It was my birthday week. I had a great week. It involved some work, some play and a lot of celebrating. I love my birthday: the celebrations always last for weeks/months: this one will be no different.

Let me start with the serious stuff, the work. That’s what this blog is supposed to be about after all: PhD, poetry and life. I spent time on Sunday copying and pasting the poems into the thesis. The title page has a working title: ‘Title Page’. I find it hard to give a title to a poem; giving a title to a whole collection is particularly challenging. It’ll come to me one day when I’m reading the poems, or when I’m asleep, or when I’m desperate because I’ve got to submit tomorrow. Suggestions welcome. It’s good to see the poems in some kind of order, and good to have temporary page numbers to reference them in the critical part of the thesis. I’ve referenced them in red ink, because obviously the page numbers will change as the writing grows. I need to be able to find them all as easily as possible to edit when the time comes. I stopped work at lunchtime so I could watch the Wimbledon men’s final: Djokovic v Anderson. It wasn’t one of the greats, actually. Djokovic entirely overwhelmed Anderson, who didn’t really start playing until the third and final set: Djokovic didn’t allow him to play. Sunday evening was taken up with the World Cup Final: a relatively easy win for France, although Croatia at least looked as if they were trying.

Monday was my birthday. A year older but not too much wiser, I hope. I’ve changed my day for working at the Black Ladd, doing the books, so that’s where I spent my birthday. In the evening we walked back there for a birthday meal. Halfway there—it’s about a mile from our house—the heavens opened. Going back was as wet as going onward, so we kept going. By the time we got there we were soaking: I had to wring my skirt out before I could go indoors. But it wasn’t cold, and the rain was welcome. Mostly. The three-week fire on Saddleworth Moor was extinguished by it; but the fire on Winter Hill continues to burn, I believe. Anyway, we had a large glass of wine, and sat at the table in the window from where you can see across Manchester and Cheshire to the Welsh Hills.  It’s spectacular. The meal was lovely too—a Portobello mushroom and beetroot burger for me, new to the menu–and Amie, bless her cotton socks, gave us a lift home, so no more dousing. Happy birthday to me.

Tuesday I was thoroughly dispirited. I came to my desk expecting to work on the next development of the thesis, only to find the work I did on Saturday around Biblical good and bad mothers hadn’t saved. Aaaargh! I’m sure I’m not the only person this has happened to, but it felt huge, a huge disappointment. We’ve had a lot of very short sharp power cuts recently, you hardly notice them happening, but the clocks start flashing so you know there’s been one. I expect the work I did was the victim of a power cut, though I don’t know how. But the wifi hub would have needed to reboot, so the cloud would have been temporarily disabled. Oh, I’m looking for excuses, because I don’t use the MacBook from the mains power source. I don’t know what happened, but suffice to say I closed the document and it didn’t save the work I did. Memo to self: keep pressing the ‘save’ icon while working. Frustrating doesn’t come close, because I was quite pleased with what I lost.  It was only a paragraph, but I didn’t relish starting again. I couldn’t even remember exactly what I wrote; just that I’d been pleased with it and a general idea that it contained Mary and Eve. So I did an internet search into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women in the bible—written predominantly by men, remember, so a bit biased—and came across a 1913 silent movie on YouTube about Judith and Holofernes. He was an invading army commander, come to besiege and defeat Judith’s community. The elders in the community couldn’t come up with any plausible plan to break the siege and save the people; but Judith could. She made herself alluring and went out to meet Holofernes, who fell in love with her. She took him to her bed and in his happy post-coital slumbers she lopped his head, smuggled it back into her community and spiked it on the city walls. The invading army were so shocked and dismayed to see their leader leering at them in death from the city walls, they just packed up and went home. Judith saves the day! The over-acting of the silent era was there in spades: all those hand gestures and facial expressions. It was wonderful; and I was pretending it was research. I couldn’t decide after if Judith was a ‘good’ woman or a ‘bad’ one. Perhaps it’s good to do bad things in the best interests of your (patriarchal) community; but seducing your enemy and then murdering him does seem a tad naughty.

Wednesday I re-wrote the lost paragraph. I don’t know if it’s as good as the original—lost—one, but Judith gets a mention, and it is academically referenced so that’s as good as it gets, I guess. At the end, though, I felt as if I’d been on a treadmill, working like stink and getting nowhere forward. Sometimes work is just a slog. After the paragraph was replaced—and saved—I spent a happy hour researching the fieldfare, a bird of the thrush family. I have an upcoming deadline for a poem inspired by said bird for the next Beautiful Dragons anthology Watch the Birdie with about eighty birds represented by about eighty poets. The fieldfare used to be known as the fellfer in the Fens and I researched dialect names for it. I didn’t find ‘fellfer’, but I found lots of similar dialect names. I’m thinking a poem around these different names for the same bird.

On Saturday I was back at my desk working on the thesis. I did lots of research into the way a woman in mid-twentieth century could lose her self in marriage and motherhood: the way she was usually called ‘Mum’ or ‘such-a-body’s wife’ and often had to put her other desires on hold for housewifery and maternity. I found out that the Anglican Church only recommended dropping ‘obey’ from a bride’s marriage vows under Rowan Williams’ Archbishopric early in the twenty-first century. Isn’t that astounding? And I found an article on time.com about Meghan Markle NOT vowing to obey Prince Harry. In May 2018. I should hope not too: how archaic an idea is that; and still a thing, apparently. So, the thesis moves on apace.

Other stuff this week: I’ve kept up the running, increasing time and distance, three times a week. I’m quite proud of myself that I can now run more than 3k—I know the app was Couch to 5k, and I will get there; just need a bit more practice. The final aim of the app was actually to run for 30 mins and I’m now running for 35. I’m not bothered too much about distance, just about improving slowly. Three months ago I could barely run at all, so any progress from zero is good work as far as I’m concerned.

On Friday Bill and I went to York for the day. We caught the train from Stalybridge. The train was delayed by about seven minutes, which could have put the connection at Huddersfield at risk, except that train was also delayed, so no problem. The railway is run on delayed trains at the moment: starting times seem to be a rough guesstimate. We had a butty in the sunshine in York then went to the pop-up Rose Theatre that’s in the Castle Car Park for the summer. We went to the afternoon performance of Richard III. The theatre looks like a good replica of an Elizabethan theatre, if you ignore the metal scaffolding in place of the wooden structure of the real thing. The seats, although plastic covered and minimally padded, are authentically uncomfortable though. The play was good, a bit am-dram and over-acted but we enjoyed it. I’m so glad we went, because it’s a bit of history—sort of—a pop-up theatre in York. They are showing performances of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth as well as Richard III, so why not catch one of them. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Well, that’s it, a lovely week, a lot done and a year older. I’m including a poem that I might well have posted last year, about turning seventy. But I’m posting it again: how time flies. It seems only last week I was celebrating my seventieth and here we are a year on. Tattoos and glittery boots still intact, and I’m still here, still learning, still living life to the full, still loving it.

Significant

Seventy has arrived.
It knocked on the door, then barged in
uninvited, as if it had been expected.

Seventy has arrived
and taken over the lounge
with its greetings cards, its balloons and bunting,
its ‘seventy years young’ badges,
its ‘you don’t look a day over…’
its fire hazard of a birthday cake.

Seventy has arrived
and you, hot on its heels,
kicking its arse with those Doc Marten’s
salted and peppered with glitter
that settles on the ground like moon dust
wherever they walk.

Seventy has arrived
and the bee tattoo is its music.
Play it again.

Rachel Davies
2017