Celebrity Archives • My Dog Errol

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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).]

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.

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.

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.

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!