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Category: Train

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.

280 • A Poet’s Blessing

280 • A Poet’s Blessing

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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

161 • Dickens

161 • Dickens

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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.