Municipal construction

Given the (relative) popularity of the post about municipal fountains (http://recreationground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/top-five-municipal-fountains-eastern.html), here's a news story from Macedonia about its current monument-building programme: no mention of fountains per se, but the picture at the bottom apparently shows a partially constructed one: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/new-bach-of-statues-erected-in-skopje

The financial implications of killing children

Quote from today's Guardian (5/4/2013): "David Cameron has strongly endorsed controversial comments by George Osborne in which the chancellor highlighted the killing of six children by Mick Philpott to raise questions about welfare payments." 
Quote from nowhere: 'Tom Phillips strongly invites David Cameron to endorse controversial comments by yours truly in which I would highlight the killing of numerous children (and adults) in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the name of the UK government to raise questions about tax payments to said government.'

Easter in England

In the light of Tory welfare cuts, IDS idiocy, Daily Mail hatespeak and the BBC's inadvertent sparking of class war (amongst the, erm, Facebook classes at least), here's Czech dissident Jan Urban, only months after the Berlin Wall came down: ‘There is much that we want and need from the West but there is one thing which I do not want: carelessness with people.’

On Blog Stats

Although it's obviously flattering to know the overall number of people who've bothered to look at this blog (nearly 10,500, as it happens), what's far more interesting, and indeed intriguing, is where these people have logged on from and what they've been looking at. Curiously, according to the latest figures, Recreation Ground is most popular in Latvia (followed by the UK, Germany and USA), while the most popular post seems to be 'Top Five Municipal Fountains (eastern Europe)' from June last year. Techie types will no doubt be delighted to know that 62% of visitors to this page used Internet Explorer to do so.

Two Rivers Press reading at Oxford Brookes

I'm reading alongside fellow Two Rivers Press poets Kate Behrens and Peter Robinson at Oxford Brookes on Tuesday 19 March, 6pm. The full details are available by clicking here

Fenlanders

Perfectly flat source

of glass-half-empty wisdom

(You never gain without you lose),

these drains and fenland ooze;

unbroken horizontals

bred smallholders quick

to silence, feuds.

Cousins, not on speaking terms,

learnt allegiances, who was who,

precise degrees of indifference to use

in the family’s every orbit.

A lack of generosity in nature, then,

accounting for a hardness of heart?

Well, yes, there was that – breeding fruit

and veg from plots that felt the brunt

of poor winters, North Sea winds,

relentless, giddying skies.

No wonder they took the dim view,

were adamant they knew what they knew,

distrust of water, close observation

of changes, levels and rules,

the fragile treachery of things,

a closed world better off for keeping closed.

From here, though, also, eccentricities of will:

great-grandfather who made do

and the most out of left-overs,

sticks, old hat. Always on the loose,

ditch-strider, habitual trespasser,

or, back home, his having to explain,

if anyone should ask, why the swan

he’d killed was better called a goose.

Such stamina for living on the hoof:

as if each morning, bent-double and running,

he was tempting snipers to shoot him down,

which on such open ground they could have easily done.

'Fenlanders' appears in the collection Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012), available here

Balkans Peace Park Project 2013

It's still not too late to volunteer this summer ... teaching English, teaching cricket, making a community play .. . Details here: http://balkanspeacepark.org/ and films from summer 2012 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIopLoBwDSc and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyDwFHvtEjE