Wondermentalist

March’s Wondermentalist is looking good from the performance side, with Leonie Evans and Asha McCarthy of Rae booked to play, and Mr Dean Parkin, of Lowestoft, Suffolk, author of the collections Irresistible to Women and, imminently, Just My Luck, filling the sought-after headline slot.

That’s definitely a positive to take us forward with a spring in our step. On the other hand…I’m not too sure how the audience is going to get to hear of it, unless of course you all (audience) are regularly coming to this site, avidly reading everything then slipping off again, scrupulously leaving no trace. Maybe that’s it, you’re treading lightly upon the blog, leaving no cyber-footprint, conflating cyber with carbon and, because the thought of cyber-offsetting is too vague and upsetting, opting to make no mark whatsoever upon the pristine comments sections of the posts. Well, if that’s the case, and I’m sure it is, I salute you. I respect where you’re coming from. But there’s no need to hold back. Do not tread gently upon this good blog/Rage, rage against the drivel that I write.

So, why might the audience not hear of it? Because I managed to lose the wondermentalist mailing list. Or wondermentamailinglist as it should be known. At first I suspected random key-strokes from either me or Tom and Finn (my sons, age 4) but Chris of Macwyse – for all your mac needs – reckons it’s a hard drive anomaly. He also recommends an external hard-drive to back everything up. He recommended this calmly and philosophically, without the hint of a spec of a trace of how-many-times-do-people-need-to-be-told-to-back-everything-up-for-crying-out-loud. This was much appreciated. My own mailing list also disappeared. Posters are up, flyers are out, I’m sure the word on the street is buzzing, literally buzzing, like a swarm of bees trapped in a warm fridge.

But it remains to be seen whether we can pull the usual full house without e-mail publicity…

This is the other other warm-up intro poem I promised to put up here. The Company of Leeks

Down through the generations
We’ve been generating leeks
We’ve not won all the prizes
But we’ve had our winning streaks
Won enough to furnish houses –
We’ve had fewer troughs than peaks
In the company of leeks

Rosettes, I’ve had a few
And then some honourable mentions
To see a leek you, yourself, grew
Receiving plaudits and attentions…
When that leek in peak condition
Wins a Best Leek Competition
You feel so cock-a-hoop
It calls for cock-a-leekie soup
Although it isn’t Mum’s leek pudding
…It’ll do

For what is a leek – what is it like?
Let’s sneak a peek – let’s take a look…
A cylinder of bundled sheafs
Tortilla wrap of Welsh motifs
A spring onion on steroids
Upside down Olympic flame
Close relation of the onion
They are Garlic’s kissing cousin
They’re en eco-party-popper in freeze-frame
Or pagan Barbie
A little bit ineffable
A heavy metal daffodil
It makes me feels so affable
The company of leeks

So you can keep your Spanish beach
I’ll stay where leeks are within reach
The tasty part of vichyssoise…
And while the world around me sleeps
Beneath the undemanding stars
I’ll keep the company of leeks

I read three poems for my warm-up intro on the 23rd. I’m going to put them all up, starting with the second…

The Amazing Memory Man’s Magical Memories

– an unforgetful love poem –

I remember the dress that you wore when we met
The dress with the dots – how could I forget
Two hundred and four – none exactly the same
I counted them all as you came through the door
…gave each one a name

We walked out together, beneath a lumpy grey sky
I see it so clearly now in my mind’s eye,
The pavement, the drizzle, the cars grumbling by…
Ford Mondeo, blue, N76 RBT
Toyota Corolla, white, C213 XPL
Citroen Picasso, red S79 YAE

You kissed me. I missed one. But I didn’t mind.
We were young. We had time.

The restaurant. We held hands. Once more we kissed.
And whispered sweet nothings - well, you did,
I whispered the whole set menu and wine list…
(And what’s really nice is:
I can still recite it, including the prices)

And then back to your place, your face stuck to my face
While my eyes memorised your cd’s
I noticed a book there beside the computer
The abridged Kama Sutra ‘for the hurried lover’
In two minutes, I’d read it – from cover to cover

You said, Hey do you seriously think that kind of thing can impress me?
And I closed the book, and my eyes, and said, Test me…

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