"The winter sun is so weak. It strains to lift the weight of morning".

'The puddle bathers' by contemporary Glasgow printmaker Fiona Watson #womensart #WinterSolstice pic.twitter.com/NxJ6RUy3zT

— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) December 22, 2019

Early stroll

Just in from the Bard of Barnsley...

Early morning train journey up north

Ian's route (then from Sheffield to Barnsley on a branch line)

Hotel room light you are sudden and harsh and uncompromising and you are no admirer of shadows.

New Street Station you are still a maze but you are a shinier maze than before.

Soundtrack to my early ride through the Midlands to home: download of Jazz Now on @BBCRadio3, soloing by the half-light fields.

As I leave New Street, I think about the late poet Roy Fisher's seminal line 'Birmingham's what I think with...'

North of Birmingham
The sky can't decide
What to wear.

A nest interrupts
A tall tree.

The sun awards the sky a gold medal.

The sun
Plays hide and seek
With the horizon.

Cravats of mist
Across a Tamworth field.

The sun dances on those wide lakes near Burton on Trent.

Huge ranks of different-coloured containers near Burton on Trent: geometric art.

The train passes trees
Urgent with white blossom:
Unstoppable calendars,
Diaries to be filled by Spring.

Each morning unique and unrepeatable.

As we leave Derby I'm enjoying more jazz: download of @BBCRadio3 Jazz Line Up from Edinburgh; jazz's endless fluid reinvention of itself!

Almost Chesterfield.

In Chesterfield the spire points to a corner of the sky.

Then on to the centre of the world.

Zooming home.

0736 to Barnsley you rattling ancient chariot to the sunlit uplands.

(Ian McMillan, presenter of Radio 3's The Verb, travelling Cross Country this morning, tweeting as he went. Taken together, they read a bit like a poem,

I like Cross Country trains - unlike Northern Rail ones. He's not wrong about Birmingham New Street. I can't stand that station).

"As if we could stand in the silence of this single moment of light"

Radio 3's The Verb can often be worth a listen. 

It helps that I'm a big fan of Ian McMillan, the Bard of Barnsley (and a very regular BBC regular) - especially his delightful Twitter feed. 

If anything justifies Twitter (and plenty doesn't) then it's Ian's Twitter feed with its stream of poetic nibbles, jokes, friendly replies, interesting links, miniature reviews, and lovely unfamiliar paintings. It's a daily pick-me-up. 

I hope he's keeping a record of them because they'd make a great book. Here's a sample, just in case he isn't. 

He always starts the day, just as I'm getting up too (around 5.30!), with an "early stroll" and is usually at his most poetic first thing on Twitter. 

And, as I see most sunrises at the moment, I'll very drawn to his take on them (mostly from the other side of the Pennines).

• Dawn has flung her red scarf high into the eastern sky. It hangs and floats.
• Early stroll. The sky's first morning redraft. A note by a tree: CLEAN BIKE TIDY UP. Four dogs bounce and seethe around a trudging man.
• Early stroll. Two cats watch me, still as ornaments on  a shelf. The sky sings light music and a wooden chip fork points to infinity.
• What's a football manager's favourite mint? TacTics.
• A bird splashes in the birdbath in the garden, making a tiny storm until it flies away trailing water from its wings.
• Early stroll.In the East the sky smoulders and blushes.Across the valley the streetlights are broken necklaces.The painted wheelchair fades.
• Morning moves from a glint to a gleam to a glow.
• Baffled, scared Mancs point at the sun through the tram windows. 'What kind of rain is that?' one asks in a quavering keening voice.
• Early stroll. A single crocus's optimistic flame. Clouds daubed on the sky, still drying. A dead grey bin lies in state, mouth gaping.
• A man yawns and stretches on the train, as though the air is heavy and he is lifting it like weights.
• Early stroll. A twig in the shape of a Y. Something covered passes on a truck. A man loading golf  clubs into a car glances at me, nods.
• I've had more stolen Algerian money than you've had hot Dinars.
• In the garden a single bird plays the tuneful flute it made in night class, improvising a feathered aubade. 
• Some tumbleweed rolled into a bar. I'd been there earlier, telling jokes.
• Early stroll. The sky is a blue and orange poem, redrafting.The geese emerge from the gloom in feathered vagueness. Pots in a gravel garden.

And to end, a short impromptu early Sunday morning poem:

Late became early
When the sky wasn't looking
When the sky was distracted
By the first church bell ringing.

It's a funny thing (that I originally posted this without giving it a title, and took hours to realise the fact)

It's a funny thing because, especially having watched this morning's BBC Breakfast, this comment at Biased BBC made me laugh out loud (genuinely, rather than in the sarky Twitter sense of 'lol'):

AsISeeIt

April 16, 2016 at 9:04 am

The BBC forced-marriage miscegenation between Charlie Statist and No-go Munch-my-spaghetti are here again to entertain us this morning.

So pleased to see a castrato in a happy pairing with a feminatrix – showing the nation this is a viable life choice. BBC social agendas may well be under attack worldwide from news of hypocritical celebrity shenanigans – but here in little England (and Wales) our quaint laws protect our massive stars from criticism – how’s their tax affairs we wonder, anyone shining a light there? And this on the day I find to my dismay Jackie Chan was named in the Panama Papers – I wish the BBC could furnish us with more names and details. But we digress.

Our dynamic BBC duo reckon the Brexit debate is getting a bit ‘heated’. Strange, I thought the Leave campaign were doing rather well and scoring some good hits. Poor old Obama, it’s diplomacy 101 that when the POTUS visits England he don’t mention the Declaration of Independence. Boris made a barnstorming speech yesterday with many fine soundbites eg. ‘I say British-made French knickers to the Bremainers’ meanwhile the BBC crawling headlines pick out some very staid and bland statements – odd.

And so to the newspaper review. oh dear. As they read a few selected headlines it’s like Charlie and Naga live in a different BBC-approved world of news – scarcely parallel, more like divergent – a BBC universe of news but not as we know it, Jim.

Raise the red flag comrades, ‘Poet’ Ian McMillan is here to review the Tory Rags – “This is an Age of Inequality” is the text for today, you children of the ‘Blair rich project’. Our Ian reckons when the kids pick up the FT (assuming after somewhere north of two dozen years of state comp and uni they can read a newspaper and they actually choose the pink ‘un – a stretch, I know, but go with Ian for a moment) then the FT really ought to use more inventive graphics in their rich list. So we can visualise these rich bastards. You know kids- like the evil gits who brought you your i-phone and cheap air travel. 23 million hedgehogs piled up in a heap would do the job – I’m not kidding, it was Ian.

Then some riff about potatoes on the moon. Was it Attila the Stockbroker who sang about how he kept tropical fish – in his underpants. Now that was poetry. and there’s one for the teenagers!

And we close with our ‘poet’ Ian. Who wandered lonely as a climate skeptic on the BBC. Yes a big shout out for Climate Change and some stuff and nonsense about early daffodils. Come back from Mars to planet earth, Ian. Pop over to the post-Easter weather forecast and some news of late snow on them tha hills.

My main point of dissent here is that I absolutely loved Ian McMillan's contributions this morning. 

His half-deadpan/half-broad-and-Northern humour had me laughing out loud several times - and he wore his worthy left-wingery (though unquestionably on display throughout) very lightly. 

In fact I'd go so far as to say that this was the best BBC Breakfast paper review I've seen in a long while, at least since...well, since the Bard of Barnsley was last on...

...and I've been trying even since this morning to see if some kindly YouTube user has captured the moment and posted Ian's lovely, hilarious tribute to Phil Sayer, the voice of London Underground's 'Mind..the Gap' (who died this week), as I thought you'd love it too. Alas, no one has done so yet.

Ian McMillan was funnier in just  two minutes here than the entirely of the last series of The Now Show...

...and here am I going on about it and you probably didn't see it, and (unless YouTube comes to the rescue) might never see it.. So I should probably shut up about it then.

Though it might get lost in translation (and as you probably had to be there, as it was the delivery that made it so funny), the Bard of Barnsley was commenting on To boldly grow: Nasa puts potatoes on menu for Mars. His suggestion was that Mars Pipers will be the obvious spud of choice and that "these will be anti-gravity potatoes, because there's less gravity on Mars, that will lift themselves from the chip pan up to your mouth." 

Well, it amused me.