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The Tuesday picture
Quote of the day
The Midgie’s week in 200 words
lower case: a poem
Pencaitland in the first week of autumn
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Quote of the day
‘Land of polluted river,
Bloodshot eyes and sodden liver
Land of my heart forever
Scotland the Brave’
Billy Connolly
The Midgie’s week in 200 words
Dolphins, long championed for their intelligence, are less sophisticated than chickens, according to a new book about them. It was revealed that the Queen’s corgis are fed only fillet steak or chicken breasts prepared by chefs and covered with gravy by the Queen herself. The Ugly Animal Preservation Society appointed its first mascot – a blobfish that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Nicholas Clegg proved that there is such a thing as a free lunch with his announcement that all children in the first three years of primary school in England will be given free school meals. In Britain last year, 807 people died as a result of taking tranquillisers and pain-killers, 89 more than the number who died from heroin and cocaine. The chief executive of the supermarket chain Morrison’s claimed that a third of its customers are ‘one pay cheque away from bankruptcy’. The weather forecaster Sian Lloyd was disinvited from the wedding of her step-daughter to the son of Tony Blair; she thought it might have something to do with her opposition to the Iraq war. A Labour MP, Rachel Reeves, who was described by the editor of the BBC’s Newsnight as ‘boring snoring’, said she felt humiliated. Atheists have formed a Sunday Assembly movement to allow them to meet on Sunday mornings to sing songs and sit in silent contemplation. Brian Sollitt, the inventor of the After Eight mint, died at the age of 74.
lower case
For Rev R S Thomas – poet
You heard the fragile voice of God
Through the tempting mists of disbelief,
Stayed faithful to the style of the day
And started all your lines in the upper case.
Entering your sixties,
clinging to belief and serving souls,
you cry: Where is the Child? The Manger is empty.
Wiping clean the grey slate of your sadness
in the poem: If You Can Call it Living
you change to lower case;
keeping up with the times
but in touch with eternity,
still watching for the movement of a curtain
at God’s window. Dominus tecum.
Gerard Rochford