Gash

 April 15 Word of the Day: Gash

 

White cells rush in to stop the flow though it’s

only the vegetable knife, only onion, the red blood

shines and sticks to things. Skin. The course of events

has something to do with it: having to wait

‘interminably’ for whatever: just those two

quarrelling on the escalator got you. Down. Why

can’t they find somewhere else? Versus, that is

how quarrels actually look! Then the heat,

in the workroom and ‘someone’ was not being upfront.

When they act like a prat you wonder what’s your

part: do I overreact, sound usual, absorb it all

in practised silence, say something to clear the atmosphere,

what? We know what happens through mini-disasters,

we keep on going. But damage control is only

half the battle. The red swells up in its svelte way.

Never afraid of it, but you know it means

something else, alack: the day has been loose, hectic,

unsatisfactory. Apply elastoplast on the washed area. 

 

Loose? Hectic? Unsatisfactory? Did you say that

on the spur of the moment cutting your thumb?

Actually so even-handed, and you have to be easy

to finish cooking anyway: exact litres, tablespoons

and minutes, serendipity of an extra flavour,

the art of the spicy aroma or lifting boiling

water off the heat. The outside goes quiet.

The gush heals of its own accord. The night cools,

No doubt an essential purpose of cool nights.

In its place, the sign of a ‘hot’ day: a red

stripe. In its place, steady breathing, ask me

to accept the forces not so aching blind.

The gauze bandage an alternate flesh colour for those

who eat too many oranges. A soft distraction

from a page of night-reading. Drifting mind

could escape all those bad moves, mistaken

accusations. Retract them, even.

You could be walking away like

a perfect hermit who has found sophia.

 

[September 2020, retrieved and reworked April 2026]

Erudite

 April 14 Word of the Day: Erudite

 

Erudite is the invisible mender

 Erudite bonds given hard facts to certain other unexpected and unlikely thoughts to produce original outcomes

 Erudite proves rapid-set in the receptive mind, keeping its stylish effects long after even though no one is quite sure how

 Erudite works long hours for detailed outcomes

 Erudite can be of the highly specialist application right through to domestic science, personal improvement and do-it-yourself

 Erudite appears to hang in the air, even look invisible, yet it is high load-bearing, if needs be going everywhere at once and impressively

 Erudite might look like it requires a lot of learning but without really trying it holds the whole construction together with a minimum of fuss

 Erudite is good around the house fixing ignorance and nonsense

 Erudite sometimes looks like it’s all surface, before noticing its hidden depths that spread into the past in vast inventions and intentions

 Erudite may be in error and rude, then dead right and civil

 Erudite is not the answer to everyone’s prayers, but then most prayers do not require erudite

 Erudite is resinous, resonant resounding, available to everyone but not everyone responds

 Erudite sticks to the point at every point, no matter the matter

 Erudite indites midnight flights 

 

 

 

Teddy

 April 13 Word of the Day: Teddy

 

The teddy bear was first produced in 1903, but the New Yorker who made the toys only started the Ideal Toy Co. in 1907, while Steiff of Germany had reportedly already been manufacturing them. This is all happening around 1906, the year of John Betjeman’s birth. Indeed, the teddy bear and Betjeman grow up together. They are peers. When, late in the poet laureate’s life, he was called ‘teddy bear to the nation’ the phrase had more Freudian meaning than the speaker could have been aware of.

 Is it an insult or term of praise? What is it? The English liked to believe the teddy bear was named after the King, though Americans are in no doubt it was named after the President. Evelyn Waugh gives Sebastian a teddy bear in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ to indicate that his character clings to childhood and doesn’t want to know about the adult world; Sebastian becomes an alcoholic and disappears half way through the novel. This was a clever ploy by Waugh, who had led his readers to think the book was all about Sebastian, when it was about Charles Ryder’s relations with the whole family and the attendant Roman Catholicism of its heritage. We are in no doubt too that Waugh got the teddy bear idea from observing the behaviour of Betjeman at Oxford in the 1920s, though Betjeman of course is not Sebastian in any way, shape or form. Aloysius is one of the few comforts and securities in a confusing world

 The teddy bear itself is a 20th century cultural artefact that was given supreme value by the great admirer of English cultural artefacts. Betjeman also wrote a story, one where the teddy bear is the main character. In contrast to the very Catholic Aloysius, Waugh’s name for Sebastian’s teddy, Betjeman’s teddy is called Archibald Ormsby-Gore. Archie, for short. (pictured) He had a lifelong friend, an elephant called Jumbo, who appears also in ‘Archie and the Strict Baptists’. Archie would go to chapel and listen to sermons that went for hours. Betjeman shared with Waugh a fascination with the peculiarities of English religion, though Betjeman would be called thoroughly Anglican, though not of the severe Calvinist kind, and certainly not a Strict Baptist. He has a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Noticeably, Archie in the story is someone whose differences the author both celebrates and tolerates. Through all the vicissitudes of life, Archie the actual teddy was there (and Jumbo) to the end, being in the poet’s arms when he died in 1984.