THE BIG BOOK SWAP (re-scheduled to 20 Jan) helps to raise book funds for schools in Africa and Ian joins in. 

 SNOW NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

It’s always a blanket of snow, have you noticed ?
It’s never a duvet, or a sheet;
There’s chaos all over and treachery where
Some cars got stuck on a street;
It was the coldest night since records began
Except tonight will be colder
And language freezes in a cliché storm
And, before we’re very much older
There’ll be panic buying of milk and bread
And icicles caught in a camera’s eye
A snowball just missing a reporter’s head
And icebound aircraft refusing to fly
Because, as stories go, this one’s narrative
Is underdeveloped to say the least:
It snowed. We froze. But the news imperative
Means we keep bringing crumbs to the TV feast:
Kids sledging. Trains standing. Monkeys with baked spuds.
Then we’ll all forget the weather...till next time it floods.

© Ian McMillan 8.1.10 for Newsnight, BBC2

Ian tours with The Ian McMillan Orchestra whose cd project Sharp Stories featured on The South Bank Show and at BBC Proms Plus. www.theianmcmillanorchestra.com 

'Words and music. That's it. You've done it!' Lancaster Litfest'09
'verbal wit and brilliant musicianship makes it a kind of Flanders and Swann with the subject matter firmly uprooted from London to Yorkshire. I love Flanders and Swann so that’s quite a compliment.’ www.thejazzmann.co.uk 
'‘I’ve laughed so much, my face hurts’ Coventry Young Writers' Festival

Ian is poet-in-residence for The Academy of Urbanism and Barnsley FC. He’s UK Trade & Investment’s Poet, Yorkshire TV’s Investigative Poet and Humberside Police’s Beat Poet.

Ian is Visiting Professor at Bolton University . He’s an honorary doctor of Sheffield Hallam University, North Staffs Polytechnic and most recently University Centre Barnsley  -   Huddersfield University. ‘You can call me Doctor Doctor Doctor…’ 

Ian is a judge for this year's Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award.

Ian's verse autobiography Talking Myself Home (John Murray Publishing) came out on 4 Sept.

Reviewed by Paul Batchelor The Times
Ian McMillan is one of the UK's best-loved poets and performers, and his new verse memoir exudes an easygoing warmth. This is a self-deprecating self-portrait, in which McMillan presents himself as the innocent bystander to a surreal life: in one episode he finds himself fronting a folk band called Oscar and the Frog, playing Acker Bilk songs on a watering can for a crowd of heavy metal fanatics (The Worst Gig Ever, June 1979).

Talking Myself Home by Ian McMillan
John Murray, £10; 96pp  Buy the book here

Yorkshire Humour with cartoonist Tony Husband came out in time for those Christmas stockings! Published by Dalesman.

Yorkshire folk are funny: it's a fact. If you need proof, go and stand in a bus queue or sit in a café with a bunch of them or go to a football match or the barber’s shop. Funny things will be said, guaranteed. 

Buy the book here

'It’s impossible not to like McMillan. If they made him Poet Laureate on Friday, a lot more people would be reading poetry by Monday’ Sue Arnold, The Guardian
'It cleared me chest something wonderful' Theatre By The Lake, Kendal

Ian's latest book, The Richard Matthewman Stories, just out in Pomona. One-off gig coming up in Barnsley.

For a Yorkshireman who has spent half a lifetime in his native pit village, moving south is a mixed blessing and it is where Richard Matthewman's memories begin as he looks back with affection, humour, and no small measure of exasperation at 42 summers - and bitter winters.

From boyhood through adolescence to marriage and a family, his stories are filled with a rich gallery of characters - the relations, friends and village notables of a vital community filled with life and incident but as brittle and unmistakably northern as the coal seams on which it was built.

THE TWELVE YORKSHIRE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

On the first day of Yorkshire Christmas my true love gave to me
A tinsel muffler to put round me tree
On the second
2 racing pigeons
3 nippy whippets
4 flat caps
5 Dickie Birds
6 Grandmas grumbling
7 Grandads snoring
8 Banghra Dancers
9 parkin makers
10 Bowls full of Yorkshire pudding batter
11. Football teams struggling in the lower divisions
12 Michael Parkinson Blow Up Dolls

© Ian McMillan 25.12.09 

TWO NIL

Oh the day’s not nice and the day’s not pretty
It’s the day after Barnsley lost to Bristol City!
You might feel indifference, you might feel pity
Cos Barnsley let in two at Bristol City
But I feel a pain right in me nitty-gritty
And me heart’s in a tangle like a bowl of spaghetti
You might dismiss it but I just can’t forgetti
That Barnsley lost to Bristol City
I’ve got dreams: I’m a kind of Walter Mitty
And I dreamed that we might beat Bristol City
And I’d celebrate by playing my new Scritti Politti
Album while I ate a plate of cannelloni
But we lost two nil to Bristol City
And I have to admit I’m feeling pretty....unhappy.

© Ian McMillan 8.1.09 for Five Live and The Gabby Logan Show

THE BARD OF THE BUTTON TIN

Our house was always full of Burns;
We had his picture on a shortbread tin
That became my mother’s button tin.
It’s strange the way a poet learns:

I asked my dad about the solemn bloke
On the button tin; my dad explained
About the bard, and he explained
How the poet’s words came from the folk

He listened to, their songs, their rhymes,
Their stories in the Ayrshire air;
Dad’s story hung in Yorkshire air
And then, as he did many times

My Dad recited ‘To a mouse....’
In his dancing Scottish voice
And a poet’s long-dead voice
Reverberated round our house

And the stern chap on the button tin
Could not suppress a Bardic grin.

© Ian McMillan 8.1.09 for The Times and Rabbie's 250th Birthday

CONNECTED

Before, when you got mail,
It was a chap in a cap with a sack packed full;
Before, when you researched
You sat and sweated in a library that was just this side of dull;

And when you booked your holidays
You stood there in a queue
Behind a family of five and a pensioner or two
And life seemed so much slower, somehow;
There was acres of last week and just half a glimpse of now;

Today you click
On a mouse
And you can shop till you drop without leaving the house
And now you send 
Your blogs
Right across the globe and the photos of your dogs
Can appear on your site in the twinkling of an eye
And in a tick you get a picture back of Grandma saying Hi!
Framed against the backdrop of a California sky…


And it’s been fifteen years from before to this
And now we’re living in a universe of constant cyber bliss! 
And like the first fire in the cave
Or the first turning of The Wheel
The internet is changing how we think and speak and feel
And in the next fifteen years the net will turn and twist again
And go down murky sidestreets far beyond this Barnsley brain
And one thing’s certain: the net is here forever,
Constant as taxes, unpredictable as weather…

And before I’m dragged right under in a growing tide of spam
I’ve time for just this one last post: I click therefore I am!

© Ian McMillan, for BBC R4 Today, 7.8.06

SLOUGH RE-VISITED

Come friendly words and splash on Slough!
Celebrate it, here and now
Describe it with a gasp, a ‘wow!’
Of Sweet Berkshire breath

Slough is open, wide and green
With gorgeous buildings in between;
In the museum can be seen
Slough life, Slough death

Which show the history of a town
That people have tried to put down
By talking of it with a frown
And cruel sneers.

It’s true Slough Town don’t always win
But losing’s shrugged off with a grin;
Slough can take it on the chin
And has, for years.

Some towns are just seen as a joke
Through a fog of prejudicial smoke
Well, let’s shut up these put-down folk:
Their opinions smell!

Ask Slough people if they’re glad
To live in Slough, dismissed as bad:
Mum and dad and girl and lad
Are living well!

In 1196 it was known as Slo
and through the years it’s had to grow:
people came here ‘cos they didn’t want to go
To Maidenhead.

On foot, in coaches, trains and cars
To the factories, houses, shops and bars
They came to play or work for Mars
And stayed, and bred.

It’s people, living lives with care
And breathing in the Berkshire air
That make a town think ‘Yes, I’m there!’
And the sneering fails.

So, Children, Husband, partner, wife
Dismiss the poet’s rhyming knife
Slough’s the place to live your life
So hoist Slough’s sails!

© Ian McMillan, for VOLVIC, 19.4.05
as an antidote to John Betjeman’s take on the town