FIRSTLY, it’s Album of the Year time.

Mine is Steve White and the Protest Family’s Evidence Based Punk Rock, a glorious slab of The Clash meets Chas & Dave, a proper DIY East End thinking person’s singalong celebration, with some superb spoken word holding it together.

Honourable mention to The Humdrum Express’s Rastrophiliopustrocity Pomposity, more superb musical wordplay from West Brom’s social surrealist maestro.

My Artist of the Year is BC Camplight: he’s been going for decades but I’d never come across him until introduced by my friends Rachel & Mark, and I’ve been hooked ever since. 10cc meets Laibach. And I mean that.

Trump wants people to provide five years of social media history to enter the US? Time for Gavin Newsom to welcome all comers to California as long as they can provide some anti-Trump posts! I’ve done four tours of the States and have absolutely no desire to return, especially now the orange monster is turning it into a gruesome fascist corporate state while backing the European far right.  

Solidarity with the resistance growing day by day: the bravery I see in the social media videos is wonderful, and I very much hope that soon the nightmare will come to an end.

Writing this last Thursday having driven through my wife Robina’s home county of Cheshire on my way to my gig at Thornton Hough Village Club on the Wirral. (Very posh, apparently. We’ll see.) Stopped in Hartford to put flowers on her parents’ grave and buy her some proper Cheshire cheese — you don’t get that in Sussex!

It is my first gig on the Wirral for years: I must do the poem I wrote comparing New Brighton to our old one, although apparently it’s been done up since then. Planning a visit there before last night’s gig in Southport — all of course, centred around today’s Seagulls clash with Liverpool at Anfield. Mo Salah’s last appearance, so it seems, though it remains to be seen whether it is on the pitch or not.

Last Wednesday I started my trip up the country at the very lovely Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath, Birmingham - exactly as it sounds, lovely venue, great food, great beer and coffee and lots of plants for sale - and it was lovely to see my old poetic comrade and local legend Spoz again. Here we are.

And now a poem. I never thought I’d write one  about the Women’s Institute, but recent events changed all that. I don’t deal in culture wars: I deal in people, ideas and history. This one’s for my Mum.

Beery Clashmas to one and all. 

W.I. OH W.I. ?

My mother was an activist 
in the W.I.
Yes, an activist. 
‘Oh, that’s really middle class’
I hear some say.
‘You can’t be an activist in the W.I!’
Mum grew up in a council house 
left school at 16 in 1939
and was sent to work on Enigma 
at Bletchley Park
because she was clever 
and could type quickly. 
She was a fine musician 
whose aunt paid for her piano lessons 
because her parents couldn’t afford them 
who sang with the Royal Choral Society
under Malcolm Sergeant 
and the Brighton Festival Chorus 
and spent a long life 
as a pianist, organist and music teacher. 
If that’s ’middle class’
I am too -
and proud of it.

Mum told me about Adelaide Hoodless
who founded the W.I. in Canada 
after the death of her infant son 
from untreated meningitis 
seeking to educate ordinary women
in matters of hygiene 
so that the same thing 
didn’t happen to them. 
Mum continued the process:
opening minds 
forging new paths.

She campaigned hard 
to give the women of her generation 
something more than Jam and Jerusalem 
opposed right wing bigotry
and rigid conventionality 
was proud of the courses she did 
at Denman College…..

……and absolutely loved the day she 
- very nervously
and at the members’ request -
invited me
in her capacity as president 
to perform for Southwick W.I.
She was so proud of the reception I got 
and the minds it changed.

🙂

Her ability to embrace new ideas
and look beyond the conventional 
was amazing 
and she’d have been very sad 
about the decision they took recently. 
‘I don’t understand’
she’d have said. 
‘What’s all the fuss about?
Live and let live. 
We’re all the same 
under the skin’.