Mexican poet laureates

Xochipilli (see below) now resides in the British Museum which may explain why he looks rather morose for a god of poetry and dancing. He is hemmed in with a sculpture of a rattlesnake at his back and camera-clutching day trippers like me goggling in front.


I wanted a picture of X, partly because his name means 'flower prince' and partly because I'd just read an article in Red Pepper about poetry and activism. The Red Pepper article talks about poetry used as a weapon against oppression, a way of challenging authority and exposing the lies and shortcomings of those who have power.


As poetry often has pattern and rhythm, like an incantation, it can act as an adrenalin shot, revealing the world more sharply, if not more clearly. So is its natural home on the barricades or can it just as easily become an ode to the general in his palace?

One of the wonderful things about poetry is that it can often feel like a personal message, whispered to you alone. Paul Valery said prose is to poetry what walking is to dancing. Perhaps Xochipilli, god of dance and poetry, had whispered in his ear.

Evidence of poetry's enduring power is embodied in Xochipilli. Here is a medium so alluring, so persuasive it has to be controlled, channeled through an officially designated representative - a sort of Aztec version of Britain's poet laureate. Maybe that's why X looks depressed, he's contemplating yet another official royal occasion to be celebrated in verse.

Mexican poetry prince

Meet Xochipilli, Aztec god of feasting, dancing and poetry.

Stained glass and stinging nettles

I can't resist returning to St Margaret's church at Lower Halstow, even though my first visit involved a long walk and a lot of stinging nettles - good for the circulation according to Pamala, my unsympathetic and much fitter friend. So is corporal punishment I assume but we won't pursue that subject now.

St Margaret's sits at the head of a creek on the Kent marshes - Great Expectations country. The air smells of grass and salt and at low tide there's a network of tiny streams wandering over the mudflats. When the tide rises the fish begin to jump.

On the summer evening when Pamala and I picnicked and I suppurated from plant inflicted wounds by the creek the fish show was spectacular. So many were leaping and fly catching the water's surface was dimpled all over as though we were sitting in the midst of a great rainstorm that was coming from below rather than above.

So to the font - it's lead and dates from the eleventh century. The figures on it are angels and kings and they stand beneath archways, one next to the other, in a ring that reaches all round the font.

One of the charming ladies who guards the church has a theory the font was brought to England from France by an Anglo-Norman aristocrat who owned land in north Kent and Romney Marsh. As the font must weigh a ton I can't imagine why he bothered. Still it was the days of plentiful, cheap horse and serf power and it's a rather romantic idea. The night after visiting St Margaret's I dreamt of the font floating up the creek on a rising tide like a little leaden coracle.

As we've just passed Armistice Day I must mention St Margaret's stained glass 'Abide with me' window. It shows a soldier in the trenches facing an apparition of Jesus. In the background the sky is splintered by an exploding shell.

The window is based on a Christmas card Brigader General Roland Bradford was going to send to the men of his platoon in 1917. Bradford was killed in December 1917, just before Christmas, aged 25.

Angel for All Souls

Here's an angel from the fantastic font at St Margaret's, Lower Halstow...

Sitting with the scent of wet fireworks in my hair and listening to the wind and rain at the window I've just realised All Souls day has slipped past me unnoticed. Squeezed between Halloween and Guy Fawkes All Souls probably never stood much of a chance in Britain, at least not after Henry VIII sat on Catholicism.

Coming from a household that liked a party and mixed Orthodoxy (Christian variety) and atheism under a capacious C of E umbrella I was accustomed to celebrating All Souls and feel rather guilty if I don't spare a thought for the dear departed.

My mother - the Unbeliever - is a great All Souls party woman. She makes circular cakes similiar to Viennese whirls and dusts them with coloured sugar so they look like multi-coloured haloes. One year she even got hold of some Mexican 'day of the dead' sugar skulls and we lined them up on the mantelpiece and lit candles to them. Godmother - Orthodox - performed a vodka toast and danced the mazurka.

On a more serious note I think an All Souls celebration can be a good way of introducing older children to death's place in life. Keep the dead as friends and companions - talk to them and they'll talk to you.

Seeing red

All this talk of the devil is rather appropriate because I've being seeing red over the past week. A discussion about prejudice in the press lead me to the National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct. I see journalists must not encourage discrimination on the basis of 'age, race, colour, creed, illegitimacy, marital status, gender or sexual orientation'.

This statement woke the mini-Lenin bit of my brain which bellowed 'What about class?' Here we are with one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world and yet we don't want to mention the c word. Almost deafened by the sound of doors slamming in my head I recalled my demo days of waving red flags in Trafalgar Square and riding the Circle Line with a coffin we intended to pull apart on the threshold of some council office or other.

Now I must admit I've spent rather more of my life dreaming of the red soles of Christian Louboutins than of red flags but it seems to me UK plc could do with a touch more militancy on this issue. Perhaps us aging Trots should shake out our faded red flags and get them on the road again.

Incidentally the coffin we trashed all those years was ago was empty which seemed a bit anti-climatic to me. May be I should make another one and drop in a pair of Louboutins? There's a metaphor for the credit crunch era - a coffin filled with designer shoes. Move over Carrie Bradshaw it's Tussle on the tube touting designer revolution.