There are always choices to be made in writing. One of them is ‘topic’. What do you choose to write about?
I have a couple of options.
The first would be the fact that I am, at present, eating my way through
the most delicious raw cauliflower that I have ever tasted. I bought it in Aldi, mainly I have to admit,
because it was small and would therefore be consumed before I left for the UK
on Wednesday. I brought it home, cut off
the stalks and broke the head down into bite-sized florets. And I ate one. A revelation!
I have always liked raw vegetables, but this lowly cauliflower took
crudité to new levels of lusciousness.
And the cauliflower was something that I wouldn’t even consider eating
when I was young. Though that was always
when it was cooked, after suffering the disgusting smell that accompanied its
production. And, though I don’t hold it
against her (why should I, I never ate any of it) my mother boiled cauliflower
until it was soft and always added a pinch of bicarb. to do . . . what? Precisely?
Take away all of the vitamin content!
But even then, I loved to eat cauliflower raw. For me, cooking al dente was perfection: an
amalgam of the rawness that I loved with the fact that it was technically
‘cooked’! Perfect. Even my mum began to cook things al
dente. Who could ask for more?
Or I could talk about the article that I read in the digital
edition of the Guardian that allowed survivors of religious extreme cults who
had lost their faith to tell we readers how they now viewed the world – and the
world that they had lost. And that got
me thinking about my own lost faith.
I don’t think, to be fair that ‘lapsed Anglican’ is ever
going to raise enough interest to get the Guardian to open its pages to the
searing stories of how, having lost their faith, the ex-Anglican were treated
so very . . . um . . . reasonably by those who kept theirs!
Lapsed Anglicans do not write revealing fiction about how
they trail guilt feelings instilled in them by fanatical Church in Wales
preachers who . . . it simply isn’t like that.
One Anglican bishop to whom I explained that I was an
“Anglican atheist” said, “Yes, well, there are a lot of you around!” Not really the stuff that produces
hard-hitting revelations about how the ingrained guilt of Anglicanism haunted
me throughout my non-Anglican life!
Through Holy Week this year, I used the period as a time to
write a poem for each day. Not
necessarily an overtly religious poem, but a poem, nevertheless, influenced in
some ways by the week that I was in. I
did the same thing last year and I found the process strangely rewarding.
I have now published a very slim volume of nine poems: I
count Holy Week as starting on Palm Sunday and I wrote two poems for Easter
Sunday, hence the number. The titles
are: Assumption, Dress, Anticipation, Daddy Agonistes, Penultimate, Locked, Waiting, Set up and Offer. There is a sort of poem in the succession of
titles, but let it pass – I’ve ‘written’ two ‘found’ poems recently and that is
more than enough!
My point, which I haven’t made, is that I get a great deal
of satisfaction out of writing poems at such a time. Whether there is the same satisfaction in
reading them only time and an audience will tell! But there is something produced and that
gives me pleasure.
But there is an internal on-going conversation with myself
about why I should find this week significant and why I should bother writing
poetry during it. The poems themselves,
only go so far in getting towards an explanation.
There is a simple explanation of course, and that is that I
am still basically an Anglican at heart, and the loose chains of a liberal
faith are, in their way, even more difficult to break than those of a much more
authoritarian one. And that one day I
will ‘return to the faith’ – indeed one of my friends tells me this with that
voice of weary resignation that suggests that it is so obvious that it need not
be stressed. I think he’s wrong, but,
time will tell.
So, on balance, I don’t think that I will write about
cauliflower or faith – I will write about the Open University.
Today, I finished writing the last Tutor Marked Assignment
that I needed to do in the last course of my degree. Admittedly I now have to complete the long
essay that accounts for 50% of the marks, but my last TMA has been written.
And perhaps I am still writing about cauliflowers and faith,
because the Open University is an addictive sort of institution, with zealous
(I use the word advisedly) adherents who suck knowledge out of courses with the
same fanaticism with which I ate the vegetable.
Two people have already said to me, when I told them that I was getting
towards the final end of my degree, “Of course, you’ll do another, won’t you?”
And, do you know, I just might!
