan, Hawking, Mandella Malala…….
‘…  just keeps on rolling along’ – Paul Robeson
In his ‘Dreaming Time For The Witches’ Yeats explains “Sabrina was considered one of the three daughters of the mountain Plynlimon who arose one morning to make their way to the sea by different routes. Geoffrey of Monmouth described a princess who drowned in the shallows of the estuary – part of a far older tradition describing mythical journeys.
For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years offerings were made to rivers around the world in gratitude for good fortune. A Trojan connection has the granddaughter of Brutus, the grandson of Aeneus, drowned in the Severn, Snow White like, by her jealous stepmother.
Did Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin foresee the Goddess Sabrina united with Old Father Thames to usher in a golden age? The writer of the ‘Heroic Poem’ in the 1770s celebrated the Act of Parliament for the canal and on 19th July 1788 George III was there at the Sapperton Tunnel. Then what?
SABRINA:  “So there you are.
Wake up, wake up you silly old fool.
Get up Merlin.”
MERLIN:   “Ugh, good Goddess, oh… I must have dropped off.”
SABRINA:   “Only for the last two hundred and fifty years.”
MERLIN:     “I was tired. How are you and your other half?”
SABRINA:    “That weak, male, meandering, mean, home counties, money grabbing, lecherous, filthy, old … Thames.”

Sunday 27 September 2015

Bath Slavery Walk: Sunday 4th October


A message from Richard White:

This walk will mash a National Trust walk with some of the data from the Legacy of Slavery database plus anything else anyone contributes! Hope you can make it and do share with anyone you think may be interested. 

This is the beginning of an experiment I want to run over the coming year exploring a few ideas around walking, place, heritage, body, networks, enchantment and disenchantment. I thought you might be interested in playing along, maybe walking too!

Walknow: walking out 1     Sunday 4 October 10.00

Meet: 10.00 am Outside 44AD Gallery and Artists Studios
4 Abbey Street Bath BA1 1NN
(the corner of Abbey near where the Centurion used to stand)
Time: approx 2 hours..ish
more details here: https://rswpost.wordpress.com/

Please circulate this to anyone who you think maybe interested!  The plan is to do this monthly regardless of the weather sometimes a short one sometime a long one always offering a bit of a challenge. Let me know if you want me to take your name of the list...and if you have received this as a forward please let me know if you want me to add your name!
best wishes
Richard

-- 
--
Richard White
Associate Lecturer: Creative Media Practice and Heritage
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries
PhD student: walking practices, social media, heritage
RiverWalk project
Richard White portfolio

Join us on: Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn
Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN

Sunday 20 September 2015

Making your own museum: guerrilla memorialization, counter-heritage, counter-tourism and situationist interventionism



 We had a lovely walk today, revisiting the Laurie Lee poetry posts – see http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/laurie-lee-wildlife-walk-lit-crit-on.html

But this post is about unofficial memorialization; so first of all, the book that inspired me, and then some borrowed and some original ideas for making your own museum, to try out in the streets, fields and lanes in which you live, work, or travel.
Make up your own ideas too – and share, of course.

Counter-Tourism
A Pocketbook
50 Odd Things To Do In A Heritage Site
(and other places)
Triarchy Press

Gentle, surreal and subversive ideas ‘assembled by Crab Man’.
Here we have a truncated few of the 50 odd, but it’s best to buy the book isn’t it?
(More expensive, but also recommended:
Counter-Tourism The Handbook;
 Mythogeography,
Walking, Writing & Performance;
 Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic -
 by all means borrow mine if you are pushed for cash.)

Counter-Tourism
A Pocketbook
50 Odd Things To Do In A Heritage Site


‘Conduct conversations with portraits’,
‘USE THE SECRET GREETING IF YOU SEE A FELLOW COUNTER-TOURIST’
(You’ll have to buy the book),

‘Collect Heritij clichés, for example:
‘with a nod to the past and an eye to the future’;
‘ Medieval jousts – as seen on TV’;
‘travel in our “time machines"’ –
‘Share them at www.countertourism.net’,

‘Domesticate iconic buildings’ – for example,
‘Do a bit of dusting in Buckingham Palace as you pass through’,

Rewrite ‘nostalgic’ heritage sites without the class oppression,

Anywhere can be a heritage site,
You can use the tactics anywhere,
You can create your own heritage sites.

What an absolutely brilliant book!
Only £5.99

Some Counter-Tourist Tactics for Stroud

A suburban home means as much a stately home
(Put posters in windows: “EVERY HOME A HERITAGE SITE"),
Invite people around and give them a guided tour –
You could even issue tickets and rope off PRIVATE AREAS.

Leave counter-heritage notes in envelopes addressed to
HERITAGE: THE TRUTH
and insert them in the gaps between official plaques
and the surfaces to which the plaques are attached,
For example:
the Black Boy clock in Nelson Street
 needs a different contextualization,
one which foregrounds slavery rather than a clock.

Leave notes in hedgerows, estimating their age
(As a rule of toe, one species of tree per hundred years
 in a 30 metre walk along the chosen hedge),
And include some lines from John Clare about enclosure,
For example:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky’.

When you visit local long barrows,
Stand by the information boards full of their enervating statistics,
And think of all the people who questioned why such constructions were necessary, but were forced to dig and delve and hew.
Make their feelings politely known.

Visit buildings associated with slave owners who received compensation for the abolition of slavery in 1834,
And leave notes.
For example, the Rev. Joseph Duncan Ostrehan, who owned slaves in Barbados and lived at Sheepscombe Parsonage,
A memorial in the church eulogizes him:
In faithfully preaching Christ he gave prominence to the Blessed Truth that His sheep should never perish, neither should any man pluck them out of His hand.’


.
Place a ribbon across the top of the High Street,
Where the street surface is subsiding
as the numerous subterranean springs endlessly flow,
Have a placard:
‘UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT THE BEACH:
WELCOME TO THE STROUD BRANCH OF THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL AND THE REASON FOR STROUD’S EXISTENCE AND ITS SUBSIDENCE: SPRINGS’.
Cut the ribbon, remove the placard,
and re-open the spectacle of normality.

Look for where ‘the past is poking through’,
For example, the fern covered drain in the Slad Road,
Just where the drive leads up past the bakers to Star Anis,
Look down the drain into the dark world of the Slad Brook,
Trace its culverted path to the new flats on the other side
of the main road junction at the bottom of Gloucester Street,
This is Badbrook, where cloth masters were ducked
in the 1825 Stroudwater Riots,
You could leave a red paper plaque to point this out,
With the heading ‘Hidden History Number 1’,
And carry on with this act of numbered
guerrilla memorialization elsewhere in the town
and Stroudwater villages.

When guerrilla memorializing,
you are making the invisible visible,
You are rescuing the anonymous poor from
‘the enormous condescension of posterity’
Invent people, invent names and invent stories,
You could leave these fabrications in cafes and pubs,
Just like Otto and Elise Hampel,
with their anti-Hitler postcards in wartime Berlin.

Such activity opposes the fetishization of documents.

You could produce a board game for Stroud called Coffeopoly,
And place all the cafes of the town in strategic spots,
With Counter-Heritage Chance cards to be drawn,
And Counter Tourism Community Chest cards;
Such a game will reverse the history of coffee houses –
There will be no discussion of insurance, slavery, bubbles,
Trade, Empire and war,
Instead: wage rises, unions, the abolition of slavery, equality,
The end of enclosure and private property,
And the construction of a Radical History Trail,
With alternative Heritage Boards and a We Spy Quiz.

Talk to Mr. Holloway’s statue and ask him
why he was so opposed to the co-operative movement
if he was such a friend of the working class.
You might have to use a megaphone so as to ensure
he hears you above the traffic’s din.
It gets busy by the railway bridge.

Magic reinterpretations of the past in the landscape, 
with small-scale representations,
For example, take a model train and semaphore signal
down to the old Nailsworth branch line,
Place in a suitably atmospheric wooded spot,
Take pictures and write a poem and place on social media
to encourage others to do the same sort of thing
across the five valleys, villages and towns,
And so build up a collective social media
and traditional album of the past;
Hold show and tell afternoons with tea and scones,
With short talks from exhibitors about their re-creations,
Especially with reference to how passers-by reacted;
Create a shop in your kitchen with pencils, rubbers
and fridge magnets for sale.

Take photographs of incongruities in the landscape,
Surreal or jarring juxtapositions,
Visual and/or historical oxymorons,
Such as the unconscious celebration of slavery in Bristol,
With a pub called the Golden Guinea in Guinea Street,
With signboards next door consciously celebrating
Heritage and the Future;
You could create your own versions of these solecisms –
Make the invisible visible,
Illustrating the hidden assumptions of the spectacle of the street.

When you are looking for the past poking through,
Look for floral palimpsests,
Wood anemones on Rodborough Common, for example,
Connoting woodland, long lost amongst the current swards.

Look for urban palimpsests too,
But transform industrial archaeology into social history,
By leaving invented first person recollections
or fabulous but credible statistics,
These can be your counter heritage calling cards.

Choose an unobtrusive, seemingly mediocre spot,
a place with apparently nothing to recommend it,
Reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary,
A William Blake vision of the universe within a drop of water
or a grain of sand,
Record and/or photograph and/or write down your thoughts
About this exact spot on the first day of each month
throughout the year,
And share your Miniaturist’s Almanack with friends and family
On each successive New Year’s Eve.

Take pre-decimal old money into your favoured public house,
Try to buy beer at old prices but with good humour,
And with clichéd sallies,
Treat the pub as a historical theme park –
Choose a year beforehand,
And conduct all conversation as if it is that year,
For example: ‘The Day when War broke out’.

When leaving counter-heritage calling cards,
Or leaving nocturnal red paper plaques,
Or conducting conversations with the black boy in Nelson Street,
Ensure that your peregrination involves a deconstruction
Of the iconography of pub signs,
You could sketch alternative ones and proffer to publicans.

You should also ensure that your ramble includes
a deconstruction of street names:
 you might want to point at a name such as King Street,
And maintain a street discussion
about whether it might be renamed as
Citizen Street
draw passers-by into your colloquy,
As you make your pilgrimage around the names of streets.
You might want to take a wax crayon and plain paper
and make rubbings for a show and tell
In your own domestic museum.

Such an urban activity lends itself well to the countryside,
You could informally name footpaths and holloways,
And delicately mark this new nomenclature
upon your own OS maps;
You could also create a new space-time matrix
by cutting up photocopies of old OS maps,
And sticking them carefully onto a modern map,
So as to create a new utopian world.

Visit the Oxfam Shop and the bookies in Gloucester Street,
This used to be the Golden Hart  - a pub with a bowling green -,
Where Henry Vincent, the charismatic Chartist speaker,
Raised the roof and the masses in 1839,
So stroll into the bookies and mime some bowling of ninepins,
Then collect some betting slips and fill in the Six Points
As the names of your horses in six different races:
Universal Suffrage; Payment of MPs; Equal Electoral Districts; Secret Ballot; Annual Parliaments; Abolition of the Property Qualification for MP.
You might do this just the once.

If the television is on, and a period costume drama comes on,
Turn it off,
And visit the Farmers’ Market instead,
Count how many times you hear or see the words
‘artisan’ and ‘artisanal’
Used in an entrepreneurial false consciousness
bourgeois sort of way.

Take a walk across fields threatened with development
on a frosty morning,
Take photographs of your footprints
(For your own or a collective alternative museum),
Listen to the drone of the traffic,
Then imagine the sound of clogs, shoes, hooves and bare feet,
Re-create the conversations of past centuries,
By finding wormholes that will transport you through time,
For example, the alleyway in Stroud’s High Street
linked to Walker’s Bakery.

Visit Ordnance Survey Trig. Points and leave white poppies,
And practice commemorative guerrilla gardening,
With wild flowers seeds,
Rather than ceramic poppies,
In neglected, ‘appropriate places’,
Then stand in front of some CCTV cameras,
Clad in historical costume,
And recreate some famous events from the past,
With a series of historical tableaux.

Create your own lexis and vocabulary,
As in Robert Macfarlane,
For example: ‘Severnset’,
A word to describe the sun setting over the Severn,
When viewed from Rodborough Common,
Or ‘frost-furrow’ and ‘rime-ridge’,
To describe the re-appearance of a medieval landscape,
On a William Langland Piers Plowman winter’s day.

Conduct conversations with imaginary ghosts whilst out walking,
Or create an Edward Thomas imagined alter ego – ‘The Other’,
And unlike Thomas, who spurned the use a map when out walking,
Photograph a keepsake when you cross those
grid-reference lines on the map: Eastings and Northings,
Create a miniature museum of these keepsake pictures.

Rename constellations in the heavens
With names from radical history,
Then address the gutters too.

Photocopy banknotes and substitute radical faces for the monarch’s,
Just as Thomas Spence used to create a radical coinage
in the reign of King George the Third,
You could make wax crayon rubbings of coins,
But replace the circumferential Church and State fidelities,
With radical slogans and assertions.
                                                                               
Your house might begin to so overflow with your memorabilia,
That you might feel obliged to designate a room in your home
As ‘The Museum of Counter-Heritage, Counter-Tourism,
Guerrilla Memorialisation and Situationist Intervention’.

Your final radical act will be to call on people,
By ringing the doorbell, or knocking on the door,
Or you will communicate with them
In the street by word of mouth,
Instead of via social media,
And you will invite them round to view your completed museum,
And they will reciprocate,
And you will form a new community,
With feet in past, present and future tenses:
 A Society of Radical Remembrancers,
Whose oath of allegiance might run thus:
We do collectively and individually swear that we shall
Help make the nvisibilised visible,
And we shall leave mementoes to the invisibilised,
And create a series of Lieux de Memoire,
Sites of Memory,
That might be as transient and ephemeral as words writ on water,
Or as long lasting as Time might permit.