My Dog Errol • 'A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR'

366 • The horror, the horror

31st December 2020 RL Comments 8 Comments

O, these horrors have grown out of hand!
May I bury my head in the sand?
Can I let it lie there
While my corpse roves elsewhere?
A solution like that would be grand,
And my readers would all understand
Why no further postings are planned …

Yes, Covid, Idiots in Office, Climate Chaos and now this. At least I made it to the end of the year as promised. Thanks for the all lovely comments, and I know people all round the world will enjoy re-reading the 366 rhymes of My Dog Errol, again and again, in celebration of a remarkable and memorable year.

Rick Lime

365 • Exile and Extinction

30th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

‘There was never much call for a builder,’
Wrote the last living soul on St Kilda.
Still, that was the trade
Of my aunt, an old maid
Who was known – to the seagulls – as ‘Hilda’.

As she drowsed in her orchard one day
An avalanche swept her away:
A torrent of trash –
Plastic, glitter and ash –
From a culture in final decay.

I never met my Aunt Claudie, who was adopted before birth (both hers and mine) and never left St Kilda (an archipelago I intend never to visit). Quite how she eked a living, after 1930’s evacuation of the island (during which numerous dogs were deliberately drowned), the rhyme does not attempt to explain; as for the ‘orchard’, credulity boggles. Nevertheless it’s impossible not to feel a great sympathy for this imaginary geriatric, unable – even in the remotest isolation from the rest of humanity – to evade obliteration by the filthy forces that shape a ‘civilisation’ she never tasted.

364 • Fan tale

29th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My surrogate mother-in-law
Is becoming a bit of a bore
By declaiming my rhymes
At inapposite times
And then yelling ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Encore!’

In a way it’s nice to have a relative’s company during Christmas, even though she mainly comes round to fetch off her departed daughter’s possessions, a pram-load at a time. But she wanted to change ‘inapposite’ (‘Nobody knows that word’) to ‘embarrassing’. I told her it’s not embarrassing to hear one’s doggerel bellowed on the front porch in the small hours – everyone likes a fan, after all, and it’s quite flattering that she has them all by rote. It’s just that this is a decent neighborhood and anybody interested will have read the bulletins online anyway.

363 • Famous Last Words

28th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A monk who had jumped from Ben Nevis
Left his suicide note in a crevice.
Hand-lettered in gold
And five hundred years old
‘Ars longa,’ it claimed, ‘vita brevis’

Illuminated lettering – such as we find in masterpieces such as The Book of Kells – was not normally used for personal communication, but in this instance the author had no choice. An ordinary hand-written message would not have been ‘ars’, so his Latin text would have been irrelevant. Likewise, of course, if the doleful memo had been discovered the following morning, ‘longa’ would not have been apposite. And if he’d simply climbed the mountain, hidden the note, then gone home to the nunnery or wherever he lived, ‘vita brevis’ would have been nonsensical. And the choice of a secure crevice to hide it in, rather than just leaving it to blow about on the mountainside, ensures that it’s not found until ‘longa’ is appropriate. All in all, then, a well-thought out farewell to a no-doubt exemplary life.

362 • Abbesse ! Aidez !

27th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Abbess’s audit, Your Highness,
Regarding young Thomas Aquinas:
‘In his heart, nonpareil …
In his head, off the scale
But in bed? Sadly, E– – –.’

When the great Georges Perec wrote ‘Abbesse! Aidez!‘ he was perpetrating a sound-pun involving the first four letters of the alphabet as they are pronounced in the Kingdom of Francophonia. Today’s sermon, however, purports to reveal one species of help a real Abbess was able to offer to a Pope, and demonstrates how her early assessment of the levitating-saint-to-be – namely, that his compassion and intellect considerably outweighed any carnal prowess – exactly foretold the characteristics for which ensuing centuries would come to venerate him.

361 • Pandora’s Boxing Day

26th December 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

‘These microbes must stay in the flask!’
You begged to be given the task.
But it snowed, and you slipped
Down the steps to the crypt.
‘Will superglue mend it?’ you ask …

When tremors were rocking Qatar
My genie got out of the jar
When I bade him return
And repair his cracked urn
His answer was, ‘Ha bloody ha.’

‘Twas the day after Christmas … and we suddenly had time to try a little remembrance of things past. Back when we all assumed the pandemic was a gambit in the column-inches war. Back when we imagined rogue science might be to blame. Back when the spirit world was obviously exacting vengeance on an iniquitous civilization. But now we know better … if we do … will we predict, prepare, react better? Or have the Genies truly left the building, leaving their self-styled ‘masters’ holding the bottle (that’s ‘fiasco’ in Italian, of course) and counting the cracks?

360 • Joy to the world

25th December 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The truth can no longer be ducked:
This planet’s NOT totally fucked
‘Cos its prime pest, its blight,
Its blind parasite
Is programmed to auto-destruct.

I have to admit I wrote my Christmas Message yesterday — not on the morning of publication as is my wont – and road-tested it on a sandwich board, front and back, walking among last-minute panic-buyers in our Regional Shopping Mall. ‘Why are you wearing a mask?’ a child challenged me. ‘I don’t want to catch the plague,’ said I. ‘Your board says it’s going to disappear of its own accord,’ countered an angry mother. Only then did I realise that ‘pest’, ‘blight’ and so on could perhaps refer to the Covid virus, as well as to the human race. Twice the Christmas Message, then! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

359 • My kingdom …

24th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As kids, on the farm in Atlanta
We’d leave strict instructions for Santa:
‘One horse in each stocking
For riding, not rocking,
Their minimum speed set to “canter”.’

It seems that, all things being equal
This story would merit a sequel
The which I shall try,
In due course, to supply:
At present, I’m stumped by the prequel.

One is never too young to begin coveting the unattainable. Readers will readily guess the upshot and, I trust, excuse any inability to pinpoint the root of this parlous state of affairs.

358 • Stocking-filler

23rd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Folk guess I’m a big Dylan fan
From the name on my fruiterer’s van.
But I don’t deal in rumours,
I deal in satsumas,’
Said Hamish the Tangerine Man.

The unfortunate costermonger at the heart of this brief report was assassinated, one Manchester market-day, by a maniac brandishing a knife and shouting ‘Judas’. At the funeral, Hamish’s widow justified an unusual choice of music by reading from his last will and testament: ‘As the coffin sinks from sight, Mr Tambourine Man is the last music I want to hear.’ Such wording, infused with ambiguities worthy of the Pied Piper of Hibbing himself, convinced certain mourners that Hamish had been telling the truth … he’d never been a big Dylan fan at all. ‘Untangle that if you can,’ whispered the priest as we left the crematorium.

357 • Capricorn

22nd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The upcoming month looks a mess
For Capricorn: doom and distress,
Your children disgraced,
Your garden laid waste,
And minimal chance of redress.

Waking at dawn under the zodiacal sign of the Goat, I remain convinced that the practitioner of astrology is an expert in whom we can justly place our trust in troubled times.

356 • Messiah

21st December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night I first visited Handel
He was naked except for one sandal.
His minion, Agrippa,
Likewise wore one flipper.
Such greatness cares nothing for scandal.

Of course it would not be Christmas without a Messiah concert, even if the new mutant coronavirus requires the event to be held in a specially-equipped field hospital so that everyone infected during the performance can receive first-class treatment from the very moment the ‘Amen’ begins to fade.

355 • Take-away (7)

20th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Look honey, a souvenir-seller:
Go pick up a Pilgrim Umbrella!
Hold it up like a guide
As before me you stride:
In a month I may make Compostella.
NOW BRING ME A SEAFOOD PAELLA.

The same problem arises in every country. The gluttonous tourist, too slothful to maintain a normal walking pace, yearns unashamedly for street food and relies, unabashed, on his beleaguered partner to signpost a spiritual path that he’s too self-indulgent to decipher for himself.

354 • Boa sting

19th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

Said a blustering braggart from Bingley,
‘I can swallow ten scorpions, singly,
Then twelve jalapenos
That burn like volcanoes
And still swear my tonsils aren’t tingly.’

I challenged him, ‘Chew on this pie
Packed with gunpowder, chillies, and lye.’
(And gravy so gingery
Permanent injury
Threatened his throat, by the by).

Then I watched the first slice disappear
And his silly fat face lost its sneer:
As his gums glowed red hot, his
Engorged epiglottis
Put paid to his boasting career.

Of course I concede that the above bulletin is not entirely true, and that it was not penned for publication at My Dog Errol, but rather on the ‘Readers’ Homilies’ page in our Parish Magazine. It illustrates something from the Bible, as I recall. It was rejected by the Vicar (on grounds of length, I can only assume).

353 • Take-Away (6)

18th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘’Tis an etching,’ said old Piranesi,
‘And kindly don’t tell me I’m crazy.
If you say “engraving”
It’s not me that’s raving
It’s you being mentally lazy.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN JALFREZI.

The same problem arises in every era: the Old Master indulges his penchant for pedantic pontification, while relying on others to minister to his basic bodily requirements. A man unable to cook is in no position to hector those untroubled by the self-involved niceties of his Terms of Art, ‘engraving’ and ‘etching’.

352 • You are what you eat

17th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

No cannibal vegan grows fat;
Their ethical stance sees to that.
On a diet of air
You just die of despair.
Take note of this brief caveat.

Food fascism is a pernicious scourge of 21st century life. Social pressure is a bubble only if one can muster the confidence and individuality to burst it; otherwise one is likely to stack fad upon fad in hopes of cultivating peer approval. The vegan cannibal, clearly threatening nobody, ought on paper to be a popular figure; but he or she is sadly opting for a downhill path in terms of bodily prosperity. ‘Take note of this brief caveat’ indeed.

351 • Take-Away (5)

16th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

Today my old dachshund, Delphine,
Dropped dead in this trendy canteen.
‘You can say au revoir
To your Michelin star,’
I said. ‘So much for Nouvelle Cuisine.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN CHOW MIEN.

The human spirit is infinitely resourceful, it seems. Unwilling to succumb to the grief that typically attends the expiry of a cur, our narrator turns the event to advantage, knowing that – once the press gets hold of the story – the reputation of one more pretentious ‘fooderie’ will be irredeemably trashed. Who wants to eat their supper in some joint where canine corpses are scattered about? Or in a restaurant that welcomes living dogs, come to think of it?

350 • Dionysus

15th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A merry young minstrel from Kent
Made music wherever he went,
Smashing bottles in bars,
Hurling hammers at cars,
To an almost obsessive extent.

There’s a little bit of Dionysus in each of us, and there’s no harm in giving it free rein now and then, especially at the end of a cruel year in which the performing arts have ebbed almost to extinction. It’s only the word ‘obsessive’ that gives us pause in the bulletin above. Nobody likes a maniac.

349 • Take-away (4)

14th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Regarding the death of my former
Relation (the one known as Norma)
Just tell the police
She’s no longer my niece
And that was the cause of her trauma.
NOW BRING ME A VEGETABLE KORMA.

Proof, if proof were needed, that a lazy diet of convenience food can induce circular, or even Moebius, reasoning: not at all what we typically expect from a thoughtful assassin.

348 • Carnality, spirituality

13th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You claim that your abs and your pecs
Will dazzle the opposite sex?
I tell you my quads
Have bewildered the Gods
And reduced them to gibbering wrecks.

This is the question for all us body-builders, is it not, whether ’tis nobler to pump up one’s corpse grotesquely in hope that impressionable young women will fancy being steamrollered by one’s unseemly bulk, or whether to treat the said corpse as some kind of overblown temple wherein the majesty of the Divine may be both parodied and repudiated.

347 • Take-away (3)

12th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It seems that the culprit was Carla,
Who cleaned up the funeral parlor;
Or was it Luigi,
Who wielded the squeegee
Backstage in Milan at La Scala?
NOW BRING ME A CHANA MASSALA.

If today’s bulletin is some kind of post-mortem report, it will strike most sensible readers as annoyingly non-committal. What is certain, however, is that an habitual devourer of carry-out meals runs an enhanced risk of succumbing to food-poisoning; so we should perhaps be more grateful to the Carlas and Luigis of this world, who busy themselves with janitorial hygiene that benefits each and every one of us.

346 • Gold-digger

11th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

She longed for a dance with Disraeli;
Despatched ardent messages daily.
But weeks turned to years
As her cheeks burned with tears
And he never came down to the cèilidh
(Nor played on her pink ukulele).

She longed for a breakfast with Balfour
(As males go, she rated him Alpha):
But his strange emissar
In an accent bizarre
Said ‘He can’t even spare you a half-hour.’

She longed to ensnare Lord Macaulay
But he’d just pretend to be poorly.
Undaunted by failure
She fled to Australia
To marry the mayor of Kalgoorlie.

The lives of the British politicians about whom our predatory protagonist fantasises span the period 1800–1930, albeit in staggered array. Balfour was 11, and Disraeli 55, when Macaulay expired … so it seems scarcely probable that she might have harboured carnal expectations of all of them simultaneously. Readers who possess (and know how to use) a calculator will be ready to compute the probable span of her obsessions, and her likely age when she set her cap at the Antipodean mayor – but should not overlook the fact that gold was not discovered at Hannan’s Find (later called Kalgoorlie) until 1893.

345 • Take-Away (2)

10th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Today our great monarch, King Louis
Is planning to ban ratatouille,
And pass a new law
Which (to curb Habsburg Jaw)
Will require all our food to be chewy.
NOW BRING ME A DISH OF CHOP SUEY.

Classic overkill from a monomaniacal tyrant. By all means take steps to extirp a congenital deformity brought on by in-breeding. But why impose dietary sanctions on the ornery populace? Don’t these potentates realise that they look weird only because the rest of us have normal jaws? Far more appetising, then, to address the problem by making ratatouille an obligatory staple, so that – if it really causes that egregious chin condition – we shall all, in time, look like our freakish overlords, and cease to lampoon and satirise them.

344 • Christmas Market

9th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We sell mostly flotsam and jetsam
Step in for a moment, and get some:
Our clients buy masses
To mix with molasses
And massage Mama (when she lets ’em).

So the customers wait in a line,
Their patience much greater than mine.
When I shout, ‘Go to hell,
I have nothing to sell,’
They beam at me, bland and benign.

This morning’s bulletin is a triptych depiction of the insanitary madness of Yuletide shopping: first the barker openly declaring the worthlessness of his wares; then the unseemly comfort products foisted on our nearest and/or dearest when other inspiration fails; and finally the line-up – outside a depleted store – of zombie-like shoppers, their wits irremediably stultified by the worthless circus of capitalism.

343 • Take-away

8th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Hi; this is your bartender, Barney.
So sorry: your chilli con carne
Has gone by mistake
To the shack of a Sheikh
Who’d only sent out for a sarnie.’
NOW BRING ME A LAMB BIRYANI.

Too work-obsessed to think of catering for himself, the rhymester receives the phone-call everybody dreads. Sadly his response – too spontaneously Wordsworthian to be constrained within his verse-form of choice – is merely a variation on the original impulse, to rely on carry-out: it is certain to lead to further disappointment.

342 • Hard to believe

7th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note, we have film of your bride
In flagrante with Jekyll and Hyde;
All three wear top hats
And extravagant spats
But pretty well nothing beside.

Though the camera-work is cockeyed
Maud’s ardour cannot be denied,
And it’s hard to believe
What the two gents achieve
In the detail our drone has espied.

Your Worship may feel mortified
That he can’t always spot who’s astride
Nor indeed understand
Who has got the whip hand:
But the action is all bona fide.

So unless you are quick to provide
Thirty guineas to [details supplied]
Maud’s countless coitions
In startling positions
Will justly be famous worldwide.

Any husband would surely be disappointed to receive a note of this type, since it reveals the blackmailer not as some harmless voyeur (or voyeuse), but as a hardboiled extortionist who paints a needlessly lurid picture of the young wife’s uninhibited appetite and proclivities. Yet in this particular case the cuckold, addressed as ‘Your Worship’, is clearly a member of The Establishment and, as such, axiomatically more corrupt by far than his unjustly denigrated spouse. It seems probable, therefore, that her two partners-in-film are in fact the blackmailers, and they plan to split the spoils with their vivacious copulee. Let us hope those shares are at least equal.

341 • Droning

6th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The first time I heard of a drone
I coveted one of my own
To take candid snaps
Of philandering chaps
And make their sins generally known.

This is not the sort of Sunday droning one typically hears from the pulpit, and the frank admission of covetousness comes as a surprise. Yet drones – because they move in a mysterious way – are naturally a source of fascination to 21st-century clergymen, just as steam-railways were to their great-grandfathers. We should not be scandalised by the proposed, puritanical plan – it’s a good deal less invidious than molesting choirboys.

340 • Cruise control

5th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your humming-bird, Rex,
Is banned from the passenger decks.
We’re aware he’s a drone
Surreptitiously flown
To observe while our Captain has sex.

All kinds of questions arise when we imagine the shipboard arrangements that necessitated the above communique. (And, rather than offering reassurance, the fact that feckless recreational drones are being banned by winter cruise operators merely reminds us how seriously landlubbers’ privacy is compromised by the unpoliced residue – which throng our city skylines at the prying beck and call of amorally ruthless surveillance professionals.)

339 • Overheard

4th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note, your saxophonist, ‘Baz’,
With his ear-splitting urge to play ‘jazz’
Is required to abstain
Or else Take the A Train …
To Alaska, if not Alcatraz.

Who wants to live in a world whose free-spirited exponents of improvised music can be threatened with exile to a notorious penitentiary, solely for practising their art in places where others might overhear? Not I. Surveillance is a scourge, aural fascism a tyranny. And the intolerant voice of this bulletin appears to be upset as much by the would-be musician’s hipster sobriquet as by the unruly racket the neighborhood is nightly obliged to endure.

338 • Assassin (2)

3rd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The one time I served Jack the Ripper
He’d come in my shop for a kipper.
With his dagger and cloak
He seemed quite a good bloke
Till he slew a small poodle named Pippa.

Society encourages us to think badly of a serial killer, yet one recognises this shop-girl’s guilty admiration for her celebrity customer, flaunting the characteristic costume of his profession. Here Jack’s conduct, while admittedly uncivilised, is readily rationalised, inasmuch as any domesticated dog – especially the scion of so ornamental and unnatural a breed – is already Dead to Nature. Had the fish emporium chosen to host a free-range, genetically unmodified cur, the self-styled ‘Ripper’ – like any common-or-garden customer – would doubtless have been torn to pieces a good while before the completion of his intended purchase. But it’s easy to be wise after the event.

337 • Assassin

2nd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

So I’m off, on this evening’s vendetta
(Check pistol, check map, check Lambretta).
I’ll be sure to disclose
When your name’s one of those
On my list, if that makes you feel better.

It’s not easy to imagine the feelings of a parent who finds out that his or her offspring has become a terrorist or Mafioso/Mafiosa. But it’s encouraging, in the bulletin above, to note at least one hitperson’s solicitude for an anxious ancestor. Let’s hope this is not an unique case.

336 • From our own correspondent

1st December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Still holed up, in Azerbaijan,
With two dancing girls, in a barn:
The damn paparazzi
Are all over Patsy
But Patsy is all over Sîan.

War … what is it good for? Macho glory, seedy glamour, the licentious liberation that often accompanies mortal fear? The present bulletin is unhelpful. Quite how the particular situation arose we are not informed, despite the media presence. All we are offered is some needlessly intrusive detail about a putative relationship between the two dancing girls … something which is, in all probability, being faked in order to deflect the prurient and/or predatory attentions of Our Own Correspondent.

335 • Minnie’s Boys

30th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Holed up in a comedy depôt
In fascist-held downtown Aleppo:
While Chico and Harpo
Bewitch the Gestapo,
Watch Groucho bewildering Zeppo.

Even the sharpest satire will eventually be blunted and rendered obscure by tectonic shifts in the Zeitgeist. But the Marxes’ exuberant indifference to hierarchy, dismissal of propriety, and unravelling of logic make them uniquely vibrant mentors for dissidents down the ages. Marvellously the ostensible cipher Zeppo (who died on today’s date in 1979) was, in their Vaudeville heyday, the most giftedly insidious of the four, depping on stage with seamless, imperceptible brilliance no matter which of his heterogenous siblings was indisposed or unavailable.

334 • Sole-searching

29th November 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I hoped to make sense of your views
By walking a mile in your shoes.
But one glimpse of the soles
Scorched by burning hot coals
Means I need no additional clues.

Let us pause, this morning, to think back over the long, dark history of Western culture. It may perhaps be illuminating to try to pinpoint the moment when the ascetic and the self-harmer ceased to be considered uplifting role-models.

333 • Sucker

28th November 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Please note that the cleaner, McCall,
Is banished henceforth from The Hall:
Her nightly manoeuvres
With hosepipes and Hoovers
Drive too many guests up the wall.

In the owner’s estimation, paying guests are paramount and must be sucked up to at all costs. So a skivvy loses her job, not via a grateful note and cash in lieu of notice, but by dint of a curt note sellotaped to her locker door. Soon ‘The Hall’ will be filthy with dust-bunnies and aristocratic dandruff, and customers will stop coming. And the owner will have reaped his just deserts.

332 • Semen / cement

27th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said philosopher-poet John Ruskin
On exhuming a half-rotten buskin
‘Hopping round in this boot
Will cement my repute
As an expert in all things Etruscan.’

And revered archæologist Schliemann
Slept out (to discourage a demon)
’Neath a Bacofoil™ awning,
Yet woke every morning
Quite sodden with incubus semen.

Is it something about their preoccupation with the remote past that distorts the mental processes of such famous men? Perhaps they fell into recondite professions precisely because they were unable to relate convincingly to the way ordinary folk make sense of the world? Or, if the above tales are reckless fictions, do they nonetheless ring true because we instinctively sense that a particular echelon, existing in intellectual society, assumes it can get away with murder?

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

26th November 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Don’t dine at the Café du Nord
Without checking their prices beford.
One glance at the bill
For my spoonful of krill
Left me gasping for breath on the flord.

Certainly this First Year of Covid has made it hard for restaurateurs to balance their books; but habitual diners-out – having subsisted on nothing but beans-on-toast since lockdown started – fancy they’ve saved enough moolah to laugh off the Himalayan prices the more pretentious places are charging. In my naïvete I imagined that ordering nothing but an amuse-gueule would spare me financial discomfort. How wrong I was.

330 • Serial Killer

25th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Gents! Should you require an abortion,
Step into my clinic with caution.
Here tools are corroded,
Procedures outmoded,
And fees tantamount to extortion.

Surely a man has little to fear from a backstreet abortionist, especially one so unsparing in his own condemnation? Yet the very existence of such a clinic throws grave shadows on the integrity of the male of the species, who is very rarely the target of the hazardous procedure for which he is about to pay.

329 • Supercilium

24th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It’s true, you have patrons a-plenty
While I have far fewer than twenty.
Your job, my dear boy
Is to please hoi polloi
While I tease the true cognoscenti.

This bulletin pretty accurately reports some words that lately passed between a Blogger-in-Rhyme and a New Formalist Villanelle-Wrangler. I invite my legion of readers all across the globe to work out which of the two uttered them, and to what effect.

328 • American soap

23rd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your strumpet, Cecile,
Is barred from our Thanksgiving meal.
She gets your dear father
Worked up in a lather:
Myself, I don’t see the appeal.

The tiny fault-lines that extended families ignore for most of the working year can suddenly broaden into ravines of foreboding as Thanksgiving looms, and the tribe prepares to converge on the parental ranch. This mother’s note – deploring the husband’s lecherous preoccupation with their son’s voluptuous consort – betrays the tragic depths of her jealous insecurity. ‘Book yourself a makeover, Mom!’ comes the reply. ‘It’s not as though you’re strapped for cash.’

327 • My brother’s keeper

22nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Cain! Where’s thy brother?” “Who, Abel?
I tell you, that kid is unstable.
One day I’m ‘his keeper’
The next, ‘the Grim Reaper’.
I’m not sure I like either label.”

We do not require a Diploma in Psychiatry to identify the truly unstable party in this story, projecting, on to his younger brother, his own mental conflict. Nor do we need reminding that, when the Almighty next asked the same question, Cain had resolved that inner crisis, somewhat messily. Note that Cain did not destroy his other brother, Seth, nor their sisters Luluwa and Delbora. Are these siblings, therefore, all passive accomplices in the First Fratricide, inasmuch as they never exacted revenge on Cain? Or were they simply pipped to the post, when the assassin’s house fell down on his head?

326 • Sagittarius

21st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’m sorry to say, Sagittarius,
Your outlook’s still far from hilarious:
They’ll shoot holes in your hat
Or else puncture your cat,
Those nasty new neighbours nefarious.

Waking today under the zodiacal influence of the archer, how can one doubt that it’s solely the astrologer who has the insight to guide us through troubled times: inspired by the crossbow on high, his or her aim is true.

325 • Like ostriches

20th November 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

It was back in the first days of Spring
You promised our plans would take wing.
Now that Winter is nigh,
Have we started to fly?
No. We haven’t accomplished a thing.

The finger of blame can always be relied upon to point at the nearest and/or dearest of the person on whose passive-aggressive hand it is growing. Still, this is better than pointing at ‘the year’ or ‘the virus’; though clearly the real blight on all our souls at this epoch is still festering moodily somewhere in the vicinity of the Oval Orifice.

324 • Monserrate

19th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In the mountains beyond Bogota
Five gangsters had opened a spa.
I went once or twice
But it wasn’t that nice:
It needed more je ne sais quoi.

They’d been loading some drugs on a mule
When it panicked and fell in the pool.
Soon that afternoon’s dip
Was a ten-hour trip
And the place seemed a lot less uncool.

To those who protest that ‘drugs mule’ is nowadays a mere metaphor for a human trafficker, I can only counter with the evidence in the bulletin above. The narrator’s first-hand testimony seems incontestable, and critics who urge the contrary are merely drawing attention to their innate misogyny, or a groundless predisposition to doubt the objectivity of individuals who delight in regaling us with accounts of their psychedelic experiences.

323 • Remote

18th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This pod is controlled from a distance:
Press button to summon assistance.
Squirt sample in funnel.
Scream ‘Help me!’ down tunnel
Till system confirms your existence.

Obviously it is sensible that machines should validate the identity of their human masters, before coming to our rescue. We should applaud the Authorities who have programmed them so assiduously in their own image.

322 • The Spurning

17th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your ward, Abigail,
Did not gain a place here at Yale;
The Provost reviled
The ‘preposterous child’
While his staff found her ‘stupid’ and ‘stale’.

Well, I didn’t gain a place at Yale either, and I urge Abigail, and other rejects like her, to wear the disdain of ivory-tower eggheads as a badge of freshness and distinction. Either that, or to sweet-talk their guardian into endowing some hifalutin’ think-tank there, with free education for his dunderheaded protégée a specified condition of contract.

321 • Harlotry

16th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your daughter-in-law
May no longer trade as a whore.
Her clients drive cars
Far, far larger than ours
And we don’t want folk thinking we’re poor.

The author of this note, discreetly popped through a neighbor’s letterbox, rightly equates social status with automobile dimensions. Such objective measures are much more reliable and indicative than a mere moralistic objection to the young relation’s profession. It is never appropriate to sit in judgment over a woman’s right to choose.

320 • The Apple

15th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yelled Adam to Cain, ‘Listen lad,
Don’t feed that big snake: he looks bad.’
Whispered Eve, ‘It’s OK:
Take an apple a day
For your real, biological dad.’

‘Every harlot was a virgin once‘, our Great Poet reminds us; in similar spirit this morning’s sermon invites us to reconsider the First Fratricide who, as a blameless tot, feels an instinctive kinship with the serpent that seduced his mother. Adam’s mistrust of the entity that cuckolded him is understandable; yet contradictory parenting ensues, undoubtedly sowing the seeds of Cain’s transgressive development. Wiser heads than mine must ponder how Mary and Joseph sidestepped this problem, when a similar predicament beset their own relationship.

319 • Autumn Offensive

14th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It wasn’t much fun in the army.
The bullets and bombs didn’t scar me
But I hated the stench
From the opposite trench
Of stale sauerkraut and salami.

It is a shining privilege for the journeyman doggerelist to contribute this humble morsel to the glorious banquet already served up by the longer-established War Poets.

318 • Somme

13th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Alas for my ptarmigan, pTom
Who expired in a ptrench on the Somme.
Though he fought ptooth and claw
Through the pterrors of war
He was ptaken, at last, by a bomb.

Friday 13th traditionally flushes out people’s tales of bad luck and trouble. Our contribution here – which incidentally revisits a couple of well-received My Dog Errol themes (Pet Elegies, and Tales of the Riverbank) – also provides a worthy billet for the plague of silent Ps that has infested our escritoire in recent days.

317 • Blitzkrieg

12th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I met Edvard Grieg
Was during the recent Blitzkrieg.
I found myself yawning
Throughout his piece, ‘Morning’,
But blamed it on battle fatigue.

The Norwegian composer’s melodic gift has won him few admirers. What a tragedy, hindsight hints, that he didn’t team up with Vera Lynn, to produce work of lasting cultural resonance that could assuage the griefs of this most ghastly epoch in human affairs. Too late now, of course, since the Warbling Dame’s recent promotion to be the Archangels’ Sweetheart. [See also here]

316 • Older / Wiser?

11th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A telegram: ‘Dear Rupert Brooke,
You are older by far than you look;
Yet that Freemason, Kipling,
Still wrote like a stripling
Long after you closed your last book’.

Running pretty late this morning: self-evidently, this rhyme came into my head without any thought at all. Brooke’s name was all over the radio when I was waking – how he swam naked with Virginia Woolf, and was killed by a moquito. No comparable claim can be made about Kipling. His well-known schtick – ‘you’ll be a man, my son’ – makes decent folks heave.

315 • Buckstopper

10th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Oh King! Why reproach us recruits
For such small specks of muck on our boots?’
‘Should the Kaiser detect
Such cosmetic neglect
Then I’ll be the one that he shoots.’

This morning’s bulletin – a parade-ground conversation from long, long ago – exemplifies the generous spirit evinced by great leaders of an all-but forgotten century. ‘The Buck stops here,’ would have been a pithier – yet exactly equivalent – answer from the British monarch. What joy it is, to contemplate a return to those days, when a potentate acknowledged the responsibility that goes with great privilege … and, by example, inspired the highest standards even in his lowliest subjects.

314 • National Trust

9th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The groundsman reports to the Duchess:
‘Your lobster needs five pairs of crutches
Having ricked his ten knees
On the flying trapeze
That we built by the pond where his hutch is.

‘And, begging your Ladyship’s pardon
We’ve finished landscaping The Garden:
Your flora and fauna
Are crammed in one corner.
This concrete takes ten years to harden.’

Meanwhile, back in Merrie England, the serfs pay lip-service to the whims of the landed classes, and the needs of their exploited livestock, while covertly expediting the blind March of Progress which tramples all before it.

313 • Unholy ghost

8th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I had just been relieved of my post
(No 2 in the Heavenly Host)
When the Infidel Horde
Made me Chair of the Board
(Not bad for an Unholy Ghost?).

It may seem, following today’s developments, that we have the opportunity to lighten up, and turn our thoughts aside from the Orange Demon and his festering cohort. Yet, as Paradise Lost reminds us, the exile may well carve out a new kingdom … he has millions to make as an after-dinner speaker, a freakshow curiosity whose legacy will be measured by the volume of vomit he induces. So, what better way to salute John Milton, who died on this date in 1674, than to flip thru the above-mentioned 80,000-word epic, on which this morning’s rhyme is based? Then, in lieu of stepping out to church, reward your labors with a full English beanfeast.

312 • Failure

7th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night they invented Champagne
I was fighting the Fascists in Spain.
When they slipped me a slug
(Served in Franco’s own mug)
I just emptied it into a drain.

George Orwell (celebrity author of Dining Out in Paris and London) evidently drew on personal experience when commissioned to write songs for the musical Gigi; but Maurice Chevalier dismissed an early effort (fragment above) as ‘half-hearted’, and the gig was offered to Jean-Paul Sartre instead. In today’s political climate, however, we recommend the resurrection of the Orwellian text, which centres on mendacious boasts and – crucially – the cretinous, offhand actions of a failed fighter who, ultimately, knows himself unfit for anything but illusory greatness.

311 • Liar, Liar

6th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Do tell! What became of that lout
Whose lies you once bandied about?
Did he close down your cult?
Or become an adult?”
“Nah. The fire in his pants fizzled out.”

Overheard this time next year, in the Smithsonian: a former Democrat and an erstwhile Republican chatting as they admire a wittily elegant ‘Tactical Chaos’ exhibit from 2020 [it’s a cloisonné enamel pin, in gold-plated brass, on which portly presidential ‘pants on fire’ are presented with little shifty eyes and a comical golden quiff … I got mine here].

310 • Loser!

5th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I hear fireworks, and popping of corks,
I hear doves running rings around hawks;
I hear jubilant cries
At a Loser’s demise,’
Said the ghost of a grinning Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes is popularly reviled for lack of success in his ambition to blow up the English Parliament on this day in 1605; as a damp squib, therefore, he’s well-placed to pour derision on other thwarted politicos. Every year, in the UK, his effigy is burnt in celebration on 5 November, and this will surely continue until an even more laughable failed wannabe comes to the public’s attention.

309 • All at sea

4th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Terrible typhoon in Tampa.
Washed right out to sea in the camper.
Weather in Florida
Couldn’t be horrider.
Lots of love, Granny and Grandpa.

A postcard, serendipitously delivered this morning, summarises the tempestuous climate back home, now that America is Great Again. How thankful I am – as an ex-pat – to be breathing a (marginally) less toxic atmosphere than my beleaguered countrymen at this time of count and counter-count, rhetoric and threatoric, and gaseous White House bombast. Is there any decent American who would not prefer, at this filthy hour, to be marooned offshore in a foundering RV that reeks of terrified Gray Nomads?

308 • A Sensible Choice?

3rd November 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

Lock that ape in his airtight Rolls Royce
Till it stifles his snide, stupid voice.
Draw a line in the sand.
Send a sign to the land:
Maybe, this time, a Sensible Choice?

Three instructions for November 3.

307 • Polemicist

2nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I went to meet George Bernard Shaw
But his concubine answered the door:
‘Will you plese go away?
Hes at work on a play
As Ive told you nineteen times befor.’

And so we seek out another well-regarded dramatist, three score and ten years on from his last mortal breath … but in vain. He was probably tinkering with spelling reform that evening, not writing anything sensible at all. In any case the famous Socialists, anti-vaxers and eugenicists of yesteryear can be of no avail in the present crisis; the past is gone; and the future’s gone too, unless the electorate votes with its wisest imagination.

306 • Regicide

1st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

With all common sense in abeyance
I summoned MacBeth, at a seance
(The usual procedure
The cards and the ouija)
But no one ‘came through’ (except Fleance).

In Shakespeare’s time the monarch was revered as God’s representative on earth, and to kill him (or her) was a sin without parallel. Today, of course, such potentates as we still acknowledge are more typically reviled as emissars of Satan. In our moments of deepest despair, therefore, we might wish to be possessed by some high-flying assassin, and to accomplish what needs to be accomplished; but in fact all we can muster is the spirit of an obscure runaway, remembered only for fleeing a scene of monstrous injustice – an epitome of cravenness in crisis.

305 • Perpetraitor

31st October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your acolyte, Artie,
Is banned from our after-show party.
Act II of MacBeth
Does not call for the death
Of King Duncan by so-called ‘karate’.

Geez, Shakespeare was a dude that knew a whole lot about the darkness that can swamp a whole realm after a gracious, humane, temperate ruler gets ousted by a card-carrying psychopath. But his Scottish Play holds comfort for us all: though there was no shortage of countrymen with the means and the motive to cut him down, the tyrannical megalomaniac was eventually unseated by his own delusional self-belief.

304 • In for a penny

30th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I met Ezra Pound
He was dragging a bobsleigh around.
I said, ‘Waiting for snow?’
And he answered me, ‘No,
But my husky was recently drowned.’

Remembering Pound on his 135^th birthday, the person in the street thinks of him as the tone-deaf, fascist crackpot who repeatedly published translations from languages he did not speak. Were his chums right to have him committed? Traveling by bobsleigh (if he did), yet keeping but one husky (if he did), might suggest a certain imbalance. As early as 1958, however, he declared that ‘all America is an insane asylum’. We shall not look upon his like again.

303 • Beyond the Grave

29th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Though Alison Gross is a witch
She clearly has Absolute Pitch,
Screaming perfect Top Cs
At the sky and the trees
While her body lies dead in a ditch.

In many countries today the loudest voices are indeed those of the departed; their noisome legacy is routinely summarised in resonant soundbites whose catchiness masks, for many, the emptiness of their achievements.

302 • Against the day

28th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

America, rise! There’s a war on
More epic than Gandalf v Sauron:
You can vote, by the 3rd,
For The Truth and The Word,
Or the megalomaniac moron.

An Amazon blurb in 2006 announced a new novel set in ‘a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places’. Some believed those words were written by the novelist himself, Thomas Pynchon. Others are certain that they were penned by a time-travelling fugitive from today’s Washington, where a farcical tragedy is unfolding in which we have all been given a part. If this were played upon a stage … I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. But fiction it ain’t. We gotta get shot of the Ramblin’ Man. I’m pynchin’ myself, but I don’t bite my tongue: You hear me Tolkien to ya?

301 • Naked cheek

27th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

We beheld an old Burgher of Calais
Who’d come, without clothes, to The Ballet.
When they called him immoral
He said, ‘Do not quarrel
With me: take it up with my valet.’

As ever, the challenge to a wealthy pervert’s idiosyncrasy is brushed aside, and the onus of explanation – and inevitable blame – falls on the shoulders of his hapless factotum.

300 • Postcard (4)

26th October 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

My postcard to Wole Soyinka
Said ‘How d’you like Rodin’s “The Thinker”?’
‘Not as good as “The Dunce”,’
He responded at once
(I got the same answer from Glinka).

It’s encouraging, of course, to receive fresh evidence of empathy-across-time between writers and musicians, but it’s unsettling to discover that both spurn a sculptural masterpiece in favour of a work so definitively substandard that not a single art historian bothers even to mention it. Yet it sounds like a statue for our time, when so many forcibly-emptied plinths stand ready to accommodate images of some contemptible thick-head, should such a person come to public attention.

299 • Poets’ Corner

25th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was charmed, at The Tabard, by Chaucer,
But his pilgrims could not have been coarser.
The Friar and the Dyer
Set fire to the Squire
And the Nun drank her tea from the saucer.

620 years to the day from his death, Geoffrey Chaucer’s band of Canterbury pilgrims still serves as an exemplary model … all types and trades socialising without inhibition, their differences of class and rank rightly set aside. Today’s sermon, however, prompts us to ponder the charmer’s continuing residence in Poets’ Corner, asking if Westminster Abbey is really the best spot for the shrine of a rapist?

298 • Decent folk

24th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your godfather, Geir,
Though scarcely a social pariah,
Has a squint and a hump
That make decent folk jump
So we’re slinging him out of the choir.

‘Decent folk’ … what a world of repugnance and shame that nauseating phrase brings up. If we all boycotted ensembles where such a term is used in earnest, choral singing would cease overnight. No bad thing, you might retort. But that end must not be accomplished by marginalising the Geirs and quasi-Geirs in our society … who are legion.

297 • Scorpio

23rd October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Dear Scorpio: what can I say?
Catastrophe’s heading your way:
Viral mishaps,
Economic collapse.
You may want to call it a day.

Waking to a new morning, as the celestial scorpion comes into its own, I’m surely not alone in deriving great strength from the impartial counsel of the astrologer, whose infallible sagacity shines out like a beacon against the drossy darkness of science, common sense, and associated delusions.

296 • Class distinction

22nd October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Stand my bodyguard down,’ cried The Duke
As he strode through the crowds in the Souk.
‘See, the commoners blench,
And recoil from the stench
Of my horseradish-sodden perruque.’

More heart-warming stories of this kind might do much to restore ordinary folk’s admiration for their overlords, who are too often painted by the media as out-of-touch, self-absorbed, and lacking in self-knowledge. This unspecified Duke amply possesses what Shakespeare calls ‘the common touch’, and harbours no illusions about the effect his presence has on the lower orders.

295 • Startling

21st October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your patron, Earl Spenser,
Will not be admitted to Mensa.
His Lordship’s IQ
Is quite startling, it’s true.
We have never met anyone denser.

This rhyme concerns a fictional Earl Spenser, not to be confused with the orator who on 6 September 1997 – while eulogising ‘the most bizarre-like life’ of his late sister – shared with a grieving nation the ironic insight that ‘a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’ In a further proof of sagacity, the real Earl resisted any temptation to dilate upon Diana’s other attributes … goddess of chastity / fertility / the moon, sometime consort of Lucifer, etc etc.

294 • Akhnaten

20th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Akhnaten, my favorite Pharaoh,
Bellowed ‘Blast!’, as we danced the bolero:
His fury was focused
On quite a large locust
Which savaged his silver sombrero.

This bulletin attempts to pinpoint the ‘pistol-shot’ that heralded one of Egypt’s Great Plagues. Had this been confined to insects’ molesting the ostentatious headgear of an entitled plutocracy, the populace would doubtless have considered the whole business a blessing. History tells a different story, but as ever we are at liberty to believe whichsoever version we prefer.

293 • Nefertiti

19th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I flew my cartoon autogyro
To draw Nefertiti in Cairo:
What a look of surprise
When I dotted her *i*s
And crossed both her *t*s with my biro!

It was Tintin, I believe, who introduced my younger self to the possibilities of the autogyro; likewise his creator, Hergé, sparked my lifelong interest in drawing. The summons from a Pharaoh was a pleasant, if predictable, consequence of these twin influences (Akhnaten was gracious enough to approve of the woman I drew for him, and subsequently married her).

292 • Gnasher

18th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.

That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.

291 • Implants

17th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In LA, a lass named Ludmilla
Got grabbed by a giant gorilla
That bit off her head
And left her for dead
Stripped naked and strapped to a pillar

At which point a serial killer
Embalmed her in pink Polyfilla
While her carcase was whipped …
(I’m just quoting the script:
She’s been cast in a low-budget thriller).

For decades Hollywood has thriven on demeaning women, both off and on the screen. Ludmilla may seem crazy to audition for this clichéd pile of crap, but a girl has to live, no? Mind you, she could have stayed back East on daddy’s farm, dignity intact, and lived a happy and fulfilled life milking lamas, shearing wildebeests and marrying her childhood sweetheart, Sergei. But that’s not the dream our tainted Western culture implanted in her unhappy head, is it?

290 • Biopic

16th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In this movie, a lone paratrooper,
Flying blind through a wartime pea-souper,
Comes down in the dark
Near the edge of Hyde Park
On the head of the drummer, Gene Krupa.

16 October is indeed the date that Gene Krupa died, but not in the decade, nor the manner, suggested above. As a pitch for a biopic, therefore, its chances might seem slight … though, being extremely short and requiring no set whatever, it might prove attractive to a studio with very limited cash.

289 • Born again

15th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Hey presto! One wave of this wand,
And I wake as a Hollywood blonde!
And how fancy it feels
In my falsies and heels
Being hailed the first female James Bond.

Our enlightened times have seen strong and righteous pressure for certain iconic screen roles – which have done untold harm by glorifying repellent machismo and mindless thuggery – to be reinvented as women [Jodie Whitaker as Mrs Who, and Helen Mirren as Prospera, have shown this can be accomplished with stylish conviction]. But while the film industry continues to cast able-bodied actors as persons with disabilities, and uses straight actors to play gay characters, there is – mercifully – no logical reason why a man (namely me!) should not fulfil the feminists’ long-cherished dream of a Lady 007.

288 • Mental make-up

14th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The first time I slept with Max Factor
He claimed to be Virgo Intacta.
When I cried ‘This is mad!
Are you not my real dad?’
He said, ‘No, son, you’re only an actor.’

Folklore suggests that, in the movie business, it’s possible to sleep one’s way to the top; but this morning’s bogus instalment suggests that, in the make-up department at least, different rules apply. Here the Alpha Male swats aside the Young Pretender’s hopes, implanting in his mind an idea that would corrode anybody’s confidence. It would be interesting to know how this fictional conversation continued, on subsequent trysts. The catamite would be well advised to challenge his master with the riposte that We’re All Actors.

287 • For Men!

13th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

My dream is to dance with Grace Kelly
Sharing one rubber glove and one welly,
Sharing one birthday suit,
Two bottles of Brut,
And three jars of cold K-Y Jelly.

Attentive readers may note that this charming, carefully-visualised fantasy fixates on a Screen Queen who has not made a single film in the last 64 years. What is it about the present generation of actresses, then, that so repels our imaginations, focusing them instead on past eras, eras of subtle ambiguity and romance, eras when one could never be sure whether ‘Brut’, for instance, signified a dry, sparkling wine, or a pungent preparation for disinfecting the male armpit.

286 • A-listers

12th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Playing Aleister Crowley at chess,
The outcome is anyone’s guess:
Four bishops on fire
Queens a-quake with desire
Three kings in a state of undress …

For a few golden years the sex-crazed dope-fiend Crowley – born 145 years ago today – was dubbed, by the papers, ‘The Wickedest Man in the World‘. How ignominious, parochial, and inconsequential his Satanism and misogyny appear now, in a world where the barbarous leadership of serial liars and delusional psychopaths is glorified in headlines daily.

285 • Jordan

11th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

There’s just one more applicant: Gordon,
Well-equipped for the post of church warden.
A total abstainer,
He’s drunk wine in Cana,
And once dipped his nose in the Jordan.

We’re in real danger, here, of seeing a thoroughly unsuitable candidate appointed to a responsible office, thanks to the shortsighted – or perhaps wittingly bogus – recommendations of a silver-tongued sponsor.

284 • Street delicacy

10th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It was carnival evening in Derby:
My shrimps burnt to death on the barbie.
I entered a raffle
And won a falafel
Cooked up from dead wasps and wasabi.

A measure of caution is advisable, during a pandemic, where street-food is concerned. This applies even when an exotic treat appears to have been gifted by fate, in compensation for previous arrangements’ having gone up in smoke. Don’t let the fresh air and cheering crowds blind you to the intrinsically nauseous nature of the fare on offer. Our appetite for a bargain is a severe and culpable weakness.

283 • Gyratory care

9th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The upside-down baby of Bath
Liked to stand on his head in the hearth.
Once an hour he was turned
To ensure nothing burned.
The corpse was interred at Penarth.

Bath and Penarth lying some sixty miles apart, and in different countries, the reported choice of burial-ground seems inexplicably remote: casual readers of this brief life may suspect foul play. Note, however, that the age-at-death of the subject is not stated. We cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility that – thanks to the careful rotary management described – this obstinate individual was not roasted in infancy as first appears, but rather lived to a ripe old age, perhaps being buried in Glamorganshire after serving as a wise yet eccentric pastor until the age of (let’s say) 77. Very possibly his personal charisma was such that parishioners learnt to stand on their heads as well, the better to commune with him: after all, spiritual truths are best imparted eye-to-eye.

282 • Discharge

8th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

“This golden-haired Man in the Moon,
This fat-headed, pus-filled balloon,
This bag of black bile
Laced with venomous guile:
His discharge can not come too soon.”

Adapted from last night’s two-hour call with my one-time class-mate back home. No idea who or what he was ranting about … I just enjoyed hearing his rage … hardly needed a phone … [thanks bigly, Hooch]

281 • Incompetence

7th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Please note: your chiropodist, Pete,
Will be shot, should he enter our street.
He made such a botch
Of repairing your watch
He sha’n’t get his hands on my feet.

It’s all-too easy to suspect across-the-board incompetence when, in fact, ineptitude has been proven in one field only. The luckless ‘Pete’ here may indeed be a jackass-of-all-trades, but what would become of US society if we took pot-shots at every bungling nincompoop who came to our attention?

280 • A Poet’s Blessing

6th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One day, on a train, I met Tennyson
And offered to give him my benison.
By way of reward
(And because he’s a Lord)
He fed me a fragment of venison.

Dead 118 years ago today, and his tiresome oeuvre justly forgotten, this entitled poetaster’s name lives on as a gift to makers of very short pieces in which sound is a great deal more important than sense. ‘What hope is here for modern rhyme’ etc etc

279 • Ax me another

5th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This ax I acquired near Mauritius,
A purchase both proud and propitious:
One night in the smog
It destroyed a small dog
That might have grown up to be vicious.

Here we are again with a canine spin on the timeless, and deeply tedious, sophomoric conscience-tickler, “If you could travel back to 1946, would you destroy ‘The Donald‘ as he lay puking in his gold-plated crib?” To which the only moral answer must be, “Let us set sail for ‘near Mauritius’ immediately, and acquire a job lot of these proud and propitious axes.”

278 • Sausages

4th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I dreamt that I’d asked Buster Keaton
To show me the worst thing he’d eaten.
But when he confessed
That the Wurst was the best
I wished I had asked Mrs Beeton.

Who knows why I dreamt about the stony-faced comedian (unless the radio-alarm informed my half-waking mind that Keaton was born on this date 125 years ago). Admittedly, the dreamer’s idiotic request deserves no better answer than a weakly-punned ‘confession’ (the word used in its secular (ie meaningless) sense). I should perhaps not declare this from the pulpit, but nocturnal encounters with the gastronomically-inclined Mrs Beeton are probably a great deal less unsatisfying.

277 • Discontented

3rd October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note: there’s no rational reason
Why Summer’s a popular season,
Why Spring has its voters
And Fall its promoters,
Yet longing for Winter is treason.

‘Winter of our discontent’. ‘Nuclear winter’. ‘My corpse’s wintry mien’. To go on would risk wearying the good-hearted, and alienating cultivated opinion. Or would it? Our thoughts echo unwittingly with such discriminatory language. How long, people, until a Winter Awakening? We have much to learn from decent folk South of the Equator, where such biased talk is seldom heard. Come on, Northern Hemisphere! If it wasn’t for Winter, FFS, I wouldn’t have been born at all! And I bet I’m not the only one.

276 • Escapology (4)

2nd October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’ll escape to the Isle of Capri
To the comfort of sandscape and sea
Where the heart-broken herds
Trade their kind, empty words.
Just the world and his widow, and me.

‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ is a particularly oblique and idiotic saying I’ve occasionally heard during my time in Britain. Likewise this bulletin is full of fine words, told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Clearly I shall not escape anywhere: the whole district is suffering another Covid lockdown. Clearly I would never want to escape to any place infested with fellow-divorcees. The only viable escape shall be inward, into the world of my daily blurtings, and into healing correspondence with the thoughtful souls who read them.

275 • Dear John

1st October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The pink billet-doux read ‘Dear John,
I have taken the children and gone.
Accept your comeuppance
’Cos no-one cares twopence;
It’s time to give up and move on.’

I saw it coming, as did my many readers who have been inboxing me with words of support. Thank you, thank you. Nonetheless it’s a bitter blow. She could have got my name right, the cow.

274 • Quondam entanglement

30th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Guess the kettle has run out of cream
And the kitten’s got sick of the steam.
I used to convulse
At the throb of your pulse:
Now I dance to a different dream.

To live outside the law you must be honest, as our Great Poet saith. But it’s not easy to live outside the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which wants us to believe that organised systems tend towards chaos, unless energy is fed in to sustain their structure. Today’s bulletin – not written by me, but slipped under my door by the lovely Angharad – is intended to show me that her vital energy has not ebbed, but is rather being directed elsewhere. I conclude, however, that what has actually ebbed is her ability to organise metaphors convincingly. Unless she mixed those lines up on purpose in a cruel attempt at parody.

273 • All night I cry

29th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’ve not seen a sign of my spouse
Since she opted to live as a mouse.
All night I cry ‘Please
Don’t you fancy some cheese?
I’ve set trapsful all over the house.’

Can we lure back our spouses with nibbles? Or woo our lost partners with treats? Am I accidentally writing the start of a Music-Hall song? The answer to the first two questions is, regrettably, ‘no’ … not if the morsels in question are elements in a lurid murder plot. Don’t say it couldn’t happen. Do say, ‘How terribly British, to offer such a flippant take on such a desperate scenario.’

272 • The New Solomon

28th September 2020 RL Comments 3 Comments

The Nabob of New Nagasaki
Has painted his genitals khaki.
The grounds he supplied
Were ‘To stop my young bride
From bragging she’s slept with a darkie:
We hate all that racist malarkey.’

A companion piece to yesterday’s heartfelt parable, this bulletin depicts ‘a leader whose perception and compassion present a stark and humiliating contrast to the failings of Western potentates’. The sacrifice the Nabob makes – in order to negate a loathsome opinion, voiced in unacceptable language – reveals ‘a Zen-like clarity of action and a laudable commitment to non-confrontational protest’. Astute and deftly understated, part of his testament ‘deserve[s] to be carved deep into the façade of every Governmental HQ on the planet’, where many hope to see ‘bas-reliefs in granite, gigantic friezes and modish, gaudy frescoes commemorating the compact wit and crystalline sagacity of a latter-day Solomon’.

271 • Sermon of the Stripes

27th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I don’t like the look of your back,’
Said one zebra. ‘Get out of our pack.’
‘We’re just different types,’
Said the one with white stripes
To the other, whose stripes were all black.

Would that we lived in a receptive world where the childlike simplicity of an animal parable sufficed not only to turn the hateful tide of racist rhetoric, but also to clarify and bolster the self-worth of the myriad poor souls who endure it. “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed”, writes our Great Poet. Yet, amid the tumult of modern-day hatred and hurt, upraised voices too often defy comprehension, emitting ‘more heat than light’ as the saying goes. And the cruel crassitude of our amoral leaders – to whom any kind of enlightenment is anathema – constitutes the most tragic obstruction of all.

270 • Surplus to requirements

26th September 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

A crafty old crook from Pamplona
Once posed as a cardiac donor.
The ad. for his heart
Said ‘Good second-hand part
Unused by its previous owner.’

‘Crafty’, perhaps, in that the familiar language of Classified Ads deftly deflects attention from the more problematical aspects of his offer. But ‘crook’, really? Where’s the crime in seeking to divest oneself of an organ that serves only as memento of a life untouched by true romance?

269 • Normal

25th September 2020 RL Comments 3 Comments

Please note that your stepson, Francisco,
Is banned from this evening’s Class Disco.
When everyone queues
To kiss Mrs Hughes
A normal-sized child will get his go.

Modern-day teachers show commendable dedication, generosity and imagination in devising bonding exercises, early in the academic year, that will incline their young charges to warm to the grade school experience. This tersely-worded bulletin, however, gives the receiving family insufficient sense of their unfortunate stepchild’s infraction. Is he too large, or too small, to join his new class buddies in Inappropriate Touching with their tutor?

268 • Punctured

24th September 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

This has to be grounds for divorce
And she’s not shown the slightest remorse.
What makes me see red
Is stilettos in bed
When they burst my inflatable horse.

I trust loyal readers can endure a brief glimpse of my dirty laundry, as outlined above. Are we looking at ‘unreasonable conduct’ here, or ‘irretrievable breakdown’? (Please don’t alert Pope Clement VII to this matter, or things might end very badly. I live in hope that present-day mores condone divorce more readily than beheading, although – thanks to Unprincipled Egomaniacs in High Places – a new Dark Age beckons incontrovertibly.)

267 • Libra

23rd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

They weighed you in Libra, the scales:
Now all your fine life-planning fails.
No matter what talents
You chuck in the balance
The world sucks the wind from your sails.

Waking this morning under the sign of the celestial scales, it’s liberating to remember how our lives are laid out in full by the time the midwife has us snipped and weighed. I was 9lbs 10 in my maiden diaper … heavy, man.

266 • Hot Hot Hot

22nd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My love, while the weather is warm
(Almost three times the seasonal norm)
Let us sprawl in this field
With our soft parts revealed
Awaiting the imminent storm.

The storm is not ‘imminent’, it’s actual. What did St Greta tell you: ‘Make hay while the sun shines, make love while the world burns, make excuses while you bury your dead’? No, I don’t think it was that, but I wasn’t really listening.

265 • Symbolismus

21st September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One needs to be mentally nimble
To capture a gnat in a thimble
Or one pitiful crumb
In a ten-gallon drum
Or the quest for true love in one symbol.

To answer the poet point-for-point: who are these people who seek to capture gnats, and why do they set themselves up for failure by making thimbles their tool of choice? Who are these crumb-hunters who encumber their travails with such unwieldy and inappropriate canisters? And why oh why would anyone with even a single gram of common-sense waste their time dreaming up a symbol for some pointless and unattainable personal quest? We suddenly need some ersatz sequel to The Song of Solomon, do we?

264 • Snake in the Boudoir

20th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Coition continued full-tilt
Till a cobra crawled out of the quilt;
This dampened the heat
In the Honeymoon Suite
And a quart of Veuve Clicquot got spilt.

Ordinary folk have little to fear from the proverbial ‘snake in the grass’, because the snake in the grass is minding his or her own business, in the same way as a bridal couple does on their wedding night. The non-proverbial ‘snake in the bedding’, however, is another story, and its kinship with the Garden of Eden narrative – from which humanity didn’t emerge particularly well – is not easily overlooked. For those who will wish to reflect on this matter a little, until we meet next Sunday, a suggested topic: ‘This House believes we should all be a lot happier if the cobra remained in the quilt next time: out of sight, out of mind.’

263 • Playing away

19th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’d love to be playing croquet
But there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Let’s wait till Angharad
And I have got married,
Then nothing will stand in my way.

Yeah right, nothing will stand in my way … except Angharad herself. Who’d have guessed? Maybe I should have asked her to join in the fun, of course, but it’s a bit late in the day for that now.

262 • Idols of clay

18th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Let us live by the anarchists’ credo:
First steal a huge barrel of Playdoh
Then fashion a golem
That looks like Mo Mowlam
To drag through the streets of Laredo.

She’d have been 71 today, Mo Mowlam, had she not died so young. The above bulletin proposes a straightforward method for reviving the plain-talking British MP who, while serving in the Shadow Cabinet, urged the destruction of Buckingham Palace. It’s now the USA that stands in desperate need of such a firebrand radical, and that’s (partly) why today’s lesson in Thaumogenesis is set in a city divided by Trump’s imaginary Mexican wall, a comic symbol of his brainless posturing, and a heartening portent of his imminent demolition.

261 • Right and Popper

17th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I grew up believing Karl Popper
Would choose to say nothing improper
Such as ‘Buy me a pint
And my pal here, Geraint,
Will give you a ride in his chopper.’

It is evident, wheresoever we choose to look, that today’s gullible masses equate celebrity with sanctity. Just as we cast an overgrown TV host as a saviour of the free world, so we picture any Viennese pioneer of critical rationalism as a kind of pious hermit, melancholically meditating in his minimalist penthouse atop some ivory tower. But as this morning’s bulletin suggests, Sir Karl was a mere mortal, like anyone else who likes a drink and is chummy with Welsh helicopterists. His death, 26 years ago today, proves it.

260 • Whipsnade

16th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your child, Mary-Lou,
Is banned from our trip to the zoo.
The keepers advise
That a girl of her size
Might get killed by a rogue cockatoo.

Please note, rather, that a truly enlightened society would ban all children from visiting all zoos, the better to hasten their abolition. Since vested interests will surely strive to keep them in business we must – however ruefully – concede that the extinguishing of a few toddlers, by vengeful Psittaciformes bursting forth from internment, might prove a useful catalyst in turning the tide of public opinion against such egregious institutions.

259 • Bigglesworth

15th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Let’s review all the rubbish that’s written
In praise of The Battle of Britain.
At the head of the queue
We find Biggles’s view
(By the which I am thoroughly smitten).

Only a remarkable writer can make real people feel part of a fictional situation; and arguably it’s even harder to convince readers that a fictional character was present in a real situation. Today is Battle of Britain Day, supposedly: click this Amazon link … judge the above-mentioned publications for yourself.

258 • Faye King

14th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Forgetting the wives they’re forsaking
Men queue for a fling with Miss Faye King:
We all know she neuters
Her second-rate suitors.
It just seems a gamble worth taking.

Incredibly there are men who would disagree that emasculation, by some painted celluloid vamp, is ‘a gamble worth taking’. What abject feebletons! We Real Men can validate our virility only through high-profile competitive mating; an alpha Hollywood vedette is both a mirror for male vanity and an antidote to the slow poison of a complacent marriage. The conquest, and satisfaction, of such illusory femmes fatales constitutes a Darwinian endorsement, a seal of machismo. In our dreams, at any rate; our most ignoble and embarrassing dreams.

257 • Femme Fatale

13th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yet rather than cutting my hair
Delilah confided, ‘Beware!
By curtailing the length
I may limit your strength,
And you’ve little of either to spare.’

This morning’s reading from Judges 16 warned us about the guile of Philistine women, and about the likely aftermath of games that involve sexual partners in tying each other up. Our sermon, now, will develop that theme of the femme fatale, and seek to establish which option is – in the long term – more injurious to the male ego: (a) to be castrated outright, or (b) to be spared emasculation thanks to confidential hints that there’s not much down there worth lopping off?

256 • Other lives

12th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The stresses and strains were quite striking
All my vigorous years as a Viking.
In a subsequent life
As Napoleon’s wife
Things were frankly much more to my liking.

There are lines, all up the stairwell at home, of suckers waiting to be fleeced by my hypnotist neighbour who – in exchange for fat wads of greenbacks – claims to ‘regress’ them to previous existences. Almost invariably they were once men of action, ladies of leisure, persons of consequence. Almost inevitably his lies plunge them into deeper and deeper disenchantment with the daily greyness of their workaday worlds. So I harangue them from the bottom landing: ‘Get a grip, people! There’s another life you can live for nothing! You’re in it, now: make a move, take time by the horns, burn down the haystack while the cuckoo crumbles.’ And as they bustle off home, equipped – by my visionary rhetoric – with destinies colorfully reimagined, they almost instinctively press fat wads of greedy greenbacks into my outstretched paws.

255 • Fred ♥ Suzy

11th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said Fred to a frizzy-haired floosie,
‘I rather enjoy my jacuzzi:
If I ply you with gin
Will you join me therein?
And cherries as well, if you’re choosy.’

Then Suzy responded, ‘I getcha,
You sad and pedantic old lecher.
Avert thy vile eye
Lest I smite thee thereby
And despatch thee to hell on a stretcher.’

The elderly gentleman’s request to the lady is, on the face of it, civilized enough; yet she takes offense, and appears ready to do him violence. We should be aware that the now-impermissible label ‘floosie’ is not uttered in her hearing, unless she is somehow privy to the word-choices of the narrator from whose brain she has sprung. And her imputation of pedantry (based solely on the gentleman’s use of ‘therein’, which is no longer current in British conversation, yet perfectly justified when there’s a necessary rhyme to complete) seems a tad arch in a young person from whose lips archaisms such as ‘smite’, ‘thee’ and ‘thereby’ spill in such preposterous abundance. [See also #122]

254 • Monster hoax

10th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Those tracks that we noticed, while skiing,
Suggest some gargantuan being.
Maybe Bigfoot is real?
If that print was his heel
Then his toes will be something worth seeing.

In a secular age, humanity’s innate yearning for supernatural guidance finds expression through the belief in, and adulation of, some improbable freaks. Lumpen, unruly monsters fascinate the American psyche, their stupidity presenting an intriguing counterpoise to inconceivable power. Still, only a couple more months before voters can consign one such oafish hoax to richly deserved oblivion.

253 • Currency crisis

9th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A shifty young slut from Sri Lanka
Had a senseless affair with a banker:
When she paid him for sex
She was forging blank cheques,
And he brought plastic flowers to thank her.

Of course we’re not out to shame this particular slut, nor to heap ignominy on that particular island: any affair with a banker is a priori senseless. Would that I were sufficiently familiar with international finance to understand how the interpersonal circumstances outlined above should conduce to the forging of cheques, let alone blank ones. Doubtless it’s one of the few downsides of commercial coition that are not widely discussed.

252 • Mud

8th September 2020 RL Comments 5 Comments

There was an old man of Llandudno
Whose wife left him all of a sudden-o.
She’d chatted with Charlotte
The neighbourhood harlot.
His name was quite palpably mud, no?

Baleful and hideous, is it not, to see the conniving women of the parish ganging up on a well-nigh blameless man? Full disclosure: I have never wittingly visited Llandudno, and know nobody there trading under the name of ‘Charlotte’. Consequently the present bulletin cannot legitimately be supposed to bear any relevance to my recent history.

251 • Pre-nup

7th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Of course I’ll help planning your wedding
But first, have you thought where you’re heading?
Into what sort of strife
Are you plunging your life?
Into what kind of trap are you are treading?

‘Tis the privilege of a godparent to help steer his godspawn’s way through the perils of adult life … even when he has nothing sweeter to offer her than personal experience.

250 • Arms of Mary

6th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

While dancing with Mother Teresa
I noticed she carried a Taser,
Three Colt .45s
And six slaughterman’s knives
(No wonder the other nuns praise her).

Sentimentalists point to tininess and piety to explain the extraordinary career of Sister Mary Teresa (whose Feast Day was yesterday); the above snapshot lays the emphasis on feisty preparedness. In deciding which side to take, be sure to avoid gender bias.

249 • A Voyeur’s Lament

5th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My Andalusian amœba …
I summon her to me: ‘Arriba!’
Yet she sulks in her pool
Coquettish, but cruel:
Unbearable beauty, Bathsheba.

‘You saw her bathing on the roof,’ as Laughing Len sang, ‘Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya.’ But am I King David, or Farmer Boldwood, observing my innamorata through a specialist microscope, made by Óptica of Seville, and formerly in the possession of Luis Buñuel? Quite why this flirting – especially since it can scarcely be pursued to consummation – should so annoy a human marital partner is beyond me.

248 • Freya

4th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My match stalled at love-love with Freya,
A consummate shuttlecock player.
She fielded the blame
For our unfinished game
Though a lot of the culpa was mea.

‘Match-maker’, ‘player’, ‘score’, ‘clean sheet’ – sporting jargon is readily confused with informal terms relating to the so-called Battle of the Sexes. Did the lovely Freya catch me on the rebound? Did I take one for the team? A gentleman’s lips are sealed. Or they were sealed. But this Friday is Freya-day. I fear it will be a long walk to the pavilion.

247 • Julie noted

3rd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

What a jolt, to be jilted by Julie,
An upstart, a pipsqueak, a schoolie!
I am not ‘old and weird
With dead gnats in my beard’
And my pants do not reek of patchouli.

So it’s back to school for the young, and back to the drawing board for others (their elders and betters, by most accounts). You don’t see Daniel Craig getting rejected by Léa Seydoux, do you? Or if you do – I don’t think I’ve seen that film – she surely doesn’t insult him in such vague and unimaginative terms.

246 • Adjectives fuse

2nd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Sighed the notable painter, Ravilious,
“Was ever a surname as silly as
The one that I use,
In which adjectives fuse
To imply I’m both ‘raving’ and ‘bilious’?”

They come around so quickly now, these anniversary acknowledgments of the death – in 1942 – of Eric Ravilious. One tends to hear small children, in galleries, referring to him with some mocking variant of the word ‘Ravioli’; interesting to read, above, how he himself construed the unusual surname.

245 • Succulent

1st September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

From the front door I called, ‘Hallo Vera,
Could you come just a little bit nearer?
There is one simple test
I must run on each guest
To be certain she’s not a chimæra.’

Some would argue that Vera wasn’t a ‘guest’ when I hailed her in public; and others that a woman snatched from the street isn’t really a guest either. I reject such censorious insinuations. My tests invariably concluded that the persons I sought to address were unattainable, in virtue of their being illusions. There’s not a court in all Siberia – nor, for all I know, in the wider world – that would convict a man for ‘bending his eye on vacancy’. Are you trying to tell me the law is an ass? #MeNeither

244 • Frozen

31st August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Seduction is strained, in Siberia
Where trysts mostly end in hysteria.
‘I despise you!’ they shrill,
Vaulting over the cill
And abseiling down the wisteria.

I admit it’s a good while since I had an apartment in Tomsk, so I trust readers will excuse my memory if certain botanical details in this brief, and otherwise veridical, scenario strike them as inauthentic.

243 • Crim. Con.

30th August 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I observe that your wife has undressed.
My brief telepathic request
Was never expected
To be intercepted …
I trust you don’t think me a pest.

The priest who spouts Mosaic law forbids us to ‘covet’ another man’s wife; the attorney, blethering about ‘criminal conversation’, concerns himself with ‘physical contact with an alien and unlawful organ’. These pests aside, where does blame lie in the present, sad case? The disrobing spouse, responding to a supernaturally-registered suggestion, perhaps believes she is obeying the will of a Higher Power. Can the true issuer of that command really be guilty, if he never expected his libidinous impulses to come to light? Many would consider him no adulterer; but more would consider him a fool, since – by apologising so stiffly to the no-doubt startled husband – he proclaims his otherwise-unprovable involvement. Yet, to the woman, the putative adulterer is a hero, having rescued her from possible charges of wilful exhibitionism, or lewd and wanton provocation. Bravo for him, therefore; and huzzah for such a tiny bulletin, fairly bursting with such sapient doctrine.

242 • Skin Deep

29th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It’s hard to be horrid to Hannah,
That winsome and whimsical manner,
The bugs in her bread,
The bones in her bed,
The blood on her Bunty bandanna.

All readers will surely be familiar with this kind of weekend acquaintance, in the presence of whose surface charms we knowingly turn a blind eye to one or more unsettling indicators of their workaday life.

241 • Draft dodgers

28th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

While Tolstoy was crashing chez nous
The vodka caused quite a to-do:
A draft press-release
To announce War and Peace
Was repeatedly flushed down the loo.

When Chekhov was based at our flat
The samovar sizzled and spat
But his brow remained tortured:
A draft Cherry Orchard
Went straight in the tray for the cat.

While Nabokov slept on our floor
His anguish was hard to ignore.
One draft of Lolita
Was burned in the heater
Another lined many a drawer.

Great men these may be, but the example they set is a dangerous one. While ‘Writer’s Block’ may seem a lofty phrase – redolent of restless perfectionism, frustrated dedication, and doomed entanglement with a capricious Muse – the fabric of society will surely unravel when the slothful, uncommitted or incompetent start playing for our sympathy with copycat claims such as ‘Banker’s Block’, ‘Roadmender’s Block’, ‘Republican Presidential Nominee’s Block’ and so on.

240 • On reflection

27th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On the point of removing my shorts
I suddenly had second thoughts:
Maybe keeping them on
Till the newsmen had gone
Would forestall some unhelpful reports?

In a world where the salacious media seem omnipresent, such moments of discretion and insight are to be cherished.

239 • Empty nesters

26th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I went to the Garden of Love
To marry my sweet turtle-dove.
But we got so depressed
In that tiny, cramped nest
That we each gave the other the shove.

The first line, above, is appropriated from Our Great Poet; the rest is triteness itself … well-suited to the wearisome scenario it depicts. A cuckoo typically expels its step-siblings, and step-parents, in order to annex their space for itself; but in this instance the nest is left wholly untenanted. One might expect close confines to provide the perfect milieu for connubial satisfaction; but here they promote a different category of physical cooperation. A significant degree of acrobatic rapport must have been required for the partners to achieve simultaneous expulsion.

238 • What’s she like in bed?

25th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Oh how I delight in your snoring!
A riot of sizzle and roaring:
A nightly recital
So varied, so vital,
Your daytime assertions seem boring.

As a general rule the professional male of a certain age regards the secrets of the boudoir as sacrosanct. Yet, as we see above, the day will dawn in most long-established relationships when it becomes a tactical inevitability that certain hitherto-undisclosed truths be revealed.

237 • Wind-up

24th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I have to confess, I’m in shock
At your plan to stop winding our clock.
Are you scared of the chime,
Or the passage of time?
Its tick is much worse than its tock.

You can either stare a looming personal crisis right in the eye, or try to make light of it. A short blast of nonsense – establishing some kind of bogus dualism at the heart of the matter – should be sufficient to test the troubled waters.

236 • Virgo

23rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may trust, under Virgo the Virgin,
That your boons and your blessings will burgeon:
But such hopes are misplaced
(Like a frog in fishpaste
Or a goat in the garb of a surgeon).

My mother had a fair-sized bee in her bonnet when it came to Mariolatry. Sooner trust an astrologer than a woman, she would often say. For a long while I was blind to the paradox in those words, but recent events in my private life, which I shall not make public here, are forcing me to re-evaluate them.

235 • Escapology (3)

22nd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My passport still shows the faint stamp
From the night I enrolled as a tramp!
Though I soon swapped ‘The Road’
For my present abode
When the company iPad got damp.

To succeed as a vagrant, one must of necessity eschew the proprieties of office and the allure of corporate cybertrash. In this bulletin, abyssal and humiliating inauthenticity is compounded by the author’s feeble pride in the scarcely-readable documentation of his or her self-delusion.

234 • Escapology (2)

21st August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Spent the night in the park. Not depressed,
Simply giving my Real Life a rest.
Woke with seven huge holes
Gnawn by weapons-grade moles
In my warranted bullet-proof vest.

Aspirations to a bucolic idyll are here outweighed by some dark mental baggage. Humanity’s preoccupation with warmongery is not the easiest aspect of ‘Real Life’ to shrug off. A person who dons body-armour for an excursion to Eden can surely not be wholeheartedly expecting a decent night’s sleep.

233 • Escapology

20th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

What joy to live out in the park,
And skulk in the bushes till dark!
Then catch cocker spaniels
To fry in Jack Daniel’s,
And start forest fires with one spark!

The Pastoral Impulse has a long and healthy history, but this outlaw’s short-sighted manifesto merely catalogues the reckless and ignoble impulses of a vainglorious deviant from whom any genuine Noble Savage would recoil with contempt.

232 • Messina / Massena

19th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“So I’ve flown all the way to Messina
To view this Exploding Hyæna,
And now ‘She won’t burst
Till the crowd has dispersed’?
No Sir! I stay here till I’ve seen her.”

Thanks to good ol’ coronavirus the era of self-centered, impetuous air-tourism is drawing to a close. This means more-breathable air all around the world. It also means that the hoodwinking of brainless Americans by shabby Sicilian mountebanks with their callous animal-exploiting sideshows will have to move closer to home: from Messina to Massena, in all probability.

231 • Exterminate!

18th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Dalek invaders from Skaro
Have colonised Kilimanjaro.
Some say Moriarty
Is leading their party
And plans to exterminate Poirot.

The archetypal figures of modern myth, heroic or villainous, are of course made in our own image, just as their classical antecedents were. Here an African mountain is their Parnassus, from which they observe humanity’s self-destruction; and, as if on stage for our delectation, re-enact it in robotically brutal parody.

230 • Cometary Dazes

17th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Astronomer Royal, Edmond Halley
Confided (back when we were pally),
‘On sighting a comet
I gen’rally vomit;
And shooting-stars drive me doolally.’

Not an ideal companion, then, on our seasonal expedition to the heath to view The Perseid Shower, and to join in the midnight incantations whereby witches implore these cosmic projectiles to validate their hitherto-purposeless trajectories by hailing down on the skulls of this planet’s most infamous leaders.

229 • Pura tontería, pura sabiduría

16th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night we gunned down an intruder
He proved to be Pablo Neruda.
Here’s hoping the burglar
We’ve hanged in the pergola
Wasn’t The Lion of Judah.

Constitutionally one is permitted to defend one’s patch, but too often this right is taken by householders as a license to exterminate any foreign or outlandish figure who approaches or penetrates our homesteads. In this morning’s sermon we remember all the great minds and shining role-models, the poets and Aslan-substitutes, who have been swept away in such episodes of indiscriminate violence.

228 • Épater la bourgeoisie

15th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At dinner, chez René Magritte:
Just silence, and nothing to eat.
As the third hour passed
He hissed ‘Welcome,’ at last
And the maid brought a single boiled sweet.

In this brief bulletin we commemorate one of Belgium’s cultural Titans, who died 53 years ago this morning. In his life, just as through his mischievously haunting image-making in various media, Magritte gnawed relentlessly at the malignant roots of bourgeois sensibility. Bravo!

227 • Bingo!

14th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A pretty good night at the Bingo:
We won the first prize, a flamingo.
I wasn’t too chuffed
When I found it was stuffed.
Next time I’ll opt for the dingo.

A dingo is not a suitable pet, any more than a flamingo is. It should be running about in the tundra or wherever, making its own way, not relying on another, less noble, species for its upkeep.

226 • Howzat!

13th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My son hurled a gobbet of Gouda
At a git riding high in a howdah
Who then toppled down dead,
While the elephant fled.
As a parent, I’ve never felt prouder.

Though many will admire this laudable initiative – and the consequent emancipation of an enslaved animal – others may simply be disgusted at the waste of good cheese. (Still others may suspect that the proud father has embellished the facts, in the interests of procuring an unexpected rhyme; and that his offspring’s actual feat was nothing more remarkable than lobbing a brick at a git on a bike.)

225 • Glorious Twelfth

12th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Glorious Twelfth is at hand!
Posh gunmen all over the land
Utter bloodthirsty howls
And slay thousands of fowls,
A practice I can’t understand
But fervently wish to see banned.

We may long to stop brainless toffs assassinating wildlife; but if we grant Governments the power to curtail people’s hobbies, where will it end? We’d be a nation of vegans … no bad thing.

224 • Apecraft (3)

11th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My quest for perfection began
When I first met a Renaissance Man
(Namely Fra Lippo Lippi,
Who held up our Chippy
Disguised as an orang-utan ).

Many an unrealisable life-trajectory has been determined by inappropriate fixation on the accomplishments of historical figures: frustration and self-loathing are the invariable consequences. In this brief confessional piece we are shown how ill-founded such hero-worship can be: if Lippi is skilled in all things, how come the ape-suit he relies upon – while fulfilling this gourmet heist – fails to conceal his identity?

223 • Apecraft (2)

10th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.

I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.

222 • Apecraft

9th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I read in The Military Journal,
An ape’s reached the rank of full colonel.
Since beasts lack a soul
He can act out the rôle
Without fearing Hellfire eternal.

We’ve grown accustomed to press scaremongering concerning military robots, which pictures Artificial Intelligence running berserk on battlefields of the future. Far more alarming, however, are reports that our Masters of War have already appointed creatures – without conscience, yet close to us in tactical reasoning – to execute their damnable machinations. Has humanity learnt nothing at all from the PG Tips scandal of the 1970s?

221 • Loris Farewell

8th August 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Farewell to my loris, Louise,
Who loved to curl up on my knees.
She felt like a friend
Till she forced me to spend
Such a fortune in medical fees.

In a civilised society, such as we nominally aspire to, a true friendship would endure even as the associated medical bills began to pile up. In trans-species relationships, however, this aspirational principle appears to be tainted by a culpable, chauvinistic parsimony.

220 • Corking Pet

7th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘It’s only the dull birds that squawk:
The ones worth possessing can talk.’
Now you’ve purchased a crow
That keeps saying ‘Hello!’?
Better start saving up for a cork.

Humans high-handedly ascribe greater value to animals in which we perceive characteristics similar to our own. Yet the shortfall in their accomplishments quickly oppresses us – appearing gruelling, or tedious – with ignoble consequences that often epitomise our own folly and cruelty.

219 • Bluebird Farewell

6th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my bluebird, Baptiste,
Who detested the winds from the east.
He would drowse on the hob
While the cook did her job …
And was finally part of the feast.

Inexplicably our culture approves the harvesting, for human nourishment, of various fowls of the air. The bluebird, however, has a sentimental significance to many, and the callousness of its assassin in this story is therefore noteworthy.

218 • Escalator

5th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In order to settle a score
I nailed a dead rat to your door.
Then you glued a grilled stoat
To my second-best coat.
So I’m bursting this slug on your floor …

Animals are often invoked in interpersonal abuse (‘You pig!’ ‘You bitch!’ and so on), but in this bulletin they cruelly serve as bodily sacrifices in what should be a war of words only. And, far from settling the score, their use appears to be ‘upping the ante’, as each participant glories in ever-more savage and ostentatious gestures. Such is humanity’s impercipient appetite for escalation.

217 • Penguin farewell

4th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my penguin, Pierre,
Whose dream was to fly through the air:
Though he clung to that kite
With apparent delight
I felt for his inner despair.

It is not easy to distinguish ‘delight’ in a penguin physiognomy, and it seems probable that the dream of flying was the author’s, not that of his long-suffering pet, which is singularly ill-adapted for such manoeuvres. All too often humanity’s purported kindnesses are, at base, paper-thin masks for gnawing personal inadequacy.

216 • Carruthers

3rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was baiting a bear named Carruthers
At a church of the Carmelite Brothers.
I’m ferociously strong
So he didn’t last long,
But I guess they have plenty of others.

Musculature and morale falter infallibly in captive animals: it’s not the strength of the vainglorious aggressor we marvel at here, but the weakness of his victim. Monks may be ‘known for their unpleasant habits’, as the old joke goes: but should we perhaps applaud this compassionate Brotherhood for allowing its bears to be slain outright? Worldlier bear-baiting gangs are obliged, by commercial imperative, to keep their victims alive, to suffer – for our delight – day after day.

215 • Oyster Farewell

2nd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my oyster, Odette,
Who could never abide getting wet
But would snivel and cry
When the bed was too dry:
All in all, quite a difficult pet.

This Sunday’s moral dilemma. Which is more odious: to posit an inner life for a creature that self-evidently cannot signal emotion to a human being? Or to denigrate her supposed caprices, when these have clearly been triggered by needlessly-inflicted cruelty?

214 • Skintext

1st August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This morning, a bolt from the blue:
Our tadpole has got a tattoo.
Neatly lettered in black
On the small of his back
It reads ‘What would Lord Attenborough do?‘

I confess I find it distressing when the young choose to disfigure themselves with texts they may well regret in adult life (I spent a small fortune getting ‘What would Jesus do?’ lasered off the mons veneris of my Significant Other). It’s perhaps not surprising that animals look to Sir David Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS FSA as a saviour, but any responsible tattooist would have known that ‘Lord Attenborough’ refers not to the well-loved environmentalist but to his brother Richard, a noted squanderer of frog DNA in his role as the unconvincing proprietor of ‘Jurassic Park’ in the eponymous blockbuster movie.

213 • Jackdaw Farewell

31st July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my jackdaw, Jean-Claude,
Who liked to lie flat in the road.
The neighbours all laughed
But I thought he was daft.
He doesn’t deserve a long ode.

Many will feel it unlikely that the corvid in question ‘liked to lie flat in the road’, and judge it more probable that he was mown down there by a careering juggernaut … which is what the neighbours found amusing.

212 • Dogged

30th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The store on the way to the station
Was manned by an outsized Alsatian.
‘Pray, are you a grocer?’
I asked. It said ‘No sir,
You’re having an hallucination.’

The products of our imagination often seem programmed to mislead; but as this instance shows, we should study to ask them The Right Question … in this case , something like ‘Please may I have an apple and a banana, in a brown paper bag, to sustain me on the journey up to town?’ It is seldom appropriate to challenge a shopkeeper’s professional credentials.

211 • Flatfish farewell

29th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my flatfish, Phillippe,
Who is, frankly, a bit of a creep.
As I choose my next phrase
I can feel his cold gaze
Though he wants me to think he’s asleep.

The floundering author wishes us to understand that he continues to be haunted, from another realm, by a fishlike gaze of opprobrium – which is more probably the buried memory of well-deserved contempt dished out by a grade school teacher.

210 • Sleeping cats

28th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A hangman, who dwelt in Beijing,
Once dreamt that his cat was a king:
With a wave of its paw
It created a law
That, should he awake, he would swing.

To be alive at all, in this era, is to be somebody’s hangman or hangwoman (or to reside somewhere else on the hang-spectrum); but only in dreams does a person fully acknowledge the prospect of dying by the hand of their own inventions. If this clarity of comprehension invaded ‘Real Life’, should we still be facing such imminent Climate Suicide?

209 • Earthworm farewell

27th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my earthworm, Yvonne,
Who has grown rather pallid and wan.
Certain notes I would hum
Made her coil round my thumb.
I can scarcely believe that she’s gone.

Human beings will mourn even the most apparently-inconsequential creature, once they have elevated it to the status of personal pet. Yet note how this plaint is entirely self-centred, and the principle recollection focuses on episodes of manipulation and control.

208 • Body and/or Soul

26th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

There are Driverless Cars in our town.
Small wonder pedestrians frown:
One went for a jog
With her Bodiless Dog
And a Riderless Bike knocked it down.

Just as Modern Man has dispensed with the idea of the soul, so his cleverest machines now rove at large without their once-crucial guiding hands. Emblematically, in this Sunday’s searching parable, we witness the extinguishing of a Spirit Companion (easily the best kind of dog, in that it does not slobber, yell, bite, excrete or fornicate indiscriminately) by exactly such a futile, mechanical zombie.

207 • A Grand Scheme

25th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I sat, with my cat, at the vet’s,
Where a ghastly, huge dog with Tourette’s
Snapped and bellowed and whined,
A Grand Scheme came to mind:
Euthanasia For Other Folk’s Pets.

All true … but let us not be too hard on dogs; it’s so easy to see them as unruly embodiments of all that is vulgar and vicious, and to forget that the cur’s owner in this cameo may feel correspondingly ill-at-ease with the little cat – threatened, even, by the placid decorum with which she awaits her final summons into the consulting-room.

206 • In the Mirror

24th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Lord Fortescue ruffles my fur:
I narrow my eyes, and I purr.
We sprawl on the sofa
One lazy old loafer
And one upper-crust bon viveur.

People become like their pets, as the saying goes. Doubtless a similar – albeit opposite – belief is held among cats. Time is running out in mankind’s search for the ‘Reciprocal Osmotic Gradient’ – the so-called ‘Grand Scheme’ – by which our shabby race can live in balance with the remaining non-human animals on the planet. Improbably, however, the present poem depicts a member of the Hunting Classes achieving exactly that symmetry.

205 • Leo

23rd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your career – once allegro con brio –
Turns so deadly dull, thanks to Leo,
You’ll be longing, instead,
For a whole month in bed
Next to three baleful badgers with B.O.

Springing from our beds, with the Lion ruling the zodiac, we should surely genuflect for a moment – not to the King of the Beasts, but to the Astrological Adept, whose acumen, in the field of predicting human affairs, lies beyond any reasonable doubt.

204 • United State

22nd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Now we’ve pictured the Earth from the Moon,
All Nations shall Sing the Same Tune.
All Rifts shall be Whole
As we Share the One Goal.’
Great words – but I hope we start soon.

This Utopian creed, this Moon-Age Daydream, was overwritten, as the 60s’ influence waned, by warmongers and capitalists – the enemies of humanity – to the point of obliteration. Half a century on, however, our invisible ally, coronavirus, rides in like the cavalry with a blistering counter-attack … and we’re united once more.

203 • Omphaloskepsis

21st July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Astronomers travel to Tulsa
To view the Crab Nebula pulsar.
To spare that expense
It would make far more sense
To stay put, and examine my ulcer.

Yes indeed, with all the sparkling technology at its disposal humanity now tends to look outward, rather than inward, for its enlightenment. But why make expense a guiding principle? Why not emulate the navel-gazers of yore, who lived wisely, if not too well, on cowpats and cobwebs in hovels moulded from their ancestors’ excrements?

202 • Apollo 11

20th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

An astronaut’s moll named Amanda
Went down in the NASA moon-lander.
Neil and Buzz got away
But she’s there to this day
Penning anti-US propaganda.

Year on year we remember Apollo 11 and its plucky pilots; yet we hear little of the lonely martyr who renounced our planet, choosing instead to rail against its greatest nation from a nearby satellite. Sadly this marooned dissident’s solitary effusions register as mere pinpricks alongside the crass proclamations, 51 years later, of the Overgrown Baby whose vacuous tweetings make his country a daily laughing-stock across the entire world.

201 • Unhappy houri

19th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The great Russian cosmonaut, Yuri,
Was fired into space with a houri.
But when they came down
His face wore a frown
And hers wore a mask of cold fury.

Though the literal truth of this fragment is debatable, it is a parable fit to illustrate any sermon about the moral and ethical implications of sex in space. (The Kremlin evidently didn’t expect the Creator to take pity on the lonely Gagarin, and fashion a companion for him by repurposing a redundant rib).

200 • War of the Words

18th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I must reconsider Persuasion.
I found, on another occasion
That its fame was a fraud
(Or I simply got bored
Before the main Martian invasion).

‘Later in the program we celebrate the death of Jane Austen,’ says Radio 4. One knows what one hopes they mean. Nice to learn that the person who came up with the slogan on the UK’s ten-pound note was, in life, a woman. We must wonder who’s been collecting those royalties, since she died 203 years ago.

199 • Brazil

17th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A caustic young clerk from Brazil
Chose the tools of his trade with great skill:
‘A poison-pen letter
Turns out so much better
When using a porcupine quill.’

It’s tempting to turn a kinder eye on an infamous trade when the practitioner follows it with subtle artistry. But would you admire an assassin, in the instant before he or she lunged forward to splinter your skull, for selecting a top-of-the-range sledge-hammer?

198 • Pillow talk

16th July 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

I was giving myself CPR
While two gunslingers trashed my guitar.
Yet, perverse as it seems,
I’d give forty such dreams
For the way that things actually are.

At first glance, this verbatim account suggests the heart-stopping hold any delicate possession exerts on us. At second glance, it appears impenetrably stupid. Yet, as an afterthought, perhaps we should ponder the worries and woes of waking life, and deplore the feverish parodies of it that are discharged by a toxic subconscious as we reluctantly escape from sleep.

197 • Where are they now?

15th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We’ve not seen a great deal of Piers;
He hasn’t come this way for years.
The reason he states
Is the size of the weights
That he’s tied to the hairs in his ears.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Layla.
She’s given her heart to a sailor.
She’s renting her spine
To a colleague of mine,
And the rest still remains with her gaoler.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Chalkie
Since he walked, on his hands, to Milwaukee
Where he teaches guitar
At The Conservatoire,
So he claims. But I guess that’s a porky.

A little suite of patterns or exemplars for those who need to craft excuses explaining why they no longer visit people they were friends with in High School (it’s too, too bourgeois, after all, to persist in blaming the Covid crisis for our insularity and self-absorption).

196 • Miss Walker recollected

14th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Miss Walker –
So winsome, but such a fast talker!
In one very quick chat
(In a bush, near her flat)
I grasped just the single word, ‘stalker’.

Miss Walker and Ms Carter roomed in the same apartment complex as I recall, two pretty cute babes. Walker called me out, but I turned the tables and reported her for misconduct. It takes two to tango, I claimed at the time. I wasn’t that popular when the Principal dismissed her. Not being her only teen admirer, I didn’t feel that guilty. Go figure.

195 • Smith

13th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Throughout the whole town of Penrith
There is nobody living named Smith.
Thus, when one gets born
They’re received with great scorn
(This may be a slight urban myth).

Hostile responses to ‘outsiders’ are fostered by malign leaders in many lands. This piece of disingenuous scaremongering, however, requires us to believe that an über-common surname is unknown in one particular Lake District community, and not to question where its unjustly-vilified new-borns can be coming from.

194 • Ms Carter, recollected

12th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Carter?
That course was a total non-starter.
I blame her huge eyes,
Her marble-white thighs
And her stylishly-streaming stigmata.

Yes, Paulina Carter, never to be forgotten, however hard I try. It was my first glimpse of such oozing wounds, and her whispered explanation (‘Call me a victim soul’) seemed somehow unsettling. Many of my classmates learned to focus on their studies: I only had eyes for Paulina.

193 • Gold Rush

11th July 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

With metal detector in hand
Each weekend he trudges the land:
He sets forth at dawn
And at dusk, all forlorn,
Brings home his pretend contraband.

We should be unwise to laugh too long at this apparently hopeless hobby. As in the good old Klondike days, our dogged adventurer rates his chances at 50/50: each day he either will, or won’t, strike lucky, discovering an Aztec astrolabe, or a Holy Grail, or a plutonium nugget the size of Grand Central Station. There’s no middle ground.

192 • Ms Ewing recollected

10th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Ewing
(Whom most of the parents were suing)
Would cram us with Stilton
While yodelling Milton
God knows what she thought she was doing.

This was a couple years on, again, from my previous educational memo. The idea of snacking on British food in the BritLit class sounds kinda cool on paper. But it was implemented in this unruly, worrying manner: maybe gas from that nauseous cheese had gotten the better of her.

191 • Postcard (3)

9th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The postcard I sent Seamus Heaney
Asked ‘Have you been watching The Sweeney?’
‘Good luck, and get lost,’
Was his simple riposte
(The same as I got from Puccini).

Here we find a further instance of post-life coincidence, where two masters of different arts, from different countries, and from different times, are united in a single opinion which – though manifestly dismissive – is expressed with endearingly musical alliteration, and a paradoxical wit. [See also here and here]

190 • Hang on!

8th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

’Twas the opening night of Peer Gynt,
The show that made Ibsen a mint.
I remarked, ‘It’s quite long …
Maybe cut Solveig’s Song?’
But he scowled, and did not take the hint.

I forget which circle of Hell is reserved for hangers-on who imagine celebrity ‘creatives’ might profit from their two-cents’ worth of Philistine advice. Ibsen, and his composer Grieg, were wise to ignore the present cloth-eared recommendation, and the narrator was lucky not to get his big head kicked in. [See also here]

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

7th July 2020 RL Comments 12 Comments

Our Deputy Dean, Dr Campbell
Told us ‘God’s out to get those who gamble’.
Yet she died, in a bet,
Playing Russian Roulette
Which the School needed skill to unscramble.

This somewhat garish episode from childhood taught us more about adult hypocrisy than we could have learnt from any number of bookish fables or homilies. The school Governors reacted to a popular employee’s death by proclaiming a string of revisionist accusations … how she had ‘lied to the Board who appointed her’ … how her college degree had been ‘incorrectly specified’ … how dates of her previous employment ‘contained inaccuracies’. In short, parents could not blame the school for appointing such a dissolute daredevil to be their children’s moral guardian, because ‘Donna Campbell was not the person she purported to be.’ Well, which of us is? Even as a child I was mesmerised by the Establishment’s feeble catalogue of squirming, pedantic and ineffectual exculpations. Hats off, say I, to a memorable teacher, whose gift for non-verbal demonstration imparted such significant life-lessons.

188 • Family ties

6th July 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

At birth I was joined to my twin
Not by bones, nor shared organs, nor skin,
But this broad ginger beard
Which still dangles, unsheared,
’Twixt her beauteous cheeks and my chin.

I realise there could be objections to this rhyme, and I wish to pre-empt them by explaining that, in a perfect world, my first choice would have been the strong past participle ‘unshorn’ in place of ‘unsheared’; but in this Philistine age the writer who seeks to keep such charming archaisms alive is all-too often ostracised as some kind of a freak.

187 • Ms Clayton recollected

5th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Junior teacher, Ms Clayton,
Disparaged the books of Len Deighton:
‘Too dismal, too bloody!
Instead let us study
My Odes to the Glory of Satan.’

‘Clayface’, as she was always known, had little idea what teenage boys enjoy reading – nor, indeed, what Bible-belt parents consider appropriate. I think she was from The Bronx, or Brooklyn. At that age, I imagined they were the same place.

186 • Potus Alert (6)

4th July 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I’ll tell you what makes for good neighbours:
It’s not any wall-building labours.
It’s missiles piled high
Backed by spies in the sky
And ominous rattling of sabres.

It’s supposedly Independence Day back home, but tragically we are still living in chains, shackled to vindictive incompetence, risible, solipsistic ignorance, and benighted self-delusion.

185 • Ms Phipps recollected

3rd July 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Our Junior teacher, Ms Phipps,
Wore outfits with thousands of zips:
To combat the moth
She would use only cloth
Bought in very thin Möbius strips.

What better way for a teacher of Math to introduce perplexing concepts in Topology, you might say. But we were older now, and teenage hormones made it impossible not to dwell on the imagined contortions, in her boudoir, as she dressed. Or undressed. A Möbius stripper. I blush to think of it, even now.

184 • Man Friday’s Tale

2nd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I met Robinson Crusoe
He was halfway through ‘Émile’ by Rousseau,
An excellent book;
If you’ve not had a look
Then I strongly suggest you should do so.

Academics talk about ‘metachronic hyperagonism’ when an imaginary character is caught reading about another imaginary character, in fiction published a full generation after her or his own supposed lifetime (luckily we are not obliged to listen). I leave it to others to imagine in turn what Rousseau’s Émile was reading. Anyway, today is apparently the death-anniversary of Daniel Defoe. On publication, his pioneering ‘Robinsonade’ claimed to have been authored by its imaginary protagonist, which may also be metachronic hyperagonism (ie ‘self-referential bullshit’). Especially since Crusoe was really Kreutznaer in any case.

183 • Growler

1st July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One problem with Winnie-the-Pooh
Is trying to remember who’s who,
What with Mowgli the cheetah
That rabbit named Peter
And Piglet, the young kangaroo.

Let’s not forget that characters in children’s books are animated largely by the imaginations of the young readers themselves. Perhaps we should excuse a modern-day adult – a human in whom the creative impulse is largely atrophied – for voicing opinions as palpably fatuous as those in today’s bulletin. Especially since Pooh was really Growler in any case.

182 • Ms Hewitt recollected

30th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Hewitt:
In theory she knew how to do it,
But as often as not
When she felt on the spot
She just made it all up. And we knew it.

Teachers should take care not to underestimate pupils’ insight and cunning. Admit it, if you’re flustered: it’s a good deal more endearing – and educative – than any amount of nervously-extemporised drivel.

181 • Opportunity missed

29th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At the edge of the old aerodrome
There hovered a shimmering dome.
Some alien lord
Tried to lure me aboard.
‘Forget it,’ said I, and went home.

At first glance there’s a rare honesty about this recollection: no ‘alien abduction’ ensued. Yet the narrator’s peremptory rejection of the ‘alien lord’ is probably a gesture of self-disgust from a speaker disappointed at having subscribed to garish 1950s’ sci-fi tropes, themselves anaemic emblems of dissatisfaction with the inescapable dystopia we have imposed on ourselves.

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

28th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Purvis,
Enlivened a boring church service
By lighting a fuse
That ran under the pews,
And made some of the parents quite nervous.

Ms Purvis was another amiable maverick on our school staff, and this had been one of her more famous Founder’s Day pranks. Of course we urged her to repeat the escapade, but I guess she’d gotten a major rap before, so it had to remain a story.

179 • Blight on Blight

27th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I have only two problems with ‘Noddy’,
The plots and the writing (both shoddy).
If only Ms Blyton
Had worked with the light on
(Or simply been flung in a wadi).

These lines paraphrase my earliest memory of literary criticism. Ms Nicholls’s passion was commendable, her logic less so. A wadi-flinging before 1922, when Blyton published her first title, might have seemed arbitrary and over-harsh. Yet once she’d made it into print, the damage was irreversible – the smug racism, compulsive sexism and wooden stereotyping were out there, a viral formula spreading relentlessly from mind to mind to mind, yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.

178 • Ms Nicholls recollected

26th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When our Primary teacher, Ms Nicholls
Equipped us with scythes and with sickles
We skipped down the street
Swiping folk off their feet.
She did get us into such pickles!

In a lesson about the Grim Reaper, when I was probably about 7 years old, our teacher brought in her academical robe and some gardening tools, and we took turns to dress up as Death. I owe that school a lot, and return to it often in dreaming. Ms Nicholls seems to have moved on, however.

177 • Postcard (2)

25th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My card to the poet John Dryden
Asked, ‘What of the sea-god, Poseidon?’
‘A bit of a nonce,’
Was his simple response
(I got the same answer from Haydn).

Dryden, ‘Glorious John’, died some 320 years ago, yet this does not preclude his responding, in dreams, to a postcard from a fan. More remarkable, perhaps, is that Haydn – whose earthly life did not overlap at all with Dryden’s – should turn out to echo the latter’s downbeat assessment of a celebrity nymph-molester. [See also here]

176 • Medusa

24th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

That ugly, snake-headed Medusa
Whom painters depict as a loser
Was once wise and fair
(And had regular hair)
Till Poseidon turned up to abuse her.

Legend tells how wily he-man Perseus slew the snaky-haired she-monster, reflecting her petrifying gaze back in her own eyes by using a mirror, the ironically-selected symbol of feminine vanity. Yet the neglected prequel is a viciously contemporary catalogue of power-seduction and slut-shaming. #MeToo indeed.

175 • Infesting Voltaire

23rd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At the start of the soirée Voltaire
Had several large worms in his hair.
As the evening wore on
I observed that they’d gone,
Though I dread to imagine quite where.

Some readers will suppose that our narrator has been hallucinating: possibly the soirée itself, or the celebrated host’s writhing hairdo, or – most likely – the vanishing of a tonsorial infestation. But let’s not be guilty of underthinking a righteous parable, in which even the lowliest creatures – like rats, instinctively quitting a sinking ship – desert the living corpse of a shameless anti-Semite.

174 • The Crabmonger

22nd June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Is anyone else fond of crabs?
I’ve 69 here, up for grabs:
The mother’s no beaut
But her grand-kids are cute.
They’d make a nice change from kebabs.

I have doubtless inveighed before, in this Verse Marathon, against the keeping of animals as pets. Who can remain dry-eyed on apprehending the uncertain status of these crustaceans, offered up by the crabmonger as a foodstuff, even after their family background, and personal charm, have been so heart-warmingly attested.

173 • Cancer

21st June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Is your zodiac character Cancer?
Is your fate a dark question? I’ll answer:
What the stars have in store
Will assist you no more
Than a Zimmer-frame aids a lap-dancer.

Waking under a strange sign in this very strange year, I’m just so glad that the clear-sighted astrologer, deftly unravelling the tangled threads of time, may still be relied upon to remove any worrying uncertainty from our lives.

172 • Deep Fake (7)

20th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to James Mason
We were both throwing up in one basin.
I think it was him
’Cos I said, ‘Awright, Jim?’
And he answered, ‘Whatever you say, son.’

In this final ‘I think it was him‘ case-study we do at least have some hint of confirmation from the actor himself – though the background to the particular encounter is left to the inferential skills of the reader. Crucially, though, the past week’s program at My Dog Errol has offered us a handle on the way celebrity capitalism tampers with the already-shaky sense of personal identity with which the last century has saddled our culture.

171 • Deep Fake (6)

19th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to John Wayne
We were trying to hide from the rain;
I think it was him
But his hat had a brim
And there wasn’t much light in that drain.

Isn’t this the pits, though? How much room can there be in that culvert? Why would a macho idol need to hunker down if he’s already wearing his Stetson? Man up, Wayne: give the other guy the hat, or git the hell out of that spillway.

170 • Deep Fake (5)

18th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I joined Phi Beta Kappa
I was kicked down the stairs by Frank Zappa;
I think it was him
Though he’d been to the gym
And was looking uncommonly dapper.

Here our unfortunate narrator is subjected to a cruel assault, on a day that should have been notable for quite different reasons. The wounded ego is naturally keen to recast the humiliation as an encounter with a musical idol, yet the fantasy it supplies casts the object of his veneration in an unsavoury – and wholly improbable – light.

169 • Deep Fake (4)

17th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to Fats Waller
He asked me to lend him a dollar;
I think it was him
Though he looked rather slim
And was clearly no stranger to squalor.

In this episode of our Impostor Syndrome explorations it seems unlikely that the interlocutor is an impersonator, as his replications of the intended ‘impersonee’ are so slipshod. By the same criteria, however, it can scarcely be the real Fats Waller either, which leaves the reader in something of a quandary.

168 • Deep Fake (3)

16th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to George Clooney
He seemed quite improbably puny.
I think it was him
’Cos he asked, on a whim,
If I wanted to meet Carla Bruni.

The ersatz celeb in this case seeks to draw attention away from his physical inadequacy by offering an introduction to a fellow star. Presumably he has an equally unconvincing Signorina Bruni waiting round the corner, primed and ready to pounce. Or perhaps he’s the real McCoy, just smaller-than-life?

167 • Deep Fake (2)

15th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to Bob Dylan
He asked me to spell ‘Enniskillen’.
I think it was him
Though he looked somewhat prim:
It might have been Harold MacMillan.

The real Dylan can be antagonistically oblique when subjected to unwanted attention, yet the facial demeanour reported here feels inauthentic. Arguably a stalker of celebrities, and an impersonator, are not far apart on the fanboy spectrum. In this piece we examine the predicament of the former, when confronted by a (probable) specimen of the latter.

166 • Deep Fake

14th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That evening with Truman Capote
He praised the great power of peyote.
I think it was him,
Though he looked pretty grim,
Part capon and partly coyote.

Ingestion of psychoactive substances is a significant component in many a religious ritual, and our species surely benefits from experiencing, or seeming to experience, the world from the viewpoint of non-human, ‘totemic’ animals. In the present bulletin, however, it’s unclear whether the author, or the writer he alludes to, is under the drug’s influence.

165 • Fakin’ it

13th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A fancy-dress party! Huzzah!
Yet the invite said ‘Come as you are.’
So I went as I was
Which was lucky, because
I was already dressed like a star.

The implication of this paradoxical summons is that we are perpetually in fancy dress … indeed, unless you design and make your own clothes, you’re always partly costumed as someone else. More unsettling, though, is the notion that anyone disguised as a star might wish to attend a gathering where everybody else knows they’re fakin’ it.

164 • Meet the team (18)

12th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

And lastly, your mentor, Bob Cratchit,
Whose cloak is encrusted with bat-shit.
A pipistrelle lurks
Near the desk where he works:
How he longs for the leisure to catch it!

How useful, to be finally introduced to one’s office mentor on the very day one hands in one’s notice. The repulsive colleague one has taken such pains to avoid turns out to be the very person who has supposedly been looking after one’s interests all along. Relieved of my care, perhaps he will now have free time to catch the Corvid-carrier that haunts him like a familiar.

163 • N.I.L.A.D.

11th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was spoon-feeding Zsa Zsa Gabor
Till she held up her bowl and said ‘More’.
Sadly ‘Oliver Twist’
Tops the very long list
Of Novels I Loathe and Deplore.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion in literary matters, though ideally it will be accompanied by an explanation, when so forcefully expressed. Our narrator may be scandalised by the anti-Semitism many claim to detect in Dickens’s story; but does that provocation truly justify leaving a femme fatale (albeit a superannuated one) to starve?

162 • Meet the team (17)

10th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A poltergeist, gaunt and grotesque
Sometimes haunts the Enquiries Desk.
When it flings rusty knives
Clients flee for their lives,
Even shrieking the word ‘Kafkaesque’.

This warning is well-meant, no doubt; but it is unclear whether the supposed spectre is a visiting querent, or an employee detailed to impart information. In fact both sides of the Enquiries Desk, in any normal institution, will inevitably be fraught with tiresome memories of frustration and misunderstanding.

161 • Dickens

9th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I read Great Expectations
My train had got stuck between stations:
Since time was so tight
I omitted, outright,
All the plot and the long conversations.

When they can find us nothing to look forward to, the British media likes to keep us doped with pointless anniversaries. ‘Today we celebrate the death of Charles Dickens,’ offered BBC Radio 4 a moment ago, and hordes doubtless cheered this maladroit proclamation. As our bulletin suggests, during the 150 years since Dickens’s passing the UK has learnt to scoff at entertainment that requires any imaginative participation.

160 • Meet the team (16)

8th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Look out for our caretaker, Ken,
And his heavily-hybridised hen:
With its modified beak
It can actually speak
Though not in the language of men.

In any business the janitor – or similar dogsbody – may prove the most interesting and innovative of thinkers. Unfettered by ambition, untainted by rivalry, he or she is free – like a Shakespearean Fool – to defy norms, and provide a foil to institutional formality through the creative quirks of an idiosyncratic mind.

159 • Prohibited degree

7th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“On Saturday night, for my sins,
The sex-robot gave birth to twins:
Yeah, sounds kinda sweet
But the brats are on heat –
And that’s where my problem begins.”

The vicar made no apology for basing his sermon on a rhyme copied from a lavatory door. As the future promises ever-more realistic robots, he asserted, the poem’s scenario will become commonplace, posing ‘hitherto unexampled moral dilemmas’ for mankind. He seemed more interested in delineating ‘transgressive urges’ than in recommending how we should handle them.

158 • Manila

6th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our holiday let in Manila
Was owned by a serial killer:
I can still visualise
How his victims – all flies –
Lay vanquished all over the villa.

At this time of year enforced quarantine, or voluntary isolation, inevitably brings up memories of holidays gone by, often polluting them with intimations of mortality. The tininess, as well as the profusion, of the assassinees is deeply shocking.

157 • Meet the team (15)

5th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may glimpse our Owner, Sir Harold,
In tweedy tuxedo apparelled:
His wife is a Dame,
With a stupid long name,
And his heirs are all quadruple-barrelled.

Ownership, surely the root of all evil. And Sir Harold, so blinded by his own wealth, or that of his privileged partner, that all notions of good taste in tailoring have flown out of the window.

156 • (Postscript)

4th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My knowledge is sparser than sparse
So this twenty-page scrawl is a farce.
Oh please, dear examiner
Credit my stamina!
Surely you want me to pass?

As the pollen-count exacerbates the common misery, one is reminded how hay-fever was the go-to excuse for a feeble performance in school and college examinations around this time of year (a personal footnote for the marker, extolling quantity over quality, was a second-string gambit, offered in reckless hope).

155 • Meet the team (14)

3rd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Don’t squeal, when you first come across
The corpse in the cupboard (our boss –
His wife’s an embalmer).
He died of bad karma,
A sad, but not serious, loss.

The progress of many an institution is hampered by the veneration employees persist in according to the charismatic figureheads of a former imperium. Here, characteristically, a dead boss has not been replaced: his ‘loss’ is judged non-serious, provided his mortal remnant is retained at the premises.

154 • Corona-nation

2nd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to the Queen
It was only her voicemail machine:
While awaiting the ‘beep’
My hand went to sleep
And my mobile fell in the latrine.

Your Majesty, a few lines to celebrate 67 years since your Coronation! Or Covid19tion, are we saying that now? Anyway, that’s a long time on the throne, a high toilet-tissue mileage. Sorry we never got to chat, back in the day. The music was pretty loud at my end. Perhaps at yours too – maybe that’s why you didn’t pick up?

153 • Meet the team (13)

1st June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This tart is your underling, Suki:
She helps us look after the loo-key.
It lives in her drawer
Under spiders galore,
And the cubicle’s also quite spooky.

No young colleague – even if she imposes a Goth’s visual stylings on her work-station, and other purlieux within her ambit – should have to endure the denigration here implied in the choice of the word ‘underling’, nor the childish linguistic register used in describing her meagre responsibilities.

152 • Sapient cephalopod

31st May 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

The octopus looked in my eye
As he clung to my shivering thigh.
‘Man is scarcely unique,
Just a hideous freak,’
He observed. I could make no reply.

Alarmingly the octopus sets out to debunk Descartes‘s teaching, that ‘animals are mere machines, but man stands alone’, but its intentions are contradicted by the scenario itself. For one thing, the man is not ‘standing alone’. For another, only a unique species could fantasise such a damning put-down from a ‘mere machine’ – and then be too stupid to come up with an appropriate riposte.

151 • Night Flying

30th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Again, I’ve been out half the night
Retrieving what’s left of my kite
Always trapped in a tree
Or on wires I can’t see.
Is there something I’m not doing right?

How often we falter along, locked compulsively into a simple yet crippling life-mistake! Next time you encounter a midnight kite-flyer, bite back your natural contempt for their stupidity and perverseness, rather taking them aside and – perhaps with half-a-dozen kindly-chosen words – setting their whole life on a new and conceivably happier course.

150 • Meet the team (12)

29th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Be kind to our stock-keeper, Howard.
He’s desk-bound, but scarcely a coward.
He put down his pen
And toiled like ten men
The night the Great Cake was devoured.

This distasteful snapshot of office life reveals how body-shaming – more typically reserved for female colleagues – is in special cases applied also to men. In this huge chap’s case, jealousy of his evident arithmetical prowess apparently legitimises jibes about his outlandish bodily bulk.

149 • The Florist’s Tale

28th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘It’s tragic,’ declared Robin Hood,
‘My public has misunderstood
Why I left Sherwood Forest
To work as a florist.
Fact is, I’m allergic to wood.’

As we contemplate the inn-signs of Merrie England, this ‘Hood’ is typically presented as some kind of macho archetype. Reading between the lines of his own account, however, suggests the erstwhile outlaw was none too comfortable in that role: in soliciting public compassion, he boldly goes against the grain.

148 • Meet the team (11)

27th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our spin-doctor gushes hot air
As he swivels all day on his chair
Sometimes dazed, sometimes dizzy.
But since he looks busy
The managers seem not to care.

In a world that stands or falls by surface meanings, the appearance of industry – however compulsive and futile – evidently guarantees continued employment.

147 • Crinoline Paradox

26th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I owe my continued existence
To this garb, worn at Granny’s insistence.
Yes, work colleagues mock
My huge crinoline frock
But they strongly maintain Social Distance.

Fashions come and fashions go. The widest crinoline in its day was some 2 metres across: hence its re-emergence in the Covid Era as an agent of Social Distancing. Paradoxically, however, the present-day Politics of Cool forbid us to shy away from any man who chooses to flaunt his Granny’s cast-offs in public. So what can a poor boy do?

146 • Meet the team (10)

25th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That nurse with the knife is Nanette
Whose brief is our burgeoning debt.
She can cut it by half
If she slashes the staff
But you mustn’t take that as a threat.

The presence of trained medical personnel in the workplace would, in an ideal world, be reassuring. But, trained for what? The idea that my new colleagues and I might be culled, in the name of economies, is somewhat less so.

145 • Excuses

24th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I lifted the side of the lorry
Twelve pigs tumbled into the quarry.
Thus the law they call ‘Sod’s’
Caused an outcome at odds
With the one I’d been hoping for. Sorry.

An apology ought generally to be accepted in good faith, but perhaps not when the speaker seeks to blame some external ‘law’ for his or her personal blunder. The Bible speaks of demonic possession in falling swine, of course: this might have made for a more winning excuse, though that story’s Animal Rights credentials are pretty flimsy too.

144 • Gross!

23rd May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I fear I shall never forget
Being slung in a dank oubliette
With nothing to eat
But three plates of meat
Two plums and a rancid baguette.

I confess that I grow weary of press reports comparing the Social Isolation we temporarily endure, in hope of impeding the incursions of plague, with the privations experienced by ‘lifers’ in the bottle-dungeons of Romantic fiction, whose pretend incarceration made little contribution to society .

143 • Meet the team (9)

22nd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On that bench lies our governor, Maud,
Who formerly sat on The Board.
In the financial crash
She lost most of our cash:
Disgrace was her only reward.

With characteristic chauvinism it’s a woman the company blames, and shames, for market losses which (as they implicitly acknowledge) afflicted the great majority of businesses in the sector. One is surprised they haven’t feminised her job-description to ‘Governess’.

142 • Gemini

21st May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The outlook’s obscure under Gemini,
The Twins: things are tricky with them on high.
One says, ‘You’re in clover,’
The other, ‘It’s over.’
The end of your world must be semi-nigh.

Arising at dawn, with Castor and Pollux in command overhead, I am heartened and reassured to reflect that the astrologer can still be relied on to be straight with us in these troubled times. Except this month. Our author seems to believe that ‘Dioscuri‘ means ‘obscure gods’ — needless to say, he has small Latin and less Greek.

141 • Meet the team (8)

20th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

140 • Progress log

19th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At our meeting to Forge the New Way
I was baffled by Paragraph A.
When we fell into bed
Stumped by Paragraph Z
I had understood nothing all day.

A day’s work at the office, or, equally, an entry from the ‘Progress Log’ that the marriage guidance counsellor insists that I keep. But enough about that. Note the classy use of the British ‘Z’ here.

139 • Meet the team (7)

18th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Down there is our treasurer, Rafe,
Who begs on the street, like a waif.
It’s a strategy meant
To throw thieves off the scent
Of the keys to the company safe.

In the office environment, confidential ‘insights’ of this sort are often tests of the listener’s gullibility, or else veiled threats: ‘You could end up on the street too, if you don’t do a decent job’ (ie, play the corporate game. It’s just a question of figuring out some of the rules).

138 • Mount Ararat

17th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In the season that followed the flood
When the world was in bloom, or in bud,
Mrs Noah complained
‘Since this planet got drained
My husband’s been stuck in the mud.’

All too often the wife feels sidelined during the enaction of a Manly Project, and finds it difficult to empathise with the exhaustion and ennui experienced by the husband when it’s over. The more so, when every other creature within eye- and ear-shot has gone forth to multiply with a vengeance.

137 • Blair / Astaire

16th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A delicate dancer from Ware
Explains why she killed Fred Astaire:
‘A quiet inner voice
Said I hadn’t a choice:
It was him, or else Lionel Blair.’

Archetypally spineless strategy, to blame one’s crime on contradictory supernatural promptings. But is it a crime, or rather laudable atavism, to destroy alpha practitioners, thereby clearing the path to pre-eminence in one’s chosen field?

136 • Meet the team (6)

15th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your audio typist is Juno:
She hums only music by Gounod.
You’ll implore her to cease
But the din won’t decrease:
She doesn’t know any words you know.

Irrepressibly tuneful and sentimental, the Frenchman’s compositions are the last thing one wants to be reminded of at any time, least of all in a lockdown-defying office. Every memo I dictate for typing begins ‘For fuck’s sake Juno, change the bloody record, can’t you?’ … but the poor girl just hasn’t the linguistic sophistication to oblige.

135 • Droit de Cuissage

14th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A churlish charwoman from Cheddar
Whose boss seemed reluctant to bed her
Tore up, in frustration,
His Nobel citation
And ran his research through the shredder.

I took a look at Cheddar on my first UK visit, way back. It’s kinda nice and they have a mini-canyon you can run along. Unexpectedly it’s also the setting for this topical revenge scenario, as the boffin-geek denies his cleaner an habitual perk of employment. #MeNeither

134 • Meet the team (5)

13th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our company lawyer, Corinna,
Works out of a bedsit in Pinner.
Best not to ask why.
You’ll find out by and by.
Just don’t let her take you to dinner.

The workplace is pregnant with erotic foreboding and intimations of past scandal. ‘Dinner’ is identifiable as a euphemism … but for what, exactly? Some ropes are better left unshown.

133 • Potus alert (5)

12th May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Was ever a leader alive
More ripe for his P45
Than the 45th Potus?
So who are these voters
Who want his regime to survive?

‘P45’ means different things in different territories; back home, it’s that contemptible clown in the White House; here in Britain it’s a ‘pink slip’ document you receive from your employer when your contract terminates. The rhyme above, on the occasion of the Nebraska Primaries, optimistically brings the two meanings together in a transAtlantic alliance.

132 • Meet the team (4)

11th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In Human Resources we’ve Irma
Who commutes every Monday from Burma.
Frankly, sightings are rare
As her head’s in the air
And her body abhors terra-firma.

‘Human Resources’ … the phrase speaks volumes, volumes of ill-defined flabbiness. Surely Irma – whom I’m sure I’ll never meet – could find a less embarrassing and more rewarding job by remaining in Burma?

131 • Skunk

10th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One evening (a tiny bit drunk)
My room-mate befriended a skunk.
When I voiced my regret
He said ‘Don’t be upset,
She’ll be safe on the uppermost bunk.’

Preachers urge us to find the best in our fellows, and not jump to the lazy conclusion that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’. Yet it’s hard to believe, in the present instance, that the room-mate’s intentions are, in the long term, Platonic. ‘O perilous fire that in the bed-straw bredeth’, as our great poet observed.

130 • Attaboy!

9th May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

‘Well of course, he’s a National Icon.
Have you sat through his series on lichen?’
David Attenborough’s voice
Makes the whole world rejoice
(Or despair, when he’s not turned the mike on).

Yesterday the great man turned 94. He’s one of the few homegrown celebs the British media haven’t yet found a way of undermining. No doubt their lenses are trained on him night and day, hoping to snap inappropriate touching with a Venus flytrap, or lewd banter with a limpet. #MeNeither

129 • Meet the team (3)

8th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

And this is your manager, Amy.
Her statements are all pretty samey:
Things like ‘Cover my back,’
And ‘I’m all right, Jack,’
And ‘Die if you ever betray me.’

The predictability of these proclamations is reassuring, even if the office culture they suggest runs counter to civilised expectation.

128 • Agent provocateur

7th May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

My aunt, up in Appleby Parva,
Has woven a black balaclava:
Defying the veto
She roves, incognito,
Provoking all kinds of palaver.

Incredible though this bulletin may appear, my adopted country genuinely boasts a hamlet named Appleby Parva, rural, remote and right-leaning. Since the time of Lady Godiva, any kind of outgoing behaviour there is received as a scandal, so 2020’s Covid Lockdown is a boon to most residents. My British aunt, however, has the measure of her neighbours and takes a geriatric delight in courting opprobrium.

127 • Meet the Team (2)

6th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your opposite number here, Jake,
Has never once made a mistake.
Just you copy him
And the chances are slim
That he’ll ever work out you’re a fake.

The quest for personal authenticity never did run smooth. To avoid being called out as a fake, behave like a fake. Furthermore, however you choose to play it, someone will be judging you.

126 • Tagus away

5th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

John Fowles tried to finish ‘The Magus’,
But his typewriter fell in the Tagus
And a young Portuguese
Who seemed eager to please
Suggested a trip to Las Vegas.

Many readers will have puzzled over the famously indeterminate ending of Fowles‘s once-trendy tome: perhaps he became distracted, as suggested above?

[No more river-rhymes from me, now. Too many people have drowned, the big book I’ve been copy-editing is off to Thames and Hudson, and – with the aid of various Telescreens – I’ve started a fresh job, joining an as-yet unfamiliar team (for as long as I can endure it).]

125 • Meet the team

4th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

First, please greet your co-worker, Eric,
Who hails from the city of Berwick.
His friends call him ‘Anne’,
His enemies ‘Stan’,
But he answers to nothing but ‘Derek’.

First day of a new assignment, being shown the ropes via Internet link-up. Of course it’s ungracious to be pedantic, but Berwick is not, and never has been, a ‘city’ – and this blunder shakes my confidence in the other particulars imparted by my morning’s informant.

124 • Missouri position

3rd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Though His sea-walking record still stands
Christ’s rivals haunt various lands:
The Bishop of Newry
Has crossed the Missouri
Not once, but three times … on his hands.

Of course there are those who regard the original miracle as a piece of trickery, one that crossed the shaman/showman boundary. It’s nonetheless dispiriting to read of high officials in the Church – however skilled in circus-craft – setting out to upstage the Nazarene in so meretricious a fashion.

123 • The critics (2)

2nd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Selected reviews (some quite sniffy):
‘His rhythms and rhymes can be iffy.’
‘Some themes are perverse,
And others far worse.’
‘Deserves to be dunked in the Liffey.’

It pleases the workers in prose to pass comment on the workers in verse. Fortunately we do not have to pay them any heed. Anyway, the River Liffey is a literary character in its own right, as any Dubliner will tell you, at length.

122 • MayDay

1st May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

It’s not my position to scold
And I hate to seem prudish, or old,
(And a bath with a friend
I can quite recommend)
But this hot-tubbing cult leaves me cold.

Still, into the maelstrom I go
Where viruses seethe to and fro:
Veruccas and boils,
Private bodily oils
Exuded by folks I don’t know.

A-swill in this scum marinade
I try not to look too dismayed.
I’ll sip my Martini,
Let slip my bikini
And hope pretty soon to get laid.

A modish recreation, its pointless vanity emblematic of our times. The narrative voice here appears conflicted, but peer-pressure – or else indiscriminate carnality – wins the day.

121 • The Ouse

30th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As the cops drag a corpse from the Ouse:
‘Look Sarge, it’s all covered in clues!’
‘Wrong. The arm says “Suzanne”,
But it’s clearly a man.’
‘Right! We can’t trust a bloke with tattoos.’

This little cameo might suggest that The Boys in Blue — for all their open-mindedness, emotional intelligence and forensic acumen — haven’t quite got their heads around Gender Fluidity yet.

120 • Humming-bird

29th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’m beginning my decade-long task
To remain in this humming-bird mask.
As to how I’ll get by
When I can’t even fly
Most folk are too frightened to ask.

The shaman is able to escape humanity – its ailments and anguish – by trance experiences of other species’ lives. The next-best thing, for us regular types, is a mask of some sort. Don’t let the crowd’s pusillanimous gawping unsettle you or cause you to question – for a single moment – the purpose, efficacy, or duration of your chosen path.

119 • Rhône

28th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Hats off to my patient Aunt Joan
Who taught me to play the trombone,
Or rather, she tried,
Dropping hints from the side
While I bobbed up and down in the Rhône.

No amount of patience on an instructor’s part will produce measurable progress in a pupil unless the overall circumstances are conducive to pedagogy. The informal teaching scenario here, and the diffident mode of inculcation, would garner scant praise from those who are paid to criticize professionals at work.

118 • Neath

27th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My dining companion at Neath
Drew a long scary knife from its sheath:
‘You have to get rough
When the steaks are this tough,’
She explained, as she sharpened her teeth.

This was damnably alarming when it happened, and it’s only now, a couple years later, that I realise it’s a neat symbol for the way we damage ourselves by bad eating. [for Ceridwen]

117 • Rhine recovery

26th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was casting my pearls before swine
When the fattest one fell in the Rhine.
Two nuns in Cologne
Fished it out with a drone,
But more by good luck than design.

Like many a parable, this poem probably answers more questions than it asks. In terms of title I toyed with ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and ‘The Pig Fishers’ but decided that either would be thoroughly misleading. In any event, the point is proven: one man’s miracle is another man’s coincidence.

116 • Potus alert (4)

25th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

With tough healthcare questions to settle,
‘The Donald’ shows fans his true mettle:
We’ll defeat this disease,
His great wisdom decrees,
If we all begin mainlining Dettol™.

A memorable coronavirus intervention from the well-known TV entertainer. But he’s done himself a disfavor by recanting, and claiming his diagnosis was ‘sarcastic’. Intelligent people might stop taking him seriously.

115 • Euphrates (Volga)

24th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

So sorry to read that dear Katy’s
Just drowned in the mighty Euphrates.
Her twin sister Olga
Was drowned in the Volga,
But that was way back in the Eighties.

Some would see the hand of ‘Fate’ in this double accident; others would suspect a genetically-governed recklessness where powerful currents are concerned. Equally, it could all be entirely meaningless.

114 • Dressing to kill

23rd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Each year, seven Knights of the Garter
Are killed re-enacting ‘Get Carter‘:
A small price to pay
For a mem’rable day.
(Wish they’d tackle ‘The Mahābhārata’).

Patron Saint’s day in the UK; a fit time to reflect on the most ancient British chivalric order. There are only ever two dozen such Knights, so turnover is clearly high. Doubtless casualties would soar if their Lordships deigned to address the Sanskrit epic, as recommended.

113 • Beard of Avon

22nd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A scholar writes: ‘Is it not weird
How Shakespeare’s portrayed with a beard?
The Sweet Bard of Avon
Was always clean-shaven.
At least, that is how he appeared.’

The reasoning of this ‘scholar’ does not reward protracted scrutiny. It pleases self-styled experts to wreathe their heroes in mystique, such as the belief that Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April, for which no firm evidence can be found.

112 • Isis

21st April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At Oxford I’d very few vices
And strove to avoid any crisis
Unlike AJP Taylor,
The soi-disant ‘sailor’,
Who scuppered my punt on the Isis.

While we’ll never know whether Taylor sank this vessel deliberately, we can be quite certain that, even in the golden days of the Twentieth Century, any man of letters attracted gossip and rumour. Today, it would be threats of hanging or violation at the very least.

111 • Taurus

20th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

For those who were born under Taurus:
Your fate’s a calamitous chorus
Of fracas and ruction
Brouhaha, destruction
And more (please consult your Thesaurus).

Waking today, invigorated by the star-sign of the Bull, I am confident that the astrologist is one expert we can still count upon for precision and insight in equal measure. No Taurus-shit.

110 • Niger

19th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Adrift on the old river Niger,
Just me and the prophet Elijah
And a Woman in White
Who likes watching men fight –
So we take it in turns to oblige her.

Some ‘Sunday fools’ still believe spirits move among us, and a few, perhaps, suppose that they’re prepared to conspire with mortals in illogical, Lawrentian pacts. But what we’re really investigating here is the troubling, antiquated trope of Objectified Woman as Muse. Perhaps she is a spirit too?

109 • Frankie and Connie

18th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Come sailing?’ said Frankie to Johnny.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Can I bring Connie?’
As old ballads tell us
When F. got quite jealous
That picnic went right down The Swanee.

‘This story has no moral, this story has no end. This story only goes to show that there ain’t no good in men’. ‘No, nor women neither.’ It all hinges on the word ‘jealous’. No doubt tabloid readers will judge Bisexual Temptress Connie the guiltiest of the three.

108 • In the dark

17th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Enough of your ifs, buts and maybes,
I need to know when I’ll catch rabies.
Please, Government analysts,
Pundits and panellists,
Treat us like brothers, not babies.

Ever feel you’re being patronised, kept in the dark about the virus crisis, by the vested interests that run the media or stand to profit from the pandemic? More comfortable, isn’t it, than recognising your histrionic worries for what they truly are – the atavistic bleating of the self-obsessed toddler you continue to cherish at the core of your being.

107 • Seine

16th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I was raiding a wreck in the Seine,
Just me and two badly-dressed men.
They began to perspire
And my snorkel caught fire:
I’m not going to risk it again.

Arguably today’s adventurers fall somewhat short of the swashbuckling bravado that distinguished our childhood heroes. Alas, that we were so easily duped, from the cradle.

106 • Social Distance

15th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’ve stopped going naked at night:
My beauty deserves direct light.
Yet often, by day,
Viewers hurry away
Which I don’t find entirely polite.

Pandemic guidelines apply to everyone on the planet, no exceptions: and our newsmongers imagine the whole world is listening as they ram the point home. Yet they’re overlooking cases like the present subject who, venturing out after many years of Absolute Isolation, is nonplussed to find Social Distancing in operation, and takes it as a personal affront.

105 • Ribble

14th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In her self-designed submarine, Sybil
Has been dredged from the depths of the Ribble.
When the river burst in
Through its rice-paper skin
It was very much more than a dribble.

Characteristic press prejudice ensures that this tragedy of the female pioneer, engulfed in her own creation, is much less widely reported than, say, the sinking of RMS Titanic, a male creation with similar design faults.

104 • Final Performance

13th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

An affluent actor from Alnwick,
In his stateroom aboard The Titalnwick
When the tragedy strok,
Gave his ‘Running Amok’
Amidst plain, proletarian palnwick.

Privileged panic is art; plebeian panic is mere lack of self-control. RMS Titanic sank 108 years ago tomorrow. (While almost a third of the human passengers survived, only a quarter of the dogs did. No wonder they hate us.)

103 • Orinoco communion

12th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We scattered your ashes, dear Yoko,
On the tides of the great Orinoco.
Then we stood on the bank
Where we mournfully drank
One very small cup of cold cocoa.

Strangely our culture dignifies rivers with names, and admiring soubriquets such as ‘great’. But here that adjective serves to minimise the status of the departed, as does the meagre potation, shared among an unspecified number of mourners.

102 • Colorado fading

11th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We watched our blind bailiff from Boulder,
(As old as the hills, if not older)
Half the night, as he swam
Round and round, at the Dam,
Growing colder and colder and colder.

By definition the Colorado is colorful, but this must have been a dull scene, and the average Joe or Joanne would have packed up and gone home on such a chilly evening. We must admire the moral courage if those who resisted any temptation to intervene as a well-liked character attended to the final actions of his career.

101 • Belfast Agreement

10th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A bell rings the hour in Belfast
To signal the end of the past:
Let the future begin!
Let us all abjure sin!
Let us wonder how long this will last … .

This incisive Anglo-Irish bulletin (posted as the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement actually falls on another Good Friday) reminds us that our lifetime is linear. Why, then, spend it eddying in circles?

100 • The Thames Look

9th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My effortless elegance stems
From standing so long in the Thames,
Where my girdle and gown
Have been stained sewage-brown
And the narwhals have nibbled my hems.

It takes vision and courage to pursue such a strategy of self-abasement and neglect; but great discoveries in Art (and Fashion) often arise serendipitously from a background of dismal privation.

099 • Tea on the Lea

8th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When Gandhi set sail on the Lea
And fancied some tadpoles for tea
The beadle of Broxbourne
Brought five pints of frogspawn
And charged but one single rupee.

Jesus’s supposed UK excursion is celebrated in song all over Britain (‘And did those feet‘ etc); whereas Gandhi’s teatime outing on a relatively-obscure Thames tributary is commemorated only in this five-line fragment. Likewise the generosity of Hertfordshire officialdom.

098 • Once Bonnie

7th April 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

So – why do our mem’ries replay
That film-clip of beauteous decay
In which Clyde, once a sweetie
Becomes less up-Beatty
And Bonnie is Fadun’ Away?

Puns feel inexcusably trite; yet the arch wordplay here seeks to point up cinema’s pollutive complicity in our culture’s collective angst. When The New Hollywood temporarily massacres charismatic stars, its consumers become the life-long victims, haunted and taunted by unshiftable visions of desperate beauty defaced.

097 • Clyde

6th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I lived with my bellicose bride
Not far from the mouth of the Clyde.
Our little oil-rig
Felt surprisingly big
For somewhere with nowhere to hide.

The past-tense ‘lived’ in this brief statement is ominous. Any bride might be bellicose, having so egregious a dwelling foisted on her by matrimony: yet no hint of blame attaches to husband in the poem – rather, he merely personifies the expectation of a violent dénouement.

Glancing back, I notice Rivers of the World has become a bit of theme at My Dog Errol: this is the ninth and, let’s hope, last instalment.

096 • Substitution

5th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note: our great brain surgeon, Guy,
Has sadly been Summoned On High.
His place will be filled
By this gibbon: unskilled,
Yet keen to be given a try.

Euphemism is the rhetoric of cowards: if a priest cannot mention death from the pulpit, where can we expect to hear it named? Covid 19 takes the high-flying medic as readily as the homeless man; but in the former’s case, as this vicar reminds us, there is no shortage of volunteers willing to step into the breach.

095 • Yangtze Kiang

4th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I drift down the Yangtze Kiang
I shall scream about Sturm, and then Drang.
If the onlooking horde
Fails to cheer, or applaud
They shall hear a yet harsher harangue.

Anyone remember the days when a troubled youth could devote a sophomore vacation to exhibitionistic acts of existential self-exorcism? The Chinese ‘hordes’ didn’t listen for long, it has to be admitted.

094 • ‘Grand National’

3rd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The steeplechase season is nigh:
Watch dozens of thoroughbreds die!
Broken leg, broken back,
Put to death by the track.
Let the owners be shot too, say I.

What are these wretched creatures good for? High-status playthings for the rich, exciters of adrenaline for greedy gamblers, disposable victims of capitalism? ‘Grand National’, indeed: what kind of Nation judges their creation, and exploitation, ‘Grand’? Anyway, it ain’t happening in 2020, Year One of the Virus. Hurrah for that.

093 • Mississippi

2nd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One year, as an unemployed hippie,
I swam down the great Mississippi.
I enjoyed it a lot
’Cos at times it was hot
Though, at others, decidedly nippy.

Now that we mayn’t venture further than our own back yards, it’s painful to recall the days when a youth could spend a couple months in unreflective, self-indulgent doggy-paddling. Though the great Mississippi had all the fragrance of a sewer, it has to be admitted.

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

1st April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I swung – in my skimpiest Speedos
And the loudest of lime-green tuxedos
From the high diving-board –
Some buffoon cut the cord
(This has happened in several Lidos).

For the committed exhibitionist – a burgeoning breed in our benighted times – no stunt is off-limits. The lifeguard above, intervening to frustrate an ill-judged April 1 prank, is surely not the prime ‘buffoon’. (And if outraged libertarians cite Shakespeare’s King Lear – Act IV, where the suicidal Duke of Gloucester asks ‘Is wretchedness deprived that benefit / To end itself by death?‘ – I shall refute them thus: the Duke, at least, is not play-acting.)

091 • Zambesi

31st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

From the source of the mighty Zambesi
My swim to the coast looks so easy.
(When euphoria palls
The Victoria Falls
May turn me a trifle more queasy.)

Each human individual is trapped at the centre of their world; of course, the cause for queasiness here is not the loss of one foolhardy adventurer’s life, but the outright death of the river, precipitated by humanity’s dithering over the climate crisis.

090 • Evasive inaction

30th March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

On balance, I share your dismay
At the meteorite heading this way.
Such rumours aren’t new
But if this one is true
We’d be wise to start packing today.

Oh, these Overgrown Etonians with their sang congelé in the face of a population-threatening calamity, acknowledged by all neighbouring Governments! Where was the decisiveness, the adrenaline? This entitled lassitude, this phlegmatic indifference to the Commoners’ Fate, shall not go forgotten.

089 • Saint Lawrence

29th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On his water-skis, down the St Lawrence,
Hurtled John, the Archbishop of Florence;
First his wires became crossed,
Then his halo got lost.
Soon he gave himself up to the torrents.

Factually this new river-piece may seem problematic, fraught as it is with lies and nonsense. Symbolically, however, we find The Baptist succumbing to the immersion on which his fame rested, and note in passing how the foolhardy loss of any churchman’s reputation (cf the halo, above) habitually presages self-extinction.

088 • Opacity

28th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

To hell with this transparent cake,
The sort that a spectre might bake!
I want to eat suet,
Not view the world through it.
You promised me something opaque!

The novelty birthday cake is an idea best avoided. A showy comestible is often more gratifying to the donor than to the recipient.

087 • Irrawaddy

27th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

By a weir on the wide Irrawaddy
I wrestled a square-headed squaddie.
From this wild waterfall
To the Bay of Bengal
It will bear what remains of his body.

Rivers! It’s all too easy to them as rubbish-chutes. A shallow trench could have been dug for the defeated soldier’s corpse, to mitigate the impact of its decomposition on the marine environment.

086 • Viral Reset

26th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Young Hans, in the Austrian Tyrol,
Wants to live as a lass from The Wirral;
And his old spotted cow
Self-identifies now
As a blind Transylvanian squirrel.

Many enlightened thinkers regard the present virus pandemic as a ‘reset button’ for civilisation. Let us hope everyone may re-invent themselves, discovering – through introspection brought on by Social Isolation – their true nature, and history, emerging happier and better-balanced than they felt at the outset of the crisis.

085 • Danube

25th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One night on the island of Lupa
A guillemot fell in a stupor.
On the Danube, I guess
There was no NHS
So I trust someone contacted BUPA.

The British set great store by their ‘NHS’ (National Health System), and this piece explores what will happen when — post-Covid, no doubt — they sell it down the river to US capitalist interests. The difference? One pays for BUPA.

084 • Cuckoo, coffee

24th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Last night on the island of Skomer
A cuckoo fell into a coma.
They soon brought him round
With a cup of ‘FreshGround™
With its powerful, distinctive aroma’.

Yes, even in a wildlife paradise it’s impossible to shake off the mind-forged manacles of capitalism, in this case, an inane advertising slogan. Luckily the remedy was effective, but That’s Not The Point.

083 • Aries

23rd March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Alas for the children of Aries.
Your fate, I foresee, never varies:
Abused and constrained,
Exploited and drained
Till you envy dead cows in our dairies.

Waking this morning under the influence of the Ram on high, who can doubt that the astrologer is an expert on whom we can still place our confidence despite the unruliness of the times?

082 • Saviours

22nd March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Did you read, on some scrap of papyrus,
How Christ raised the daughter of Jairus?
No dark Dead Sea Scrolls
But soft white paper rolls
For our conquest of Coronavirus.

Admittedly there were no New Testament books among the genuine Dead Sea Scrolls, though with the more recently-discovered fakes anything goes. But whereas those scrolls record the superstitious beliefs of a sect 22 centuries ago, 2020’s rational response to mortal disease is spelt out in the barren superflux of hoarded lavatory-paper.

081 • Tiber

21st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A mermaid emerged from the Tiber
To force me to feast on raw fibre;
Since I, like Rasputin,
Gorge only on gluten
Her fad did not gain a subscriber.

Our Roman week must surely end here. Food fads are one thing, food fascism another. A bearded charlatan may be outwardly less appetising than a Diving Belle, but at least the controversial Russian kept his dietary irregularities to himself.

080 • Phallus vs. Breast

20th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Dear Cleo,’ said Julius Cæsar
(He was trying his utmost to please her),
‘I do like the style
Of your place near the Nile,
That huge Leaning Tower of Giza.’

We must guess that Cleopatra’s response was something along the lines of ‘Cease this detestable though widespread practice of patronising your host civilisation by construing it in terms of the paltry achievements of your own country.’

079 • Trajan

19th March 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Our eminent emperor, Trajan
Was minded to marry a Cajun.
But processing in pomp
Through her Baton Rouge swamp
His cohort succumbed to contagion.

Empires are forged and maintained by matrimony; here Trajan’s men are thwarted in their attempt to bring him a trophy bride from exotic, as-yet undiscovered territory, and in the particular case few would doubt that the virus was doing a sterling job.

078 • The Ominous Snowman

18th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One burden of being a Roman
Is that, having been mugged by a snowman –
Which was merely an ogre
Wrapped up in a toga –
Great Cæsar must deem it An Omen.

Our Roman week continues. I don’t know if Tacitus or Suetonius or any of that crowd mention the above episode. But if it occurred, those who deny the meaninglessness of this world will undoubtedly have invested it with Weighty Significance.

077 • Epoch envy

17th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Dead Cæsar was texting dead Brutus:
‘We needed mobility scooters.
If Rome was so clever
Then how come we never
Had smartphones or cars or computers?’

A Roman theme appears to be emerging at My Dog Errol … God knows why. Still, the idea that any sophisticated civilisation from another time would look admiringly on our present, chaotic epoch is pretty laughable, no?

076 • Northward Ho!

16th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Their streets stretched so straight through the regions
Controlled by great Rome and her legions.
They vented their wrath
On the Gaul and the Goth
But nothing could tame the Glaswegians.

Scotland the Brave, as some would call it, has stood up feistily to a variety of dominators from the south, both before and since the building of the Antonine Wall.

075 • Ideas of March

15th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When Cæsar spurned Artemidorus
His senators hollered in chorus,
‘That prophet’s our geeza,
Not you, Mr Cæsar!
Your hubris is starting to bore us.’

Our narrative here differs in several key respects from Shakespeare’s account of the same (15 March 44 BC) episode. Hard to tell who got it right. But a similar marginalisation of the expert, by the egotistical leader, is a perpetual curse in public life.

074 • Hermitwear

14th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A hermit I met in Ostend
Informed me, ‘It’s vain to pretend
That the leaves in your hair
And that sack that you wear
Will ever catch on as a trend.’

Even in the hermit community, peer-pressure is clearly immense. The ‘Hermit Look’, now de rigueur, was initially scorned as too outré. Gullibility lies at the heart of all dress fascism.

073 • Friday 13th

13th March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I was shoving my mule in his shed
When a meteor fell on his head.
I curse my bad luck …
Why didn’t he duck?
Next time, an alpaca instead.

Let’s not blame the beast of burden, nor bad luck. The fault, dear brutes, is not in our stars, but in ourselves: whatever animal you capture and exploit, it will be the Wrong Choice.

072 • Topeka

12th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A trendsetting tot from Topeka
Went to mooch round the mall in one sneaker:
‘It’s a question of style.
I wore three for a while
But one is just so much uniquer.’

The Mall, a suitably soulless setting for this act of fatuous self-flagellation, emblematic of the damage we all endure in the name of ‘style’, however idiotically it manifests itself.

071 • Pot luck

11th March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

‘We met on a mauve double-decker
That never quite made it to Mecca.
Now she lives in a squat
But my life’s gone to pot,’
Said the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

This historical piece harks back to a distant time when posing on the Hippie Trail held more noble allure for a university graduate than posing as an investment analyst in The City.

070 • Grasshopper

10th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A grasshopper went in the closet
And left an unwholesome deposit
Then sued the hotel
On account of the smell.
That wasn’t quite cricket, now, was it?

‘There’s nothing in your Verse Marathon that’s suitable for reading to little children,’ writes one reader. True, and I didn’t intend to imply that there would be. This morning, however, a tale of an anthropomorphic insect, in a lightweight tone suitable for any age-group.

069 • Laddish bragging

9th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I went to a marvellous party:
And shagged this cute goddess, Astarte,
In front and behind,
Then got my dick signed
By most of The Illuminati.’

Pretty much as I heard it on the train, though with a few details changed to make it rhyme better. Testosterone talking, but his fellow travelers took it for gospel. Had to feel sorry that he’d swallowed those role-players’ stories. At least he managed to quote Noël Coward correctly. [This one is for my correspondent and critic, Ura]

068 • Bishop Berkeley

8th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I never supposed Bishop Berkeley
Would seem, as a spectre, so sparkly.
It’s frankly nightmarish
To see him so garish
Especially through a glass, darkly.

Berkeley argued that what we see exists only in the mind. If this is indeed a spectre, it would seem to be offering some kind of ironic comment on that theory. More probably, however, our narrator has been the victim of brainwashing by pious parents or Bible-bashing teachers in high-school.

067 • Empty Shelves

7th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Slim pickings … the neighbours are dying …
I’ve left it quite late … panic-buying …
Found five plastic forks …
And this small bag of corks …
But nothing you’d call ‘death-defying’ …

Corona Virus is a gift to the right-wing media that elected the present UK government; amid their craftily-orchestrated furore of hand-washing and panic-buying, who has headspace to worry about the vicious incompetence of Our Leaders? Nobody sane believes that Shopping will Save the Day … but who has the courage not to stock up on indispensibles, ‘just in case’?

066 • A Royal Tribute

6th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I frequently found John of Gaunt
In a somewhat unsavoury haunt
Where he wasted his days
In a dope-addled haze
And the arms of a dull débutante.

The great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandperson of the UK’s well-known Prince Harold would have turned 680 this morning, had he not chosen to squander his privileged life in unrewarding dissipations. Still, British society typically takes the older roué to heart … so Many Happy Returns, Gaunty-Boy!

065 • Crufts

5th March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Distressing to learn that your cyrrh
Is severely allergic to myrrh:
I’d procured a supply
To be flicked in its eye
And smeared on its foul-smelling fyrrh.

Oh the Brits love their animals: some huge dogfest, The Crufts, starts this morning. Sure, there’s a hint of cruelty in this ironic rhyme, but it’s nothing compared to the indignity of enslaving an animal for life, in order to harvest the adoration you have so little hope of garnering from your own species.

064 • Sabrina

4th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

She told us her name was Sabrina.
It seemed a bit posh for a cleaner.
She swept the back room
With a Burberry broom,
But we just didn’t like her demeanour.

The lackey whom your innate class prejudice caused you to spurn was not necessarily posh. She’d adopted a classy name, and purchased a high-end accessory, in hopes of impressing those hoity-toity enough to advertise for a cleaner.

063 • Slippery

3rd March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A devious dunce in Dumfries
Liked to baste his whole body with grease.
‘It helps me relax
And squeeze into cracks,’
He advised the admiring police.

Not such a dunce, perhaps, since he shares our Leaders’ modus operandi: openly declare your corrupt ways, and the Establishment will be duped into applauding your principled frankness.

062 • Forever young?

2nd March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

They flock to the talks he keeps staging,
That serial killer from Beijing:
Each final recital
Beguiles with its title,
‘Straightforward Prevention of Ageing’.

Of course there are psychopaths – and not solely in the Orient – who prey on the fears of the elderly; but far more culpable, surely, are the youth-glorifying capitalists whose adverts nourish such insecurities.

061 • Delinquents

1st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A posse of querulous crones
Went out in the dark to throw stones.
One struck a black cloud
Which split, like a shroud
As the angels glared down from their thrones

Our scenario here may seem improbable, but of course the demonisation of the Energetic Older Woman is not. No surprise, then, that the angels glared.

060 • Leap lines

29th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The lemming’s reputed to leap
From clifftops, to die in the deep.
But none of that’s true,
It’s what Britishers do
When they follow some self-serving creep
And vote ‘Leave’ while their minds are asleep.

Leap Day entitles the poet to employ a Leap Line, the better to evoke the Leap of Faith, lately made by our British allies, into the icy depths of worldwide contempt and opprobrium.

059 • Out of India

28th February 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

My clock was designed in Madras
By a maker both clumsy and crass.
The bell doesn’t sound
And the hands won’t go round
Yet it belches a foul-smelling gas.

I guess we all know someone who hunts down foreign goods at bargain prices, only to disparage the maker – rather than their own cheapskate stupidity – when the items prove unsatisfactory.

058 • The new tobacco

27th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The roll-out of 5G’s complete!
Humanity’s stupidest feat!
For most of my life I
Have hidden from Wi-Fi
But now it pollutes every street.

Smoking, the cool trend of a previous generation, is now proven lethal. Likewise this shiny communications technology, foisted on us by profiteering corporations, will probably show its true hand in years to come.

057 • One bullet

26th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Onstage, in the unmatching shoes
A songwriter murders the blues.
My neighbour’s huge feet
Pound an unmatching beat.
One bullet. But which should I choose?

It’s tough enough living in a culture that tolerates second-rate musicians and audience extroverts with bad timing. But, worse still, an archaic constitutional right – to go armed – puts these irritating people’s lives in undeserved jeopardy.

056 • Automaton

25th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A small ad. I saw in The Mail:
‘Mechanical Weasel for sale.
Can whistle the theme
From Pick the Wrong Team,
And tries to beat time with its tail.’

Today’s parents, terrified of their children venturing out of doors, continue to bolster our consumer culture by the purchasing of trashy toys, exemplified by the patronising, unnatural design of this unwanted item, which pays half-hearted homage to some self-evidently worthless TV show.

055 • Puma uncertainty

24th February 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

There is no truth at all in the rumour
That I strangled my godfather’s puma.
But I’m licensed to choke
Those who can’t take a joke
And he really had no sense of humour.

In today’s world a bad reputation prospers exponentially, often fertilised by the antics of the gutter press. Referencing concepts from quantum mechanics, the ambiguous pronoun ‘he’ in our final line ensures uncertainty about who has been throttled (even in the most sublime poetry the ‘meaning’, if any, is perforce completed by the reader).

054 • Mysterious ways

23rd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Arrested for doing a wheelie
Inside the cathedral at Ely,
The bishop begins
To atone for his sins
By singing all hymns in Swahili.

Is anyone even faintly shocked, nowadays, by news stories of this kind? Ecclesiastical malpractice is typically shrugged aside, while punishment and penitence are too often tokenistic.

053 • Sibling rivalry

22nd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In a horrible hostel at Dover
My sister seduced Casanova.
I blush to recall
How their sport, through the wall,
Spoilt my chess match with Anna Pavlova.

It sure wasn’t the Chelsea Hotel, but the high concentration of ‘names’ from various arts and eras made it the perfect battleground for (yet) another bout of sibling rivalry.

052 • Go, diva

21st February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A message from Lady Godiva:
She wants you to act as her driver.
One thing: have a care
Not to whistle, or stare,
And kindly contain your saliva.

This hokey British legend (adapted) shows how little has changed since the Dark Ages or whenever: an eternal triangle featuring the coy exhibitionist, the willing voyeur, and the disingenuous admonitions of a leering go-between.

051 • The stiltwalker

20th February 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Said a feisty young midget from Wilts
As he strode through the county on stilts,
‘Sure, I get a good view
But so, madam, do you
On the days when I choose to wear kilts.’

A correspondent – read his or her comments here – protests that I’m wasting my chosen verse-form, whose topics are properly sex, body-parts, mockery, and nothing else. The present verse, then, is dedicated to Ura, and it’s as far as I’m prepared to go in the debased direction s/he recommends (unless it proves popular, of course).

050 • Pisces

19th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Preparing predictions for Pisces
One pictures poor souls on the high seas
Awash on a raft
Or some other frail craft
Facing icebergs as far as the eye sees.

Waking this morning under the zodiacal sign of the fish, I feel convinced that the astrologer is an expert on whom we can still rely in troubled times.

049 • Little Ned (finale)

18th February 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Tonight sees the funeral feast
Of Ned the Chihuahua (dec’d).
As principle mourner
I’ll crouch in the corner
And hurl chunks of Pal at the priest.

One might well have passed the redundant stocks of dog-food to another pet-owner, but pelting the ‘priest’ (ie the creature’s sobbing ex-proprietor) with it is a much more cathartic option. [See also here]

048 • Fudge

17th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As far as I’m able to judge
All children are partial to fudge
Hence my gift for your spawn
When s/he’s finally born:
This slab of brown fossilised sludge.

To give sweets to a child, in this era, is to risk arrest. And would the pregnant mother be well-advised to devour this farsighted present herself, in hopes of forestalling childhood obesity in years to come?

047 • Entrapment

16th February 2020 RL Comments 6 Comments

When summoned to meet the new vicar,
I took him two bottles of liquor:
With a villainous oath
He decanted them both
Saying ‘Bet I can swallow mine quicker.’

We may well ponder the nature of this ‘summons’; less obscure is the motive of the summonee, who exploits the churchman’s weakness by taking the role of tempter. Which, then, is the more culpable party?

046 • Potus alert (3)

15th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“My wall will be tall, and much finer,
Than even the Great Wall of China.
Gonna fly to Beijing
Meet with President Ming
And head-hunt his brilliant designer.”

The author apologises once again for having befouled readers’ imaginations with such a contemptible waste of DNA. Should the speaker take that flight, it would surely be a heartbreaking tragedy for the world if he were to succumb to the current plague.

045 • Ciara and Dennis

14th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

They sit in the tempest, together
(She tickles his nose with a feather,
He scratches her sternum
With sprigs of laburnum)
Ignoring the world and the weather.

Valentine’s Day typically falls a in month of storms and tempests. True lovers, however, rise above any meteorological inconvenience.

044 • Lord Abercrombie

13th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In a luxury flat in Belgravia
Or the crypt of the nearby St Saviour
It’s Lord Abercrombie
The amateur zombie
Rehearsing his tiresome behaviour.

The aristocracy! Lovely part of the world, mind.

043 • Infiltrator (4)

12th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Before I arrived in this county
I hoodwinked a gullible Mountie:
‘You steal on the sly,
I turn a blind eye,
We share ten percent of the bounty.’

We’ve met this conniving character before. The remainder of the ‘bounty’ will presumably be salted away in some Offshore Fund. [See also here]

042 • Gravel

11th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A popular pundit named Pavel
Likes to garnish his goulash with gravel:
‘It’s not merely greed
It’s the roughage I need
And without it my guts would unravel.’

The media manipulates its gullible public into a state of dietary insecurity, which is then fed by the fads of witless ‘influencers’.

041 • The Critics

10th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Q
Why is Handel’s long masterpiece, Saul,
Much like Pink Floyd’s immortal The Wall?
A
If you left out the stuff
That’s just twaddle and guff
You’d have hours of Nothing At All.

Our toxic culture lionises any sniping columnist whose primary skill is the facile disparagement of genius.

040 • Brecon

9th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said the priest in the parish of Brecon,
‘This God thing is finished, I reckon.
I’ll hang up my cassock
And crouch on this hassock
Till fresh opportunities beckon.’

Disillusion is the mother of liberation, it’s often said. But it’s all too easy to ‘crouch’, in passive expectancy, amid the ruins of an outmoded belief system, rather than seeking out – or forging – a fresh one.

039 • Dead of night

8th February 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

From the coalhole, or under the floor,
Strange birdsong I’ve not heard before.
The monochrome coo
Of a black cockatoo?
Or the plaint of a plainclothes macaw?

Edgar Allan Poe … that middle name, prosaic though it may be, confers a certain gravity. I was named Richard Eric Lime in imitation of the rhythm of Poe’s name. I’ve yet to marry an underage cousin, however.

038 • Little Ned (3)

7th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That coroner’s waiting till autumn
To start on your puppy’s post-mortem.
Well the later he gawps
At Ned’s pitiful corpse
The sooner I get to report him.

Maybe I did nothing to make Ned’s brief life agreeable; but I can certainly compensate by a vengeful attack on the slothful bureaucracy that thinks nothing of delaying his funeral. [See also here]

037 • Choice of cheeses

6th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Whenever I feel a bit gloomy
I gnaw on an hunk of halloumi.
I know I’d feel better
With facefuls of feta
But that stuff just passes straight through me.

Our culture has us hooked on comfort foods. In this portrait of a greasy placebo rejected, we sense the all-too-knowing body overriding the whims of that needy weakling, the mind.

036 • Hanoi

5th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Chief of Police in Hanoi
Has no time for sorrow or joy.
Impassive, he waits
For the petulant Fates
To toss him aside like a toy.

So, insofar as we admire lawmen at all, do we admire the hard-bitten Stoical type? Surely we require a certain degree of imagination – not, as above, superstition – in those who are paid to arrest us?

035 • Westminster

4th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

No wonder this country feels callous,
While its Parliament plots in a ‘Palace’.
If you’re democrats, meet
On some ornery street
Where the air isn’t dripping with malice.

So I rail against my adoptive country? I rail against my home country too.

034 • Curses

3rd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I find I’ve forgotten my purse.
Excuse me a mo’, I must curse.
‘Damn, bugger and shit.’
That helped not a bit.
Please wait, while I say something worse.

‘Damn braces’, in the insightful words of our Great Poet. But you’ve got to do it properly to feel the benefit.

033 • Pet shop

2nd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We know you were keen on a chimp
But the one in the shop had a limp.
This won’t be the same
But at least it’s not lame:
So let’s think of a name for your shrimp.

The trusting child dreams of an ideal birthday present, liberating, life-enhancing and dynamic. But, come the glorious day, the shameless parents make excuses and deliver something underweight, slimy and unfit for purpose. Sounds familiar, no?

032 • Divide and Deceive

1st February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

These losers who voted for ‘Leave’,
Who fell for ‘Divide and Deceive’:
Did they not have the brain
To stick up for ‘Remain’?
What in hell did they hope to achieve?

The people have spoken. Out of their arses. And so a glorious new era of restriction and stupidity begins …

031 • Infiltrator (3)

31st January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Before I arrived in this town
I traded my clothes with a clown.
Written off as a berk,
I may openly work
To turn the whole world upside down.

For the day my adopted country throws out the baby with the bathwater. The guile of the demagogue matching the gullibility of the person in the street. [Related story]

030 • Island mentality

30th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Why, hark! ’Tis the hornet-detector:
‘Intruders at large in this sector!
We don’t want our honey
To taste or smell funny.
Go home, and stop nicking our nectar.’

Island Mentality in a nutshell. The xenophobic bee whose words we report seems to have scant understanding of the mechanisms of his own livelihood. Free movement of ‘outsiders’ is clearly about to end.

029 • Infiltrator (2)

29th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Before I arrived in this city
I wrote to the Central Committee
Announcing my scheme
To rescind their regime
And abscond with the keys to the kitty.

Yes, indeed, announce your crimes well in advance. Then, once you’ve perpetrated them, the witless electorate will revere you as a person of your word. [Related story]

028 • Pandemonium

28th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

First medics deliver my jab
From the Pandemic Antidotes Lab.
And then they forecast a
Full global disaster:
‘The whole world a mortuary slab’.

Our behaviour is entirely contradictory, but you’ve come to us because we’re experts, and we know our paradoxical behaviour will only strengthen the illusion of authority we take pains to foster.

027 • Little Ned (2)

27th January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Has lately been shot in the head.
Our Desk-Sergeant, Marcus,
Can show you the carcase.
No further light will be shed.

I didn’t get on with this dog, I admit. But I never wanted it to come to this. And the tone of the police memo, specifying their callous Desk-Sergeant merely by a chummy forename – leaves a great deal to be desired. [See also here]

026 • Living room

26th January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Zookeepers struggle to gauge
When a creature’s too small for its cage.
Though they argue the toss
Re. the great albatross
With amœbas they’re on the same page.

In contemporary culture, when we pose the same question about great and small, it’s inevitably the former that receives the lion’s share of the debate, even when the question is demonstrably fatuous.

025 • Round the world

25th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You still think the planet is flat?
Let’s climb up this tree for a chat.
From here, you’ll observe,
One can see round the curve …
Now how do you feel about that?

In this telling cameo, the impudence of empiricism confronts the implacable majesty of received wisdom.

024 • Potus alert (2)

24th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

X, so we’re told, marks the spot
Where Abraham Lincoln was shot.
If instead he had said
‘Mark a Z on my head’
He’d have lengthened his life quite a lot.

A homily about alphabetical precision, I suppose. Despite its subject matter this one is intended to be read as if we were in Great Britain – to reap the full benefit of those internal rhymes.

023 • Crockery

23rd January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

We dined on five loaves and two fishes.
Each slice was quite thin, but delicious.
Seeing Christ and his mates
Had brought five thousand plates,
We stayed on to help do the dishes.

Such a lot of administrative/background work goes unnoticed, its practitioners unacknowledged. It would be nice to see behaviour like the above become the norm again.

022 • Potus alert

22nd January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Vacationing in The Bahamas
Misfortune befell the Obamas.
On the night she forgot
Where they’d anchored their yacht
A crocodile stole his pyjamas.

It’s a question of scale, no?

021 • Aquarius

21st January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Unfolding the fates for Aquarius,
I notice two contrasting areas.
Your prospects are bleak
Till the end of next week;
After that your whole life is precarious.

Waking today under the star-sign of the Water-carrier – and with just a few days until ‘Brexit’ starts – I feel certain that the astrologer is one expert we can still rely on to tell it like it is. (Click here to see what I was reading.)

020 • Antichrist alert

20th January 2020 RL Comments 9 Comments

The Antichrist got on our bus.
He didn’t cause much of a fuss.
No sulphurous whiff,
No tusk in his quiff.
But somehow, not quite one of us.

Thing is, how do we know it was The Antichrist at all? And why does Otherness have to be such a bugbear?

019 • Steamrollers

19th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said a drunk, in a park, in Manhattan.
‘I’m beginning to notice a pattern:
When steamrollers pass
Where I lie on the grass
It tends to be me that they flatten.’

I was thinking of Sondheim, ‘Sunday in the Park’ or whatever it’s called, but didn’t quite stay on the rails. I’m not sure when steamrollers last ran in New York. This is an historical piece.

018 • Turing

18th January 2020 RL Comments 6 Comments

Recalling my chum, Alan Turing
Whom people once talked about ‘curing’:
His craving for cabbage,
His crush on Charles Babbage;
Ah! Memories fond and enduring.

Fond and enduring indeed: he had charm and genius in equal measure. Though, so do most people, frankly. Perhaps I mean, ‘in equally high measure’, if that doesn’t sound too awkward.

017 • Gossips

17th January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Quite why it’s occurred is unclear
But my forehead has sprouted an ear.
The gossips may jest,
But it keeps me abreast
Of the quips they don’t want me to hear.

Is it better to know what detractors are saying about you, or to be free of the defects that catalyse their scorn? Unhappily, the more genetic modification we tolerate in our food chain, the more frequently we shall encounter such bodily aberrations.

016 • Little Ned

16th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Is banned from the marital bed.
Henceforth I expect him
To lick his vile rectum
On top of the wardrobe instead.

Ned is long gone, mercifully, but traumatic memories remain, not least of this memo’s over-stern wording. [See also here]

015 • Bleeding

15th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One thing my life sorely lacks is
Some nostrum to quell epistaxis:
To limit the gore
That I trail on the floor
And the bloodhounds that follow my trackses.

Every citizen has a dripping wound, acknowledged or not: nosebleeds are the least of it. So much genetic data surrendered to malign agencies – not so much the hounds themselves as those who presume to marshal them.

014 • Cartographers

14th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

No prizes for guessing the plight
Of the boffins who set out to write
A useful snake-atlas
That showed all the rattlers
And where, and what person, they’d bite.

For those of us who live in the regions such an atlas would cover, it could have seemed a useful publication. Yet once again we see mankind confounded by a hubristic attempt to pre-empt the processes of nature.

013 • Postcard

13th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My postcard to Cardinal Newman
Asked, ‘What does it mean to be human?’
‘It means “Knowing You’ll Die”’
Was his simple reply
(I got the same answer from Schumann).

This kind of thoughtful feedback from historical figures is somehow heartening, even if their message is occasionally rather bleak.

012 • The sporran

12th January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Leaving Troon for some tropical place
Feeling shy on account of my race.
So as not to look foreign
I’ll sport a huge sporran
And draw people’s eyes from my face.

An issue that, regrettably, afflicts all travellers and outsiders. The sporran is a kind of oversized ornamental furry purse that puts any wearer, or viewer, in mind of some ungainly marsupial.

011 • On a plate

11th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Karl Marx lived in Notting Hill Gate
With a world-weary waitress named Thwaite.
Yet until she retired
Every thing he desired
Was handed to him on a plate.

An indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy, or an evocation of True Love? Apparently her name was Tanya. (Adjustment of the geography of London, and of certain other particulars, has been necessary to make this piece come out satisfactorily).

010 • Everyman redux

10th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

John Dough, the old baker from Delph
At last had the town to himself.
The folk that he’d fed
All lay rigid in bed
Or folded away on a shelf.

In which a despairing artisan turns on his fellow Proles. A hint of Americanese may come through in the first couple lines of this piece, though it’s been a while.

009 • Press Barons

9th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I pity all those who aborted
My plan, unexpectedly thwarted,
‘To succour the needy
With blood from the greedy’
Which not one Press Baron supported.

Well maybe one Press Baron did support it, but regrettably our metre doesn’t readily permit that level of precision.

008 • Adam, Eve etc.

8th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

How pleasant to meet Piltdown Man
The fount of our whole human clan:
With Lucy his wife
They’re the source of all life
Dating back before records began.

Think, on the other hand, how disgusted our primitive ancestors would be to encounter us, now that we’ve laid waste the world that brought them into being. Although – a pedantic note here – I believe there are now question-marks hanging over Lucy’s identity, in some scholarly circles.

007 • Faeces, eh?

7th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Genuine poets will sigh, coo
And swear that ‘We honestly like, ooh,
We love your new pieces;
(Your doggerel’s faeces
But Hey! It’s OK to write Haiku!)’

Personally I’ve got nothing in particular against highbrows, and in this instance they’ve got a point: 366 days of churning out three-line snippets that don’t even have to rhyme would have been a far less demanding challenge than the one I’ve embarked upon. Nevertheless I have no intention of downgrading.

006 • Nero

6th January 2020 RL Comments 5 Comments

For Boris, the Emperor Nero
Was clearly a personal hero:
Self-centred, uncouth
A stranger to truth
And with street-credibility zero.

I blanch to have polluted readers’ minds with such a contemptible waste of DNA.

005 • Courtiers

5th January 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Each evening the King of Kowloon
Egests, from his gullet, a prune.
His courtiers compete
As they crouch at his feet
To flick it away with a spoon.

There may well not be a King of Kowloon at present; but anywhere, any time, you’ll find entitled hierarchies demeaning the grovelling lowerarchy. That’s what we’re investigating in this piece.

004 • Crime scene

4th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ said I
Yet the policewoman made no reply.
Now she’s driven ten times
Past the scene of my crimes
With a devilish glint in her eye.

‘Crimes’ that may not, in fact, be real. Our brow-beaten narrator is surely on the brink of delivering some specious confession.

003 • Three sisters

3rd January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Cordelia, Goneril: call
The hunters to dine in our hall.
Yet do not call Regan.
Since she became vegan
We have no such daughter at all.

Some time before the play begins, I assume, the alpha-male tyrant rallies his sycophants against the principled child. A pity Shakespeare overlooked King Lear’s fourth child Greta, ‘Mistaken, at first, for a beta …’

002 • Infiltrator (1)

2nd January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Before I arrived on these shores
I skip-read a list of your laws
To try and find one
I could break just for fun
While defying the rest with good cause.

Needless to say we’re not talking about literal shores here. [Related story]

001 • Something is rotten

1st January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Adrift in a city of fools
Where all the king’s horses are mules
We are drenched in deceit
From an ersatz élite
While callous incompetence rules.

Happy New Year to all. This is perhaps more solemn and direct than I expected for a first report, but My Dog Errol insists I should stick with whatever’s in mind as I wake.

000 • Declaration

25th December 2019 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’ve undertaken to post verses daily
from the start to the end of 2020.
Read The Argument in the panel to the right.
Determined to fulfil this 366-day challenge.
See everyone soon.
Richard.