At a Lancs V Sussex County Cricket match in 2007.
Finally, the ankle surgery
has mended.
Flintoff, the big, forthright man
is thumping down the pitch,
filling in the footmarks.
Down at the Lancs. stand,
a father with a paunch
talks to a mobile.
'The usual rounds of
ice-cream and drinks'
he says, turning
slowly in circles.
He stumbles over
a blue nylon boundary rope.
as three boys
play Darth Vader with their
tiny replica bats.
'Ross' he shouts, holding
the phone to his belly,
waving admonishments with
the free hand.
Ross has been kicking up
the dust, twitching
the blue rope.
Ahmed jigs in for the
Sussex side
drawing swallow circles in
the summer air
beyond trampled grass
and plastic cups.
At the close of play, all
three boys have beguiled
Hopkinson into signing
fake score cards
and miniature bats.
'D'you all play?' he enquires,
laughs an Aussie laugh,
full and fruity,
larger than his life.
He bends over to scrawl
big hoops and crosses
on each card.
His blue eyes are backlit
by an ice cream sweater.
He turns round and
his name is written
in maroon on it.
Ross waves the cards
at his father, turns to his friend.
'D'you know the highest score
in the Ashes'? he says
'It was 18 for 8'
He pauses to let it register,
then goes on.
'How old is your bat?'
'Got it at Christmas'.
'I've had mine for two years!'
'Yeah, yours is marked, though'
'So-you can put it in the washing machine'
was the last word, putting down
the Yorker after
a few seconds, smothering it.'
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
It’s a small world.
It was situated on a busy road that housed not only Tranmere Rovers football club and the Ducklings nursery but also numerous medical practices of uncertain status.
A huge plastic banner resembling one of those ‘all you can eat’ banners that buffet-style restaurants like to display was draped across the front wall.‘NEW PATIENTS WELCOME,’ it announced.
The Buckingham Dental Practice was in fact a large,Victorian house which had been converted, so that patients would frequently wander into rooms not meant for them. In vain might one try to imagine the original character of the house and of those who once lived there, so heavily impregnated was the whole place with its present purpose and its pink mouthwash smell. It was impossible not to run one’s hand along the smooth curved banisters without a frisson of dread at the horrors to come. Neither could the waiting room, with its gaudy women’s magazines spread on the low coffee table reassure.
The morning of my appointment to analyse a flaring tooth pain was a bright, brisk, December morning. Sunlight, passing in and out of the clouds faded in and out of the waiting-room, coinciding, it seemed, with the flares of pain. Each burst of sun from behind a cloud illuminated the low table in the centre of the waiting room.
The lady sitting opposite me was about fifty-eight. She was seated on a black, studded, leather chair. Half discomfitted, half-curious, she leaned forward on the creaking shell of leather, picked up one of the fluorescent chat magazines and held it at arm’s length for an instant before dropping it cautiously on the pile of similarly pink and yellow chat magazines that boasted ‘Britain’s first pregnant man, and whose features, including ‘My doughnut shame’ and ‘In a Klass of her own’ were so garish that they seemed to be shouldering each other off the page.
The woman was dressed darkly, in order to resemble someone much younger; her own daughter perhaps? Her feet were crammed into black, chisel-pointed boots and the chain-belt she was wearing cinched a waist that was barely distinguishable from her hips. At her throat, she wore a pashmina, tie-style scarf. Reactolite, square- framed glasses topped her head( she felt that glasses like these took years off her). She had lately been considering laser eye surgery but had decided to have her veneers done instead as this seemed the natural thing to do.
A few minutes elapsed in the private, but disturbed sphere of the waiting room, during which time she took a packet of Dove tissues from her handbag, blew her nose in a self-satisfied way and lifted the main body of the Daily Telegraph, which someone else had cast aside. She appeared to read the main headline in a desultory fashion, her face retreating from the newspaper pages in affectation of distaste, then she let it flop back onto the low coffee table as though it was too heavy for her to hold.
As is so often the case in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, it was hard to discern the exact reason for her visit. Nonetheless, she was to be seen swiftly.
The dental assistant, whose badge read ‘Kirsty’ was wearing a pastel green smock. She waved me down the landing to an empty practitioner’s room and swiftly backtracked along the corridor to usher another patient towards a door marked Dr.Lindsay. I stood for a minute in the empty room before realising that it was the wrong one.
I soon found the correct room with Kirsty now installed by the dental instruments cabinet. The tall Dr O’Brien hovered near the yawning black dental chair while I contemplated the statistic that dentists, followed by farmers were members of those professions most liable to commit suicide. I wondered what it was that induced such despair. I could understand farmers, lonely, communing with their Fresian herds at 4 a.m., then deriving less than a penny a litre for their milk from the ruthless supermarket chains in the face of soaring feed prices. I could feel their despair at having this year’s wheat crop flooded at the crucial harvesting time, but dentists?
Dr. O’Brien took an x-ray then sent me back to the waiting room, where a conversation was now flowing between the fifty-eight year old woman and a new, middle-aged woman with thinning, magenta-coloured hair, a tailored denim jacket and Ugg boots. They seemed to have some sort of connection between them.
‘We were in Cuba too last year’ said the first woman. ‘Isn’t that strange. I think we stayed in …I can’t remember the name of the place... I think it began with an H?’
‘Havana, so were we, but we had the second week in Puerto de los Sablos. That’s on the coast.’
‘Did you?' the first woman purred, the self-satisfaction now having spread to her conversation.'Oh yes, we found the hotel in Havana was alright but they’re like, very laid back in there.’
‘Mmm, that’s right, we found that too, but the year before that we were in Thailand. They couldn’t do enough for you there, and right away. Everyone is so friendly.’
‘Well, they do say that don’t they? A bit too much sometimes with the men!'
There was a burst of appreciative laughter from both the women.
‘And I think it was in 2005 that we went to Jamaica' the first continued.
‘ Now that’s somewhere we’d love to try, but Brian’s not as keen as me.’
Both women laughed and there was a kind of gurgling satisfaction in their laughter.
‘So how are you fixed for Christmas?’ the first woman asked the second.
‘Oh we thought we’d go away again but I’m not so sure with all this, you know, the credit crunch. My daughter’s asked us over to Sligo, that’s where she met her husband.’
‘Oh that’ll make a change. We’re off to Florida. We DID do the shopping trip to New York a few years ago, it was amazing but…’
At this point a small, tinny shout seemed to leap out of the first woman's handbag. She stared at the bag, wilfully pulled it towards her, whipped out the offending mobile whose ringtone was a pre-recorded male voice which shouted angrily ‘message!Message! MESSAGE! M-E-S-S-A-G-E! She swiped at the thing, pointed it away from her, shot me a withering look in reply to my obvious scowl. Staring incredulously at the screen, then cupping the mobile against her cheek so she could fondle the bag, she told the mobile, the waiting room and its occupants that she had done the rest of the shopping but would be late, repeated the word ‘Prenton’ twice, then squirelled the mobile away into her bag. She picked up the dropped thread of the conversation almost immediately.
‘Yes, we DID the shopping trip to New York too’
'Did you stop off in London like WE did on the way back?’ the first woman interjected.
‘No, no. God, no.Too much trouble. Queues etcetera. Anyway this year we just want to be somewhere warm, after all that cold, so we thought Mexico.’
During the course of their conversation, I had been holding the pages of the Daily Telegraph open on page twenty-seven, retreading an article that bristled at me not so much because of its content but with my annoyance reflected back at me from the page. I fulminated at the thought of the air-miles the two women had blithely clocked up over the past few years between them.
The tall Dr.O'Brien appeared in the doorway to relieve me of my fury.
‘Mrs Jean Robbins.’ he called, appearing to examine the sheet of paper he was holding out in front of him.
The first woman stuffed her Dove handkerchieves into her handbag and waddled to the door. After she was installed in Dr O’Brien’s room, the second woman with the thinning, magenta-coloured hair turned to me approvingly.
‘Isn’t it a small world?’ she remarked. ‘Would you believe that that lady and myself were both in Cuba last year, and then we both turn up at the same dental practice?
Unbelievable!’
It was situated on a busy road that housed not only Tranmere Rovers football club and the Ducklings nursery but also numerous medical practices of uncertain status.
A huge plastic banner resembling one of those ‘all you can eat’ banners that buffet-style restaurants like to display was draped across the front wall.‘NEW PATIENTS WELCOME,’ it announced.
The Buckingham Dental Practice was in fact a large,Victorian house which had been converted, so that patients would frequently wander into rooms not meant for them. In vain might one try to imagine the original character of the house and of those who once lived there, so heavily impregnated was the whole place with its present purpose and its pink mouthwash smell. It was impossible not to run one’s hand along the smooth curved banisters without a frisson of dread at the horrors to come. Neither could the waiting room, with its gaudy women’s magazines spread on the low coffee table reassure.
The morning of my appointment to analyse a flaring tooth pain was a bright, brisk, December morning. Sunlight, passing in and out of the clouds faded in and out of the waiting-room, coinciding, it seemed, with the flares of pain. Each burst of sun from behind a cloud illuminated the low table in the centre of the waiting room.
The lady sitting opposite me was about fifty-eight. She was seated on a black, studded, leather chair. Half discomfitted, half-curious, she leaned forward on the creaking shell of leather, picked up one of the fluorescent chat magazines and held it at arm’s length for an instant before dropping it cautiously on the pile of similarly pink and yellow chat magazines that boasted ‘Britain’s first pregnant man, and whose features, including ‘My doughnut shame’ and ‘In a Klass of her own’ were so garish that they seemed to be shouldering each other off the page.
The woman was dressed darkly, in order to resemble someone much younger; her own daughter perhaps? Her feet were crammed into black, chisel-pointed boots and the chain-belt she was wearing cinched a waist that was barely distinguishable from her hips. At her throat, she wore a pashmina, tie-style scarf. Reactolite, square- framed glasses topped her head( she felt that glasses like these took years off her). She had lately been considering laser eye surgery but had decided to have her veneers done instead as this seemed the natural thing to do.
A few minutes elapsed in the private, but disturbed sphere of the waiting room, during which time she took a packet of Dove tissues from her handbag, blew her nose in a self-satisfied way and lifted the main body of the Daily Telegraph, which someone else had cast aside. She appeared to read the main headline in a desultory fashion, her face retreating from the newspaper pages in affectation of distaste, then she let it flop back onto the low coffee table as though it was too heavy for her to hold.
As is so often the case in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, it was hard to discern the exact reason for her visit. Nonetheless, she was to be seen swiftly.
The dental assistant, whose badge read ‘Kirsty’ was wearing a pastel green smock. She waved me down the landing to an empty practitioner’s room and swiftly backtracked along the corridor to usher another patient towards a door marked Dr.Lindsay. I stood for a minute in the empty room before realising that it was the wrong one.
I soon found the correct room with Kirsty now installed by the dental instruments cabinet. The tall Dr O’Brien hovered near the yawning black dental chair while I contemplated the statistic that dentists, followed by farmers were members of those professions most liable to commit suicide. I wondered what it was that induced such despair. I could understand farmers, lonely, communing with their Fresian herds at 4 a.m., then deriving less than a penny a litre for their milk from the ruthless supermarket chains in the face of soaring feed prices. I could feel their despair at having this year’s wheat crop flooded at the crucial harvesting time, but dentists?
Dr. O’Brien took an x-ray then sent me back to the waiting room, where a conversation was now flowing between the fifty-eight year old woman and a new, middle-aged woman with thinning, magenta-coloured hair, a tailored denim jacket and Ugg boots. They seemed to have some sort of connection between them.
‘We were in Cuba too last year’ said the first woman. ‘Isn’t that strange. I think we stayed in …I can’t remember the name of the place... I think it began with an H?’
‘Havana, so were we, but we had the second week in Puerto de los Sablos. That’s on the coast.’
‘Did you?' the first woman purred, the self-satisfaction now having spread to her conversation.'Oh yes, we found the hotel in Havana was alright but they’re like, very laid back in there.’
‘Mmm, that’s right, we found that too, but the year before that we were in Thailand. They couldn’t do enough for you there, and right away. Everyone is so friendly.’
‘Well, they do say that don’t they? A bit too much sometimes with the men!'
There was a burst of appreciative laughter from both the women.
‘And I think it was in 2005 that we went to Jamaica' the first continued.
‘ Now that’s somewhere we’d love to try, but Brian’s not as keen as me.’
Both women laughed and there was a kind of gurgling satisfaction in their laughter.
‘So how are you fixed for Christmas?’ the first woman asked the second.
‘Oh we thought we’d go away again but I’m not so sure with all this, you know, the credit crunch. My daughter’s asked us over to Sligo, that’s where she met her husband.’
‘Oh that’ll make a change. We’re off to Florida. We DID do the shopping trip to New York a few years ago, it was amazing but…’
At this point a small, tinny shout seemed to leap out of the first woman's handbag. She stared at the bag, wilfully pulled it towards her, whipped out the offending mobile whose ringtone was a pre-recorded male voice which shouted angrily ‘message!Message! MESSAGE! M-E-S-S-A-G-E! She swiped at the thing, pointed it away from her, shot me a withering look in reply to my obvious scowl. Staring incredulously at the screen, then cupping the mobile against her cheek so she could fondle the bag, she told the mobile, the waiting room and its occupants that she had done the rest of the shopping but would be late, repeated the word ‘Prenton’ twice, then squirelled the mobile away into her bag. She picked up the dropped thread of the conversation almost immediately.
‘Yes, we DID the shopping trip to New York too’
'Did you stop off in London like WE did on the way back?’ the first woman interjected.
‘No, no. God, no.Too much trouble. Queues etcetera. Anyway this year we just want to be somewhere warm, after all that cold, so we thought Mexico.’
During the course of their conversation, I had been holding the pages of the Daily Telegraph open on page twenty-seven, retreading an article that bristled at me not so much because of its content but with my annoyance reflected back at me from the page. I fulminated at the thought of the air-miles the two women had blithely clocked up over the past few years between them.
The tall Dr.O'Brien appeared in the doorway to relieve me of my fury.
‘Mrs Jean Robbins.’ he called, appearing to examine the sheet of paper he was holding out in front of him.
The first woman stuffed her Dove handkerchieves into her handbag and waddled to the door. After she was installed in Dr O’Brien’s room, the second woman with the thinning, magenta-coloured hair turned to me approvingly.
‘Isn’t it a small world?’ she remarked. ‘Would you believe that that lady and myself were both in Cuba last year, and then we both turn up at the same dental practice?
Unbelievable!’
A Never-Ending Battle
If anything it's they
who are occupying
our homeland that they have no business
being in.
I would say it's a rogue
state, except it's not really a state.
It's not anything.
It doesn't exist.
Population? What are you
talking about?
2.5 million did you say?
Yeah, but they don't really count.
Do you count ants, individually?
They need culling
If they live like animals in gangs
and herds,
they can't expect not
to be slaughtered -d'you get me?
And 2.5 million -
on one strip of land?
It's disgusting-they breed like rabbits-
and then they act like the world
owes them a living
What is everyone bellyaching about?
They're sitting on top of
the juiciest land;
the primest cuts,
they don't even appreciate it
my friend;
they've got some balls,
sucking the Fertile
Crescent dry,
It's Canaan's Land-
always has been
or didn't you ever read the Bible
you schmuck or are you just
a Philistine?
It's the Chosen Land they're
overrunning like
cockroaches.
Lieberman's right.
Best to drown 'em all
in the Red Sea-
all in one go.
The Land of Milk
and Honey-you read about
that in school, right my friend,
they're bleeding it dry
with their seven kids each
or is it eleven? Anyway, and
their pregnant womenfolk
ready to pop another one any minute
trailing behind them like
the servile dumbasses that they are,
and their ancient relatives
clinging on
like some kind of tribe?
And when you try to pop one he bobs up again
like a fairground shooting alley.
They don't have any pride,
these people, living in ramshackle stone huts
like so much human litter
degrading the place.
They're probably spreading diseases
with their filthy sewage overflowing and their
inbreeding. Right now, they're
probably spreading all kinds of shit
to our people.
You give them an inch
and they'll take a mile-
best to confiscate
the things they'll
just squander
best to wall them in
where we can
keep an eye on them.
Best to wall them out too.
in case they infect us with
God knows what- or we have to
hear their craven,
raving prayers and their wailing
banshee mumbo jumbo.
They'd kill you as soon
as look at you.
It's the kids you've
got to watch-like a hawk
They may have a stoopid flower in their
hand, and a smile on their stupid faces
but don't let that fool you- they're wild.
Loco. We've seen them used
as human shields
when we have to
batter down the doors
of their Goddam huts
to prise them out of their shells-
You know-just how low can you go buddy?
And you know what?
You can kick
down their flimsy tents
like a pack of cards -they'll all
go up again the very next day.
They're hard faced and thick-skinned
these people;
They're like Hydras, my friend;
you cut one head
off and ten more spring up-
Oi Vey, I tell you;
It's a never-ending battle.
Source: The Independent. 17.01. 2012
The paper reports that the Design Council has spent one year studying how to reduce aggression in A&E wards. Its guidelines, which are being piloted in University Hospital, Southampton, include the idea that staff should be able to dim the lights to calm down agitated persons. It suggests changes to the decor and seating designs, plus signage notifying people why others will be seen ahead of them.
Hospitals plan to
dim the lights at A&E-
you can guess the rest.
A&E welcomes
careful drinkers..or you'll end
up in A&E.
Hospitality
sweet at A&E: all mod
cons for all mod cons.
Get hammered, then dry
out in the comfort of our
Casualty lounge.
'In the interests of
fairness, people who kick off
will be seen to first'
The paper reports that the Design Council has spent one year studying how to reduce aggression in A&E wards. Its guidelines, which are being piloted in University Hospital, Southampton, include the idea that staff should be able to dim the lights to calm down agitated persons. It suggests changes to the decor and seating designs, plus signage notifying people why others will be seen ahead of them.
Hospitals plan to
dim the lights at A&E-
you can guess the rest.
A&E welcomes
careful drinkers..or you'll end
up in A&E.
Hospitality
sweet at A&E: all mod
cons for all mod cons.
Get hammered, then dry
out in the comfort of our
Casualty lounge.
'In the interests of
fairness, people who kick off
will be seen to first'
Monday, February 20, 2012
Writer's block. 16.04.2008
Source: BBC Radio 4
The Today programme, on Radio 4 discussed the phenomenon of writer's block with two fellow sufferers, one of whom was the former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
Andrew's having a
hard time, sitting on his stool
waiting for motion.
The Today programme, on Radio 4 discussed the phenomenon of writer's block with two fellow sufferers, one of whom was the former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
Andrew's having a
hard time, sitting on his stool
waiting for motion.
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