My wife Jilly and I live in a small East Hertfordshire village. A bit too small, but that’s beside the point here and perhaps a topic to explore on another occasion. We are very conscious of our good fortune, and it was certainly an advantage during lockdown. One of the few things we were able to do then was to go walking in the beautiful and too-little known local countryside, and there are many possibilities from our doorstep in all directions.
There are obvious pleasures in country walks; the exercise, the clean air, and the opportunity to study nature at close quarters. Time to talk and listen to each other as well. But not only each other, for the people you pass along the way have turned out to be worth listening to as well. At first we weren’t listening, and often there wouldn’t have been anything to hear even if we had been. Self-conscious and discreet, people pause their conversations and pass with a greeting, continuing when the transient company has passed. As I suppose we tend to do ourselves as well. But many did not, and carried on talking audibly as we passed, without the customary mutual acknowledgement.
It was a while before I consciously realised this, and started to listen to what I had up to then just been hearing. And it soon struck me that these parings of conversation were in themselves quite fascinating. I can’t remember exactly when I realised their potential as threads in the weft of a larger verbal tapestry, but I started to dictate what I’d heard into my mobile’s voice recorder. Once home, I played them back to assess their creative potential, listening to their subtleties and subtexts, turning them this way and that.
Not so much objets trouvés as objets entendus, and detached from their original context, these fragments have an independent afterlife, like abandoned rocket stages now in orbit, or heading under inertia to infinity. We have named them ‘Robinsons’, but you must stay with me for the explanation. Here’s a couple by way of illustration:
a phone call at 9.30
on Tuesday they sent a card
Having got them home and spread them out on the table, so to speak, what can you do with them? I thought that they could be re-arranged into a sort of Dada-esque poem, where there may or may not be a connection between each line or image. It doesn’t matter, that’s the whole point. It’s an abstract form, akin to casting the Tarot, and for the reader to interpret. Jilly on the other hand suggests that a Robinson might provide the inspiration for a story, which must include it somewhere or be written around it. You might have other suggestions; I’d be pleased to hear them. My first Robinson-inspired poem is this:
Bracing for impact,
you can’t sleep on your bike,
which I think is good.
The first and hopefully the only time
that will have to happen.
I didn’t spend much time with him.
Punctuation and capitalisation is up to you. My only rule is that each Robinson has a separate line, and you can’t add any other helpful words like conjunctions to improve the flow. But these are my rules. You can set your own if you wish.
Finally, why ‘Robinsons’? The answer reveals interesting things about the way we make meaning. Finding it hard to talk about these phrases, they needed a name. Fumbling for a description, I’d compared them to ‘filfots’, the figurative and geometrical decorative devices in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Jilly might have misheard this as ‘Philpots’, and remembered Trevor Philpot, a television news reporter of the 1960s. She might then have fast-forwarded to the present, and thought of the Today programme’s Nick Robinson. Hence ‘Robinsons’. I was puzzled at first, but appreciating the name’s appropriate randomness, happily embraced it. Jilly is uncertain about whether this is how it happened, but no matter, I like the explanation, and as with so much else in the way we construct our understanding of the world, it’s based as much upon misapprehension as verifiable truth. How we light upon the things we know, or think we know, is a fascinating byway of its own.
So now, over to you. Get out and about; tune in and record, like so many private detectives. Robinsons have a diverse habitat and may be urban as well as rural, so the potential is endless.
