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366 • The horror, the horror

366 • The horror, the horror

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O, these horrors have grown out of hand!
May I bury my head in the sand?
Can I let it lie there
While my corpse roves elsewhere?
A solution like that would be grand,
And my readers would all understand
Why no further postings are planned …

Yes, Covid, Idiots in Office, Climate Chaos and now this. At least I made it to the end of the year as promised. Thanks for the all lovely comments, and I know people all round the world will enjoy re-reading the 366 rhymes of My Dog Errol, again and again, in celebration of a remarkable and memorable year.

Rick Lime

364 • Fan tale

364 • Fan tale

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My surrogate mother-in-law
Is becoming a bit of a bore
By declaiming my rhymes
At inapposite times
And then yelling ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Encore!’

In a way it’s nice to have a relative’s company during Christmas, even though she mainly comes round to fetch off her departed daughter’s possessions, a pram-load at a time. But she wanted to change ‘inapposite’ (‘Nobody knows that word’) to ‘embarrassing’. I told her it’s not embarrassing to hear one’s doggerel bellowed on the front porch in the small hours – everyone likes a fan, after all, and it’s quite flattering that she has them all by rote. It’s just that this is a decent neighborhood and anybody interested will have read the bulletins online anyway.

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.

329 • Supercilium

329 • Supercilium

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It’s true, you have patrons a-plenty
While I have far fewer than twenty.
Your job, my dear boy
Is to please hoi polloi
While I tease the true cognoscenti.

This bulletin pretty accurately reports some words that lately passed between a Blogger-in-Rhyme and a New Formalist Villanelle-Wrangler. I invite my legion of readers all across the globe to work out which of the two uttered them, and to what effect.

316 • Older / Wiser?

316 • Older / Wiser?

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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.

307 • Polemicist

307 • Polemicist

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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.

300 • Postcard (4)

300 • Postcard (4)

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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.

275 • Dear John

275 • Dear John

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The pink billet-doux read ‘Dear John,
I have taken the children and gone.
Accept your comeuppance
’Cos no-one cares twopence;
It’s time to give up and move on.’

I saw it coming, as did my many readers who have been inboxing me with words of support. Thank you, thank you. Nonetheless it’s a bitter blow. She could have got my name right, the cow. 

265 • Symbolismus

265 • Symbolismus

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One needs to be mentally nimble
To capture a gnat in a thimble
Or one pitiful crumb
In a ten-gallon drum
Or the quest for true love in one symbol.

To answer the poet point-for-point: who are these people who seek to capture gnats, and why do they set themselves up for failure by making thimbles their tool of choice? Who are these crumb-hunters who encumber their travails with such unwieldy and inappropriate canisters? And why oh why would anyone with even a single gram of common-sense waste their time dreaming up a symbol for some pointless and unattainable personal quest? We suddenly need some ersatz sequel to The Song of Solomon, do we?

241 • Draft dodgers

241 • Draft dodgers

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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.

211 • Flatfish farewell

211 • Flatfish farewell

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Farewell to my flatfish, Phillippe,
Who is, frankly, a bit of a creep.
As I choose my next phrase
I can feel his cold gaze
Though he wants me to think he’s asleep.

The floundering author wishes us to understand that he continues to be haunted, from another realm, by a fishlike gaze of opprobrium – which is more probably the buried memory of well-deserved contempt dished out by a grade school teacher.

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?

191 • Postcard (3)

191 • Postcard (3)

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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]

177 • Postcard (2)

177 • Postcard (2)

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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]

166 • Deep Fake

166 • Deep Fake

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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.

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).]

013 • Postcard

013 • Postcard

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My postcard to Cardinal Newman
Asked, ‘What does it mean to be human?’
‘It means “Knowing You’ll Die”’
Was his simple reply
(I got the same answer from Schumann).

This kind of thoughtful feedback from historical figures is somehow heartening, even if their message is occasionally rather bleak.

009 • Press Barons

009 • Press Barons

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I pity all those who aborted
My plan, unexpectedly thwarted,
‘To succour the needy
With blood from the greedy’
Which not one Press Baron supported.

Well maybe one Press Baron did support it, but regrettably our metre doesn’t readily permit that level of precision.

007 • Faeces, eh?

007 • Faeces, eh?

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Genuine poets will sigh, coo
And swear that ‘We honestly like, ooh,
We love your new pieces;
(Your doggerel’s faeces
But Hey! It’s OK to write Haiku!)’

Personally I’ve got nothing in particular against highbrows, and in this instance they’ve got a point: 366 days of churning out three-line snippets that don’t even have to rhyme would have been a far less demanding challenge than the one I’ve embarked upon. Nevertheless I have no intention of downgrading.