Pork Pies

Monkey Meets Pontius Parrot

Monkey Meets Pontius Parrot
(With glorious  memories of Macarronic Latin)

Pontius Parrot is very clever
and very pontifical.
“Pretty Polly!”
He pontificates from his pulpit.

His name isn’t Polly
and he doesn’t have a pulpit
but he parrots words
in Macaronic Latin:
“Caesar adsum jam forte.”

Pontius Parrot is perky at the podium
and bounces up and down,
preening himself self-consciously,
rattling his chains,
shaking his bars,  and speaking Latin:
“Brutus aderat.”

He is marked with shame and scandal.
A dysfunctional family of feathered friends
 has henpecked him until he is black and blue
and he has thrown up copiously:
 “Caesar sic in omnibus.”

He dips his wings in holy water,
calls for some soft soap, 
and washes his feathers and claws.

Poor Pontius Parrot,
he can only say “Repent!”
“Brutus sic in at.”

Commentary:

I asked Moo if he had ever painted a parrot, but he told me that he hadn’t. However, one of his favorite viewers, had once called this painting a pile of spaghetti wriggling in tomato sauce and he thought that spaghetti was close enough to macaroni for it to serve as a painting for Bony Macaroni Latin.

I had to explain to him what we mean when we say Macaronic Latin. Back to that boarding school and we used to invent all sorts of Macaronic Latin phrases. They used to cane us with bamboo canes. So here’s the verb paradigm in Latin for ‘to cane a student’. Bendo – whackere- ouchi – sorebum. Of course, it helps if you know what Latin verb paradigms look like. They are easy to remember and are aide memoires for the four main parts of the verb. Bendo – I bend over – first person singular, present tense – whackere – to whack or cane – infinitive – ouchi – I said ‘ouch’ – past tense – sorbum – the inevitable result – past participle.

Now, if we look at the italics in the poem we see a poem within a poem, and that smaller poem is written in Macaronic Latin.

“Caesar adsum jam forte.
Brutus aderat.
 Caesar sic in omnibus.
Brutus sic in at.“

Translation

Caesar had some jam for tea.
Brutus had a rat.
Caesar sick in omnibus.
Brutus sick in hat.

Oh never underestimate the ingenuity – linguistic and / or otherwise (and we won’t go into that one right now) – of the bored-to-tears Public Schoolboy. Especially if he is not destined to be a Perfect Prefect like Perfect Prefect Plod – who was never any good at Latin, if I remember well. Neither was I come to think of it. Horrible language, dead and reeks like the dead rat that Brutus ate.

As for the ‘repent’, well, usually, just before he beat you, the master doing the beating would enquire as to your health and ask you if you repented of your sins, crimes, bad language, being cheeky to Perfect Prefect Plod, or whatever else you had done (like smoking or holding a girl’s hand in public instead of a boy’s). You always said ‘yes, of course I do, sir,’ in the vain hope of avoiding a beating. But, bad luck, the cane descended anyway, ouchi was heard, and the victim retired to the bath room to examine his past participle, also known as his sorbum.

I bet you never imagined any of that. Wow! What a great lesson I have taught you today. Think about it all and think about it carefully. Now you know why Pink Floyd sang “We don’t need no education.” But what an education it was. And remember, the Duke of Wellington, Old Nosey, once said ‘my battles were won on the playing fields of the pubic schools of England.’ Oh dear – I hope I got that right. I fear there’s a letter missing somewhere.



What would your life be like without music?

Daily writing prompt
What would your life be like without music?
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What would your life be like without music?

Very quiet.

I consulted Moo, my favorite artist, on this one and he said that the above answer was much too brief and slightly cynical.
“Look,” he said to me, “this is today’s painting. It’s called Walking on Air.”
“Walking on air?” I queried.
“Yup,” he replied – “I hear music, but there’s no one there.” Then he told me to listen quietly to his painting. And I did. But nothing happened.
“I can’t hear a thing,” I told him.
“How many people do you see inside the painting?” he asked.
“About four,” I replied. “A girl with long red hair, a little girl with a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, an old man, all hunched up, running away from something, and someone on the left hand-side, at the bottom, but I’m not sure what they’re doing.”
“Idiot,” he said to me. “Open your mind, not just your eyes. Look again. Now what do you see?”
“The same people, and there may be a couple more. How many people do you see, Moo?” “None. That’s why I hear music, because there’s no one there.”
“You’re having me on, aren’t you? You’re pulling my leg? You’re taking the…”
“Easy now,” he grinned maliciously, ” you don’t want your next word to be taken and used in evidence against you, do you? Now, look out of the window. What do you see?”
“I see blossoms…”
“But the trees are bare,” he smiled. “Do you toss and turn in your bed at night?”
“I do. And I’ve gone and lost my appetite.”
“I bet those stars shining in the skies last night, will be shining in your eyes tonight.”
“My golly, Moo, I think they might be. You know, you are a genius.”
“I am indeed. But I usually travel incognito. And listen…”
“Wow. I hear someone singing softly, and the voice is coming from the painting… but…”
“I know. There’s no one there.”

How quiet would my life be without music? As quiet as it would be without art, poetry, a sense of humor, friends who laugh with me, not at me, and people like you, who read this, and don’t think that I am totally insane. Oh yes, and if there was no music in my life, there would be no Great Starts to the Day, and no Poems for the End of Time.

Write about your first crush.

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first crush.
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Write about your first crush.

No. No, I can safely say that I have never had that sort of crush, except on a teddy bear or a little poo-pee aka puppy. I guess my first real crush was an orange crush. And no, again, not that orange crush either. I guess I have never been a fan of the Denver Broncos. But, as a child, I loved Orange Crush and Dandelion and Burdock, the former suitable for children and the latter looking remarkably like grown aka groan up beer.

During my time at university, I fell victim to several crushes. One was at the bottom of a collapsed scrum while playing rugby. Never much fun that sort of crush. All those sweaty, smelly bodies. Another came in an attempt to beat the Guinness Book of Records under the achievement – how many people can you get inside an English Telephone Kiosk? This was in the sixties, when England actually had telephone kiosks. If you have never seen a real English telephone kiosk, there’s one down in Kingsbrae Gardens, and I highly recommend a visit to that antiquity – almost as good as the statues in the gardens.

Anyway, one day in rag week, a group of Bristol University students, me among them, started crowding into a telephone kiosk. We entered upright, tried kneeling, others kneeling on our shoulders. We managed about twelve.

Doors open or doors closed? This baby came with no instructions. Poor parents, even more miserable single parents. And they are almost always young women, aren’t they? Come to think of it, maybe we should have invited some female students to join us – much lighter in weight and far less smelly – in the bad sense!

So, we tried a different tactic. If the first measure was a crush, and indeed it was, well, the second measure??? Judge for yourselves. One of us held the door open, the rest of us lay down like logs, feet outside the door, and the newcomers lay down on top of us. Ingenious indeed. But those at the bottom could scarcely breathe. They were the victims of a real crush.

Like the finger in the woodpecker’s hole, we reversed it – feet in, heads out. We got up to twenty-seven students. Then we ran out of student volunteers. Revolting. We asked passers-by to help us. But to no avail. Reversed and removed. Equally revolting. Sent our efforts in, with photos. There was no response. We didn’t make it. I still don’t know what that particular crush record is.

In Cassis-les-Calanques, 1960, I was one of eight people standing in a Citroen Deux Chevaux. That was quite a crush. But, in Santander, Spain, 1970, Clare and I watched 11 people, yes, eleven, get out of a SEAT 600, a 600cc Spanish four-seater car, otherwise known as a bullet / bala, and with about as big an engine as your lawnmower. They exited, one by one, and proceeded to enter the local church for Sunday mass. Can you imagine 11 people riding on your lawnmower?

Maybe that wasn’t a crush at all. Maybe it was just a (Morris) minor miracle.

If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?

Daily writing prompt
If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
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If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?

Oh dear – such a difficult question. I have seen so many people puzzling over which dress they would choose, which blouse matched the skirt, which tie best highlighted the shirt, what color hanky, suitably folded, best suited the little breast pocket of the suit. Why do we have to have outfits? Couldn’t we have infits.

Now that’s a great idea. The one infit that I wear, every day, regardless, is my birthday suit. I have worn it, day in, day out for 80 years and it still (in)-fits me and, quite honestly, I have never spent a day without out it. Of course, it has worn a bit over the years. And no, I will not show you any photos.

However, I can say that the six pack that I once sported has become a rubber tire. There are bruises and scars where once the skin was white and tight, or bronzed and shining bright. Muscles have shrunk. Back has bent. Arthritis kicks in, now and again, but my birthday suit adapts to everything. It really was a wonderful invention.

And, guess what! Every day is my birthday now and today I am 29,370 days old. Not everyone can say that. And yes, I can also tell you, in all confidence, that I wear my birthday suit every day now in celebration of each passing birthday.

In Spain everybody has two birthdays – the day they were born and their saint’s day. The saint’s day is the day on which the saint after whom they are named is celebrated. Two birthdays is lovely – but to have 365 birthdays a year, to wear my birthday suit for every one of them, is spectacular. And it’s even better to have 366 birthdays in a leap year.

I know you know that a leopard cannot change its spots, but did you know that a leopard had 365 spots on his coat – one for every day of the year? Now that’s a fact that not everybody is aware of. What about a leap year, you ask. Well, on the 29th of February, every four years, to find that extra spot, you just have to lift the leopard’s tail. And don’t ask me how I know, because I am not going to tell you.

How do you waste the most time every day?

Daily writing prompt
How do you waste the most time every day?
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How do you waste the most time every day?

Answering stupid questions like these – now that would be a great response. But there are other ways to waste time – like mousing around on the computer – some call it surfing, which sounds like fun – but acting like a mouse that’s chasing its own tail / tale, well, that is most surely a waste of time. Playing verbal cat and mouse games is a good way to go too.

Most devilish of all, sitting in a car, beside a lollipop person, who has just stepped out and stopped you from joining the car, ten yards ahead of you, that is now the last car in the latest convoy to be held up, while you are now the first car waiting to go next time. You sit, and sit, and wait.

Then – INSPIRATION – I turn my disc player on and lo and behold – Pete Seeger sings The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, from the Spanish Civil War. What’s special about that, you ask? Well, how about the chorus? – “No pasara’n! No pasara’n!” / “They shall not pass! They shall not pass!” sang the Abe Lincoln Brigade as the battle for Madrid thundered on. I open the car window, turn up the volume, bellowing it out loud while waiting to count the cars coming from the opposite direction.

It was a very long wait. And then the first of 109 cars, trucks, and various other vehicles appeared. Bored now with The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, I changed quickly to Viva la Quinta Brigada, kept the volume up high and “No Pasara’n! The pledge that made them fight” rang out as the official truck with its magic sign “Follow me!” crept up in front of me, turned, and started to crawl, snail mail style, down almost two kilometres of highway at 10 KPH.

When we got to the end of the road works, he turned into someone’s driveway, and I, and the next two cars behind me, followed him. I learned a few choice words to add to my vocabulary – “Like WTF do you think you are doing?” “It says follow me! on your truck.” I replied. ” I just did.” And off he went again on a long, four letter rant. Then, on foot, he stood in front of the convoy that had stalled anyway, now having nobody to follow, and guided his three black sheep out onto the road that led to freedom.

Well, that was an adventure and an absolutely total waste of time. As the court case will be, when I appear before the magistrate next week. Believe you me, if you believe all this, you would believe anything. And, congratulations, you have just successfully wasted another five minutes of your precious time and I have wasted ten of mine writing this piece.

Aliens

Aliens

We know they are out there – but do we realize that they already exist within our own heads? They float around inside our skulls, sending out alien signals and outlandish messages. Buy more, crave more, consume more, eat it all up, leave nothing on your plate, don’t give anything to anyone else, it’s yours all yours, don’t share, be greedy, mine, mine, mine. And we cry “Mine” until we undermine our own society and then the aliens have taken us over and they are in full control and wielding total power.

Search for yourself amidst the ruins of your consumer life and your life consumed. Dig deep into the troubled mine of your mind and rescue what remains. Perform an act of artificial respiration upon yourself and create yourself anew, in the image of what you want to be, not what the aliens want you to be. Be brave. Kick them out. Win back your own life. Resist them. Fight them on the beaches, in the bleachers, on the non-stop radio, on the endless subliminal messages cast out by the tv.

Reject the false notion, the siren song that calls out endlessly – ‘j’achete, donc je suis‘ – “I buy, therefore I am.” You are more, so much more, than the purchasing power of your dwindling dollars. Breathe deep. Walk out in the sun and the rain. Be yourself. Make friends with others of like mind. Fight those aliens, wherever you find them. Fight back. Renew yourself. And renew the world around you.

This message brought to you by
the anti-buy yourself happiness campaign.

30 things that make me happy!

Daily writing prompt
List 30 things that make you happy.
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List 30 things that make you happy.

The first thirty dots I add to a dotty painting. As we all know, pointillisme drives one dotty. So, start counting each little dotty – when you get to thirty you can stoppy – and you’ll be as happy as a poppy. I do hope poppies are happy. I know poo-pees are. They wag their tales when they are hippy, happy, hoppy.

Oh yes, counting the ten toes on my feet when I have a double-trouble bubble bath. Then counting the ten toes on my grandson’s feet – that makes twenty. Then counting the toes on my other grandson’s feet. That makes thirty. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, hard to see those toes when the bubble baths bubble. Pinch each bubble, make them pop. When you get to thirty you can stop. Okay, okay, I hear you laugh – and that’s the joy of a bubble bath.

Boxing Day

They’re not Boxing Gloves – but they could be. Photo by my friend Geoff Slater.

Boxing Day


            By the time I get up, the gloves are really off and the sparring has begun in earnest. I hear angry, raised voices, walk downstairs to the kitchen, and a hush falls on the room. Knife-edge glances slice their menacing ways through the thickening atmosphere.
            Time for boxing: on my left, in the blue corner, my mother, smoking what is probably her second packet of the day. A thin haze of grey smoke escapes from her bruised lips and a cloud of exhaled fumes crowns her head with a murky halo. On my right, in the red corner, my father. White-faced, hungover yet again, truly into the spirits of Christmas. He breathes heavily, like a Boxer Dog in the mid-summer dog-days, snoring and snorting at a bitch in heat. In the middle, my grandfather, the referee. He is keeping the combatants apart, creating a tiny breathing space so the true Spirit of Christmas can disentangle itself from those false Christmas Spirits and bring peace to earth again for at least sixty seconds between each round.
            I look around the heaving, seething, threshing silence of a room where conversation has suddenly ceased. The fire is burning merrily. Beside it, tongs, poker, and small shovel stand to attention. On the hearthstone, the little red brush, with its long handle lies in ambush. This is what my father uses to beat me when he can’t be bothered to take off his leather belt. Scorch marks from the hot coal fire sear the handle and back of the little red brush. I threw it on the fire one day, hoping to see the end of it. Of course, it was rescued from the flames, resurrected, and I got beaten for that act of rebellion too.
            “It’s all your fault!” My father breaks the silence, pointing at me. His red-rimmed eyes blazing with a sudden and renewed anger. He starts to rise, but my grandfather steps between us.
            “Go and see your granny,” grandpa tells me. “She’s in the kitchen. Go now!” He points to the kitchen door.
            I run a gauntlet of staring eyes and go to my gran. As I shut the door behind me, voices rise higher in the room I have just left. Boxing Day, indeed. The gloves are off. The battle has begun again. My grandfather has evacuated me from no-boy’s-land and, for a moment, I am no longer trapped in the mud-filled, cratered, shell-holes between the trenches, the uncut barbed-wire barriers, the poached-egg eyes peering through periscopes and spying on me from the parental and priestly parapets above the wooden duck-boards that line the floor on the far side of the room and keep the enemies’ feet clear of mud and water.

Monkey and the Bean Counter

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Monkey and the Bean Counter

An acolyte in a charcoal suit runs by.
He neither stops nor speaks
but slips on slippery words
dripping from another monkey’s tongue.

This other monkey has eyes of asphalt,
a patented pewter soul,
ice water flowing in his veins.
“Hear no evil! See no evil! Speak no evil!”

The hatch of his mind is battened tightly down.
Nothing gets out nor in.
The acolyte’s fingers grasp at a khaki folder,
his manifesto for success.

Senior monkey stalks to his office
and turns on the radio.
His favorite music:
the clink of mounting money.

Disturb him at your peril:
this monkey is very important,
and very, very busy.
He’s also clever:
a real smarty.

First, he empties all the chocolate candies from the box
then he sorts them into little piles:
green with green, brown with brown,
blue with blue, red with red.

Then, like the Good Shepherd checking His flock,
he counts them again and again,
to ensure that none have been stolen
and not one has gone astray.

Comment: Another Golden Oldie, this time from Monkey Temple. I have updated it slightly so it won’t be exactly the same as it is in the printed text. Senior Monkey has, of course, built a bigger box into which he can place all his chocolate candies and tuck them away for ever and ever. I guess if he were a bull and not a monkey, he would have tucked them away for heifer and heifer. Such is the sad state of reality in the Monkey Temple. But if monkey were a bull, he would be living in the cow shed, not the Monkey Temple. Oh dear, oh dear: and oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive with fiction, flash fiction, creative non-fiction, and all the other sugar and spice which goes into the spinning of spider-webs and fairy tales. Speaking of which, did I ever tell you the story of the… well, maybe next time. So tune in again tomorrow. Same thyme, same plaice, and I’ll sing you a song of the fish in the sea… and a fishy tail that will be.

Wet Welsh Rain

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Wet Welsh Rain

              Day after day, rain, drives in over Singleton Park and Swansea Bay. It claws its clouded way, shroud clad in grey cloud, up Rhyddings Park Road, through Brynmill, and up to the Uplands and Sketty, as it was then, now Sgetti. In those days, the rain got everywhere. It swirled around ankles and knees wetting everything below the hem of the raincoat. Umbrellas kept the shoulders dry. But when the wind blew, and gamp and brolly turned inside out, and people looked as though they were duelling with the wind, and threatening to poke each other’s eyes out, then a good soaking was sometimes better and safer and, in the worst of the rain and the wind, the gamps and brollies came down.  As for the puddles: they were everywhere. You walked in them, whether you wanted to or not, and your leather shoes turned into a pulp that let in water. Socks slopped around your feet, wetter than soggy blotting paper aka blotch [hands up if you remember blotch!]. Heads down, we faced the wind, draped around bus stops, waiting for buses that never came singly, but only in threes after much long suffering. Wind like a whiplash drove the rain before it and everywhere, woolen scarves turned into wet wash cloths and woolen gloves became underwater rain-sodden mittens.

Comment: As Tropical Storm Arthur gathers in the North Atlantic, we would do well to remember the good old days of summer holidays in Wales when it rained every day, bob dydd, during the whole two-week vacation. But did it really rain back then? Who remembers now? I seem to remember it was sunny every day, especially when the cricket was suspended with the words Rain Stopped Play displayed across the television screen. Ant the lunch time cricket scores: what joy to listen to them and to discover one day, as I listened on my illicit radio hidden in my school dormitory,  that play had been stopped because of “piddles on the putch, sorry, I mean puddles on the pitch” [hands up if you remember that announcement!]. I am sorry to say that particular radio announcer did not stay in his job for long. A great pity: I found him rather amusing.

We would do well, too, to recall the twelve days without electric power that followed Hurricane Arthur, back in 2014 [hands up if you remember Hurricane Arthur!]. Alas and alack: how accurate are our memories? And did all of those things really happen? As the street vendors and newspaper vendors [hands up if you remember paper boys!] used to cry out on street corners “Echo, Echo, South Wales Echo: Read all about it” or “Post, Evening Post, South Wales Evening Post, read all about it!” The South Wales Echo and the South Wales Evening Post hands up if you remember them … Oh those were the days … or were they? … click here and read all about it!