Blues

Kipper Kapers

Kipper Kapers

Old Welsh Intelligence Test Question: “Does a kipper swim folded or flat?”

5-4-3-2-1 –
Time’s up, Ladies and Gentlemen.
So – what’s your answer?

Yes? No? Maybe? I don’t know?
It’s a trick question of course / wrth gwrs. And Kippers can play tricks on you too as they flipper and flapper, and flip and flop. Especially if you eat them late at night.

So this is a painting of a midnight Kipper Kaper Attack, when you want to sleep, but can’t, because you don’t know the answer to the kipper IQ test and all those little kippers are capering around and making fun of you and mocking you.

How do you avoid a Kipper Kaper Attack when the bad dreams start and the Kippers Kaper? Well, you answer this next Welsh IQ test question. “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me when down to the river to swim. Adam and Eve got drowned. Who do you think was saved?”

And if you answer “Pinch Me!” Then I will, and when I do, you’ll wake up, and you’ll be safe from another Kipper Kaper attack until the next time you eat them.

There – simple isn’t it?

Low Ebb

Low Ebb

We have been apart too long, my love,
night’s dark corridor lying between us
and neither of us approaching the other
when doors close and blinds are drawn.

The way to the heart of the matter is not
an easy path to walk, not any more.
Our secret ways and dreams lie cold
upon chill, empty sheets and pillows.

Each day the tide revives the beach,
flowing out, abandoning its wet debris
for the sun to perform its magic: fresh
seaweed drying above warm sand.

Sea-birds bury their beaks, writing claw
letters as crabs burrow, dig deep, waiting
for the tide to return and re-create
its alternate reality of dreamy waters.

Half of my bed performs its nightly duty.
The other half lies cold, empty, lonely.
No sea-life wanders there, not even in
my most creative dreams of sun and sand.

Comment: The loneliness of old age is compounded by many factors, including ill-health, sleeplessness, and the need to sleep in separate rooms. How many homeless people suffer that loneliness, and more, and at ages much less than ours? And then there’s the distress of trying to live in poverty, to survive from day to day, with safety net that will not protect us, if we chance to fall. A sad world then, as Polly Toynbee points out in today’s Guardian.


Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.

Daily writing prompt
Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.
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Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.

Sir Alex Ferguson, one of soccer’s greatest managers, once said that it wasn’t the victories he remembered, but the defeats. So it is with my own coaching career – it’s the losses I recall. Same thing with random acts of kindness. There have been many, too many to count. I will not paper my e-walls with glowing memories of past kindnesses. But what about those random acts of kindness I failed to do? Here’s one of them.

            Crave More: I hate those words. I always choose a cart with the shop’s name on the handle. I can handle that. I can’t handle a shopping cart that screams Crave More at me every time I stoop down and place another item in the wire grid. If stores were honest, they would inscribe their shopping carts with a sign that said Think More, Crave Less, and Save Your Money. I bet that would quickly cut into profits.

            Anyway, there I was, in La-La-Land, leaning on my cart, still half asleep, when this ghost drifted towards me. “Help me,” it said. “I’m hungry. I need food.” I woke up from my dream, looked at the ghost, tall, skeletal thin, cavernous eyes and cheekbones protruding, gaps in the teeth, grey face drawn and lined. The single word “Sorry” came automatically to my lips. Then I felt shame. I looked at him again. “I only carry plastic.” The excuse limped heavily across the air between us. I saw something in his eyes, I knew not what, and I turned away.

            Then, as I walked away, I added 100 lb of muscle to the scarecrow frame. Took forty years away. Filled his body with joy and pride, and remembered how he played when I used to coach him, hard and fast, but true. I ran my hand through the card index of former players that I had coached. I knew their moves, and attributes, the way they played the game, their stronger / weaker side, their playing strengths, their weaknesses. I remembered him holding up the Champion’s Cup. But I couldn’t remember his name.

            I pushed the cart all over the store in a frantic search for him. I went to the ATM and took out cash. I could hand it to him. I could tell him he had dropped it. I went through a thousand scenes. I could invite him to the snack bar. I could tell him to buy what he needed and follow me to the check out lane where I would add his purchases to my cart. I looked everywhere. He was nowhere to be seen.

            A single opportunity. One chance. That’s all we get. Miss it, and we blow the game. Take it, and we win the Championship and hold up the Cup.

Modern Society

Daily writing prompt
What would you change about modern society?
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What would you change about modern society?

Good question – what indeed? First, define society. It’s not as if a single society dominated the world. Do we then distinguish between the world, this geoidal planet on which we live, and the multiple societies that inhabit this world? If we do, then what right do you, or I, or any other individual have to change any or all of the world’s cultures and societies? And how do we change them?

Many ways have been tried in the past, very few successfully. The Spanish Inquisition burned many books and censored others. Other book burnings and spurnings have taken place, and in some places, they are still happening. But are they effective in the long term? Good question. Short term, maybe. Long term, I am not so sure.

Do we limit education, and by extension, knowledge, to a few , limited people, who believe what we believe, and do what we want them to do? That has been tried as well. Short-term successes, but long term disasters. As well as depriving people of education and books, we can also enslave them. This is still happening in many places.

So, another definition: what do we mean by change? Change for the better? Change for the worse? Change for change’s sake? Change for the betterment of our own selves and the devil take the hindmost? And what do we mean by modern? So many questions – so few answers.

Albert Camus once wrote that he was ‘optimiste, quant au monde, pessimiste quant a l’homme‘ – an optimist where the world is concerned, a pessimist where humankind is concerned. Personally, I am not sure that this particular thought stands up any longer. Is it still possible to be optimistic about a planet that we are capable of blowing to smithereens, a planet, moreover, that is currently suffering from wind and rain, fire and flood, famine and war, pandemic and a pollution like none we have ever seen before?

How can I change the world? I am just a single human being. Well, I am a married one, actually. But I only have one vote. I rather fear that single vote (votes don’t marry and produce offspring) will have little effect on my ability to make any change at all to modern society.

Pass the soap and a towel, please, as a certain person said a long time ago. I want to cleanse my hands and purge my soul. I am too old a dog to try and learn new tricks.

Which activities make you lose track of time?

Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?
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Which activities make you lose track of time?

I guess it depends on how you define activities. Sleeping certainly makes me lose track of time. But sleeping is not an activity, you say. So I say, what about sleep walking? A track to walk on, and sometimes sleep walkers lose track of themselves, and hands of the clock lost in the dark ahead of them, on they go, tick-tock, little clockwork soldiers marching until someone or something wakes them up. Where am I? They ask. And what time is it?

Watching my fox terrier chasing his tail as he runs round and round in circles, never quite catching it, but never giving up his high hopes of catching that little rat-tail of a tail that dangles there behind. And round about and out and in all day that silly dog did spin, spinning in prose and spinning in rhyme, until I lost all track of time.

Same thing happens with that little electric railway that ran on a single loop around the kitchen table. Diddle-da-diddly-da, just like a real train, except no smoke, no puff the magic dragon, no sense of a schedule or arriving and departing on time, when circular time is meaningless, as are the numbers on the sundial when the sun isn’t shining, or the hands on the clock when the numbers are missing, and you don’t know whether you are looking in time’s mirror or are standing on your head in the Antipodes and all the while the clock hands are marching round and round, tick-tock, and there is no track by which time can be tracked. And the runaway hands went round the track and the ghost train hooted whoo-hooo, as it vanished into the timeless tunnel of darkest night, and then exited. like Rip Van Winkle, the engine driver with a huge beard, and the carriages all covered with cobwebs and skeletons peeping out of the compartments and sitting beside some of the travellers as they snore on their seats.

And wow, the activity, if it be an activity, of walking my fingers over the keys has just made me lose track of the last ten minutes. And now it is time for me to drive to hospital, have a needle stuck in my arm, and allow a nurse to draw my blood. And the moment from the first sight of the needle to the moment it is withdrawn from the end is e-n-d-l-e-s-s and takes an eternity.

What Bothers You and Why?

Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
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What bothers you and why?

I went to the pharmacy today for my regular shots, booster and upgrade. The pharmacist asked me if I was allergic to anything. “Yes,” I replied. “I am allergic to stupidity.”

Stupidity is a singular thing, but it comes in many forms. The car driver who weaves his car through thick traffic, breaking the speed limit, threading a narrow pathway, overtaking on the inside, the outside, turning a two way street into a three way street by adding a third lane, even though there is oncoming traffic in the new lane he has built for himself. Such people rely on the charity of others to give way and make space.

Then there are incompetent teachers. Not all teachers are incompetent. Some are wonderful, kind, friendly, and comforting. Others are martinets, escaped from the army cage, and strutting the classroom, using the ruler to beat the students into submission. ‘My way or the highway,’ they claim, and what they say goes, even if it climbs to the height of stupidity or falls to the bottom of the well of incompetence.

Goya illustrated the nature of various kinds of stupidity in his wonderful etchings. Witches flying, donkeys braying, simple people worshipping the expensive clothing but never seeing the corruption it covers. So, turn to the Caprichos and the Proverbios, or, if you want to receive a real lesson in man’s inhumanity to man, look at the Desastres de la Guerra, the disasters of war.

Stupidity – a simple word – but with multiple meanings. What bothers me, and why? Stupidity, plain and simple, in its multitudinous forms.

Window Pain

Window Pain

I live in a world beyond the material world.
At night, I swim, a silver fish, among the stars.
Constellations net me in their glistening hair.

By day I wander along a piano’s keys.
I replay life’s golden dreams again and again,
its quartets, concertos, and its symphonies.

A harmonious blacksmith, I no longer know
who, or what, I am. I only know I exist right here,
at my desk, looking out through my window,

a window in my mind, that serves as a mirror,
reflecting all I was, and am, and ever will be.
Sometimes, the sun shines. Often the rain

falls cold against that window pane, and I press
my nose against cold glass, and feel again the pain.

Wash Day Blues

Wash-Day Blues

“Out, out, foul spot.” Yet,
however much I scrub them,
those blood spots on my clothes
will not disappear. No seas
incarnadine for me. Picking
at scabs, my fingernails draw blood.
with so many ragged edges.

The old, stale liquid flows
fresh again from once-healed wounds.
Why made me open them up?
Was it just boredom? Or that itch
ever nibbling at the mind’s edge?

Tell me, how do we walk away?
How do we heal ourselves?
How do we forgive and forget?
Does the fresh blood wash away
the dirt I feel crusted round me?
Will I ever be clean again?

Wednesday is wash-day.
I scrub again and again
at all my dirty linen. Then I watch
as my wrinkled skin grows damp, scabs
soften, and I open them once more.

Lost

Lost

Where can it be? I put it
somewhere safe, but I
can’t remember where.

So many things grow legs,
go absent without leave,
walk out of my world.

I am slowly losing control.
My life will soon be left
in somebody else’s hands.

They will control my wants
needs, and necessities.
Then I too will be lost.

Placed somewhere safe,
perhaps, there to lie forgotten,
abandoned, secure, perhaps,
but who knows at what cost.