Wind

It was not until I was studying the wonderful Ted Hughes' poem 'Wind' for the old O-Level that a thought hit my often addled adolescent brain, that you could only see the effects of the wind and not the wind itself. Not a great discovery I can hear you saying, but an interesting one nonetheless. It took me back to being thirteen and having a great, bumptious music teacher called C. Sharp (we never did found out what the C stood for). Mr Sharp was telling us about a particular composer who had been alive at the same time as the Pre-Raphaelite artist I was trying to counterfeit in Art, and how they would drink coffee together in some London club. This was earth-shattering news to my spotty ears as up to then I had kept artists, writers and musicians in their own boxes. They weren't allowed to fraternise and influence each other, oh no! Another revelation for the late developer! Which reminds me, I must stop using as many exclamation marks. One of my sixth form students made me feel guilty the other day because he said when he read my comments with exclamation marks he could hear me saying, Waqar.......!!! and it made him flinch in his bedroom.

Back to the wind. If you haven't read it, here is an extract:

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.

and the rest is here.

The effects of the wind can be seen on my neighbour's barbeque kite, not yet furled in for the winter and the only colour on a drab day.