SUGIE pronounced shoogie

Browsing through the poetry of Thomas Morgan McGurk, my late father, I found this one, about his sister-in-law Struan's pure white cat, called Sugie (pronounced "shoogie" because she was as white as sugar.)

You'll notice that this contains proof, if such were needed, that my parents used to take a dictionary to bed and find exciting new words. Here's an opportunity to expand your vocabulary!

Anyway, it's the internet, and you know, cats ...


SUGIE
Albescent puss, proliferous and proud,
Cohabitant of luxury and ease,
What dream obtrude upon they gremial sleep?
What heart-seducing, feline Odysseys?


Distract thee from thy couch, when day has gone,
And night has wrapped its mantle round thy heart,
Calling thee forth, where wanton Tom-cats sing
Their love-songs with an unmelodious art?

Immantled in thy coat of hirsute snow,
Quivered with barbs of loveliness and grace;
The moonlit yard, beneath a starlit sky,
Is surely not for thee the safest place!

While shades of ancestors behind thee stand,
Adjuring thee to spurn thy false delights,
Biology has destined thee to write
An Iliad of polyandrous nights.

Go forth, and taste the sweet, connubial air,
The door's ajar, and Hymen holds his court,
Fair nymphomaniac, now take the field,
Horripilant and fierce before the sport!

Methinks it is a fate of worst degree,
A jest of feline gods in bacchic mood,
First to be born a cat, and then to act
The masquerade of humans, preaching good.

And yet, meseems, for thee the loving hands
Of gentle humans toil with tireless jest.
The lap of luxury, the cup of joy
Is shared with thee. Was ever cat so blest?

For thee the night is dark with felon's stealth,
When comely maidens, armed with spade and pail,
Delve the rich loam of dewy pleasances
And sift it then of worm, and slug, and snail.

What wonders of the deft, chromatic brush,
What meadows lush, and opalescent meads
Are to the world denied, through hours ill-spent
In min'stering to thy sanitary needs?

Oh, then the gay glissade, the lepid leap!
The vanished languor and the routed sloth !
Art is well lost for rapture such as this
And kings would lose their crowns for less, in troth.

Sugie! Thy name should blaze in solar glow,
Lighting a canvas in thy mistress' flat,
Amid thy progeny, esconsed in luxury,
The feline matriarch, the model cat.

T.M.M 5th January 1947

Her Last Encore

Tidying out some boxes of papers, I come across this poem. I must have written it about 10 years ago, at a guess, though I don't remember much about it. Thought it might raise the odd titter.

HER LAST ENCORE

She did not cry or scream or shout
that day she cut her finger;
she pulled the glassy fragments out
and sang - for she's a singer.

The bloody puddles stained her score;
the notes could not be read.
Yet still she sang her last encore,
ad-libbing words instead.

Alas! She could not stem the flow.
Red gore poured all around.
She faltered, weakened by the blow,
and slumped towards the ground.

The crowd, in horror, rose as one,
to see the diva dying,
"I fear that nothing can be done!"
the tenor whispered, crying.

So still the prima donna lies,
right there, where she did drop.
the crowd files out, with sorry sighs,
and the cleaner brings her mop.

ally McGurk

ME - the horrible, hidden disease

I have friends who suffer from ME. Most of them, I haven't met, even those who live nearby, because it's so bad that some of them have to live most of their lives cloistered in darkened, soundproofed rooms.

People don't know about this disease, or if they do, they only know a little about it. Until recent years, my own perception was that it was characterised by an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, making it impossible to do very much, and the more you did, the more exhausted you felt. And yes, there is that. But there is so much more, that I knew nothing about.

I've asked some sufferers to describe their own experience of living with ME, in their own words, and I'm going to reproduce what they've said on some new pages on this blog. Please read at least some of this, especially if, like me, you weren't aware of some of the symptoms.

I'm a musician, and I have a lot of friends who are also musicians. Last Christmas we did a fundraiser in our local village hall for those who'd been affected by the Cumbrian floods. It was a great success, and the audience thoroughly enjoyed themselves, telling me they'd be happy to come to more events of the same sort. I've been meaning to do another one ever since. Well, now I have a charity that desperately needs funds - ME Research.

Please have a look at their website and consider donating to research for this poorly-funded, and little-understood disease. You can read the official explanation  here: WHAT IS ME?

I haven't set the date for the fundraiser yet, but the first one should be at the end of September if things go to plan. I'll print out our sufferers' statements and plaster them round the walls, and make sure everyone who comes along knows exactly what we're fundraising for.

In the meantime, please read. I'll copy and paste patients' statements as I get them.
You'll find links to these pages on the right --->

Thank you.

______________________________________________________________________

Things from our attic (1)

I was up in the attic over the Easter holidayss, trying to sort out the jumble of boxes and stuff. Here are 4 bowls which belonged originally to one of my ancestors - one of the many James or John Robertsons - not sure which one. Probably an uncle rather than a direct ancestor - my grandfather's brother was James Robertson, and he also had uncles James and John. The bowls are made of ebony with engraved ivory inserts; they live in little bags, one of leather, and one tough brown cloth with a leather handle.

The leather bag was lined with a piece of hessian sacking, and although I've often taken the bowls out to look at them, I've never examined the sacking before. It's quite interesting, as you can see from the 3rd photo. I don't think there's any particular connection with the bowls - I think my granny (Allison Robina Robertson), to whom it's addressed probably just used it to line the bag for whoever was using the bowls at the time. Can't help wondering what was sent from Melbourne to Edinburgh, wrapped in hessian sackcloth. I recognise the name "Newcombe" - I think she was a friend of my granny's, and of course Granny's twin sister Hellen had married an Australian and moved to the antipodes with him, so there's a connection.

My Perthshire Robertson ancestors (the male ones, anyway) were keen curlers in winter, in those long lost days when the lochs used to freeze solid in winter; in summer they'd take to the bowling greens.

ALLY'S BIZARRE MISHAPS: No.4

On Friday - on this Friday, of all Fridays - I was punctured, twice, by thorns.

First thing in the morning, up the veg garden with with the dog, my peace was disturbed by the next door geese (those big white farmyard geese - they have a large flock of them) having a bit of a barny, and making even more noise than usual. So I nipped up on top of the dyke, where there's a hole in the hedge (this is where we stand to take photos of auroras) to get a better view of the local Goose War. It was interesting watching several of them ganging up on another one, chasing it with wings flapping furiously. Fine. Curiosity satisfied. But on the way up on to the dyke, I very slightly lost my balance, wobbled a wee bit, put my left hand out to steady myself, and managed to puncture it on a big thorn in the hawthorn hedge. It hurt! It bled! I took it back into the house, cleaned it up, put a plaster on it, and more or less forgot about it.

And then, thorn attack No.2. Later in the afternoon, on a walk with the dog, we were crossing one of those impossibly narrow footbridges that cross drainage ditches in Lakeland fields. I put my right hand out to brush aside the overhanging vegetation, only to discover too late that it consisted mainly of brambles. So: thorn injuries on both hands now.

Only then did the significance of the day occur to me. Good Friday - crown of thorns. Hmm... Was somebody up there trying to tell me something? Maybe I was supposed to be in church on Good Friday afternoon?

Well, I dunno. But the injury on my left hand is still hurting, and I think it may be infected as it's swelling up a bit, and the doctor's surgery doesn't seem to be open at weekends, and since Monday's a bank holiday I may have to wait until Tuesday to get it seen to. By that time my hand may be the size of a balloon, which will make playing sax for the morris dancers on Easter Monday a bit tricky. I'll try doing some phoning in the morning and find out what one's supposed to do in these circumstances. It's not bad enough to go to A&E, (not yet, anyway!) and besides I think I've heard the A&E at our nearest hospital (Whitehaven - not really near at all!) has closed now. You can see I don't have much to do with doctors or hospitals - I'm very much out of touch with procedures.

Guess I should have gone to church....

POETRY CORNER

It's a while since I wrote a poem (as opposed to a song).  It might end up with music, but right now, it's a poem. Click here to see it.

Ally's Bizarre Mishaps: Nos 2 & 3

Ally's Bizarre Mishaps - No.2 (29th March  2014)

While gettting a teaspoon out of the drawer this morning, to make a cuppa, I was unexpectedly attacked by a larger spoon, which, having somehow got itself entangled with other bits of cutlery, suddenly extricated itself and sprang with some force out of the drawer, landing very firmly, handle first, upon my bare toe, causing what feels like a cracked or at least chipped bone. Can't bear the touch of a sock on it at the moment, although it doesn't hurt so much with shoes on, for some reason. I suppose I ought to go and wrap it in frozen peas, but it's probably a bit too late for that now.

 Ally's Bizarre Mishaps - No.3 (1st April 2014)

Lovely evening, so I decided to go for a run along Hadrian's Cycleway, which is a new path that runs sort of in between, and parallel to, the main Maryport-Allonby road and the sea. I parked at Allonby and went off, jogging westwards. Realised it was too long since I'd done this, and felt a bit out of condition. By the time I reached the wooden footbridge across the stream, I was ready to stop and drink some water, so I leaned on the rail, gazing across to the sea, and took a few good gulps out of my nice aluminium water bottle. And then the bottle cap, that rather important thing that stops the water from falling out, slipped out of my fingers and dropped into the stream below.

My first thought: shoes and socks off - get into the water and retrieve it! But the stream's in a deep cutting, maybe 4 feet down, and although I could probably get down there, I'd never get back up again. Managed to stand on a few nettles with my bare feet, though, before I'd figured this out.

At least the cap had got stuck behind something in the water, and wasn't moving downstream, which gave me time to think.

Oh well, - find a stick! The stopper has a round hole in the top, so it should be easy to catch. Unfortunately, as there are no trees around there, there are no sticks either. I fiddled about with long plant stalks but they were too flimsy and too short.

The only solution was to run back to the car, drive up near the bridge, and use one of my telescopic walking sticks (which live in the car boot) to rescue it. This almost didn't work, as my first attempt just moved the stopper away from the thing it was trapped behind, and it started floating downstream. I had visions of it disappearing into the sea ... and I'd probably have followed it, so determined was I by this time not to give up.

Second attempt, though, worked! Hurrah! I triumphantly brought my walking stick up out of the stream with the bottle cap hanging on it like a bead on a necklace.

It's fine now. I've given it a thorough wash. My feet and legs are stinging though, from those nettles ...