The romantic imagination

In a pouring out of melancholy
Beethoven's frown filled the small room
Like rain. His pastoral story
A repetition of antique gloom
Go for a walk, please, mother said
And so, having finished the Sunday roast
We would trudge through snow or mud
My father loved drab places the most
I would have said no, if I could

To his bleak weekly panorama

Of a winter walk through a dark wood

Or to Tchaikovsky's sickly melodrama

But I was a kid, I had nowhere to go

His manic depression cast a long shadow

On feeling pain in Sainsbury's

Self-service machines are speaking to us now

Soothingly; they never argue or shout

Only plodders are using the checkout

The grey-haired nodders with nowhere to go.

At least, they are not in a tearing hurry

Their pace is infuriatingly slow

They fumble with pills, talk to the radio

Stumble to Wetherspoons for a curry.

Today, I am travelling down their road

I ignore the machines that stutter and blip.

Are you collecting your nectar points, sir? No.

Why not? Because I am more than a bar code

You cannot interrogate me from a strip

I feel pain, I walk in sun and shadow.

Note: with a shocking toothache, en route to the dentist, I pop into Sainsbury's in Forest Hill and discover that Blade Runner has arrived – machines are talking to people in Lycra running shorts buying bags of tangerines. I am averse to the self-service thing (I don't know why), so I shuffle behind some elderly coin fiddlers and force myself to smile and not to be impatient, thinking that I am closer in demographic and attitude to them than I am to the treadmill pounders who are shopping a la Ridley Scott. I almost pop into the gloomy, cavernous Wetherspoons over the road, for a pint of bitter subsidisded by the British Association for Decrepitude but, realising that I have to go to work, I stop myself in time.

Paying the price

As ministers meet for an emergency water summit, a drought is announced in south-east England

Channel 4 News, 21 February, 2012

Christmas? There was a heat wave this year
We ate our roast turkey by the pool. Yawn
The figgy pudding melted, I fear
Although the thick damask curtains were drawn

In January, the sun made us frown
Blazing, day after day. Please make it cool
Snowdrops wilted. The bluebells were scythed down
Like an army. It was too hot for school

We squandered our precious liquid for hours
All of the lawn sprinklers were barely off
And we enjoyed constant baths and showers
Our parents had to go largely unwashed

Like poker players, we gambled on rain
As if the water wasn't running out
We imagined we could live without pain
And now we are paying the price – a drought

Note: Ah guilt. We are born guilty because of the Fall (we should not have slaughtered those poor Neanderthals); we have guilt forced down our throat, whether by religionists or climate change activists; we try to transfer our guilt to others; we die guilty

Paradise

The smell of rancid fat

On a sultry afternoon

The chips are sizzling and the sky’s

A violent shade of blue

The wife is flipping burgers

I think I’ll have some fun

I’ll go down to the beach

And grow my belly in the sun

Another beer, another game

Another drunken clash

Another plate of pie and mash

At Harry’s English caff

She welcomed me to heaven

On her beauties I could dwell

She does the wash and cooks for me

An’ other stuff as well …

While I watch the telly

She tidies round the house

You could have a wife like her

All you need’s a mouse

Another beer, another game

Another drunken clash

Another plate of pie and mash

At Harry’s English caff

She’s as pretty as a postcard

My doll, my peach, my bride

She doesn’t mind when I get drunk

She loves it, ’er inside

Pour me another lager love

To end this pissed-up night

I met this bird in paradise

She loves the English life

Another beer, another game

Another drunken clash

Another plate of pie and mash

At Harry’s English caff

Humming bird

Apart from us – taut, exotic and svelte
Your existence is parallel to ours
With your dreadlocks, nose ring and bullet belt
You are fast. Your minutes are our hours
I infer the beating of your caged heart
On your thin bike, the wheels are a sliver
You do not see me. Your narrow eyes dart
If I am clay, you are like quicksilver
Some hunt singly, some gather, some herd
Some esteem eating, or books, or song
You are an exotic – a humming bird
In a moment you will flit away, be gone
In humans, we value beauty and good
You are different. I'd follow if I could

RockZest

RockZest at The Rose - Debut Gig from Graham Russell on Vimeo.

This is me on the left playing the bass and my lovely friends, Cecillia (the goddess of music), Alfredo on drums and Dan Morley on guitar. We are an anglo-Italian band from south-east London, SE 23. We are going to do some of our own songs soon. Watch this space. Will

A prayer for Conservative councillors

A COURT ruling banning prayers from being a part of formal council meetings has been slammed by councillors who claim that God helps them make important decisions.

Redbridge News

To the tune of Bank Robber (approximately) by the Clash

Make taxes lower for our pals
By depriving hospitals
Favour the wealthy, force the poor
To work much longer than before
To bigger bonuses says ‘yes’
While you destroy the NHS
Punish and ignore the sick
Privatise and cherry pick
The assets of the welfare state
While racking up the bankers' slate


May the days be long and dark
Especially in the closed-down park
May all the libraries be shut
Up with knowledge do not put
Close down every meals-on-wheels
Let the hungry live on eels
Keep the masses in their place

With booze and bingo and replace

Their services with charity

Call it the ‘Big Society’


Please God can you fill my gut

With frequent trips to Pizza Hut

Curse the left and bless the right

Let more beggars freeze at night

Fill the world with spleen and hate

Oppose an EU ‘super state’

Freedom and human rights, you see

Are an alien currency

Thanks for all this, oh and mate

Leave me a key by heaven's gate




Note: May the ‘Big Society’ be nailed for all time as what it is – a way of rolling back everything meritocratic and progressive that was achieved in the twentieth-century, especially after World War Two.

Violence and hope: a controversy on the 63

NB Martin Amis author, Christopher Hitchens, journalist 

Two people sit on the bus, discussing Shakespeare
Another: “Your Uncle Vanya was superb”
Our driver, a classics scholar with film star looks
Speaks in Greek to his friend. He's never forgiven him
For those comments, in the London Review of Books

The sky's a gigantic, suppurating bruise
There's Peckham Rye common, where Blake saw his angels
Puddles, with tower blocks in them, slide by us
Queen's Road, where the palm trees of Peckham parade

Listlessly. But who is this getting on the bus?

It's only Hitchens and Amis – Starsky and Hutch!

Hitch's last book is on everybody's mind

The atheist tract set Lewisham alight –
God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion

Everyone has an opinion all right!

A stranger joins them. Looks like a varsity man

His Oxford scarf is an exclamation mark

He and Hitch are friends, they met at Balliol

Precocious union debates were their platforms –

Rowing on the Cherwell at dawn, the May ball

We have entered that liminal zone, the Old Kent Road

The least favoured spot on the Monopoly board

Every pub claims to be Henry Cooper's gym

You can still smell the Brylcreem and aftershave

“Splash it on all over”, they used to call him

Here, thin yellow men regret the smoking ban

Punch drunk, their fingers twitch for untipped Rothmans

Collecting beer glasses in their frosted-glass lairs

They are Charlie Chaplins, without his millions

Violence and hope flavour the atmosphere

We slither past Tesco's; to its rear the Shard

A slim, grey needle, pierces the sombre sky
“A point well made,” says Hitchens, of his new mate
“Martin?” The upper-deck debate's in full swing

What would Amis pere have thought? Martin hesitates

“I'm sorry I don't agree,” he announces

He will overcome this upstart; fuck him up

Like an unleashed Staff, he goes on the attack

“I see that you haven't read Christopher's book;

If you had done so, you would understand that ...”

As we pass through the Elephant, the boys

Go at it, hammer and tongs, giving it some

At Blackfriars, the brown river staggers by

Does God exist? At least they have entertained

The 63 bus is themed by their colloquy

Playing tennis with Martin Amis

Martin's vicious forehand slams
A yellow missile onto the baseline
It's a rocket. Whistles like a bullet
Two games to one. Final set

With a faintly superior smile
He looks almost apologetic
‘I'm afraid I won that one, again’
He shows barely a trace of sweat

My people wrapped butter for his
There is a certain look to their mouths
We pressed their cricket whites
Ran their baths, polished their brogues

Their superiority is in-bred
Part of the order of things
Like Martin's forehand lob
We died for them in our droves

Prep school, Oxford, the coxless fours
And now this. A minor victory
On the municipal courts
He is about to take me apart

He crouches at the quivering net
He'll be modest in victory, of course
Smile and offer a limp fist
Shame I had such a rotten start

Juvenescence

For Dan


Can we be sure it's no longer night?
Pitched somewhere between black and white

The world will be indeterminate today
Seen through a gauze, in shades of grey

On the stretched common, like a frozen sea
Ice-rimed willows bend intimately

The stumps of men on the white field
Show us that the snow will yield

Casually, we talk of ‘nightmare’ and ‘chaos’
As if the winter could kill us

We are fascinated by our ice skin
But we know that it will never win

We will go to the library on the bus
Go to sleep; the light will wake us

Go to work, come home and then
There will be summer, winter and summer again

The problem of evil

I study your resting face on the train
A powdered carapace. You are on standby
Soon, you will leave and be human again
Exercise judgment, laugh and cry.
We merge our dark clothes into the crowd
Our faces frozen, because to smile
Is to be human; it's not allowed
For each stretched minute, attenuated mile.
We work and rest, breathe easily or cough
Our lives are finite, for good or ill
Measured steps define our humanity.
We are human. The light goes on and off
There is no goodness in the surrendered will
Without ego, there is no morality.

Note: I was with my friend Corin in the pub last night. Over a few pints, as well as other matters, we were discussing why the Nazis had an affinity with Buddhism (counter-intuitive subject, but it’s true) and why sentimentality and violence go together. The Nazis were very sentimental about animals – Himmler could not abide the idea of cruelty to the creatures of the forest – the deer and wild boar.  I ventured that it is because under both fascism and Buddhism the will is surrendered, allowing evil to prosper. And I said “without ego there is no morality”. I know it’s controversial but I think that Buddhism lends itself to state immorality – look at Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. This leads us to the problem of evil and to its Christian solution, which I don’t necessarily agree with, that God gave us freedom of choice so as to allow us to choose to be good. This implies that good only exists with reference to bad, just as light only exists in relation to darkness.

I thought, this morning, of the heavily made-up, London woman in her impractical clothes I had seen on the tube the previous day, travelling from Waterloo to Charring Cross, on the good old Northern Line. A minute on the Northern Line is equivalent to an hour above ground. Her face was a mask. On the tube, all of our faces are masks. Why? We surrender our humanity. But what if the train crashed? Some people would be frozen with terror. Some would help others; some just look after themselves. Humanity would break in – and morality. What if we lived forever and we were happy all the time? There would be no morality, but there would ne no need for morality because we would not need to make choices about apportioning wealth or sharing things out. The poem stems from the expression on the woman’s face.

St Harry of Redknapp

Harry Redknapp cleared of tax evasion

Harry Redknapp said his "nightmare" was over after being cleared of tax evasion.The Tottenham boss had denied accepting secret untaxed bonus payments from former Portsmouth chairman Milan Mandaric, while he was club manager.Mr Mandaric was also cleared of two charges of cheating the public revenue over the £189,000 payments.

For Steve M

You reject wealth to honour other's needs
In tax you pay far more than is your due
In city slums, observing beggars' weeds
No-one is more generous than you
A saintly man, a humble mendicant
You take no stock in houses, cars or food
And live quite simply, for your wants are scant
Your only pleasure – merely doing good
To serve the poor is your ascetic creed
A respected philanthropist, you bestow
Your well-earned riches like scattering seed
Whether in Tottenham or Monaco
If not on earth, you will be praised by Him
Welcomed to glory by the seraphim