And indeed, for myself at any rate, they did. If PLAIN SPEAKING represented a personal nadir, then the last completed pieces of the 80s – ENGAGED TONE and GOODBYE – point to an upward and onward path. Much of the 90s was spent becoming rooted: marriage, children and building a working niche in radiography. There was little time for poetry, and I became a collector of scraps – disconnected fragments of observation scribbled down in the back of a diary. I guess there was always intent to utilise these images and phrases somehow, but I had little notion as to how and when this would prove possible.
As the paucity of material posted demonstrates, it was a slow and tentative return. One focussed principally on domesticity, and uninformed by a sensibility of craft skills – though I had started to count syllables. By the end of the decade however, having completed a professional MSc, creative momentum was building once more.
On the political front, it was a time of acquiescence. The collapse of the Iron Curtain had dispelled the urgency of the anti-nuke movement, and after Thatcher was ousted (akin to a modern-day Julius Caesar) we knew it was only a question of time before her establishment was finally cleared out. What an unforgettable night May the first 1997 was – like Hercules’ cleansing of the Augean stables. But a false dawn for the left. By then I’d left the Labour Party after it ditched Clause IV (part4). Not because I thought that elegant, but dated, language couldn’t be enhanced, but – in trying to arrive at something of wider, more contemporary appeal – the conceptual cornerstone of “common ownership” had been abandoned. Without indicating this means by which it would achieve its goals, and with an acceptance of the market written into the Party’s constitutional aims, Labour forsook any socialist credibility.
Which is not to say that – initially – there weren’t significant gains. For instance, the Tories internal healthcare market – in which hospitals, rather than co-operate, competed with each other to the detriment of outcomes overall – was swept away. Later, of course, it was revived on the wholly spurious grounds of patient ‘choice’. (Primary Care Trusts have even employed ‘care advisors’ to persuade patients to use privately-run services; like having John Prescott come round to insist you must shop at Tesco.) The only difference this time round being that ‘the market’ has been deliberately rigged in favour of the private-sector, who’ve been creaming off the easy, routine and – above all – profitable work ever since. (So not the chronic, A&E, or the elderly…) Just goes to show how far it is possible to stray from supposed ‘core values’ when there’s no underpinning ideology.
Phew. I feel better for having got that off my chest. Allegedly this is a poetry blog, so pay no heed to the above (unless you want to), just make what you will of the poems. More about them, I hope, in my next spiel.
