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Category: Geographical

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.

363 • Famous Last Words

363 • Famous Last Words

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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.

361 • Pandora’s Boxing Day

361 • Pandora’s Boxing Day

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‘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?

359 • My kingdom …

359 • My kingdom …

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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.

355 • Take-away (7)

355 • Take-away (7)

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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

354 • Boa sting

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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). 

350 • Dionysus

350 • Dionysus

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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.

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.

346 • Gold-digger

346 • Gold-digger

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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.

339 • Overheard

339 • Overheard

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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.

336 • From our own correspondent

336 • From our own correspondent

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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

335 • Minnie’s Boys

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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.

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.

324 • Monserrate

324 • Monserrate

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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.

322 • The Spurning

322 • The Spurning

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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.

318 • Somme

318 • Somme

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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.

312 • Failure

312 • Failure

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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.

309 • All at sea

309 • All at sea

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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?

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?

296 • Class distinction

296 • Class distinction

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‘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

293 • Nefertiti

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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).

291 • Implants

291 • Implants

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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

290 • Biopic

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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.

285 • Jordan

285 • Jordan

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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

284 • Street delicacy

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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.

279 • Ax me another

279 • Ax me another

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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.”

276 • Escapology (4)

276 • Escapology (4)

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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.  

272 • The New Solomon

272 • The New Solomon

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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’.

270 • Surplus to requirements

270 • Surplus to requirements

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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?

262 • Idols of clay

262 • Idols of clay

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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.

253 • Currency crisis

253 • Currency crisis

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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

252 • Mud

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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.

249 • A Voyeur’s Lament

249 • A Voyeur’s Lament

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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.

244 • Frozen

244 • Frozen

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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.

235 • Escapology (3)

235 • Escapology (3)

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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)

234 • Escapology (2)

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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

233 • Escapology

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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

232 • Messina / Massena

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“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!

231 • Exterminate!

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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.

219 • Bluebird Farewell

219 • Bluebird Farewell

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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.

210 • Sleeping cats

210 • Sleeping cats

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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?

203 • Omphaloskepsis

203 • Omphaloskepsis

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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?

199 • Brazil

199 • Brazil

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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?

197 • Where are they now?

197 • Where are they now?

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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).

195 • Smith

195 • Smith

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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.

167 • Deep Fake (2)

167 • Deep Fake (2)

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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.

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.

135 • Droit de Cuissage

135 • Droit de Cuissage

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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)

134 • Meet the team (5)

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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.

128 • Agent provocateur

128 • Agent provocateur

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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.

126 • Tagus away

126 • Tagus away

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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

125 • Meet the team

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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

124 • Missouri position

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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.

121 • The Ouse

121 • The Ouse

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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.

119 • Rhône

119 • Rhône

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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

118 • Neath

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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

117 • Rhine recovery

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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.

115 • Euphrates (Volga)

115 • Euphrates (Volga)

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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.

112 • Isis

112 • Isis

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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.

110 • Niger

110 • Niger

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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

109 • Frankie and Connie

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‘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.

107 • Seine

107 • Seine

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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.

105 • Ribble

105 • Ribble

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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.

103 • Orinoco communion

103 • Orinoco communion

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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

102 • Colorado fading

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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

101 • Belfast Agreement

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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

100 • The Thames Look

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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

099 • Tea on the Lea

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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.

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.

095 • Yangtze Kiang

095 • Yangtze Kiang

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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.

093 • Mississippi

093 • Mississippi

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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.

091 • Zambesi

091 • Zambesi

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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.

089 • Saint Lawrence

089 • Saint Lawrence

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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.

087 • Irrawaddy

087 • Irrawaddy

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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

086 • Viral Reset

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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

085 • Danube

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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

084 • Cuckoo, coffee

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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.

081 • Tiber

081 • Tiber

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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.

079 • Trajan

079 • Trajan

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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.

074 • Hermitwear

074 • Hermitwear

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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.

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.

071 • Pot luck

071 • Pot luck

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‘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.

063 • Slippery

063 • Slippery

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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?

062 • Forever young?

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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.

059 • Out of India

059 • Out of India

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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.

051 • The stiltwalker

051 • The stiltwalker

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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).

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.

036 • Hanoi

036 • Hanoi

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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?

025 • Round the world

025 • Round the world

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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.

022 • Potus alert

022 • Potus alert

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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?

019 • Steamrollers

019 • Steamrollers

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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.

014 • Cartographers

014 • Cartographers

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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.

012 • The sporran

012 • The sporran

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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

011 • On a plate

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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

010 • Everyman redux

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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.