Hygge Feature #27 Beating the Rain

The rain can ruin a camping trip and make our experience of the outdoors less pleasant than usual. Apply hygge to rescue the situation with togetherness, and generate your own warmth, as these two poems do.

 

 

 

Sharleen Spitieri joins the Guides

Guide Camp 1993
a night of rain and bin liners
teenage girls released into
Moniaive hills

d-i-y

except we didn’t

no fire to speak of
tinned supper
and the rain
the hateful rain
a long night ahead

until someone brings out a mini system
presses play—we scream
side-part hair
wet liquorice straps

a field of hasty
chrysalis
black writhe of
pubescent puperae

jerky marionettes
dancing deep into the dusk

Carolyn Patricia Richardson

First published in Scots Rock (Red Squirrel Press 2016)

 

School trip to Machynlleth Centre of Alternative Technology

For Dawn Ingram

Deep in Mid Wales, log cabins,
year sevens crying for posh hotels,
unremitting rain, mud puddles underfoot,
misty hills surrounding, windows blurred.

All activities rained off, what to do
but tinder the fire with cereal boxes,
stoke with dry logs; cook up a pan of soup,
bake bread from a packet mix;
settle down with blankets
and write poems all day.

No wifi, no phone signal, no screens
just alternative technology.
Dawn sets up a collage table
with old magazines, felt tips, pritt sticks,
shows them techniques
as I do with words next door.

In the evening, storytelling and poetry
by the fire, in pyjamas, with hot chocolate,
year sevens’ faces glowing.

Still spoken of as the best school trip ever
not despite but because of the weather.

 

Angela Topping

 

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