Why a free bus pass is a ticket to romance
THIS is the time of year when, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson put it, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Prose is too blunt an instrument to depict the agonies and ecstasies of finding, wooing and winning your beloved. Only poetry is fit for such grand themes, and some of the most beautiful poems in the English language have been inspired by love.
Still, when you explore the treasure house that is love poetry, a troubling theme emerges. Poets seem to feel that romance is strictly for the young and beautiful. If the middle-aged or — heaven forbid! — the elderly should dare to wander into the realm of hearts and flowers, they can expect to be booted briskly back out again, accompanied by howls of derision.
In the literature of love, anyone past the first flush of youth is doomed to mockery, humiliation and sharp regret. Deceived husbands, betrayed wives, deluded old fools led a merry dance by manipulative young minxes — from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Auden and Larkin, the message is clear: wooing is not for wrinklies. It is high time some brave bard took up his pen in praise of senior sensuality, and Christopher Matthew has risen to the challenge.
His sprightly volume of bittersweet verse is an affectionate account of experiencing the pangs of love at a time of life when the most urgent question about an impending tryst with your sweetheart is whether you feel spry enough to take off your socks before ravishing her.
Doughty champion though Matthew is of mature allure, he is clear-sighted about its challenges.
From poor Bob, who thought a joke Valentine’s present might charm his sweetheart: ‘[He] lost his head, one has to say/And plumped for AntiNagging Spray’, to Tom, who nursed a burning passion for a fellow pupil named Simpkins Minor, before settling down into wedded respectability (though not, alas, with Simpkins Minor), his poems chronicle the many unexpected pitfalls of autumnal courting.
Matthew is not, it has to be said, a comic versifier of the calibre of Hilaire Belloc or John Betjeman. There are a few daring excursions into limerick, clerihew or haiku form. Most of his verses have a tum-ti-tum metre and his rhymes can be a touch rickety: ‘Sixties/hyperactive pixies’.
But he describes his poems as ‘short stories . . . in disguise’, and there is something endearingly familiar about the characters who populate this slim volume, amusingly illustrated by Tony Ross.
They include Jenny Parr, a merry widow who becomes a telly star at 82 and marries her much younger co-presenter; Burr and Marguerite, a hippy couple who mortify their children by carrying on in their 70s as though it were still the Summer of Love; and, most touching of all, the 63-year-old singleton of the title poem, who finds love on the bus and reminds all of us past our first youth that a hopeful spirit, an open heart and an intrepid attitude to public transport can bring unexpected joy at any age.
As Matthew puts it: ‘If life is overtaking you, then I would recommend:/Stick out your hand and hail a bus. Who knows where it will end?’