YOU’LL WRITE A POEM ABOUT THAT

I’m on the beach at Bamburgh in Northumberland, walking so slowly I’m convincing myself that time is just a human construct and it doesn’t really exist at all; or maybe it exists temporarily like that sandcastle. Yes, of course time has no idea what a month is and couldn’t care less how long a second takes to flicker by but I’m in such deep reverie on this wide sand canvas that I’m questioning the very nature of time itself. I’ll give it a capital letter: of Time itself. That’s what Northumberland does to me: it makes me aware of all kinds of possibilities and it convinces me that, in certain lights and at room temperature, I could have been a philosopher.

I’m also eating a bag of crisps so enthusiastically that many of them are transferring themselves to my polo shirt. I know, I’m a 65-year-old bloke and I shouldn’t be eating a bag of crisps but I’m on my holidays and so I’ll allow myself just the one bag, like I allow myself a tube of Pringles at Christmas. There’s something reassuring to me that my mind is churning big Time-based thoughts around and my hands are conveying crisps into my eager mouth, missing the target more than once. I accidentally drop a crisp and a passing gull falls to the sand, picks up the crisp and steals it away in an excitement of wingflaps. A man in a hat too big for his head and probably for his lifestyle too points at the gull and says ‘You’ll write a poem about that!’

Oh yes: the cry that fills the air whenever I’m around, whenever any poet is around, once people know you attempt to write deathless verse either as a hobby or as a living (and let’s face it, as far as poetry is concerned the two aren’t always so far apart). Those six words follow me everywhere; less so these days, to be honest, because I’m not on TV very much, but somebody always seems to spot me on a beach or at a beauty spot and, with a chuckle in their voice like a mid-morning DJ, they’ll challenge me to put pen to paper. The Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls, Wembley Way, Anglesey, Toronto, Clifton Park in Rotherham, Great Yarmouth: if I’d written a poem about all of them, I’d have an anthology full with some drafts to spare.

I grin at the bloke and his hat and say ‘Yes, I might. Or a novel!’ We both laugh and the gull wheels away. I could tell him all the things I’m about to tell you about the poem I think I’m going to write, but he’s already halfway to Seahouses, walking so quickly he’s almost catching up with the motion of the Earth so that where he is, it’s standing still.

The thing is, I was going to write a poem about this moment on this beach. My notebook is folded and ready for action in my pocket and there’s a pen rubber-banded to it that’s brimming with unwritten lines. The poem I’m going to write will have something of the past in it, and something of this morning’s reflected and refracted light. It will try and link the then and the now, try and get them walking alongside each other; perhaps that’s where my earlier Time-thinking is going. Into a file marked IAN’S POEMS.

The poem won’t rhyme, and the rhythm will be the rhythm of my speech and of my thoughts. It will be about the nature of change and how some things never seem to change at all. I find the coast a good place to begin poems but not to finish them, for some reason that maybe has to do with familiar settings rubbing up against unfamiliar settings to strike sparks that might eventually smoulder into a poem. I’ll make notes and have a run-up and maybe a high jump or two into a couple of lines; the notes will be incoherent and inchoate and anybody stumbling across them, once they’ve wiped the gull poo and the chip grease away, will find something that looks like a half-formed shopping list or a prescription for corn plasters. Somewhere in these squiggles and biro-runes a poem is waiting in disguise.

At home, in my little writing room, I’ll engineer the lines into some heavy lifting and gradually I’ll be able to take the scaffolding away and the poem will stand on its own shaky metrical feet.

Now, though, the poem is just floating around in the Northumberland air. I stand by the water and remember the time my three kids and all their cousins ran up and down the beach endlessly one broad and beautiful summer, playing a game that they had devised and the rules for which they redevised every five minutes. The younger me stands next to my two brothers-in-law and if you were to do a reconstruction of the scene now, I would be the only surviving brother-in-law. The other two are not with us any more, on the beach or anywhere. They’ll be in the poem, though; they’ll have that paper and alphabet immortality. They’ll be laughing as a Frisbee spins towards them.

The poem will partly be about loss and about the way each turning of the tide is a kind of loss. I still think every day about those two men on whom the tide went out. I write the word Frisbee in the notebook, making the poem’s beginnings seem even more like a shopping list. As the waves lap my beach pumps, I make a solemn promise to myself and to the ghosts of Martyn and Terry that I won’t make the Frisbee into a heavy-handed metaphor for something coming out of nowhere. Maybe the crisp-eating gull will feature, though; maybe I could pretend they were eating crisps. Maybe that slight incident, reshaped with added linguistic music, can pull its weight across a line or two.

As the man said, I’ll write a poem about this.