Wondermentalist

In my last post I mentioned topical poems and how difficult it is to find a suitably topical topic. Probably my best-received topical poem was in the week the container ship MSC Napoli ran aground off the coast of Dorset and Branscombe Beach became a place of brazen scavenging.

Branscombe Police officers patrolled the beach to prevent unopened containers from being broken into and closed all roads leading into the village. They also handed out forms so people could report what they had taken to the Receiver of Wreck. (This must be done within 28 days, otherwise they are committing an offence.) Believe it or not this didn’t make much of a difference and most of the 50 BMW motorbikes among the containers were never recovered.

Branscombe Beach

Where looters and polluters coincide

Branscombe Beach

Where Beamer bikes are washed up by the tide

Saved from the sea’s spray

Shoved onto e-bay

More recently I was on Saturday live duty when the case of the unfortunately-named teddy bear was headline news. I felt it was incumbent on me to address the topic poetically, but to do so with tact and sensitivity. And brevity. My first thought was a list of famous bears, e.g.

Paddington, Pudsey, Winnie the Pooh

Tessie, Barney, Yogi, Boo Boo,

Lars, Fozzie, Sooty and Soo

Smokey, Rupert, Huggy, Baloo

even Aloysius

with hindsight

would do

and that would be enough, or maybe leave off the Aloysius bit and go to:

But the bear of the moment with unlooked-for fame

Is the bear over there, the bear with no name.

Not subtle, sensitive or tactful enough, so back to the drawing-board and a version of teddy bear’s picnic:

If you go down to the woods today

You’ll get a bit of a surprise

If you go down to the woods today

No need to go in disguise

 

For every bear that ever there was

Is gathered there this morning because

Today’s the day the Ursine Secular Society (soft section)

Stage a peaceful sit-down protest to express mounting dismay at the state of the grown-up world today…

(Thank you - now get out of our woods)

Still not sure. I phoned to run my thoughts by the producer said she’d prefer it if I didn’t cover the whole delicate teddy bear thing and I said Oh go one, and she said, I’d rather you didn’t, and I said, But I’d be embarrassed not to, and she said, I can live with you being embarrassed, Matt. And I thought, ah, yes, I may have lost perspective here…

So I looked at what else was in the news. The Labour party receiving donations from David Abrahams via a proxy donor was being presented as scandalous and sleazy. And irksome for the Prime Minister.

I remembered a stranger danger poster I’d seen – “A stranger is someone you don’t know. Most strangers are nice, but some are nasty and want to hurt children.” – and I wrote:

Donor Danger

Remember, members:

You can’t tell a real donor from a proxy donor

Just by looking at them.

If a strange donor approaches you

And you’re not sure if they’re a real donor

Or a proxy donor

Yell:

“I do not want your donation”

If they say:

“Well, it’s your loss”

Tell them:

“Rather that than make my Prime Minister cross”

And this would do, it would just have to do, then just before bedtime I saw a news flash that Evel Knievel had died. And I knew the best thing, under the circumstances, was to write a little encomium for him. Because he was very brave and extravagantly foolhardy – we loved him at my school, the boys did anyway. It felt like his was the kind of fame any of us could achieve if we were fearless, sequinned shameless enough.

 

Showman, frontman, stunning stuntman

In a tight white leather jumpsuit

 

He knew triumph and disaster

He knew bandages and plaster

 

Celebrated, sequinned, scarred

Evel flew, and landed, hard

 

So rev the revs, the engine roars

Knievel leaps, Knievel soars

 

Let’s leave him freeze-framed in the air

His name synonymous with Dare

 

They called him ‘Elvis on a motorbike’

Ladies and gentlemen, Evel has left the building