Plague Remedy Podcast

BEST OF: Learning to Notice the World with Poet-Forager Richard Osmond

• Stephen Sacco

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Where can I find Richard Osmond?

Where can I find his books?

Richard's  Two Books  & Two Others  




SPEAKER_02

I'm Steven Sacco, and from Bonnie Scotland, it's the story podcast for readers and writers.

SPEAKER_01

And so when you if you have no purpose or meaning to a plant, you almost literally can't see it. So people will go for a walk in the countryside, and it's not like they see 20 or 30 plants and think, I don't know what that is. They just see a kind of wall of undifferentiated green. And it's only when you start to learn the names of the plants, in my experience, that not only do you you're aware of the knowledge, but you actually feel that you have greater visual acuity.

SPEAKER_02

Hello friends, it's Stephen. I'm very happy to bring you this interview with Richard Osmond. And that is Osmund with an O. Not to be confused with Richard Osman, who wrote the Thursday Night Murder Club. But there is some confusion, so if you want to find Richard Osmond, it's a good thing when you're Googling it to put poet in front of his name. This is learned through hard experience. We've had a lot of musicians and writers on the show, and we've talked about writing and music, we've talked about acting and writing. But Richard is the first wild food forager, which he's done professionally, searching for plants, fruits, and fungi among the forest and hedgerows of Hertfordshire. He's a fantastic poet. He received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2017. He was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. In 2018, he won the Seamus Heaney first collection poetry prize. His collections are Useful Verses and Rock Papers, and they are published by Piccador. I love this conversation. And I loved listening to Richard talk about food foraging. Because it starts like so many other things, just with the idea of noticing things. As always, not as always, was like forget to do it sometimes, but we appreciate it when you click the follow button or the like button when you review us and you rate us. It's I know everybody's asking you to do it. I think I say that every week, but it makes a huge difference to us, it makes a huge difference for people able to find this podcast, and it doesn't cost you anything. So please rate us, click all the things you can click for us. We really appreciate that. And if you know somebody who would like this episode, please send it to them. And now here's Richard Osmond. Richard Osmond, welcome to the podcast. Hello, thanks for having me. So we had poet novelist before, we've had poet musicians before, but you're our first poet forager. So I thought I'd start off with that. How did you get into foraging? What are you I know what it is, but maybe you could probably explain it to me better than I could explain it.

SPEAKER_01

So foraging techn the technical term is the way animals forage, which is just looking in their environment for food, which is basically what foraging is. I in for various reasons and with various people, I go out into the woods and hedgerows around me in Hertfordshire, England, and pick wild plants and turn them into food, or just teach people how to tell the edible ones from the deadly ones. But it's quite a vague job title, in that you know the way I see it, being a forager, it was once everyone's job because it just is part of the process of being alive, and I'm not really doing much more than that. It just happens that we live in a world where that's quite a perverse thing to do, even though it's the basis of bodily functions. The day to day I do things like foraging and bushcraft instruction, so I take people on walks and show them kind of the things that I pay attention to and the ways that they can incorporate wild stuff into their lives. I work sometimes with a gin distillery and we distill gin for them, but I uh write recipes that include wild ingredients, and because there are quite a lot of unique flavours in the wild that you can't get from suppliers of botanicals that you order from a catalogue.

SPEAKER_02

What are some of those flavors that you get that you can't you can get in the wild, but you can't order?

SPEAKER_01

So there's a really common woodland flower called wood aven, for example, that is basically that if people know it these days, it's because it's a source of frustration to gardeners because it's very invasive and people throw it away. But actually, it's got really aromatic roots that have various compounds in them, including eugenol, which is the main constituent of clove oil, so it's got an oddly kind of pumpkin spice Christmassy flavour to it. And I like to point out things like that because due to a lack of really imagination on the part of the British public, we have a reputation for making very bland food because we've outsourced responsibility for flavour to other countries, so we either make bland food ourselves or mentally go to a different country to experience intense flavour. So you can have a curry, but that you're going for an Indian and you're very aware that it's not your food. Whereas there actually are lots of things that we could be farming, but also that grow just freely available in the wild that have very intense flavours, and it's not even fair to say that historically British food has lacked those flavours, we're actually quite uniquely bland now because you know medieval meat stews would have been as highly spiced if they could afford it as an Indian curry is now. So the trad if you look at recipe books up to the early 20th century that included traditional English cottage cooking recipes, the thing that restaurants claim to be offering now, like seasonal produce, authentic historical recipes and stuff, there's some bizarre flavours in there that you just would never no average English person would be able to tolerate now. Like Tansy pancakes used to be traditional, and tansy is it's quite hard to describe the flavour. It's related to fever few, another herb that it's got a taste that's it's highly bitter, and it's tastes like a cross between mint and eucalyptus, and one of those alpine herbal liqueurs that people give you when you're on a skiing holiday in Germany that bizarrely bitter over herbal flavour, and it would have been a really traditional Easter pastime to like cr really finely chop tansy to the point that the juice came out and whip it into pancake batter so that the pancake batter is vivid green, and then serve that with quite a lot of sugar on it to cancel out the bitterness, and so it has this kind of powerful herbal but also pleasantly aniseedy flavour, in a way that like there's just no there's no place in most pit people's understanding of British cuisine for flavours like that, and it's frustrating to me as a forager because not only could people be doing that, but it's free and on their doorstep, and like most people's even gardeners who know their garden plants have a blind spot for the wild, and so anything people sometimes ask me, is this a weed? And to me, that's a meaningless statement. Because if you say is this a weed, that means do I want this or not in my garden? Because all to me, like I for a long time I co-ran a pub restaurant in St. Albans, Hertfordshire selling it was like a kind of outmarket gastro pub where the food was heavily based on wild foraged ingredients and hunted game and things like that, and I would be quite happily going to people's gardens and taking the things that they were throwing away, and I had no interest in the things that they would they were growing preferentially because whether something's a weed is based all around what people want from it and what its purpose is. And so when you if you have no purpose or meaning to a plant, you almost literally can't see it. So people will go for a walk in the countryside, and it's not like they see 20 or 30 plants and think I don't know what that is, they just see a kind of wall of undifferentiated green, and it's only when you start to learn the names of the plants, in my experience, that not only do you you're aware of the knowledge, but you actually feel that you have greater visual acuity. There's the shapes of the plants and the definition of the hedro increases as a function of how much you know about it, so it feels like you're putting on a pair of extra sharp glasses. And so that that's all to say that whatever I do in the woods as a forager, which is sometimes very hazy and ill-defined, to me, being a forager is about attention and knowledge and share sharing my knowledge in a way that changes people's perception of the world in what I think is a very healthy way that a lot of people could benefit from.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's great. And you could actually I could ask you what the benefits of that are to poetry, but you've pretty much said it. And it's interesting. We weeds are a political category. Anything we don't like, we just call a weed instead of uh an actual category. How did you get into that?

SPEAKER_01

So a few things. I was never that interested in plants growing up, but I was quite fascinated by mushrooms because they seem so unpredictable and magical. Like the you can't reliably watch them grow and get harvested like a crop, they appear by night in quite enjoyably surprising way. And also, there was a time when I was at probably about eight or nine, and I had a friend over at my house, and my mum has a big collection of reference books about gardening and nature, and my friend said, Let's become experts at something, let's pick a book and become experts on it. And I randomly picked out the 1973 edition of Roger Phillips Mushrooms, which is the later editions are still the Mushroom Foragers Bible. Back then it was a very slim paperback, though. And so we said, Yeah, let's become experts in mushrooms. And we had her dad take us out to the woods and look for mushrooms, which I think we only found one because it wasn't really mushroom season. But that friend probably never thought about that from that day to this. But here I am trying to be the expert. So that that interest and passion grew just because I out of my obsessive nature and staring at the ground whenever I was out walking. I didn't really get into plants or anything until I was doing my degree in English at university, and I was heavily choosing to study medieval and Anglo-Saxon texts, and there's a lot of medical and magical texts there that make it clear that first of all, there was no real distinction between medicine and magic, and there was a very hazy line between magic and poetry, and so there and there was also a real sense that they could write about using plants in a way that implied a very broad shared collective knowledge of nature in a way that now we've lost the distinctive meanings of most plants to the common person, whereas there are all these kind of associations that they could rely on. There's a charm in Old English called the nine herbs charm, and it sets out the nine herbs that are the most sacred, and if you mix them together, they make a useful paste to prevent snakes crossing the threshold of your door. But it tells you it's a bit like the origin story, it gives you superhero origins of lots of the plants, like crab apples were brought over the sea by a magical seal. But the my favourite one was mugwart because it starts off like it it's clear that it's saying mugwart is the mother and origin of the fact that plants are magical, as if it's the clearest representation of plants' usefulness to man, and that it's firstly that's funny because mugwart is utterly ignored now, but is everywhere, and the only real interaction people have with it is having their hay fever triggered by it and not knowing that's what it is. But the idea that it it used to occupy such a prime position that you didn't even have to explain what that prime position was because everyone knew it, and there's a line in it that says, And mugwat, remember what we agreed at Reagan meld, and it doesn't say what was agreed, so it's like we we have a deal with the plants, and not only do we have a deal, but we all know about it so much that we all we have to do is remind the plants and not make them swear a new oath if we use them because it's all established, and that just felt like a real there was a real rootedness in place, and and there are other things in the old English records, like there's a really good database called Langscape that has archived all the parish boundaries written in I don't know when it is 7th to 11th century. And instead of drawing maps of the parish boundaries, all the boundaries are described as you would describe how to go on a really nice walk to someone, and they use plants as way markers, so it's walk down the hill to the brook, then up the hill to the wood until you reach the wild garlic, turn right until you find the three oak trees, and that really summed up how like people literally defined their place in the universe by their relationship with plants and used that as grounding. And I had really had positive experiences when under when in the pressures of university work, I found relief by going out into nature, and that I felt a kinship with that way of approaching nature, and also a frustration that we've lost it now. And in that frustration of all the kind of the folklore and the stories about the different plants that we've lost, I realised that the plants are still there, and that really that's the important part, and that I, in a way, I could reconnect and reconstruct some of that by walking the path, and really the important part is the tradition of continuing to engage with nature, and in doing that, I managed to find a few jobs that allow me to spend the time learning more, and the more I learn, the more I feel engaged with it, and the more I pick up the bits and pieces of folklore that still survive, and also the more I can make up my own folklore and access folklore from other cultures and other weird places that you wouldn't think of. Like the foraging instructor community has its own folklore and weird sayings that get passed around because there are convenient things to say to groups that you're teaching to forage, and people crib off each other, and so that I can see that emerging as its own oral culture in a way. You ever heard of making acorn bread in the toilet? Yeah, so there's a you can technically acorns are very nutritious and rich in calories, but you can't eat them in their natural state because they're very high in tannins, and so there have been some cultures, like some of the Native American communities in New England, I think, were would subsist on acorns for some of the year, and the way they would leech the tannins out was they had a very specific way of making a basket and they would pound the acorns and then put them in the basket and leave them in a stream to rinse the tannins out and then pull them out. And they obviously that's quite labour-intensive, but some I think it was Fergus Drennan, who's quite a famous forager, realized that a really good way to low effort rinse tannins out of acorns is to bag them in a muslin bag and put them in the cistern of your toilet. So every time you flush, you're doing a water replacement, and after a while it's you get some relatively tannin-free acorns. But it that's an example of something that is like most instructors that I know will do that when they talk about oak trees and will tell that story because it combines an authentic knowledge of like long-established hunter-gatherer practices and puts it in a modern context where you can get some of the same value from it, and also creates a funny mental image that sticks in your mind. And that's it's that's a summary of what I was doing in my first book. It's taking taking some of that deep, sort of vague, vaguely new agey sound engagement with nature that I was describing, and putting it into some context where it has relevance to the modern world, and also taking pleasure in just the ability to change people's perceptions and give them imagery with my words in the same way that I do when I take someone out into a field and point at a tree.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's fascinating. It's not only the plants, but also the history of the place. Yeah. People that were there before you, and some kind of connection. I lived in I'm a I'm pretty urban, I have to admit. But I lived in the American South for a bit. They would give you directions, like you turn right where the old hardware store used to be, and then left at the old widow's house, and you're like, I don't know where the old hardware store used to be, but that was how they negotiated their world, which is nice. They didn't pave over it like you do when you're living in an urban environment. Yeah. So is this all self-taught or is there that people go through?

SPEAKER_01

The there is there are certifications, I don't have any. There's not really one single one that would be the best to get, otherwise, I would get it. And usually because foragers are not very good at getting together and doing things as a group, because usually the reason they're out in the woods is because they don't want to be near anyone else, really. I learned partly from when I started working with the pub that I was talking about. There were a couple of foragers who shared their knowledge. But what they the names were George and Gerald, they started the company, it was called the Foragers, and it had some like really reliable things that they were foraging for the pub, but the real gift they gave me was that they paid me to be the head forager, and that created a time and incentive to identify new things and learn things on the job. Because there are things that like when I'm doing something like I've got somewhere to be that's not related to foraging, I won't have the time or interest to stop. If I see a plant I don't know, then I'll have to not find out what it is. But if it's my job to look at plants, then I can have to remember a plant. You have to have you maybe only need to meet it once, but you have to fully be present in that moment with it and take the time to as well as identify its features that you can taxonomise it by. You have to for yourself touch it and smell it and create a memory, because realistically, you can't keep the entire Encyclopedia Botanica in your head at all times. People often talk about how smell is a really good cue to memory. And I find it funny that people always seem so amazed by that because what they're saying is I smelled a certain type of washing powder and I was transported back to my grandmother's kitchen or something like that. What's happening there? That's interference in a highly discerning and refined plant identification system that our bodies have. That you pick up interference on it because we don't use it anymore. Of course, if you smell a plant, you need to remember it because if it starts to kill you and then you survive, it's very important that you remember that has happened. And similarly, it like positive knowledge. Nostalgic memories acute by smell because as a child you have a defense mechanism against eating poisonous plants, which is you're very sensitive to the taste of chlorophyll. So, like children always say, Oh, it just tastes green, and that's because chill children's palates have evolved to be less pleased by things that taste like a random green plant. Because if you go around eating random green plants, you're going to be in great danger. And so if you are then given something by a parent or trusted loved one in a situation that makes you feel nourished and happy, that's a very useful thing to remember because you will then feel safe around that plant when you remember it again. So it that that's how the system is supposed to work. And it just happens that our very few people even have very positive memories of being healthily introduced to food in any context. But when they are, it's nothing to do with nature or foraging.

SPEAKER_02

I would love to be able to put head forager on my CV. You were talking about your first book and how it's this all kind of this kind of almost meditative sit this noticing, which a lot of people say is the first start to any art. You notice you notice how your hands hit a key or pluck a string. You notice You just notice things from everyday life. So, did you have a poem you wanted to ring from that book?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. I had a lot of poems, and I at first, when I w came to write my first book, I thought that the goal was to just put together all my best stuff, and I didn't have quite enough best stuff. And the idea of writing a bit more great poetry was not very conducive to writing something. So I had to think of something that I was thinking about a lot that would how could sustain a whole book, and most of it was written from that point onwards. And there's something that I've been I've been able to describe it a bit more clearly now talking to you because I've talked about it before and written a whole book that sort of sorted out. But at the time, I just I was in the middle of that process I described to you of gaining clearer vision of the Hedro and all its different shades of green. And I was aware that clarity and that perception of colour had something to do with the way my attention span worked and the way my brain and cognition worked. And this was not trying to communicate that, it was trying to communicate the what the experience of what it's like to be out in that hedgerow having that kind of change. So I'll read it now. And that's from useful verses? This is from useful verses. Luck and colour. I caught a leprechaun in Braggart's wood. He was dressed in green and wore a four-leaf clover on his belt. His hat was the colour of Jack by the hedge. His velvet blazer was the colour of nettles. His trousers were the colour of cuckoo's meat or sleeping beauty. He was dressed in spring greens and wore a delicious garnish on his belt. His hat was the colour of Aliaria Petiola, his velvet blazer was the colour of Urtica dioica. His trousers were the colour of the leaves of Oxalis acetosila or corniculata. He was dressed with precision and variety and wore a quadrifoliate perennial on his belt. His hat was the colour of oak leaves in May. His velvet blazer was the colour of oak leaves in June. His trousers were the colour of oak leaves in July after the gall wasps hatch. He was dressed in a time and season and wore the movable feasts of Easter and Pentecost on his belt. His hat was the colour of the android symbol. His velvet blazer was the colour of a Heineken label. His trousers were the colour of www.padypower.com's trademark background. He was dressed in strong brand identity and wore a synergistic logo on his belt. His hat was lighter than his velvet blazer. His velvet blazer was lighter than his trousers. His trousers were darker than his hat and velvet blazer. He was dressed in a complex of small differences, and the plant he wore on his belt was divided four ways. HTML head title leprechaun and title. Style hash hat colour hash A3C D65. Hash V blazer colour hash one nine five four zero seven. Hash trow colour hash zero zero three nine one seven end style end head and body div ID equals hat p his hat n p and div. Div ID equals V blazer P his velvet blazer and div. Div ID equals trow p his trousers N P and Div. P he was dressed in code break and wore ampersand hash X1F340 on his belt NP N body and HTML. I caught a leprechaun among wood sorrel in Braggett's wood and demanded access to his pot of gold. Aha, good sir, he said. The role that language and tradition play in your perception of the rainbow at the end of which I keep my croc is not yet fully understood. The location of my gold, therefore, could well vary according to cultural bias. Besides, your mesolimbic dopamine circuit is stimulated by uncertainty. The view of monetary gain as primary motivator in, for example, gambling addiction has now been superseded by the theory that loss more strongly reinforces compulsive behavior. Observe the lucky shamrock on my buckle, which signifies both wealth and scarcity. The reward you receive for catching me depends on your not catching me at least 50% of the time. And then he disappeared.

SPEAKER_02

I love that. That's great. It's so modern, it turns out so not modern. I was I was thinking about how I don't know, when I first got out of, as we say in the States, college, I I was uh had a job as a proofreader at an ad agency, and I'm thinking about when you go out in nature and you can notice the different colors. And oh my god, the effort people put into how many inches have to be space around their logo and the exact color that it has to be is just tremendous.

SPEAKER_01

Actually, that's when I was writing that poem, I was also remembering that just before I got the foraging job with the pub, I worked temp for a uh company that distributed magazine subscriptions, and the only perk of that job was that I got to read the magazines, and so that some of them were like the uh like industry-only defense catalogues where it was like people trying to sell helicopters to governments and stuff. But my favourite one was that it was like the Journal of Intellectual Property Law or something like that, and there was a really well-documented case about the gambling website 32 Red, were trying to bring a suit and someone who had used the same colour red as them and claiming that because their name was 32 Red, they had ownership of the colour red, and just the idea that something so simple and what feels like a very direct experience of the world, like perceiving a colour, could be tied up in the world of commerce and marketing and everything like that. That was that really fed into it.

SPEAKER_02

What led you to poetry? What was your first I've been asking people what their first love was, not their first crush or anything, but just their first time they brushed up with a piece of literature and fell in love with it.

SPEAKER_01

In childhood, I was exposed to quite a lot of poetry because my mum's a big reader. And as well as Winnie the Pooh and the A.M. Elm poetry and things like that, there was there's a book called Don't Put Mustard in the Custard by Michael Rosen. Which is my kids love it now as well, because it's in the language of common speech, as the name suggests, it has lots of it discovers lots of interesting rhymes that you it they're the opposite of the obvious rhymes of traditional nursery rhymes. Don't put mustard in the custard, don't throw fruit at the computer, don't throw gravy at the baby, don't pour beer in his ear. As well as it being fresh to a child's mind, it's also it walks up to taboos and it has lots of poetry about kind of children almost getting in trouble for bad behaviour. It's the kind of behaviour when a child knows they're not supposed to do anything, but they find a funny way of walking right up to the line. Yeah. And he's got a real keen eye for that. It's like one of them's about a child who's saying, I'm not sticking my tongue out at you, I'm just licking my lips. And I think what is implied as I when I read that as an adult reader is that there is a sense that a poet is doing that. Like, but when you hit on something that gives the reader the kind of the heat and thrill and emotion or intellectual reward of good poetry, I think you're always walking up to some kind of unknown ledge a little bit, whether it's a humorous one or a tragic one. And that that he was able to use words and the music of words to create a space in which children could enjoy that aesthetically, like in enjoy the bending and testing of boundaries in an aesthetic way, is really healthy and quite opposite to the like some of the children's books that my children are given now, I think have a remarkably fixed mindset and seem very set on communicating one message. Whereas I see the benefit of books that encourage emotional regulation and inclusiveness and cooperation, but there's a real benefit to books which non-judgmentally allow the other side to be explored because that energy is always going to come out of a child, and if you can explore that with them and give them a funny way to have a positive experience with that, I think that's a very healthy thing, and I got a lot from that. So I think using that as a way into poetry got the rhythms of poetry and speech into my head in a way that I just had a natural tool set that I was able to turn to poetry, I think. And also, I guess the real first love is the love of the sound of my own voice, and the the so I I say that in a self-deprecating way, yes, in that I was a very annoying, precocious child, and not only would I talk the whole time, but my favourite toys were the ones that you could record your own voice, like the kid in Home Alone, the talk boy toy, but yeah, that kind of stuff. And I don't know, maybe as a podcaster, you used to record radio shows as a child, play them back, but I used to do that, and I recognize that one of one of the things about poetry, especially the kind of highly lyric poetry that it a lot of contemporary poetry is now, is that it is a way of taking your voice and putting it under a dome and presenting it to people and presenting it to yourself, and especially if you write in forms that can be generative or have a route into writing in a way that allows your unconscious to flow a little bit, and you've you find that however you get there, you get into a flow state in which you can look back at what you've written and be surprised and think, How did I write that? That's it's the same thing as like recording your voice on tape and leaving it for a year and then listening to it back and meeting your meeting myself and my own voice in a way that at times has been incredibly self-indulgent, but also has been can be investigatory and helpful and healing for things as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's funny you just say that because I actually do have a cassette tape. Um I guess it's me and my father, but I'm made up the story for school and uh called Kevin and Paul and Happy Land, and I'm telling the story into this cassette day. So that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_01

I'm I know it's your show, but I think you should at least take a small excerpt and put this put it at the end of it.

SPEAKER_02

But every time I've found it moving or whatever, I've always listened to it. Not quite sure where it is, but I think I still own that. I hope I still own that. And you know what we were saying before too, magic and poetry. In a way, when you're a kid, I think poet you're first of all, you're a natural poet, but you're not worried about interpretation or having to write an essay about it in school, and you're just you just the language, and it's like a little spell, I think.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, for sure. Like I I've got a four-year-old son, and I took I uh this is a a real British tradition that I engaged with him in last week. I took him for a cheeky Nando's, and uh and he was he has a real poetic turn of phrase, and he's he they have all those sort of highly patterned Brazilian-inspired, colourful plates, and he said, This food is delicious to my mouth, and the plate is delicious to my eyes. And uh that's the kind of thing it was like, Yeah, stay go to school for a couple of years and you won't talk like that anymore.

SPEAKER_02

But no, we get that uh out of us, or at least when I was in high school thing taught poems were something to be dissected and understood, not just experienced. That does a disservice to poetry, to literature in general. You need literary criticism, I think. But the first thing is your gut and the experience of it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's true. And we've we've lost the ability to engage the gut because of I can't remember the critic who wrote practical criticism and invented the way of analyzing a poem without knowledge of its context or author. And there's at the beginning of his book on that, he talks about like giving poems to a bunch of students and how bad their responses were, and that they're just saying things like, Oh, I didn't much care for this one. This see this one didn't do much for me, and it just harshly criticizing the poet who wrote it. And obviously, you using a sort of quasi-scientific approach to the to form an analysis gives you the ability to actually understand what poetry does and how it works, whereas describing the emotional effect it has on you actually often says nothing about the poem itself because the emotional effect happens in your body and mind, which has its own associations. But it means like we we gain that critical poise at the expense of a genuine emotional engagement with poetry, or even a sense that we're supposed to have an emotional engagement with poetry.

SPEAKER_02

I couldn't agree more about that. I don't know. I was lucky, but my mother was Irish, and so we did have poetry growing up. Because if she was just American, I probably wouldn't. I think it was a IA Richards who wrote that book. But I couldn't. What kind of poetry did you get from your Irish mother? I got Yates. She could recite poems, so I didn't even know where they were from sometimes. But my mother was going growing up in school, she could recite Robert Herrick. She used to do this poem called The Pencil Cellar, which almost is a it's interesting, it's a it's a sad story, but almost as it's a bedtime story to me. And it's about a pencil seller who's very poor, and he's trying to sell these pencils to get a doctor to see his daughter who's sick. And it did make him she could just quote poetry or quote a sonnet of Shakespeare's, and that was just amazing.

SPEAKER_01

I would love to do some research into this trend that I'm now you're contributing to uh an evidence base that I'm gathering here of people whose parents tell them incredibly disturbing, melancholy stories to help them go to sleep.

SPEAKER_00

Like my mum used to sing me this old song. I guess it it's probably like a kind of 1940s Cockney music hall song, maybe or something like that.

SPEAKER_01

And I don't remember all of it, but it's about a woman who whose baby is so malnourished that he's skinny enough to fit down the plug hole of the bath, and she accidentally lets the plug out. And my baby has gone down the plug hole, my baby has gone to the sea. It it's like it's we you don't get the level of irony as a child to appreciate that in the same way that it's sung. And also, she sang that because her parents sang that to her as a child.

SPEAKER_00

And I talked to her about it recently, and she's yeah, I just remember lying there afterwards thinking, what a tragic story for that poor woman, and then falling asleep as the the sort of existential confusion and melancholy gave way to tiredness and fell asleep. And I was like, Yeah, that's exactly how I felt. Should I do that to my kids now? It's a lot of the original Grimms were were terrible, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And those are the ones we have we commonly know in the Grimms version, they're horribly disturbing and have themes of incest and stuff in them. And then there are some that are too disturbing even to be like popularly known. Like the do you know the one about the storks?

SPEAKER_02

I don't think so, no.

SPEAKER_01

So this in in lots of places in Europe, you might have seen it, they put cartwheels on the chimneys of houses and the storks build big nests on the cartwheels. And the uh one it's a really short story. One year the boys of the town thought it would be funny to throw stones into the nests of the storks and crush all their eggs. So the next year, when the storks came to bring babies to the women of the town, all the babies were dead. And that's an old story.

SPEAKER_02

Doesn't have quite the ring of don't throw rocks at storks. Yes. It's but I think in a way, to be exposed to the bitter sweetness of life is at a young age is a good thing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, I totally I I spend a lot of time kind of fighting with older members of my family and people with more old-fashioned views about children's emotions because I think it's so valuable to give kids, especially the as I was saying about like rule breaking, they're also the space to experience sadness in a way that they can experience feeling sad, and then knowing that maybe that's it. Maybe that answers my question. My mum was giving me the experience of melancholy in a comfortable warm bed, knowing that I would wake up in the morning and she'd be there, and I'd be better able to manage my emotions. Like, I had so a good example of this is I took my kids to skate on an ice rink in the Stevenage Winter Wonderland, which is effectively a car park with some tents and hot dog stands in it and an ice rink, and it was like Stevenage is a sort of brutal concrete new town with nothing really good about it, and this was a particularly poor excuse for a winter wonderland, and so we skated around the ice for half an hour and got bumped into by loads of people, and all of us twisted our ankles. And then as we were coming out, my daughter said, That was rubbish, and but in a way, like it wasn't it was like that was rubbish, and I expect you to do something about that because she she could she was experiencing what you will experience day in, day out if you live in southern England, which is disappointment that bites to the core of your being. And I remember if I had said that to my parents, they would have been like, You're very ungrateful. You can't say something like that. We've spent all this time taking you out, maybe we shouldn't have bothered to bring you here at all.

SPEAKER_00

Or alternatively, they would have said, Oh no, it wasn't rubbish. Let's do something more fun and make it so that your memory of this is happy.

SPEAKER_01

But actually, the experience of finding out that something is rubbish and disappointing is incredibly useful for a child because if you're the kind of person who's utterly destroyed by something being rubbish, then you're probably going to be utterly destroyed every day living in the around here at least. And it's good to what I find the thing I spend most time doing with my kids is not rescuing them from things like that, just allowing them to sit and feel that way and say, Oh, you must be really disappointed. How does that feel in your body when you're disappointed? Tell me what it feels like, and just talking it out until it goes away by itself so that they know that they don't need to. As a child, I would find ways to make feelings go away, whether by like stealing food from the cupboards or obsessive behaviors, and I recognized that I was very unhealthy. Managing g giving them the skill to just the ability to just be mindful for a while and let feelings come and go and understand that's what feelings do is should not be as revolutionary as it sounds.

SPEAKER_02

I think that's something that Yeah, stories, poetry does that in a kind of a safe way. Yeah, I agree. And I think the best part of it is when something's totally rubbish, but you think it's funny. Yeah. Yeah, find they were trying so hard, but it was totally rubbish and it's funny.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, being able to find the that kind of silver lining. It's like that uh that we Willy Wonker experience that was entirely written by AI and wherever it was, Glasgow.

SPEAKER_02

Everyone knows this.

SPEAKER_01

So some entrepreneur hired a space and some drama students to do like a Willy Wonker style experience, but the entire script was written by AI, and no one stepped up to say this makes no sense because no one was paid highly enough to care that it was terrible. And so it's the whole script is online and it's it reads like a cross between the most horribly commercial Disney Channel version of Willy Wonka mixed with an existential play by Jean-Paul Sartre or something.

SPEAKER_02

You wanted to read another poem too, one that you said was a little bit cynical about online stuff.

SPEAKER_01

So this one actually so there was something I had noticed as everyone else had at the time. This was written in 2014 or 15, probably. And it was a time when social media had well and truly taken hold, but it hadn't what we now know is that was just the first sort of throat clearing of it opening the door to fascism, basically, in my opinion, or at least a world in which we have no grip on reality or ability to control what happens to us. Whereas this is incredibly naively written, just taking pleasure in some of the quirks of what a world run on social media instead of actual fact would be like before the term fake news had really come into popular usage or the threats were really clear. Yeah, I'll read that and then we can talk about the book that came after this, which is a bit more distrusting of this whole thing.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So you this is the book, this is from This is from Useful Verses 2, but it's I consciously put it towards the end of the order because even as publication was coming out, I could see that it was going to lead on to something I had more to say. Love song, 31st of July. Today the Queen Ant and her lovers took their nuptial flight, scattering upwards like a handful of cracked black peppercorns thrown in the face of a bear, the bear being in this case a simile for the population of Lewisham and Hithergreen. There is an increasingly common assertion online that the winged of every ant nest in Britain take off on the same bright morning. This says less about ants than it does about the state of media in which we place ourselves, connected enough to hear and repeat all claims and verify some, yet prone to confirmation bias owing to algorithms which favor new expressions of that which we already hold to be true. Myth moves in step with commerce. When merchant ships arrived once per season from the Orient, they brought silk and saffron and stories of dog-sized ants which mined gold and took to the sky only to defend their treasure from camel riding thieves. Now we receive the exotic via fiber optics as a stream of high-frequency trades. My love, I can't speak with authority on commodity futures, the wonders of the East, and the behaviour of insects in Liverpool and Tunbridge Wells or any city outside my directly observable reality. But it's flying ant day in my heart, if nowhere else.

SPEAKER_02

I like that very much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and I think that to me, in retrospect, that's the last gasp of what was very positive to me about social media, in which it was able to form its own kind of oral culture at moving at hyper speed. So kind of stories were that went viral, you could track them evolving over the course of a day in the same way as a folk tale would evolve over two centuries. But what clear what became quickly apparent after that was the that that kind of quickness of transmission and disconnectedness from fact and no recourse to authority, which had been very freeing, was also it put us into a state of utter meaninglessness in many ways, and where things either either meant only one thing non-negotiably, depending on which bubble you were in, or things meant all things at once in a way that I found incredibly confusing and disorienting. And it happened that in 2017 I was in a situation that I found very confusing and disorienting. I was in one of the bars on London Bridge during the terrorist attack, and so I wasn't hurt or in real danger, but I was really struck by the fact that when you're in it, you don't have the narrative yet that will be put on it by commentators in retrospect on the news, and so the things that you notice are very dependent on your own experience and your own subjective viewpoint, and the significances they have are different. And for instance, I'll read from it in a minute, but they there was a moment when a lot of armed police officers appeared in the bar and were having to corral the the customers, and some of them were I don't know whether they were off-duty people who'd been suddenly drafted in because of the emergency, or whether they were plain clothes officers who were stationed around central London in the event that something like this happened, but they were dressed completely normally, like a man going out on a Friday night, so like a a pair of grey jeans and a short sleeved check shirt or something, but holding what appeared to me to be like an AK 47 or something, and in that when someone bursts into a room shouting and holding a gun and isn't dressed in police uniform, it you your role is completely undetermined at that point, and so you a lot of things that are dramatic in a way that you'd think would have a very clear meaning end up having very confusing meanings. And so I wanted to write a book about the experience as a whole, but also taking in some of the way media surrounded it before and after, and also just say something about the confusingness of that experience and also the confusingness of making meaning in the worlds which precipitated it, and so I purposely took quite a sideways approach to it. So I there are three strands to the book. One is reminiscences and recall from my experience on the night, but because my experience was limited to not seeing very much, but also consciously sh showing only my subjective experience and drawing in bits of what was going on in my life at the time. To I make no claim to be representing the whole experience, and then rather than vividly describing any violence that happened or bloodshed that I witnessed very clearly, I took some passages from Beowulf and made my own translation of them because I found the description of Grendel bursting into a beer hole and murdering people just in terms of narrative, a lot of what happened in Beowulf was literally happening on that night, but also this idea that drink drinking in London Bridge at the weekend, you get that same experience that I imagine a troop of Danish warriors would have had in Herod, in which is you are by participating in drinking in a building, you are cementing a meaning and importance to your society and your role in that society that is entirely revolving around sitting on a bench drinking beer. So I couldn't really have been doing a more iconic kind of British London activity, and it was and intentionally, I'm sure, on the part of the perpetrators, it was an attack as much on that as a foundation of society and the popular pastime as it was on the actual humans who were there. So I I was able to render some of the more shocking parts of the experience without feeling like I was being exploitative because I was telling it through Beowulf and rather talking it rather than talking about actual victims, which I thought would have been quite unethical, really. And then to r really increase the thoughts about the polyvocality of meaning, I took passages from the Quran and translated those with I don't speak Quranic, I don't well read Quranic Arabic, except that because of the nature of old English and my work translating old English, I'm very familiar with using like corpus techniques to gloss translations. And in the same way as there's an incredibly small corpus of writing in old English, to the point that many words appear only once in the text that you're looking at at the time. So when there's the only way to know the meaning is to understand the consensus with which it's been read by other people before you, and there's a there is this website that I used as my main resource for translating the Quran, which is a full Quranic Arabic corpus uh analytics tool, where you at the most basic level you can read the Arabic and have it, the parts of speech and the grammatical relations and everything glossed for you, and have an index of every other time that word has appeared, and you can crowdsource what the meaning is likely to be. But it's also which just adds to the weirdness of this the of me using it to translate it without speaking Arabic, is that the reason it's being created, it's not just by like academic corpus linguists who are interested in analyzing language, it's that a bunch of Islamic scholars are creating it with a view to making a perfect AI that's that can teach Quranic Arabic to the same standard as the Prophet would be, which is an admirable intention, but I I think is filled with the same potentials for confusion and misappropriation that I was participating in by using it to translate. And I and I was sort of willfully choosing unusual passages from the Quran, the ones that I that struck my imagination. There were some things that talked about the the issues at hand to is like fundamental Islamism and things like that, but mainly I was choosing the bits that appealed to me as a poet or that were the most interesting and confusing to me because I think a lot of people quite unfairly assume the the Bible too, but that just because fundamentalist religion is very monolithic and tells you what's right and what's wrong, that the text itself will be like that. But actually, many texts are much more gnome and confusing confusing and speak out of both sides of their mouth, and the Quran is especially like that. It says things that you just I say the two exact opposite statements in the same sentence, or things like and take, for example, the allegory of the mosquito, a mosquito. We all know what that means, and so things like that. I'm always more interested in poetry that is that creates a space for contemplation or an occasion for your own judgment rather than giving you a a prescriptive conclusion.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was saying that it's something like the Bible, it's hard for us to have an unmediated experience with the text. Yeah. But if you look, if you do look at it a third, fourth time, you're like, this is actually quite strange, or I'm not sure what it's saying here. I know what people have said it said, but I'm not sure what it actually says. Yeah, I was gonna say, I I I was near 9-11, I ran away from the building. And talk about confusion. I must have seen people jumping, and because I know, but I didn't know what it was because I didn't have a reference point for it. This was only like a week after that I realized everything that I had seen. And my my brilliant thought when I saw well saying saw the building imploding upon itself before running was well geez, you never see that. You don't see you don't see that every day, and I was like, What a stupid thought! That was my thought. Interesting. Do you would you want to go into the poem now? Is this from rock, paper, scissors, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so this is as I said about the other one from Eastful versus the one that kind of started it off and was my way in. This one kind of this is the title poem and explains as it's as close as a thesis statement as I can get in the book, if I can find it. Eight. Sorry, let's start with the title, shall we? Rock, paper, scissors. Eight hours into Rob's stag, which had started strong with a pub crawl up the Bermansey beer mile and was now beginning to sag at a weatherspoons near Tower Bridge, a match of rock, paper, scissors was breaking out to pick between the following two options for what would happen next. One, we go to Katzenjammer's auth authentic German beer keller under London Bridge, where we would listen to an par band, eat sauerkraut, drink liter steins of Paulana Dunkel, and be held in the basement by police for our own protection as terrorists attack the door outside. See bloody victims hurry down the stairs to shelter in the bar, watch paramedics treat slash wounds to the throat and stab wounds to the stomach and slash and stab wounds to the throat and stomach, and hear a woman sob and hyperventilate because of what she couldn't bring herself to tell us she had seen up on the street level, and take cover under the traditional wooden benches when armed officers burst in with automatic weapons yelling, Down, get down! Or two, we go to a strip club. The game began. Emmet and Matt competing, so it's one, two, three, go and play on go. One, two, three, go. Both guys threw down scissors first. One, two, three, go. Both changed tack dramatically and went for paper. All bets were off. One, two, three, go. They cast their final shapes. Emmett for the beer bar stuck fatefully with paper while Matt, solidly in favour of the strip club, chose rock and lost. The decision had been made, and I dwell on it for Bethos mainly, and because the world is made of games of rock, paper, scissors like this one. Not only in the sense that every flip or arbitrary choice has disproportionately huge and permanent results, but in the sense that every gesture, either of victory or defeat, aggression or surrender, depends for its meaning on another. Put it this way, a photograph of Matt's third and losing move viewed in isolation appears to show a man raising his fist in anger about to throw a punch. Only those who know which game of signs he's playing at will read the hand as rock, and even rock means nothing without further contact. In rock, paper, scissors, rock is capable of meaning strength, or weakness, or indifference, depending on the sign selected to contest it. We called an Uber to take us to London Bridge.

SPEAKER_02

Do you want to say anything about that poem? It's it kind of dips in and out of a lot of things, I think. And then that uh ending line is really powerful.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think I think I was first of all, the way it's written is very consciously done in what I felt was an unpoetic style at the time. But I think I I recognize now is that it's I was just avoiding some cliches that I had taken to be the whole of poetic diction. And there for a long time I struggled with feeling very self-conscious in poetry and having having something I wanted to say and feeling like I had to put it into poetic language, and then inevitably that means that whatever I wrote down would be a compromise between the thing I had in my head originally and what ended up on the page. And somewhere along the line, I just I started almost for comedy sake, just writing down exactly what I was trying to say, no matter if it was like full of technical language and five times more lines than there was space for in the poem. And somehow doing that kind of those interjections of just saying exactly what I meant became the whole of my poetry and extruded themselves into every aspect of it to the point that I was then able because they took over everything, I was then forced to read them as poetry and think of their poetic qualities in a way that I previously thought they didn't count as poetry. And so I was I was playing with that, and although it's a very serious thing I'm describing, I'm couching it in a very weird way of describing it because it's like the full description of the experience appears as a bullet point number one in a list of things that we might consider doing, so it's it's not even being fully presented as reality, and then it's you are forced to realize that it was reality because of the intensity it goes to. And so I guess a lot of that what I was trying to do there is two things is like show I was really there and some really intense stuff happened, but also show that as a function of being a subjective human being who is uh living my own story on that night, the way you get into that experience is never the way a character in a film would get into it, where they in a film there'd be a sort of a first act where all of the things that I want in my life are established, and then things that are going to be complicated by the attack would be set up, and then I would have some kind of journey to go on to overcome something to get out of it at the end. Whereas obviously the reason people like films like that is that life isn't like that at all, and often if there is a story, it's the drama happens incredibly inconveniently or perpendicularly to the actual story you're trying to tell yourself, and so I guess because it was there's a story of a stag night that you expect to you're trying to you and your friends are trying to perform a certain story for the groom to be if you're out doing something like that, which is hard enough to negotiate in itself, because obviously that story doesn't often end well, and there are lots of variables to control. And so, if one of the variables is that terrorists might attack the city during the time that you're doing it, it's just it was very much trying to over-determine the main thing that was going to be an issue with writing the book, which is this isn't a story about something that makes sense to me even now, and it certainly didn't make sense at the time. And the most important thing I want to say about both the experience and the political situation is that attempts to narrativise it are very dangerous, and attempts to extract stable meaning out of it can be very problematic. But as such, here's a book I've written about uh do by necessity doing all of those things, and so I imagine it can be quite a frustrating read because I won't be pinned on anything, and it's not clear what my views are on the matter, and I'm glad I don't, yeah, I would consider it a failure if you could establish what my political leanings were, because I'm trying to represent that sort of state of disorientation we find ourselves in in our society and media, and the state of functional freeze you find yourself in a terrorist incident and how often they're quite similar.

SPEAKER_02

That's really interesting. That's really interesting. We could go on forever, but we could. This is really fun. But usually we come to the second to last question, which is are there two books and two other things that you'd recommend to our listeners?

SPEAKER_01

There are two books. Yeah, I talking of Beowulf, I for a long time I have really craved the the unironic appreciation of jewels and treasure that you get in Anglo-Saxon poetry. That there was these days, if I was to I am let me put it this way. I once was privileged enough to read some of the entrance to the Foyle's Young Poet competition that they run, the Poetry Society run every year. And as well as the very talented young poets, there are also some packs of poems sent by teachers where they just take every single poem a a whole class has written and bundle it up and send it to the Poetry Society and say, You deal with this. And there was one class where they'd been given the brief write about your deepest desire or like a wish or something. something and they'd all written about material possessions that they wanted and there were lines like I really want to drive a lowrider I would pop the suspension as I rolled through the hood or I need an Xbox and if I don't get one I might as well be dead things like that and obviously there that could do some editing to say the least but there there is a the sense now that a lot of contemporary poetry is very consciously nature based and ecologically based because if you were to unironically venerate the the treasures of consumerism then you would risk seeming a bit like that 12 year old who wrote the poem about the Xbox. And I for a while I even blogged about it for an old blog I used to run. I've just really wanted a poetry that reclaims the ability to talk about jewels and gems and gold and things of high value and high craftsmanship or artistic worth in a way that isn't so guilty. And I found a book where someone's done it. It's I just I want to get the title right because it's quite an unusual title and I always misquote it it is That broke into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott. It's from it's a Fabo poetry book that came out this year. And I think it it has a couple of sequences in it. My two favourite they're all good but the two that are relevant to what I'm talking about here is there's a series based on still life paintings. So each poem takes it has an epigraph of what the painting or the still life was and then he writes through particular experiences using the sort of moving the narrative viewfinder across the still life and then there's another sequence where each poem is a different mineral or gemstone and the amazing thing is that it's an incredibly beautiful sort of highly wrought shiny work as you'd expect from poems about beautiful still lifes and gemstones but it's also an incredibly raw exploration of an abusive sexual relationship that happened to him when he was a child. And so the fact that he's able to go to somewhere like very raw and traumatic and do like proper trauma work in the writing but also not make the poetry seem it doesn't have the aesthetic darkness and grime and brutality of the emotions that he's describing and it doesn't also seem like they're inappropriately conflicting in that way he some somehow makes the pain into something incredibly literally crystalline and beautiful in a way that I really admire. And I it's finally helped me come to terms with the fact that every time I go to a poetry and the event in London I introduce myself as Richard and they say oh Richard Scott and I have to say no I'm the other one but now I will it will be an honor to be mistaken for him because there he I could never do what he did in that book. So a lot of love to him the other book that I would love to give a shout out to is from a couple of years ago my good friend Will Harris wrote his second book and I was off the radar and didn't talk to him for a couple of years and was really out of touch and so I was really happy to get back in touch with him just as a friend and shocked and appalled to find out that he had published a second book without my knowledge or attention and so I'm now only just getting into it. It's called Brother Poem by Will Harris and he he had a great first collection called Rendang and he's really I haven't finished the second one yet but Brother Poem is it's a series of poems written to his brother who doesn't actually exist and so it's using this sort of imaginary brother as a way to explore lots of things in terms of his own life and his cultural background of being mixed race and things like that which I'm finding fascinating not least because it's a very good way of getting back in touch with a friend who I haven't known what's going on with him for a while and so exploring that with both by talking to him and also reading his life through his poetry is very good and I think you many people would like it even without him being their friend already. Are there two other things you'd like to recommend besides foraging is okay so one thing I'd like to recommend is someone just gave me a really good tip for an excellent refreshing hot weather snack which I am looking forward to the summer weather so that I can enjoy it. It's take a fruit of your choice this could be a foraged fruit like a I don't know what's a British sounding fruit a a green gauge or a damson or it could be grapes from the supermarket and you take the powder that you get to make instant what Americans would call jello but I would call jelly. Yeah okay slightly dampen the fruit and then roll the fruit in that powder and then put it straight into the freezer and it creates a kind of like an encapsulated sorbet with a sort of jellyish ice creamy layer on the outside.

SPEAKER_02

And I think that could benefit many people if they try that sounds kind of good yeah if we get any in the warm days in the summer in Scotland.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah that's not always and the a more serious thing that I'd like to recommend is swimming in very cold water. I have recently been doing a lot of work on myself and my emotional regulation and trying to turn around some depression and mental health issues I've had and my the the amount of mood boosts that I've experienced from just immersing myself in cold water was shocking and joyful and also slightly frustrating that I could have been doing this the whole time and it and I don't know I think it it depends on how your nervous system is and whether you're the kind of person to tolerate it. But I first noticed it actually in the St Andrews May dip as a tradition of the 1st of May getting into the sea and obviously in Scotland it's it was probably about 340 degrees Celsius in there which is they have ambulances stationed on the beach for hypothermia but I do remember the day after doing that just feeling like happy and content in a way that I almost never felt before and it was only years later that I realized that there is and there's this has been proven to happen we don't I'm not sure we know really why but dipping yourself in cold water for some people has a huge mood boosting effect that lasts a long time and I found that I can replicate that. So yesterday I it's about a two hour drive to my favourite beach and the east of England in Suffolk and instead of I was meant to be doing some writing and doing some paperwork and paying bills and I thought no I'm just gonna get in the car and drive and dive as hard as I can into the sea and I'm very I'm lucky that I could get away with doing that and didn't have other responsibilities yesterday but the feeling of plunging headlong into the North Sea in near freezing temperatures is one of the only times I truly feel in the moment and having that experience and then feeling the boost afterwards is something that I hope I'd like to share with other people because someone I was reading an article somewhere that said if you think about what it the history of humanity it's actually we're incredibly privileged for only the last hundred years or so to always be a fairly comfortable temperature and never to experience being absolutely cold to the bone and so it's not surprising that actually your body has things it can do to help you in those situations and that maybe going between hot and cold temperatures is quite useful.

SPEAKER_02

Great and where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01

They can find me at www.richardaosmond.com just let's just put out the disclaimer I am not Richard Osman from the British TV show Pointless and various he's also started writing books and even poetry now so he's all over my Google keywords. If you google my name which is Richard Osmond like Donnie and Marie it'll say did you mean Richard Osman and you click no and it says did you mean Richard Osman and you click no and it still shows him as the top result. I get his fan mail through my website which is Richardosmond.com and has pictures of me on it but I still get emails from him and I got an email the other day it was like I really liked what you said on TV about the state of politics and I had been on ITV news about rock paper scissors that poem I just read and I entertained a an email chain of about seven or eight emails before it became apparent that she also was a big fan of my work on the game show Pointless and my novel series The Thursday Murder Club and I had to disabuse of the fact that I was I was him and I'm not I'm actually myself which could be uh an exbook of poetry even Richard Osmond thank you so much thank you thank you for the money