Victuals Archives • My Dog Errol

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.

355 • Take-away (7)

20th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

354 • Boa sting

19th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

Said a blustering braggart from Bingley,
‘I can swallow ten scorpions, singly,
Then twelve jalapenos
That burn like volcanoes
And still swear my tonsils aren’t tingly.’

I challenged him, ‘Chew on this pie
Packed with gunpowder, chillies, and lye.’
(And gravy so gingery
Permanent injury
Threatened his throat, by the by).

Then I watched the first slice disappear
And his silly fat face lost its sneer:
As his gums glowed red hot, his
Engorged epiglottis
Put paid to his boasting career.

Of course I concede that the above bulletin is not entirely true, and that it was not penned for publication at My Dog Errol, but rather on the ‘Readers’ Homilies’ page in our Parish Magazine. It illustrates something from the Bible, as I recall. It was rejected by the Vicar (on grounds of length, I can only assume).

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’.

352 • You are what you eat

17th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

351 • Take-Away (5)

16th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

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

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

349 • Take-away (4)

14th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Regarding the death of my former
Relation (the one known as Norma)
Just tell the police
She’s no longer my niece
And that was the cause of her trauma.
NOW BRING ME A VEGETABLE KORMA.

Proof, if proof were needed, that a lazy diet of convenience food can induce circular, or even Moebius, reasoning: not at all what we typically expect from a thoughtful assassin.

347 • Take-away (3)

12th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It seems that the culprit was Carla,
Who cleaned up the funeral parlor;
Or was it Luigi,
Who wielded the squeegee
Backstage in Milan at La Scala?
NOW BRING ME A CHANA MASSALA.

If today’s bulletin is some kind of post-mortem report, it will strike most sensible readers as annoyingly non-committal. What is certain, however, is that an habitual devourer of carry-out meals runs an enhanced risk of succumbing to food-poisoning; so we should perhaps be more grateful to the Carlas and Luigis of this world, who busy themselves with janitorial hygiene that benefits each and every one of us.

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.

344 • Christmas Market

9th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We sell mostly flotsam and jetsam
Step in for a moment, and get some:
Our clients buy masses
To mix with molasses
And massage Mama (when she lets ’em).

So the customers wait in a line,
Their patience much greater than mine.
When I shout, ‘Go to hell,
I have nothing to sell,’
They beam at me, bland and benign.

This morning’s bulletin is a triptych depiction of the insanitary madness of Yuletide shopping: first the barker openly declaring the worthlessness of his wares; then the unseemly comfort products foisted on our nearest and/or dearest when other inspiration fails; and finally the line-up – outside a depleted store – of zombie-like shoppers, their wits irremediably stultified by the worthless circus of capitalism.

343 • Take-away

8th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Hi; this is your bartender, Barney.
So sorry: your chilli con carne
Has gone by mistake
To the shack of a Sheikh
Who’d only sent out for a sarnie.’
NOW BRING ME A LAMB BIRYANI.

Too work-obsessed to think of catering for himself, the rhymester receives the phone-call everybody dreads. Sadly his response – too spontaneously Wordsworthian to be constrained within his verse-form of choice – is merely a variation on the original impulse, to rely on carry-out: it is certain to lead to further disappointment.

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.

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

26th November 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

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.

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.

284 • Street delicacy

10th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

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.

274 • Quondam entanglement

30th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Guess the kettle has run out of cream
And the kitten’s got sick of the steam.
I used to convulse
At the throb of your pulse:
Now I dance to a different dream.

To live outside the law you must be honest, as our Great Poet saith. But it’s not easy to live outside the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which wants us to believe that organised systems tend towards chaos, unless energy is fed in to sustain their structure. Today’s bulletin – not written by me, but slipped under my door by the lovely Angharad – is intended to show me that her vital energy has not ebbed, but is rather being directed elsewhere. I conclude, however, that what has actually ebbed is her ability to organise metaphors convincingly. Unless she mixed those lines up on purpose in a cruel attempt at parody.

273 • All night I cry

29th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’ve not seen a sign of my spouse
Since she opted to live as a mouse.
All night I cry ‘Please
Don’t you fancy some cheese?
I’ve set trapsful all over the house.’

Can we lure back our spouses with nibbles? Or woo our lost partners with treats? Am I accidentally writing the start of a Music-Hall song? The answer to the first two questions is, regrettably, ‘no’ … not if the morsels in question are elements in a lurid murder plot. Don’t say it couldn’t happen. Do say, ‘How terribly British, to offer such a flippant take on such a desperate scenario.’

255 • Fred ♥ Suzy

11th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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]

242 • Skin Deep

29th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It’s hard to be horrid to Hannah,
That winsome and whimsical manner,
The bugs in her bread,
The bones in her bed,
The blood on her Bunty bandanna.

All readers will surely be familiar with this kind of weekend acquaintance, in the presence of whose surface charms we knowingly turn a blind eye to one or more unsettling indicators of their workaday life.

236 • Virgo

23rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may trust, under Virgo the Virgin,
That your boons and your blessings will burgeon:
But such hopes are misplaced
(Like a frog in fishpaste
Or a goat in the garb of a surgeon).

My mother had a fair-sized bee in her bonnet when it came to Mariolatry. Sooner trust an astrologer than a woman, she would often say. For a long while I was blind to the paradox in those words, but recent events in my private life, which I shall not make public here, are forcing me to re-evaluate them.

233 • Escapology

20th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

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!

226 • Howzat!

13th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My son hurled a gobbet of Gouda
At a git riding high in a howdah
Who then toppled down dead,
While the elephant fled.
As a parent, I’ve never felt prouder.

Though many will admire this laudable initiative – and the consequent emancipation of an enslaved animal – others may simply be disgusted at the waste of good cheese. (Still others may suspect that the proud father has embellished the facts, in the interests of procuring an unexpected rhyme; and that his offspring’s actual feat was nothing more remarkable than lobbing a brick at a git on a bike.)

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?

219 • Bluebird Farewell

6th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my bluebird, Baptiste,
Who detested the winds from the east.
He would drowse on the hob
While the cook did her job …
And was finally part of the feast.

Inexplicably our culture approves the harvesting, for human nourishment, of various fowls of the air. The bluebird, however, has a sentimental significance to many, and the callousness of its assassin in this story is therefore noteworthy.

215 • Oyster Farewell

2nd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my oyster, Odette,
Who could never abide getting wet
But would snivel and cry
When the bed was too dry:
All in all, quite a difficult pet.

This Sunday’s moral dilemma. Which is more odious: to posit an inner life for a creature that self-evidently cannot signal emotion to a human being? Or to denigrate her supposed caprices, when these have clearly been triggered by needlessly-inflicted cruelty?

212 • Dogged

30th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The store on the way to the station
Was manned by an outsized Alsatian.
‘Pray, are you a grocer?’
I asked. It said ‘No sir,
You’re having an hallucination.’

The products of our imagination often seem programmed to mislead; but as this instance shows, we should study to ask them The Right Question … in this case , something like ‘Please may I have an apple and a banana, in a brown paper bag, to sustain me on the journey up to town?’ It is seldom appropriate to challenge a shopkeeper’s professional credentials.

192 • Ms Ewing recollected

10th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Ewing
(Whom most of the parents were suing)
Would cram us with Stilton
While yodelling Milton
God knows what she thought she was doing.

This was a couple years on, again, from my previous educational memo. The idea of snacking on British food in the BritLit class sounds kinda cool on paper. But it was implemented in this unruly, worrying manner: maybe gas from that nauseous cheese had gotten the better of her.

174 • The Crabmonger

22nd June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Is anyone else fond of crabs?
I’ve 69 here, up for grabs:
The mother’s no beaut
But her grand-kids are cute.
They’d make a nice change from kebabs.

I have doubtless inveighed before, in this Verse Marathon, against the keeping of animals as pets. Who can remain dry-eyed on apprehending the uncertain status of these crustaceans, offered up by the crabmonger as a foodstuff, even after their family background, and personal charm, have been so heart-warmingly attested.

172 • Deep Fake (7)

20th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The last time I spoke to James Mason
We were both throwing up in one basin.
I think it was him
’Cos I said, ‘Awright, Jim?’
And he answered, ‘Whatever you say, son.’

In this final ‘I think it was him‘ case-study we do at least have some hint of confirmation from the actor himself – though the background to the particular encounter is left to the inferential skills of the reader. Crucially, though, the past week’s program at My Dog Errol has offered us a handle on the way celebrity capitalism tampers with the already-shaky sense of personal identity with which the last century has saddled our culture.

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?

150 • Meet the team (12)

29th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Be kind to our stock-keeper, Howard.
He’s desk-bound, but scarcely a coward.
He put down his pen
And toiled like ten men
The night the Great Cake was devoured.

This distasteful snapshot of office life reveals how body-shaming – more typically reserved for female colleagues – is in special cases applied also to men. In this huge chap’s case, jealousy of his evident arithmetical prowess apparently legitimises jibes about his outlandish bodily bulk.

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 .

134 • Meet the team (5)

13th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our company lawyer, Corinna,
Works out of a bedsit in Pinner.
Best not to ask why.
You’ll find out by and by.
Just don’t let her take you to dinner.

The workplace is pregnant with erotic foreboding and intimations of past scandal. ‘Dinner’ is identifiable as a euphemism … but for what, exactly? Some ropes are better left unshown.

118 • Neath

27th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My dining companion at Neath
Drew a long scary knife from its sheath:
‘You have to get rough
When the steaks are this tough,’
She explained, as she sharpened her teeth.

This was damnably alarming when it happened, and it’s only now, a couple years later, that I realise it’s a neat symbol for the way we damage ourselves by bad eating. [for Ceridwen]

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.

088 • Opacity

28th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

To hell with this transparent cake,
The sort that a spectre might bake!
I want to eat suet,
Not view the world through it.
You promised me something opaque!

The novelty birthday cake is an idea best avoided. A showy comestible is often more gratifying to the donor than to the recipient.

081 • Tiber

21st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A mermaid emerged from the Tiber
To force me to feast on raw fibre;
Since I, like Rasputin,
Gorge only on gluten
Her fad did not gain a subscriber.

Our Roman week must surely end here. Food fads are one thing, food fascism another. A bearded charlatan may be outwardly less appetising than a Diving Belle, but at least the controversial Russian kept his dietary irregularities to himself.

067 • Empty Shelves

7th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

049 • Little Ned (finale)

18th February 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Tonight sees the funeral feast
Of Ned the Chihuahua (dec’d).
As principle mourner
I’ll crouch in the corner
And hurl chunks of Pal at the priest.

One might well have passed the redundant stocks of dog-food to another pet-owner, but pelting the ‘priest’ (ie the creature’s sobbing ex-proprietor) with it is a much more cathartic option. [See also here]

048 • Fudge

17th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As far as I’m able to judge
All children are partial to fudge
Hence my gift for your spawn
When s/he’s finally born:
This slab of brown fossilised sludge.

To give sweets to a child, in this era, is to risk arrest. And would the pregnant mother be well-advised to devour this farsighted present herself, in hopes of forestalling childhood obesity in years to come?

042 • Gravel

11th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

037 • Choice of cheeses

6th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Whenever I feel a bit gloomy
I gnaw on an hunk of halloumi.
I know I’d feel better
With facefuls of feta
But that stuff just passes straight through me.

Our culture has us hooked on comfort foods. In this portrait of a greasy placebo rejected, we sense the all-too-knowing body overriding the whims of that needy weakling, the mind.

030 • Island mentality

30th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Why, hark! ’Tis the hornet-detector:
‘Intruders at large in this sector!
We don’t want our honey
To taste or smell funny.
Go home, and stop nicking our nectar.’

Island Mentality in a nutshell. The xenophobic bee whose words we report seems to have scant understanding of the mechanisms of his own livelihood. Free movement of ‘outsiders’ is clearly about to end.

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.

010 • Everyman redux

10th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

John Dough, the old baker from Delph
At last had the town to himself.
The folk that he’d fed
All lay rigid in bed
Or folded away on a shelf.

In which a despairing artisan turns on his fellow Proles. A hint of Americanese may come through in the first couple lines of this piece, though it’s been a while.

005 • Courtiers

5th January 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

Each evening the King of Kowloon
Egests, from his gullet, a prune.
His courtiers compete
As they crouch at his feet
To flick it away with a spoon.

There may well not be a King of Kowloon at present; but anywhere, any time, you’ll find entitled hierarchies demeaning the grovelling lowerarchy. That’s what we’re investigating in this piece.

003 • Three sisters

3rd January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Cordelia, Goneril: call
The hunters to dine in our hall.
Yet do not call Regan.
Since she became vegan
We have no such daughter at all.

Some time before the play begins, I assume, the alpha-male tyrant rallies his sycophants against the principled child. A pity Shakespeare overlooked King Lear’s fourth child Greta, ‘Mistaken, at first, for a beta …’