Summer’s End

Soon the summer will be over and we will start the long slow fall into darker mornings and autumn days. I like the autumn and its colours, the cooler days, even though there has not been so much of a summer this year. But there wasn’t that much of a summer last year either.

There have not been those long hot summers, which I remember from childhood, for a few years now. Not that I’m complaining, I don’t like the hot dry weather. I prefer English springs and autumns to any other season with their cooler, relatively short and changeable days.

In a way, the summer seems almost stagnant compared to the seasons before and after it. In the spring and autumn there is change, almost constant change with buds growing in one, and the changing colours of the leaves in the other. There is always something new coming or something old fading and going. Each new day feels like a new stage on a journey.

Things Are Just Things

What happens when these things no longer matter; when you turn away from the world you have made because now it suddenly seems so empty and hollow?

We create these lives around ourselves; stacking up so many things to shape our lives around our selves, things that we think have meaning beyond mere utility. We surround ourselves with all this stuff that is supposed to define us, as much to ourselves as to other people. We are sold fantasies of ourselves that will – in some magical way – transform ourselves both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Sometimes we are foolish enough to believe these marketing fantasies are somehow true; despite knowing that you cannot change yourself or your life merely by buying things.

Things are just things.

For these things to have the meaning beyond themselves that will – as the marketing of them has it – transform our lives into something new, greater, deeper, we have to also buy into the rituals that surround the things. To those on the inside a ritual has meaning, to those on the outside it just seems a lot of fuss about very little, conducted with an earnestness that seem laughably portentous and absurd.

Monday Poem: Fantasy

Fantasy

You can offer me
The choicest pick of flesh, there
On the youthful bone,
But I do not desire it.

I do not want flesh
Lit with bright pulsing neon,
Or even dressed in
The erotic exotic

Of some old faded
Routine dream, just
A few steps down
From this rain-stained pavement.

What Comes And What Goes

What comes and what goes, so much of it depends on chance, on happenstance. There is no such thing as fate, as destiny, no great cosmic scheme of things. To the universe the human is just one of those things, not central to it in any way, an artefact of the way its natural laws work, like the storms of Jupiter, but much less significant, but only in one ordinary solar system around a typical sun.

There are no gods or any other such beings out there sitting up on the clouds pulling strings and tampering with fates, there is just us. The gods outwore their usefulness a long time ago. Since the days when Galileo first put the telescope to his eye the myths of gods have become superfluous and an embarrassing hindrance... nothing more.

Life is what we make it, and things happen because things just happen. None of us have been selected by some divine hand for great or terrible things. The only gods there were ever were, were in our minds; but if we can create such great things out of just the shapes of shadows and clouds in the skies, then there should be no limit to what else we can do.

Red Rocks

Down in the valley, on the dusty ground, we walk towards the red rocks. There is no sound except for the hiss of the sand displaced by our footsteps, and our breathing sounding heavy in the heat.

We will not live for much longer. We will not reach the red rocks. That does not matter though; we never expected to reach them. I don't think we even expected to get this far.

There is no-one else out here on this road, no-one but us. We do not expect to see anyone else. All is silence and silence is all there ever will be once the sound of our steps and our breathing is lost.

We forgot how to talk a long time ago. We ran out of things top say and now all we can do is walk on until we reach the ends of our own private roads.

Not Enough

It doesn’t happen. It seems as though the world has stopped turning, as though the words that power existence have gone. There was a time when a single phrase would be enough. It would set the world turning in a new way; new reflections could be seen in all the surfaces shining this world back into the eyes. It seemed as though everything had been made new and the world was starting out again, revolving around that one moment when those particular words gave it a new axis to turn on.

It seemed that those words, in that order, had dissected the world, dissected time, laid it open in front of the eyes and made the workings of the universe so clear, almost graspable. If it didn’t make everything make sense, it – at least – gave the hand something to hold onto, some place to grasp, a handhold and somewhere to begin.

Now though, the words seem as tired as the world. Words don’t seem to be enough any more. Silence grows out from the head, fighting back against the inanities of a world babbling to itself, filling the air around itself with sound without meaning, because the words it hears are not enough, not any more.

Thursday Poem: Endless Night

Endless Night

(Ballade Royal)

She moves like sunlight through my every day
And turns my mornings languid and so slow
The afternoons that never go away
With evenings that will grow and overflow
Into the dark of night before we know
The day has gone, and I’ve so often said
I want an endless night, warm in her bed

I need to be with her in every way
From dawn and back to dawn the hours will grow
And turn as day becomes the night, ‘replay
These times again’ we whisper, ‘then bestow
Another day on us, the same, although
In darkness all our appetite is fed.’
I want an endless night, warm in her bed

Yet we are now exhausted from the fray
Our battle’s not fought, and we are not foe.
We lie here waiting for the sun’s first ray
No move made even though the room’s aglow
With day’s bright morning light, we will forego
The day to keep the night right here instead.
I want an endless night, warm in her bed

But when the mornings turn so cold and grey
And winter brings the coldest winds that blow
Across our days and bring the snow, we stay
Beneath these sheets, becomes our spring meadow
As days go dull as darker nights outgrow.
So when it seems those longer days have fled
I want an endless night, warm in her bed.

We Are The Good

If there is something out there that will give us some shape to our lives, it does not lie in heavens, or hells, or fates or destinies. It waits out there for us to make sense of it and to fit the shape of our lives around the facts of it. There is no special meaning other than what we create for ourselves and what matters to us. All that is divine is a human creation, all that is evil is a human creation; our minds can shape a world of demons if we allow them to. That does not mean that the demons are out there, salivating in the darker shadows waiting to leap out on us.

The good too is a human invention. The world beyond the human has no knowledge of good, or evil, it has only what is necessary. There is no higher being out there that embodies the good. The good was made by us, for us. We are the good, it is within us and is seen through our own eyes, not some stern bearded father look down, waiting to punish or reward.

We must walk through this world on our own and take the responsibility for it, for all we do, for all we see. We must not expect some being that exist only in our fantasies to solve the world for us.

Comfortable Silence

Sometimes there is nothing to say. Sometimes it seems that words are not necessary any more. At times only silence seems the most eloquent response. Silences can contain meaning too. There are angry silences and there are sympathetic silences.

Sometimes though only words will do and the silence that fills the space where the words should be feels wrong, empty, a thirsty man’s glass waiting to be refilled.

We use words as tools to shape the worlds around us, to build our castles in the air and to shatter those silences that would otherwise grow up as solid as walls between us. We need the words to break through that silence.

Although, now as we walk down this familiar street together, as we have done day after day for so many years, we do not feel the absence of words, the talk that used to flow between us like a river after heavy rain.

We are content now with the silence that feels as comfortable, snug and warm as an old winter coat. We have learnt each other so well that a raised eyebrow and a complicit smile can say far more to each other than the words ever can.

Memories

The most curious thing, however, is remembering a previous time when you were remembering a time before that. When we were young, my sister and I used to play in our parent's bedroom.

The dressing table mirror had two moveable wings on each end of it. If we shifted all those strange and exotic jars of potion and cream and turned each of those moveable mirrors to face each other, then you could rest you head down on the cold wood and see infinite numbers of yourself curving off into endless dimensions without beginning and without end.

Slip into memories of memories and you can end up like that, staring at an ever-receding multiplicity of images stretching back and back. But like looking into the mirrors, you get dizzy with the infinite and have to pull back, back to the single reflection in the single mirror.

Too much memory can make the eyes heavy and bloated.

The Route Between

How the moments stand there, solid and real, monuments to all our past mistakes, littering the valleys of our memories, haphazard like the outlines of some demented maze.

From up here, high on the hill of remembering she looks down in to the valley of her past, seeing the memories standing there. She feels the temptation to trace the path between them, to uncover the secret of the path that led her up here. But she knows, as we all know deep down, there is no sense to that route between the monuments of her past.

These things are not supposed to make sense. It is random, chaos, happenstance. She stopped believing in some omnipotent guiding hand when she shrugged off her childhood and began the long slow climb of the hill of understanding, as we all must do if we are to make sense of anything.

She left behind, far below, all notions of destiny and the future being anything other than what the past and accident make to form the present.

She knew that the climb up the hill of understanding was all the purpose she would need, that and a loving hand to help her over some of the more awkward parts of the climb.

The Hedgerow

Sometimes it seems as though there is nothing there. The mind seems as empty as one of those rolling green fields that cover the gentle hillsides. There is just a vast expanse of emptiness from the horizon right down to where you stand in the lane, by this convenient gap in the hedgerow.

You stepped off the road, just for a moment, and crossed over the ditch to stand here and contemplate what could be seen through this gap. There is even a fence in the gap just the right height for leaning the elbows on as you stare out over the empty field.

It seems strange, in a way, that such an obvious space for contemplation does seem to look out over… well, over nothing much. Then, though, you realise that the emptiness is what you want, what you need. You came down this quiet road looking for… not exactly an escape, but some sort of quiet relief, a space in time you could take out of your life, a side road you could wander down having no objective in mind, just as somewhere to walk through.

Now you look out across the quiet still emptiness of the bare field and feel its quiet contemplative solitude filling up the space inside your mind that you though had been filled with all the worries and concerns of your life, as they trickle away like sand through an hour glass, until all you are left with is the peace of the moment. A moment that stretches further and further out until you have had all of it you can take.

You sigh, turn away from the gap in the hedgerow and back onto the quiet side road. Without a moment’s hesitation, you walk back up the side road, back to the main road of your life, but now with the weariness gone from your step.

Monday Poem: Nameless

Nameless

It comes out of the darkness.
It comes out of the silence
Stretched like wings
Of pure blackness.
Enveloping.
Suffocating.

There are so many things
That need to be said,
So many things that ought
To take the shape of words
Moulded into form and meaning.

We think of such names for it
As to tell of the deep darkness
It grows from.
For names can tame and tell,
Remove us from these horrors.

Let its name be spoken once again.

Full-Frontal Cookery

Tinkle Velocipede – undoubtedly – gained her all-too vital celebrity status in the UK when she combined the two – up to then - entirely separate genres of TV cookery programme and full-frontal nudity.

Of course, other female TV cooks had experimented with innuendo and sexual suggestion, but had always remained fully clothed, if displaying sometimes more thigh and/or cleavage than most would consider suitable for the kitchen environment, even a mocked-up one in a TV studio, but Velocipede was the first

TV cook to perform slow-motion pancake flipping whilst topless, with many male viewers expressing admiration for her strong wrist action and the seeming slow-motion reaction of her more than ample bosom-region to the effects of gravity.

That pilot show of Velocipede’s Full-Frontal Cookery recoded the then-highest viewing figures ever for a cookery show and thus ensured that not only the rest of the series would be shown, but also enabled Velocipede’s agent to secure a contract for a further 6 series, including the now world-famous clip from series three of Velocipede furiously grating cheese on the deck of an ocean-going fishing trawler during a force-ten gale that has now become easily the most-viewed clip on YouTube for the fourth year running.

In addition, to prevent the show becoming stale, the producers have lately introduced the now seemingly essential amateur cook segment, when Velocipede provides hands-on experience for an amateur wishing to take up naked cookery, with the All-Amateur Naked Male Chef Blindfolded Sausage Sizzle Challenge Contest proving very popular with those that enjoy the spectacle of dangerous extreme sport and the sense of excitement it brings to the cookery programme genre.

Prescott Warns of Labour Money Troubles

Over the weekend, former Labour Deputy Leader, Lord Prescott of Steak and Kidney, warned that the Labour party could soon run out of the money to keep him in pies.

He warned that as membership of the party was falling through the floor, the Labour party could now only afford to provide him with ‘less that 20 pies a day’, and that if more was not done to attract new funding the entire parliamentary Labour party could be forced to take up busking on Westminster street corners in order to stave off bankruptcy.

The former Deputy Prime Minister also warned:

Just think what will happen if David Millipede becomes our next leader – all those bananas won’t be cheap y’know.

Asked for a comment – once he could be found and cornered – the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, echoed the former deputy leader’s words saying:

The Labour party’s current – and temporary - financial troubles, which – of course – began in America will soon be over. After my great successes as chancellor, I’m sure that any day now they will come knocking on my door begging me to become treasurer of the party, so I can do for my party what I did for the country…. Yes, any day now… any day now….

Sssh… was that someone knocking on the door…?

Ah….

Anyway….

However, once the Evil Tories have sorted out the country’s financial troubles which – as everyone knows were a direct legacy of the Evil Thatcher she-devil, and nothing at all to do with the former Labour Government – then we in the Labour party will start a campaign calling for state-funding of political parties, so that even though we are no longer in government we can still piss away loads of tax-payer’s money.

It’s a Conspiracy

It has long been thought - especially by those with an over-vivid imagination, a persecution complex and too much time on their hands - that things in the world are not always as they seem to be. In short, many people seem to believe that there are – out there – conspiracies by the rich, the powerful and others with a vested interest to make things appear different to the way they really are.

Of course, such people are quite reasonable dismissed as nutters and lunatics, mostly in want of a girlfriend. However, now things have changed.

For, it was revealed yesterday that there is – indeed - a secret cabal of hidden departments in most Western governments who do create these conspiracies.

In the past these departments would concentrate on creating conspiracies mainly for their domestic markets in order to divert attention away from the latest governmental cock-up, but in these days of the internet and global media increasingly the conspiracy theories are created for an international audience.

These national government departments were set up in a off-the-record meeting between the governments that make up what is now called the G7 group of countries back in the mid 1970s.

These governments had – eventually – all come to the conclusion that they needed something, anything, to divert attention of their peoples away from noticing the inherent incompetence of governments; governments who dared not admit they had no idea what was going on, and – even if they did – they had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Now, though, through the auspices of the most recent secret G7 meeting several western governments have decided to merge the efforts of their – sometimes competing – Conspiracy Departments to manufacture conspiracy theories that will encompass several governments and countries at once. This is a direct result of the humongous cock-ups now commonly known as the Iraq war, and the continuing Afghanistan debacle. These events, or series of disasters, has shown up the major players in this farrago to be a useless bunch of incompetents who could not organise a glimpse of naked flesh in a strip club, whist the governments who have replaced the original bunch of incompetent idiots have – so far – proved that – if anything – they have even less idea of what is going on and absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Consequently – as a matter of urgency all the G7’s Conspiracy Theory departments have been ordered to work together – flat-out – to develop a conspiracy theory that will transfix the populations of all the countries involved, in order to divert the attention of those populations away from the increasingly obvious fact that their governments are, have been, and always will be, completely and utterly useless, out of their depth and totally lacking of any kind of clue whatsoever, and that inventing politics so that these utterly clueless self-aggrandising idiots would leave the rest of us alone has been a complete failure.

Ofcom Report: Britons Multitasking Until Their Wrists Ache

According to a report issued by the media busybody Ofcom, the average British male now spends half his life wanking off to porn on a wide variety of devices.

As an Ofcom spokesman said, once he took his hand from his underpants and turned off his mobile:

For example back in the 1980s a bloke had to hide a copy of Razzle in the Month-End Results and pretend he was cleaning his glasses under the desk, if he fancied a quick one off the wrist at work. Then he had to wait until he got home and the wife was out at her mother’s before he could fast forward through a worn-out Electric Blue to watch a grainy woman vaguely touching herself on some exotic beach location.

Nowadays, there is so much porn about that you can have two well-oiled Russian lesbians pleasuring each other with an egg whisk and a watermelon on DVD, while you’ve got a kinky housewife teaching her toyboy how to be dirty on your laptop, and a high-quality video featuring a bevy of Japanese women dressed up as schoolgirls giving a tongue bath to a ‘plumber’ on your mobile – all at the same time.

It is no wonder the share price of Kleenex has gone through the roof.

As one formerly healthy young man said:

I’m wearing myself out here. About five years ago I set myself a challenge to see all the porn there is out there, which means that I have my DVD player going all day, the Adult channels on the TV on all night and I have about 200 000 pornsites bookmarked in my browser. If I had time to go to work these days I’d be no good there, I don’t have the strength to even hold a pen any more, not without the ink suddenly squirting out of the end all over my tie, anyway.

Luckily, though, it hasn’t affected my sex life because the wife is there every night watching recordings of that Spartacus thing on Bravo where the hunky gladiators seem to spend all their time waving their knobs at each other, while browsing Toyboy Warehouse on her laptop and flirting with some stud from Alaska she met on Facebook using Twitter on her mobile. It is costing her a fortune to keep herself in chocolate and buy new batteries for her Rampant Rabbit.

Tragic Death Of TV News Reporter

The BBC announced this morning, the death of TV news reporter, Pontificator Speculation in a tragic news reporting-related accident.

Speculation was well-known to BBC news viewers as that bloke who stood outside most of the famous buildings in the UK and around the world, in order to repeat – almost word for word - what the newsreader in the studio had just said, while nodding back to the obviously closed and empty building behind him to indicate that whatever was happening, or could happen in the future was - most definitely - not happening at that moment, before handing back to the studio where the newsreader repeated everything Pontificator Speculation had just said, because the viewers couldn’t hear Pontificator Speculation over the noisy background sounds from where he was reporting from.

According to the BBC, Speculation was about to do a piece live to camera from a riverside town suffering from the usual British summer floods as the river was about to burst its banks due to a freakish storm that was devastating the surrounding area. The police had warned everyone not directly involved in shoring up the river banks to keep away from the vicinity of the storm.

Consequently, and typically, Pontificator Speculation was the first reporter on the scene, ready to report live on-air as the gale howled around him and the rain poured down, thus making anything he was likely to say – repeating what the newsreader had just said from the dry warm studio – totally unintelligible to the viewers.

However, in order to get as close to the action as possible, Pontificator Speculation had stood just where a lorry was backing up to tip out its full load of sand ready to be used to fill the sandbags the workers were hastily piling up against the already overflowing riverbanks.

Much to the surprise of the BBC, not a single worker there noticed the reporter as he was buried alive in damp sand, still spouting his platitudes and inanities about the blatantly obvious bad weather. Furthermore, both his soundman and cameraman both also claimed to have not noticed – until it was too late – that what they were pointing their camera and microphone at, was no longer a TV news reporter, but a ten-foot high pyramid of increasingly wet sand, with both claiming they couldn’t see or hear a thing through the raging storm. Although reports that they had set up the camera and boom microphone and then quickly dashed off for a cup of tea, have been strongly denied by both the cameraman’s and the soundman’s union reps.

Pontificator Speculation was 32 and winner of the prestigious Most Pointless News Report of the Year award seven years running. He may well be missed by someone, somewhere… perhaps.

Labour Accuses Coalition of ‘Not Playing Politics Properly’

The Labour party last night accused the Con-Lib coalition government of ‘not playing politics properly’ when it emerged that the coalition were considering plans to stop giving tax-payers money to people who don’t really need it.

As Labour leadership contender, David ‘Bananaman’ Millipede said:

The whole point of being in government – apart from the chauffer-driven cars and people pretending to be interested in everything you say, of course – is to take as much money off the people in tax as you possibly can without provoking riots – like the Evil Tory Thatcher did – and then giving a lot of it back to the people who vote for you.

Now these parents who are rich enough not to need child benefit, and the pensioners who have big enough pensions not to need the winter fuel payouts are just the sort of middle-class, reasonably well-off people who would naturally vote Tory anyway, with a small proportion of those already going senile enough to believe that voting Lib-Dem might be a good idea. So, really, the coalition are just demonstrating that they just do not have a clue how to do politics properly, at all.

So, can I be Prime Minister now please?

However, when asked how a Labour government under his leadership would tackle the deficit, the Millipede replied:

Deficit? What deficit? There is no such thing as this so-called deficit. It is all an Evil Tory lie. The only problem we have in the economy is a slight shortfall because the hard-working people of this country are still not being taxed anywhere near enough.

Why, some figures I had explained to me show that there are people in this country who still manage to keep just over half their earnings, obviously that is far too much, who knows what they will fritter it away upon? When I am Prime Minister we will not rest until we can get our hands on much more of it, to spend on those who vote for us.

Thank you…. Would you like a banana?

Britain’s Leading Militant Activist – The Early Years

Tolpuddle Trumptonriot knew from a very early age that he was destined to be a militant activist, right from the time he withdrew his labour from the nursery play area when his mother attempted to wean him off the breast and on to solids, and later began a campaign of ‘Play to Rule’ in support of his nanny’s claim for a living wage and an extra half day off in the middle of the week.

Like all earnest socialists, Trumptonriot did not let the fact of his wealthy privileged background interfere with his empathy for the lower classes, no matter how naïve and romanticised it seemed to most observers who did not share his ideals and enthusiasms.

It was during his time at the Pampered Darlings, private nursery, however, that Trumptonriot’s militancy first really took off when he organised a strike by every child in the nursery, demanding more biscuits with their post nap-time glass of milk. Despite having it pointed out to him and his ‘strike committee’ that any increase in the number of biscuits would result in a large increase in the nursery fees, more work for the already understaffed nursery assistants, a possible obesity threat and the risk of even more soggy crumbs getting stuck to the Duplo, Trumptonriot continued with his action, despite the increasing threats of sending him to the naughty step made by the nursery management.

However, even Trumptonriot was forced to concede defeat when one of the parents of a member of his strike committee discovered - through a web search -that rich tea fingers had been conclusively proved to cause cancer in goldfish.

However, like all great militants, Trumptonriot vowed that he would never be deterred from his righteous course of seeking social justice for the downtrodden and the disenfranchised by mere reality.

So, with a determined step in his stride he set off – satchel at the ready - to start at one of Britain’s most exclusive prep schools where, he vowed, he would fight for justice and equality at least until matron said it was time for lights out in the dorm.

UK Coalition Government: The First 100 days

After the first 100 days of the Conservative- Liberal Democrat government, most people in the UK admitted they were rather disappointed by the coalition’s failure to ‘just get on with it!’

A spokesmaninapub for the British population said:

I mean what happened to this so-called ‘bonfire of the quangos’? I was out there every night, for the first few weeks after they were elected, with my flaming torch waiting for the howling mob to pass by on the way to set fire to the offices of the local Five-A-Day Co-Ordinator, but fuck all happened, so I just used my torch to light the barbeque instead.

I know… I know I shouldn’t do it, but every time I listen to politicians I think ‘this time they can’t just be saying stuff they think we want to hear and really believe they know what they are doing’, but each time I vote I just end up disillusioned and disappointed – It’s worse than having a wank over some internet porn and then discovering it was a ladyboy site… er.. like my mate… er… Steve did once.

There has also been widespread disappointment over the fact that the coalition government has made no move to imprison any of those urgent threats to our national security identified by the readers of mid-market tabloids, such as: illegal immigrants, teenagers, the feckless work-shy layabouts in shell suits, teenage mothers, teenage fathers, teenage jobs, teenage unemployed, teenage teenagers and smug Guardian readers.

As one person who looked at the pictures in the Daily Mail every day said:

This is supposed to be a Conservative government – admittedly with a few of those liberals in it – those Liberals, they all wear suede shoes, y’know what I’m saying? Anyway, what this country needs is a bit more good old fashioned Tory hanging and flogging… the workhouse… send them all back to where they came from… horsewhip the lot of them…. National Service….Why back in the good old days….

Furthermore, a leading political commentator said:

Really, this coalition has been a big disappointment. At the very least we had expected them to start cutting things a big quicker and a bit more than this. Along the lines of a huge sword-wielding horde – something akin to Genghis Khan’s armies – running amok and slashing everything in sight to ribbons, instead we have George Osborne counting the pennies in his purse like some octogenarian spinster paying the milkman.

At this stage in the political cycle I would a have expected them to have, say, the heads of Geldof, Bonio and Sting up on spikes across London bridge as a warning to other celebrity mouths that the days of feel-good naïve platitudes and smug leftie simplistic moralising are well over, but I suppose we’ll have to give them a little bit more time.

Legends of Rock - Part One

Osteopath Chaingun* and the Psychodramatic Megastoats first hit the British singles chart back in the summer of 1975 with their first single (The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Championed by Radio 1’s only ever truly hip DJ, Stan Rind**. The Megastoats soon achieved that level of obscurity that is a guarantee of rock music success.

However, The Megas (as they became known to their fan) did not stay obscure for long. By some oversight, they had managed to pick – as their lead guitarist – Nigel ‘Fluffytree’ Hacknslash, who possessed a trait unusual in a rock musician, a natural ability with, and a rudimentary understanding of, music.

In fact, such was his musical prowess that he spent nearly seven weeks as the principal triangle player in his junior school orchestra, until replaced by a girl who knew that a semi-quaver was not as Nigel presumed a half-masticated crisp-like snack.

It was through the musical efforts of Nigel Hacknslash that disaster befell the Megastoats. For it was he who accidentally penned a tune that an over-eager record company released as the perfunctory single from the Psychodramatic Megastoats first album: Put The Cheese Back In The Fridge, Doreen. This was, of course, The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Unfortunately, this led to the Megastoats having to appear on the then terminally unhip Top of the Pops, where Osteopath Chaingun, because he was one of the few rock stairs not to have a face like a hedgehog after a meeting with an articulated lorry, soon became a darling of the teenybop audiences of that programme. This meant Chaingun became the darling of those teenyboppers who had left behind Donny Osmond and David Cassidy, along with all their other pre-adult adolescent longings as they looked for someone who seemed to have more than a theoretical knowledge of the differences between the sexes, such that there was back in the 1970s***.

However, the Megas where saved from the fate of being known as 'a teenybopper’s band', when Chaingun fell off the balcony of his Chelsea penthouse apartment hen trying to retrieve a groupie’s bra that had somehow become attached to the next door apartment’s TV aerial during a rather tense episode of The Sweeny.

After that, the Megas replaced Chaingun with Spunk Splatterback, a man so ugly that even his own mother tried to drown him in a sack, and – consequently – only a few months later the Psychodramatic Megastoats returned to the obscurity that their talents so richly deserved.



*Real name - Norman Barnstoneworth
**Real name – Lord Rupert Henry Farigthonstone-Worthy III
***Hence the familiar cry of the 1970s-era father made to witness Top of the Pops by his offspring of: ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ to nearly every act – except, of course, Gilbert O’Sullivan.

The Return Of The Sexual Peccadillo

 

For several hundred years now, it has been assumed that - like its close cousin, the dodo - that the wild Frankly Not Very Well Crested at All (or, Sexual) Peccadillo was extinct.

However, deep in the previously unexplored jungles at the heart of the Island of Langerhans, near the still active Vas Deferens volcano, a team of zoologists from the University of The Gorbals discovered several wild flocks of these now infamous birds playing Strip Ludo with a Norwegian missionary in the car park of the island’s only out-of-town supermarket.

This is indeed good news, especially for those tempted to try the wilder shores of sexual deviance, as legend has it that these birds have a natural aptitude for the perverse and deviant unmatched in any other wild fowl, including the infamous Great White Naughty Goose of North-east Canada and the Filthy Little Guillemot which is the only sexually deviant seagull native to the British Isles, famous – of course – for its use of sex toys cunningly crafted out of flotsam during its mating displays.

However, since the Sexual Peccadillo is the most promiscuous animal known on the planet, wiling to mate with everyone and everything at the drop of a tail feather, and since it has been said that the birds produce the best and tastiest meat of all birds, then the precise location of this flock is being kept a closely-guarded secret by the – now rather tired and rather well-fed - researchers.

The Moment Is Crystal

The moment is crystal in its cold clarity when something that seemed so unformed, untouchable, rests in your hand like some rare precious jewel that you can actually get to touch. There are times when the mind seems to break through out of its usual fog of doubt, hesitation and uncertainty and reaches out to grasp something profound and essential for the first time.

There are times, like that moment you sat on the summer hot river bank watching her step naked into the stream, when time seems to crystallise into moments of profound understanding. Times like that moment when you found out what love is, the need to have her fill your life with meaning and the necessity of her. A feeling so close you could feel the shiver tremble through your own body as she stepped into the running water still as cold as the snow it so recently was when it was resting up on the high mountain that brooded above you both like some indulgent parent watching you play your young games down by the side of its mountain stream.

The way she looked back at you, sweeping the hair from her eyes, as she sank lower into that water, ready to swim into the rest of her life with you; and the way you took hold of that moment as it crystallised, knowing that it was one moment that you would always keep with you, forever.

A Leading 20th Century Artist

Biped Undercoatings was – perhaps – the 20th century’s great pre-post-impressionistic abstract pointillist painter, famous for his paintings of the elbows of some of the most influential people of the century: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Stanley Matthews, Benny Hill, Gloria Hunniford and many other such great statesmen and philosophers all sat for Undercoatings, with their elbows brazenly on display for him to capture in paint.

Of course, there were scandals too, his infamous painting of Marylyn Munroe’s naked elbow outraged the conservative America of the 1950s, and his rather frank portrayal of Sophia Loren with both elbows revealed was quite outrageous for even the ‘liberated’ swinging 60s.

By the 1980s however, when the octogenarian Undercoatings revealed his painting of celebrity child-catcher Madonna in fetish gloves with peepholes exposing her elbows in a way never seen before, there was little in the way of outrage. It seemed that both Undercoatings and Madonna had both inured people to shock and outrage and it was their explicit displays of elbows – and in Madonna’s case other arm joints such as the wrist and shoulder – in all their naked glory had made the general public rather blasé about such forms of nudity.

It seems there is only so much outrage that any such figure can cause, and as they get older what seemed daring in their youth just seems to become rather mundane. It was with this in mind that made the ninety-two year old Undercoatings public announce his great change of artistic direction in 2001.

However, his Knees I – XXII, was a step too far for many art critics, who were quick to point out that even Picasso had drawn the line (even if it was a bit of a wobbly one due to his age at the time) at frank and revealing paintings of unadorned kneecaps in all their naked glory.

Savagely depressed by the critical mauling his paintings received, Undercoatings became even more of a recluse, finally – in a fit of depression and artistic exhaustion - taking his own life by inhaling deeply next to a double-glazing salesman in late November 2005.

Thursday Poem: Heroes

Heroes

When your heroes are those
Who lack the courage
To live the life of an ordinary day.

Talking only of horizons
And what lies beyond.
You know you will awake
Alone again.

Without even the meagre comfort
Of his mythology
To carry you on through
Yet another dreamless day.

The Contemporary Sporting Star

Depthcharge Pastrycake has become the first all-nude chicken intriguer to reach the exalted heights of celebrity status since the untimely death of the sport’s greatest practitioner Nasturtium Cheeseincident. There are hopes that the high media profile of Pastrycake will do for the sport what other such famous sportspeople - such as Eaglesprout Draingurgle for Standing Around In A Field For No Discernable Reason, Instance Traindisaster for Olympic sandwich eating - have all done for their sports over recent years.

Of course, it does help that Pastrycake has become a darling of the tabloid media, mainly – it is true – down to the demands of the sport, with its governing body insisting that its practitioners perform their chicken-intriguing stances whilst completely naked. It does seem to help, however, that Pastrycake has the sort of body that makes grown men drool and gibber, and would – quite possibly - make even the most devout priest reconsider his attitude towards the choirboys.

However, there are some fans of the noble sport who feel that to concentrate exclusively on the fact that its practitioners perform their art without the distraction of clothing could make newcomers to the sport overlook the sheer tactical finesse that is involved in intriguing a whole flock of chickens using just the human body.

Fans insist that the sport of chicken-intriguing, because it uses nothing else other than the naked body, no bats, no balls (except in the men’s event, obviously) and no other team members, the chicken intriguing is pure sport, sport in its ideal Platonic sense and should therefore be the one true sport that the others are mere pale copies of. Others though just like to see the naked human body performing the chicken-intriguing stances as a pure form of art – like ballet, like living sculpture, like a nude painting come to life or even like some of the more interestingly ‘artistic’ of the photo-shoots in gentlemen’s leisure magazines. All of which has made All-Nude Chicken Intriguing the massively popular spectator event it is today.

An Eminent Victorian Natural Philosopher

Eigenvector Plimsoll-Line was without doubt one of those influential Victorian natural philosophers who help create what we now know as science. Without Plimsoll-Line, and those others of his ilk, the modern world would look very different indeed.

Plimsoll-Line was obsessed with measurement. It amazed him - as only an extravagantly-bearded Victorian could be amazed - that there were so many things in God’s universe that were of different sizes. Of course, theologians had long theorized about the existence of what Bishop Weeble had called ‘The Almighty’s Measuring Tape’. Weeble had calculated that this Holy measuring tape must – of course, in Victorian England – be imperial and not metric, and was probably around six feet long. Of course, there were equally-distinguished theologians who argued that God, being omnipotent would not need a measuring tape at all – he would just ‘know’ that something was the right size.

Into this intense – and on a few occasions quite violent* - theological debate stepped Eigenvector Plimsoll-Line.

As the eldest son of a member of the landed gentry, Eigenvector Plimsoll-Line, was one of the fortunate few Victorian gentlemen who could afford his own ruler. Plimsoll-Line was the proud possessor of a splendid hand-carved 12-inch wooden ruler, given to him by his uncle the famous MP and whore-botherer, Quadratic Plimsoll-Line on the day of Eigenvector’s 21^st birthday.

At first, the young Eigenvector Plimsoll-Line satisfied himself with measuring those things he discovered around him in his family’s country residence. However, when he was discovered by his father, one day, measuring the relative inner thigh measurements of the scullery maids, it was felt that it was time for the young man to be sent out into the world.

It was as Plimsoll-Line was working as a naturalist aboard the Royal Navy research ship, HMS Poodle, that he made his infamous discovery that was to change the world, especially in science and theology when he took his special navy measuring tape ashore in the Isles of Langerhans and began to measure the natives of that island and discovered that some of the native women had somewhat larger breasts than others.

This revelation – once Plimsoll-Line returned to England and published his results – came as a massive shock to the Victorians, who had – taking their cue from Aristotle, and not actually bothering to check – presumed that God had made all women with the same-sized wobbly bits. The church was – of course – outraged with Plimsoll-Line and his theory was roundly condemned from the pulpit, with one Bishop scornfully saying: ‘if God had intended man to go around measuring things, then he would have made us with a measuring ruler built into our arms, would he not?’

However, once it was revealed to Victorian society that, indeed, Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, then there was – quite simply - no going back.

 

*There was – of course the famous Battle of the Measuring Sticks during the English Civil War when sections of the New Model Army mutinied when Oliver Cromwell claimed that God’s measuring stick was sub-delineated into sixteenths of an inch, not the traditional eight of an inch as theological scholars up to then had assumed.

Not Touched By This World

What is this? It seems to be like a life, but there seem to be some parts missing: those things that the others seem to have, that direction, that purpose, that sense of who they are and where they are going. They never seem to stop, to doubt, to wonder. They seem to walk through this world as though they belong, never seeming to feel like someone who has woken into a strange dream world where everything seems slightly untrue, at some odd angle, leaning away from reality as though undermined by some large void that no-one seems to notice.

The earth underfoot seems to shift slightly with every step as though all this could collapse around the ears with the next step, as though everyone could fall down into some deep pit of irrationality and unknowing.

Yet those others dance on through their lives seemingly oblivious, indifferent, almost as if they would welcome that tumble back into the irrational, that void, as if somehow they would feel just as happy there as here. It is as though they are not touched by this world, as though the universe just lies out there like some prop on the stage of their lives, a mere backdrop for them as they strut their hour upon this stage.

Life As A Sculpture

[Venus with the apple awarded by Paris - Bertel Thorwaldsen]

We dance through our moments, as though time flows endless like the sea, as the tides of our days rise and fall. But we are just some universal detritus that flows along a river for a while, from our birth until we flow out into that universal sea of non-existence. It doesn’t mean that life is valueless because therefore it has no meaning, quite the opposite. It is valuable because it is so transitory, so brief against the age of the universe and special to ourselves.

Furthermore, our lives belong to ourselves and ourselves alone, not to any greater purpose, not to a god, not to a destiny, not to a country and – therefore - no-one has any right to take it away or use it for their purposes without our consent.

Our life is our own to shape and to build, a sculpture that we create around ourselves and for ourselves and through ourselves. It is – in the end – all we have and without it we have nothing, we become nothing, only existing as a fading memory.

That is why it matters to make the most of your life for yourself, not wasting it in worship of false gods, and all gods are false because they were created to explain things that now we have better explanations for. They were the stories told to comfort us when we were children.

We are too old for that sort of thing now.

The Cold Talons Of The Night

The world takes shape around us as the day grows out from the dawn, chasing the dark away into the shadows, leaving it to lurk behind trees and buildings, waiting for the day to take its leave. We are not creatures of the night-time, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, when people huddle up against each other in towns and cities they try to banish the night with light and noise. However, there is always that fear that the night awaits to unleash its monsters down those dark alleyways and in those haunted places that lie out of the reach of the spilling light.

We know now, and we should have grown out of those fears that haunt the dark places of our minds. Still, though, even now we can hear rustlings and the rumbling growls that hide inside even the darkest corners of our own familiar places when the night has taken our light away.

Once the night has gone though, we wonder what it was that held us, that reached out of the shadows with such cold talons to grasp us tight, so that all thought of escape fell away uselessly.

We do not want to turn to face the darkness; we do not want to step towards it, scared that the face we see on that monster stepping out of the shadows will be our own.

Monday Poem: Working World

Working World

Now I watch from this one window
As the ordinary world passes by.
It doesn’t seem to need me now,
Managing quite well on its own.

Its days can start and dress themselves
Then go about their daily routine
Morning fresh and getting things done.

Afternoons begin slowly, winding down
To a point of stillness
Before the slow rush back home.

Then the evening eventually falls quiet
Underneath the night’s thick blanket
To sleep and dream of tomorrow.

Growing Away

It is like something you know the shape of; there is something familiar about how the day begins around you, as though it is the return of someone back into your life that you used to know. It brings with it a strangeness; a hesitation, as though you are not quite sure you are the same people any more. It is a feeling that something may have happened to one, or both, of you that has taken your life, or lives, off down another road away from who you used to be.

You know, though, that you have changed and that the familiarity has, at the same time, has an edge of unfamiliarity, as though you have grown out of that old life and it doesn’t quite fit any more. You no longer think the same things, say the same things, believe the same things, wear those same clothes or listen to that same music.

In a way you would think it strange that you did live, think and feel as you once did. Growing up, growing older, must contain at least an element of growing away, of movement toward something new. Ideally, it would be something deeper, richer, fuller; a growing of understanding of the world and how it shapes us and how we can shape ourselves to fit into those places where we can find ourselves some new home beyond that place and that life we once lived.

New Extreme TV Show

Chewtoy Malodourant is soon to become one of the UK’s most famous celebrities, if his new TV programme takes off as well as  his production company expect. Not since the death of the ludicrously be-shorted antipodean that became famous for poking stroppy wild animals with a stick – they say in their press release – has there been a TV personality willing to do pointless death-defying things in front of the TV camera for no other discernable reason than to annoy the shit out of dumb animals.

In each of the six episodes of the first series of Chewtoy Malodourant – Mad bastard Or What?, Malodourant puts himself purposely in harm’s way so that the jaded commercial TV audience can experience the vicarious thrill of him almost having his head brutally severed from his body to go bloodily bouncing around their giant wide screens in glorious HD quality realityovision.

For example, in episode one, Malodourant goes around several Geordie pubs deliberately spilling pints, and staring at their ‘birds’.

In episode two, Malodourant visits several inner-city ‘social’ housing estates to complain to the residents about them setting fire to broken fridges in their front gardens, and to ask if it is really entirely necessary to dismantle so many cars at once on their driveways.

In the third episode Malodourant calls a teenager a poof in front of the rest of his teenage gang, while loudly disparaging the model of his mobile phone and the unfashionable status of his footwear.

Unfortunately, the production company have admitted that the filming for the rest of the series will have to wait until their presenter has been discharged from hospital. However, they have said – in a further press release that C4 have committed to a further series of Chewtoy Malodourant – Mad bastard Or What?, providing that, at the end of filming this first series, the presenter is still alive to make it.

Thursday Poem: The Hands of A Man

The Hands of A Man

These are the hands of a man
But I don’t know what that means.
These are not the hands of a son of toil
They have not worked the fields
From darkness to darkness.

They have not hammered out
Black gold from blacker mines.
They have not sweated rivers
In torrent to smelt and shape metal.
.
They have not saluted, or taken
The life of an enemy of this state.
They have not been clasped so tight
As belief in martyr’s prayers
Or held onto the rigging
As wild storms churned and boiled
Tossing their careless toys.

They have not stroked the keys
Or taut strings of beauty’s song.
They can’t paint the shapes of this world,
or carve from wood or stone.

They have not been the first
Hands to reach out in welcome
Across once-hostile borders.

They have held broken-winged birds
Blind kittens and newborn babies.
They have learnt the shapes of lovers.

They have plucked fruit from trees
And fresh grapes off the vine,
Chopped once-living flesh to feed
This endless cycle of living to live.

They have painted nursery walls
And held on tight, enveloping
Small hands to cross busy roads.

They have taken hold of these words
And slowly learnt the weight of them.
These are the hands of a man
And, still, I don’t know what that means.

The UK’s Leading Male Adult Film Superstar

Donkeydong Sheepworrier is probably the UK’s leading adult film male superstar. He first shot (several times in the film) to fame in that classic of the Adult film genre, Debbie Does Bilston. These days the film is regarded as a classic, a subtle critique of Thatcher’s Britain where the eponymous Debbie, played by the then unknown, Strumpet Mellowthighs, sets out to do in Bilston what many on the Left believed the Thatcher government was doing to the rest of Britain at the time.

Pausing to give succour to a miner’s picket line at the start of the film, Debbie sets out to express her working class solidarity with the local labouring men of Bilston. She decides that she can achieve this through having sex with as many horny-handed sons of toil as she can find in the exotic Bilston locale, during the 87 minutes of the film.

In an unusually romantic touch for a adult film of the time, Donkeydong Sheepworrier is cast as a union leader in the Bilston region. Although it must be true that there are many women who are sexually-aroused by the thought of a romantic dalliance with such a glamorous figure as a local union rep, such roles are not usually found in the adult genre. Not only that, with the calibre of acting ability that adult film stars are renowned for, Sheepworrier was able to add a depth to the character of the union rep that is not usually found in the real-life counterparts, especially in the now notorious Communist Manifesto and baby oil scene featuring Sheepworrier, Mellowthighs and seven other women.

Tragically, however, Sheepworrier’s career was brutally (and literally) cut short due to a tragic accident on the set of a adult film version of a classic British pantomime, entitled Wood In The Babes, when a short-sighted lumberjack made a fatal mistake when Sheepworrier was lying down on his back in the woods waiting to start shooting a scene.

Strumpet Mellowthighs, however, went on to achieve worldwide mega-stardom after appearing as the lead in a all-nude hot lesbian action adult film version of Germaine Greer’s classic The Female Eunuch.

From Memory To Memory

Now and then: then and now. Time drags you from place to place and from memory to memory. The world seems filled with moments you have lived before. Everywhere you look you see ghosts of your past lives moving through these streets and down along these wooded paths.

You were young here once, when this world seemed so much bigger, stretching far beyond wherever you tried to reach. It seemed that the roads you ran down would go on forever, all leading down to that shore and the sea, expanding your world as you dived deeper into it and swam further from your familiar shores. It seemed it could go on and on, like some endless sea, with islands dotted here and there, each one promising a lifetime of its own, whilst at the same time hinting at what more lay beyond the horizon.

So there were many nights when you stood out on the shore, watching the sun set beyond some horizon, while you made plans for building another boat to sail off towards that hazy land in the far distance.

Now, though, you know just how big the world is, and how easy it is for some careless hand to blot it out forever. You know too that every road you walk down, every path you take and every sea you sail leads only way, and always will – in the end – bring you back here, face to face with yourself.

Banjo Twitching In The Bushes

Banjo Duckponderer is probably Britain’s most famous birdwatcher, becoming one of the UK’s most unlikely celebrities through the surprise ratings success of his early evening TV nature programme – Banjo Twitching In The Bushes – where he lurks in bushes the length and breadth of the UK in the hoped of spotting some of Britain’s less small and brown birds.

The fact that Britain is home to many different types of birds has come as a great surprise to most inhabitants of this island who thought that the British Isles had only two species of birds: the small brown ones and pigeons.

In fact it was Duckponderer’s startling revelation that there are different sorts of the small brown birds, during the first series of Banjo Twitching In The Bushes, that made him into the star he is today, even though most people, and that includes most birdwatchers, cannot easily tell any of the small brown birds apart.

It has been long known, of course, that in the UK there is not a single surviving bird that looks anything like any of the illustrations in any book of domestic birds, which has led many people to believe that the different species that these books contained were just a way of padding out a book that - if it did contain descriptions of the actual birds of the UK - would be little more than a pamphlet.

Not Romance

The amount of time left is not so great; I can feel it slipping through my fingers as I write.

She was the one though, I doubt if I will, or could ever forget her. She took my hand as we walked under the moonlight. It was a bit like romance, although, we both knew too much for it to be romance.

It was just sex: desire, lust. Maybe it could have been more, given time - but it is hard to tell now. It was such a long time ago.

I found it hard to believe she was even interested in me. Let alone that she wanted, desired me. I feel too much of the fool to be an object of desire for anyone. She did feel that way though, and, I suppose, that is what makes the memory of her so important to me.

It seems so long ago. Sometimes it even seems as though all of it happened to some other person; as though it is not me, and only me, who inhabits this shell of a body. Sometimes the memories take me by surprise, as though they belong to someone else, someone other than me.

I do not want to walk out in the world though. It is better for me to stay here, inside… inside, where it is safe. I have no need to go out there. All I need is here. All I want is here, except her - of course.

Focus of Attention

[Vase with Twelve Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh]

She needn’t be alone any more. She could walk with a companion at any time, but she did not need the sad attentions of the urgent males who came up to her, seemingly, wherever she stood. She did not want to be, did not like being, the focus of all that attention. She wanted silence and her own thoughts. The other girls, she could see, were getting jealous of her, the way the boys would gather in groups to whisper and to stare.

Standing in front of her bedroom mirror one day, she decided to change her hairstyle: the long flowing blonde hair would have to go, she decided. She fancied something stern, efficient. Even then, though, there was nothing she could do about her face; her eyes, her nose, her lips, her bone-structure. She sighed and picked up a book from her bookshelf.

Sitting down on her bed, she began to read.

She could not get comfortable, could not concentrate on the plight of Tess. She looked up from the book as if she saw the posters for the first time. Groups of young men staring at her - like that - again. She jumped up from the bed and tore the posters from the walls, screwing them into tight balls of wrinkled colours before throwing them towards the bin.

By the end, only the poster of Van Gogh's vase of sunflowers remained untouched on her wall.

Tame Words

Sometimes the words don’t seem to come that easily. Sometimes, they are reluctant to come out into the open of the page where they are vulnerable to every passing eye that could read into them whatever it wishes.

The words themselves are meaningless; they just want to herd together for safety there on the bleak plain page. The words themselves do not even care if you can find meaning amongst them; they just want to graze quietly on that empty page where they wander. They want to be left alone to go about their own word business through their word day, soaking up the sun and eating up the white space.

Words are gentle creatures, unused to the anger you want to force them into, not wanting to be manipulated into the fetid mires and swamps of you politics, your advocacy, your need. The words want to wander wild and free across the great white pages.

Now though they are cowed, domesticated, mere shadows of what they once could have been in the heroic days of stories, tales, legends and sagas.
Now the words are herded into tight neat documents that say nothing, and say it with all the passion and love of words of a dead, rotting corpse.

The Justification of Crowds

Take the road or take the path; sometimes you know which direction to move in.

We stood together at the top of the stairs, next to the door to your room. I knew that if you took my hand, we would walk into that room together, shutting the door on the world outside.

The world would stay on the outside while we would turn that room into our universe, our own private universe. What need would we have for a world such as this? A cold heartless indifferent place, when we could make our own world, in our own image.

We all have the power to make our own worlds, if we dare to use it. We all know those who scream the loudest in their urging us to join them are the very ones we should avoid at all cost. We do not need them, we do not want them.

You do not need to join their clubs, official or unofficial; you do not need your tribe - however loosely it is defined.

When you see a crowd forming, turn the other way. You do not need the justification of a crowd. Identity is not something others bestow upon you. It is something you give to yourself and is yours alone.

Politically-Aware Stoats

Sometimes it may seem as though every single stoat in West Shropshire is sniggering at you for being on the political Left. This – indeed – may very well be the case, but it is – we feel – more incumbent on you as the jape-ee to establish the meaning and the context of the reason why the aforesaid small mammals find you so hilarious.

This is – of course – a major change in the political landscape in this immediate post-election period. For, throughout its tenure, the Labour government regarded such inter-species ridicule, or even the mere possibility of such inter-species ridicule ever taking place, as something that should be of deep concern to society as a whole.

For such is the collectivist mentality on the Left that any such drollery by one species towards another must be seen as articulating something derogatory about not just the individual that is the butt of the humour, but of the whole collective of which that person is a member, in this case the human species. Not only that, such is the lack of humour, humanity or even insight on the Left as to the nature of joshing, banter and so forth that they believe anything said or done in a humorous manner must be meant, and meant as an act of hostility, and furthermore the ‘alleged’ humour of it as merely a veneer to hide a deeper insidious political purpose. For such is the limited mindset that says ‘everything is political’ and mean it, that it has such a narrow, simplistic and parochial outlook on the rest of the universe. For – in reality – most of the world, most of life, most of humanity is not political. The political is the aberration and therefore those that think that everything is political are themselves an aberration, which is why the bloody stoats find them all so fur-wettingly funny.

Monday Poem: Out Of Reach

Out Of Reach

So, we are left behind
Alone on this cold shoreline
And staring far away
To the horizon’s end
While telling all those tales
We can recall too well.

We know his story ended
When he took the long step
Out into the cold darkness,
Beyond where we could reach,
Beyond our voices crying
Calling for him to come home.

This Familiar Beach

There is time and there is the sand that runs through your fingers as you sit on this familiar beach. There was a time when your eyes watched closely over these same sands as your children ran down to the sea and across to rock pools full of the life of this new world for them to discover.

Now those children have gone away to walk the beaches of their own lives, leaving you here to watch the waves falling over each other in their own hurry to claim this beach for themselves.

The tide too, though, will turn and those waves retreat back into the folds of the sea, leaving the beach deserted, and the children’s running footprints washed away as though those days too have long gone.

You come to the beach not to bring those days back, but because you know the sea can always answer those questions we ask about the transitory and the eternal; just by the way it drags itself up these beaches, and back again, every day.

So you walk down to the edge of the sea to leave it some more, new, footprints for it to erase the next time it returns, and you know, deep down, that will be enough.