So, here is the second of my all-week blogs to celebrate publication day for my new collection Hostile Environments on Thursday. Exciting news, copies are now winging their way to people who pre-ordered, so that’s good and today’s plant of the day is cuckoo pint or lords and ladies, or snakes head, or bobbins, or starch root or naked boys or adders meat or adders root or friars cowl or Adam and Eve or arum maculatum. I love a plant with many names – it speaks of loads of uses and/or an interesting appearance, or the ability to tweak human imagination. Where I come from in Bolton it was always called cuckoo pint so that’s the name I’ll stick to here. Above is a little photo (not from my garden) of the plant before the berries form which is meant to look like male and female genitalia (thus the lords and ladies and Adam and Eve names). I can just about see it at a stretch. Not sure about the derivation of the other names though would LOVE to know the adder-ish ones which must be lost in time. If anyone knows please fill me in, or maybe make up an origin story? The only other cuckoo pint name I do know the origin of is starch root – thus called by nuns in the sixteenth century who ran laundries. They used to dig it up and boil the root to extract the starch which was good for stiffening ruffs when such neck gear was all the rage amongst the rich and powerful. Cuckoo pint grows all over the wooded parts of my garden and though loads of folk think of it as a weed – a poisonous weed at that – I love them. They speak of stories and old wives tales, and folklore lost in time. And they really come into their own in winter when those red red berries shine like Yule lights in the long dark days and, though the berries are poisonous to humans – not so with birds, to whom they provide an important source of wintry nutrition. It’s funny how things can come into their own, in different times and places. Like my wee story Bagsy Blobsy No Back answers. I wrote this story way back in 2016, about my childhood, growing up in the 70s. I sent it to various mags and comps where it got rejected and/or long-listed nowhere. I rewrote it and it longlisted but didn’t shortlist in Flash 500. I then placed it into my memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones which was published in 2021. I read it (and other stories) at the online, in-covid lockdown launch in April 2021 and was overwhelmed by the love this story got. I then read it on BBC radio Cambridgeshire where they played it multiple times, so much did people enjoy its summertime nostalgia.
In 2024 I entered it for the brilliant South Warwickshire Lit Fest flash creative non-fiction comp – here’s a link to their site https://www.southwarwickshireliteraryfestival.com/
(you can enter published stories into this comp which I highly recommend as they are a friendly, lovely lot and do brilliant feedback as well as inviting winners to read at the event) and you guessed it – it won! So you know – stories can have afterlives and futures and other incarnations that you might not think they’d have – and rejections are just steps on the road to that magical moment of acceptance.
Just realised I haven’t mentioned the PhD application I said I’d write about today in yesterday’s blog. Guess it’ll have to wait till tomorrow then, but in the meantime, here’s me reading Bagsy Blobsy no Back Answers, the recording from that first book launch. https://youtu.be/GbKiP_DziQo
Jan Kaneen Creative and Other Writing 