Fleur's Jandals

 In my half sleep this morning, I half heard some talk of the New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock on Radio 3, and I believe one of her poems was read. Later, after I'd surfaced to face the day, I looked her up and was pleased to find that she is still alive – 90 now – and, since 2008, a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Over the years I've come across quite a few of her poems, mostly in anthologies. She writes a kind of cool, jaunty, no-nonsense light verse which reads easily and often leaves a feeling of good cheer in its wake – which is not a common thing among modern poets. Indeed, one of her poems, 'Londoner', opens Wendy Cope's cheering anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. Mutatis mutandis, this one has a slight feel of Frank O'Hara about it, and it brings back to me something of the excitement I used to feel about being young and at large in London. Here it is – 

Londoner

Scarcely two hours back in the country
and I'm shopping in East Finchley High Road
in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals* –
of flipflops as people call them here,
where February's winter. Aren't I cold?
The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling
at my smiles and not at my bare toes:
they know me here.
                                 I hardly know myself,
yet. It takes me until Monday evening,
walking from the office after dark
to Westminster Bridge. It's cold, it's foggy,
the traffic's as abominable as ever,
and there across the Thames is County Hall,
that uninspired stone body, floodlit.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.

* 'Jandals', a conflation of 'Japanese' and 'sandals', is a New Zealand word for light sandals with a thong between the first two toes.