Historical Archives • My Dog Errol

365 • Exile and Extinction

30th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

‘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

28th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

362 • Abbesse ! Aidez !

27th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

359 • My kingdom …

24th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

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.

356 • Messiah

21st December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night I first visited Handel
He was naked except for one sandal.
His minion, Agrippa,
Likewise wore one flipper.
Such greatness cares nothing for scandal.

Of course it would not be Christmas without a Messiah concert, even if the new mutant coronavirus requires the event to be held in a specially-equipped field hospital so that everyone infected during the performance can receive first-class treatment from the very moment the ‘Amen’ begins to fade.

353 • Take-Away (6)

18th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘’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’.

346 • Gold-digger

11th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

345 • Take-Away (2)

10th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Today our great monarch, King Louis
Is planning to ban ratatouille,
And pass a new law
Which (to curb Habsburg Jaw)
Will require all our food to be chewy.
NOW BRING ME A DISH OF CHOP SUEY.

Classic overkill from a monomaniacal tyrant. By all means take steps to extirp a congenital deformity brought on by in-breeding. But why impose dietary sanctions on the ornery populace? Don’t these potentates realise that they look weird only because the rest of us have normal jaws? Far more appetising, then, to address the problem by making ratatouille an obligatory staple, so that – if it really causes that egregious chin condition – we shall all, in time, look like our freakish overlords, and cease to lampoon and satirise them.

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.

338 • Assassin (2)

3rd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The one time I served Jack the Ripper
He’d come in my shop for a kipper.
With his dagger and cloak
He seemed quite a good bloke
Till he slew a small poodle named Pippa.

Society encourages us to think badly of a serial killer, yet one recognises this shop-girl’s guilty admiration for her celebrity customer, flaunting the characteristic costume of his profession. Here Jack’s conduct, while admittedly uncivilised, is readily rationalised, inasmuch as any domesticated dog – especially the scion of so ornamental and unnatural a breed – is already Dead to Nature. Had the fish emporium chosen to host a free-range, genetically unmodified cur, the self-styled ‘Ripper’ – like any common-or-garden customer – would doubtless have been torn to pieces a good while before the completion of his intended purchase. But it’s easy to be wise after the event.

335 • Minnie’s Boys

30th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

332 • Semen / cement

27th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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?

327 • My brother’s keeper

22nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Cain! Where’s thy brother?” “Who, Abel?
I tell you, that kid is unstable.
One day I’m ‘his keeper’
The next, ‘the Grim Reaper’.
I’m not sure I like either label.”

We do not require a Diploma in Psychiatry to identify the truly unstable party in this story, projecting, on to his younger brother, his own mental conflict. Nor do we need reminding that, when the Almighty next asked the same question, Cain had resolved that inner crisis, somewhat messily. Note that Cain did not destroy his other brother, Seth, nor their sisters Luluwa and Delbora. Are these siblings, therefore, all passive accomplices in the First Fratricide, inasmuch as they never exacted revenge on Cain? Or were they simply pipped to the post, when the assassin’s house fell down on his head?

325 • Like ostriches

20th November 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

It was back in the first days of Spring
You promised our plans would take wing.
Now that Winter is nigh,
Have we started to fly?
No. We haven’t accomplished a thing.

The finger of blame can always be relied upon to point at the nearest and/or dearest of the person on whose passive-aggressive hand it is growing. Still, this is better than pointing at ‘the year’ or ‘the virus’; though clearly the real blight on all our souls at this epoch is still festering moodily somewhere in the vicinity of the Oval Orifice.

320 • The Apple

15th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yelled Adam to Cain, ‘Listen lad,
Don’t feed that big snake: he looks bad.’
Whispered Eve, ‘It’s OK:
Take an apple a day
For your real, biological dad.’

‘Every harlot was a virgin once‘, our Great Poet reminds us; in similar spirit this morning’s sermon invites us to reconsider the First Fratricide who, as a blameless tot, feels an instinctive kinship with the serpent that seduced his mother. Adam’s mistrust of the entity that cuckolded him is understandable; yet contradictory parenting ensues, undoubtedly sowing the seeds of Cain’s transgressive development. Wiser heads than mine must ponder how Mary and Joseph sidestepped this problem, when a similar predicament beset their own relationship.

319 • Autumn Offensive

14th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It wasn’t much fun in the army.
The bullets and bombs didn’t scar me
But I hated the stench
From the opposite trench
Of stale sauerkraut and salami.

It is a shining privilege for the journeyman doggerelist to contribute this humble morsel to the glorious banquet already served up by the longer-established War Poets.

318 • Somme

13th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

317 • Blitzkrieg

12th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I met Edvard Grieg
Was during the recent Blitzkrieg.
I found myself yawning
Throughout his piece, ‘Morning’,
But blamed it on battle fatigue.

The Norwegian composer’s melodic gift has won him few admirers. What a tragedy, hindsight hints, that he didn’t team up with Vera Lynn, to produce work of lasting cultural resonance that could assuage the griefs of this most ghastly epoch in human affairs. Too late now, of course, since the Warbling Dame’s recent promotion to be the Archangels’ Sweetheart. [See also here]

316 • Older / Wiser?

11th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

315 • Buckstopper

10th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Oh King! Why reproach us recruits
For such small specks of muck on our boots?’
‘Should the Kaiser detect
Such cosmetic neglect
Then I’ll be the one that he shoots.’

This morning’s bulletin – a parade-ground conversation from long, long ago – exemplifies the generous spirit evinced by great leaders of an all-but forgotten century. ‘The Buck stops here,’ would have been a pithier – yet exactly equivalent – answer from the British monarch. What joy it is, to contemplate a return to those days, when a potentate acknowledged the responsibility that goes with great privilege … and, by example, inspired the highest standards even in his lowliest subjects.

314 • National Trust

9th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

313 • Unholy ghost

8th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I had just been relieved of my post
(No 2 in the Heavenly Host)
When the Infidel Horde
Made me Chair of the Board
(Not bad for an Unholy Ghost?).

It may seem, following today’s developments, that we have the opportunity to lighten up, and turn our thoughts aside from the Orange Demon and his festering cohort. Yet, as Paradise Lost reminds us, the exile may well carve out a new kingdom … he has millions to make as an after-dinner speaker, a freakshow curiosity whose legacy will be measured by the volume of vomit he induces. So, what better way to salute John Milton, who died on this date in 1674, than to flip thru the above-mentioned 80,000-word epic, on which this morning’s rhyme is based? Then, in lieu of stepping out to church, reward your labors with a full English beanfeast.

312 • Failure

7th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

311 • Liar, Liar

6th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Do tell! What became of that lout
Whose lies you once bandied about?
Did he close down your cult?
Or become an adult?”
“Nah. The fire in his pants fizzled out.”

Overheard this time next year, in the Smithsonian: a former Democrat and an erstwhile Republican chatting as they admire a wittily elegant ‘Tactical Chaos’ exhibit from 2020 [it’s a cloisonné enamel pin, in gold-plated brass, on which portly presidential ‘pants on fire’ are presented with little shifty eyes and a comical golden quiff … I got mine here].

310 • Loser!

5th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I hear fireworks, and popping of corks,
I hear doves running rings around hawks;
I hear jubilant cries
At a Loser’s demise,’
Said the ghost of a grinning Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes is popularly reviled for lack of success in his ambition to blow up the English Parliament on this day in 1605; as a damp squib, therefore, he’s well-placed to pour derision on other thwarted politicos. Every year, in the UK, his effigy is burnt in celebration on 5 November, and this will surely continue until an even more laughable failed wannabe comes to the public’s attention.

307 • Polemicist

2nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

306 • Regicide

1st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

With all common sense in abeyance
I summoned MacBeth, at a seance
(The usual procedure
The cards and the ouija)
But no one ‘came through’ (except Fleance).

In Shakespeare’s time the monarch was revered as God’s representative on earth, and to kill him (or her) was a sin without parallel. Today, of course, such potentates as we still acknowledge are more typically reviled as emissars of Satan. In our moments of deepest despair, therefore, we might wish to be possessed by some high-flying assassin, and to accomplish what needs to be accomplished; but in fact all we can muster is the spirit of an obscure runaway, remembered only for fleeing a scene of monstrous injustice – an epitome of cravenness in crisis.

305 • Perpetraitor

31st October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your acolyte, Artie,
Is banned from our after-show party.
Act II of MacBeth
Does not call for the death
Of King Duncan by so-called ‘karate’.

Geez, Shakespeare was a dude that knew a whole lot about the darkness that can swamp a whole realm after a gracious, humane, temperate ruler gets ousted by a card-carrying psychopath. But his Scottish Play holds comfort for us all: though there was no shortage of countrymen with the means and the motive to cut him down, the tyrannical megalomaniac was eventually unseated by his own delusional self-belief.

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.

301 • Naked cheek

27th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

We beheld an old Burgher of Calais
Who’d come, without clothes, to The Ballet.
When they called him immoral
He said, ‘Do not quarrel
With me: take it up with my valet.’

As ever, the challenge to a wealthy pervert’s idiosyncrasy is brushed aside, and the onus of explanation – and inevitable blame – falls on the shoulders of his hapless factotum.

300 • Postcard (4)

26th October 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

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.

299 • Poets’ Corner

25th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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?

294 • Akhnaten

20th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Akhnaten, my favorite Pharaoh,
Bellowed ‘Blast!’, as we danced the bolero:
His fury was focused
On quite a large locust
Which savaged his silver sombrero.

This bulletin attempts to pinpoint the ‘pistol-shot’ that heralded one of Egypt’s Great Plagues. Had this been confined to insects’ molesting the ostentatious headgear of an entitled plutocracy, the populace would doubtless have considered the whole business a blessing. History tells a different story, but as ever we are at liberty to believe whichsoever version we prefer.

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).

292 • Gnasher

18th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.

That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.

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.

288 • Mental make-up

14th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The first time I slept with Max Factor
He claimed to be Virgo Intacta.
When I cried ‘This is mad!
Are you not my real dad?’
He said, ‘No, son, you’re only an actor.’

Folklore suggests that, in the movie business, it’s possible to sleep one’s way to the top; but this morning’s bogus instalment suggests that, in the make-up department at least, different rules apply. Here the Alpha Male swats aside the Young Pretender’s hopes, implanting in his mind an idea that would corrode anybody’s confidence. It would be interesting to know how this fictional conversation continued, on subsequent trysts. The catamite would be well advised to challenge his master with the riposte that We’re All Actors.

287 • For Men!

13th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

My dream is to dance with Grace Kelly
Sharing one rubber glove and one welly,
Sharing one birthday suit,
Two bottles of Brut,
And three jars of cold K-Y Jelly.

Attentive readers may note that this charming, carefully-visualised fantasy fixates on a Screen Queen who has not made a single film in the last 64 years. What is it about the present generation of actresses, then, that so repels our imaginations, focusing them instead on past eras, eras of subtle ambiguity and romance, eras when one could never be sure whether ‘Brut’, for instance, signified a dry, sparkling wine, or a pungent preparation for disinfecting the male armpit.

286 • A-listers

12th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Playing Aleister Crowley at chess,
The outcome is anyone’s guess:
Four bishops on fire
Queens a-quake with desire
Three kings in a state of undress …

For a few golden years the sex-crazed dope-fiend Crowley – born 145 years ago today – was dubbed, by the papers, ‘The Wickedest Man in the World‘. How ignominious, parochial, and inconsequential his Satanism and misogyny appear now, in a world where the barbarous leadership of serial liars and delusional psychopaths is glorified in headlines daily.

282 • Discharge

8th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

“This golden-haired Man in the Moon,
This fat-headed, pus-filled balloon,
This bag of black bile
Laced with venomous guile:
His discharge can not come too soon.”

Adapted from last night’s two-hour call with my one-time class-mate back home. No idea who or what he was ranting about … I just enjoyed hearing his rage … hardly needed a phone … [thanks bigly, Hooch]

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

278 • Sausages

4th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

262 • Idols of clay

18th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

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.

257 • Femme Fatale

13th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yet rather than cutting my hair
Delilah confided, ‘Beware!
By curtailing the length
I may limit your strength,
And you’ve little of either to spare.’

This morning’s reading from Judges 16 warned us about the guile of Philistine women, and about the likely aftermath of games that involve sexual partners in tying each other up. Our sermon, now, will develop that theme of the femme fatale, and seek to establish which option is – in the long term – more injurious to the male ego: (a) to be castrated outright, or (b) to be spared emasculation thanks to confidential hints that there’s not much down there worth lopping off?

256 • Other lives

12th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The stresses and strains were quite striking
All my vigorous years as a Viking.
In a subsequent life
As Napoleon’s wife
Things were frankly much more to my liking.

There are lines, all up the stairwell at home, of suckers waiting to be fleeced by my hypnotist neighbour who – in exchange for fat wads of greenbacks – claims to ‘regress’ them to previous existences. Almost invariably they were once men of action, ladies of leisure, persons of consequence. Almost inevitably his lies plunge them into deeper and deeper disenchantment with the daily greyness of their workaday worlds. So I harangue them from the bottom landing: ‘Get a grip, people! There’s another life you can live for nothing! You’re in it, now: make a move, take time by the horns, burn down the haystack while the cuckoo crumbles.’ And as they bustle off home, equipped – by my visionary rhetoric – with destinies colorfully reimagined, they almost instinctively press fat wads of greedy greenbacks into my outstretched paws.

250 • Arms of Mary

6th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

While dancing with Mother Teresa
I noticed she carried a Taser,
Three Colt .45s
And six slaughterman’s knives
(No wonder the other nuns praise her).

Sentimentalists point to tininess and piety to explain the extraordinary career of Sister Mary Teresa (whose Feast Day was yesterday); the above snapshot lays the emphasis on feisty preparedness. In deciding which side to take, be sure to avoid gender bias.

246 • Adjectives fuse

2nd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Sighed the notable painter, Ravilious,
“Was ever a surname as silly as
The one that I use,
In which adjectives fuse
To imply I’m both ‘raving’ and ‘bilious’?”

They come around so quickly now, these anniversary acknowledgments of the death – in 1942 – of Eric Ravilious. One tends to hear small children, in galleries, referring to him with some mocking variant of the word ‘Ravioli’; interesting to read, above, how he himself construed the unusual surname.

241 • Draft dodgers

28th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

230 • Cometary Dazes

17th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

228 • Épater la bourgeoisie

15th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At dinner, chez René Magritte:
Just silence, and nothing to eat.
As the third hour passed
He hissed ‘Welcome,’ at last
And the maid brought a single boiled sweet.

In this brief bulletin we commemorate one of Belgium’s cultural Titans, who died 53 years ago this morning. In his life, just as through his mischievously haunting image-making in various media, Magritte gnawed relentlessly at the malignant roots of bourgeois sensibility. Bravo!

224 • Apecraft (3)

11th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My quest for perfection began
When I first met a Renaissance Man
(Namely Fra Lippo Lippi,
Who held up our Chippy
Disguised as an orang-utan ).

Many an unrealisable life-trajectory has been determined by inappropriate fixation on the accomplishments of historical figures: frustration and self-loathing are the invariable consequences. In this brief confessional piece we are shown how ill-founded such hero-worship can be: if Lippi is skilled in all things, how come the ape-suit he relies upon – while fulfilling this gourmet heist – fails to conceal his identity?

204 • United State

22nd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Now we’ve pictured the Earth from the Moon,
All Nations shall Sing the Same Tune.
All Rifts shall be Whole
As we Share the One Goal.’
Great words – but I hope we start soon.

This Utopian creed, this Moon-Age Daydream, was overwritten, as the 60s’ influence waned, by warmongers and capitalists – the enemies of humanity – to the point of obliteration. Half a century on, however, our invisible ally, coronavirus, rides in like the cavalry with a blistering counter-attack … and we’re united once more.

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).

200 • War of the Words

18th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I must reconsider Persuasion.
I found, on another occasion
That its fame was a fraud
(Or I simply got bored
Before the main Martian invasion).

‘Later in the program we celebrate the death of Jane Austen,’ says Radio 4. One knows what one hopes they mean. Nice to learn that the person who came up with the slogan on the UK’s ten-pound note was, in life, a woman. We must wonder who’s been collecting those royalties, since she died 203 years ago.

191 • Postcard (3)

9th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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]

190 • Hang on!

8th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

’Twas the opening night of Peer Gynt,
The show that made Ibsen a mint.
I remarked, ‘It’s quite long …
Maybe cut Solveig’s Song?’
But he scowled, and did not take the hint.

I forget which circle of Hell is reserved for hangers-on who imagine celebrity ‘creatives’ might profit from their two-cents’ worth of Philistine advice. Ibsen, and his composer Grieg, were wise to ignore the present cloth-eared recommendation, and the narrator was lucky not to get his big head kicked in. [See also here]

184 • Man Friday’s Tale

2nd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I met Robinson Crusoe
He was halfway through ‘Émile’ by Rousseau,
An excellent book;
If you’ve not had a look
Then I strongly suggest you should do so.

Academics talk about ‘metachronic hyperagonism’ when an imaginary character is caught reading about another imaginary character, in fiction published a full generation after her or his own supposed lifetime (luckily we are not obliged to listen). I leave it to others to imagine in turn what Rousseau’s Émile was reading. Anyway, today is apparently the death-anniversary of Daniel Defoe. On publication, his pioneering ‘Robinsonade’ claimed to have been authored by its imaginary protagonist, which may also be metachronic hyperagonism (ie ‘self-referential bullshit’). Especially since Crusoe was really Kreutznaer in any case.

179 • Blight on Blight

27th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I have only two problems with ‘Noddy’,
The plots and the writing (both shoddy).
If only Ms Blyton
Had worked with the light on
(Or simply been flung in a wadi).

These lines paraphrase my earliest memory of literary criticism. Ms Nicholls’s passion was commendable, her logic less so. A wadi-flinging before 1922, when Blyton published her first title, might have seemed arbitrary and over-harsh. Yet once she’d made it into print, the damage was irreversible – the smug racism, compulsive sexism and wooden stereotyping were out there, a viral formula spreading relentlessly from mind to mind to mind, yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.

177 • Postcard (2)

25th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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]

176 • Medusa

24th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

That ugly, snake-headed Medusa
Whom painters depict as a loser
Was once wise and fair
(And had regular hair)
Till Poseidon turned up to abuse her.

Legend tells how wily he-man Perseus slew the snaky-haired she-monster, reflecting her petrifying gaze back in her own eyes by using a mirror, the ironically-selected symbol of feminine vanity. Yet the neglected prequel is a viciously contemporary catalogue of power-seduction and slut-shaming. #MeToo indeed.

175 • Infesting Voltaire

23rd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At the start of the soirée Voltaire
Had several large worms in his hair.
As the evening wore on
I observed that they’d gone,
Though I dread to imagine quite where.

Some readers will suppose that our narrator has been hallucinating: possibly the soirée itself, or the celebrated host’s writhing hairdo, or – most likely – the vanishing of a tonsorial infestation. But let’s not be guilty of underthinking a righteous parable, in which even the lowliest creatures – like rats, instinctively quitting a sinking ship – desert the living corpse of a shameless anti-Semite.

166 • Deep Fake

14th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

163 • N.I.L.A.D.

11th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was spoon-feeding Zsa Zsa Gabor
Till she held up her bowl and said ‘More’.
Sadly ‘Oliver Twist’
Tops the very long list
Of Novels I Loathe and Deplore.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion in literary matters, though ideally it will be accompanied by an explanation, when so forcefully expressed. Our narrator may be scandalised by the anti-Semitism many claim to detect in Dickens’s story; but does that provocation truly justify leaving a femme fatale (albeit a superannuated one) to starve?

154 • Corona-nation

2nd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to the Queen
It was only her voicemail machine:
While awaiting the ‘beep’
My hand went to sleep
And my mobile fell in the latrine.

Your Majesty, a few lines to celebrate 67 years since your Coronation! Or Covid19tion, are we saying that now? Anyway, that’s a long time on the throne, a high toilet-tissue mileage. Sorry we never got to chat, back in the day. The music was pretty loud at my end. Perhaps at yours too – maybe that’s why you didn’t pick up?

149 • The Florist’s Tale

28th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘It’s tragic,’ declared Robin Hood,
‘My public has misunderstood
Why I left Sherwood Forest
To work as a florist.
Fact is, I’m allergic to wood.’

As we contemplate the inn-signs of Merrie England, this ‘Hood’ is typically presented as some kind of macho archetype. Reading between the lines of his own account, however, suggests the erstwhile outlaw was none too comfortable in that role: in soliciting public compassion, he boldly goes against the grain.

144 • Gross!

23rd May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I fear I shall never forget
Being slung in a dank oubliette
With nothing to eat
But three plates of meat
Two plums and a rancid baguette.

I confess that I grow weary of press reports comparing the Social Isolation we temporarily endure, in hope of impeding the incursions of plague, with the privations experienced by ‘lifers’ in the bottle-dungeons of Romantic fiction, whose pretend incarceration made little contribution to society .

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.

126 • Tagus away

5th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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).]

113 • Beard of Avon

22nd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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?

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.)

101 • Belfast Agreement

10th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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?

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.

098 • Once Bonnie

7th April 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

So – why do our mem’ries replay
That film-clip of beauteous decay
In which Clyde, once a sweetie
Becomes less up-Beatty
And Bonnie is Fadun’ Away?

Puns feel inexcusably trite; yet the arch wordplay here seeks to point up cinema’s pollutive complicity in our culture’s collective angst. When The New Hollywood temporarily massacres charismatic stars, its consumers become the life-long victims, haunted and taunted by unshiftable visions of desperate beauty defaced.

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.

082 • Saviours

22nd March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Did you read, on some scrap of papyrus,
How Christ raised the daughter of Jairus?
No dark Dead Sea Scrolls
But soft white paper rolls
For our conquest of Coronavirus.

Admittedly there were no New Testament books among the genuine Dead Sea Scrolls, though with the more recently-discovered fakes anything goes. But whereas those scrolls record the superstitious beliefs of a sect 22 centuries ago, 2020’s rational response to mortal disease is spelt out in the barren superflux of hoarded lavatory-paper.

079 • Trajan

19th March 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

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.

078 • The Ominous Snowman

18th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One burden of being a Roman
Is that, having been mugged by a snowman –
Which was merely an ogre
Wrapped up in a toga –
Great Cæsar must deem it An Omen.

Our Roman week continues. I don’t know if Tacitus or Suetonius or any of that crowd mention the above episode. But if it occurred, those who deny the meaninglessness of this world will undoubtedly have invested it with Weighty Significance.

077 • Epoch envy

17th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Dead Cæsar was texting dead Brutus:
‘We needed mobility scooters.
If Rome was so clever
Then how come we never
Had smartphones or cars or computers?’

A Roman theme appears to be emerging at My Dog Errol … God knows why. Still, the idea that any sophisticated civilisation from another time would look admiringly on our present, chaotic epoch is pretty laughable, no?

076 • Northward Ho!

16th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Their streets stretched so straight through the regions
Controlled by great Rome and her legions.
They vented their wrath
On the Gaul and the Goth
But nothing could tame the Glaswegians.

Scotland the Brave, as some would call it, has stood up feistily to a variety of dominators from the south, both before and since the building of the Antonine Wall.

075 • Ideas of March

15th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

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.

068 • Bishop Berkeley

8th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I never supposed Bishop Berkeley
Would seem, as a spectre, so sparkly.
It’s frankly nightmarish
To see him so garish
Especially through a glass, darkly.

Berkeley argued that what we see exists only in the mind. If this is indeed a spectre, it would seem to be offering some kind of ironic comment on that theory. More probably, however, our narrator has been the victim of brainwashing by pious parents or Bible-bashing teachers in high-school.

066 • A Royal Tribute

6th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I frequently found John of Gaunt
In a somewhat unsavoury haunt
Where he wasted his days
In a dope-addled haze
And the arms of a dull débutante.

The great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandperson of the UK’s well-known Prince Harold would have turned 680 this morning, had he not chosen to squander his privileged life in unrewarding dissipations. Still, British society typically takes the older roué to heart … so Many Happy Returns, Gaunty-Boy!

053 • Sibling rivalry

22nd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In a horrible hostel at Dover
My sister seduced Casanova.
I blush to recall
How their sport, through the wall,
Spoilt my chess match with Anna Pavlova.

It sure wasn’t the Chelsea Hotel, but the high concentration of ‘names’ from various arts and eras made it the perfect battleground for (yet) another bout of sibling rivalry.

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.

035 • Westminster

4th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

032 • Divide and Deceive

1st February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

These losers who voted for ‘Leave’,
Who fell for ‘Divide and Deceive’:
Did they not have the brain
To stick up for ‘Remain’?
What in hell did they hope to achieve?

The people have spoken. Out of their arses. And so a glorious new era of restriction and stupidity begins …

031 • Infiltrator (3)

31st January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Before I arrived in this town
I traded my clothes with a clown.
Written off as a berk,
I may openly work
To turn the whole world upside down.

For the day my adopted country throws out the baby with the bathwater. The guile of the demagogue matching the gullibility of the person in the street. [Related story]

024 • Potus alert (2)

24th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

X, so we’re told, marks the spot
Where Abraham Lincoln was shot.
If instead he had said
‘Mark a Z on my head’
He’d have lengthened his life quite a lot.

A homily about alphabetical precision, I suppose. Despite its subject matter this one is intended to be read as if we were in Great Britain – to reap the full benefit of those internal rhymes.

023 • Crockery

23rd January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

We dined on five loaves and two fishes.
Each slice was quite thin, but delicious.
Seeing Christ and his mates
Had brought five thousand plates,
We stayed on to help do the dishes.

Such a lot of administrative/background work goes unnoticed, its practitioners unacknowledged. It would be nice to see behaviour like the above become the norm again.

018 • Turing

18th January 2020 RL Comments 6 Comments

Recalling my chum, Alan Turing
Whom people once talked about ‘curing’:
His craving for cabbage,
His crush on Charles Babbage;
Ah! Memories fond and enduring.

Fond and enduring indeed: he had charm and genius in equal measure. Though, so do most people, frankly. Perhaps I mean, ‘in equally high measure’, if that doesn’t sound too awkward.

013 • Postcard

13th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

008 • Adam, Eve etc.

8th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

How pleasant to meet Piltdown Man
The fount of our whole human clan:
With Lucy his wife
They’re the source of all life
Dating back before records began.

Think, on the other hand, how disgusted our primitive ancestors would be to encounter us, now that we’ve laid waste the world that brought them into being. Although – a pedantic note here – I believe there are now question-marks hanging over Lucy’s identity, in some scholarly circles.