In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • Of My Neighbour the Severn

    I live in the West of England, near the Severn Estuary, where the river begins to narrow. Here above, is a picture of it, taken by Nicola Knoop. I am close enough now to see it a few times most days, and to be aware of it, all the time.

    The river is grand, very restless and not a little sinister.

    Recently, I wrote a poem about it. Click here for the link.

    The last few lines of the poem make reference to, and play on, a line by Edmund Spenser, a poet who lived (and wrote) in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. TS Eliot quotes the line in his great poem The Wasteland : “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.”

     

     

     

     

     

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  • The Parrot from on High Speaks of Democracy

    As our General Election continues, and in the light of much of its content, we might ask this question : what is the difference between an election and an auction ?

    Answer 1 : at an auction, cheats need to be more careful than at an election, as we punters get a better chance to examine properly the goods on offer.

    Answer 2 : at an auction, the best items cost most, at an election, the worst.

    Answer 3 : a wrong decision at an auction is a waste of money, at this election a wrong decision will be a waste of life.

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  • The Parrot Views the Earth from Afar

    The UK General Election presently in progress begs the question whether there is any difference in quality of democratic process between a Referendum and an Election.

    Both seem to involve a lot of lying at high volume, a lot of propaganda ditto, and various other forms of manipulation and trickery – whatever their perpetrators can get away with, in fact.

    And all for the sake of a decision made by “A Sovereign People Properly Informed.”

    In the meantime, the parrot escapes the cage and a troubled nation’s great flood of lies and ascends far up for a bird’s eye view of us all. 

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  • The Lying Toad Our Leader

    As the election continues, and Mr Toad hops around this broken country, lying to people for his personal advantage, here’s further word on democracy and the use of language.

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  • The Parrot Mourns the Loss of Home

    The Parrot is awash in a flood of untruth and unrule, as the UK’s general election gets under way. The result when it comes would appear to be a matter of pure random chance, or skill, or criminality, in the underhand use of social media to manipulate people, no more truthworthy than a drawing of lots.

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  • The Parrot Catches Election Fever

    The stanza above refers, of course, to the sudden large majority in the House of Commons for Mr Johnson’s preference for a General Election dated December 14th, 2019.

    I, for one, failed to understand this sudden end to the parliamentary containment of the Toad, this letting go of the impasse, this apparent agreement to engage in the disagreement of an election. It brought the demagogues and shadowy enforcers back into play.

    Was it a real decision, requiring energy, or just a failure to make a decision, requiring only weakness, or inertia ? Where had the Second Referendum gone ? Where was the challenge to Johnson’s multiple deceits, felonies, abuses of power  ? Who was getting what out of this ? For whose good ? 

    Or was it just exhaustion, a surrender to chaos and destruction ? I feared the latter – I hoped I was wrong. I asked the parrot. He hadn’t a clue. Too busy. He was awash in the flood.

    And writing this stanza, I was thinking, among other things, of the very recent implosion of the “People’s Vote” campaign. Well done, everybody. Much easier to fight each other than take right action.

    And, inevitably, I was thinking of some famous lines from Yeats’ “Second Coming” : “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

     
     
     
     

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  • Dr Doombeetle Tutors the Toad

    We’ve already met Dr Doombeetle in these stanzas, of course. He is Dominic Cummings, who first came to general notice as advisor to Mr  Michael Gove at the Dept of Education (Mr Gove has previously appeared in these    stanzas too, to be precise the 7th one – see “Jetsam Gove” in “Parrot Speaks of the Brexit Agon (2)” ).

    One or another of the pair came up with the term “The Blob” as a genial  description of the nation’s teaching profession. Mr Cummings does like taking people on and screwing them.

    Next, he seems to have played a very leading role in the “Leave Campaign” and came up with that clever and wickedly misleading “Take Back Control”  slogan.

    And now, towards the end of 2019, from deep within his t-shirt, he seems to be running Mr Toad.

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  • The Parrot Reports on the Launch of a Toad

    What’s that I see up there in the sky ? Is it a bird ? Is it a plane ? oh no ! It’s a high-flying, high-lying Hoodlum Toad !

    Just as I was uploading this, it was being reported that the Toad was going to press for a December General Election. 

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