Steve_Bamlett_blog

I wrote some verse for Catherine’s birthday and read it to her yesterday on our celebration dinner at Alishaan in Durham, the present from Geoff and I on her special day.

As usual with me for some birthdays, the verse is an acrostic like that Mr Elton prepares for Harriet Smith to please Emma in the eponymous novel, Emma by Jane Austen. Jane thought silly men wrote acrostics to display their vanity to a vainer audience. She may be right (who am I to say it is not so!) about me. But even Jane could never be right in this opinion about the lovely friend of both Geoff and me, Catherine, its subject and audience both.

Here  is the acrostic verse:

CATHERINE cast a line, and caught a fish,
AS flowing bursts and floods of water vied
TO undermine her: Cast a spell to wish
HER stand forever still in eyes that cried 
EVEN as they cast in verse short lines and
RHYMES praying naiads to make Cate still stand
IN pushback on time’s riverbed of sand.
NO more can I than cast a line that tries
EVEN to catch those eyes where her truth lies.

Here is the version I gave her last night and from which I read aloud, the photographs are from her best catch, husband Paul.

Paul took her to Beamish Museum to get hair done in fifties style at the Neamish Fifties museum, the before and after, with Paul in the before, is below:

With love

Especially to dearest Catherine today

Steven xxxxxxx