Subscribe to this blog's feedThese days Yorkshire Water staff have iambic pentameters and the click of a camera shutter on their minds as much as PR09. Well, that appears to be the case for they are learning some new skills, namely poetry and photography.
The initiative has involved Barnsley bard Ian McMillan and Yorkshire photographer Ian Beasley. Disconnector loves many of the poems on the website www.yorkshirerivers.co.uk. Here is one of his favourites:
Thorncliffe Water Memories
I’m wearing my parka with the hood up
And the road is flooding and it’s exciting.
Water is spraying from the manholes,
They’re lifting and it’s exciting.
There’s a noise: of people, of water, of rain.
The pub is shut. Shut by water.
And here’s another, celebrating the writer’s first experience of water:
Age seven, Filey beach, Spring Bank Holiday.
The tide’s coming in and I’m in a red/blue dinghy
With my dad holding the rope,
Dad is wearing brown trousers, fawn shirt,
And he’s holding the old blue rope.
His hair is there but only just.
It’s cold. I want to go in.
Dad says no. Nothing but the wind
Whistling down the beach.
And the waves crashing on the beach.
Get scribbling, says the great man (Disconnector not MacMillan).
