Devon Eccentric Colin Shaddick (no it’s official – he came third in this year’s competition), dropped us a poetic line to explain a bit about the origins of his award-winning eccentricity. You could get more of an insight at the Salon del Eccentrica, an Eccentric evening at the Broomhill Art Hotel, Barnstaple on Thursday, June 18 at 7.30pm.
Eccentric! Who, Me?
Maybe this is how it all started?
Imagined kazoo solo.
One hooded and very blue day
when I was at a most sensitive stage,
I was struggling
to wring some temperate words
from the chilly language
that shot to-and-fro,
above my rattling head.
I decided to try out
a few investigational expressions of my own.
I needed to make my mark:
draw a line in the sand.
I waited for a fleeting lull
in the daily hubbub
that continually clanged
from the pots and pans
in the steamy kitchen.
I made my entrance
and Mother turned towards me,
her arms now motionless
and her reddened elbows quivered
just above the popping soapsuds
and waited for the off.
I smiled, and determined to show off my verbal skills,
began my tirade…
They were not well-received words.
I was not allowed to continue with my experiment.
My father hurriedly interjected
and promised he would give me a thick ear…
in a minute.
I had no memory of him giving me anything, before.
I was totally flabbergasted
when he said he’d give me something -
and so speedily too.
I so wanted him to give me something.
I then pictured myself with one thick ear…
and decided it would look quite daft.
I told him that I thought it would look daft,
but he took no notice
and he up and gave me one anyway.
But it wasn’t within the minute!
No.
He said he’d give me one…
in a minute.
It took much longer than a minute.
By the time my thick ear arrived,
a good twenty minutes or so had passed!
Can incidents like the one I’ve just described above,
have a lasting affect on a person’s life?
Time moved on and I slipped inaudibly along with it…
Then, one day it happened –
I think I said something like,
Eccentric…Eccentric!
Who, me?
I’d never given much thought to eccentricity, really…
that is until they said I was eccentric.
They, were the British Broadcasting Corporation.
An eccentric was the last thing I’d contemplated being.
After all, as far as I was concerned
it wasn’t me who was heading in the wrong direction!
Vivid pictures then began to flow through my mind:
eccentrics as mad, frizzy-haired inventors,
or mumbling white-coated professors
ensconced in leaded-light, oak-panelled lodgings …
Stereotype images like that.
So, how did I get into this situation?
I vividly remember my dad treating me like an outsider,
but my mum often said she thought I was an artist
and that poetry was the most noble art.
So, when I left school and flew the uncomfortable nest,
I knuckled-down and made a new start.
I bought myself a Moleskine notebook… in black.
The sort that all the best poets
painters and composers are said to use.
It had an elastic band to hold it tightly shut…
(for when I wasn’t ready for the muse.)
With tried and tested equipment like that
how on earth could any decent publisher refuse?
But I’d get this recurring dream.
“Oh,” I’d be saying out loud.
“If I held the post of ‘Chair of Professor of Poetry’
at a famous old university,
I’d kiss goodbye to adversity.”
I’d be repeating this phrase over and over.
But, I’d be as happy as old Larry.
What a great way
to spend each and every busy-buzzing day.
I’d just tarry… there,
reading piles of good books, (and my guitar mags)
and every so often, quietly gaze down
from my dusty old window
at the pigeons pecking and puffing themselves up
on a perfectly manicured lawn,
in the quaint and quiet quadrangle.
I’d chat to the poetry students
in a fatherly-like way.
(They have scant knowledge
about anything in the real world,
you know.)
“This is the way poetry’s done,”
I would say to each one,
then show them a selection of
my very popular
self-published pamphlets.
They would probably pipe-up and say,
“Caw that’s brilliant, that is, sir.”
Then I’d rock back on my heels
and say to them: “Off you go then.
Order yourselves some copies from Mr Jenkins,
in the lovely old library downstairs,
and give ’em a good read.
But, no cheating though.
Make up some of your own stuff.”
They would then say,
“Oh, sir, pleeease!”
Then I’d relent and say:
“Well, go on then,
but change the words about a bit.”
I’d tap out my pipe on the pitted stone window ledge
and chuckle to myself, muttering quietly:
“Huh, bloody kids, who’d ’ave ’em?”
Then I’d sing a little song.
Who drew
the very thin line
between sanity and madness? (X3)
Who drew,
who… drew… it?
‘Aren’t all eccentrics bonkers, though,
and think of nothing other than their pet subjects,
and even if they attempted to repair the most simple of things
they’d turn out to be bodgings?
‘Their heads are in the clouds.’
That’s what people say.
Then again,
I do tend to engage my brain before my mouth
and some people have to wait ages
to get an answer.
Sometimes it can be as long as…
say, a goose would take
to complete its hazardous journey south.
I don’t always mean to be rude,
but you should understand
that I like a lot of solitude.
It’s not that I’m particularly shy,
it’s just because…that’s why.
‘An eccentric slice of a British way of life’,
that’s how I was described…
and all because I wrote Japanese-type verse
called haiku.
They thought it rather strange that I sometimes compose
when I’m riding on my baiku.
They wanted me on Radio 4.
I was to talk to Clare Balding about my poetic style,
and while I was explaining it, she would interject a bit.
It was something new for their programme, Ramblings.
Ramblings is a broadcast where everything depends
on supposedly interesting folk and their amblings.
That’s how the final die was cast.
Normality, for me, had breathed its last.
I was now officially ‘Eccentric’
and the BBC had nailed me to their mast.
Whatever happens in the future
as a result of this whirl of eccentricity…
will be secondary.
But that crowning moment
at the ‘Eccentric Club’ will always remain
with me and be the best,
because it’s where I got my title:
‘The Great British Eccentric 2009.’
I’d passed their test.
It now gives me the opportunity
to get so many dark secrets off my chest.
And did you know that…
If you say the word
kazoo, backwards,
it reads, oozak?
It then sounds more
like a question:
‘Oozak?’
That’s probably why
they never called
it that.
Come and enjoy Devon – book a hotel and get away!
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