Last posting date for the Theakletuffin thing!

Just a reminder that today is the last posting date for print orders of The Theakletuffin Book before Christmas. So if you know a small child or a big kid that would like an unusual gift this year surprise them with this lovely coffee table book. The Theakletuffin Poem. (There's a video now as well.)
PS This is the last Christmas/Book promo you will see on this blog this year. Normal Narrowboat Wife service will resume next week. I am just so excited that I finally created my picture book! :-)

I made a video!

I just made a 3 minute video to tell you the Theakletuffin story.

• Quirky pictures
• Silly words
• Written by Peggy
• Narrated by Peggy

Watch the video.

View the book.

Book reduced in price until 2013!

Book Launch: A Theakletuffin Story

I have finally gone and done it and published a little book with pictures and everything. I wrote this twelve years ago when I bought my first canal boat and used to perform it in function rooms above pubs around London. I was a founder member of the Radge Poets but I wanted to be like Lewis Carroll. So I made up a lot of nonsense words and turned them into a quirky fairy-tale. 

I sent it to a major children’s publisher who surprisingly wrote back to me and said that everyone in the office loved it and laughed a lot. But regrettably they did not feel it was suitable for children. 

The grown-ups on the London poetry scene always liked it and my five year old daughter likes it too. I don’t think it’s unsuitable! But I’ll let you decide. 

This book will answer your question: What would happen to Theakletuffin Valley if the Theakletuffin queen was caught snibbledorping the Cumbleduffinbing?

Look inside the book: The Theakletuffin Poem

What do you think? Unsuitable?

More Than Just a Mum Meme

Kate blogs at Kate Takes 5 and she had a great idea to share a picture about the sort of stuff you did before you were a mum.
"I want you to post one picture on your blog of you being 'More that just Mum'. Then come back here and link it up for all to see."
I was the vocalist in a band called 'Stoked'. I was a performance poet - I sold my poetry and got paid to perform! I was a founder member of Dangerchix International. I travelled India, I rode an elephant. I had orange and blue fluorescent dreadlocks down to my waist that glowed under UV light. I was a techno-fairy. I went to illegal free parties and lounged around on the bonnet of a New York yellow cab in a field in Oxfordshire. When I was twenty-something life was very interesting and impulsive; but I don't miss it. I am also enjoying drifting quietly on the waterways with a handsome doctor and two tiny boat girls.

And Kate? She actually did aerobatics - flying a plane, loop the loops in Australia!

Dangerhix International

When I Ate Your Sweet Heart

Continuing the Narrowboat Wife Poetry Week, here is the second poem, which follows on from Monday's poem: Your Mind.

(It's funnier if you read the other poem first.)

When I ate your sweet heart

 

When I ate your sweet heart

I spat it disgusted

It was broken and twisted

And tasted like mustard

And so I repaired it

With patience and kisses

Now it’s shiny and new

For your shiny new missus

And mine is more bitter

Than a triple espresso

So now i watch my sweet tooth

And I watch what I swallow.

(c) Peggy Melmoth

Lyrical Loops

It's poetry week at Narrowboat Wife! Inspired by my recent discovery of Jo Bell, boat poet and writer of The Bell Jar blog, I am waxin' lyrical this week.

To kick off is a poem I wrote many years ago, and I will follow up with the sequel on Wednesday.

Peggy
xx





Your Mind

I want to walk through your mind

Leave no stone unturned

I want your life to unwind

To find the secrets that burned

You and when I do

I want to be amazed

To know you inside

And all of your ways

To explore every part

I want you surrounded

And when I eat your sweet heart

I want to be astounded.

(c) Peggy Melmoth

Following Dreams

I dreamed I had a little girl
And she was just like you
And when I woke up in my bed
I found that it was true.

(c) Peg

You might also like: Some Dreams Come Alive

Little Legacy: A small thing handed down by a predecessor.

When I was seven years you were eleven years

Took my new bicycle for a ride

Stood in the park I watched you ride away

I didn’t want you to, and I cried.

        

(Part of a poem I wrote many years ago).

This summer the Doctor and I were invited to a wedding at a beautiful, ancient west-country church. I used to visit the churchyard now and then, on birthdays and Christmas to remember my step brother. I’d never heard of viral pneumonia, it happens to the young or the old and came very suddenly in the night. Time is a healer and losses become memories, but twenty years after his death I found myself re-living his funeral on a quiet sunny summer day. I remembered the black clothes that my skinny seventeen year-old self wore. I remembered which hymns were chosen. I remembered following the coffin out of the church and I watched it carried to the hearse. When I looked behind me the whole congregation had assembled silently behind me and stood on the steps in front of the church yard gate. This summer, twenty years on, I laid some fragile tangled flowers on to the memorial stone and for the first time ever I did not cry at the grave side. 

Later that afternoon our friends were married. The church that has seemed so ominously stifling to my teenage self was alive with pride, joy and love; bustling with colours and happiness. The groom was stylish in a deep red suit and wore a permanent smile. The bride was breathtakingly beautiful in the dress of her dreams and their family and friends released wishes of strength and happiness into the stones and foundations of the ancient church so that every molecule resonated with glittering hopes for the future. Outside in the church yard the bells rang out with joy, and we threw confetti over the happy couple. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two young children in their best smart wedding guest clothes jumping and playing over my brother’s grave. 

Little Legacy is a remembrance project, a positive and creative space, to celebrate small things handed down by predecessors. This is a concept created by Penny at the Alexander Residence blog. The idea is to share a scrap of wisdom that arises from the past, something that connects you to your past and drives you into the future. Little legacies can come from people living or dead and  don’t have to be a memory from long ago. 

At the beginning of their vibrant life together this bride and groom unwittingly gave me an intensely happy memory to re-frame my perception of a beautiful, ancient west-country church. Lives have seasons, everything changes, cycles and circles; a lovely lesson learned.

Visit http://peggymelmoth.wordpress.com/ for remote secretarial services, copywriting, or freelance writing commissions.

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Contentment

Image Credit: Hemel FM

‘Sleep is for The Weak’ Writing Workshop has given me the opportunity to reflect on how my narrowboat life has changed over the last ten years.  I’ve been writing this blog for over a year now, through depression and bereavement. People always ask me, ‘What’s it like, living on a boat with kids?’

My blog is the answer to that question. But now, with a bigger boat, my beautiful boat girls and my handsome Doctor I think I can gingerly approach Contentment, perhaps introduce myself to her, and see if we can get along. So at the same festival that I went to ten years ago, I notice how my attitudes have changed...

Boxmoor Canal Festival 2011

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the 2011 Boxmoor Canal Festival.

For more than twenty years you have been supporting the famous Tring Canal Festival organised by The Wendover Arm Trust (or WAT) to fund the restoration of the Wendover Arm from Tring to Wendover.

As we are unable to hold the festival at our usual site in Tring, from this day forth the festival shall be known as The Boxmoor Canal Festival! You can expect to see decorated narrowboats, traction engines, fairground rides,  live music, a real ale bar, birds of prey, a craft marquee and boat trips on offer throughout the day. Later on you can see the Ellesborough Silver Band and the Fun Dog Event – best canal dog.  If you have children you may not see the inside of the beer tent this year. You are more likely to be standing beside the swing boats or the merry go round in the rain. But the real enjoyment this year is watching the eyes of your children transfixed on the falconry display, seeing an owl and a vulture swooping up close. Then you watch expressions change from fear to  delight as your three year old becomes absorbed in her first ever Punch and Judy show; oblivious to the rain she stands up at the front to shout out a reply to Mr Punch.

Note that the boat with flower pots, a bicycle and fire wood on the roof with washing hanging off the tiller is a live aboard boat.  These people do not really mind fishermen or Rosie and Jims.  You can ask them three questions. Is that your boat? Do you live on that? And; Isn't it cold in the winter?

Try asking that Boat-Wife there, the one with the fancy new boat. (She ought to polish her brass.) I asked her one little question, that was it and she was off!

Yeah the festival Wendover

In the beer tent I recall

She held our table spell-bound

With her stories that are tall

And cruising down the Cut

She told me all about it
She said when you get a boat
I know you're gonna like it.
And you won't believe the people
And the things that people do
But they're lovely water gypsies
In fact they're just like me and you.

(Read the full poem on this post http://narrowboatwife.blogspot.com/2010/07/angel-islington-to-uxbridge.html)

You Don’t Look Like a Boatwoman

Photo Credit: Charles Lamb Pub website

After the funeral , sitting on a crowded tube train into town, and standing still like a plastic mannequin on a grimy London escalator I was thankful to be alive. The Mellow Mum can no longer experience this existence. I am thankful for the daily grind. I feel each breath of winter air as I emerge to ground level at Angel station, I am alive. I am re-evaluating my life. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. There is no time to be wasted; now is the time to live.

Or maybe the future will start when I wake up in the morning. Right now I really want to go to my room and be on my own, with some maudlin music and a bottle of wine. But I don’t have a room. I am in my late thirties now and I don’t have my own bedroom. Suddenly that seems peculiar, absurd. So, to be alone, I went to the Charles Lamb pub. It is full of people. I try to cry secretly. Oh me! I wearily and dramatically feel like serenading the many leaded-rectangle paned windows, gently flickering candles and green-painted wooden panels. All of the wobbly rustic tables are taken. I sit on a stool at the bar and order a large red wine.
“We only do wine in one size,” she says. It ain’t large. But it’s large prices; Islington prices.
The melancholy fellow on the bar stool next to me tries to get her attention to order a drink. She looks right through him. I offer him half a smile, apologetically. He is drunk, and considers my smile to be an invitation to initiate conversation.
“What are you thinking about?” He demands of my pensive face. I pay the lady for my wine and take a sip.
“I’m thinking about my friend,” I reply. He nods, sagely.
“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have that nonsense respected...”*
I can’t help smiling just a little.
“Friends are like table legs; they keep you stable,” I reply. “If one falls off, you wobble.”
He smiles, holds out his hand and introduces himself.
“Charles Lamb, essayist and poet.”
“I thought so,” I replied, shaking his ghostly hand. I could tell by his nineteenth century fashion sense that he was different somehow. “Associated with the romantics, Shelley , Hazlitt, Coleridge and Wordsworth and considered by admirers as “a pre-Victorian sugar daddy distributing kisses and kindliness”.
“Ah, you have heard of me! Yes, Samuel Coleridge is a good friend of mine.” He sits up straight on his bar stool and glows with satisfaction and pride.
“No, it says all that on the chalk board behind you.” I remind him. His pen name was Elia when he lived in Colebooke Row. “I live in Colebrooke Row too.”
“I’m at Colebrooke Cottage!” he exclaims.
“I’m on the canal,” I tell him. “On a boat, near the Islington tunnel.” He eyes me up and down and looks confused.
“You don’t look like a boatwoman.” He expects to see a frilly black sun bonnet and ankle length skirts.
“Well things have changed a bit on the Cut lately,” I explain. He shakes his head and the very old clock behind the bar strikes seven. My kids will be in bed soon. I’m too miserable to handle the chaos of the bedtime routine but I think about making a move.
“Do you know there was a competition to design the Islington tunnel?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “But old James Morgan ended up designing it himself.”
“ I know that it took three years to build,” I offered. He nods.
“All those navvies with their wheelbarrows, horses and explosives; they finished it in 1818. I’ve seen you boat people walking your horses over the top.”
“Yep, there’s no towpath in the tunnel,” I reply. I didn’t tell him that we haven’t got a horse.

I finish my drink in silence as I survey the fairy lights, the ornate mirror and the deliberately scruffy wooden floorboards. It’s intentionally homely like a Hoxton trendy bar, not like a spit and sawdust back street boozer. The people drinking here are young and probably work in media, but it escapes by a hairs-breadth from being swanky (with a silent ‘s’), to being simply cosy for the younger drinker. I feel a little bit old among the other patrons here, but my new friend looks positively ancient.
He decides not to order another drink, stands up to leave and puts on his rather charming hat.
“I always arrive late at the office but I make up for it by leaving early,” he grins.
Maybe it was the fairy lights, maybe it was the wine, but as I follow him out of the door I feel a little bit warmer inside. A chalk board suggests ‘Mulled Cider – the cure for winter blues’. I turn around to look down Elia Street and Charles has silently gone towards home; nowhere to be seen.

*Charles Lamb 1775 – 1834

http://www.thecharleslambpub.com

Are You Waiting There?

I wrote this exactly eleven years ago, the first time I lost a friend. Here it is for you, if you have ever lost someone. 

Photo credit: Epping Forest Burial Park

 Website

Are you waiting there?

Are you waiting there?

Under the grass

For one of your friends

To come strolling past

And burst into tears

And lay down some flowers

And lament over ancient

Forgotten hours

When you were alive

Having it large

Living so deep

That you would carve

Your memory in

To all of our hearts

Are you still there

Under the grass?

Or did you kick off

Your earth boots at last

And leaving your body

Feeding the grass

Soar into the ether

The everything space

And begin to exist

In all time and space

In between atoms

And out of existence

Returned to the source

And into the distance

A little bit here

A little bit there

A little bit me

And a little bit yeah

Giving it some

And having it large

All over the place

And up in the stars

You can try as you might

To just disappear

But I've a sneaking suspicion

That you're still kinda here!

28/03/00

Photo Credit: Epping Forest Burial Park Website