If your fast life style should leave you distressed

Come under this tree and have a good rest

We can watch the sun up and watch the sun down

And if we feel outcast we can chat to the Clown

He lives in a castle by Old Father Thames

And brings us sad tales of the downfall of kings

And if we feel downcast he sings us a song

About a world without sorrow and a world without wrong

And if we feel downcast he cracks us a joke

About a world full of laughter and a world full of hope

So if your fast life style should leave you distressed

Come under this tree, feel free, be my guest

We can watch the stars twinkle in the night sky

And when we are ready we’re happy to fly

As the Clown picks a tune, his style, troubadour

And when he has finished we beg him for more

As we watch the stars twinkle in the night sky

And when we are ready we’re happy to die

I sang that one at Mum’s funeral in Mistley Church (having completed it in the morning by a blackberry bush where she loved to pick) – and, for obvious reasons, I’ve never been able to do it with the same feeling since. 3 chord song – but I did it acapello. Lullaby.

added 28th April 2011:

acorn

birthday acorn (10/2/2011 nikpic 1)

euphemism of the day: ‘mission creep’ for ‘military escallation’ – Shame on the BBC Radio Four Today Programme’s warmongering presenters.

Euphemism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Euphemism is a substitution for an expression that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the receiver like the civilian deaths that result from the continued escallation of these premidiated arms-traders’ killing sprees in the Middle East – is the oil worth it, Ma’am? (ammended 26/4/2001)

 Nick Ward Scenarios Top Posts (the past week)

And if we feel outcast he sings us a song

About a world without sorrow and a world without wrong

Happy to Fly

1984 remembered

pull the other one, anna chapman (Kushchenko)

Spring

‘Le Tango’

There is no political ‘right’ and ‘left’ anymore. There are those who destroy the planet for short-term gain and those who attempt to reverse the destruction.  There are people involved in the arms trade (knowingly and unknowingly – that’s most of us with hight street bank accounts); and there are people who oppose the arms trade – unequivocally – and there are those, like me, I am ashamed to say, who have yet to move our bank accounts to arms-trade free financial insitutions - because our ‘subsidy-benefits’ paperwork complicates the transfer or we are just too lazy (I’m currently with shady Santander, once Abbey National). Is the Co-Op Bank as clean as it claims to be? If not, should there be -  could there be – is there the demand for – a Green Bank ? – a bank free of the greed-monsters currently gloating in the City of London – an anti-arms traders bank, no less? An ethical bank, investing in sustainable environmental solutions (we have the people) enabling us (investors) to release ourselves from our sickening dependency on fossil fuels and war.

added April 22: I’m now banking with the Co-Operative…

For John Humphrys and Barrie Humphreys (and hats off to Colin Firth!)

[]Heart to Heart (lamrim)

If I was in charge of MGM

May 6th, 2011

Tao Reading

 .

(my lovely Cambridge roses, added 6th May 2011)

‘Tao Reading’, painting by Nick Ward (28/4/2011), charcoal, acrylic, glitter on 4xA4 card and tracing paper. A tribute to Chao-Hsiu Chen’s 81 Tao Te Ching cards inspired by Chinese sage Lao Tzu (Connections Book Publishing). Sold to Michael Woods (13th May 2011).

The Present: ‘The Tao is free from desire’ (card 34)

The Past: ‘ To be without ego’ (card 7)

The Future: ‘The Tao guides without commanding’ (card 51)

The Possibility: ‘One who moves with the Tao is equal to it’ (card 41)

(2011/04/29/a-tao-reading-for-the-duke-and-duchess-of-cambridge)

…and here’s a Cambridge song to mark the happy occasion of the Royal Wedding and  the visit on Wednesday of the Queen and Prince Philip to this ancient and beautiful centre of magic and enlightened humanism:

Cambridge Light Blue Blues

Sitting by the river with my musical mate
Got to tell you now that its a lovely fate

Cambridge light blue blues (light blue blues, light blue blues)

Granchester Meadow where the Cam does flow
Haunted by a poet that I used to know

Cambridge light blue blues (light blue blues, light blue blues)

Baites Bite Lock, well, what do you know?
Got my first ukelele forty years ago

Cambridge light blue blues (light blue blues, light blue blues)

Sitting by the river with my memory
Weeping Willow looking like a sad old tree

Cambridge light blue blues (light blue blues, light blue blues)

(B flat/A/G-G… C/D/Bflat/C/G)

10th May 2011: selected verses from another Cambridge song:

Diamond Mind, Song For Syd Barrett (2005 -2011)

ammended 10th May 2011, a Pink Floyd tribute quoting ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and based on the same tune, slightly changed (D/G7/D/G7/D/E/G/D)

featuring artwork below by Damian Hurst

The Pagan Jester’s in the mound (x2)

The Pagan Jester’s in the mound beside the king

Your song my friend is very fine

The flaming sword is double-double edged (x2)

The flaming sword, sharp as a butcher’s knife

cuts through twin fears of death and life

And diamond mind is shining still (x2)

I’ll sing my song beneath your window pain

Your gift, my friend, is very fine

‘And when the dam breaks a thousand years from now

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.’

A dedication

the role of the dramatist…

just the other day…

Queen heads Royal flotilla

The Pageant will see a thousand-strong flotilla of boats travelling down the Thames on Sunday June 3rd 2012.
www.talktalk.co.uk/video/37521/news/Queen-heads-Royal-flotilla/ – Cached

 

Liza, Liza, dream with me

I’ll meet you by the willow at the house of John Dee

Liza, Liza, boat with me

I’ll take you down the river all the way to the sea

I am the Boatman

 

I am the Boatman « Nick Ward Scenarios

22 Feb 2009 … Nick Ward Scenarios. playwright-director-musician-painter … I am the Boatman with a crystal ball. I can drown or I can burn …
nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/i-am-the-boatman/

 

3 June 2011: I love the sound of the Royal Flottila in celebration of the Diamond Jubilee 2012: will the single scullers out front stay in formation, as imagined in the illustration to issue 52 of  Rowing and Regatta magazine (May 2011),  or can we wager that there will be a break-away group going for the line?

 

29th July 2011…and finally to conclude this bitty-fool’s blog, dedicated to our great Queen Elizabeth the Second:

 

‘Tectonic Plates’ – on 4xpurple A4 paper with water-colour and acrylic

Fukushima crisis: Nuclear only part of Japan’s problems

‎BBC News – 4 days ago
The crisis at Japan’s Fukushima power plant has sparked a national review of energy policy and turned public opinion largely against nuclear power, …

‘Pattern Recognition (Keiko)’, painting by Nick Ward, 7th July 2011, water-colour, acrylic, pastel, charcoal on 2xA4 paper

also, yesterday, painted ‘Back to Black’ on kitchen roll (on A4 paper)  watercolour, ink and acrylic… RIP AMY!

…this way up, I think…

 RIP Lucian Freud

 

…and a poetic breakthrough, Maam, added here 9th December 2011:

 

For Ted Hughes

How they hounded him

father-furious

wolf-wounded

in his obdurate silence

on the subject of Sylvia’s suicide

.

Poor Ted!

.

When fame struck hard

with massive disregard

for his-her female craft

he swamped her as he loved her

a very crushing boatman

waited on domestically

by her out-dated sanity

.

He slept around

lauded, amplified,

in down-trodden Primrose Hill, late fifties,

plentiful with sparrows’ eyes

that bed-sitting existence with mouths to feed

Where have all the sparrows gone?

.

No wonder then the pre-poetic raw dawn happened

Camside, old English crooked river,

by Cam when two were one together, however briefly

that kind of love is transatlantic

.

And, then, years later

these astonishing stanzas emphasising barely bearable grief

beneath the slated silence

Who knew such forces were at warring play in the after-life?

quivering with numbed shafts of pure meaning

etched in a grief-stone, the heart,

with a poet’s mind harder yet

than the granite-weighted memory of Zoo wolves howling

at poor Ted’s, primitive, hidden, remorse.

7th December – in response to the laying of  the Ted Hughes  memorial stone, Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

these words

could change the axis of our love
the well-spring of desire, however,
is a constant thing of passing

 
 
6th December 2011, Cambridge

I liked Seamus Heaney’s observation on Radio Four when he remembered that spending time with Ted Hughes made him feel like himself – and after seeing Hughes he felt ‘even more himself’  than he did when he was spending  time with him.

Lovely way of putting it.

(Seamus Heaney paragraph ammended 8/12/2011 – humanism, my creed, if I have one.)

The other item I particularly enjoyed on yesterday’s Radio Four Today Programme was the invitation for listeners to submit a question for Stephen Hawking to celebrate his 70th birthday in January.

As long-term Nick Ward Scenarios fans might have guessed, my question for Professor Hawking is: What was philosophy before it died?

Professor Hawking: Philosophy is Dead « Nick Ward Scenarios

Note to ‘Where have all the sparrows gone’.

Note to ‘Where have all the sparrows gone?’.
 
The evening before the early-morning writing of ‘Where have all the sparrows gone?’ I was speed-reading Simeon Potter’s Our Language (1950, Penguin Books) in which he writes on pages 18 and 19: ‘Latin did not displace Celtic in Britain as it had displaced Celtic across the sea in Gaul. To the English intruders the Celts offered neither friendship nor culture, and little by little the latter were driven westward. The English victory at Deorham (577) separated Wales from Cornwall and that at Chester (613) separated Wales from Cumbria or Cumberland. Many of the Cornish Celts found new homes in Britanny, where Breton or Armorican is still a living language, whereas Cornish died out in the eighteenth century. Welsh, Manx, Erse, and Gaelic are living tongues, though most Welshmen are all Celtic-speaking Manxmen are bilingual. Many English river-names are Celtic: Aire, Avon, Dee, Derwent (Darent, Dart), Don, Esk (Axe, Exe), Ouse, Severn, Stour, Tees, Thames, Trent, and Wye. Several of these, like Avon, Esk, and Stour, mean just ‘water’, but some, like Cald(er) ‘violent’. Cam ‘crooked’, Dee ‘holy’, and Dove ‘black’, are descriptive. Some names of cities and towns are Celtic: London, Dover, Crewe, York, Leeds, Catterick, Penrith, and Carlisle. To a Celtic name Latin-derived -chester or -cester may have been added: Dorchester, Gloucester, Leicester, Manchester, Rochester, and Winchester. Upon the Old English spoken language, however, Celtic left few marks.’

 
Hence line 21 of the poem ‘ Camside, old English crooked river’ is at once literally true, the Cam on the Granchester Meadow side of Cambridge, upstream that is, where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes loved to walk and talk, etc, is indeed a ‘crooked’ old English river – however the line also employs some poetic license as the Celtic word cam for ‘crooked’ pre-dates ‘old English’. I am wondering now, on December 9th, if I would have written the poem at all without having first read, at ‘reformed-dyslexic’ speed, Simon Potter’s fascinatingly dated book. The paragraph on Celtic-named rivers certainly made me pause and I was delighted to learn the original meaning of Cam and to ponder the wider significance of our beautifully rugged, noun-ungengendered, language to last – and how the poet’s have made it a fast language too – when needs be.

 

Last night I dreamt of two full moons. (Scroll down for note added 4/2/2012 if you’ve already read this and wonder where it’s all heading.)

I was surprised by the BBC R4 Today programme’s editorial decision to promote Iraq-war, torture-complicit, David Miliband’s poisonously fratracidal article in the New Statesman above the increasingly focussed performances of Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband (referred to by his brother not as ‘Ed’ but as ‘Ed Miliband’ weirdly), in exposing the Cameron-Clegg failure to tackle the iniquitous workings of the tax-evading, bonus-bloated, culture of Cameron’s sociopathic banking mates in the City of London. The illegal invasion of Iraq did not get a mention on Radio 4 this morning  in relation to D Miliband which, again, makes me wonder if the BBC Today Programme team were asleep in the run-up to the war against which huge numbers of people protested, including members of the Labour Party. David Miliband is the Blairite back-stabbing brother from Hell. No wonder Ed is untroubled by this corrupt former Foreign Secretary’s ‘thoughtful contribution’ advocating ‘restless re-thinking about past mistakes’ (except when it comes to the GB’s disastrous and inhumane foreign policy). Cast aside your reticence, Ed, and knock your slimy brother out with a quick left hook is my advice. That’s the way to do it!

Why do dramatists love divided brother stories, Mrs Miliband?

Meanwhile, from Washington, the alarming delusion is issued by Leon Canetta that the building of  a heavily-armed Taliban-affiliated US-UK Afghan ‘security force’ is justifaction for military withdrawl from those poor Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal borderlands as early as 2013. The Today Team refrains from asking exactly how much this pointless exercise in strengthening Islamic extremism has cost in financial and human terms since 11 September 2011. What has the cost been? How weakened are we, militarily, as a result of this catastrophically mishandled war? – ongoing.

 I applaud the BBC for giving highly articulate Environmenalist Ben Stewart access to the 8.10am interview slot (shared with corrupt Met Police apologist, Bob Quick, reeling from the police agent provocateur Mark Kennedy scandal) in which he wittily related the story of Police Officer ‘Lin’ who infiltrated the anti-war Rebel Clown Army at a cost to the taxpayer of £250,000 and can be found on YouTube calling out ‘I tickle a tree, I tickle a tree’. Ben Stewart is demanding ‘independent judicial oversight’ in these cases – good man. Mark Kennedy is beneath contempt. Scum pig!

I was also surprised that the Today Programme failed to mention the cause for the growing tension over the Fawkland Islands (flights are being blocked by Argentina) – which is, of course, the British offshore drilling for oil in these disputed waters. Perhaps Justin and James (Webb and Naughtie) might enjoy some Nick Ward Scenarios background on this subject, first posted here as: nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/oil/, before it really gets out of hand.

 Am I a Public Servant?

To conclude today’s R4 Today feedback here’s a quote from the Kama Sutra (and I’m sorry to miss Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time discussion of this Hindu mystical-erotic masterpiece (so close to my heart) as Banjo Nick heads off  for a day of frozen busking and posting of this blog from the ranks of public-access computers in the best-stocked provincial library in the country – that’s the great Cambridge City Central Library, of course). Who needs the University?

Have no fear, Melvyn, I’ll catch the repeat. This is from ‘The New Illustrated Edition’ of the ‘Art of the Kama Sutra’ (text copyright Duncan Baird Publishers, 2011), page 79, Chapter VII on ‘The various modes of thrashing, and the sounds appropriate to them’, Sutra 1: ‘Sexual intercourse can be compared to a quarrel, on account of the inconsistencies of love and its tendency to dispute’. Call that pleasure?

Here are some Indian-mystical inspired paintings from 2010/2011:

‘Dark Goddess’ – painting by Nick Ward (2011) – water-colour, crayon, chalk, felt-tip pen, glitter on A4 card

‘Kali’ (2010, water-colour, ink, acrylic on 4xA4 card), by Nick Ward

The Goddess Kali is something else! In Indian transcendental-ritual practice she represents some pretty shattering metaphysical concepts like 1. Creation 2. Preservation 3. Dissolution. My personal tantric practice is heavily into ‘ritual’ activity – this painting is a good example. I finished it this morning (14/8/2010) to the ironic and laid-back sounds of Alex Lester’s 2am – 5am BBC Radio 2 slot having woken from a full-on dream of my mother (who died in 2005) – suffice to say, in the dream she was very much alive and in the course of the dream died in a rowing boat in a rough sea. Alone. The black parts of the painting are my own hand-prints. I’ll come back to Kali.

Note added 4th Feb 2012

The Kama Sutra quote comes from Chapter 2 (‘On Sexual Union’). For some years I have been contemplating a large-scale theatre piece telling the story of the life of the ‘historical’ Buddha, Gautama. Part Six of  the Kama Sutra (‘On Courtesans and Their Way of Life’) is a systematic account of the role played by the ‘ideal’ courtesan as enabler of ascetics; patron(ess) of arts – artist and intelligencer of erotic love – devotee of Shiva – and, most challengingly, of non-attachment.  The fascinating relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism is tangled and complex and non-monastic traditions of Buddhism do not necessarily invoke celebacy – or vegetarianism, for that matter. Think of Black Hat Danish-Tibetan Lama Ole!

Yesterday’s BBC R4 Today Programme (3/2/2012) went some way to offering a corrective to the big headline story from Thursday which I chose not to focus on in this blog, namely, the shocking account of  the ‘traveller’ press-ganging of British homeless men into road-building in Continental Europe.

The corrective was to detail the £8 million plus set aside by Basildon City Council to clear Dale Farm. I did not believe that the esacped victim of the slave-gang interviewed by the Today Programme was authentic – he sounded like a role-playing police agent provocateur – and the BBC’s follow-up interview with the mealy-mouthed brutalist running Basildon City Council suggests to me that the BBC remains alert,  but only just, to the kinds of scapegoating of both travellers and the vulnerable homeless that the Murdoch press thrives upon. Judging the few by the many.

Where would English folk-lore be without gypsies?

This is from a C19th poem by John Clare:

The joys of the camp are not the cares of the Crown,
There’ll be fiddling and dancing a mile out of town.
Will you come to the camp ere the moon goes down
A mile from town?

The camp of the gypsies is sweet by moonlight
In the furze and the hawthorn – and all out of sight
There’ll be fiddling and dancing and singing tonight
In the pale moon light.

Elswhere (to keep it balanced) Clare described a gypsy camp thus:

There stinking mutton roasts upon the coals,
And the half-roasted dog squats close and ribs,
Then feels the heat too strong and goes aloof;
He watches well, but none a bit can spare.
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away:
‘Tis thus they live – a picture to the place;
A quite, pilfering, unprotected race
On the subject of slave-labour this morning’s team of  James Naughtie and Justin Webb did not mention that the vast quantities of London Olympics trinkets (which could so easily be manufactured here in the UK, thereby boosting the economy and creating jobs) are being produced in China with workers, reportedly, being paid around 27 pence per hour. How much will the UK middle-men be making in the mark-up? Does that register as ‘Growth’, Mr Cameron?

This morning’s show gave us the following stats on Afghanistan. 3,021 civilian deaths in 2011 – an 8% increase on 2010. The breakdown, (according to Quentin Summerville in Kabul) suggests an 80% increase in deaths caused by the ‘Taliban and their affiliates’. What does the BBC Radio 4 editorial team understand by the word ‘affiliates’ given the growing evidence of increasing cross-over from Nato-backed Afghan ‘security forces’ and Pakistan-backed Taliban units? Where are the weapons and explosive devices coming from? What percentage from UK arms-trading investors and manufacturers? Does that count as economic ‘Growth’, Mr Cameron?

Leon Panetta is warning that Israel is planning to attack Iran in April. Anti-war protesters are well-advised to take him at his word because he ought to know on account of being President Obama’s Defense Secretary. Foreign Secretary, William Hague, tells us that Sumalia is ‘the world’s ‘most failed state’ (awash with weapons in the hands of crazy Islamist suicidalists with inported weapons supplied  by whom?). I do not doubt Hague’s assessment. He might, if he were honest, add ‘and Israel is the world’s most dangerous Nuclear Power’. Whatever happened to CND? What kind of God-given right does Israel have to stockpile nuclear weapons? Weapons inspectors should be sent in to Israel and Israel should be disarmed as a matter of urgent international security, is my peace-loving view. There is zero moral authority for Israel invading Iran. Period.

Elsewhere in the programme we had a Mr Fag warning of the dangers of cancer and an Angela Knight defending the criminally bloated plutocrats in the Financial Sector.

I agreed with everything the wonderful Polly Toynbee had to say, which was roughly that London’s banking elite are despised, they are hated, by the vast majority of the taxpayers who underwrite them. If banking is, at base, an honourable profession (or at least a necessary one), and almost as old as prostitution, then why do so few bankers work for the love of it? – and why do so few bankers and corporate bosses celebrate the responsible generosity which is the bedrock of philanthropy.

Great Britain has an enviable tradition of that, as Bill Gates acknowledges. Why do so few multi-millionare bankers and Corporate Bosses support the formation of  a Green Bank – totally free of investments in fossil fuels and war, for instance. That would be a hit with millions of small-time investors, in my view.

On professional cycling – yes, like athletics – it is riddled with illegal drug-enhanced performances – and there’s nothing the authorites can really do about it. I predict a brain-numbing number of cheats will win London Olympic Gold medals, in these and other sports. Soon the time will come when they should just be able to get on with it – become pharmaceutically-sponsored freak-shows – get some glory, earn millions, create some entertainment – and die very much younger that they would otherwise have done. The wonderful thing about my sport – marathon sculling on natural waterways – is that no kind of drug-enhancement will win the race, certainly not my occasional drug of choice, canabis. The race is won by watermanship. Reading the river, gliding the stream – and crushing the opposition.

Why Sir Steve Redgrave is my sporting hero… briefly

Speaking of  river-communing and boats I was entranced by this morning’s BBC R4 6am ‘Open Country’ profile of the Fenland eel-trapper whose methods of trap-building (willow-weaving) have been found by digs in rodhams (silted ancient estuaries) to be esssentially unchanged since 800 BC. I wonder how much money he earns and I wonder if he would exhange his watery life-style for that of a banker’s life of abject shame and spiritual poverty. The last Fenland eel-catcher, so close to the spirts of his ancient ancestors (and thanking them for every eel he catches, he tells us), deserves nothing less than a knighthood, Ma’am.

 That would send out a message about reclaining the bankers-corrupted honours system and the beauty of sustainable fishing that would surely warm the heart of  His Royal Highness, The Very Green Prince of Wales.

 

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Posted by: nickwardscenarios | January 31, 2012 (edit)

Israel (stop) Iran (stop)