Wallflowers

Wallflowers

(couplets waiting to dance)

I held this tiny flame of love

Amid the howling storm

The silent night slipped like a glove

And kept my fingers warm

………

The bits of blue sky I see

are an illusion

brought on by lack of sleep

………………..

And television makes us

Like the Lady of Shallott

……

I wasn’t offended

- until you said sorry

Cohen (on R4 “Leonard and Marianne”)

Only one thing made him happy

And when that was gone

Everything made him happy

Fame

I was born famous

It took me years

to achieve this level of obscurity

Women are the master race

It is because we are wise

that we refuse to dominate

Mushroom Pate

So, I had this friend and we met in pubs and discussed philosophy, feminism and beer; and one day I invited her to dinner with myself and then partner.

“Can I bring my boyfriend?” she asked

“Sure”, I said.

And then it happened. She dropped those two words into the soup of my life which changed it forever. She said:

“He’s vegan”

I swallowed. I licked my lips. Was that a shred of steak between my teeth?

“Oh, fine”, I said.

Vegan? What? What? Vegan? What to do? What do vegans eat? What shall I do? Reader, I rushed around in a flat spin. The truth was, I didn’t have a clue what vegans ate. All I knew was what they didn’t eat. If only I’d had the internet in those dark days – I could have looked up www.vegansociety.com

As it was I rushed around Sainsbury’s muttering: “Pasta – no, mayonnaise – no, pizza – no, cheese, no” like some demented mantra. In the end I made salad and got a mushroom pate from Mark’s and Spencer’s (“ooh! Mark’s and Spencer’s! They’re so good, aren’t they? They’re so good!” as Alexei Sayle used to say – and how true)

www.ciao.co.uk/Marks_Spencer_Department_Stores__Review_5061300

- and everything was fine. He laughed at my jokes and pretended to like the pate. It took us another 3 years to get together – a bit like “When Harry Met Sally”

www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/ -

Interestingly, there was a bit of telepathy involved here. After we got together and I was waiting to go to India, Mark phoned me. I was thinking about that line in “When Harry Met Sally” he said.

I gasped. “I was just watching that!” I said.

And it was on video too – so he couldn’t have been thinking about TV schedules.

Spooky!

More marital bliss anon

Pip pip!

Oh all right then…

If you insist, here’s the story of Mark and me. I was in Spain, he was in a deep depression, living on one turnip a week (like Baldrick) blackadder.powertie.org/transcripts/3/1/Then I came back from Spain. I was at a total cusp in my life, if cusp is the word I want. I could go back to Spain, I could stay in India where I was headed, I could go somewhere else. The one thing I did not want was to go back to an England which, still crazy after all these years, reeked of Thatcher. And then, quite suddenly, Mark and I got together. After I collected my visa for India, we went to the Tate and then on to a pub I knew on the Embankment. Then in a drastic moment, over beer and sandwiches, I blurted out something like, “I feel I want to marry you and have your babies!” he was quite taken aback but said yes. Apparently his reaction was as nothing to that of the people at the next table.

And all because of some mushroom pate. Of which more anon….

Incidentally, the word “drastic” occurs with comic frequency in one of my favourite childhood books, Professor Branestawm.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Branestawm

Leonard (again)

You may not be the greatest bard

in the land

though some said you were

and others said you should be

(but spelt it differently)

For Robert Browning

When I started this blog, only two people read it – me and Hanif Kureishi. Now, only I read it.

(That’s a joke – although Hanif started me on this path, for which I thank him, I don’t believe he’s ever read it.)

I am going to write a poem called “My Last Post” – a little tribute to Browning’s My Last Duchess.

mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/275duchess.htm

Two Countries Divided by a Common Language

America to Britain: “hast taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to cuss”

Britain to America: “you are welcome to use the language, but whatever our computers tell us, we will never forget that we had it first”

(The title is of course a quotation from George Bernard Shaw) forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=146783

Goodnight

goodnight world. If anyone gets this message in a bottle, come and see me on my desert island. I decided on my Desert Island Discs the other day. I was quite restrained – only 4 were Cohen.

Dear Leonard

you are the hero of all of us lost soldiers, all the sinners who don’t know which way to face when we kneel.

Ich Bin Ein Sinner

(for Noel Edmonds)

Ask not

what your universe can do for you

ask what you

can do

for your universe

More Messages in a Bottle

I said to Leonard Cohen, how lonely does it get?

Leonard Cohen hasn’t answered yet

Is there anybody out there? Sometimes I think I’m alone in cyberspace epart from the spammers who live next door. I hear them coughing all night long. (In cyberspace no-one can hear you scream). Yesterday I wrote a poem about the paradoxes of fame and how I both desire and shun it.

More Latin Made Simple:

sui generis – a large Chinese takeaway

causus belli – fattening food

Magna Carta – a film starring both Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine

More Letters to Leonard

Dear Leonard

I came to see you in July. Still waiting for you to return the visit. Still, I guess you have a lot of fans to get round before Hannukah. It amuses me to think of you as some dark Jewish Santa, whispering a poem down every chimney.

Would you like your mince pie now?

Love

L.

“There’s nothing wrong with not being Tommy Cooper”

This is what Mark said to me this morning.  I am trying to believe it.  If you don’t know Tommy Cooper, well – he’s dead. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Cooper And so am I.

Gray’s Elegy

“There was a sort of lateness

to her sort of greatness”

Not Drowning but Waving…

With this blog it sometimes feels as if I’m on a desert island sending out these messages in bottles without hope or expectation.  I thought I saw a steamer once on the horizon but then it vanished…

Anyway, here’s today’s poem – very topical

Glitter

All that Glitters is not gold
- Man, you made my blood run cold