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Category: Recreation

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.

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.

355 • Take-away (7)

355 • Take-away (7)

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Look honey, a souvenir-seller:
Go pick up a Pilgrim Umbrella!
Hold it up like a guide
As before me you stride:
In a month I may make Compostella.
NOW BRING ME A SEAFOOD PAELLA.

The same problem arises in every country. The gluttonous tourist, too slothful to maintain a normal walking pace, yearns unashamedly for street food and relies, unabashed, on his beleaguered partner to signpost a spiritual path that he’s too self-indulgent to decipher for himself.

352 • You are what you eat

352 • You are what you eat

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No cannibal vegan grows fat;
Their ethical stance sees to that.
On a diet of air
You just die of despair.
Take note of this brief caveat.

Food fascism is a pernicious scourge of 21st century life. Social pressure is a bubble only if one can muster the confidence and individuality to burst it; otherwise one is likely to stack fad upon fad in hopes of cultivating peer approval. The vegan cannibal, clearly threatening nobody, ought on paper to be a popular figure; but he or she is sadly opting for a downhill path in terms of bodily prosperity. ‘Take note of this brief caveat’ indeed.

350 • Dionysus

350 • Dionysus

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

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

348 • Carnality, spirituality

348 • Carnality, spirituality

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You claim that your abs and your pecs
Will dazzle the opposite sex?
I tell you my quads
Have bewildered the Gods
And reduced them to gibbering wrecks.

This is the question for all us body-builders, is it not, whether ’tis nobler to pump up one’s corpse grotesquely in hope that impressionable young women will fancy being steamrollered by one’s unseemly bulk, or whether to treat the said corpse as some kind of overblown temple wherein the majesty of the Divine may be both parodied and repudiated.

346 • Gold-digger

346 • Gold-digger

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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.

342 • Hard to believe

342 • Hard to believe

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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.

339 • Overheard

339 • Overheard

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

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

338 • Assassin (2)

338 • Assassin (2)

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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.

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

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Don’t dine at the Café du Nord
Without checking their prices beford.
One glance at the bill
For my spoonful of krill
Left me gasping for breath on the flord.

Certainly this First Year of Covid has made it hard for restaurateurs to balance their books; but habitual diners-out – having subsisted on nothing but beans-on-toast since lockdown started – fancy they’ve saved enough moolah to laugh off the Himalayan prices the more pretentious places are charging. In my naïvete I imagined that ordering nothing but an amuse-gueule would spare me financial discomfort. How wrong I was.

324 • Monserrate

324 • Monserrate

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In the mountains beyond Bogota
Five gangsters had opened a spa.
I went once or twice
But it wasn’t that nice:
It needed more je ne sais quoi.

They’d been loading some drugs on a mule
When it panicked and fell in the pool.
Soon that afternoon’s dip
Was a ten-hour trip
And the place seemed a lot less uncool.

To those who protest that ‘drugs mule’ is nowadays a mere metaphor for a human trafficker, I can only counter with the evidence in the bulletin above. The narrator’s first-hand testimony seems incontestable, and critics who urge the contrary are merely drawing attention to their innate misogyny, or a groundless predisposition to doubt the objectivity of individuals who delight in regaling us with accounts of their psychedelic experiences.

321 • Harlotry

321 • Harlotry

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

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

317 • Blitzkrieg

317 • Blitzkrieg

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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]

309 • All at sea

309 • All at sea

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

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

306 • Regicide

306 • Regicide

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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

305 • Perpetraitor

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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.

301 • Naked cheek

301 • Naked cheek

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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.

294 • Akhnaten

294 • Akhnaten

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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.

292 • Gnasher

292 • Gnasher

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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.

289 • Born again

289 • Born again

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Hey presto! One wave of this wand,
And I wake as a Hollywood blonde!
And how fancy it feels
In my falsies and heels
Being hailed the first female James Bond.

Our enlightened times have seen strong and righteous pressure for certain iconic screen roles – which have done untold harm by glorifying repellent machismo and mindless thuggery – to be reinvented as women [Jodie Whitaker as Mrs Who, and Helen Mirren as Prospera, have shown this can be accomplished with stylish conviction]. But while the film industry continues to cast able-bodied actors as persons with disabilities, and uses straight actors to play gay characters, there is – mercifully – no logical reason why a man (namely me!) should not fulfil the feminists’ long-cherished dream of a Lady 007.

287 • For Men!

287 • For Men!

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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

286 • A-listers

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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.

284 • Street delicacy

284 • Street delicacy

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It was carnival evening in Derby:
My shrimps burnt to death on the barbie.
I entered a raffle
And won a falafel
Cooked up from dead wasps and wasabi.

A measure of caution is advisable, during a pandemic, where street-food is concerned. This applies even when an exotic treat appears to have been gifted by fate, in compensation for previous arrangements’ having gone up in smoke. Don’t let the fresh air and cheering crowds blind you to the intrinsically nauseous nature of the fare on offer. Our appetite for a bargain is a severe and culpable weakness.

276 • Escapology (4)

276 • Escapology (4)

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I’ll escape to the Isle of Capri
To the comfort of sandscape and sea
Where the heart-broken herds
Trade their kind, empty words.
Just the world and his widow, and me.

‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ is a particularly oblique and idiotic saying I’ve occasionally heard during my time in Britain. Likewise this bulletin is full of fine words, told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Clearly I shall not escape anywhere: the whole district is suffering another Covid lockdown. Clearly I would never want to escape to any place infested with fellow-divorcees. The only viable escape shall be inward, into the world of my daily blurtings, and into healing correspondence with the thoughtful souls who read them.  

268 • Punctured

268 • Punctured

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This has to be grounds for divorce
And she’s not shown the slightest remorse.
What makes me see red
Is stilettos in bed
When they burst my inflatable horse.

I trust loyal readers can endure a brief glimpse of my dirty laundry, as outlined above. Are we looking at ‘unreasonable conduct’ here, or ‘irretrievable breakdown’? (Please don’t alert Pope Clement VII to this matter, or things might end very badly. I live in hope that present-day mores condone divorce more readily than beheading, although – thanks to Unprincipled Egomaniacs in High Places – a new Dark Age beckons incontrovertibly.)

266 • Hot Hot Hot

266 • Hot Hot Hot

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My love, while the weather is warm
(Almost three times the seasonal norm)
Let us sprawl in this field
With our soft parts revealed
Awaiting the imminent storm.

The storm is not ‘imminent’, it’s actual. What did St Greta tell you: ‘Make hay while the sun shines, make love while the world burns, make excuses while you bury your dead’? No, I don’t think it was that, but I wasn’t really listening.  

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?

264 • Snake in the Boudoir

264 • Snake in the Boudoir

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Coition continued full-tilt
Till a cobra crawled out of the quilt;
This dampened the heat
In the Honeymoon Suite
And a quart of Veuve Clicquot got spilt.

Ordinary folk have little to fear from the proverbial ‘snake in the grass’, because the snake in the grass is minding his or her own business, in the same way as a bridal couple does on their wedding night. The non-proverbial ‘snake in the bedding’, however, is another story, and its kinship with the Garden of Eden narrative – from which humanity didn’t emerge particularly well – is not easily overlooked. For those who will wish to reflect on this matter a little, until we meet next Sunday, a suggested topic: ‘This House believes we should all be a lot happier if the cobra remained in the quilt next time: out of sight, out of mind.’

263 • Playing away

263 • Playing away

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I’d love to be playing croquet
But there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Let’s wait till Angharad
And I have got married,
Then nothing will stand in my way.

Yeah right, nothing will stand in my way … except Angharad herself. Who’d have guessed? Maybe I should have asked her to join in the fun, of course, but it’s a bit late in the day for that now.

262 • Idols of clay

262 • Idols of clay

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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

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.

258 • Faye King

258 • Faye King

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Forgetting the wives they’re forsaking
Men queue for a fling with Miss Faye King:
We all know she neuters
Her second-rate suitors.
It just seems a gamble worth taking.

Incredibly there are men who would disagree that emasculation, by some painted celluloid vamp, is ‘a gamble worth taking’. What abject feebletons! We Real Men can validate our virility only through high-profile competitive mating; an alpha Hollywood vedette is both a mirror for male vanity and an antidote to the slow poison of a complacent marriage. The conquest, and satisfaction, of such illusory femmes fatales constitutes a Darwinian endorsement, a seal of machismo. In our dreams, at any rate; our most ignoble and embarrassing dreams.

255 • Fred ♥ Suzy

255 • Fred ♥ Suzy

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Said Fred to a frizzy-haired floosie,
‘I rather enjoy my jacuzzi:
If I ply you with gin
Will you join me therein?
And cherries as well, if you’re choosy.’

Then Suzy responded, ‘I getcha,
You sad and pedantic old lecher.
Avert thy vile eye
Lest I smite thee thereby
And despatch thee to hell on a stretcher.’

The elderly gentleman’s request to the lady is, on the face of it, civilized enough; yet she takes offense, and appears ready to do him violence. We should be aware that the now-impermissible label ‘floosie’ is not uttered in her hearing, unless she is somehow privy to the word-choices of the narrator from whose brain she has sprung. And her imputation of pedantry (based solely on the gentleman’s use of ‘therein’, which is no longer current in British conversation, yet perfectly justified when there’s a necessary rhyme to complete) seems a tad arch in a young person from whose lips archaisms such as ‘smite’, ‘thee’ and ‘thereby’ spill in such preposterous abundance. [See also #122]

254 • Monster hoax

254 • Monster hoax

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Those tracks that we noticed, while skiing,
Suggest some gargantuan being.
Maybe Bigfoot is real?
If that print was his heel
Then his toes will be something worth seeing.

In a secular age, humanity’s innate yearning for supernatural guidance finds expression through the belief in, and adulation of, some improbable freaks. Lumpen, unruly monsters fascinate the American psyche, their stupidity presenting an intriguing counterpoise to inconceivable power. Still, only a couple more months before voters can consign one such oafish hoax to richly deserved oblivion.

253 • Currency crisis

253 • Currency crisis

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A shifty young slut from Sri Lanka
Had a senseless affair with a banker:
When she paid him for sex
She was forging blank cheques,
And he brought plastic flowers to thank her.

Of course we’re not out to shame this particular slut, nor to heap ignominy on that particular island: any affair with a banker is a priori senseless. Would that I were sufficiently familiar with international finance to understand how the interpersonal circumstances outlined above should conduce to the forging of cheques, let alone blank ones. Doubtless it’s one of the few downsides of commercial coition that are not widely discussed.

252 • Mud

252 • Mud

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There was an old man of Llandudno
Whose wife left him all of a sudden-o.
She’d chatted with Charlotte
The neighbourhood harlot.
His name was quite palpably mud, no?

Baleful and hideous, is it not, to see the conniving women of the parish ganging up on a well-nigh blameless man? Full disclosure: I have never wittingly visited Llandudno, and know nobody there trading under the name of ‘Charlotte’. Consequently the present bulletin cannot legitimately be supposed to bear any relevance to my recent history.

248 • Freya

248 • Freya

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My match stalled at love-love with Freya,
A consummate shuttlecock player.
She fielded the blame
For our unfinished game
Though a lot of the culpa was mea.

‘Match-maker’, ‘player’, ‘score’, ‘clean sheet’ – sporting jargon is readily confused with informal terms relating to the so-called Battle of the Sexes. Did the lovely Freya catch me on the rebound? Did I take one for the team? A gentleman’s lips are sealed. Or they were sealed. But this Friday is Freya-day. I fear it will be a long walk to the pavilion.

244 • Frozen

244 • Frozen

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Seduction is strained, in Siberia
Where trysts mostly end in hysteria.
‘I despise you!’ they shrill,
Vaulting over the cill
And abseiling down the wisteria.

I admit it’s a good while since I had an apartment in Tomsk, so I trust readers will excuse my memory if certain botanical details in this brief, and otherwise veridical, scenario strike them as inauthentic.

243 • Crim. Con.

243 • Crim. Con.

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I observe that your wife has undressed.
My brief telepathic request
Was never expected
To be intercepted …
I trust you don’t think me a pest.

The priest who spouts Mosaic law forbids us to ‘covet’ another man’s wife; the attorney, blethering about ‘criminal conversation’, concerns himself with ‘physical contact with an alien and unlawful organ’. These pests aside, where does blame lie in the present, sad case? The disrobing spouse, responding to a supernaturally-registered suggestion, perhaps believes she is obeying the will of a Higher Power. Can the true issuer of that command really be guilty, if he never expected his libidinous impulses to come to light? Many would consider him no adulterer; but more would consider him a fool, since – by apologising so stiffly to the no-doubt startled husband – he proclaims his otherwise-unprovable involvement. Yet, to the woman, the putative adulterer is a hero, having rescued her from possible charges of wilful exhibitionism, or lewd and wanton provocation. Bravo for him, therefore; and huzzah for such a tiny bulletin, fairly bursting with such sapient doctrine.

235 • Escapology (3)

235 • Escapology (3)

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My passport still shows the faint stamp
From the night I enrolled as a tramp!
Though I soon swapped ‘The Road’
For my present abode
When the company iPad got damp.

To succeed as a vagrant, one must of necessity eschew the proprieties of office and the allure of corporate cybertrash. In this bulletin, abyssal and humiliating inauthenticity is compounded by the author’s feeble pride in the scarcely-readable documentation of his or her self-delusion.

234 • Escapology (2)

234 • Escapology (2)

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Spent the night in the park. Not depressed,
Simply giving my Real Life a rest.
Woke with seven huge holes
Gnawn by weapons-grade moles
In my warranted bullet-proof vest.

Aspirations to a bucolic idyll are here outweighed by some dark mental baggage. Humanity’s preoccupation with warmongery is not the easiest aspect of ‘Real Life’ to shrug off. A person who dons body-armour for an excursion to Eden can surely not be wholeheartedly expecting a decent night’s sleep.

233 • Escapology

233 • Escapology

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What joy to live out in the park,
And skulk in the bushes till dark!
Then catch cocker spaniels
To fry in Jack Daniel’s,
And start forest fires with one spark!

The Pastoral Impulse has a long and healthy history, but this outlaw’s short-sighted manifesto merely catalogues the reckless and ignoble impulses of a vainglorious deviant from whom any genuine Noble Savage would recoil with contempt.

227 • Bingo!

227 • Bingo!

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A pretty good night at the Bingo:
We won the first prize, a flamingo.
I wasn’t too chuffed
When I found it was stuffed.
Next time I’ll opt for the dingo.

A dingo is not a suitable pet, any more than a flamingo is. It should be running about in the tundra or wherever, making its own way, not relying on another, less noble, species for its upkeep.

225 • Glorious Twelfth

225 • Glorious Twelfth

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The Glorious Twelfth is at hand!
Posh gunmen all over the land
Utter bloodthirsty howls
And slay thousands of fowls,
A practice I can’t understand
But fervently wish to see banned.

We may long to stop brainless toffs assassinating wildlife; but if we grant Governments the power to curtail people’s hobbies, where will it end? We’d be a nation of vegans … no bad thing.

223 • Apecraft (2)

223 • Apecraft (2)

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My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.

I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.

220 • Corking Pet

220 • Corking Pet

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‘It’s only the dull birds that squawk:
The ones worth possessing can talk.’
Now you’ve purchased a crow
That keeps saying ‘Hello!’?
Better start saving up for a cork.

Humans high-handedly ascribe greater value to animals in which we perceive characteristics similar to our own. Yet the shortfall in their accomplishments quickly oppresses us – appearing gruelling, or tedious – with ignoble consequences that often epitomise our own folly and cruelty.

217 • Penguin farewell

217 • Penguin farewell

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

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

216 • Carruthers

216 • Carruthers

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I was baiting a bear named Carruthers
At a church of the Carmelite Brothers.
I’m ferociously strong
So he didn’t last long,
But I guess they have plenty of others.

Musculature and morale falter infallibly in captive animals: it’s not the strength of the vainglorious aggressor we marvel at here, but the weakness of his victim. Monks may be ‘known for their unpleasant habits’, as the old joke goes: but should we perhaps applaud this compassionate Brotherhood for allowing its bears to be slain outright? Worldlier bear-baiting gangs are obliged, by commercial imperative, to keep their victims alive, to suffer – for our delight – day after day.

209 • Earthworm farewell

209 • Earthworm farewell

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Farewell to my earthworm, Yvonne,
Who has grown rather pallid and wan.
Certain notes I would hum
Made her coil round my thumb.
I can scarcely believe that she’s gone.

Human beings will mourn even the most apparently-inconsequential creature, once they have elevated it to the status of personal pet. Yet note how this plaint is entirely self-centred, and the principle recollection focuses on episodes of manipulation and control.

208 • Body and/or Soul

208 • Body and/or Soul

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

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

200 • War of the Words

200 • War of the Words

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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.

197 • Where are they now?

197 • Where are they now?

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We’ve not seen a great deal of Piers;
He hasn’t come this way for years.
The reason he states
Is the size of the weights
That he’s tied to the hairs in his ears.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Layla.
She’s given her heart to a sailor.
She’s renting her spine
To a colleague of mine,
And the rest still remains with her gaoler.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Chalkie
Since he walked, on his hands, to Milwaukee
Where he teaches guitar
At The Conservatoire,
So he claims. But I guess that’s a porky.

A little suite of patterns or exemplars for those who need to craft excuses explaining why they no longer visit people they were friends with in High School (it’s too, too bourgeois, after all, to persist in blaming the Covid crisis for our insularity and self-absorption).

193 • Gold Rush

193 • Gold Rush

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With metal detector in hand
Each weekend he trudges the land:
He sets forth at dawn
And at dusk, all forlorn,
Brings home his pretend contraband.

We should be unwise to laugh too long at this apparently hopeless hobby. As in the good old Klondike days, our dogged adventurer rates his chances at 50/50: each day he either will, or won’t, strike lucky, discovering an Aztec astrolabe, or a Holy Grail, or a plutonium nugget the size of Grand Central Station. There’s no middle ground.

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

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Our Deputy Dean, Dr Campbell
Told us ‘God’s out to get those who gamble’.
Yet she died, in a bet,
Playing Russian Roulette
Which the School needed skill to unscramble.

This somewhat garish episode from childhood taught us more about adult hypocrisy than we could have learnt from any number of bookish fables or homilies. The school Governors reacted to a popular employee’s death by proclaiming a string of revisionist accusations … how she had ‘lied to the Board who appointed her’ … how her college degree had been ‘incorrectly specified’ … how dates of her previous employment ‘contained inaccuracies’. In short, parents could not blame the school for appointing such a dissolute daredevil to be their children’s moral guardian, because ‘Donna Campbell was not the person she purported to be.’ Well, which of us is? Even as a child I was mesmerised by the Establishment’s feeble catalogue of squirming, pedantic and ineffectual exculpations. Hats off, say I, to a memorable teacher, whose gift for non-verbal demonstration imparted such significant life-lessons.

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.

165 • Fakin’ it

165 • Fakin’ it

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A fancy-dress party! Huzzah!
Yet the invite said ‘Come as you are.’
So I went as I was
Which was lucky, because
I was already dressed like a star.

The implication of this paradoxical summons is that we are perpetually in fancy dress … indeed, unless you design and make your own clothes, you’re always partly costumed as someone else. More unsettling, though, is the notion that anyone disguised as a star might wish to attend a gathering where everybody else knows they’re fakin’ it.

160 • Meet the team (16)

160 • Meet the team (16)

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Look out for our caretaker, Ken,
And his heavily-hybridised hen:
With its modified beak
It can actually speak
Though not in the language of men.

In any business the janitor – or similar dogsbody – may prove the most interesting and innovative of thinkers. Unfettered by ambition, untainted by rivalry, he or she is free – like a Shakespearean Fool – to defy norms, and provide a foil to institutional formality through the creative quirks of an idiosyncratic mind.

159 • Prohibited degree

159 • Prohibited degree

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“On Saturday night, for my sins,
The sex-robot gave birth to twins:
Yeah, sounds kinda sweet
But the brats are on heat –
And that’s where my problem begins.”

The vicar made no apology for basing his sermon on a rhyme copied from a lavatory door. As the future promises ever-more realistic robots, he asserted, the poem’s scenario will become commonplace, posing ‘hitherto unexampled moral dilemmas’ for mankind. He seemed more interested in delineating ‘transgressive urges’ than in recommending how we should handle them.

153 • Meet the team (13)

153 • Meet the team (13)

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This tart is your underling, Suki:
She helps us look after the loo-key.
It lives in her drawer
Under spiders galore,
And the cubicle’s also quite spooky.

No young colleague – even if she imposes a Goth’s visual stylings on her work-station, and other purlieux within her ambit – should have to endure the denigration here implied in the choice of the word ‘underling’, nor the childish linguistic register used in describing her meagre responsibilities.

152 • Sapient cephalopod

152 • Sapient cephalopod

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The octopus looked in my eye
As he clung to my shivering thigh.
‘Man is scarcely unique,
Just a hideous freak,’
He observed. I could make no reply.

Alarmingly the octopus sets out to debunk Descartes‘s teaching, that ‘animals are mere machines, but man stands alone’, but its intentions are contradicted by the scenario itself. For one thing, the man is not ‘standing alone’. For another, only a unique species could fantasise such a damning put-down from a ‘mere machine’ – and then be too stupid to come up with an appropriate riposte.

151 • Night Flying

151 • Night Flying

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Again, I’ve been out half the night
Retrieving what’s left of my kite
Always trapped in a tree
Or on wires I can’t see.
Is there something I’m not doing right?

How often we falter along, locked compulsively into a simple yet crippling life-mistake! Next time you encounter a midnight kite-flyer, bite back your natural contempt for their stupidity and perverseness, rather taking them aside and – perhaps with half-a-dozen kindly-chosen words – setting their whole life on a new and conceivably happier course.

137 • Blair / Astaire

137 • Blair / Astaire

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A delicate dancer from Ware
Explains why she killed Fred Astaire:
‘A quiet inner voice
Said I hadn’t a choice:
It was him, or else Lionel Blair.’

Archetypally spineless strategy, to blame one’s crime on contradictory supernatural promptings. But is it a crime, or rather laudable atavism, to destroy alpha practitioners, thereby clearing the path to pre-eminence in one’s chosen field?

122 • MayDay

122 • MayDay

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It’s not my position to scold
And I hate to seem prudish, or old,
(And a bath with a friend
I can quite recommend)
But this hot-tubbing cult leaves me cold.

Still, into the maelstrom I go
Where viruses seethe to and fro:
Veruccas and boils,
Private bodily oils
Exuded by folks I don’t know.

A-swill in this scum marinade
I try not to look too dismayed.
I’ll sip my Martini,
Let slip my bikini
And hope pretty soon to get laid.

A modish recreation, its pointless vanity emblematic of our times. The narrative voice here appears conflicted, but peer-pressure – or else indiscriminate carnality – wins the day.

114 • Dressing to kill

114 • Dressing to kill

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Each year, seven Knights of the Garter
Are killed re-enacting ‘Get Carter‘:
A small price to pay
For a mem’rable day.
(Wish they’d tackle ‘The Mahābhārata’).

Patron Saint’s day in the UK; a fit time to reflect on the most ancient British chivalric order. There are only ever two dozen such Knights, so turnover is clearly high. Doubtless casualties would soar if their Lordships deigned to address the Sanskrit epic, as recommended.

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.

110 • Niger

110 • Niger

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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?

107 • Seine

107 • Seine

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I was raiding a wreck in the Seine,
Just me and two badly-dressed men.
They began to perspire
And my snorkel caught fire:
I’m not going to risk it again.

Arguably today’s adventurers fall somewhat short of the swashbuckling bravado that distinguished our childhood heroes. Alas, that we were so easily duped, from the cradle.

106 • Social Distance

106 • Social Distance

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I’ve stopped going naked at night:
My beauty deserves direct light.
Yet often, by day,
Viewers hurry away
Which I don’t find entirely polite.

Pandemic guidelines apply to everyone on the planet, no exceptions: and our newsmongers imagine the whole world is listening as they ram the point home. Yet they’re overlooking cases like the present subject who, venturing out after many years of Absolute Isolation, is nonplussed to find Social Distancing in operation, and takes it as a personal affront.

105 • Ribble

105 • Ribble

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

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

102 • Colorado fading

102 • Colorado fading

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We watched our blind bailiff from Boulder,
(As old as the hills, if not older)
Half the night, as he swam
Round and round, at the Dam,
Growing colder and colder and colder.

By definition the Colorado is colorful, but this must have been a dull scene, and the average Joe or Joanne would have packed up and gone home on such a chilly evening. We must admire the moral courage if those who resisted any temptation to intervene as a well-liked character attended to the final actions of his career.

099 • Tea on the Lea

099 • Tea on the Lea

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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

098 • Once Bonnie

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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.

095 • Yangtze Kiang

095 • Yangtze Kiang

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As I drift down the Yangtze Kiang
I shall scream about Sturm, and then Drang.
If the onlooking horde
Fails to cheer, or applaud
They shall hear a yet harsher harangue.

Anyone remember the days when a troubled youth could devote a sophomore vacation to exhibitionistic acts of existential self-exorcism? The Chinese ‘hordes’ didn’t listen for long, it has to be admitted.

094 • ‘Grand National’

094 • ‘Grand National’

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The steeplechase season is nigh:
Watch dozens of thoroughbreds die!
Broken leg, broken back,
Put to death by the track.
Let the owners be shot too, say I.

What are these wretched creatures good for? High-status playthings for the rich, exciters of adrenaline for greedy gamblers, disposable victims of capitalism? ‘Grand National’, indeed: what kind of Nation judges their creation, and exploitation, ‘Grand’? Anyway, it ain’t happening in 2020, Year One of the Virus. Hurrah for that.

093 • Mississippi

093 • Mississippi

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One year, as an unemployed hippie,
I swam down the great Mississippi.
I enjoyed it a lot
’Cos at times it was hot
Though, at others, decidedly nippy.

Now that we mayn’t venture further than our own back yards, it’s painful to recall the days when a youth could spend a couple months in unreflective, self-indulgent doggy-paddling. Though the great Mississippi had all the fragrance of a sewer, it has to be admitted.

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

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As I swung – in my skimpiest Speedos
And the loudest of lime-green tuxedos
From the high diving-board –
Some buffoon cut the cord
(This has happened in several Lidos).

For the committed exhibitionist – a burgeoning breed in our benighted times – no stunt is off-limits. The lifeguard above, intervening to frustrate an ill-judged April 1 prank, is surely not the prime ‘buffoon’. (And if outraged libertarians cite Shakespeare’s King Lear – Act IV, where the suicidal Duke of Gloucester asks ‘Is wretchedness deprived that benefit / To end itself by death?‘ – I shall refute them thus: the Duke, at least, is not play-acting.)

091 • Zambesi

091 • Zambesi

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From the source of the mighty Zambesi
My swim to the coast looks so easy.
(When euphoria palls
The Victoria Falls
May turn me a trifle more queasy.)

Each human individual is trapped at the centre of their world; of course, the cause for queasiness here is not the loss of one foolhardy adventurer’s life, but the outright death of the river, precipitated by humanity’s dithering over the climate crisis.

089 • Saint Lawrence

089 • Saint Lawrence

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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.

066 • A Royal Tribute

066 • A Royal Tribute

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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!

061 • Delinquents

061 • Delinquents

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A posse of querulous crones
Went out in the dark to throw stones.
One struck a black cloud
Which split, like a shroud
As the angels glared down from their thrones

Our scenario here may seem improbable, but of course the demonisation of the Energetic Older Woman is not. No surprise, then, that the angels glared.

057 • One bullet

057 • One bullet

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Onstage, in the unmatching shoes
A songwriter murders the blues.
My neighbour’s huge feet
Pound an unmatching beat.
One bullet. But which should I choose?

It’s tough enough living in a culture that tolerates second-rate musicians and audience extroverts with bad timing. But, worse still, an archaic constitutional right – to go armed – puts these irritating people’s lives in undeserved jeopardy.

056 • Automaton

056 • Automaton

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A small ad. I saw in The Mail:
‘Mechanical Weasel for sale.
Can whistle the theme
From Pick the Wrong Team,
And tries to beat time with its tail.’

Today’s parents, terrified of their children venturing out of doors, continue to bolster our consumer culture by the purchasing of trashy toys, exemplified by the patronising, unnatural design of this unwanted item, which pays half-hearted homage to some self-evidently worthless TV show.

051 • The stiltwalker

051 • The stiltwalker

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Said a feisty young midget from Wilts
As he strode through the county on stilts,
‘Sure, I get a good view
But so, madam, do you
On the days when I choose to wear kilts.’

A correspondent – read his or her comments here – protests that I’m wasting my chosen verse-form, whose topics are properly sex, body-parts, mockery, and nothing else. The present verse, then, is dedicated to Ura, and it’s as far as I’m prepared to go in the debased direction s/he recommends (unless it proves popular, of course).

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.

033 • Pet shop

033 • Pet shop

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We know you were keen on a chimp
But the one in the shop had a limp.
This won’t be the same
But at least it’s not lame:
So let’s think of a name for your shrimp.

The trusting child dreams of an ideal birthday present, liberating, life-enhancing and dynamic. But, come the glorious day, the shameless parents make excuses and deliver something underweight, slimy and unfit for purpose. Sounds familiar, no?