The intention of Podcasting the collection was to provide people with a poem a day throughout the whole Christmas and New Year period from 2008 into 2009.

Those who followed the collection as it built up day by day will have heard the poems in the intended order. If you’ve come along now then you may prefer to listen to them that way by scrolling to the bottom and working up. Alternatively why not choose one of the category options on the left (eg Humorous) to pick the sort of poems you’d like to hear.

This last contribution is short but sweet. If you’ve been along for the ride and picked out some of the themes then I hope it makes a fitting close though. And don’t forget that the Equality and Diversity Podcast, “Just Plain Sense” continues to run over at podcast.plain-sense.co.uk

Best Wishes Christine Burns

This poem was written at the height of the mid nineties hype about the World Wide Web, at a time when the papers were full of talk about the “Internet Highway”. Looking back, some of the hype was justifiable. The WWW has altered our lives in undreamed of ways. Yet my aim was to challenge the idea that it could do everything. Although we knew nothing then about things to come, such as social networking and Second Life, I still think it’s important to challenge to remember that we live for real in the physical world, and that there are some things that can’t be substituted in the virtual one.

The poem was begun in 1974 but I couldn’t find the words to finish it and put it away. Then, around 1994 - when I was ready to write again - I got it out and finished it off.

You can definitely see the join - the second half has a different tempo and the style is changed. Still, the moral is to never give up!

We’ve all met them of course; the people who’ll say “Yes, but it’s more than my job’s worth to help you”. This poem is connected with the previous one. They were both written the same angry, tearful weekend, when I crashed into that barrier at full speed. I was younger then, of course. Now I’d know what to do rather than writing a poem about it.

As this is New Year’s day - a time when everyone reviews their lives and makes resolutions - I thought this was a fitting time to read such a poem about making positive steps towards change. Personally, with all those years of hindsight, I can say that the day I wrote this poem was a really positive one, from which I’ve never looked back.

I hope everyone this year gets to clear up the dark alleyways and banish the shaddows this year.

Like so many emotionally driven poems, Greed draws from personal experience, on the receiving end of another woman’s insane hunger for gratification at all costs. You don’t need much imagination to work out the scenario which it describes, so I’ll not labour the tale .. although I will say that, like any good therapy, the poem worked wonders for me.

The effect of the greed had been crushing. To spit the anger and hurt out onto paper in one venomous Sunday-morning outburst enabled me to get the last vestiges of the previously wordless anger out of my system in one go so that, by the third verse, I actually felt sorry for my abuser. And that’s the way it has stayed ever since.

This was originally inspired by watching an acquaintance of mine succumb to an aesthetic surgery addiction. First it was just going to be a little liposuction here, then it was a rather more dramatic piece of bone surgery there. Each treatment was followed by her critical examination of some other part that wasn’t “right” and I could see her spending her entire savings in pursuit of ever more unnecessary perfection.

It wasn’t a straightforward decision (is it ever ?). What made it hard was that, paradoxically, I was very fond of him … or rather I was still very fond of his best side. Unfortunately the more established we became, the less I saw of that good side … and the more he chose to regard me as a full-time audience for what I now realise to have been his intense self hatred.

Of course, being me, I just wanted to mend him … to make him feel better … to help him to be what he always managed to be for others when we weren’t alone.

Good natured … fun … a source of support for me as well.

Feeling I was getting nowhere with the awful decision about whether to part from someone who was unfortunately liable to drag me down with him, I sought the advice of a close friend. …A very out lesbian friend, as it happens, who’d suffered what seemed like just as much anguish from her women friends, as I was experiencing now.

We spent a lot of time comparing our experiences. Was it different ? Or did lesbian partners endure just as much anguish from each other as heterosexual people did ?

I knew what I wanted. I understood that people were often attracted to me because of the emotional strength which they perceived. Maybe I was attracted to them by the complementary sense of being needed. There’s something very desirable about a “little boy lost”. The snag was that there were also lots of times when I wasn’t in a state to be their mummy substitute; times when I needed a daddy substitute of my own. Someone whom I could lean on. Somebody who could take over sometimes and provide a space for me to let go for the time I needed.

How did that sort of role exchange take place between two women? Was it a gender related thing ? If so then maybe I was on a hopeless search for my ideal man. Was it the case that people were fixed in either one behaviour or the other … nurturer or dependent ? That seemed unlikely, because my very problem stemmed from exhibiting both behaviours myself.

I can’t say that my friend was altogether objective in her answer either. We knew, and I acknowledged, that she wanted me to be more than just a friend. So I’m really not sure if her answer to my question wasn’t tinged with a little bit of wishfulness.

In her view though, she felt that women were better starred as lovers, because of that greater ability to fulfil both roles in one : to be the big sister one moment, and the little sister, the next. She described instances of both and said how, she believed, true one-ness occurred when the roles became so fluid that she and her lover could be both at the same time, changing poles from moment to moment.

It certainly was an intoxicating thought and it stuck with me when I went to sleep that night, imagining the type of relationship my friend had painted. The next morning I had the words to express it in this poem.

What’s interesting is that lesbian friends who hear the poem all seem to understand the meaning without the need for an explanation. Heterosexual friends almost all assume I’m writing about something else.

So draw your own conclusions …

At the time I was alone in the house that I normally shared in one of the less salubrious parts of Manchester’s northern suburbs. Everyone else had gone home for Easter, but I’d stayed on, to house-sit and to fret over my impending finals. Worse, I thought I’d fallen in love. (How wrong we can be).

It had been a miserable few weeks. I’m still sure to this day that the house was haunted. It was cold, damp, and the last few nights had felt very lonely. It had even snowed. Yet on that particular morning Spring had decided to arrive. Sunshine positively beamed through the large bay window of the downstairs room where I worked. I could feel the light passing through my skin and warming me inside. And my room looked different suddenly. The corners weren’t dark anymore. Everywhere was fresh and new. Was it love or the sunshine ? It didn’t matter, but the two were both bound up together in the sense that life was different today than it had been yesterday.

I used to sing the lyric but advancing age means I seem to have lost the ability to hit the top notes or sustain them. So, this is the first time I’ve tried to reinterpret the lyric poetically. Hopefully the sounds of a warm Spring day help it along.

I have always been struck by the way in which the famous Christmas Day Truce between opposing trenches in the First World War really highlighted the futility of human battles. For a short period, deadly enemies came together because of their similarities, before retiring to their lines to resume killing one-another. So it occurred to me to borrow that backdrop but replace English and German opponents with Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Trans people.

May the peace in your own lives extend beyond one day.

The setting to imagine is an empty meeting hall. You know the sort — basic wooden trestles; folding chairs; chipped paintwork. The final celebratory meeting has ended. The caretaker is folding the chairs and trestles. The table on the stage is still festooned with posters and leaflets. The revellers have gone on to a pub and to enjoy the spoils of success and the lonely campaigner, now decades older, tired, takes one last look around at the scene and wonders what it all did for them, and why they actually gave up so much.

Come with me as I explore that thought.

On the evening in question, I was feeling happy and content as I got ready for bed, and rather rueful that although there was nobody “special” in my life at the time. I seemed to have reached a plateau. A point where the full time company of another person didn’t seem to matter quite as much as it had before. In fact you could say quite the reverse …

I sat up in bed, craddling my precious cup of fruit tea, and looked around the room .. suddenly aware that the order and calm felt quite precious. I’d got my own home, work was going well, there was money in the bank, and I began to realise that the thing I’d mourned for so long (the lack of somebody special to focus on) was now potentially the most disruptive thing I could let into my nicely-ordered life.

A lover in my life would be nice company, and somebody to care about … and to care for me. Yet they would also take away the peace and calm I’d taken so long to establish. Their things would be strewn on the floor .. vying for space. Their needs would inevitably conflict with mine. I might want to listen to music and stare wistfully into space just when they wanted to do something entirely different. I’d get used to it, of course, but would the cost be worth it ?

From a purely selfish point of view, of course, there’s no doubting that it’s nice to go to sleep with someone’s chest pressing against your back, and an arm around you .. and to wake in the realisation that your head is rested on that same lover’s chest, listening to their sleeping heart beat. To *smell* that special aroma of someone you’re in love with.

There’s no getting away from the fact that there are advantages as well as disadvantages to living as a couple.

Yet as I thought about it, I realised that I’d even evolved a sort of replacement for that physicality too. Beside me I had a big cuddly lion that my parents had bought me .. and lately I’d realised that I slept a lot better if I lodged this behind my back as I lay down to rest. So I *did* now have a sort of surrogate partner. A partner who provided the thing that I missed .. and yet demanded nothing in return.

The more I thought, the more I could see that the stuffed toy was quite an important palliative, for the moment. It allowed me to enjoy the time I needed for regrouping, by putting off the simple physical desire for closeness.

And how many people, I wonder, look desperately for a relationship .. any relationship .. just so they won’t have to feel alone in those moments between the distractions of the day and letting-go of consciousness ?

Maybe adults need their teddies more than children, in fact ? Could a good teddy save a desperately lonely person from charging blindly and hungrily from the carcass of one realtionship to another, without pausing to think, in-between, what they really want ?

So, come with me now, as we explore why there really is nothing to equal a teddy …

Is it you, your friends, or are you both as likely to keep the fun and shared interests going?

This poem harkens back to a time (long passed now) when I seemed to be doing all the work. The title is a reference to a TV ad campaign at the time for British Telecom.

If you’ve been relying on a friend to call you every time, why not pick up the phone today and return the interest.