Vehicles Archives • My Dog Errol

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.

350 • Dionysus

15th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

342 • Hard to believe

7th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

341 • Droning

6th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

340 • Cruise control

5th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

339 • Overheard

4th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

337 • Assassin

2nd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

323 • Remote

18th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

321 • Harlotry

16th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

309 • All at sea

4th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

308 • A Sensible Choice?

3rd November 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

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

Three instructions for November 3.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

232 • Messina / Massena

19th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

226 • Howzat!

13th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

217 • Penguin farewell

4th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

208 • Body and/or Soul

26th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

202 • Apollo 11

20th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

201 • Unhappy houri

19th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

181 • Opportunity missed

29th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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.

145 • Excuses

24th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

138 • Mount Ararat

17th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

117 • Rhine recovery

26th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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.

110 • Niger

19th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

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

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

109 • Frankie and Connie

18th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

105 • Ribble

14th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

104 • Final Performance

13th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

099 • Tea on the Lea

8th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

089 • Saint Lawrence

29th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

071 • Pot luck

11th March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

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

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

054 • Mysterious ways

23rd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

052 • Go, diva

21st February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

050 • Pisces

19th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

022 • Potus alert

22nd January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

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

It’s a question of scale, no?

020 • Antichrist alert

20th January 2020 RL Comments 9 Comments

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

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

019 • Steamrollers

19th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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