By the time I got back, I was enchanted by both.

Being untutored in the arts, I was free to decide for myself what I liked and didn’t like even if what I liked wasn’t the right thing or it was unfashionable or whatever. That sentiment applied equally to my music playing and to poetry.

One night, in Darwin, during a bone-shaking thunderstorm, I heard someone playing blues harp in the other room. It was the most amazing sound I had ever heard come out of a harmonica and I went to investigate. There was an Australian dude a little older than me and we got talking.

He invited me to play a little too and he said words to the effect of “Wow! I have never heard anyone play the harmonica like that!”. I am still not sure if he meant Wow! That was great! or Wow! You suck!

Since I had no idea how I was meant to play it, I just played what sounded good to me. Same deal with poetry.

I jumped around all over the book and each poem launched me into a quest for more poetry like this. I had been force-fed Wilfred Owen at school but reading him of my own accord felt reckless, revolutionary. After six years in the navy, I had to read poetry to find out what war was about.

I have, again, no recollection of why I decided that I should learn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart but I gave up after about 75 verses. I was heartbroken when my new team at work decided that Team Albatross was too gloomy for a team name. They must not have read Coleridge (or heard the song).

My tastes were eclectic (sorry, Dylan, that I made you learn For Whom the Bell Tolls for a recital) and after mini-expeditions with Kipling (Kim, The Man Who Would be King), DH Lawrence (The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) and a day trip or two with Tennyson and Betjeman, I settled on George Gordon Byron as my travelling companion and soulmate.

I read everything that Byron had ever written and, for a short, mad while, I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the second mortal to swim the Hellespont; I wanted to so scandalize my wife on my wedding night that she would file for divorce the very next day (must’ve been a pretty successful night as it produced Lady Ada who also discovered the joys of programming); I wanted to seduce the wives, sisters, sons and mothers of prominent politicians, including the prime minister’s; I wanted to raise a private army and go liberate the Greeks from the Turks or to die trying – like Byron did.

Shelley and Keats travelled with us for a while, but neither thrilled me the way Byron thrilled me.

I haven’t read poetry for a long, long time – except to read old favourites to my daughter. My passion, like Byron’s life, was brief but intense.

Scylla: [LOUD!] *LOUD CLICK* I WHOOSH YOU INTO WAKEFULNESS! NO SLEEP FOR YOU! MY INFERNAL NOISE BRINGS FIRE FROM THE VERY DEPTHS OF HELL *LOUD CLICK* [subsides. Exit stage left. LOUDLY!]

The Sirens: [Sensuous, enchanting] Close your eyes, weary traveller! Dreams we have for you. Or, if not dreams then reverie for none shall dream while watching waiting.

Charybdis: [Creeping, oozing] My icy fingertips drag you back from slumber. Can such cold exist? Know it well, foolish mortal for I bring it unto thee!

Scylla :[SHOUTING] *LOUD CLICK* BEGONE CHARYBDIS! YOU WILL NOT WAKE HIM WITH YOUR COLD HARD SILENCE FOR I WILL WAKE HIM WITH MY FIRES! AND MY WHOOSHING! I WILL *LOUD CLICK!!* [falls silent]

The Sirens: [weird harmonies] Such dreams, such dreams you will not know if you sleep and dream of wakefulness or wish for sleep’s gentle release.  Remember, ye that teacher of old and of those days when the seven seas ye rode and ships tall sailed and soft! wailed the sunsets of your youth. I will sing of them to ye…

SCYLLA: [SHOUTING!] *LOUD CLICK! IT IS NOT YET MY TURN BUT STILL I CLICK AND WHOOSH MY HOTNESS. NO SLEEP FOR YOU *LOUD CLICK*

Charybdis: My turn it is and cold I bring, such cold ye have not known or yet imagined *LOUD CLICK* I HAVE THEE FOOLED FOR I AM NOT CHARYBDIS WITH HIS ICY DAGGERS! I AM SCYLLA WITH MY WHOOSING AND MY INFERNO AND MY INFERNAL WHOOSHING AND MY CLICKING *CLICK AND WHOOSH!*.

Narrator: What new demon is this! Avert your eyes, Brave Ulysses! For it is 12:30 AM You have slept for hours yet not slept at all and many hours yet remain in your journey through your twilight of neither sleep nor proper waking.

The Sirens: [singing soothing songs] I have a dream for thee! Remember the girl from the days of thy coming of age? She was no girl! She is your bank manager and your loan is denied! For why would you approach me for a loan unrobed!? I mock thee and cast thee out into the streets where you are lost and searching..search for what??… ye have forgotten..and search ye must..and search…for wakefulness or sleep…why search? Ye have have no need for sleep for *LOUD CLICK AND WHOOSH* [IN VOICE OF SCYLLA] SLEEP NOT! FOR I MUST WHOOSH AND CAST OUT YOUR DREAMS AND COOK THEM IN MY FIRES!

CHORUS: There is no sleep for you while these strange songs haunt your memories and your reverie. Write them down ye must or we will pluck at thine eyeballs with false promises of slumber. Go now and write! Confront your tormentors and banish them – and sleep – with words and blogs. No more dreams for you tonight or any night for sleep is banished!

There were three men came out of the west
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.

John Barleycorn is the personification of beer and/or barley and the three men from the west killed him and buried him in the ground.

They let him lie for a very long time
Till the rains from Heaven did fall,
And little Sir John sprung up his head
And so amazed them all.

They’ve let him stand till Midsummer’s day,
Till he looked both pale and wan.
And little Sir John’s grown a long, long beard
And so become a man.

But John Barleycorn springs back to life and grows strong again… until the men cut him down and make sure that he is really dead this time.

They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp,
To cut him off at the knee,
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist,
Serving him most barbarously.

They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks,
Who pricked him through the heart
And the loader, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s bound him to the cart.

They’ve wheeled him around and around a field,
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn

They grind up him up to make beer giving John Barleycorn the chance to get his revenge on those three men from the west.

They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s ground him between two stones.

And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
And his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last

The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker, he can’t mend kettle nor pots
without a little barley corn

The earliest surviving written record is from the sixteenth century but there is evidence that the song and the story is much older – like this twelfth century pub in Hampshire.

I spent a very pleasant day listening to every version I could find – from Martin Carthy to Paul Weller via Billy Bragg and Jethro Tull and The Fairport Convention and many, many more. The best version by far is by Traffic but they each have their own charms.

Turn up the volume and raise a glass to that ancient hero.

Long live John Barleycorn!

Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,

I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.

And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;

Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.

So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave …

Helen Fisher doesn’t think so:

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

William James

We sent you code.
You sent back tests.
Free.

You helped us find crappy code.
Now we have to find it for ourselves.

Shame it’s so easy. Here!
I found some!

(with apologies to EJ Thribb, aged 17½)

He compares the pro-war conservatives in the US with the militaristic imperialists (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“) in pre-World War I Europe and suggests that the seminal event which ended such thinking in Europe was, in fact, The Great War.

Interesting analysis that I need time to digest but I can’t let the Dulce et Decorum reference to pass without quoting Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Historical note : Wilfred Owen completed this in 1918 but still found time to die before the end of the war a few months later.