Hello Southport! We Are Lee Mack's Dibber

What better way to celebrate Lee Mack's birthday than by going to The British Lawnmower Museum to see his Dibber (stop sniggering at the back) and therefore prove that he was indeed telling the truth on Would I lie to You? It is slightly spooky to see Albert Pierrepoint's lawnmower suspended by a noose from the ceiling. Well worth the two pounds it costs to get in. And downstairs you can not only buy a brand new mower but a safe as well. The BLM - for all your grass-cutting and security needs.

Cognitive Dissonance in Blue and Grey

You’re always going to hate me,
It’s in your nature,
Colouring me in montone,

Pushing down the whole world,
Under one blue ocean,
Squeezing it to fit your single mind.

You were a towering non-believer,
Immune to the false hypnosis,
Armed with the real,

The sparking arc of ignorance,
Enlightened by knowing,
What you didn’t know,

Weaponised out of existence,
Until you were some shadow,
Talked of in low voices,

Marked for death and resurrection,
A figurehead of evolution,
Absorbing vitriol like a sunset.

But some bullet got you later,
A venom-polluted shell,
Painted delicately in tribal colours,

Which diffused like river dyes,
Released to trace the hidden track,
Of unknown tributaries,

Through your blood and brain,
Like the mad dilution you still deny,
(It pains me to agree).

And you hate and package,
Whole peoples as of one mind,
To kill all those that oppose,

Or end them, badging them as void,
Imagining yourself as target,
Their shining path objective.

There’s a military camp reflected,
In your censure,
Gold braided generals in the films,

You run unhindered when alone,
Stamping, escalating columns,
Irreligious armies mobilised.

What peace is this that comes with boots,
With tracks and guttering exhausts,
To tear up the land with cavalry?

What truce and truth from afterburners,
Prises answers from the poverty,
The dust and refugee,

Already sensitive and sinister,
Suspicious of the aid from troops,
And you in their face?

I’m sensitive and wrong,
The face of a new European poet,
Delighting in my lack of fight.

You’re tough and pulsing,
Threatening to burst your vessel,
A blood-spitting snake,

Coughing up the black smoke,
Of generations,
Breathing in sick history,

To report your fears of invasion,
Of demographic infiltration,
Of a nation sleep walking,

Out of your English bed and bedrock,
Over the hills of Jerusalem,
And into the distant grey.

... But Not Here

I Was There Right!

How did she get that dress under the table?

I Wasn't There Right?

War Memorial - Port Sunlight (Clouds from Wharram Percy)

Satellites

We're blank and in holding patterns,
Stalled in void and care of government,
Skating along in a permanent present,
Wasted in the quiet and blinding sun,
Perfect children hiding from late rain,
In bus-shelters and scarred cement,
Our shadows rippling at our sides,
Made permanent by this long drought,
And the grit of our own cortices.

But being new and unflawed minds,
We sigh and with hot, shallow breaths,
We shall overcome in any generation,
And being unoccupied and beautiful,
We need no understanding of the world,
Or thoughts of future sustenance,
The blistering road burns our eyes,
The light sky is squeezed by storms,
To a narrow, distant golden runway.

Dear Esther,

    The sky is brilliant blue tonight, a strange fault-line with my mood and my memory of the island. And though those memories might seem dark and brooding when recalled, they are amongst my happiest. You perhaps imagine I am crazy, that I know nothing of the modern world. Maybe this is indeed true but they are my memories and you have no say over them. You may as well imagine yourself as unlike my recollections but that is your mistake for you shine like a diamond over this calm sea, in defiance of the raucous screeching of the gulls and other birds. In a dream last night I thought I fell but in the end I was flying across this, my entire world for the last month and I was on my way home, back to you and the dark underwater places that you inhabit now.

Dinosaur Hunter

They call me a communist soldier,
They call me Marxist whore,
The tick-tock, click track drumbeat,
Of invasion, famine and war.

I'm a dazzle-hued Molotov Cocktail,
Acting on foreign direction,
And I hide in the sky in the leaking high-rise,
As a focus for insurrection.

I'm the red in the bed of your husband,
A honey trap, up to no good,
Ringed with the scent of fast-food oil,
A destroyer of nationhood.

I'm the threat of a dubious future,
A stooge of the NKVD,
An agent for change and destruction,
A stain on the land of the free.

I'm a shill for the end of Old England,
A biblical plague reinvented,
A feminist thinker, libertarian hag,
A dangerous statist demented.

I'm all for the revision of history,
The retelling of colonial lies,
I'll make you forget the old battles,
Turn heroes to men to despise.

Self-loathing and bound for extinction,
I'm a compromised relic of labour,
For the future's resistant to change and decay,
With a hatred of love and your neighbour.

I don't see me in all of this garbage,
I'm the complaint of the sad and the old,
Though I'm approaching the end of my own life,
And can see the decay and the cold.

It's a false rhyme that spooks the old soldier,
The gooks in the shadows of night,
With drugs to turn you to zombie and spin,
To straw men and dimmers of light.

And their old England never existed,
Apart from the pain and starvation,
Bouncing along the last zero line,
Through boom-bust and angry inflation.

Do Mole's Have Oeuvres?

Moody Mole

With this brief entry I have finished all 11 sections of AM's diaries and very fulfilling they are - the definition of bitter-sweet. Now we just have to wait for the official Volume 10 (two of the diaries are just fragments in various publications). I only had to order one from the library - my copy of The Wilderness Years seems to have vanished into the ... er ... wilderness. Adrian Mole is a writer up there with Proust for detail of observation and despite the exquisite pompousness of his own literary efforts the diaries are strangely free of overt pretension. While reading the last book I think I identified at least three levels of irony. Sue Townsend for Prime Minister! Brett Mole for Chancellor! The horrible truth is that I started writing poetry because of Adrian Mole. My early efforts were as bad if not worse than his but I like to think I've progressed more than Adrian. Only you can tell me whether that's true.

From this to a lazy Saturday morning listening to that nice Stuart Maconie's Freakier Zone with extracts from the releases on Brian Eno's Obscure Records label. Boy is giving the various tracks either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down with one fingers-in-ears, which is disappointing though maybe not very surprising.

Bits

On the news, a squalling ball of hunger,
A Libertarian Hijack,
At distance, like a rock to the damaged,
A room-sized transparency,
To be ignored and mailed away.
The connections of learning are new,
Knowing only the basics,
The barely-sustaining feelings,
That command only tears and pain,
Not yet inducted into higher things,
Not yet partisan or grouped.

I Was the First Person to be Rickrolled

In the heady days of the first year of my first job I was beginning to start the record collection I'd always been promising myself. The extent of my music collection up to then was basically Mike Oldfield and an unnatural obsession with Virginia Astley. Somewhere in the occasional single-paragraphs that Ms. Astley warranted in such publications as the HMV instore magazine, I gleaned the fact that she had a brother who was a producer and singer-songwriter of gently left-leaning tendencies. So when I saw the 12 Inch of Never Gonna Give You Up, I snapped it up and was mortified to hear the then-ubiquitous sound of Stock, Aitken and Pete "Hornby" Waterman. The person I was really after was - JON Astley the one-time Brother-in-law of Pete Townshend - and indeed slightly odd recording Artiste. And just so you don't suspect me of RRing myself, here's a strange video embedded.



The reason for setting down this memory is the fact that I actually Rickrolled someone myself today. One of our number is leaving the company and going to work in Newton-Le-Willows - the home town of our Rick himself and I conveyed the ostensible link to the relevant company via IM to a colleague who was mortified to have been caught. I did buy Roadblock but I really did know that was SAW.