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Category: Experts

362 • Abbesse ! Aidez !

362 • Abbesse ! Aidez !

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The Abbess’s audit, Your Highness,
Regarding young Thomas Aquinas:
‘In his heart, nonpareil …
In his head, off the scale
But in bed? Sadly, E– – –.’

When the great Georges Perec wrote ‘Abbesse! Aidez!‘ he was perpetrating a sound-pun involving the first four letters of the alphabet as they are pronounced in the Kingdom of Francophonia. Today’s sermon, however, purports to reveal one species of help a real Abbess was able to offer to a Pope, and demonstrates how her early assessment of the levitating-saint-to-be – namely, that his compassion and intellect considerably outweighed any carnal prowess – exactly foretold the characteristics for which ensuing centuries would come to venerate him.

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?

357 • Capricorn

357 • Capricorn

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The upcoming month looks a mess
For Capricorn: doom and distress,
Your children disgraced,
Your garden laid waste,
And minimal chance of redress.

Waking at dawn under the zodiacal sign of the Goat, I remain convinced that the practitioner of astrology is an expert in whom we can justly place our trust in troubled times.

353 • Take-Away (6)

353 • Take-Away (6)

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‘’Tis an etching,’ said old Piranesi,
‘And kindly don’t tell me I’m crazy.
If you say “engraving”
It’s not me that’s raving
It’s you being mentally lazy.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN JALFREZI.

The same problem arises in every era: the Old Master indulges his penchant for pedantic pontification, while relying on others to minister to his basic bodily requirements. A man unable to cook is in no position to hector those untroubled by the self-involved niceties of his Terms of Art, ‘engraving’ and ‘etching’.

351 • Take-Away (5)

351 • Take-Away (5)

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Today my old dachshund, Delphine,
Dropped dead in this trendy canteen.
‘You can say au revoir
To your Michelin star,’
I said. ‘So much for Nouvelle Cuisine.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN CHOW MIEN.

The human spirit is infinitely resourceful, it seems. Unwilling to succumb to the grief that typically attends the expiry of a cur, our narrator turns the event to advantage, knowing that – once the press gets hold of the story – the reputation of one more pretentious ‘fooderie’ will be irredeemably trashed. Who wants to eat their supper in some joint where canine corpses are scattered about? Or in a restaurant that welcomes living dogs, come to think of it?

332 • Semen / cement

332 • Semen / cement

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Said philosopher-poet John Ruskin
On exhuming a half-rotten buskin
‘Hopping round in this boot
Will cement my repute
As an expert in all things Etruscan.’

And revered archæologist Schliemann
Slept out (to discourage a demon)
’Neath a Bacofoil™ awning,
Yet woke every morning
Quite sodden with incubus semen.

Is it something about their preoccupation with the remote past that distorts the mental processes of such famous men? Perhaps they fell into recondite professions precisely because they were unable to relate convincingly to the way ordinary folk make sense of the world? Or, if the above tales are reckless fictions, do they nonetheless ring true because we instinctively sense that a particular echelon, existing in intellectual society, assumes it can get away with murder?

330 • Serial Killer

330 • Serial Killer

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Gents! Should you require an abortion,
Step into my clinic with caution.
Here tools are corroded,
Procedures outmoded,
And fees tantamount to extortion.

Surely a man has little to fear from a backstreet abortionist, especially one so unsparing in his own condemnation? Yet the very existence of such a clinic throws grave shadows on the integrity of the male of the species, who is very rarely the target of the hazardous procedure for which he is about to pay.

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.

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.

314 • National Trust

314 • National Trust

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The groundsman reports to the Duchess:
‘Your lobster needs five pairs of crutches
Having ricked his ten knees
On the flying trapeze
That we built by the pond where his hutch is.

‘And, begging your Ladyship’s pardon
We’ve finished landscaping The Garden:
Your flora and fauna
Are crammed in one corner.
This concrete takes ten years to harden.’

Meanwhile, back in Merrie England, the serfs pay lip-service to the whims of the landed classes, and the needs of their exploited livestock, while covertly expediting the blind March of Progress which tramples all before it.

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.

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.

281 • Incompetence

281 • Incompetence

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Please note: your chiropodist, Pete,
Will be shot, should he enter our street.
He made such a botch
Of repairing your watch
He sha’n’t get his hands on my feet.

It’s all-too easy to suspect across-the-board incompetence when, in fact, ineptitude has been proven in one field only. The luckless ‘Pete’ here may indeed be a jackass-of-all-trades, but what would become of US society if we took pot-shots at every bungling nincompoop who came to our attention?

278 • Sausages

278 • Sausages

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I dreamt that I’d asked Buster Keaton
To show me the worst thing he’d eaten.
But when he confessed
That the Wurst was the best
I wished I had asked Mrs Beeton.

Who knows why I dreamt about the stony-faced comedian (unless the radio-alarm informed my half-waking mind that Keaton was born on this date 125 years ago). Admittedly, the dreamer’s idiotic request deserves no better answer than a weakly-punned ‘confession’ (the word used in its secular (ie meaningless) sense). I should perhaps not declare this from the pulpit, but nocturnal encounters with the gastronomically-inclined Mrs Beeton are probably a great deal less unsatisfying.

267 • Libra

267 • Libra

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They weighed you in Libra, the scales:
Now all your fine life-planning fails.
No matter what talents
You chuck in the balance
The world sucks the wind from your sails.

Waking this morning under the sign of the celestial scales, it’s liberating to remember how our lives are laid out in full by the time the midwife has us snipped and weighed. I was 9lbs 10 in my maiden diaper … heavy, man.

261 • Right and Popper

261 • Right and Popper

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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.

260 • Whipsnade

260 • Whipsnade

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Please note that your child, Mary-Lou,
Is banned from our trip to the zoo.
The keepers advise
That a girl of her size
Might get killed by a rogue cockatoo.

Please note, rather, that a truly enlightened society would ban all children from visiting all zoos, the better to hasten their abolition. Since vested interests will surely strive to keep them in business we must – however ruefully – concede that the extinguishing of a few toddlers, by vengeful Psittaciformes bursting forth from internment, might prove a useful catalyst in turning the tide of public opinion against such egregious institutions.

230 • Cometary Dazes

230 • Cometary Dazes

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Astronomer Royal, Edmond Halley
Confided (back when we were pally),
‘On sighting a comet
I gen’rally vomit;
And shooting-stars drive me doolally.’

Not an ideal companion, then, on our seasonal expedition to the heath to view The Perseid Shower, and to join in the midnight incantations whereby witches implore these cosmic projectiles to validate their hitherto-purposeless trajectories by hailing down on the skulls of this planet’s most infamous leaders.

222 • Apecraft

222 • Apecraft

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As I read in The Military Journal,
An ape’s reached the rank of full colonel.
Since beasts lack a soul
He can act out the rôle
Without fearing Hellfire eternal.

We’ve grown accustomed to press scaremongering concerning military robots, which pictures Artificial Intelligence running berserk on battlefields of the future. Far more alarming, however, are reports that our Masters of War have already appointed creatures – without conscience, yet close to us in tactical reasoning – to execute their damnable machinations. Has humanity learnt nothing at all from the PG Tips scandal of the 1970s?

164 • Meet the team (18)

164 • Meet the team (18)

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And lastly, your mentor, Bob Cratchit,
Whose cloak is encrusted with bat-shit.
A pipistrelle lurks
Near the desk where he works:
How he longs for the leisure to catch it!

How useful, to be finally introduced to one’s office mentor on the very day one hands in one’s notice. The repulsive colleague one has taken such pains to avoid turns out to be the very person who has supposedly been looking after one’s interests all along. Relieved of my care, perhaps he will now have free time to catch the Corvid-carrier that haunts him like a familiar.

156 • (Postscript)

156 • (Postscript)

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My knowledge is sparser than sparse
So this twenty-page scrawl is a farce.
Oh please, dear examiner
Credit my stamina!
Surely you want me to pass?

As the pollen-count exacerbates the common misery, one is reminded how hay-fever was the go-to excuse for a feeble performance in school and college examinations around this time of year (a personal footnote for the marker, extolling quantity over quality, was a second-string gambit, offered in reckless hope).

148 • Meet the team (11)

148 • Meet the team (11)

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Our spin-doctor gushes hot air
As he swivels all day on his chair
Sometimes dazed, sometimes dizzy.
But since he looks busy
The managers seem not to care.

In a world that stands or falls by surface meanings, the appearance of industry – however compulsive and futile – evidently guarantees continued employment.

146 • Meet the team (10)

146 • Meet the team (10)

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That nurse with the knife is Nanette
Whose brief is our burgeoning debt.
She can cut it by half
If she slashes the staff
But you mustn’t take that as a threat.

The presence of trained medical personnel in the workplace would, in an ideal world, be reassuring. But, trained for what? The idea that my new colleagues and I might be culled, in the name of economies, is somewhat less so.

143 • Meet the team (9)

143 • Meet the team (9)

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On that bench lies our governor, Maud,
Who formerly sat on The Board.
In the financial crash
She lost most of our cash:
Disgrace was her only reward.

With characteristic chauvinism it’s a woman the company blames, and shames, for market losses which (as they implicitly acknowledge) afflicted the great majority of businesses in the sector. One is surprised they haven’t feminised her job-description to ‘Governess’.

141 • Meet the team (8)

141 • Meet the team (8)

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Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

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.

132 • Meet the team (4)

132 • Meet the team (4)

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In Human Resources we’ve Irma
Who commutes every Monday from Burma.
Frankly, sightings are rare
As her head’s in the air
And her body abhors terra-firma.

‘Human Resources’ … the phrase speaks volumes, volumes of ill-defined flabbiness. Surely Irma – whom I’m sure I’ll never meet – could find a less embarrassing and more rewarding job by remaining in Burma?

130 • Attaboy!

130 • Attaboy!

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‘Well of course, he’s a National Icon.
Have you sat through his series on lichen?’
David Attenborough’s voice
Makes the whole world rejoice
(Or despair, when he’s not turned the mike on).

Yesterday the great man turned 94. He’s one of the few homegrown celebs the British media haven’t yet found a way of undermining. No doubt their lenses are trained on him night and day, hoping to snap inappropriate touching with a Venus flytrap, or lewd banter with a limpet. #MeNeither

127 • Meet the Team (2)

127 • Meet the Team (2)

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Your opposite number here, Jake,
Has never once made a mistake.
Just you copy him
And the chances are slim
That he’ll ever work out you’re a fake.

The quest for personal authenticity never did run smooth. To avoid being called out as a fake, behave like a fake. Furthermore, however you choose to play it, someone will be judging you.

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.

116 • Potus alert (4)

116 • Potus alert (4)

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With tough healthcare questions to settle,
‘The Donald’ shows fans his true mettle:
We’ll defeat this disease,
His great wisdom decrees,
If we all begin mainlining Dettol™.

A memorable coronavirus intervention from the well-known TV entertainer. But he’s done himself a disfavor by recanting, and claiming his diagnosis was ‘sarcastic’. Intelligent people might stop taking him seriously.

113 • Beard of Avon

113 • Beard of Avon

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A scholar writes: ‘Is it not weird
How Shakespeare’s portrayed with a beard?
The Sweet Bard of Avon
Was always clean-shaven.
At least, that is how he appeared.’

The reasoning of this ‘scholar’ does not reward protracted scrutiny. It pleases self-styled experts to wreathe their heroes in mystique, such as the belief that Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April, for which no firm evidence can be found.

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.

096 • Substitution

096 • Substitution

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Please note: our great brain surgeon, Guy,
Has sadly been Summoned On High.
His place will be filled
By this gibbon: unskilled,
Yet keen to be given a try.

Euphemism is the rhetoric of cowards: if a priest cannot mention death from the pulpit, where can we expect to hear it named? Covid 19 takes the high-flying medic as readily as the homeless man; but in the former’s case, as this vicar reminds us, there is no shortage of volunteers willing to step into the breach.

090 • Evasive inaction

090 • Evasive inaction

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On balance, I share your dismay
At the meteorite heading this way.
Such rumours aren’t new
But if this one is true
We’d be wise to start packing today.

Oh, these Overgrown Etonians with their sang congelé in the face of a population-threatening calamity, acknowledged by all neighbouring Governments! Where was the decisiveness, the adrenaline? This entitled lassitude, this phlegmatic indifference to the Commoners’ Fate, shall not go forgotten.

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.

075 • Ideas of March

075 • Ideas of March

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When Cæsar spurned Artemidorus
His senators hollered in chorus,
‘That prophet’s our geeza,
Not you, Mr Cæsar!
Your hubris is starting to bore us.’

Our narrative here differs in several key respects from Shakespeare’s account of the same (15 March 44 BC) episode. Hard to tell who got it right. But a similar marginalisation of the expert, by the egotistical leader, is a perpetual curse in public life.

067 • Empty Shelves

067 • Empty Shelves

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Slim pickings … the neighbours are dying …
I’ve left it quite late … panic-buying …
Found five plastic forks …
And this small bag of corks …
But nothing you’d call ‘death-defying’ …

Corona Virus is a gift to the right-wing media that elected the present UK government; amid their craftily-orchestrated furore of hand-washing and panic-buying, who has headspace to worry about the vicious incompetence of Our Leaders? Nobody sane believes that Shopping will Save the Day … but who has the courage not to stock up on indispensibles, ‘just in case’?

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.

058 • The new tobacco

058 • The new tobacco

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The roll-out of 5G’s complete!
Humanity’s stupidest feat!
For most of my life I
Have hidden from Wi-Fi
But now it pollutes every street.

Smoking, the cool trend of a previous generation, is now proven lethal. Likewise this shiny communications technology, foisted on us by profiteering corporations, will probably show its true hand in years to come.

042 • Gravel

042 • Gravel

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A popular pundit named Pavel
Likes to garnish his goulash with gravel:
‘It’s not merely greed
It’s the roughage I need
And without it my guts would unravel.’

The media manipulates its gullible public into a state of dietary insecurity, which is then fed by the fads of witless ‘influencers’.

041 • The Critics

041 • The Critics

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Q
Why is Handel’s long masterpiece, Saul,
Much like Pink Floyd’s immortal The Wall?
A
If you left out the stuff
That’s just twaddle and guff
You’d have hours of Nothing At All.

Our toxic culture lionises any sniping columnist whose primary skill is the facile disparagement of genius.

038 • Little Ned (3)

038 • Little Ned (3)

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That coroner’s waiting till autumn
To start on your puppy’s post-mortem.
Well the later he gawps
At Ned’s pitiful corpse
The sooner I get to report him.

Maybe I did nothing to make Ned’s brief life agreeable; but I can certainly compensate by a vengeful attack on the slothful bureaucracy that thinks nothing of delaying his funeral. [See also here]

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?

035 • Westminster

035 • Westminster

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No wonder this country feels callous,
While its Parliament plots in a ‘Palace’.
If you’re democrats, meet
On some ornery street
Where the air isn’t dripping with malice.

So I rail against my adoptive country? I rail against my home country too.

028 • Pandemonium

028 • Pandemonium

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First medics deliver my jab
From the Pandemic Antidotes Lab.
And then they forecast a
Full global disaster:
‘The whole world a mortuary slab’.

Our behaviour is entirely contradictory, but you’ve come to us because we’re experts, and we know our paradoxical behaviour will only strengthen the illusion of authority we take pains to foster.

026 • Living room

026 • Living room

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Zookeepers struggle to gauge
When a creature’s too small for its cage.
Though they argue the toss
Re. the great albatross
With amœbas they’re on the same page.

In contemporary culture, when we pose the same question about great and small, it’s inevitably the former that receives the lion’s share of the debate, even when the question is demonstrably fatuous.

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.

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.