Appleby Horse Fair

So the gypsy horse fair is over and things can begin to get back to normal. I love the traditional aspects of it - the horses and the beautiful painted caravans, but there’s little of that left now. The painted caravans are there for show and people actually sleep in the modern, chrome plated affairs parked next door. The horses too are just a commodity - transport is in four wheel drives, or the convertible Audis that seem to be the favoured vehicle at the moment.

Up on Fair Hill - about a mile out of Appleby - is the main encampment - a collection of the old vardas and newer caravans. Every road verge and patch of grass has horses tethered on it.

The country lane is closed to traffic and converted into a race track, where the trotting horses are put through their paces in front of potential buyers.
This is the picturesque side of the Fair. Tomorrow I’ll show you a different one - a tale of police harassment and public disorder.
But I did feel quite sad, watching the last of the vardas trotting up the hill out of Appleby, heading home - or just possibly the next Fair.

Flash Fiction: Fortune Cookies

There are two of them in the basket; one for each of us. I choose the nearest, then hesitate. The other one seems to be winking at me in the pink light of the fringed Chinese lamp. My hand hovers.
‘Oh, go on then,’ he says, in a tone that is half way between irritation and resignation. Then he picks up and opens the one I’ve just refused. An odd smile twitches at the corner of his mouth as he reads; ‘Don’t cry for it, try for it’.
Mine crumbles into fragments when I break it open. There’s nothing inside. I look on the tablecloth, on the floor, under my napkin. But there’s still nothing. The cookie is empty. I’m not superstitious, definitely not, but something uneasy and irrational drags itself out of hiding and sits there in the coloured foil, staring at me.
‘If you don’t eat it, it can’t come true,’ he says. He’s already crunching into his, the almost-smile still curling one side of his mouth.

The Tuesday Poem: Horse Trading

I've decided not to put poems in the sidebar, which distorts the line breaks, but to put them up in the main body of the blog from now on. I've also been accepted as one of the Tuesday Poem group and am committed to putting up a poem (not necessarily my own) every Tuesday if I can.

They wake me early, cantering
along the river-bank below my window;
testy stallions and barrel-bellied mares
with velvet mouths and feathered shins,
bare-backed by Irish gypsies
over for the Fair.

Later I watch the pure-bred
horses harnessed in sulkies
jouncing across the grass,
arching their necks and lifting
their polished hooves like gods
from old mythologies.

In my house their ancestors gallop
under the floor. Five horses heads;
ivory shells of thin bone, blank sockets
rearing up at me out of another time.
Shaman's stallions, carrying souls to heaven.
Five white horses: one to protect

each corner of the house, one more
to bring fertility, sacrificed at the fall
of the year. Their shoes are above the door.
Their manes and tails pack the space
between my floor boards
curl in the plastered wall.

Outside I watch them turn and trot,
hock deep in foaming water,
"broken to harness" under the whip
flesh and sinew sold on a hand-clap.
At night I hear their mythic hooves
beating on wood; their snorting breath.

I wrote the poem lying in bed listening to the horses on the river bank below my bedroom window, during the Gypsy Horse Fair in Appleby. The town has a long association with horses and, although we don't have any horses carved into the landscape as in southern England, some of the houses here have horses' skulls buried under the floors. The mystical significance of this has long vanished, but the traditional Horse Fair continues.

Creative Writing On-Line

Part of this writer’s life is tutoring an on-line creative writing course for the Open University. It started about 6 years ago and I was one of the first tutors recruited. Since then we’ve all, as a group, pioneered the teaching of creative writing on-line through what is now called (abominably) the Virtual Learning Environment. This means that we set up conferences on the internet where our students can post up work, comment on each other’s writing and chat. As tutors we set group exercises, mark assignments, arrange on-line tutorials and oversee the on-line forum. It works well, though I much prefer face-to-face contact with students. Suggestions for improvements to precious, often sensitive, material are so much more palatable when conveyed by the human voice, modified by discussion, and not contained in the cold print of an email.
Today - Saturday - was the marking moderation meeting at Milton Keynes. This is essential, because we all have to give the same levels of grade to our students for similar work. So I had to get up at 4.30am to catch a train, participate in a mock marking exercise with other tutors and then get on another train back to the Lake District. The journey takes 4 hours each way, so it’s a long day. For me it’s several hours of soul searching into the value of teaching creative writing.
Can it be taught at all? You certainly can’t give students the talent to write - all you can share is the technical expertise. I often wish that there’d been a course around when I started out, so that I didn’t have to learn by hit or miss.
Can it realistically be marked? Or is that purely subjective? We try to mark by rewarding demonstrated techniques - the craft of writing - with a little bonus in reserve for manuscripts that have the ‘Wow’ factor.
Is it ethical to turn more writers out into a world with diminishing markets? When publishing is in its worst crisis for decades? But I think so long as you don’t give students unrealistic expectations and warn them how hard it’s going to be, then that’s ok. It’s ironic somehow, to encourage others to compete with you in an already over-crowded profession.
But students are learning for different reasons anyway - some of them simply do it for themselves. Some are writing as therapy, or to make sense of past experiences. Others are doing the module as part of another degree. Some European students are studying to improve their English. Only a small percentage want to be writers.
So now home, very tired, to crash in my own bed after a long day. It was great to meet the other tutors - almost the only time we get together. And in another month the course will be over for another year. Not sure whether I’m going to be tutoring again next year. I’ve decided that, with such a hectic travelling schedule, I need to cut my work load before I fold under the pressure! In three weeks I’m off to Cuba and three weeks after that I head off to New Zealand and Australia. After that I think I need a holiday .......

Appleby Horse Fair

This is what Appleby is famous for - a gathering of gypsies and horse traders. Every year this quiet, rather conservative town has its population boosted from around three and a half thousand to thirty thousand by an influx of Romany travellers from all over the UK and Europe, as well as all the tourists who come to see them. For the residents, it's rather like being under seige.
The fair is very ancient, though it’s bizarrely called the New Fair, because a new charter was handed out by James II in 1685 to legalise a previously unregulated gathering. The long association with horses here has some strange manifestations. Sometimes, digging up the floors of old houses, horses heads have been found buried underneath.
Most of the horses are the small, compact, brown and white horses traditionally bred by the Romanies. They’re much used for ‘trotting’ - sometimes called cart or gig racing - and the fastest fetch huge sums of money here. There’s a big Irish presence and I’m constantly reminded that some of my ancestors were Irish horse-traders. It was in my father’s blood and I seem to have inherited his love of horses along with the dodgy Irish genes!
We live on the river bank, so we are right in the centre of activity and have to fence off the garden to stop it being trampled down. Once, when we failed to get the wire up in time, we came home to find three horses on the front lawn, one tied to the apple tree and a very large four wheel drive parked beside it.

Every morning the horses intended for sale are brought down to the river to be washed and groomed. Today was mares and foals day - some of the foals only a few days old.

Tomorrow it will be stallions. Further downstream, where the bridge crosses into town, the river is very deep and a lot of the horses are brought down to swim - most ridden by children. But sometimes adults are tempted to take them in and you can see the horses struggling to stay afloat. In previous years there have been a number of accidents, including the deaths of horses, and the RSPCA have a big presence here. Anyone with a strong stomach can follow this link to YouTube.

Cumbria in mourning

I think everyone who lives here is feeling shaken today by a crime that would seem more credible if it happened in the USA. A quiet man,a good mate in the pub, a man who kept himself to himself, suddenly goes on the rampage with two guns, killing his twin brother, his solicitor, and at least nine other people, injuring many others and finally turning the gun on himself. There are many questions. We are all asking why a man who was capable of 'flipping' like this was allowed to have two high performance guns. Are the checks adequate? Probably not - it's still very easy to get a gun. Cumbria is a hunting and shooting county - I live surrounded by it. But I always want to ask why anyone really needs a gun? Is it necessary to kill anything? I don't believe that killing animals for fun is either ethical or moral. And if private individuals are allowed to keep guns, there is always going to be someone, somewhere, who is going to use that gun under stress against another human being.

When I landed in Boston, USA, the first thing I saw was a giant poster with a picture of a dead child and the slogan 'It is easier to child-proof your gun, than it is to gun-proof your child'. It's stayed with me for ever.

Goodbye to Italy

It's goodbye to Italy for a while and hello to rainy England! All I can do is look at the photographs and listen to the music. There was a great deal of it at Peralta. Memories of friends busking in the square at Pietrasanta, Irish fiddle music on the terrace for Easter, blues guitar in the bar during the writing course. I love most kinds of music and used to sing in a folk group a long time ago. This is a very early Tuscan folk song, in dialect, that will always remind me of my winter in Tuscany.