Winter Morning

The wind howls, cold and lonely, every day blowing us deeper into darker mornings. The colder nights stretch themselves over the daylight hours. Thick dark clouds, like blankets, cover the sky. The weak, ineffectual sunlight, washy as watercolour turns the world pale. The horizon shortens as the world narrows and limits itself.

The gaze is lowered as the body hunches into itself against the cold. The wind blows rain against the face, Ice-needles.

Everywhere is too far to go.

I do not want to go out there, to walk through a landscape made alien by the winter weather. I do not want to go walking over the cold, hard, dead ground, beneath the skeletons of trees that shiver under the dull grey-uniformed sky.

Here we can sit, with a raging fire and hot drinks. We can be cosy together in the artificial warm, under artificial light, as the wind and rain batter futilely at the walls.

We will sit here warm and safe together as wind and rain knock on the window, eager to be let in.

Un-Mollified Small Mammal Awareness

These days it is not that often we have to call out the 24-hour mobile Small Mammal Mollifiers with their pre-saturated transverse small mammal mollifying devices, even in the wild untamed jungle of the public transport system, except - of course – on Tuesdays during the first month after the Christmas holidays.

Nowadays, with such experts always at the ready, the danger of having to deal with any un-mollified small mammal during the course of one’s usual working day has been reduced almost to zero. In fact, recent government-sponsored research has revealed that anyone born after the date of Paul McCartney’s first solo post-Beatles beard will probably never have come across any un-mollified small mammal during their use of public transport, unless – of course – they are resident in one of the outer London boroughs.

Of course, back before the explosion in small portable consumer electronics, any small mammal mollifiyer encountering an un-mollified small mammal would have had recourse to the slide rule, cheese sandwich, plumb bob and portable tensing racket that had been the standard small animal mollification tools from almost the beginning of the Victorian era. Back in those days too, the various small mammal mollifying stances and ritual incantations were a basic part of the school syllabus with even a child of as young as 12 being able to snap into the Crouching Stockbroker, Bewildered Dental Hygienist In A Chinese Takeaway stance as immediately on hearing the standard initial small-mammal mollifying incantations such as ‘Oh shit! What the hell is that thing scuttling around the wainscoting?’ or ‘Run away! Run away! It’s a monster!’

These days, though, small mammal mollification is best left to the fully-certificated expert, unless you want to be sued – or severely beaten about the head and neck with a sharpened portable tensing racquet.

Monday Poem: In The Name Of Blood

In The Name Of Blood

We speak of this blood
As though it has some property beyond
The sheer magic of its redness.
We give names to these dreams and call them true,
Expecting the world to conform.
We have no plan, just vague notions
There is something beyond the mere redness,
Calling our blood home.

Finding it too hard
To accept how a mere ape needs just one
More small step to grow up human,
We search for reasons, we search for more clues
In the dark blankets of the sky.
We want to be greater than this,
Despite knowledge, despite history, we think
We do deserve it.

So now, we search for
Stardust in the lines of our blood as we
Dream of our final redemption.
But, let us go and we will fall
From the sky as we dream of endless flight.
Falling, always falling. We look
Up at the stars, their promise of future
And learn how to wish.

Always falling down.
There is so much distance and so much space.
We fall between the stars and know,
What it really means to be so alone
As blood seeps into the staining
Ground from the still body of just
One more child. And still we do not learn how
All blood is alike.

Political Parties To Have Quotas For Women MPs

Apparently, it seems the UK’s political parties feel that the rest of the British population would despise politicians far less if there were more women amongst their ranks, despite the experience of the last few years of increased numbers of female MPs.
So, despite evidence that most women would much rather chew their own heads off, or – if the worst came to the worst – endure a full-on threesome with Gordon Brown and Jack straw, than even consider entering the mind-numbing, soul-destroying slough of despond that is modern political life, the political parties are seemingly determined to have more female, and other ‘minority’ MPs in an attempt to make their publicity photographs appeal to as wide a demographic as possible. All this despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of voters have no interest in the sex, ethnicity or any other diversity tick-box of their elected representatives, being only really interested in whether the candidate has some competence for the job… for a change.
As one voter said:

The trouble is that politics attracts the kind of people who are interested in politics, with an almost pathological need to stick their noses into things they have very little understanding of, when what the country needs to elect are people who have a deep fascination with whether our bins get emptied on time, or realise that criminals are not just an excitingly exotic subculture, or that the ethnic diversity of the BBC’s weathermen makes no difference to the amount of snow that falls on us.

However, some current MPs have expressed concerns that an increase in the number of women MPs could bring about changes to the traditions of the Houses of Parliament. Consequently, a senior political party figure moved to reassure the current batch of parliamentarians, saying:

There is absolutely no reason why women can’t be as inept, venal, incompetent, or corrupt, as men, as the present Labour government has so overwhelmingly demonstrated.

Unfortunately, though, it seems as though the plans of the political parties will come to naught as women, it seems would much rather do a job that matters than strut and posture on the political stage for at best a few moments of glory, but mostly to see all that they once believed about the world and how it works crushed under the careering juggernaut of reality. As a veteran BBC political commentator said:

Frankly, most women – like most men - have more sense than to waste their time in the petty bickering and backstabbing of political parties when they can get plenty of that at any family get-together. So, in order to meet their quotas the political parties will have to have pressgangs hiding near shoe shops and cake shops ready to pounce on any unsuspecting women who even vaguely represents that party’s demographic. It is the only way they’ll get sufficient numbers to meet these ludicrous targets they’ve set themselves.

Friday Poem: Infestation

Infestation

I warned you about the danger
of letting poems into the house.

Now we have verse everywhere,
sonnets asleep in the kitchen
and bawdy ballads in the bedrooms.

We have cupboards filled with couplets
and villanelles on the veranda.

At night, I hear triolets
scratching together in the walls,
and I found enjambment curled up
asleep in my pyjamas.

There are rhymes without reason
all over this household,
and anapaests in the attic.

There are wild stanzas
performing free verse on the lawn
right in front of the neighbours.

There's an epic hogging the bathroom
and the gasman can't read the metaphor
all the sestinas blocking up the cellar.

The laundry basket is overflowing
with a load of dirty limericks.

Yesterday, I tripped over
a haiku in the hallway.
There's alliteration all around us
It's a pain in the assonance.

Now, we are going to have to call
for a professional prosodist
and have the whole house scanned.

I warned you about the danger
of letting poems into the house.

 

(Published Envoi 131 February 2002)

No Better Than They Ought To Be

Slingback Pencilcase first came to public attention as the world’s first celebrity Rodent Disconcerter on the C4 ‘reality’ programme People Who Are No Better Than They Ought To Be, a programme that purported to be an in-depth investigation into the cleanliness standards of some of the more hygienically-dubious people of this country. The programme, however, instead turned out to be a must-watch for those who like to tut, sigh, and shake their heads at the slovenly habits of those who seem to spend their entire lives eating cold food out of cans whilst sitting in their rather grotty underwear in front of a constantly-on hyper massive TV set: i.e. people not all that far removed from the programme’s intended audience.

However, as the makers of this type of ‘reality’ programme discovered, even these programmes need the stereotypical good guys and bad guys that once populated the simplistic dramas that this new type of ‘reality’ programme eventually replaced in the schedules.

Some of the earliest ‘reality’ programmes were even built around the cold heartless villain who in days of yore would be tying helpless victims to railway lines, but these days callously votes off the less heart-warmingly photogenic of the contestants on ‘talent’ shows, whilst the heroes of these types of programme, like Slingback Pencilcase went out – armed in her case with only a mouse trap and a large bloodied mallet – to do battle - if only symbolically against the increasing yobification of this once great mediocre quite nice all-right-I-suppose nation.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time there was a time that had a Once upon it. The time didn't mind all that much, just as long as the Once kept still and didn't keep trying to scratch its ears all the time. But - as we all know - the Once has very itchy ears indeed. Furthermore, the Once always felt as though all it needed was just one more really good scratch to sort out that itch once and for all.

But it never did.