Pink Cadillac

Despite overcrowded roads, rising fuel prices, polluting carbon emissions and horrific accident statistics, our love affair with the automobile still continues. For many of us the car we drive reflects what we wish to say about ourselves. Just as with the cut of our clothes and the size of our house, our choice of car can reflect the image we want to portray to the world.

Psychologists say this choice can betray a great deal about our politics and personality, about our insecurity, about our seeming need to project ideas of power, success, wealth and virility. Or the lack of those things. Sometimes it seems impossible to do or buy anything without that action or choice showing to the outside world a stance or viewpoint or perceived projection which we feel is maybe simplified, clichéd or just plain wrong.

I must admit I've never been much interested in cars. Nor in clothes or houses for that matter. I'd rather be anonymous, and blend into the background, rather than conciously or unconsciously make a statement. I don't want an expensive look-at-me car, a wardrobe full of fancy shirts, a posh house stuffed with burglar alarms and surrounded by fences and locked gates. I'm more of a second-hand VW Golf, jeans and tee-shirt, Victorian terrace kind of guy. (And this in itself is also making a strong statement about me. You see, we can't get away from it!)

This poem comes from The Green Book Of Poetry, edited by Ivo Mosley.

To a young man driving his own car

So you're already driving your own car
I'll bet your friends are jealous
As you were learning to drive
I thought how splendid for you
To go speeding everywhere
Getting any kind of licence is good.
I often said
Now you speed about in your car
you can't see the roadside trees changing
with the seasons
you can't see the merchants selling fruit
or fish at the roadside
you can't see the woman running along
with a sick child slung on her back
Always on the look-out for traffic-patrols
and red lights
your eyes fixed straight ahead
you speed about
your eyes have grown sharper
your mind has grown busier
and though the price of fuel
may go up even more
and exhaust fumes block your view
you drive around
and do not intend to walk anyway I'm sure
and those years of youth that people spend
walking or running
getting about by bus or subway
you are spending at over 40 mph
When I see you speeding along in your car
I feel you have isolated yourself
too lightly
and my heart grows heavy

KWANG-KYU KIM, Korean, b. 1941, tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé

Lie Down And Listen To The Rain

Leaving Combe Martin in the rain ...

Looking back on Water Mouth in the rain ...

The sun shone briefly over Ilfracombe ...

And in Torrs Park a brisk wind was blowing ...

This is Croyde Bay beyond Woolacombe, where I camped on a 'Holiday Park' campsite for the night. It was pretty dire. I could find nothing to eat. There was no hot water in the Portakabin showers. Though the rain held off momentarily ...

Here's a poem about rain, taken from one of my treasured poetry collections, The Green Book Of Poetry, edited by Ivo Mosley. This poetry anthology, published in 1993, is little known, and I love it. It's a book I used to sell when working as a freelance publishers' sales agent in the 1990s. Mosley visited Japan back in the 1970s. He then read Japanese at Oxford (there are lots of Far Eastern poems in the book) and subsequently became a stoneware ceramicist in Devon. Its a constantly surprising collection - don't look in here for all your usual anthologized pieces - and each poem is linked by Mosley's own perceptive, humanistic, eco-aware commentary. Although this poem from the anthology describes the rains of spring, it was easy for me to identify with the same feeling during the rains of Devonshire's late summer...

Third Day Of The Third Month, Rain: Written To Dispel My Depression

I go out the door; it's raining, but I can't go back now,
so I borrow someone's bamboo hat to wear for a while.
Spring has tinted ten thousand leaves, and I didn't even know;
the clouds have taken a thousand mountains and swept them away.

I look for flowers in the village
but they hide from me on purpose;
and even when I find them, they only sadden me.
It would be better to lie down
and listen to the rain
in the spring mountains -
a quick downpour, then a few scattered drops.

As spring dies, the scenes grow more beautiful:
the poet will remember them for the rest of his life.
Level fields overflowing with green -
wheat in every village;
soft waters reflecting red -
flowers on every bank.

YUNG WAN-LI, Chinese, 1127-1206, translated by J CHAVES