Ingoland, My Ingoland

I will arise and go now....

Roger McGough at St Mary's, Snettisham, September 3rd, 2025

Meteorological autumn already. Season of fruits and mellifluous substances.  I am up early and out, walking to the sea, breathing the fresh, slightly sharp air, 

enjoying a feeling of peace. Sometimes the world is too much with us, but not this morning. Sunflowers turn their heads to the rising sun, 

 

while berries ripen, grateful for the recent showers.

I love Ingoland (my name for the area of Norfolk where I live, drained by the river Ingol) or even Engerland, the land where my mother lay labouring to give me life.  I have always loved you.  From the days of branch lines, 

and steam trains, from the days of Winnie the Pooh, or where Trevor Dudley-Smith (Elleston Trevor) mused By A Silver Stream, I have lived and loved in a sweet bubble of family and friends, of farmers and hauliers in Sussex, of aunts and uncles and cousins in London and beyond.  I have loved Dame Edna Everage, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, Duke Ellington, Count Arthur Strong and others of the no(a)bility. I love village churches,

And old vicarages; Laurence Sterne and William Cowper, John Donne and George Herbert.

I used to drink in Levenshulme with Kendo Nagasaki and my friend Spen, who had done time for manslaughter as he came home from the army and found his wife in bed with another man, whose skull, it turned out, wasn’t adapted to a blow from a soldier.  I ate cow’s udder sandwiches with a workmate at Viner’s in Sheffield, swapped Raymond Chandler novels with Angela Lansbury’s uncle at Brown Bailey’s. I was a student when uprisings were de rigeur. I drank too much on occasions, and ate what I could from Lancaster market, wandered lonely as a clown in the Lake District, and fell into impossible love in Scotland, twice.....  Old flames, now dowsed.....

 

It was my country.  The country of Nelson.  The country of Shakespeare and Joyce and W B Yeats (You sure?  Ed.)

 

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

W B Yeats

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven

 

 

We had Sooty and Sweep.  Andy Pandy.  The Flowerpot Men.  Bruce Lacey.  Mr Pastry.  We played in bombed out buildings and air-raid shelters.  There were two tv channels, and we only had one, and I had to go to Denys's house to watch The Lone Ranger....

 

Then, around the time that JFK and Pope Giovanni XXIII hit the big sleep, the Beatles wanted to hold my hand, and I grew a little bit up, (thank you Jackie Short, et alios....)

 

And along came the Liverpool Poets, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Pattern, and her majester Lily the Pink with a scaffold to uphold her....  And life turned from B & W to colour.  From 350 lines to 525.  And, eventually, from analogue to digital.

 

  

 

And perhaps that’s where it went awry?  We used to drink ententes cordiales, and get along with our neighbours – after all, in 1966 we made amends for WWII in a penalty shootout, when I was at Warcop Army Camp.  What was going to go wrong?

 

Which brings me to Mr McGough....  

 

He has just been to stay.  He came to perform his show, “Alive and Gigging,” (not as some promoters would have it, “Alive and Giggling,”) at St Mary’s, Snettisham, the high church of Ingoland, and we had a wonderful evening.  Full house, many laughs, a few tears, much reflection on the world we have grown to inhabit.  

 

But there’s the rub.  

 

All the while, there’s an acid eating away at this world, dissolving the things we hold/held dear. My grandparents, and my parents, wore uniforms and lost their youths defending a world they believed in.  A generation stood against fascism and beat it back and proved it wrong.

 

But like the Hydra, it has come back, fag ash and Burberry, fake tan and golfing cheats, a creeping, crawling resurgence of things that ought to have drowned in sewers.  And we are all affected, all conflicted.  I want to love my enemas.  I could even give Nadine Doilies space (she, like me, never made it to the Hows of Lourds) but, like Martin Loofah’s reformation, the slate was not whipped clean and so there is still the seed of disquiet, the worm of hatred.  

 

Angerland, My Angerland....  So....

 

I must arise and go now, and go to Italy,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and bottles made:
Nine lean-tos will I have there, a cave for my honey-bee;
And live apart in the free-trade grave.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.....

 

Who am I/are you kidding?  We are all caught in the sticky spider’s web of life.  We are as insects who eat the world and leave nothing useful behind.  It is too easily beautiful to walk out on the shores of Ingoland and to ignore what is going on all around.  

 

Ow!  Ow! brief candle!
I’m but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets my hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

 

 

Which is why we are off to Italy.....  Better the devil you don’t know.....

 

I love my Engerland.  I love my country of birth, but I am not English.  I am not British.   I cannot fly the flag of some obscure saint who was probably martyred at Diospolis, now Lydda, in what was Palestine, around the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century.  I am as English as W B Yeats, as James Joyce.  I am a European, and am uncomfortably proud of that. Don’t paint my house with red crosses. Don’t paint the roundabouts with symbols of some kind of purity.  Around 12.000 years ago no one lived here.  We are all migrants or descended from such.  No one is pure anything.

   

And to return to the beginning of this piece.  I have just had the privilege, honour and pleasure of hosting Roger McGough in my house.  At 87 years of age, in that awkward period between birth and death, he still raises a giggle and pokes fun at the world.  Whether you would consider him a National Treasure or not, some have called him the Patron Saint of Poetry.  Others say he has done more for poetry than champagne has done for weddings.  I would say he has brought light into a dark world and made many many people feel better about their worries.

 

At breakfast he told me of a poem-in-progress. I don’t have total recall, but it was about the stink of politics, and the punch line (yes, poems are like jokes) was that the Speaker of the House of Commons was calling for quiet....  “O Dour!  O Dour!  O Dour!”

 

Arrest my case.....  

 

We are bound for Italy, where at least somethings are different.....

 

This is for Roger and my other fellow travellers through this world.

I am land.

I am happy for you live on me.

Till and plough, graze your cattle,

build your homes upon me.

I will feed, nourish, even bury you

But I am not yours.

Not yours to fight over.

To invade and plunder, divide and destroy.

I do not belong to you.

Even though you claim me, I am not yours.

I have no name, flag or anthem

Call me World.

Roger McGough

Call Me World

A Modest Celebration

All you need is.....

It is a dull, misty morning. As is often the case these days, my mind clicks and whirrs as if it is in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, little impulses flickering around like grains of sand in an old tin, the platelets colliding and then sticking as I worry about amyloid-ß plaque formation, and in amongst this turmoil I hear snatches of songs and echoes of poems once learned:

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

W B Yeats

EASTER 1916

I walk out in the dim day, wondering about this world and how it has seen plague and war ever since we began to civilise ourselves.  I have often thought how fortunate I have been not to have been in some other time, some other place. I kick myself for my superficial and trivial mind, and then lapse into a kind of torpor, before another thought emerges.  Did Alexei Navalny die in vain?  And why did this occur to me?  I face the wall:

And Robert Frost comes to mind:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down

 

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

And then walking on, I see the village church spire probing the mist above.  Why can't I believe in something?  Anything?  Did the saints all die in vain?

Those poppies round the gate - the messages of love - those who fought and died, or perhaps, just died - what is this life if full of care?  I must snap out of it.  The news - today's news - will soon be forgotten.  Please?

George Harrison comes to mind.  He said this about a song he wrote: Sometimes you open your mouth and you don’t know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.

I like it:

Give me love, give me love

Give me peace on earth

Give me light, give me life

Keep me free from birth

Give me hope, help me cope

With this heavy load

Trying to touch and reach you with

Heart and soul

 

George Harrison

Give me love (Give me peace on earth)

I walk on, the damp clinging to me, smoke from an early bonfire drifting lazily around me.  There is someone on the allotments before me.  Tim Mann stands and leans on his hoe, and we exchange greetings.  It is a moment of hope.  The only other person in the world for the moment and we share thoughts on the way the world is turning.  How strange that on this dull morning the one person I meet speaks in a language I understand, and says things that I can comprehend, things that seem to chime with things I would like to say too.

They'll try to teach you how to stop shining. 

And you, instead, must shine on. 

Tim Mann to his 10 year old self

I am lifted up.  Perhaps all is not lost?  Sanity is not entirely dead.  While there are the empty spaces - the desolation:

There are also flowers that bloom:

And, to put it coarsely, there is hope that something fresh may grow out of the shit:

Another song comes to mind. I remember seeing the Beatles perform this in July 1967 on a TV show that went simultaneously around the world. And I remember seeing a counter ticking, as the 200 millionth birth in the United States of America arrived. There are now nearly 350 million persons in the USA. Isn't that crazy?  In my short lifetime, the number of us on this planet has gone from around 2.5 billion (when I was born) to approximately 3.5 when All You Need is Love was recorded, to 8.2 billion today.  (That's a lot of gravestones, Ed.) 

Nothing you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn
How to be you in time
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 

John Lennon/Paul McCartney

All You Need is Love

OK I may be blinding myself with gossamer dreams (look what happened to John? Ed.) but there has to be hope, and there has to be love (Though maybe that is what you are missing this morning? Ed.)

I walk on.  The path enclosed in weedy growth, the sky so dense that the Pink-footed geese are confused, their two- or three-syllable scratchy honks sound worried as they flap in chevrons through the murk:

But then, back in the village, I dream there is a rainbow over the cottages. Is this a portent of better things to come, or a symbol of an impending storm?

Truth is, I don't know what to make of it.  I cannot make sense of my life, let alone the bigger picture. W B Yeats comes back, his gravestone in Drumcliff suggesting that perhaps we should not take everything too seriously:

Cast a cold Eye 

On life, on Death.

Horseman pass by!

This evening I will stage a modest celebration.  I will light a bonfire and I will burn away confusion and regret. No effigy will be consumed, for that is not the way.  I will try to give thanks for good.  We can but try....

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn
How to play the game
It's easy

 

There is music in the midst of desolation
Laurence Binyon

 

“We are all the same, to notice our similarities is to celebrate it in others. It is to celebrate ourselves and each other as being human.”

Tim Mann

And for more about Tim, please see his website:

 https://timmannartist.com/introduction/

 

 

She came in through the bathroom window.....

High Windows.....

The Open Window, Yellow Wall, c 1919

I am in Tate Modern, that vast and powerless monument to control, peering through windows.... I am enjoying The Colour of Memory, the C C Land Exhibition. As the guide points out, The paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947) create a remarkable sense of intimacy. Many of them allow glimpses into a private world, depicting the domestic life that Bonnard shared with his companion, Marthe de Méligny.

La Fenêtre
(The Window)

1925

 Pierre Bonnard

Photo © Tate

CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

https://www.tate.org.uk

There aren't many connections, perhaps, between Pierre Bonnard and Philip Larkin, but some link fizzes through my mind. Larkin, apart from anything else, may not be best remembered for his use of colour, but the records of daily life, and the way things are remembered and reimagined perhaps link the poet and the painter, as does the use of windows (and that's not pc).....

But, just maybe, one informs the other?

I think I see the poet leaning on the railings, looking down....

But it's a mistate (sic).....  Larkin wouldn't be seen dead in jeans....

Looking through windows is not necessarily voyeurism.  It's a way of framing experience, of playing with dimensions - even if only two.

In Nude in the Bath we see an out-of-focus figure in a dressing gown entering the frame. A Larkin-like Pierrot in his lover's bathroom, the light from the window filtering through the layers of their lives.  1925 was the year that Bonnard married Marthe, but it was also the year that Bonnard's other lover, Renée Monchaty, to whom he had proposed marriage in 1923, committed suicide.

The figure in the bath is not Marthe in 1925, but a younger Marthe, less tubercular, perhaps more as he wanted to remember her, to record their love....

While other people wore like clothes

The human beings  in their days

I set myself to bring to those

Who thought I could the lost displays.....

Sympathy in White Major

Philip Larkin

Nu dans la baignoire

(Nude in the Bath)

1925

 Pierre Bonnard

Photo © Tate

CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

https://www.tate.org.uk

Paintings, especially framed ones, are windows onto other worlds.  Other times, other places.  People we never knew look back at us through openings in the walls, through glass, through time.  Again and again Bonnard's pictures step through a frame, and then through a window, colouring in lost days....

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In full-grown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

The Trees

Philip Larkin

So similar.  So different.  A bottle of wine, half consumed.  A woman, half complete.....

The Open French Window, Vernon, c 1921

The Door Opening onto the Garden, c 1924

I am not alone.  These window frames are focal planes for all, and sundry (sun dried, sic). We gaze, refreshed, through the openings at worlds we missed, yet which we love.  

The woman in red here crouches as if to welcome the woman in blue, to invite her in; the seated man could almost be the painter, more aloof.....

Dining Room in the Country, 1913

And here, in southern France, the viewer watches over a reclining Bonnard, the roof of his house, Le Bosquet, in mid-canvas, the landscape of the distant Estérel mountains reflecting the shades of the viewer's clothing while Bonnard merges naked into the straw.....

Landscape at Le Cannet, 1928

Time for a drink.....

When I drop four cubes of ice

Chimingly in a glass, and add

Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,

And let a ten-ounce tonic void

In foaming gulps until it smothers

Everything else up to the edge,

I lift the lot in private pledge:

He devoted his life to others.

Sympathy in White Major

Philip Larkin

And I walk through the windows.....

Into another world....

Though, again, I am not alone.  There are windows all around, reflecting, shining, framing all we are....  

Or what we seem to be.

Way below, in the teeming Borough Market, the dance of life continues, the music indistinct, blurred by the shuddering of time. Nothing is fixed; nothing is certain; the actors play their parts, then disrobe, and, eventually, disappear.....

If Bonnard had had the absence of mind, he might have caught the scene, some years later. Larkin, too, could have gazed disconsolately upon the frantic antics of others more energetic than he, and, perhaps, have latterly written up a thought, and then we, the outsiders, the empty cataracts of existence, would have marvelled at what they saw.....

But it is quieter in the gallery.  In Normandy. I am drawn in by the blood red wall, the cat in the deckchair, the cat by the table, the jug on the shelf, the woman's red shirt against the distance, the simple meaningless of the moment. The meaningful moment of simplicity.....

I leave it...  I come back...  I do not let myself become absorbed by the object itself..... (Pierre  Bonnard.)

High Windows

by Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s 

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, 

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— 

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if 

Anyone looked at me, forty years back, 

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide 

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide 

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: 

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin, 
High Windows
from Collected Poems. 
Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin.

High Windows above the Empty Powerhouse

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Homage to a Government

Philip Larkin

Didn't anybody tell her.....

London Bridge

Didn't anybody see?

I am out of Tate Modern, a vast and uncontrolled monument to power, where I was peering through windows....  I very much enjoyed The Colour of Memory, the C C Land  Exhibition.  As the guide pointed out, The paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947) create a remarkable sense of intimacy.  Many of them allow glimpses into a private world, depicting the domestic life that Bonnard shared with his companion, Marthe de Méligny.


Now I am at London Bridge.....

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

This be the verse

Philip Larkin