Carers Week 7th – 13th June 2021
Carers Week is an annual campaign to raise awareness of caring, highlight the challenges unpaid carers face and recognise the contribution they make to families and communities throughout the UK. It also helps people who don’t think of themselves as having caring responsibilities to identify as carers and access much-needed support.
We hope you all enjoyed Carers Week 2021 as much as we did. Throughout the week carers in the City came together in various ways.
We had a presentation from the City of London Children and Families team on Short Breaks. Let us know if you’d like information on the Short Breaks policy.
This was followed by an online self-massage session with the Mary Ward Centre.
We had our first in-person coffee morning with carers at the Golden Lane Community Centre, and our first male carers online event was a great success.
We finished the week with a poetry session hosted by The Reader Group.
Thank you to the carers and others that attended the events. You helped celebrate carers in the City of London!
Below are screenshots from some of the online events. We’ve also added the poem discussed in the session with The Reader, and a poem submitted by a city carer.
If you feel inspired to write some poetry, then do send it our way to be shared on the website. Email Kevin@cityconnections.org.uk
Visit the National Carers Week Website Here
Happiness
by Raymond Carver
So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near t he window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly, And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
My morning walk
By a City Carer
Out of the lift, through the door and onto the brick paved podium
But a podium is a small raised area
For someone to stand on to be seen
So why has a vast paved area at first floor level in the heart of a housing estate been given that name?
A man passes carrying a bicycle
Conforming with the rule, “no cycling”
But only he conforms – he is middle aged
The young ignore the rule
No snail to be seen on the paving
Maybe it is the weather
On a rainy day they proliferate
They need moisture to survive
There’s a man on a mobile access platform
Manoeuvring both vertically and horizontally
Snipping at a cable that lies on an overhang
Occasionally bits of the cable fall down
Pozzo is the name of a shop one can see from the podium
Pozzo was an Italian football coach
Or a symbol of the excesses of capitalism from “Waiting for Godot” –
Maybe the sign is incomplete
The shop on the corner of Carthusian Street with a toponym, Vecchio Parioli
An old part of Rome
Italian restaurant of course
And Carthusian for the Charterhouse Monastery that stands there
Memories of Henry V111, and his “Great Matter” and the break from Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn
He had to ensure the acquiescence of the Carthusian Monks
But he failed
And so began a long process of attrition and martyrdom
It is a warm morning – people pass in straw hats and clothes become fewer
The statuesque Mediterranean Spurge has had its Spring day
but the triple headed Turkish sage Phlomis is bursting in to life
Whorls of tubular hooded yellow flowers
A group of sightseers, one lies face down photographing water
Their leaderwith a knapsack
Topped with a vertical wire from which flutters a flag
And so to home
London on behalf of The
City of London corporation
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