Little Blue Blog - Laureate Squad
Little Blue Blog - The Canterbury Laureate Squad
Sunday 30 August 2009
Before today I'd never seen the point of beach huts. Expensive cupboards crammed with superfluous picnic gear and web-laced deckchairs? Or elaborate changing tents designed to facilitate the English beach dance of towel and twisted underwear?
Sitting here now, though, I recognise that this hut, at least, induces a wonderful sense of calm. It has no balcony, so basically it's a box with three solid sides and a fourth cut open at the top to reveal the view. The only things to look at are sea and sky, framed as if in a photograph, but ever changing - not just the clouds and colours, but human arrivals and departures, birds, boats, bobbing yellow buoys, windfarm dancers. As in a cinema, you're forced to focus, the sensory deprivation of the surroundings directing attention to the main image.
The options are close observation or a retreat to the mind's eye - and either, they say, is a good starting point for writing.
Vicky Wilson
Thursday 3 September 2009
Today - predictably - I've been working on seascape poems. Then walking into town in search of lunch, I came across a house up for auction. Open suitcases piled with jazz records and sheet music littered the garden; two oxygen tanks stood sentry at the front door. Peering through the windows, I saw:
A worn blue-grey carpet and faded red-plush curtains
Crates of rusting tools - clamps, drills, chisels, pliers
Three framed pencil portraits of dogs
A tea service with a dozen stained cups set out as if someone were about to pour
A commode supported on a plastic frame
Sheets of calligraphy practice
A shelf of pottery dogs, neatly spaced
A photo of a man in a shiny suit, dark hair slicked back, playing a piano
A sign: Roger, don't forget to take your medication.
Back in our temporary home, I realise my fellow writers are quietly accumulating mugs, cutlery, pebbles, books, photographs, candles, towels, blankets, postcards, bags, pens, a hammer, kitchen roll. Each object at some point considered, acquired, used, discussed, redesignated, transported, positioned, rearranged, re-used
As I pack up, I notice a lone hairgrip, shed on Sunday by my daughter. I leave it where it fell, straddling the boundary between rug and floorboards, aligned with the exit.
Vicky Wilson
Observations
07/09/2009
I spy with my little (blue hut) eye: 26 statuesque wind turbines standing out to sea, only 5 turning, in very slow-motion; 11 yellow buoys, as round and as smooth as snooker balls; inestimable rusted groynes stretch into the distance, tips of their toes reaching into the waves; a gently rippling tide; huts, dilutions of blue and occasional red; a grassy slope, sloping 1-in-3; a small red and yellow hut standing on the stones, a lifeguard reclining in a deckchair, hands clasped firmly behind his head; a white butterfly, actually the colour of milk, flutters; promenaders in shorts and t-shirts, left to right, right to left; an elderly couple sitting together on the pebbles, lost in conversation; a young mother walking with a toddler, hand in hand; in the distance still, the remains of Herne Bay Pier, a deserted island of sorts; a fat cyclist, up and down, up and down the peddles, puffing; a well-dressed elderly gentleman, his back bent, but no stick; 3 teenagers squealing, jeans rolled to their shins, wading; a disabled man in an electric buggy, steering one-handed; an American woman asks her friend, 'How much do these beach huts cost? We have the same in New England, only larger'; a pregnant woman strolling with an intimate; seagulls strolling too, upon the grass; banks of pebbles, lumped together like hump-backed whales; low, thin, whispery clouds; a boat far out to sea, like a dot; a helicopter high overhead; an orange oil tanker, just a speck; 6 sailing boats, mere white triangles on the horizon; a boy roller-skating; a beach hut owner taps nails into planks, sounding like a woodpecker in the woods, tap tap, tap tap tap; a young woman with the palest legs in the universe undresses behind a large towel, her body even paler than mine; grandparents caring for their grandson, but he falls from a shallow step onto his hands, bawling, and they comfort him; a Council bin man pushes a barrow overflowing with refuse sacks as orange as his luminous jacket, 'There must be a limit to what you can carry?' a passer-by quips, and the bin man answers with a broad, though tired, smile; an electric blue dragonfly flits silently, randomly between the huts; a man dressed only in dark shorts lies flat across a bench, reading a book; a Red Admiral takes a breather on the beach hut steps; a frantic terrier drops a tennis ball at the base of the Little Blue Hut, lies down in the grass, tongue lolling over her brilliant white teeth. She leans against the cool wood panelling. Her collar bears a heart-shaped name-tag too small to read. She starts eating the longest, most moist green blades. 'Having an early lunch,' I say to her owner. 'Not yours I hope?' she replies. 'The grass,' I say. 'Oh, she thinks she's cow,' she says, and we laugh; a cyclist rides by using no hands , as if he is a seagull in the air; a passenger plane hums dimly, high above us all; the tide slaps the shore; more swimmers now, and it does the heart good to see the sea, how much better to feel it?; a number of people stop to comment on the huts; everyone it seems has a view on them, or from them; and just for today, for a change, no one more than me.
Every now and then, during the afternoon, there is the deepest rumble, vibrating through the foundations of the Little Blue Hut, moving up through the wooden floorboards, up through my sandals and feet, entering my core. Is it the tremor from an earthquake, or a MOD exercise? At 3pm, a mother tenderly changes her baby's nappy on the grass between the huts and the sea, and I notice for the first time, that the tide has really shifted.
Andrew McGuinness
Today
09/09/2009
Today feels like symmetry; the nines of the day, month, year. 999. Should I be alarmed? Certainly, the atmosphere feels different at the hut today, inside and outside. Colder. The undulations of the Tankerton slopes more closely match a torrid sea, and all the wind turbines turn today, their arms wheeling. The waves roll the stones, heaving them high up shore, and the tide turns angrily from right to left, frothing at the mouth. Dark seaweed uprooted from the rocks and bed, rises with the swell and spreads like a wreath upon its surface. Windsurfers battle the wind and sea, weaving between the yellow buoys, their billowing sails bent backwards at acute angles. I notice that a hardy couple are bracing themselves bravely in deckchairs, hiding in the dip of a groyne, their hair in a frenzy. I sit, pour myself a coffee, and take the chill out of my hands so I can write. For the first time in this hut, I can smell salt, can smell it in the wooden walls, the furniture, in miniscule, invisible airborne bubbles. I stay in my wicker chair, closing my eyes, listening to the sea, and to the rattle of the almost gale, thinking how things can change.
Not long after, I stand again, looking out to sea; and where the hardy couple had once sat, in the dip of the groyne, there is only a moving pool of seawater.
