The Last Night

Some photos from our Last Night

Travels in West Africa

These guys are Tuaregs at a traditional gathering and music festival in northeastern Mali in 2006. They have come together from various parts of the Sahara. 

I was lucky enough to go to the festival (different from the quite famous music festival near Timbuktu) with a group of friends. And we were truly lucky. Until a year or so before 2006, this part of Mali, up beyond Kidal, had been off limits because of a Tuareg insurrection. It is now off limits once again, because of a combination of Al Qaeda activity in the region and renewed Tuareg unrest. 

We flew to Bamako, the Malian capital in the southwestern portion of the country, then caught a bus to the ancient mud-brick city of Djénné, where we spent a night on the roof of a local inn. Amazing stars. And a donkey that brayed at regular intervals through the night ... usually just when one was finally getting off to sleep. Here is the market of Djénné, with the Great Mosque (reputedly the largest mud-brick structure in the world) behind. 

From Djénné we hired a pirogue (long, narrow riverboat) to take us up the Bani river, a tributary of the Niger, to the river port of Mopti. This took a couple of days. We pulled in at night and camped. The boatmen poled us along, a bit like punting. And they just kept it up all day long. 

From Mopti we went into the Dogon country, where we visited this market. 

And from there we went on up to the Tuareg festival. A friend who was living in Mali at that time organised 4x4s and drivers for us. Adventures abounded, which I don’t have time to recount. The Tuareg rock band Tinariwen added a contemporary element to the festival. A more traditional component was camel racing. One of these lads (I can’t remember which) was the winning jockey in a race.  

One of our group, Sophie, liked Mali so much, and Djénné in particular, that she returned and built a mud-brick hotel there: hoteldjennedjenno.com. 

It’s done very well until the recent troubles have rather diminished tourist numbers. She does a very good blog: www.djennedjenno.blogspot.com. 

Edwin Morgan' poem

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song

Sssnnnwhuffffll?

Hnwhuffll hhnwfl hnfl hfl?

Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.

Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhalf fl fl –

Gm grawwwww grf grawf graw gm.

Hovoplodok-doplodovok-plovodokot-doplodokosh?

Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrl fok splfok!

Zgra kra gka fok!

Grof grawff gahf?

Gombl mbl bl –

blm plm,

blm plm,

blp.

Edwin Morgan (1920- )

a bigger frog...

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=218

Ice cream

Three children sat at a table looking out of the window of an ice cream parlour, one pistachio, one chocolate orange and one vanilla.  A tramp caught their eyes. He was a short man, in a combat jacket and matching hat with a long grey wavy beard and quite clearly no longer the full shilling.  He looked back at them and stuck his tongue out.  Then he moved away the tables in front of the shop to make a passage to the window and leant right up against the glass and stuck his tongue out all the way.  The children were from the country and they were not used to this sort of thing but it was warm in the shop and their aunt was there, so they carried on looking, carried on licking, one pistachio, one chocolate orange and one vanilla.  The tramp stepped back and, with a flourish, pulled off his hat to reveal an unexpected baldness .  Now he looked like Tolstoy.  In a combat jacket.  After a lobotomy.  But the indifference of the children began to bore him and his mind turned instead to cigarettes and they watched him shuffle off in search of a man who seemed to know his name and sometimes treated him to a smoke.  He had forgotten their faces before he was out of sight.

Poet blog

I like what this guy is doing with his blog: seanhewitt.blogspot.com. Includes a lot of Irish stuff.

Family Life: 1 Tantalus

And so Tantalus, my great-grandfather by one reckoning, great-great-grandfather by the other. Now, he got invited to a feast on Olympus. All that nectar and ambrosia, like extra thick double cream, lychees, cinnamon, fillet steak, nougat, Tabasco sauce, oysters, Manchego, clementines, chicory, a freshly brewed double espresso, marzipan, a 1980 Clos de la Roche, the whole lot blended, fused and scooped into magic mouthfuls. Bloody hell, he thought, as he sat there with the gods. I’m taking some of this home for my friends. Nobody will notice. So he tucked some under his robes. And that was that. Or so he thought.


Now, he’d enjoyed the hospitality of Olympus and wanted to return the favour. He asked Zeus; Zeus was delighted to accept. The day for the feast arrived and there was Tantalus, dressed up and ready, down in the palace kitchens with the cook, checking the stew. He took a spoon, dipped it into the pot, brought it to his lips, blew on it, then sucked in some of the juice and a shaving of lamb. From upstairs came the sound of his son Pelops (my grandfather by the one reckoning, great-grandfather by the other), crying in his cradle. Tantalus sampled the stew. Nice tangy, thymy lambiness. Lovely globby rich oiliness in the sauce, with floating flecks of blood red. Perfect! 

But shit! Just one hiccup. 

Not e-bloody-nough of it. 

Fuck! 

Now, I want you to make an effort here. Put yourself in his sandals. Zeus—the boss, if you like—is coming to dinner. You realise that you haven’t cooked enough. And there’s your chubby baby gurgling upstairs. Now, come on! It’s obvious, isn’t it? You can’t let Zeus down. You’re just showing willing. It’s a bit of a tease, too, really. You want to see if he’ll notice what he’s eating. I mean, if he’s god, he should know. And if he’s god … well, who knows? … he may bring the little chap back to life again. So there we are. Sorted. And there’s the doorbell ringing. A rush to the door. Wow! It’s the lot of them—Hera, Demeter, Apollo, Ares, the full caboodle. Good thing we did what we did. 

You serve aperitifs on the terrace. Finally, you usher everyone into the dining room, and they sit down. The butler comes in with the stew. Footmen take the plates round. By now you are feeling a bit nervous. Shit! I hope I didn’t go too far. No. It’s OK. You crack a feeble joke. You flap your hands around as if to drive off the doubts that are beginning to swarm at you like gnats. Well, tuck in, folks. Except these aren’t just folks. These are gods. And they aren’t stupid. They know what’s on their plates. And they’re looking at you. Except perhaps Demeter who’s on a different planet anyway, because of the loss of Persephone—but that’s another story. She’s already chomped into a chunk of Pelops’s shoulder before Artemis kicks her under the table to stop her. 

And that’s three crimes my forebear has committed. First, he nicked nectar and ambrosia from Olympus. Second, he served up his own son. Third, and perhaps worst of all, he took the gods for fools. Zeus, sitting there at the end of the table, lifted his hand. There was silence, as the other gods sat looking from him to Tantalus and back to him. A thunderbolt zinged down the table.

And if only that were it. Food and drink were Tantalus’s undoing. Food and drink would be his torment. See him, tied to the bough of a tree laden with fruit: nectarines, russet apples, mangoes, sweet dwarf bananas, naseberries, strawberries, figs, everything you can imagine. Beneath him are the waters of a lake, limpid and sparkling. The waters rise, and he bends down for a drink. But just as he does so, they recede and he finds himself gazing at a patch of mud. Or he reaches out for a fruit. The day is still and cloudless, yet just as he puts his hand out, a wind whips up and the fruit is snatched from his grasp.