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Poet Phil Poole |
Poole’s poetry casts cold eye over cancer
PHIL Poole has had the news we all dread. Whittington doctors found a tumour in his gullet was malignant.
He was diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer on Easter Sunday.
I caught up with him at his home in Archway yesterday (Wednesday) when he spoke frankly about his desperate circumstances.
“I don’t think anything can prepare you for that moment when they tell you,” he told me. “The nurse was most kind, there was no delay and the doctor wore a summer dress. She asked me to say something of my life. I did, then I remembered the words I had learned that are on WB Yeats’ gravestone: ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by’.
“Having terminal cancer is like being on death row – every morning you wake up is a reprieve. At first the chemotherapy feels like a sledgehammer knocking your brain. You feel groggy. When I get through it I feel euphoric.”
Mr Poole, 64, is coping in the only way he knows how: by chronicling each moment of the experience in a series of short poems. He will be reading some of them at an event at 3.30pm in Torriano Meeting House tomorrow (Friday).
Inspired to become a poet by WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and TS Eliot, he has become a regular face there over the past five years.
He recently edited a collection of poems called Torriano Nights – A Festschrift for John Rety.
Mr Poole told me he would use his platform at the event tomorrow to praise the care he has had under the NHS. In particular, his nurses and the consultant oncologist Dr Pauline Leonard, one of the country’s leading authorities on gastrointestinal and lung cancers.
He will also be talking about his career as a master carver and his work repairing “brattishing” – little decorative crestings – in the Houses of Parliament.
“I suppose that was the high point in my career,” said Mr Poole. “I had never heard of brattishing before, so I had to do some research. They are quite complex little things. Each one took me a week. In the end, I restored 138 and the whole project took me five years.”
‘Priorities’? It’s time to put your house in order
“THE services provided do not meet the council’s priorities.”
If you are a voluntary group, just hope that you never see these words in a letter from the Town Hall, because it could be the municipal equivalent of the black cap judges used to don when uttering the death sentence.
The Torriano Meeting House were unlucky recipients of just such a letter this week. I mentioned last week how this unique nurturing ground of poetic talent was faced with finding an extra £65 per month as the Town Hall gets tough on rate payments from voluntary groups.
This week, their appeal to be spared from paying was rejected.
Aside from its lively regular poetry readings, the Meeting House offers a base for a wide range of community groups: local history for the elderly, Friends of Abu Dis, workshops of every kind, rehearsal space for drama groups. For many it is a lifesaver in these grim economic times.
If that does not meet the council’s priorities, it doesn’t say much for the council.
Theo’s cold shoulder over pay freeze quiz
GOING straight for the jugular, Labour councillor Theo Blackwell asked Moira Gibb, the council’s chief executive, who earns nearly £200,000 a year, whether she would accept a pay freeze in the economic crisis.
But before Ms Gibb could reply at the scrutiny meeting last week, Tory Andrew Marshall gallantly intervened insisting: “We are not going to make up council policy on the hoof.”
To her rescue also came Lib Dem council chief Keith Moffitt who said Camden paid well to ensure it attracted talented staff. All this had been sparked off by an article by Steve Bundred in the Observer calling for “severe pay restraint” in the public sector.
Readers will recall that Bundred – the present chief executive of the Audit Commission – was Camden's chief executive in the 90s. Roughly, Bundred today earns a little more than Ms Gibb, £212,000 a year.
He started his career as a researcher for the National Union of Mineworkers and was later a London Labour politician before becoming Camden’s financial director, finally taking the top job at the Town Hall.
I am sure that Bundred and Ms Gibb feel the same pain as many much lower down the income league.
Havana great time: Vester casts his lens over Cuba
THIS picture come from the lens of Ron Vester, a Hampstead-based photographer who cut his teeth working for a newspaper in Jamaica.
He has been away from his Belsize Park beat for a few weeks on a trip back to to Caribbean and managed to fit in a visit to Cuba, to chronicle the 50th anniversary of the Revolution.
In a note accompanying his pictures – they will be on display at the Heath Library in Keats Grove next month – Ron says he had originally worried about walking around the city and taking lots of pictures, but instead, he found lots of willing subjects.
“No one appears to notice me as I walk around old Havana, with my large camera and zoom lens,” his handwritten notes say.
“It had been nine years since I had last gone to Havana. It still looked exactly the same, crumbling buildings and sensuous old cars.”
Ron noticed a crucial difference between the young in Cuba and those in London.
“Healthy, lean young people enjoying themselves walking by the sea,” he says.
“I notice none have mobile phones or iPods.”
To some, this may seem a product of America’s embargo on their tiny neighbour. To others, myself included, it could be construed as a blessing in disguise.
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Your comments:
Phil Poole shows amazing courage. We all wish his treatment to be successful. The item on the Torriano Meeting House beggars belief. There's more to local life than financial gymnastics. My heart bleeds for the poor councillors earning in excess of £200,000. The majority of residents can only dream about that kind of money.
J. Kerkhoven
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