Allen Ginsberg in Newcastle, weeping on the hill, and the ballad of the cardboard cafe
With Tom Pickard and Patrick Laurie
When I first met Tom Pickard, we sat in a shed at the bottom of his garden and we talked about the years he spent living above a cafe high up in the North Pennines. From time to time the cafe either blew away or would go up in flames, in odd circumstances, and Tom was installed as a sort of caretaker. His marriage had broken down, the rent was cheap, and he could write there, with only the wind and an occasional kestrel for company.
Tom is old now but he is sharp as a tack and his poetry, often bawdy and frequently full of birdsong, is some of the best writing on the natural world that Britain has ever produced. But there’s more to Tom than that. He was an integral part of the British poetry revival and the Transatlantic counterculture, which he writes about today in Boundless. He is not, in any formal sense, an educated man. And yet, the extent of his reading and his ability to write poetry are both immense.
Tom is testament to the truth that privilege and connections and degrees mean nothing in art. There are brilliant writers who spend their lives putting up scaffolding and there are PhD students who can hardly write at all. You can’t buy ability and Tom, quite for free, has ability to spare.
Like Tom, Patrick Laurie, who is also writing today in Boundless, has done a fair bit of stone dyking – Tom once said to me that dry stone dyking is a bit like writing poetry. You have to work out which stones need to go where in order to make it all stand up. Patrick has lots of education but that’s not why he’s a great writer. He’s a great writer because he’s got a good ear and he spends countless hours out on the hill, listening to the birds and watching the rain roll in across Galloway.
He once told me he saw a fox taking one of his beloved black grouse when he was out in the small hours and he felt tears rolling down his windburned cheeks. He writes well because he feels and he cares.
What I mean is that classrooms and academic departments don’t make writers. As Tom once wrote in the concluding lines of a poem, ‘you did your time at Durham, PhD. I did mine at Brixton, HMP.’ At least I think that was it – I can’t check the collection to confirm it verbatim as, with so many of my favourite poetry collections, I had a party and gave it to somebody. I don’t remember who. It was Basil Bunting, by the way, who came down to London to vouch for Tom’s character when he was behind bars. Incarceration, Tom told me when I saw him recently, is not an experience he’d ever wish to repeat.
Patrick Galbraith
Editor
Ginsberg in Newcastle
'Hope you can introduce me to lots of hairy rockers': The poet, Tom Pickard, on when Allen Ginsberg paid him a visit at the Mordern Tower
In the summer of 1965 I was 19 years old, a father of a two year old boy, and living with Connie, a married woman who was my two year old’s mother. We’d been homeless for a couple of years during which time we’d rented a near derelict old turret up a tall narrow forbidding back lane used by prostitutes, petty thieves to unpack their swag, and those desperate to get a quick one off the wrist, haunted by the risk of being caught with the evidence in hand. On match days mob-handed fans, on their way to St James Park, streamed along it, full of alcoholic hoo-yee! And as the lane is only a couple of yards wide you wouldn’t want to walk toward them from the opposite direction. Most approached the entrance to the alley at the Gallowgate end with trepidation. It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a place you walk into without thinking about it.
On one side, the 25ft 13th-century walls, and on the other, the back end of warehouses and a few fume-emitting electroplaters who were protected against burglars by barbed wire on which used condoms were sometimes spiked like a shrike’s larder. The lane was without any form of street lighting and so going to poetry readings on the dark nights made many nervous; but the Northumberland Arms, which backed onto the entrance to the alley, was a welcome drop-in en-route. It was run by Rosie, a feisty blond woman in her late 50s, always immaculately made-up. Rosie could be short and sharp with idiots and her asthmatic husband, George, who called time with a wheezy ‘sup ya pops’ to be followed by her, ‘hev yeez nee yems to gan te.’ The pub was an essential stop-off and enabler for many before taking a first step into the dark lane.
Tom Pickard's Fiend's Fell Journals were published by Flood Editions in 2017
A calf for winter
Author and farmer Patrick Laurie has been forced to do calving a little differently. He has put his faith in his animals and is hoping for the best
Autumn, last year, found me in a state of nervousness. A series of minor misjudgements over a year prior to that had led to a situation in which a small number of my Galloway cows were out of sync with the rest of the herd. Some of them were away on other farms when the bull was about to be dropped and others were grazing on far-flung bits of moorland and it wasn’t going to be possible to fetch them back in before the bull had to move on elsewhere. A good bull is always in demand.
Few things go precisely according to plan in farming. It seems like the thrust of this job is an ability to respond effectively when it starts to go wrong, always keeping three or four potential conclusions in mind from the outset of every new project. If those are exhausted and you’re really in trouble, there also needs to be an escape hatch from which simply 'not losing lots of money' is a win. Perhaps I could have been tighter on these cows, but there was no single knockout moment of forehead-slapping idiocy which meant I was on the verge of skipping a year for six of my excellent ladies. Lots of little details worked up together, and I had been faced with a choice: postpone their ‘bulling’ for a year or let the bull go to work in December 2023 — I chose the latter option and plumped for my first 'autumn calving.'
Patrick's Sunday Times bestseller, Native: Life in a vanishing landscape, was published by Birlinn in 2021
Cetti’s Warbler: Cettia cetti
Named after Francesco Cetti, an Italian Jesuit priest and zoologist, the Cetti’s Warbler has been a British resident since 1961 and is remarkable for its explosive all-year-round song and bright red eggs.
Jim Moir's More Birds was published by Unbound in November 2024