In Ilfracombe, hungover.

There’s a nice little new aquarium in the Devon seaside town of Ilfracombe which takes you down, tank by tank, from the source of the Taw to the sea and to Lundy. I’ve always liked aquaria, there’s a deep peace in those tanks. However, I can’t say I recommend a trip to Ilfracombe when you’re battling a hangover and a howling gale is blowing. If your head is fugged and pounding there are probably better trips. And there’s a decent possibility that a gull will steal your chips.

In Ilfracombe the shop shelves are spattered all with tat. The drizzle-sodden westerly will whip away your hat. The sea’s a touch too churning when you’re feeling out of sorts. The bolder of the tourists sport anorak and shorts. In Ilfracombe the cliffs are grey, the sea around them slops. Damien Hirst’s café/restaurant is a slap across the chops. In Ilfracombe the cliffs are grey, not white like those of Dover. In Ilfracombe, in Ilfracombe. In Ilfracombe, hungover.

The Cobb at Lyme – Remembrance Sunday

A popgun
Halts the strollers on the Cobb,
Stays the fossil-hunter’s hammer mid-chop.
On the Prom, a mother gathers up
Her wriggling pack of dogs and tykes,
By force of will forces them
to measure out the distance of a minute.

All the Ones.
Only the rollers and the wicked gulls –
specked over the impertinent ancient arm
that pokes into a vastly more ancient sea –
tear rudely at the moment. Still, who cares?
This is our affair, not theirs.


November 07

Up Lansdowne Lane

A shock of green. Not quite a rhapsody
perhaps – the pain of strolling up the lane
on unfamiliar muscles does for that –
But a pastoral nonetheless, picture perfect
almost to the point of parody.
The scene across the fields gallery-still
and, in close-up, swaying leaves nearly as real
as on a high definition screen.

The shock is obscene. Here, just beyond
the reach of belief, and out of range,
People act out a way of life on a stage
of spattered soil and heather, and tilling toil,
and weather-forecasts that matter.Breathe it all in.
Your aching office chair-shaped back
and sandwich pack insist that weekend time
is time you mustn’t lose.
Deeper than fun, here’s the real deal:
cost-free, guilt-free and, most unlikely, sans booze.

But at the top of the hill,
Even in the moderate modulations
of England’s lukewarm wilderness
under a rare sun, a cold can grip and protest:
The spineshiver of the human ant
all alone inside a distance; and the inescapable need
to run back to the nest.

August 07

I Am Born Again

The English are twice-born,
Thrice-born, timeworn.

Rhodesia, East India, Hudson Bay,
All of them flushed down Victoria Falls,
And the japes and the scrapes
and the scraps with the Gauls,
C'est payé, balayé, oublié.

The sun at last sets,
And the fingers that stretched
So thin across unthinkable spaces,
Now retract with the riches and races
They've fetched, and smaller but stronger
For the crises and twists,
The gold-ringed hand will bunch in a fist,
A punch in the face for the traitors we've kissed,
For the chances we took and the chances we missed,
And spare one for poor William Bligh,
Sunk in Dover Beach sand, as once more old England
Is born again, and so am I.

And no, I regret nothing.
And yes, I regret every thing.



July 07

England Have My Bones

Bagpuss was buried, in a deluge, at dawn,
Postman Pat cried at the grave.
At the back, Alex deLarge just yawned,
Henry’s Cat tried to look brave.

England is a tangled, mongrel ball
Of wool, and you choose your own strand.
Be Nogbad the Bad, or Flashman, the cad,
Or join Robyn Hode’s Merrie Band.

We each have a line, and at the end of mine
Waits a crapulent Enderby,
With a verse-filled tub, and a half-filled cup
Of glue-warm stepmother tea.
Bagpuss was buried, in a deluge, and
The cemetery wept under the strain
Of a million Bank Holidays of rain.



July 2007

Pier Head, Liverpool

Run down any road –
run down or rising –
All lead to the dockside's
shocking wealth of beauty.
Citadel of a landed island,
Evolved in isolation,
The capital of herself.

She shows her best face to the sea:
Defying both sides. The marine air,
in which her Graces sing,
Like all things Scouse or scouser:
The homesweet warmth of a shorebound sailor,
The cold cut of a Celtic edge.

November 2007

The Bonfire Men

In autumn when the bonfire men
send their smoky whispers
across to Seven Sisters,
Highbury and Islington,
The old air holds a pigeon’s song,
A song of chestnut fires and charcoal-tired
eyes and the long, cold-nip night to come.

At dusk their signal is answered by
brazier-gazing football men,
Black-hatted, donkey jacketed,
But by the song connected with the
rugby gents, the brown ale men
who man the pubs of Borehamwood
and stand their round, and understand
how much of life is made of moods.


October 2007

Heir Apparent

An old hand – the oldest – at waiting,
But still never learned to sit still.
An old master’s thwarted apprentice,
A grand young duke, over the hill.

Neither up nor down, but always marching,
But on every newsreel falls the cursed
shade of the shy exhibitionist
blonde mistake that you fell into first.

Now her branches beneath you are spreading,
Their flowers bloom bright while yours dim,
And it’s hard not to fall when a life is
spent so publicly out on a limb.

So on with the ceaseless crusading,
Set forth once more unto the breach,
For country! For farming! But purpose
is forever just out of reach.

But perhaps one day yet you’ll find meaning
in those rustic pub, foxhunting scenes,
Or maybe you’ve found it in love now
(or in whatever ‘in love’ means).


March 07

Beer Garden

The Rodney’s scratchy backyard
(‘Beer Garden’ is a joke).
Thirty square foot of rubbled slabs
on which to stand and smoke
at a panoramic view of the car park,
And after dark, a cold string of bulbs
left unreplaced from some distant lark
on the grounds of If it ain’t broke.

Reclining at the table, drink at hand,
A grizzled pink bear of a man
and his son, fizzy on Coke,
Clambering all over him,
As children sometimes do
(Girlfriends sometimes too, a test
of parental patience perhaps,
before you make your own pests).

I knew him. At the garage once,
He resolved some mystery in my car.
Wielded a spanner with the slow care
that hints at the sleeping bear beneath.
Even his knuckles had muscles –
I remember thinking – his wrench-grip,
which now grips the leg of his wriggling sprog,
to lift and, in an agony of giggling, land.
And think what unspeakable damage
those knuckles could do
in the wrong hands.



July 07

The Golden House Takeaway

A Lancaster bomber bulks over Bellevue Road
And dumps its load as I bolt for the zebra
Then into the shelter of the Golden House, with a bang
And a jangling entrance at once whisper-echoed
By the coloured strips of the kitchen doorway.
My yellowed reflection meets me at the counter
Into his almond face I must bellow my order
Over the drums of the Blitz outside.
Which suddenly stop.
My counterpart retreats, slightly richer, to his strips.

A spring roll, a steak pie, a pile of poppadoms.
The wares sit under hot museum glass
Like a joke awaiting a punchline.
In the corner an old thug reads an old Hello,
Grinding his prawncracker knuckles.

Outside again, in cool air.
The Lancaster whipped away, or shot to shrapnel.
Gleaming, the ancient pavements of Two Mile Hill beneath
An evening sky, washed pink and streaked with gold.
In England, everything that’s born is old.


July 07