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365 • Exile and Extinction

365 • Exile and Extinction

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‘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.

351 • Take-Away (5)

351 • Take-Away (5)

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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?

347 • Take-away (3)

347 • Take-away (3)

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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.

343 • Take-away

343 • Take-away

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‘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.

333 • Sucker

333 • Sucker

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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.

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

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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.

314 • National Trust

314 • National Trust

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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.

299 • Poets’ Corner

299 • Poets’ Corner

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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?

239 • Empty nesters

239 • Empty nesters

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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.

218 • Escalator

218 • Escalator

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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.

216 • Carruthers

216 • Carruthers

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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.

212 • Dogged

212 • Dogged

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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.

186 • Potus Alert (6)

186 • Potus Alert (6)

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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.

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

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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.

158 • Manila

158 • Manila

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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.

144 • Gross!

144 • Gross!

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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 .

097 • Clyde

097 • Clyde

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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.

072 • Topeka

072 • Topeka

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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.

070 • Grasshopper

070 • Grasshopper

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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.

054 • Mysterious ways

054 • Mysterious ways

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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.

046 • Potus alert (3)

046 • Potus alert (3)

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“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.