For my money, creators of aphorisms are the most irresponsible wordsmiths available for public hire on the Queen’s Highway. Compared to penners of pamphlets revolutionary, carbuncular cartoonists satirical or even showbiz editors of tedious tabloids, those who make their bread by composing concentrated droplets of advice are dangerous in the extreme.
And what have you done, dear reader, to deserve such a tirade from this, your weekly poetry sage? Well, nothing, obvs. I on the other hand, your loyal correspondent, have spent the week restricted to bed, in the throes of that pitiful plague most of my fellow-man seem to endure with the innocuous; ‘I seem to have a bit of a sniffle’. Oh, the hand I have been dealt. Just as the weather was getting better and I was looking forward to breaking out the blazer (stripy) and boater (straw), I have been brought to a pitiful state and dare not stray more than a few steps from my box of tissues. The reason for my ire? A pal, who shall remain nameless, had the gall to drop in on my hour of need with a bag of oranges, a bottle of ginger wine and good wishes. How generous, you might say, a Good Samaritan, you might add, except for his parting gift; ‘Chin up!’ he exclaimed. ‘Remember laughter is the best medicine!’
Which is not the most constructive advice to give to the mainspring and tireless rudder of one of the world’s oldest Tuesday evening poetry workshops. Fortunately, the lurgy had yet to strike during this week’s session, meaning I did not have to interrupt the proceedings with any raucous and unwarranted sneezing. I was able to fully appreciate John Hurley’s arid poem ‘Hill Walking’, on the need to get a little fresh air in the lungs. Christine Shirley’s take on street culture was not lost on me either, with its exposure of knife culture. Anne Furneaux’s recollection of the time her father fell victim to a stroke while fishing also struck me as apposite, and I am glad that I did not need some unctuous linctus to appreciate it. Peter Francis followed up with a dark and lascivious view of gun culture which gave me something to think about, back in those pre-cold days of last week when I could think. Our newest member Sara brought us a poem about tea, which tastes differently when it snows – how I could taste anything. Daphne Gloag brought a very personal view of a lost friend which nonetheless managed to strike us universal. Another new member this week, Roger Beckett (two new members in a week, and where were you?) brought us something of a metaphor in his poem revealing our better selves. Pat Francis described the place I really would not have minded being this week, the Celtic heaven of Avalon. Nick Barth is lucky in that he can think unaided an has been thinking about the process of writing poetry. Finally, Martin Choules has been using his clear, mucus free eyes to read some radical theories about the structure of the universe and its essentially electric structure.
So, who did coin that most dangerous phrase ‘laughter is the best medicine’? Ironically there is almost no chance at all that the originator was Humphry Davy, he of the lamp of the same name and early experimenter with nitrous oxide. According to his own accounts, Davy was an enormous fan of the stuff, self-administering great quantities of gas, along with port, wine and anything else he could lay his hands on, to addle his senses, all in the name of Science with a capital ‘S’. The thing that strikes one as odd about Davy is that he never made the cognitive leap from the dissociative effects of the gas to its myriad uses in the short-term elimination of pain. Perhaps it was Davy’s dysfunctional relationship with the dour, gothic Samuel Taylor (the late Samuel Taylor to his friends) Coleridge. Long-time associates, Davy and Coleridge were recorded several times at Pitshanger Poets Workshops in the early eighteenth century. On one famous occasion, Davy prevailed upon Coleridge to settle an argument that he was having with the rest of the scientific community. You see, very few learned men held with the young Davy’s assertions that laughing gas could be used to distract the human mind, such that it could effectively prevent pain. To test this on a range of human subjects, Davy had Coleridge come up with a dreadful piece of banal doggerel to read out at the next PP Workshop – something about wedding guests and albatrosses, would you believe, while Davy and his assistants had nitrous oxide pumped into the room under the door. Unfortunately, the results were not good for Davy’s theories. Not one of the workshop attendees found anything amusing in the tiresome, long-winded tale of the cursed sailor. The gas was clearly innocuous, had failed to raise a titter in the audience and was unlikely to have any reproducible effects on the human brain. Davy dropped his research into nitrous oxide and it was to be another eighty years before its invaluable benefits to surgery and dentistry were at last arrived upon. Meanwhile Coleridge found that he could not lay aside his crazy tale of the cursed sailor and just had to complete the story. Samuel Taylor read the final, epic poem at many public events throughout his life. However, he would freely admit that it never met as warm a reception as that night when its first faltering opening lines were first performed to a tripped-out roomful of Pitshanger Poets.
If you have been, thank you for reading.
The Pitshanger Poets 