On the Angel

Get into these streets
these people
this glorious ark;
this joy, this spirit
this towering pride.

Get into the day
the evening
the night.
Into the heart
Into the life.

Get into your city
Get into my city
Get into Newcastle.

Audio advert on the 21 “Angel” bus between Durham and Gateshead, July 2010. By Marika Rose.

Things Millenials Hate


Things millennials hate: old stuff,
mayonnaise, reading a book,
bluegrass music, movies that are
mostly talking, being sober
at school, people who have never
been on TV, having opinions,
losers, math, having an emotion,
animals, not being on Facebook,
virgins, when your mom makes you talk
about your day at the dinner table,
murders.

Things millennials love:
texting, sexting, Twilight.

From Young people neither love nor hate anything, Gawker, 6 August 2010.

Three words

I’ve got seven
kids. The three
words you hear
most around my
house are ‘hello’,
‘goodbye’ and
‘I’m pregnant.’

Dean Martin quoted in the Guardian Family section, 7 August 2010. By Marika Rose.

Commatose

The Board is mindful
of the guidelines produced
by the Association
of British Insurers
and the attention being given
to CSR issues
by investors and wider
stakeholder communities.
The Board acknowledges
the commercial and ethical importance
of the development and maintenance
of a culture of continuous improvement
in CSR matters
as far as they are relevant
to the Group’s activities
and accepts that
the implementation of a system
for measuring and reporting
on key CSR indicators
may, over time, be appropriate.

From Harvard International’s Corporate Responsibility statement, 28 June 2010.

Sea State

Humber Thames Dover Wight
Plymouth North Biscay
Portland. Smooth or slight.
Variable three or four. Fair.

Moderate or good,
Occasionally poor later.

From the UK Shipping Forecast, 22 June 2010. By Nathan Lechler.

Hepaticous

And then you’re in an operating room,
Staring deep
Into a stellate smash of livid liver.

It oozes discontinuous destruction.
Fragments of hepatic mush are strewn
And coddled among clots of blood,
Stained with bile and mixed with stool.
The beauty of the enzyme pathways is nowhere to be seen;

Dr. Krebs is not in the building.
Weak indeed is the capsule holding it all in,
split apart like broiled bratwurst.
How little it takes!

From Dr Schwab’s Brittle Beauty. By Jim.

Vivid

I am not sure why this summer seems so vivid,
with each day somehow more beautiful than the last.
I only know that is the way it feels. The days
are moving as if each hour is two, and every
detail – a salad, a bunch of sweet peas or box
of tiny broad beans – is somehow more rich than it
would normally be. It is as if the colours,
sounds and scents of summer have been turned up a notch.

Tiny broad beans so tender you could eat them pod
and all; sweet little peas (they love a drop of good
steady rain) and lettuces that have benefited
from the cooler mornings and evenings. I made a
bean sauce this week with a base of crisp purple
and white spring onions, broad beans and tarragon. I
gave it a backbone of cubed unsmoked bacon and
bound it with a little cream. I skinned the larger beans
but left the real babies in their paper-thin skins.

The early peaches are at last arriving from
France and Italy. I wait all spring for these fruits
with their rose-scented juice. It is rare to find them
perfectly ripe in the shops, so I make sure I
buy them a couple of days before I need them.
The old trick of putting them in a paper bag
with a ripe banana to speed up their ripening
works well, but they do very nicely just left out
for a day or two. But there is no need to squeeze
and prod. An unripe peach has virtually no smell;
a ripe one will tell you it is ready to eat.

From Nigel Slater’s recipe column, 4 July 2010.

Sawbones

I will reach in gently and caress the liver,
the stomach and spleen.
Slide over the top,
into the recesses,
curl the fingers enough to sense the texture,
the fullness.
The bowels move away and under,
and over the top as I direct my hand.
I can describe your kidneys now,
I’ve circled the top of your rectum,
held your uterus,
measured your ovaries between my fingers.
Part of you is gone at the moment,
but I’m here,
I know you now.
You trusted and let me in,
you opened your belly to me,
and I entered with force.
I’ll stay until it’s right.
It’s what I must do.
You think you’ll never touch me so
intimately as I’ve touched you.
But you have.
You have.

From Taking Trust on Surgeonsblog, 7 October 2006. By Marika Rose.