Lewes Constituency Archives - Wolfie Wolfgang

Wolfie Caged

Colin Bell — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 18:01:17 +0000

How I survived lockdown.

I have finally got round to writing a blog now that, wisely or foolishly, the great British lockdown is being eased. Until now, I haven’t quite managed to write about this, the strangest of times. I was last on here in February for the launch of my poetry collection, Remembering Blue, http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-colin-bell-remembering-blue.htm After that memorable event, my last public adventure was when I went to London to see the impressive Troy exhibition at the British Museum.

Then the curtain came down on my life outside my home here in Lewes.

Here are some photographs and thoughts to mark the passage from then to now. Just one person’s view on the extraordinary and, for many, the often tragic interruption to normal life that was, and still is, Covid-19. I know that I have been very lucky.

The reality sank in over Covid-19 and the long lockdown when I looked out of my window one evening. Here is my street in those weird days of silence – days went by with no one out there, it seemed. There were no cars either, but all over the world we had a clear and clean blue sky – an unexpected plus.

On TV, I watched the Italians suffering and showing a brave face – it couldn’t happen here could it?

I had been having my roof retiled and, luckily, the job was finished just before the lockdown rules came into force. So, at least, I wasn’t going to be subjected to scaffolding being my only view.

Instead of scaffolding I got this face at my window next morning – the Waitrose van delivering somewhere in my street made me jump in momentary terror when I saw him, this guy, like someone in The Shining, grinning at me.

Being a writer is a lot like being in permanent lockdown. I was used to spending hours alone in an empty room, so I was unfazed by the experience, especially in the early weeks. Good news comes for a writer when you hear of your work being published, , and it helped at this time that I had three new Fibonacci poems published by The Fib Review – http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html making a total of 100 poems published in consecutive issues, over eleven years, in this impressive journal. I was chuffed by the news of those Fibs and then I heard that Ward Wood Publishing http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/author-search.htm plan to bring them all out as a book. I didn’t need to leave the house for any of this.

All over the world, people learned to come together using the new technological wizard on the block, Zoom. I did it for family reunions, personal training sessions, tai-chi and for my regular poetry group meetings. I worked for me, but I know several others found it distressing and isolating. I had been attracted to the internet and most of its offspring since the beginning, so I wan’t sure why people didn’t find it natural and a wonderful opportunity in a time of crisis.

Then came the Spring, not always a season lacking cruelty, but my flowering cherry tree greeted me every time I looked out of the window and I managed even to celebrate the traditional Japanese hanami ceremony as usual with my neighbours – not quite as usual of course, but we raised a glass of wine to each other over the fence, acknowledging, as the Japanese do at this time, the transience of beauty, and, of course, life.

Being locked-down meant there were less interruptions to my life than usual, so , during this period I finished my third novel, Over the hills is a long way off, and sent it off to the publishers Ward Wood Publishing. A great moment.

Then the tulips in my garden got into full keeping-Wolfie-happy mode. Was it lockdown, or was it one of the loveliest English Springs in memory? A bit of both, I suspect.

Even the flowerpots were seductive in the extraordinarily hot weather that dominated the beginning of lockdown and made life bearable for anyone lucky enough to have a garden.

Lilies and fuchsias started to flower as the temperatures soared and I started to spend longer out in the garden where you can’t feel isolated, self-isolated or any other kind of isolation, because there are the bees, butterflies but, yes, also evil lily beetles ready to devour the seasons most elegant flowers – gardens are seldom as peaceful as they look.

Then, it was Summer. The main event in my garden in any Summer is always the roses – and, this year, it was actually quite difficult to feel down when they were in full bloom. Mine are not just beautiful to look at, but they are shamelessly aromatic. On a hot morning and, for others, early evening, you don’t even have to stick your nose into their petals to get the fragrance.

My little poetry notebook came into its own out in the garden too. I have used this small book for writing poetry, mostly the Fibonacci ones, for over a decade now. It sits comfortably on the garden table and wears the smudges on the cover put there by a shower of rain in Florence when I first started writing these little poems. It is always there for those emergency poetry-writing moments.

Summer by the dustbins can be inspiring too – especially the tiny pond, a French washing bowl from the 1950s, with its irises and waterlilies….

…and, of course, the frog. She has been here in the garden now for three years and, I am not sure if I imagine it or not, but she seems like a friend when she pops out of the water to stare at me. I stare at her too. It feels like a rapport. I resist thinking that she recognises me, but if she happens to be in the pool, she always puts her head up out of the water, and, yes, we greet each other. I often wonder if there can be a relationship between man and frog.

As Summer became hot and sunny here in southern England, and the lockdown continued, I felt extremely fortunate to live in such a lovely place with the leafy Bronze Age mound to the rear of the traditional Sussex flint walls, When the study window is open, I even get a bit of a sun-tan and feel almost out-of-doors when I am at my computer.

In June, up there in my room, my novel-writing surge led me to finish my next book too – well, almost finished, it is the fourth draft of my fourth novel, In the lovely month of May. My time in lockdown has been well-spend completing two fiction projects and writing some new poetry too.

As lockdown eased, and social distancing became a priority, contractors were allowed back from furlough. Electrician Lloyd returned to complete the works that were interrupted in March. The final touch on home-improvements, illuminating the garden and allowing it to be a sanctuary day and night.

The gardening lighting system makes the garden a magical place by night….

….a glass of wine on a humid evening with the roses lit from beneath, and I felt I was living in a movie….

….sometimes waiting for Count Dracula to call.

Novel-writing on pause, Dracula asleep, the sun came back and things apart from just writing came to fruition, like the surprisingly good harvest from the little cherry tree that I planted in a pot last year.

The next important job after so many writing projects had reached completion was to catch up on reading The New Yorker – perfect summer reading was their fiction edition with a ‘new’ Ernest Hemingway short story and one, a rather good one, by the fascinating Haruki Murakami, unpredictable, cryptically profound and witty in turns – I am a fan.

Some idle rose dead-heading resulted in this accidental flower-arrangement in my birdbath. ..all seemed calm and still that day. Yet, I thought of others a lot less fortunate than me. Those that had lost their jobs, who had to live with a family of small children in a one-bedroom flat, the many elderly victims of the virus in Britain’s inadequate care home system, or those who weren’t even lucky enough to have a protective wall against infection, like the Brazilian slum-dwellers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I hope the world will learn to care about its endangered people after inequalities are so brutally exposed in this terrible time. It’s too easy, maybe, for me to say this from the privileged environment of my own back yard.

My garden, I know is an oasis. It was a good place to continue my study of the complex modernist poetry in Ezra Pound’s Cantos which I am reading, one by one, in chronological order, at the on-line poetry readings I give every week in the virtual world of Second Life. Beyond Pound’s unpleasant enthusiasm for Fascism and anti-semitism (recanted, I hope), I have found many parallels between the troubled world he was describing and our own. Like Wagner, and other ‘bad guys’ who were also geniuses in our culture, we have to hang on to their good bits – we can learn from them, and find inspiration there too.

My virtual world avatar is Wolfgang Glinka, or Wolfie for short, and his weekly poetry event, Wolfie’s Poetry Surf has been running without a break since 2012 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/57/238/21 – during lockdown, I have not been the only one to appreciate the value of these virtual communities of writers and artists that gather together from all over the world in the much misunderstood virtual world of Second Life. Wolfgang Glinka now runs an arts complex there known as The Glinka Gallery and, during lockdown, opened four new buildings with a festival of fine art, poetry, photography, music and dance. when real life arts venues were all forced to close.

I even got to become a dancer in the virtual world in my collaboration with the creative talents of the Sway & Dance Troupe – we have also made animated films together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAuvt2MOi_E

The Glinka Gallery has been an inspiring project which will, I hope, live long after lockdown ends. Believe it or not, it has kept me in the real world during this strange time when it is not always clear what is real and what is imagined. My virtual gallery is now a recommended venue on the Second Life webpage. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nolidae/122/233/3001

It would have been all too easy to get really unfit during lockdown but, luckily, I was able to continue my weekly personal training sessions with my excellent and dedicated trainer, Gyles Abbott. https://www.wearesoulfit.com/, who carried on doing our one-to-one classes via Zoom before we were allowed again to meet up once more at his studio. I now have a custom-built weights cupboard in my study and, during lockdown began to do a second personal training session with Gyles’ weekly notes. I have not felt so fit for a very long time.

I am not alone in thinking that many of our new lockdown habits will continue long after the dreaded virus has been defeated. Certainly I am determined to keep up my training at home as a brilliant extension of my fitness regime.

Over the last few weeks I have a new fitness challenge thanks to my friend Vanessa Newman who nominated me to take part in an online push-up marathon #25pushupchallenge on Facebook, when I had to do 25 pushups a day for 25 days to raise awareness of anxiety, depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder issues. Problems, I suspect, only intensified by the lockdown. I hope my efforts, along with all the other participants, did some good. It certainly got me going and I enjoyed it immensely. I got better at push-ups too with online advice from my personal trainer, Gyles, and my ever-vigilant kungfu instructor, Neil Johnson http://www.whitecranefightingarts.com – an example of the positive value of social networking, not just when we are socially isolated. I shall continue to challenge myself with these press-ups – a classic from of exercise.

After three months when I had hardly left the house, some of the restrictions were lifted and, gradually and cautiously, I began to go out to places where social distancing was easiest – like the ruins of Lewes’ 11th century Cluniac Priory…

…or the wide open spaces of the Sussex Downs near Lewes, along the River Ouse…

…and over the hills – but not far away….

then after more restrictions were lifted, it was even possible to do the 6 miles journey to the sea at Seaford…..

…and then to Worthing in West Sussex to visit my mother, who had been socially isolated in her flat over-looking the sea.

In August, we entered another stage in the nation’s retreat from lockdown, I took a train to London for the first time since February. Masked and gloved, I reached the nation’s relatively deserted capital.

I was heading for the National Gallery and an exhibition postponed when all the country’s public venues were forced to close. I have never seen Trafalgar Square so empty.

Practically empty too was the National Gallery’s Titian exhibition, Love, Death, Desire which reunited Titian’s Poesie – six late masterpieces painted for King Philip II of Spain in the late 16th Century and not seen together for nearly 500 years until the National Gallery brought them all together again in London. It was a moving, and, after so long a time of social isolation, an overwhelming experience to see these powerful pieces in an almost perfect setting. Maybe there was a benefit in it being a bit of an effort to book ahead, to arrive at a precise time and to go round the gallery in a small group where everyone could see and appreciate the art on display. It has been a long time since I remember seeing such a serious group of art gallery visitors where people stood, often for ten minutes of more in front of a single painting and, yes, looked.

There was plenty to think about when I was back in my garden, but, of course, tempting though it is to think of the ending of lockdown being the end of Covid-19, that is far from the reality. I hope that people will carry on being careful and responsible in this long campaign against the 2020 pandemic. I hope too, that we will take some of the lessons of this period with us into the future. Let’s try not to pass on our germs to others in public places. Let’s value our personal spaces more, respect the time we need to spend alone in our own heads, and feel closer to our fellow human beings in a world where the virus treated us all as equals. I hope too that we will remain cautious over traffic pollution, and the excesses of early twenty-first century ‘First World’ hedonism.

Finally I have to reiterate my own sense of my own good fortune during this time. I wanted to share my experience of the lockdown, but I am well aware of how different it was for so many others far less fortunate than myself. I have to add too that I usually have the common cold at least several times a year, maybe even too many times a year, but, since lockdown, I have been 100% infection-free – I have learnt a lesson there. I wish us all a new world where, just maybe, there will be a vaccination that works to prevent all future pandemics.

The post Wolfie Caged appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The spider and the bumble bee – a story of Lewes’s Liberal life.

wolf01 — Mon, 18 May 2015 22:00:00 +0000

Here in my home town of Lewes, UK, now thanks to secret voters in the recent General Election, a Conservative constituency, we are learning to take the rough with the smooth. It’s spring, which is nice, but it’s been unseasonably cold, well, cool in that North West wind that has blown up over the last few days but that has meant that the blossom has hung around longer than usual and that’s good too. Yes, we are taking the rough with the smooth here now that we have found out that our new member of Parliament is a Conservative and that our former and rather splendid MP, the energetic Liberal-Democrat Norman Baker has been unceremoniously cast aside after 18 years as Lewes’s representative in Parliament.

Now, I like spiders. I’ve often said that in these blogs and, here in my small town garden in the now Conservative constituency of Lewes, I am lucky to have a healthy community of little creatures all, as far as I can tell, feeling at home here. The spiders are much in evidence and that is good.

In these days when we are told that bees, rather like Social-Democrat MPs, are becoming worryingly scarce, I am fortunate to have a lively community of bees buzzing around in my garden too.

I like bees, especially bumble bees and do everything in my power to help them to thrive here by planting flowers and shrubs that are bee-friendly. I hope I’m making a difference because my environment would be a whole lot less pleasant if bees disappeared altogether.

I do have, of course, spiders and, as I said, I like spiders too.

In the summer months, I’m lucky enough to have beautiful creatures like damsel flies.

Sadly, sometimes, my spiders catch my damsel flies but, well, I have learnt to take the rough with the smooth.

I try to stay calm when I see another example of Nature being red in tooth and claw but it doesn’t stop me wishing for a greener Britain one day. Through all of this, I’ve carried on liking spiders.

The only problem is that I have begun to associate Britain’s endangered bees with this country’s similarly endangered Liberals because, in both cases, I believe Britain would be less, well, British without them.

So, just after that General Election when Lewes rejected Norman Baker, I noticed from my bathroom window that one of my spiders had caught a bumble bee. The more it struggled, the more it got ensnared. Well done to the spider who had got itself a fine meal but, hey, I thought of Mr Baker and tried to ignore the comparison. One day soon, I hope, that friendly buzzing sound will return to my Lewes garden. Lewes wouldn’t be the same without bees or Liberals.

The post The spider and the bumble bee – a story of Lewes’s Liberal life. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The UK General Election: Who should we vote for tomorrow?

wolf01 — Tue, 05 May 2015 22:00:00 +0000

The leaders of the UK’s seven main political parties (not including Northern Ireland)

In case you are one of those lucky people (presumably not in the UK) who haven’t been subjected to the very long PR campaigns run by Britain’s political parties and the consequent media orgy that has been this, the longest run-up to a general election that I can remember, here’s some explanation.

Strangely, or maybe not, the length of the campaign has made very little difference to the opinion polls that show the main two political parties (Conservatives and Labour) almost equal and, even more unusually, that an amazing 40% of the electorate say that they haven’t decided how they will vote. – it’s not for any lack of publicity. The election will be held on Thursday this week and, needless to say, everyone thinks it will be very close with the strong possibility that neither main party will achieve a working majority.

There has been more than enough coverage of the 2015 election campaign from people who, probably, know what they’re talking about so I won’t pretend to be a political pundit. All I can do is add some of my thoughts now that we only have a day to decide how to vote.

David Cameron

I know some (actually only a few) people who have always voted Conservative and who will continue to do so no matter what. Well good luck to them – I admire people who know what they believe and stick to their principles even if I totally disagree with them. It’s quite interesting, in case you hadn’t noticed, that the Conservative Party hasn’t been elected by the British electorate for 23 years, not since John Major’s victory in 1992 – David Cameron became Prime Minister, without a majority, as the leader of the party that could form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (leader Nick Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister).

I suspect, by now, most people will have worked out what they thought about the coalition government even if we as a nation still haven’t grasped the realities of political coalition. Certainly the unpopularity of the Liberal Democrats since they entered government shows that being a party of protest is a lot easier than actually having to do the job.

Gordon Brown

I was sad to see the collapse of the Gordon Brown government and still believe that history will redeem his reputation as the man who prevented a much greater economic crisis than we’ve actually endured since 2008. I have been amazed how the Conservatives have succeeded in persuading people that the World economic crisis of that year was all Gordon Brown’s fault. It only goes to show that people will believe what they want to believe – it’s one of the downsides of democracy. The Conservative Party tried to turn the financial collapse into political propaganda and wanted to use austerity cuts as a method of undermining the welfare state on a long mission to fulfil their dreams of a Thatcherite state where there would “be no such thing as society”.

Ed Miliband

The Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, has distanced itself from Gordon Brown too and acknowledged that the last Labour government made mistakes. It is true, they did (Iraq, Bank regulation, pension fund taxation and failing to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the last election) but Ed Miliband, deeply unpopular since coming to the job, has finally started to look like tomorrow’s man as we have got to know him better and in spite of a largely negative campaign against him by most of the British newspapers. It is still highly doubtful that the electorate will vote for Labour to go it alone as he would obviously prefer.

Nigel Farage

The loss of electoral support for the two main parties has led to some dramatic and, maybe, exaggerated press predictions, especially over the last year over the rise (and hopefully, fall) of Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP – pronounced you-kip) that has been blaming everything on immigration and the European Union. As somebody wrote, people who are tempted to vote for UKIP are voting for some imagined past – probably a fantasy English world circa 1952 when the Queen was a young woman, Europe was a long way away, somewhere on the other side of the world, and the sun always shined in the sky as opposed to Mr Farage’s posterior. We will see on Friday if UKIP has made any difference – their popularity is on the wane but, across the country they could still let in the party that their voters don’t actually want.

Whichever main party gets to form a government, the experts and the polls tell us that they will have to at least co-operate with some of the smaller parties and thus, this year, we have all taken extra notice of those other political leaders – especially Nigel Farage of UKIP, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist party) and Natalie Bennett of the Green Party. Putting UKIP to one side (I’ve already said too much about this depressing party), the others are all to the left of Labour and in with a real chance of keeping a minority Labour government in power. It is important for anyone who votes for them to realise that their vote might, this time, actually make a difference.

Natalie Bennett

I have much sympathy for many of the policies advocated (as long term ideals but unconvincingly costed) by the Green Party and I’ve been saddened by the several public relations disasters that have plagued their charisma-challenged and surprisingly honest leader, Natalie Bennett, because much of what she has said about the environment and the reordering of economic priorities will be commonly agreed one day and I would like to hear Green Party voices in the House Of Commons even if it is only to act as the nation’s conscience.

Nicola Sturgeon

I am not a fan of Nationalism (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German, North Korean or any other variety) but then I don’t have a Scottish or Welsh vote. However I disagree with those who want to deny the Scots a voice in the UK parliament as some kind of revenge policy because so many of them want independence from the United Kingdom (maybe we should come up with a new collective name for the old UK). At the moment, the Scottish Nationalists come across as an idealist left wing party with a splendidly articulate leader in Nicola Sturgeon, but, if I had a Scottish vote, I would not vote for a party that wants to break up the UK and I have a long enough memory to remember that it was the Scottish Nationalists who voted with the Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher, to bring down the Labour Government in 1979.

Nick Clegg

The other minority party, of course, is the Liberal Democratic party, led by the much maligned Nick Clegg. OK, Liberal Democrat politicians sat around a Conservative cabinet table and agreed many policies that shocked and saddened many of their supporters but it is possible to believe what they say about doing their democratic duty in doing a deal with the Conservatives at a time of economic crisis when the electorate had failed to elect an outright winner. I would’ve preferred a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition but the Conservatives had more seats and that, I guess, was democracy at work.

Cameron and Clegg – Coalition Partners

This week the British electorate may well have another hung parliament and, I believe, we as a nation need to wake up to the realities of political coalitions. The Liberal Democrats made mistakes in the last government and agreed to policies that still make me shudder but they also limited a Conservative government’s harshest instincts and helped to control the horrors advocated by those right wing Conservative backbenchers – the people who would get their way if the Conservative party wins a workable majority.

So where do I stand just before this important moment in British electoral history?

Well, I’ve never believed that any one party has all the answers but there are a number of policies that I can say I support:

1) We should remain in, support and influence the European Union and only have a referendum if and when major policy changes occur.

2) We should maintain the United Kingdom but improve the political structures in each member country including all parts of England.

3) We should adjust the tax system so that it doesn’t benefit the richest members of society at the expense of the most needy.

4) We should take much tougher measures to limit gas emissions and end the potentially dangerous use of nuclear power.

5) We should stop playing politics with the National Health Service.

6) We should properly fund universities and make them free at source for all.

7) We should re-nationalise public transport and reintroduce bus services in all rural areas.

8) We should down-grade (but not abolish) Trident when the decision has to be taken in 2016 and then, through example and negotiation, lead the rest of the world towards total nuclear disarmament.

Then again, what do I know!

If I lived in most parts of Scotland or Wales, I would vote Labour but I don’t, I live in Lewes in England.

Norman Baker

What I do know is that I have been saddened by the consequences for the Liberal Democrats in the fall-out from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition and fear the loss of a liberal voice in Britain. Most of my list above is, I think, Lib-Dem policy. I live in a town fortunate to have a very good constituency MP, the Liberal-Democrat Norman Baker and I intend to vote for him on Thursday. We are not only electing a government but someone to look after our interests where we live and Norman Baker, who did some good things as Transport Minister in the Coalition Government (as well as resigning from Theresa May’s Home Office on a matter of principle), has also been an energetic and effective local MP.

Caroline Lucas

Just down the road from here is the city of Brighton – a place that also has an excellent constituency MP in the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas. I hope she too will be returned to Parliament on Thursday.

I would like Thursday’s election to produce an Ed Miliband government with strong Liberal-Democratic and Green backing but I only have one vote. However, I intend to use it and I hope everyone else in this country will do the same however they vote. We should remember that one of the many good things about democracy is that we can also vote people out of power. So get out there tomorrow and, yes, you, the 40% of undecideds, it’s make your mind up time so go vote and make a difference.

The post The UK General Election: Who should we vote for tomorrow? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.