Sara Goodwins was named as the fourth Manx Bard in 2017. This week she shares one of her latest poems and explains what led her to write it.

There is a lot of concern - rightly - about the threat to lives and livelihoods from the pandemic, but reading stories of unremitting gloom can get depressing. I thought we could do with a bit of light relief.

This poem is therefore unashamedly about something fairly trivial. That’s the beauty of poetry; you can write about the day-to-day things just as well as about the great philosophical questions and often find a way in from the small to the large.

Before you read the poem I should acknowledge that even my nearest and dearest would agree than I am not much of a cook. I have half a dozen recipes which seem to work and that is mainly what we eat, unless my husband cooks. I can make a decent cake but, regrettably, we can’t live on cake alone.

I am however, perhaps oddly, fairly good at making preserves: jams and chutneys, all that sort of thing. It’s perhaps even odder in that I don’t like jam or chutney much, but the family do, so whatever I make usually disappears.

Incidentally, the traditional difference between what constitutes jam, chutney and pickle is what you use to preserve the ingredients. For jam and marmalade you use sugar, for pickle you use vinegar, and for chutney you use both sugar and vinegar.

However, if you’re making it, as far as I’m concerned you can call it whatever you like.

What limits the conveyor belt of preserve production for me is not so much the lack of ingredients as the lack of jars to put the finished product in.

It is not unknown for me to have seriously underestimated the number of jars needed and to end up with some left over preserve which wouldn’t fit into the jars I had.

This gets stored in various receptacles in the fridge with strict instructions to the family to ’eat that first’. Please don’t donate jars! Thank you, but it would embarrass the newspaper and we have nowhere to store them.

So I have been pluming myself on my marmalade making. Well, as this poem explains, perhaps no longer¦

A Sticky Situation

I made some grapefruit marmalade

(To slather a baguette);

The recipe was new, unmade -

The damned stuff didn’t set.

I peered into the marinade;

The mess was clearly runny,

Like slightly gloopy lemonade;

I didn’t find it funny.

I checked amounts, the fruit I’d weighed,

And boiled it all once moreâ?¦

It went off like a hand grenade!

Swamped stove and kitchen floor.

I switched the heat off and surveyed;

What had been clean and neat

Was covered by a thick cascade,

A sticky yellow sheet.

It coated cupboard tops and sprayed

The fridge, it stuck congealing

On the toaster, like some weird pomade,

It even splashed the ceiling.

I seized the mop and ricocheted

The suds from floor to side.

Hours later, very well valeted,

The place had - nearly - dried.

The unused jars still stood arrayed

In rows along the dresser,

Marooned, their emptiness displayed,

A gift for my successor.

We all prefer our food homemade,

And cheer our home-grown crop,

But next time I want marmalade

I’ll buy it, in a shop.

by Sara Goodwins

Fourth Manx Bard

www.manxbard.im