Illustration by Jac May (ie the ordinary is a boar!)
In 2019 the National Trust was giving out a leaflet of `The Lakes, Places to explore in 2019′. No. 10 was Aira Force and the tiny description, framed as an imperative like all their other bossy notes, began with the words “Escape the ordinary…” I couldn’t help feeling that we are pursued through all our days by the spectre of the ordinary: being ordinary, achieving ordinary things, aspiring to the ordinary, hunted by the ordinary as if it were a domesticating or all-devouring beast. While we were staying at Stainton near Penrith, and after visiting Aira Force, I wrote these verses.
The dull day hunted me,
deadened my passions and lights,
chewed at my gut like parasites[1];
“Escape the Ordinary”
I cried into the days and nights.
Mediocrity hunted me,
filling the night with flat dreams,
chasing me down corridors of screams;
“Escape the Ordinary”
I cried, “at all costs, by any means.”
My plain life hunted me,
so many days lived without surprise,
times I could have looked into your eyes;
“Escape the Ordinary”
I cried, “and find where beauty lies.”
Lost opportunities hunted me,
I could have leapt a city wall[2]
but played safe and missed it all;
“Escape the Ordinary”
I cried, “better to try and fall.”
The Ordinary has hunted me,
but now I can spy him out
and from my watchtower I shout
“Escape the Ordinary!
Fly from him or muzzle his fang-filled snout.”
[1] I got this horrid image from Andrew Marr, in his excellently written book A History of Modern Britain, Pan Books 2007, p.454. Discussing the militancy of Liverpool City Council in 1985 he describes the Revolutionary Socialist league as “a party-within-a-party, a parasitic body nuzzled inside Labour and chewing its guts.” I finished reading this in the same holiday week in which I wrote the poem. He has a number of extremely vivid and apposite images.
[2] see 2 Samuel 22.30: “For by thee I have run through a troop: by my God have I leaped over a wall.”