BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer


lockdown


  • Living la Vida Lockdown-Here Comes the Sun

    crimson peony against green leaves

    It’s the warmest day so far, and the garden is looking quite pretty. I’m not the only one taking photos today – my daughter has caught me in the act of actual gardening, harvesting thyme.

    me, harvesting thyme

    I have moved on to the planting out stage, the tomatoes are in the greenhouse border, and the aubergines are in bigger pots. There are planters full of ammi majus, lupins and cerinthe, and fennel and agastache are in the borders. There are helichrysum, mollucella and nicandra which I will dry for winter flower arrangements, and annual seeds in the gaps left by the bulbs which have gone over. My initial optimism about the germination of said seeds has since been damped by the realisation that a lot of the green shoots have turned out to be hairy bittercress and willow herb, but you never know. The recent rain has done wonders for everything!

    Mostly I include rather pleasnat pictures of my activities, but you’ll be glad to know there are no photos of the comfrey liquid I’ve just strained and stored in old milk cartons. It smells particularly vile, but it is rich in potassium and the tomatoes and fruit bushes will be getting a very healty watering of this stuff over the next few months. More photogenically, I have started to harvest my herbs, first making a dandelion muscle rub for aches and tightness, and a violet leaf oil for skin sensitivity, and now drying thyme on a rack I made years ago from a muslin nappy tacked to a frame of leftover 2×2 struts.

    thyme leaves and flowers on a drying rack.

    I’m also making chive flower vinegar, which is coloured implausibly pink, and has a faint onion taste in salad dressings

    Poetry is harder to come by. You might like to see, among many other good things, a poem I have in the latest edition of Stravaig, but there is very little new work of my own happening just now. However, I have started work on a new Red Squirrel Press pamphlet to be published in October, so I haven’t lost all my poetry muscles!

    In Scotland we hope to hear more about the roadmap for coming out of lockdown tomorrow. It has been an anxious time, but one that has brought out both the best in our communities, and the strange and dangerous gaps in our politics economy and social and environmental thinking. I’m sure many people have been thinking how we can implement the lessons we have learned!


  • Living la Vida Lockdown

    a shelf with primroses, an oil lamp and a statue of the Virgin Mary

    I don’t know about you, but this week has been a tough gig. I may have been mentally prepared for a lockdown (that oil lamp you can see was bought in Sri Lanka for the first one!) but emotions tend to take a bit longer to process. Also, while my life is relatively undisturbed, it has become obvious that for an awful lot of others, it is full of anxiety and heartbreak, and the grim realisation that some of us are being left to battle alone, in the teeth of what is, at best, a casual and callous disregard for their dignity and well-being, or, as it looked at first glance, a strategy to write off the most vulnerable.

    I was pleased to see the Scottish Government move quickly to issue statements that DNR forms are not to be sent out to whole groups of people because they have disabilities or are over a certain age, and to reassure them they are not to be placed under to pressure to sign them. Statements were explicity made to autistic people to reassure them their needs were being taken into consideration too. In England, I believe health authorities also undertook to send out similar reassurances. But by then the damage had been done. On other issues too, it is becoming clear that the help offerred to businesses isn’t effective, that moves to supply equipment to hospitals are lagging, and that the police monitoring of social distancing guidelines is inappropriately harming disabled people who find themselves harassed for to stopping to rest. And the Westminster government is ruthlessly heading towards a collapse of of the Brexit talks and a cliff edge crash out of the withdrawal agreement.

    I am confident that there will be a surge of resistance to any such move, and that the government will find itself under severe scrutiny when the lockdown is over, but I was shocked to find a friend sharing a post on Facebook from a page called the 17.4 million, instructing us to share a picture of the Prime Minister if we felt he was doing the ‘best job possible’. No, they aren’t working on the PPE issue, or coming out of lockdown, or the needs of those whose livelihoods have been destroyed, but my goodness, they are working on the PR on social media.

    I haven’t been this angry all week, though I did write a long and very angry poem, which I have submitted somewhere (so can’t share here). But I have been afraid. In different ways the lockdown has hit the members of my household hard, and I’ve found it difficult to keep my head on and hold everything together.

    I’ve also been feeling increasingly uncertain about the new book. When all this is over, things are going to feel very different to when I started to put it together. It is far too soon to think of ‘after’, and writing about ‘during’ is going to take finesse. Plus some of the questions I’ve been raising – like ‘what is a person?’ ‘how do you know you’re a person?’ are answering themselves. A person is a network of relationships of many different kinds, with your history, real and mythologised, with your landscape, your community (all of the communities you’re part of, not just the human ones) and they are all under stress just now, changing week by week, before our very eyes. And that is where I’m moving to – transition and transformation, what you take with you, what you lose, what you find. I might have to change the title, too. It was going to be Burnedthumb, as claiming the right to be my poet self was such an important thing to me, but if you’re here at all, you know I’ve been Burnedthumb for about fifteen years – and this book needs not to have its main focus on me. It’s going to be about all of us.

    I’m still lighting a candle at eight o’clock every night for everyone who is in isolation and finding things tough. And sending love to you all.



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