A Comfy Kind Of Restless

Hi 🙂

So yes, it’s a flipping Jimpix day.  I think I was nobbled for the last one not being too bad 🙁

From (flipping) Jimpix

I shall admit straight away that the research for this one did not look straightforward from the start, so I only used the 15 minutes to actually write the poem (and boy, did I need it!!). 

I had never heard of ‘Unicode’, was not sure of the precise symptoms/causes of ‘colitis’ but it was quite easy to figure out what a ‘skelpie’ would be in the Urban Dictionary…!

So I looked them all up.

Unicode is: “a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems,” according to Wikipedia.

Colitis is an inflammation of the colon and rectum, exacerbated by stress.

Skelpie is in Cupar, Fife, Scotland.  There is a farm there. 

It has a hill called Skelpie Law near it.  I can imagine what the Urban Dictionary listing would be for that, too 😀

So my research was a fat lot of help as I sat there: timer running, blank page staring…

Tong  Unicode  Hook  Relaxed  Ivory  Cricked  Culmination  Colitis  Skelpie

“It all went a bit…Pete Tong…”

His talent for understatement

Always creeps up.

I did not have the Unicode

Set in my head…!

(And my right hook

Was itching for freedom).

The last time I relaxed around him?

The dear only knows.

(My eyes’ permanent purple

Set under the ivory,

Neck cricked ‘round the phone

At crazy hours)

I sigh, but seldom fix…

And the holiday I took,

Falling off the horizon:

No restive culmination.

As I stuff my case again,

I can feel the colitis sparking –

That familiar knot of pain

As I drive past Skelpie Farm.

What on earth has the guy been up to that makes the poor speaker so stressed and unwell?!

Notebook nonsense

‘Unicode’ in my context is supposed to mean that she (in my head the speaker is female) doesn’t know where to begin forming a script to tell him how much he annoys her.  As it is a computing term, I thought it would be cool to use it as a thinking one, too (the brain being a computer, blah blah).  I hope it works ok for you?

I like the double meaning of ‘as I stuff my case again’ in the last verse.  I wonder why she keeps putting up with this man?  What is their relationship?  I thought maybe a brother?

We had a lovely holiday in Fife, staying in a B&B. I did actually check, and there are lots of places to stay around Skelpie Farm, but I don’t know if one needs to actually pass the farm on the way back home?  So poetic license there.

[I am assuming that everyone knows that ‘Pete Tong’ is a DJ whose name has become Cockney rhyming slang for “wrong”?]

What do you think the back story for this poem is?  What do you think happens when she gets home?  I can’t see the situation, with her health, being sustainable long term.

Hubby said to me that the only other way he could think of to incorporate ‘skelpie’ would have been to have it as a lisping child’s take on ‘kelpie’, and then to link to the beautiful sculptures in Falkirk.  This thought had actually crossed my mind, briefly, while I was frantically searching for a site to help with my poem, but I write a lot of poems about parenting and didn’t want to today.

Too easy, y’know?

😛

[Edit 4/3/17: Oh no! I am gutted I didn’t find the Scottish Roller Derby’s blog sooner!! Another skating poem might have been written 🙁 ]

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