No Room For The Unstable

Turned on the radio to discover the media have named today Panic Saturday. Spotting an opportunity, I asked a friend recently diagnosed with acute anxiety if she would like to accompany me into town in the hope we might qualify for free parking. Thirty minutes later, Cynthia and I were pulling into a disabled parking bay directly opposite The Booze Bucket, her Prozac prescription clearly displayed on the dashboard next to a large crucifix. Experiencing the same rush as when I find any amount of money, I smirked across at my twitchy accomplice while ratcheting up the handbrake, confident our plan would work. So, you can imagine our surprise when, upon our return a mere nine hours later, we found a £70 ticket with a brusque rebuttal: Acute Anxiety? You’ll have to do better than that… issued by an equally dissociative traffic warden.

Now Cynthia can’t watch Top Gear and refuses to leave the house without her Dusty Springfield wig, so it’s no surprise so many folk hate the holidays.

Coming Achoo

Winter stops us in our tracks

With biological attacks

Perhaps to kick us into touch

Because it doesn’t like us much.

The common cold, the experts note,

Is still without an antidote.

As for the ‘flu, we get the shot

Which seems more like an afterthought.

Coughing, sneezing… who’d desire us?

It’s our friend, the winter virus.

Ironic, because when it strikes us

It’s just saying that it likes us.

St George’s Dei

God is an Englishman

He wears a bowler hat

He gave us brollies for the rain so folk can stop to chat.

His favourite meal is fish & chips and if he’s staying in

He likes to watch the cricket, eating biscuits out the tin.

He cheers on Blackburn Rovers and when in The Great Beyond

He drives an Aston Martin, telling angels: “Call me Bond.”

He sent us earthly kings and queens to reign on his behalf

Then sent The Benny Hill Show to make everybody laugh.

God is an Englishman

Sublime and yet absurd

A marvel we commemorate each April 23rd.

Everyone’s a Critic

In ancient Athens, lived a man who did not suffer fools

Who scorned the rich and powerful, disparaging their rules.

Renouncing laws and social norms from which he felt exempt

Diogenes The Cynic viewed convention with contempt.

He called an earthen jar his home, forgoing earthly goods

Promoting a philosophy which few Greeks understood:

We need not work! Food should be free!

We’ve been robbed of our liberty!

A dog needs only food and sleep

So, worry not about your keep!

Revolting, in more ways than one, he never bathed and took great fun

In mocking local passersby unlucky to have caught his eye.

Once Philip, King of Macedon, discovered what was going on

He fetched him from the marketplace to meet this heckler, face to face.

Philosopher, comedian, Diogenes first drew him in

Then seized the moment to berate the trappings of the civil state.

The king considered all he’d heard and pledged Diogenes his word

That he would try to make life fair for all his subjects everywhere.

Then Philip’s son, the Late & Great, who relished seminal debate

Next headed for the rebel’s lair to bump heads in the open air.

Soon Alexander found the spot and asked Diogenes his thoughts

On justice, kings and slavery to test his rival’s bravery.

Diogenes, quite unafraid, lamented: We have been betrayed.

The reason for our very birth is to enjoy fruits of the earth.

Young Alex, in your palaces, you drink from golden chalices

While I do nicely in this jar… am I no better than you are?

And now you claim to be divine, directly drawn from Zeus’s line

Yet, as I spy your horse nearby I fear, like you, it cannot fly.

The Great One knew he’d met his match, aware that he would never catch

A cynic who cared not for kings, nor for the folly each reign brings.

Amused, young Alex asked his host which thing in life he wished for most:

Was it a wife? Slaves of his own? Or simply to be left alone?

Reclining in the summer breeze, his eyes now closed, Diogenes

Admitted there was only one: for Alex not to block the sun.