BAD ASS TERZA RIMA

SPEAKING ABOUT D. H. LAWRENCE, Malcolm Muggeridge reportedly said that he was a “bum poet and a bum person”. Without actually hearing the stress behind Muggeridge’s words it is difficult to know whether the great man thought that the famous plagiarist Lawrence was “bum” as in “no good”, or someone interested in “bums”, whether these were vagabonds or derrières of females, or even males. Although Lawrence’s work is generally remarkably dull even by the hideously low standards of End-of-Empire English literature, particularly his turgid poetry, I would like to hope that Muggeridge meant the latter, and that Lawrence was a bum man.

THIS IS, OF COURSE, BECAUSE one expects one’s poets to be interested in sex, to have sex and to write about it. Otherwise we are reduced to pantheistic drivel about animals and plants, and one can see enough of that on BBC2.

SO IT IS WITH SOME PUZZLEMENT that I have been reading about the enforced resignation of Ruth Padel, the latest occupier of the joke position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. According to The Guardian, animal-lover Padel, perhaps not the first poet to spring to one’s mind or come to one’s lips when one thinks about modern poets, “displays a bewildering variety of stanza forms: terza rima, quatrains, syllabics, alexandrines, free verse and some marvellous sonnets”. And also can write some rather cruel e-mails bad-mouthing rivals and accusing them of sexual harassment in order to get them to drop out of her way in her election to the Oxford post.

ANY MAN WHO HAS TAUGHT POETRY to young girls, as I have done, knows that sooner or later this will end up in hanky-panky, if not just hanky, and to accuse a good poet of feeling up a lady’s bum when no one is looking is about as mean and pointless as blaming the cat for lapping up the cream.

BANK HOLIDAY BLUE MONDAY

THE BLUE MONDAY IS COMMONLY referred to nowadays as the most depressing day of the year. The moment upon which this day falls has been worked out with the scientific precision that one expects from people who make money working these things out and publishing them in newspapers such as The Guardian or The Daily Mirror, but close examination of the mathematics behind this formula reveals a lack of sense and sensibility that not even a Rosetta Stone positing Guardian-Mirror-speak next to regular language would be capable of explaining.

YET THE STRAIGHTFORWARD COME-UPPANCE awaiting a hefty tranche of our good leaders from the lower House of Parliament will come this weekend, and they will not need clever formulae to help them work out what is the darkest day of their lives. For some of them it will be, as the Whitsuntide Bank Holiday, the first time they have had to go “back to the patch” to face the music for a long time. Indeed, some of our representatives may have been thinking of doing what they normally do on Bank Holiday weekends: telling the wife/girlfriend/boyfriend (depending on the party) that they would be working late, and slipping off to a northern French channel port with their secretaries and attempting to have sex with them. And failing miserably because of too much Port.

TODAY THESE COCKY MP’s will be sipping on their avant fracas, some of them for the last time, and wondering how it all went wrong. In their constituency meetings on Monday, many of them will find out. Suicides are expected. The Archbishop of Canterbury has even stepped in to ask the population not to “grate on” too much, as this will “upset moral”. The mood in the Shires, however, seems to be calling for blood to be spilt. And some of this will be expected from “thieving toad” Andrew Mackay, the worst of the bunch of daylight robbers we have seen to be caught out. Whether he gets stabbed in the back by his local party officials or in the stomach by the voters, blood will flow. Or perhaps gin.

NINETY-SIX TEARS

WHATEVER ONE MAY THINK ABOUT PRINCE CHARLES, one can never say that he is a quitter. Even when he was being forced by everyone to accept the opportunity of being happily married to a nice girl, with whom he could live the rest of his life admired by many other men, he abandoned Diana Spencer and went doggedly after his “first, one and only true love”, Camila Shand. If he can stick to his guns in a face-off of this kind then one would be at best foolhardy to imagine him giving up on his absurd crusade to save the planet.

IN FACT, OUR CARING KING-TO-BE, much as took place during the excruciatingly embarrassing period encompassing his “falling out” with Diana and espousing of the Shand woman, seems to be spurred on into “straining every sinew” [his expression] to save “old Mummy nature” [idem] each time a jibe comes his way about him being roundly off his cake. We now, he told us all in his Mayday speech, have only ninety-six months before it is “too late” and “all over” for all of us. I must confess I was moved to tears, thinking about everything I will lose when the temperature increases by nearly 2º Centigrade over the two-hundred year period after this date. Who will look after my Triffids?

THERMAGEDDON, AS HE CALLS IT, cannot be avoided unless we act now, act together, and “act as one”. “One” wonders why he does not understand why “we” think he is mad. “Forget the credit crunch,” he droned on, “this is the climate crunch,” adding that there will be no point in having any money in the bank in a few years’ time because the planet will be dead in July 2017, a date he repeated in a speech to a giggly Italian parliament, more worried, no doubt, about Charles’ graphic detail of “a football pitch” disappearing every four seconds in the Amazon. If the Italian deputies seemed shocked it was because they took this literally, and hoped this disaster would not spread to Juventus, AC Milan, Napoli, Lazio or Cagliari, football clubs in which most of them hold shares.

ST MICHAEL THE MARTYR

THOSE OF US WHO KNOW OUR SAINTS will be fully aware of the story of St Michael the Martyr, whom we celebrate on May 23rd, remembering his charity, selflessness and disregard for worldly goods. Michael was martyred in the ninth century for his Christianity and chastity, and is one of the most important of the saints in the Orthodox catalogue.

AFTER AN EARLY LIFE of some difficulty and tribulation, during which he gave up all personal ambition in order to serve Man and God, he then visited the holy places of Jerusalem, found his calling, and became a monk. He was held in such high esteem by the Abbot of Mar Savvas Monastery that he was allowed to indulge in the business of buying and selling monastic wares in the town. On one occasion he was humbly selling his wares when he was introduced to a princess, who fell in love with him. He rejected her advances, for which she felt slighted; she had him captured and sent to speak to the sultan on charges of being corrupt and faithless. Having been sentenced to death for refusing to implicate his fellow Christians in these charges, he was forced to drink poison, but this did not work. He was then urged to fall upon his sword, which he did not do, being instead slaughtered by the sultan’s men.

HE SHOULD NOT, OF COURSE, be confused with Saint Michael of the Police, believed to endeavour to protect policemen all over the world in their duties, and in honour of whom many police officers wear medals. Nor should he be confused with St Michael, the emblem of the most successful private businessmen ever to emerge from the rich nation of Britain.

WAITING FOR GODOT

GIRLIE GIRL KAY BURLEY (not pictured here), voted the “Most Desirable Woman on TV” for three consecutive years by Satellite TV magazine, has for some time been a rival to burly Adam Boulton on Sky News as the most uncompromising and pushiest defender of the common chap in dealing with our arrogant and oft-aloof politicians. When she recently had to interview the malodorous, chain-smoking Ken Clarke, her no-holds-barred demeanor showed us all that she is much more than just a pretty face lift.

ONE SOMETIMES WONDERS what would become of our world if we were left to the devices of the chancers who tell us they represent us, and it is only due to the work of people in the press and on the TV who do not kowtow to the big-wigs that we have any chance of being able to munch on our grape nuts and yoghourt in the mornings in some peace.

KITTEN- AND ARSENAL-LOVING KAY has been doing an excellent job of late, but seems somehow divided in having to show off her frocks at Ascot and then having to be stern when faced with stone-faced, bone-headed politicians, suggesting that someone else able to show some teeth needs to stand up and be counted.

STEP FORWARD DERMOT “The” MURNAGHAN, who in his grilling this morning of Margaret Beckett, “the 29th most powerful woman in the world” and possibly the most notorious potted plant collector, showed that he will not suffer fools lightly. “You claim for food,” presents The Murnaghan, “Do you eat as an MP or as a human being?”. One wonders. One imagines that next time Beckett speaks to Dermot she will only be one of these.

MALIK AFORETHOUGHT

PROVING THAT SUNDAY MORNING reaches those greasy places that other bitter, twisted scouring pads can only dream about, we have the fact that after publishing my last piece of infotainment about our beloved leaders and their ridiculous expenses, which are obviously the result of special deals done by shifty businessmen, the irksome Daily Telegraph and the searching, prying chaps on the BBC and Sky News have finally cottoned on to the fact that some MPs are getting under the counter offers unavailable to the common punter.

DEFIANT LANCASHIRE MUSLIM LAD and now ex-justice minister Shahid Malik, speaking in his flat, northern twang, justifies his expenditure with the following, clarifying, if not grammatically sound, statement: “This is not your massage parlours, this is not your moats and Maltesers, this is your TV, just what is bigger than what you’ve got where you have yours, and it’s all one million per cent by the book.” “This”, by the way, is being charged only £100 per week for a house in his West Yorkshire constituency after securing a discount from Tahir Zaman, a local businessman and sometime criminal.

BIG-SPENDING MALIK POINTS OUT that he has done nothing wrong, yet “with hindsight” he would have done things differently. As a Muslim, Malik perhaps does not have the same view of what happens when one meets one’s maker as I do. But, as a believer in equality of religion throughout the globe and even for Thetans, I can see his point. I will definitely try this line out when I have to face my own maker sometime in the future.

BUMS ON SEATS

COMMUNIST TABLE-TENNIS CHAMPION and film writer Ivor Montagu was responsible for what is probably the best piece of writing about the absurd workings of Hollywood and its maniacal bosses. His book With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Seven Seas, 1968) delightfully details how B. P. “Budd” Schulberg, as a Hollywood producer, said that people preferred to see what they thought was reality rather than what was “really reality”. Thus, Schulberg has to explain to Montagu, “snow on the ground in Moscow” is an absolute, whether in July or January. This is the “Moscow of the Mind”, which should not be confused with the “real” Moscow.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS MAXIM recently when reading and listening to all this kafuffle about expenses claimed by Members of Parliament in Britain. The logic behind my thinking is that, just as in Schulberg’s world, in our world there is a “parliament of the mind”, which has very little to do with the real parliament that is tasked with running Britain. It appears to me that the British public has had an idea about its elected MPs that – until recently at least – overrode reality and common sense. How on earth any of the voters imagined that their representatives would not use their expense accounts willy-nilly for all and sundry is beyond me. And, in my opinion, anyone who has to put up with the boring life of an MP deserves fringe benefits galore.

THE TRUE SCANDAL HERE involves the bargains MPs seem to be getting. I suspect that they are offered special rates simply because they are important politicians. George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, apparently paid £400 for a chauffeur-driven car trip from Chester to London; last August I paid £80 for a simple cab ride from Manchester airport to Liverpool, and I have just booked a taxi from Bristol airport to Bath that will cost £50. Osborne’s deal is outrageous.

ALSO, IF GORDON BROWN CAN FIND a half-day, five-day-a-week cleaner in London who charges only £6,500 for two years’ work I want his or her phone number. Likewise David Willetts’ electrician: if the shadow universities secretary’s firm only charges £115 for fitting 25 light bulbs I feel I am being cheated by mine, at €20 every time he comes to lighten my darkened doorstep. And if Francis Maude, the Shadow Cabinet Office minister, was charged only £387.50 for moving house, then the cowboy firm that charged a friend of mine £200 for moving a fridge needs looking into.

MOST OF THE OTHER EXPENSES also seem to be something of a steal, suggesting that what The Telegraph ought to be doing is publishing the names of the companies who give such special deals to politicians so that the public in general could use them. The only other newsworthy aspect of all this senseless muck-raking is in the detail: John Prescott broke his toilet seat twice, two MPs have broken the actual toilet over the last two years, two have needed new toilet brushes, one, “Gorbals” John Reid, bought a “black glitter toilet seat” (for only £30), and Paul Murphy, the Welsh Secretary, used his second home allowance to spend £35 on a toilet roll holder.

PARADISE LOST

MY EYE WAS TAKEN OFF the political ball this weekend due to a fleeting visit to the Algarve in order to attend a friend’s wedding. Let me first state that the wedding was a wonderful affair, everything went extremely well and the day-long reception was held in a surprisingly beautiful complex in an area of Portugal which is not exactly my favourite place on the planet. My congratulations and thanks are due to all concerned.

BUT IMPROVEMENT COMES HARD to the Algarve. Michael Winner, food and restaurant critic extraordinaire, was in Portugal sometime last year I believe, and was introduced to what is supposedly the best that the country has to offer, along the exclusive Estoril Coast area. He concluded that the housing looked like every unemployed plumber and handyman in the country had been allowed to build a house in whatever style caught their fancy and that the food consisted of mainly badly prepared cod brought to us by rude and incompetent waiters. He ended his Sunday Times column with “You see a lot of cod in Portugal. But you won’t see me there again.”

ONE WONDERS WHAT SORT OF LANGUAGE he would have come up with if he had been to the Algarve. In the past the region was considered to be something of a paradise. Nowadays, for some people, it may still be so. But for those of us who like our food brought to us on the same day as we order it, like to have a shower during which we ourselves control when the water goes from hot to cold and like to think that a hotel that charges 350 euros per night for a double room might certify that there is not a cement mixer working outside our window at eight in the morning and a fire truck pumping out foul-smelling waste from a burst pipe leading from the septic tank underneath the hotel “so it doesn’t seep into the swimming pool”, the paradise is hard to find. Unless you are one of the hordes of cockroaches, rabid dogs and killer rabbits that infest the terrain.

STAND UP FOR DEMOCRACY

A GOOD DEAL OF THE JOKES about politicians being comedians, clowns or idiots will have been used up by most commentators after so many years of dire political behaviour by leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, so I will try to avoid the obvious here. Al Franken, a comedian turned Democrat (why does that sound strange?), is not exactly the first entertainer to move into politics in the USA, something completely logical in a country where the TV is as close to a deity as most people will ever see, and actually is the godhead in California, just as Elvis Presley is God in Nevada.

IN CALIFORNIA NOBODY THINKS that Arnold Schwarzenegger is unfit to be the state governor, and even if any doubts lingered there would always be the echo of Ronald Reagan to remind them of how one can make the move from the silver screen to the political stage. Indeed, in a rare moment of insight, Reagan summed up the ease of this transition in a BBC TV documentary in 1989 when he stated, “In Hollywood, if you can’t sing or dance, you wind up as an after-dinner speaker.”

MINNESOTA, HOWEVER, is not California, although it does have a tradition of apparent humour passing off as political and social commentary in the monologue drudgery produced by writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor, all brought together in his famous, brain-numbing novel Lake Wobegon Days. Thus a boring stand up comedian like Franken might easily pass without a hitch into the realms of boring politicians representing farmers. I hope he one day becomes president.

I AMUSE MYSELF ON OCCASION by side-stepping true analysis of issues pertinent to friends by providing obscure replies. Such as: “He didn’t come off his line enough,” or “He punched when he should have caught the ball” when talking about Albert Camus or Julio Iglesias. I look forward to being able to say things like, “His material is far too Jewish” when Franken gets to the top of his game.

AND AS FOR A COMEDIAN helping a president sort out the Supreme Court, which Franken will apparently do for Barack Hussein Obama, I thought Gore Vidal had already done that when he wrote Duluth.

WE ARE NOT A MUSE

BEING A POET MYSELF, I am always interested in the criteria involved in choosing our Poet Laureate, or versificator Regis, as the title was termed when first introduced by Richard Coeur de Lion. When some years ago I wrote briefly about Andrew Motion, the outgoing laureate, my efforts almost led to a case in court, which only goes to prove that poets are more sensitive than politicians, even abysmally talentless poets whose verse is on the same standard as the lyrics to a rap song.

WHEN QUEEN VICTORIA was asked to sign the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which, in Article 11, included penalties for homosexual and lesbian conduct, she refused to sign the Bill as it stood. Victoria refused to believe that it was possible for a woman to indulge in sex with or love another woman. “Lesbians do not exist,” she is reported to have said

THUS MY INTEREST WAS SLIGHTLY AROUSED when I heard, some time ago, about the Queen’s latest choice as versificatora, announced yesterday. Carol Ann Duffy is in fact one of my favourite writers of the moment, although that does not necessarily mean that I would think she should be chosen as the Poet Laureate, and obviously being a lesbian and stout New Labour supporter has nothing to do with the Queen’s choice: “My love is like a red, red rose,” is of equal merit when written by a man or a woman, Tory or Labour supporter.

TALENT IS WHAT MATTERS, as in everything else. And one of Carol Ann Duffy’s more sneaky poems is in fact called “Talent”, and is one of those poems we are supposed to think about rather than enjoy. As it happens, I have a poem of the same title myself, with which I will end this afternoon.

Talent
This is the political circus. Now think
of a man, failing in the polls in
all the papers. He holds his breath.

There is no vote yet.

You want him to call an election, don't you?

I guessed as much; he promises then recedes.

The word bampot is written all over him.