Poetry and creative writing by Phil Lowe
My second WordPress site created to express my more poetic writing.
When I was around the age of eight (early 1960s) I was give a large cake tin of marbles as a gift from a kind cousin who had grown out of playing marbles. They were beautiful and all shapes and sizes. I was young and innocent and a fellow schoolchild cheated me out of every single marble by making up rules in the playground. Over a lunch break I lost the lot to the laughing bully. In this poem I have decided that they were cursed in another’s hands. Phil Lowe.
Review.
“I wouldn’t normally pick up this type of book, but just fancied something amusing to read. I personally hate public transport, so thought I’d give it a go. I was not disappointed. Beautifully observed, anyone who travels on public transport will recognise these characters! From stroppy teenagers, to fractious children, drunks and people who squash you to death in your seat – all human life is here. If you are from Nottingham, even better, as most of the book is based there. Phil’s observations and ability to make sense out of the absurd is very clever, and he has a real talent for description. I’m actually there, on the bus with him, wiping at the steamed up window and listening to such bizarre comments as: “White dog poo? Haven’t seen any in years. I wonder if it is to do with Brexit?”
If you fancy a lovely, light-heated book to pick up and read – maybe on your own bus journey – this is for you.”
Natalia Wieczorek. London
Review
Anyone who has the ‘pleasure’ of public transport, needs to pick this book up! Witty, and cleverly observed, Phil Lowe takes us on a journey, literally a journey! Trains, trams, buses…. the foibles and idiosyncrasies of the human-being laid bare, as Phil takes up his back seat on the bus and takes stocks of the British public. Read it on the bus, read it on the loo, but read it you must.
Jo McLeish. Leicester
Please consider supporting my new humour writing by purchasing a copy of The Total Joy of Travelling On Public Transport. You won’t regret it!
PHIL LOWE
Some of you may recall that I said that I was going to use my redundancy money to allow me to take six months off to complete a writing project called The Total Joy of Travelling On Public Transport. It’s a book of humour. Well, I finished the project a few days ago and the manuscript (all 60 A4 pages) has now been emailed to my publisher. I am hoping that it will be on sale on Amazon (Kindle download and paperback) late November or early December. I am relying on it selling for my future income. Any support from you guys would be much appreciated.
Here are the first couple of pages to whet your appetite.
Ah, the total joy of travelling on public transport. Do you love travelling with the delightfully varied public and their dubious electronic gadgets and often odious habits? Do you mind when the person behind you has a full blown argument on their mobile phone with the speaker positioned at extra loud, just so you are sure to get both argumentative sides of the mutual yelling? Is it OK for someone to apply their nail polish on a hot bus, thereby nearly choking the other passengers to death with the toxic fumes? Would special mobile confessionals built into modes of public transport ease the congestion of verbal diarrhoea from total strangers? Do you balk at getting up close and personal with the great unwashed? Are you the kind of person that finds the joys of travelling on public transport highly amusing or, would you rather just throw yourself under a bus?
Many thousands of people in Great Britain travel to work and back on public transport. We commuters use the buses, trains and trams, on average, around five days of the week. We endure the pleasure of other passengers talking loudly on their mobiles. Season after season, we delight in strangers coughing their germ clustered spittle all over us, almost to the point where we wonder if it is actually raining inside the vehicle. Some other passengers sit crunching sweets like a starving deaf horse and some salivate wildly as they delve into endless bags of stinky squid and blue cheese flavoured crisps. And, quite often – well, let’s just say it – it gets much worse! I know. I have been there. I mislaid the tee shirt and bought an annual travel pass.
I used to work for a major supermarket as a butcher and fishmonger. During my eight and a half years of working there I made twenty combined bus and tram journeys a week to work. That’s four a day, five days a week, totalling approximately a thousand minutes or sixteen and a half hours sitting on public transport in order to get to work. That’s proper commitment for you. Most days the commuting necessitated early morning travel and late afternoon returning home in the rush hour traffic. On a Thursday and Friday it was midday travel to work and then I’d be travelling home at night with a bus load of excitable half naked and semi pissed young folk heading into Nottingham to go clubbing. Or whatever young folk do these days. Half naked and pissed Bible study perhaps.
Occasionally I read whilst travelling, but mostly I just people watched. It was fascinating. As a writer and observer of life I was making notes and sometimes recording my observations onto a Dictaphone and trying not to be obvious about it. My inner comedian regularly found himself seeking out comedy gold in the habits and relationships of my fellow travellers. When the chance came I would write my wry observations down in a notebook or on scraps of paper at work. Little did I realise how useful they would be as aide memoires in eventually writing this book.
It was just a writer’s habit to document things and to amuse myself at the time. Like many people, I love to people watch but less (first joke alert) through high powered binoculars these days. Often events were funny or disturbing or even both and I assumed I would definitely remember them without recording them in some way. Even an hour later I would be trying to tell a quirky travelling incident to a mate at work and I would struggle to recall what had made me smile or nearly throw up on the journey. Try doing those both at once. Or better still, don’t. Eventually, once this book seemed like it was going to be a reality, I made it a rule to make sure I documented.
Most of the stories in this book are focussed on my travels around Nottinghamshire. Some of the stories occurred at the time when the Broadmarsh shopping centre bus station existed. It has since been demolished and now the massive building site is slowly being re-developed into a new travel centre with a new bus station. No doubt, the poorly looking black foot pigeons that made their crude razor wire edged homes, in and around, the old bus station will return to re-home themselves in the future pigeon friendly, steel and glass palace of bus travel. In the meantime they will be putting their crippled avian feet up in sunny Spain and knocking back the Spanish beers whilst topping up their suntans. Who can blame them? Sometimes, I wish I was a pigeon.
Critically, a few years ago, a new tram line was built and I made full use of it to convey me from Nottingham to work in the small town of Beeston. I was delighted by this as it often meant less bus travel where it felt it was like travelling in a mobile doctor’s surgery where all the travellers violently coughed and sneezed throughout the journey. Or as I half jokingly called it – the voyage of the eternally damned. Life can be as random as getting on the wrong bus twice in one day and believe me I have done that.
Reflecting that, the nature of this book wryly meditates on my travelling life in the following non-chronological and I suppose, rather random stories, of the total joys of a daily bus and tram commute to work. So, lovely readers, please dip into my amusing retrospective tales and enjoy my surreal humour. Like most forays into the public arena of life one encounters a degree of bad language and references to sex. Shock horror! This book has its share of these but my main reason for writing this is to share my experiences and daft flights of fancy. Enjoy the ride and hold on tight! Ding ding!
Phil Lowe
This red chair is part of the furniture at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham and seeing it the other day brought back memories of the 1970s when I was a big cinema goer and often got myself all romantic and shyly asked a few girls out on dates. Like many young men I found myself stood outside the ABC cinema or the Odeon cinema in Derby all alone on a winter evening, constantly looking at my Timex watch to see how late my date was. Of course I had my more than my unfair share of being stood up i.e. dateless and mortally embarrassed. So in this poem I got to thinking of a fantasy of myself standing or sitting waiting for decades and years for the one date I hoped would lead to a snog on the back row or even a young romance.
This poem could equally have been called Stage Fright as it alludes to an actor finding themselves in the toilet practically glued to the seat with tricky bowels. Their show is about to begin but they daren’t leave the safety of the dressing room toilet. Phil Lowe
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The Poetic Tourist Experience.
A sheet of newspaper flew across the City Hall square.
Caught up in its debates and comments I took the hands
Of a child in print and swirled in the buffeting currents.
Pigeons gawped amazed and extricated themselves from the
Crusty roof-tops that find few witnesses in the flustered
Cramp alleys below.
Over the habit tapping offices; the rabbit warren crevices,
Deep dank, blue lit and piss stained corridors corrupt in
Search of sunlight and good, we floated.
Slapped by rogue winds, the news sheet, my kite, was ripped from
My grasp and without aerial support I fell a full two inches.
Floor sixteen of the Royal Car Park. Azure ceiling, design by God.
The time is twelve hundred hours and twenty-five minutes.
Photo to secure a moment in a fraction of a second.
The city shifts perspective, reflective in the Royal Hotel.
Two lone cars shift in the breeze and cannot wait until the summer.
Hot tarmac – cool wind in their aerials.
Top floor, level sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen. Twelve.
Clank. Slither metal box downwards. Graffiti. Rev-Atomic.
No idea what this means. Stop. Man gets in. Just licked shoes.
Brief encounter with his briefcase. Documents soaked in whisky.
Stop. Pause for door. Street level. We go out and out we go.
A public house. A quick drink. Blurred conversations in the background.
Back room gossip. “I heard this… She told me that… What’s he writing?
The dog had to have an anal injection. It hates going to the vet.
And it never eats the biscuits the vet gives him. Wonder why?”
Toss back the KP nuts. A breeze catches the empty packet.
Broken match on the table. Broken marriage in the corner.
Laughter running up the stairs. A glass breaks behind the bar.
I take a photo through lace. Shutter closes. No-one bats an eyelid.
Not for a fraction of a second. Finger collection barman sings, painfully.
A clutch of Norwegian motorcyclists queue at The Tales of Robin Hood.
Blonde and padded thick with leather they swing and creak through
Two hundred and fifty thousand fake leaves and fake medieval forest.
They dodge false arrows flying and thudding wood split past ears.
There is wood smoke in the air and smell of robbery pervades.
None of it true but passes for an entertainment for one historic hour.
Outside the police chase a man who tries to photograph an ice cream.
A chewed cornet is the only evidence. He is arrested anyway for asking
Where the money goes from fountains. Some people are crazy and some
People buy two pounds of strawberries for a pound. Some grow their own.
“Two punnet of strawberries for a pound! Fresh ripe strawberries!
Come on duck! Two for a pound. You’ll not get um cheaper elsewhere.
What a bargain. It’s a bargain! What a bargain! Big bargains Barry me!
Treat yer lady. Treat yerself. Treat the cat with cream. Treat the kiddies!
Sorry sir. No photographs allowed of my strawberries. Not now. Not never.
Not in a month of strawberry picking Sundays”
Lunchtime. Afternoon Tea. Yorkshire Tea. Very English. Very indulgent.
Cucumber sandwiches. White and green crunchy fluff. Fresh scone and
Raspberry Jam with real pips. One pound eighty -five. Table number five.
They play the same jazz tape heard a million thousand times by the staff.
In the distance the Forte Crest Hotel sits discrete amongst passing ghosts.
The sun breaks through outside and a couple shift into a heavy leg dance.
He frees her heel from the grate. He is her knight in shining Armani.
She sports a baggy shirt that hides a figure too large; a figure borne and cultured
From too many English frizzles. Home made pork sausage, smokey bacon,
Grilled to perfection tomatoes. Hot French croissants with just melting butter.
All this is as chocoholic tongue tempting as another Belgian chocolate.
An oily pigeon fights a lukewarm chip cascading murder scene tomato sauce.
A man slips on a Pukka pie. Arms and legs akimbo. He taps a stationary car.
Alarm boops electric and signals falsely – alerting the world to a state of theft.
The chip shop owner swears his deep annoyance. Fifth fucking time that day.
At Nottingham Castle human traffic crosses in front of the camera’s lens.
A battered yellow Cortina smokes to a halt. The travellers are out on the town.
Women checking hems for creases, blousey blouse tops for glimpses.
They disappear into the fag ash Old Castle Inn. They are in there somewhere
Cackling like witches and oblivious that Robin Hood’s statue is listening.
A footprint fossil lined in ochre threatens to pull away from the sediment.
It dreams its dream to hop skip and jump on real paving slabs.
A pregnant woman in big red glasses passes passing wind and blushes.
Tandoori wafts out in a ventral and nasal attack and plays havoc with the gastric.
A boy seems to leap down from nowhere and runs into the traffic.
He howls like a wolf child at their hooting and tooting.
Women slurp tomato soup from a flask, hassled by elderly bible thumpers.
“It’s a sin to drink tomato soup in public! Red soup is the devil’s drink!”
A parish vicar stands laughing at these sad reps of God forgetting that he is
Still wearing his wooden crucifix and starched dog collar.
Skate-boarders take over the Market Square. Baggy trousered boy racers
Surf and hop skip slap onto the crunching crush bone hard pavement.
Rainbows of gritty scrape rise and weep blood on adolescent limbs.
Hard faced the pained youths limp-skid onward and upward to spiral
Over a legion of city shoppers intent on avoiding confrontation.
A flute player plays his tired out dog to sleep.
An electric guitar wails for the homeless.
In a dark dank stinking underpass. People ignore it,
Passing by at twenty-four frames a second.
Out of the corner of its crusty eye the dog
Spots a spinning one pence piece and eats it.
I take the canal path home, the pink waters gently hiding
So many rusting Sainsbury’s trolleys and a child’s once favourite bike,
So long missing but not forgotten. Fish float by white belly up.
I pass under Victorian iron structures yellow cream speckled
With the excrement of fowl behaviour.
Phil Lowe
Written in 1993 and edited in 2019.
PS: Some of the places written about no longer exist as Nottingham City centre has developed over time. The pigeons referred to are all now in pigeon retirement homes by the canal side.
Click on the East Midlands Theatre image below for more from Phil Lowe
Our Amazon UK link to drama and poetry books. Great offers.
In this poem I imagined a couple where one of them was greedy and always took some of their partner/spouses food with permission. This habit has been going on years until one day the victim takes their revenge!
Sitting amongst the pink blossom on Ruddington Village Green Nottinghamshire) I was inspired to write about an old blue Nissan car parked nearby and thought it would be fun to do the poem in a slightly oriental style.
A short poem created after seeing a homeless guy playing the piano extremely well in Nottingham Railway Station foyer. It made me realise that we don’t know the individual’s background and the skills they possess – sometimes we only see the beggar on the street.
This small replica old fashioned dustbin was sitting outside a Vintage Clothes shop on Goose Gate in Nottingham. Just seeing its tiny self sat there made me laugh on a day when a laugh was most needed. Thanks bin. You’ve bin fab.
Poetry and creative writing by Phil Lowe 