All the Puddings of our Desires

Still, it is not always the case that the use of the lemon meringue between consenting adults should be regarded as something private, especially when the aforesaid pie is about to be used in an erotic context (or, even, contest) on the local byways or thoroughfares, especially on Tuesday afternoons, although for those in Ludlow or Skegness, Wednesday mornings should also be taken into consideration, especially during the one day of the British summer when all manner of folks could be out and about, staring in wonder at the lack of drizzle.

Still, though, there is a long tradition of pudding-based erotic activity in these fair to middling British isles, hence the well-known spotted dick and custard of long tradition, as well as the jam roly-poly. Everyone, too, knows just why the puritans banned the Christmas pudding, and – as we now know – it had nothing to do with the amount of alcohol poured into it and/or the diners about to take part in the ritual of the pudding as they divested themselves of enough clothing to make the whole matter something to remember during the long dull days of the remaining winter. After all, the British winter is the main motivating factor behind the invention of the television, that and wanting to get out of the necessity of holding a conversation with any visiting relatives.

However, all that is beside the point, but do remember if you are about to take your lemon meringue out into the highways and byways of his once-great nation for a spot of outdoor eroticism, always make sure you warm your spoon first.

Monday Poem: Seasons of Life

Seasons of Life

Expectation is the first warm day
when spring shrugs our coats off.
The pale bared skin of women
displaying hints of times to come
and the possibility of soft touching

as the evening shades into darkness
and we lie together wondering
why so much of this world
always lies so far out of reach,
especially on languid days

when it seems the heat
is too heavy to lift away
from the damp skin
and being too close binds us
together in ways beyond
all we ever expected

while we wait for the cooling breezes
that the darkness is sure to bring
as we turn away from each other
and wait for slow sleep to take us
on far journeys into colder times.

The Seas of the Night

All those dreams that sail by on the seas of the night and left in the port of the morning as we set out to stride into the heartland of day, leaving those dreams at the mercy of the tides of time and of memory.

She was one of those dreams I left behind as I made my way into the lands of my day.

I left her there to face the sea storms of time and face the battering by the winds of memory. I forgot about her as I went about exploring the hinterland of the day.

Later, as I drew closer to the shores of that night, though, I again began to smell her scent on the sea breezes the night brought down to where I stood on the dark shore, waiting for those dream boats to carry me far across the deep waters of the night. Those deep waters, where so many have been lost amongst the wreckage of their dreams as the night took them to itself, drowning them amongst the flotsam of their dreams, with the mermaids of the night leading them by the hand, dragging them down to those sunken cities from which no sailor of the night ever returns.

That night too, I saw her waving to me from the night ocean’s swell, waiting there for me to dive into my dreams and take the hand of my own mermaid, letting her sing to me her songs of drowning in the darkness as the deep night washed over me and I took her hand to dive deeper than I had ever dived before.

Long Live the King

It is a memory.

It is a dream.

Even now, after all these long bloody years, it still has the power to wake me –wide-eyed - with a scream almost falling from my lips.

The battle was over, we had won. I stood there, bloody sword in my hand, but still not entirely sure that I still lived. Then Lord Bernwick staggered across the bodies that lay all about me. He held his one upper arm, a bloodied rag wrapped around it, with his sword hand.

‘You are wounded, sir,’ I said.

‘This… it does not matter,’ he replied, dismissing it with a shake of his head. ‘Your… your father, sire… the king…’

I did not believe him, but still I followed him past the corpses, past those slowly becoming corpses as their screams faded and their blood spilled all around us as we walked. There were some already going through the dead and dying, looking for what could be found: money, jewellery, arms, armour – a battlefield is as wasteful of goods and chattels as it is of life and blood.

My father, the king, lay there; his men at arms gathered around him already with the air of those who mourn at a funeral. I could see that my father was no longer whole. He had been sliced, butchered. One leg was gone and there was little the Blood Priests could do to save him. Those that were not chanting rituals to the gods were drenched in the king’s blood as they laboured to save him, even though they knew it was all in vain and pointless.

I knelt and he smiled at me, a smile of agony, but still a smile. He was not a father who had smiled often and a king who had smiled less.

‘I’m glad to see you still live…,’ he said. ‘…unlike me. You, my son, are king now.’

Then he died; screaming in agony as his death, as his injuries, overpowered the feeble medicines the Blood Priests had administered to him.

When I stood again, I was king… and that was when the nightmares began.

Two Worlds Apart

Then the time came and we were no longer alone together. The rest of the world came back into our small quiet life and drove us apart again.

We had been living quietly, away from the crowds and the cities. We were living where no-one knew our real names, or had any idea what we had done, back in that life we’d left behind.

We knew it was a vain hope, but still we tried to make ourselves believe that the two different worlds of then and now could never intersect; hoping we’d left the old world far behind and it would soon forge about us.

That old world though, never forgets. That it is its role, its function. It exists to gather data and then act on that data. Our files had no last pages in them, with no resolution tying up the ends of the data. Our data were still loose and untied. The old world does not like loose ends. It is terrified that someone, someone from outside of it will see those loose ends flailing in the breeze and will take hold of one of them and tug on it, bringing that whole secret dangerous world tumbling down on those who live inside it.

Jane and I, though, thought we’d left enough tangles in the threads of our old lives to give the illusion they had been tied off and that there was no more data, no loose ends. Realistically, we’d hoped we would have longer, but that early morning - as we lay together in those small hours neither of us could ever sleep through - we heard the cars arriving; engines off, lights off, coasting down the lane to the cottage.

We did not speak, didn’t even glance at each other. We were off the bed, dressed with our escape packs ready before the cars had even stopped moving. By the time the car doors had crept open and then closed quietly we were in the woods behind the house, running… again….

The Handsome Princess

Once upon a time there was a handsome princess, not the usual course of affairs in a magical kingdom it is true, but they had been having a few problems with the magic in that kingdom and the wizards had still not quite managed to get it working properly again.

The handsome princess, though, was not that bothered. She had always had a strong dislike of dragons and the way they flew about setting fire to all and sundry, so she was rather pleased that the general dragon-killing responsibilities in the kingdom now – it seemed – came under her remit.

So did rescuing any virgin princes, which – she discovered – was a bit of a problem, because event he most inept and socially maladroit of princes did not stay a virgin for long.

There was - apparently and much to the surprise of the handsome princess – something about princes that other women found rather attractive. The handsome princess thought maybe it must be the fact that it was well-known that princes had huge... tracts of land and therefore any women with her head screwed on – and seeing the limited career opportunities in being a witch – would do her best to snag herself a prince.

However, not that many people seemed to be interested in snagging themselves a handsome princess, no matter how many dragons she killed or virgin(-ish) princes she rescued from imprisonment in high towers (it had been discovered that the only way to keep a prince virgin long enough to see him married off to the progeny of a nearby kingdom was to lock him in a high tower).

Still, the handsome princess thought, one day she would live happily ever after, after all it was in the contract, and even if the wizards couldn't get the magic working properly, the lawyers could always make sure the contracts were honoured and that she could – therefore rest assured that one day her prince would come – hopefully while she was – at least – in the same room as him.

The Problems of Domesticity

There she stood - in all her naked glory – holding the cauliflower in a rather provocative manner.

Of course, by then, I was more than a little eager for the delights of vegetable curry, but that had to be put on hold for a while, while we did the sex thing. So, afterwards, as you well know, there was little else the cauliflower was good for.

Apart from that, obviously.

It is strange how, just because of the mere fact of someone's nudity or otherwise provocative behaviour can call a halt – brief or otherwise – to many worthwhile domestic activities, like putting all the tinned goods in the cupboard into alphabetical order, or rearranging the domestic cleaning items into a more aesthetically pleasing manner.

Maybe it is Western society's obsession with sex in all its manifest forms, or maybe it is just that naked dance she does with the dusters and a tin of Pledge, but whatever it is it seems that the housework is often neglected.

It also tends to make any sudden unexpected visitors somewhat nervous when they see us eventually come to the door, hastily-donned clothing in disarray and sweating profusely whilst claiming we were only engaged in a spot of light housework.

Luckily, none of them has accidentally come across the post-coital remains of the cauliflower, hastily secreted behind the sofa at the sound of the doorbell, otherwise there would be much talk in the neighbourhood.

The End of the Golden Age

We were born at the end of the Golden Age. All of our childhood and our youth were spent teetering on the edge of chaos. There were the wars, the terrorist attacks, the strikes and other forms of strife both within our civilisation and against our civilisation, where its enemies tried to tear it all down.

Somehow, though, for all those long years we were growing up: our world, our civilisation, our country, managed to carry on. Things fell apart: there were political, social, economic and all manner of other crises and disasters, but somehow we managed to have a home, our parents had jobs – most of the time - and we managed to survive it all, until we were grown up ourselves.

It was then it all fell apart.

There had been a long war, far away mostly, lasting for most of my childhood and teenage years. It was fought far away; in desert lands inhospitable and remote, where the alliances between tribes and warlords seemed to shift like the sands and the homelands of these mostly nomadic peoples.

Our soldiers, our boys, were caught up in the middle of all those shifting alliances and shifting sands, lost in a shifting landscape where this morning’s allies became this evening’s enemies and yesterday’s brave warriors today’s forces of evil.

Mostly, though, the war did not touch us. There were, though, sporadic terrorist outrages and this led to suspicion and fear.

The foreign was no longer a land of romance and mystery, a place of possibility. Now, the foreign was a land of death and those that we came across in our daily lies were regarded with suspicion and fear as everything we’d ever known and taken for granted fell apart around us.

Monday Poem: Beginning Again

Beginning Again

Out of the dark you came to me
to show me the way through,
out to the other side of darkness.

I held your hand as the rain
slowed to a stop and the sun
peered out from behind the clouds.

The world turned from grey
to green again, as we walked away
together to find some new place

where we could build a new life
out of the remains left behind
by so many wasted days I spent

waiting for life to begin again
when all I needed was someone

to take my hand and show me how
to begin all over again.

Not Needed

Even then, though, there were moments when it seemed as though something could happen, at least when she moved slowly through the morning to come back to me as though she needed me.

I pretended to need her too. We both pretended that we had found something new, something with each other we’d – neither of us – found before. We, of course, were lying to each other. Sometimes, now, I think we were even lying to ourselves too.

She did not want or need me and I did not want or need her. We just wanted – for ourselves – something to fill a gap, some way of not being alone that would do until something better came along.

She, unlike me, had never got used to being alone. She came from a large family; she always had people around her, back when she was young and growing up. She had never known silence, quiet and solitude until she ended up here, and she ran from it – right into my bed.

Me, though… I have always been a loner, if not alone. I never seemed to find out what it was that I needed; which key it would take to unlock the secret of how to get along with others. Other people to me have always seemed alien, strange; unknowable and incomprehensible. I have learnt over the years how to be alone.

I thought I would stay alone until that day she fell into my arms, slipping and tumbling on the ice, all alone until I caught her and we fell into each other’s loneliness, like solitary explorers bursting into a treasure-filled tomb that has been lost and closed for centuries.

The Rescue

When the time came, it seemed as though we’d been waiting for far too long. Some had given up hope; others – of course – had died long before the day they’d lived and hoped for ever arrived.

We, the survivors, well… at first we thought we were the lucky ones. We could not believe the sails on the horizon were real; just another optical illusion where the sea and the sky met, just more clouds that resembled the white billowing sails of a ship at sea.

We had, for years before, kept someone on watch on the high cliffs along the beach and ready at the signal fire we patiently rebuilt after every storm washed it into the bay far below.

Eventually, though, the watch had become spasmodic with no-one noticing it had stopped, until that day when Jake came tumbling out of the water, his fishing nets forgotten behind him, yelling, screaming and pointing. At first, most of us thought it was another attack by a shark and we rushed for spears, bows and the few muskets that still had shot and powder.

Then we realised what he was yelling, saw what he was pointing at, then – as one – we turned to look back up at the cliff, the deserted look-out spot and the signal fire that had not been replenished, or remade, for such a long time.

The ship, though, had seen our island. They needed fresh water and food, so they sent a boat out. We stood, all of us, there on the beach watching that boat rowing towards us, thinking that – at last – here was our rescue.

It didn’t take long, though, after that for us to discover our apparent rescue was nothing of the sort.

Talent Contests and their Pitfalls

She had all the necessary items inventoried and prepared for the great day, up to and including the ukulele and the badminton racquets. I, of course, was more than prepared with the bee-keeper's hat, and the shin-pads polished to a lustre that had already dazzled several airline pilots and caused a certain amount of consternation to some orbiting astronauts.

Still, however, there was the matter of the cheese to resolve. She – as is her wont – had implied that the day would not go entirely to my satisfaction if she was presented with anything other than a decent segment of Cheshire, whilst I had – up until the moment she revealed the contents of the penalty clauses - had my heart set on a tasty wedge of Red Leicester.

However, that was all to come. First we had to get through the preliminary rounds. These local contests have come on apace since the days when an error-free waltz or a jar of home made chutney was enough to scoop the prize. These days, in these times of celebrity-driven culture and a seeming unending obsession by the viewing public and the TV channels to inundate us with more and more talent shows, it all means that the bar these days is set so much higher.

So, therefore, our re-enactment of the Battle of Crecy, featuring our home-made scones, a trained performing politician and a (admittedly somewhat historically-dubious) man-eating tiger, had spent several weeks in rehearsal and there was now a danger of us running out of politicians, or having the tiger die from a diet consisting mainly of prospective candidates for local party selection, before it even managed to get its jaws around the cabinet minister we had managed to lure down to his own constituency, on the day of the contest, with the promise of several plain brown envelopes and an eventual elevation to the peerage.

However, due to a mistake by the - apparently - rather short-sighted tiger, we were disqualified in the semi-finals. The final too had to be abandoned until a replacement judge could be found. They did not – though – blame the tiger, just wished it could have got to the MP first, before it satiated its appetite on the competition judge.

Thursday Poem: Out of Touch

Out of Touch

Your hands could carve the shape of her
from empty air and memory
and take her back with you
to all those remembered places
to unmake all those mistakes you made.

She could grow from within this emptiness
into solidity, and you could walk together again.
Time and memory would no longer
hold you prisoner for another hollow day.

She would never take that path,
that journey away, you would never see
that train disappearing around that curve
away from your shared lives, going out,
far from your world to a new land
you cannot reach, you can never touch.

That Inevitable Banjo

Still, I suppose it had to happen. That is the thing with the banjo, it entails a certain amount of inevitability, even when there is not the threat of a pomegranate in the immediate vicinity. Having said that, though, it does tend to add that extra frisson of excitement to the rather jaded prospect of another game of Strip Risk. The tactical variations by the threat of banjo-related mayhem alone is enough to make even the removal of an outer garment by one's opponents seem well worth the effort of deploying another few armies across a disputed border.

As for the pomegranate, as avid readers of the many Strip Risk playing forums on the interwebnets will enthusiastically attest, it had done more to enliven the game since the introduction of tactical baby oil back in the late 1970s.

Still, to my mind, when you are down to your underpants and your last three armies in Mongolia and are surrounded by opposition players who are still in their donkey jackets and wellies, there is much to be said for the surprise use of the castanets, but that – I'm afraid – is for advanced players of the game only and, thus, beyond the scope of this particular article.

The Weight of the Years

It was not easy, but then there aren’t that many easy things when you get older. Life is easy when you are young, even though – sometimes – it doesn’t seem like it.

Life is light when you are young; there is a floating freedom where life takes itself off like a kite caught by the wind, only a slender string holding it back.

As you grow older, there are more and more strings: marriage, work, children, all of them tying you to the ground. The kite of your life is heavier too, you know too much about how hitting the ground from height hurts. You no longer want to go high just to see how far up the sky is, you no longer want to be free to let the wind take you where it wants. There is too much down on the ground pulling you down, too much gravity to fly free.

Then there are the times when all those strings that tie you to the ground get entangled, when marriage and a new lover wrap themselves around each other, when the children become knots you can’t untie, when the string of work frays and comes apart, leaving you floating away from the work that tied you to the ground, but also defined you. When the string breaks you are no longer a kite, you become a toy for the winds of chance to play with, to rip you away from everything you’ve ever known, to send you spinning away into the clouds before crashing you to the ground someplace far from everything you’ve ever known.

Sometimes – even though it is never easy – you want to hold tight to those strings and never let go.

Monday Poem: No Gift To Bring

No Gift to Bring

I have no gift to bring,
this morning all I have
is a new day waiting hidden
behind curtains I can open

for you, to show you the day
spread out and waiting
for you to walk out into it.
I can take you by the hand

and lead you down the stairs
away from your warm dreams
left wrapped up in the sheets,
out into this cool morning

where the bright springtime sun
can light up your day and take you
barefoot across dew-damp grass
and out into the rest of your day.

When the Darkness was Gone

When the darkness was over, when the darkness had gone, it was like a new world out there once more. The trees were turning from cold grey sentinels back into green life and there were the early spring flowers too, bringing back colour to this once-dead world. When you turned eyes-closed to face towards the sun there was a feeling of warmth, of life.

When she came to me in the night, her body was no longer cold, shivering. She no longer clung to me, needing my warmth, my heat. Now she wrapped herself around me with her usual languid grace, not with urgency, a need to hold on to me to keep the cold at bay, but with another - more human – urgency; the need for closeness.

The day were beginning to spread too, out into the mornings, pushing the dawn further and further back into what had been the night. Now, we were awoken by birdsong and sunlight, rather than the freezing cold and the moaning wind. The evenings too, grew longer and we could feel ourselves relaxing, stretching out from the cramped, cold huddling of winter.

It seemed as though we, as with the rest of the world, were opening up, unfolding out of winter into the new brighter spring, as though everything was beginning once again.

The Door into Possibility

Then, there we were with the morning pooling around us under the bluest skies we had ever seen. The day waited there, just beyond the doorway for us to dive into it and swim together across its hours to some deserted island it had made for us. A place where we would fall on the beach together and lie there side by side, watching the few lonely clouds cross that uneventful sky.

There would be time; there would be time for both of us to take the time to explore each other. There would be no hurried fumbling with impatient clothes in a room rented by the hour, then no hurried escape back to a life that neither of us knew how to escape.

There would be time, time to watch the waves of the hours wash up on our beach, time to watch the changing of the tides. There would be too, at the edge of the beach, a hut where we could watch the sun setting over that sea of hours, setting on the old lives we had swum away from forever.

There would be a long night of languid motion and knowledge that this was a new forever and those lives we had left behind far across the seas would never come to drag us back to those lives where we’d lived so long in chains, shackled to slow dragging minutes, empty hours and wasted days.

The Crisis of Democracy in the UK

 

Earlier today it was announced by a governmental sacrificial spokesperson that the government has decided it needs more taxation money. Despite already taking most of people's money before they even have a chance to touch, stroke or fondle it, the government has now decreed that it needs to take even more of it. As the government spokesperson pointed out. 'After all, if we didn't take it off them, people would only go and spend it – more than likely on things we don't really approve of.'

However, a government-sponsored survey has recently disclosed that without some serious investment by the government, the British state will soon run out of walls up which they can piss away their tax revenues.

As the spokesman said: 'Unless there is a massive increase by about 20% per annum in the number of walls being built, then there is a very real danger that the government will no longer have enough walls in the country to piss taxpayers money up against.'

Some analysts are concerned that if the UK government runs out of these walls in the next few years, it could mean that governments in the future may have to piss tax payers money up against overseas walls, which could - in the long term – do untold harm to the ability of home-grown governments to waste hard-earned tax payers money in the way which UK voters have come to expect, which could – in a very real sense – lead to a crisis of democracy.

Thursday Poem: We Wear These Lives

We Wear These Lives

We are here, but this
is not what we want
and here is not the place.

You are not quite who
I was looking for,
and I am not what you want.

This place is not the place
we expected to be.
We wear these usual lives
while we wait for life to begin.

We wait, ready to shrug off
these lives and step
into a new world we know
is almost within reach,

yet just too far to touch.
We know we will know it
only when we see it.

The Consolations of Nudity

Once upon a time you dressed so fine* which, to the minds of most philosophers does tend to undervalue the appeal of nudity, especially to those in the near vicinity of the undressed person – providing of course that the undresser is not too hard on the eye of the undressees nearby. In which case, there could be legitimate health and safety concerns, especially if the undressees all flee for the exits as a panicking mob.

Still, as they say: …..

Well, I'm pretty sure they would say something, after all in situations like this they tend to always have some pithy apophthegm to beguile us with, don't they?'

Smart-arsed bastards....

Anyway, putting that to one side while standing back to admire its rather fetching attractiveness for a moment....

It is time to step back for a moment from the... er.... rigours of philosophy to contemplate something rather less interesting than the possibility of someone in the near vicinity getting their kit off, which makes most philosophers themselves wish they'd spent less time amongst the dusty tomes and more time out meeting people with a disinclination to remain inside their clothing, but still - apparently – according to Boethius there are some Consolations of Philosophy, and he wrote that in prison, so - perhaps - he should know.

So, mind how you go**.

 

*Like a Rolling Stone – The Dylan

** Yes, It is a philosophy pun***

***Sorry****.

****Not really*****.

*****Sorry, that is.

For the Last Day

All those days that went by, leaving us alone together in that small room. We knew that, one day, that day would be the last day. We knew a day would come when we would walk out of that room together and then walk off, apart, alone; back to our separate lives and never see each other again, except – perhaps – across a crowded room where we would exchange brief, tentative, smiles of loss and regret before turning back to what our lives had since become.

There was always an urgency at the back of every moment we spent together, an unrecognised and unacknowledged understanding that these were stolen times; times taken out of our real lives. We knew, one day, the theft would be discovered and we would become fugitives from the lives we lived beyond that room.

We also knew that room was no more than a bolt-hole, a hideout; it was not a place where a new life could grow. Even if we managed to escape our old lives to build a new one together, we knew that it would not be in that room and that outside that room what we had would only ever, could only ever, crumble into dust in the harsh light of the outside world.

So, one day, when that final day came we were ready for it, we were expecting it, and we knew what to do as we kissed for one last time and stepped out through the door of that room, back into a world without each other.

Monday Poem: Dance the Spring

Dance the Spring

While singing songs to distant skies
we step and turn as we step and learn
to move again as spring returns.

That winter was so cold and hard
it needed many dances before
the first slow signs of spring were seen

and living could return once more
to take us on, out of the cold
and darkness, through the promised spring

towards the golden days of summer.
A season when it seems as though
the winter days could never return

even as the days grow shorter
again, while falling slowly towards
the winter like the leaves that fall

each floating slowly down to earth
twisting from the oldest trees
all while the birds prepare to chase

the sun across these skies above
and leaving us alone to face
the long cold nights and wondering

if we have the strength to dance
the spring and summer back again.

Public-Funded Art

Then there was the thing. Of course, those of us who saw it were rather impressed, especially when it caught the light as the sun rose in the mornings. However, since this was Britain, the sun often didn't bother to get up all that often, preferring to just let the clouds get a slightly lighter grey as the night's rain turned into the day's drizzle.

Some thought it was one of those sculptures that the publicly-funded arts bodies like to spend our tax money on so that they can give each other awards for it and tell each other how wonderfully inclusive it all is, while the rest of us wonder how long it will be before it falls over or some local freelance entrepreneur nicks it and melts it down for scrap.

Other's - citing the overwhelming avian evidence – thought it was some new method of attracting the town's hordes of feral pigeons all into a single location so they could use it as a form of communal toilet.

Some thought it was just one more way the area's politicians could get themselves on local telly – which was of course true – but since no-one actually watches or cares about the local TV news apart from wondering what on earth the newsreader thought she was doing when she chose her costume, the brief clip of the unveiling ceremony mostly went unnoticed and the local MP was still totally unrecognised as he walked the streets, which on later recollection of his stint as the local representative in the Houses of Parliament made him think he was rather lucky to have got away with it.

Still, there were some others – mostly the local loons who gathered underneath it to drink tinned lager – staying well out of the range of the pigeons above, of course – thought it was an alien space craft. Much to everyone else’s dismissive scorn, which unfortunately turned rather sour when the aliens emerged from their ship and proved the inebriated UFO watchers were right all along.

Thursday Poem: The Shadows Unfold

The Shadows Unfold

Here everything you’ve ever known.
lies on the ground in front of you.
You cannot turn away and look
towards a new bright day out there.

We have seen all we have seen, yet
it throws its shadows dark across
the walls of all our minds, unable
to break these chains we forged, we watch
each memory unfolding here
before us, unable to turn away.

The day begins as everything
now starts again, while shadows grow
unfolding themselves here in front
of us, each watching them encroach.

But what else can we do except
let every shadow fall across
our days, while waiting here to feel
the warming light from this morning sun.

Human Origins and Out of Africa

Even then, though, there were far too many of them to be entirely comfortable. After all, the fear of such things is almost instinctive in humans, probably dating back to when our ancestors still lived in the trees. For in those times, fleeing from an opinion pollster would have been limited by the lack of available sturdy branches for escape. If you have been corned on a fruit-bearing branch, for example, there is often no other way but out and then - rather too rapidly - down, when confronted by a clipboard-wielding hominid.

Archaeologists now tend to believe that it was a desire to escape questionnaires that led to the Neanderthals moving ever-northward to escape being asked their opinions on whether it had been a mistake to descend from the trees, or whether the ice-age would have been managed better by a party more interested in expansion of the state welfare system than one devoted to increasing mammoth hunting.

After the discovery of rudimentary clipboards carved from buffalo bone in Africa, it has - now – been assumed that homo-surveyist first appeared back in the very early days of humanity, which flatly contradicts the earlier assumption that opinion polls and market research had to wait until civilisation appeared in the fertile delta around the Tigris - Euphrates triangle.

However, it now seems that there has been a parallel evolution – of sorts – between normal human species, such as: homo-erectus, homo-hablis, homo-footballist, homo-blokedownthepubist and the homo-surveyist line going back way beyond the point where the human line split from the rest of the great apes. This goes – some scientists say – towards explaining the mysterious behaviour observed in the wild, where one orang-utan will approach another orang-utan whilst holding a large leaf in one hand and a pointed twig in the other, then attempt to proceeded to engaging the other in some sort of ritualized communication, usually much to the annoyance of the disturbed orang-utan, who was - up until then – quietly going about its own business.

Chasing the Possibility

Then what?

These things do not happen in isolation, entire of themselves. There is a before and there is an after… always.

There are those moments from the time you first see each other across some distance: a street, a crowded room, a path through the woods, or whatever it is. That time when you feel that the shape in the distance resolve itself not only into a fellow human being, but there is something there – even at a distance – that makes you turn towards each other.

I – of course – never believed such things, never though such things were possible, not until we saw each other through the crowd of some party. It was as though she came into focus and the rest of the scene: the people, the room, the music, the babble of voices, all faded out until I was staring down some tunnel of distance to where she stood, staring back at me.

It lasted only for an instant, but at the same time it felt longer; as though a whole lifetime passed between us.

Then, when that moment was over she was lost again in the crowd as a couple danced between us.

I picked up my drink and moved off, steering through the crowd like some ship threading through a reef-strewn archipelago. I tried to avoid contact with the people I passed, pretending not to hear when I heard my name called, and not noticing when someone touched my elbow,

Halfway there, though, some woman whose name I couldn’t recall stood in front of me and demanded to be kissed, then whispered in my ear that she would like us to find somewhere quieter and fuck ‘…like last time,’ she whispered, her hand moving down and squeezing. ‘I’m glad some part of you remembers me,’ she said, stroking her hand along it and trying to laugh off the hurt I saw in her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered back, pressing myself into her hand. ‘But I need to find someone… urgently.’

‘Won’t I do?’ She pouted, her fingers already playing with the tab of my zip.

‘Darling… there you are!’

I couldn’t remember her name or when we’d met, but I did remember her husband. As she turned away towards him, I slipped away and made my way over to where I had seen my mystery woman staring back at me.

She’d gone, of course.

Monday Poem: Not Suitable for Children

Not Suitable for Children

Not suitable for children, due to small parts,
Our conversation pauses, as quick steps
Dash about in the hallway beyond.

Only to begin again as the door
Stays closed, shutting out the sound
Of life and play and yet another song.

We used to know the words of so many songs.
We sang them together, driving on
Down all those long roads of living,

Until that day we parked here;
Ready to learn a new song of home.

A place for all we left unsaid to sit
And brood and wait. Ready to fill
All the pauses in our stilted conversations.