Tag: Memoir

Time Travel

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A funny kind of time travel, notebooks and diaries. The poem I found in one of them is called time travel too, so I thought, a blog.

I’ve been tidying up a bit as I (re)launch into self-employed life, and I came across some poems I forgot that I wrote in 2020. As usual, there are versions of the same poem, longer and shorter, with scribbles and mis-spellings as they go from bad to – hopefully – better. Here is one that made me catch my breath. I think I wrote it on, or straight after, my first tube journey post lockdown one.

Tell me, which do you prefer Time Travel, or Empty? I’ll type them out below.

Time travel
Accelerating past a future that never was
Posters announce acts
that haven't played,
players that didn't act
in plays that
never opened.
A fleeting almost normal,
quieter.
Bicycles advertised 
a safer way to travel. 
Empty carriages mask what was habitual. 
What more could we lose
By S M R Smith on 10.08.20
Empty 
Posters of a never was
announce acts that didn't play  
and plays that never opened,  
belying the almost-normal 
of this tube ride.
Also by S M R Smith, a month or so later.

Join the search for Erik the Red this November

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November 2017 will see us launch our second caper!
In Looking for Erik  Alexandra Fitzsimmons follows tenth century Viking, Erik the Red, from Norway to Greenland via Iceland and the odd unexpected dip in a fjord. Outlaw, settler of new lands, and – perhaps literally – legend, Erik is not an easy man to catch up with. Join Alexandra to discover whether he existed, if she found him, and what she learnt about herself along the way.

Read an extract below. And watch this space for details of the launch!

There’s a shriek. I turn towards it and catch a twisting flash of white before I duck – a bird is diving straight for my face. Pulling up my hood, I turn and run. I dodge round tussocks, curse my heavy boots, and stumble. Now I have no more breath. I slow, then stop.

Right here, they threw Erik out of the country.

I sit down on a stone and breathe. Then I look up, and try, as I’ve tried so many times today, to imagine myself back a thousand years. The same hills, rising in the distance. The same colours – dull greens, mossy browns. The same sound of water lapping at the edge of the fjord.

I’m still nervous about that bird. It’s the story of this trip – each time I get close to Erik, something chases me off.  I push down my hood and listen.

Just wind, and water, and a sheep, far off.

And now there are longboats in the fjord, ponies grazing, people gathering in judgement. Politicians. Poets. Farmers. Priests. An angry discussion. A judgement. The creation of an outlaw.

And a thousand years later, me – looking for that outlaw, looking, for reasons I still haven’t completely understood, for Erik.