The bad poem that repeats
It’s the time of year for traditions and my tradition is writing a bad poem. It summarises the year just gone and traditionally begins: ’Tis the week before Christmas and what could be worse
Than having a columnist burst into verse? Before starting this year’s poem I looked up last year’s to avoid repeating myself and discovered I could hardly avoid repeating myself.
Everything I wrote about 2018 applied equally to 2019. The odd name had changed but greedy old men still ran the world for their own benefit and got away with it.
Admittedly there were a few events unique to 2019, such as the death of Doris Day, but I could hardly forge a whole poem round a change of tense in Que Sera Sera. And besides, it’s beginning to look as if the future is very much ours to see and it’s not a pretty sight.
Was it this year or last that they banned plastic bags at the supermarket? Whichever, I still forget to take a virtuous cloth bag with me to the shops. ‘‘No problem,’’ said Glennys at the checkout yesterday, ‘‘we’ve got these free ones from the fire brigade.’’ The bag she handed me had a legend printed on the side. ‘‘Have you got an escape plan?’’ it said.
‘‘I certainly have,’’ I said and gestured at the groceries I’d just placed on the conveyor belt. A passing member of the Healthy Heart Association glanced at my bacon, butter and booze, went white, made the sign of the cross with a brace of zucchini and ran gibbering for the hills. ‘‘Eat, drink, and be merry,’’ I sang to his departing back, ‘‘for tomorrow they won’t let you die.’’
‘D on’t be 80,’’ my mother told me when she was 80. She’s now 96, poor thing, not that she knows it. She’s a former teacher of history but she couldn’t tell you the date. We skype once a month or so, by which I mean that the carer holds a screen in front of her to which my mother, propped up in bed, gaunt and shrunken, does not react in any way except to look in bewilderment at the image of herself in the top corner.
Recently she stopped eating. Her favourite grandson made a special trip to see her for what would probably be the last time. She didn’t recognise him. She shrank from him in fear. Since then the doctor has increased her antidepressants and she has started eating again. He’ll be getting her jogging next.
The paper is full of advice on healthy ageing and the streets are full of people taking that advice. Everywhere I go I see Mr and Mrs Retiree on matching mountain bikes, pedalling with grim determination against the headwinds of inevitability.
Each to their own. But the world is never so stale that there isn’t something new to wonder at. Driving back from a dog walk yesterday afternoon I saw an old man crossing Ferrymead Bridge. He was built like knotted string and wearing shorts a little too short for viewer comfort, but he was going well, vigorously swinging his arms. In each hand he held a toilet plunger. I’ve been puzzling over it ever since.
The only explanation I’ve arrived at – and I do not for one minute pretend it’s conclusive – is that the old boy was taking precautions against high winds. In the event of a sudden gale threatening to blow him out to sea, he could just plug himself to the nearest wall and ride it out.
And on that encouraging note of human ingenuity, originality and preparedness, I wish one and all a very merry Christmas.