Category: Truth Telling
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The Parrot on Sanctuary
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This piece looks back to when John Skelton wrote his poem “Speak, Parrot” in the sixteenth century. All these rhyme royal stanzas about Brexit I’m writing, refer to that poem, in one way or another. It is supposed that Skelton wrote it in the precincts of Westminster, where the medieval laws of sanctuary were still…
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Mr Toad Leapfrogs the Stars
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Since his accession, Mr Johnson had been upping the ante with regard to a “No Deal Brexit” and spraying money here, there and everywhere, as if Austerity had never existed. But where was all that Tory money coming from, with our economy tanking ? What about these many years of austerity cuts we’d been suffering…
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The Parrot Meets Mr Toad
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This piece was written immediately after we heard that Boris Johnson had won the Tory leadership contest. The image of Mr Toad, a rather puffed up character in the children’s book “The Wind in the Willows” had already occurred to me. The Tories seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of plagues with which to assail…
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The Parrot Studies the Human Brain
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This stanza was written just minutes before it was announced that Mr B. Johnson, sacked twice in the past for being a liar, had just become Prime Minister of the UK. He had been elected to that position, not by the country, but by members of the Tory Party, some of whom had only just…
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The Caged Parrot Watches the Demons Dance
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This piece returns to a preoccupation of my own, concerning language. What is the point of writing, the point of taking a position and then articulating it ? And of course that leads to the question, why keep writing these stanzas, these mere words amid all the bizarre and frantic and disastrous political action going…
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The Parrot Returns to Talk of False Gods
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When I wrote this, Boris Johnson was entertaining the nation with the question of when a certain photograph was taken. It claimed to show that the nation’s prospective Prime Minister had now made up with his girl-friend after their row. It was therefore safe to vote for him. He was accused of lying (again). The…
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Jez in a Cage
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Jez remains the issue. We have just passed through the Summer Solstice and the Tories are still immersed in their leadership contest to decide the UK’s next disastrous Prime Minister. Last week was all about the Tories, fighting over their lies and fantasies and then that fight in a London flat, and so on. But…
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Speaking of the Worst
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The stanza above makes extensive reference to that extraordinary and justifiably famous poem by W.B. Yeats called “The Second Coming”. Yeats’ poem applies so closely to our own present time, of course. But might that be true of every present time ? Shakespeare too was gripped by the fear of breakdown in the order of…