Wednesday 7 November 2012

Naturally Occuring Poetry

It started as good schoolday evening after a hard day at the coal face called racing that rat and coming second and hoping that the drug tests proves top rat may not be reliably consistent in his defence of accidental inhaling of herbal tea extract.

Daughter has done good, well..... bloody brilliant really.

After reading a poem out in class which is in itself embarrassing by definition, then to heap embarrassment on embarrassment. Teacher gobsmackingly, as they sometimes do,  said it was brilliant. If there's one thing being worst than being a teacher's pet, its to be a teacher's pet in poetry. Then miracles of miracles the kids applauded in "gettin' down in the Project" sort of way. Parental pride knew no bounds.

So plaudits all round, except there started the claim of inheritace of the gene.... yes the poet gene...was it a mummy thing ...or  a Daddy thing...eeny meeny miney mo was not settling this, coin tosses were not going to establish a winner, random luck was not in this equation because history knows the Pryce family can rhyme it with the best of  it. Paternal and Maternal bonds knew the bounds

If there was God-like genius in this Pryce family then  the parents were keen to place direct responsibility with a family or families as case may be, his and hers.

In an innocent aside, Pa Pryce forgot his manhood and beer drinking prowess credential, reeling off various schoolboy poems that were rated 8 out of 10, a mistake by Pa Pryce, I knew it as soon as ey-eight passed out of my mouth, as if it had two syllables. In between 8 and 10 is nine,...... and guess what? Ma Pryce laid claim to 9. Oh yeah. Minor squabbling over the source of genius was about to start as if we were....well teenagers.

Ma Pryce Grandmother was as near a Poet laureate without actually being a Poet laureate that any non Poet laureate could be. Oh Yeah. She had apparently won competitions with published magazines.  I had an opinion, not wanted, but given freely, but not really appreciated as a gift to the art of debating. I had seen the pictures and the words "Farmers Gazette" in the magazine title was in my opinion a give away that rhyming 'cow' with 'how' was not a sign of genius, but a lack of milking knowledge.

For my part, I let it be known that Pa Pryce Grandfather suddenly read books without pictures and with  a few rhyming couplets . Accusations were about to fly.  Threats were about to be thrown as if marriage was a javalin competition. A mixture of nouns and verbs, not normally associated with threats, are suddenly made into a threat by intonation of a voice and a willpower to overcome any Y chromosome deficiency, a condemnation of all things Pryce...... "I've met your family" is heard mockingly. Divorce is a likely option.

Now things were moving into larger families circles, Pa Pryce claims of distant relatives being that close to being Booker prize winners, cheated of their rightful place in literati  by a biased judge and resentful ink industry that jointly did not understand the beauty of crayons as the true combination of  art and writing form.

Ma Pryce claims to have  an extended family that suddenly included the non-mentionable black sheep, as if by virtue of a successful poetry recital were now cast in grey. It was, she implied by the medium of the the death-bitch-stare, a family that are such bookworms that early bookbirds probably have eaten them.

Desperation may have crept in as Pa Pryce quoting historical  family trees. Family trees that proved beyond all reasonable scientific credibility that Pa Pryce's family was linked inherently and genetically to poetic-ness, so incredible that it must be true. It was said in family folk-lore and probably just an internet search away was the paternal proof of a link to Beass ap FitzPreyce the Poet. Bayess or whatever his unpronounceable name was, was a Romantic poet heroes of the Early Ages, whose script would adorn scrolls that may now be dead and near a sea, and these scrolls rhymed too...in that they may be red and near a tree. Look, its a naturally occuring poetry.

A daughter surmises, a judge and jury and possibly practising her best parent, the maternal bond is strong,  she is thankful she is genetically a girl since the only likely DNA footprint I have passed on is hairloss to her brother.



I feel a need to admit there may be some poetic licence in the latter paragraphs, bar the last one, above.

2 comments:

  1. In our house we have already decided where the line should be drawn. If our son shows promise with numbers or historical facts, it's down to my husband. If he excels at English or music, there's a chance that I've had a hand in it. If he does something arty, then it's skipped a generation.

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  2. Which for no particular reason reminds me that my kids by the misdeeds of their ancestors can play rugby for the land of my celtic roots; or football for the place of birth of my wife; or can represent a Mediterranean land where Latino grandparents grew up, in diving or perhaps football where the difference between the latter two is sometimes blurred; or in all likely events all of the above for their country by residence because that's who their friends support.

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