When I Were A Lad

Another humourous offering from my writing archive:

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about the battle of the sexes, much of it nonsense and hogwash, but what is often overlooked is another battle. Much older, and much more real. The battle of the generations! It seems to me every generation suffered from the one before and every generation is determined to wreak its revenge on the next. And its main weapon in this war? Tales! Tales beginning with the words “When I were a lad…”.

I wish I could say that I’m patiently waiting for the day when I can use this weapon myself, but I’m an impatient youth. So let me transport you, transport you to the year 2035A.D., to the year when I’ll be 75 years old, sitting in my rocking chair and telling tales beginning with the words “When I were a lad…”.

I can see it now, it’s another lovely day, I’m rocking away on my back porch, my gran’son at my feet, I’m puffing away on an empty pipe (because I don’t smoke) and suddenly, without any warning, I start my tale and watch the little mite squirm:

You know, son, when I were a lad, life was a real adventure. Take the weather. You never knew from one moment to the next exactly what it was going to do. One minute the sky could be near clear of any sign of a cloud and the next blacker than the road to Hell. And that’s black, I can tell you. Then within seconds there could be droplets of water, large enough to fill egg cups, pounding at you skin! And it hurt, boy, I can tell you. But it was natural see? God’s own water. Though it didn’t always come down as water. No, lad, sometimes it came down as balls of solid ice, big as ping-pong balls they were, and dangerous. One of them hit yer, and you’d be out cold for a month. Lose of memory too, probably. Ah, but it all toughened you up. Made a man of you. There are no real men nowadays; all soft, the lot of ’em!

Weather control. Hah!!! In my day we thought ourselves lucky if we could even guess what the weather would do the next hour, let alone day. Now, first sighting of a cloud and it’s zap! with a laser beam and guaranteed sunshine for the rest of the day. Only place it rains now, that’s what we used the call the droplets of water, by the way — don’t suppose you’ve heard that word have you? — well, only place it rains now is the wilds: jungles, moors, fells, far away mountains, Manchester. Have to pay a small fortune if you want to get wet the natural way nowadays — we, we got it for nowt, like it or not. In my day, go out of doors and you didn’t know whether to take suntan lotion or an umbrella. Don’t suppose you’ve heard of them either, have you lad? Umbrellas, eh they bring a lot of memories back.

Devices they were. Mechanical devices to direct the rain away from your face and down the back of your neck, or so it seemed to me. And so was our sense of adventure in them days that we used to buy them with metal spikes sticking out the top to attact the lightning. I remember going fishing once, in a boat on Rudyard Lake, with a dear friend, Arnold Watts. Well, we was out there in the middle of the lake when this here storm started. Arnold whipped out his umbrella, stuck it up, and zap! A bolt of lightning — that’s a massive electrical charge jumping from the sky to the ground, or in this case, the lake — struck Arnie’s umbrella and fried him to a crisp. I remember his wife cried something rotten at the funeral. But I comforted her — and six months later we were married. Umbrellas, I love ’em!

But we didn’t always rely on the weather for our dangers, no! We made our own. Take our pavements. In my day they were proper pavements, real concrete slabs, and not laid out nice and evenly like they are at these so call shopping centres — nah! Stuck up they did. At the corners. Sometimes by as much as three inches! I tell yer, go round the shops in my day and you didn’t know whether you were going to get back in one piece or with a broken neck! That was true adventure. And what’s more, in my day you had to go round the shops. They weren’t mere tourist curiosities. We had none of this press three buttons on yer home computer and it’d be sent round to yer. You had to go and get it yourself. That meant catching a bus and fighting yer way through hordes of other shoppers in cramped shopping centres and markets. You don’t know you’re born nowadays! You just don’t know you’re born.

In my day, life was full of danger. Illness, for example. There were more ways to die from illness than there were to stay alive! Take cancer. By the 1990s, they had found a cancer for every part of the body you could mention. From cancer of the left big toe to cancer of the right eyebrow. And if you didn’t think your chances of getting one from the nuclear industry and all the E for additives was high enough, you could always increase your risk by smoking burning leaves wrapped in paper — cigarettes they called ’em. Or, if you were really rich, you could sunbathe — not in Britain, mind you. Our last summer before this weather control nonsense was back in 1976, and even I can barely remember that!

Mind you, cancer wasn’t the only fatal illness. Jogging was a good way to die early. Heart disease they called it, but personally I think most of them just died from embarassment because of the damn silly costume they had to wear to do it. Ah, but they were the good old days. Now, thanks to wonderful medical science they’ve got cures for diseases that don’t even exist! Ah well, I suppose things change. Except for our beloved leader, of course.

Ah, Marvellous Maggie! Been in power for nigh on sixty years now you know. The Iron Lady they used to call her, and still not a trace of rust! of course, there are those who say she was replaced by a robot in the early ’20s, but I don’t believe a word of it. Just because she never goes anywhere without her handbag is no reason to suggest that it’s a container for her batteries. And the fact she hasn’t aged, well, look at Cliff Richard: been dead forty years now and still looks 24!

Course, the Opposition have been replaced by robots, but then all they ever did was boo, and give the occasional cry of “Hah, shucks!” and “Rubbish!”. In fact, nobody noticed the difference until on of the robot’s logic circuits rebelled and asked the Prime Minister a sensible quest — and that took ten years!

Ah, buy Maggie still marches on. And you know, given another twenty years or so and I think her policies will really begin to work.

But I’ve been talking long enough; be teatime soon. Give me your hand, lad, and I’ll walk you indoors. Of course, the tea we drink today’s nothing like the tea I used to have. That was real tea, came in proper tissue teabags, with two thousand perforations to let the flavour flood out — aye, we had none of this plastic ball rubbish you have today!

___________
©John Steele 2011
If memory serves, I wrote this back in the late 1980s in response to the nostalgia articles I was subjected to during the weekly writer’s workshop, down in the local WEA. It may have been published in their annual Writer’s Anthology but I can’t remember where I’ve put my old copies to verify this at the moment.

Stoke 2110, Betty, Mum and I’s — My entry to Stoke Story 2010

Still heady from my success as a runner-up in the Stoke Story 2002 writing competition (with “Pete and the Pottery Genie” — see elsewhere on this website), I jumped at the chance to enter the Stoke Story 2010 competition, promptly starting to write the story the day before it was due in and finishing it about 1a.m. that night, ready for emailing the following morning.

The theme once again had to have a local flavour and be something to do with the year 2010 (or anniversary past or future thereof). I toyed with the possibility of a “Pete and the Pottery Genie II” but couldn’t think up a plot, so I just adopted a suitably local sounding tone of voice and went where it took me:

If someone had told me a hundred years ago that in 2110 Stoke was going to be the Capital of England, I’d have thought they were daft.

Shows you how wrong you can be.

Mind you, to be fair, I was ’owt be a lad of ten at the time and half of the city seemed to have been knocked down to make way for new houses they’d ran out of money to build, the whole nation was depressed by the public spending cutbacks by a government nobody had voted for, and it was hard to imagine Stoke as anything but a third-rate city that couldn’t hope to compete with the likes of Manchester or Birmingham, leave alone the mighty London.

Still, best be telling you who I am, I suppose. I’m nobody.

Nobody special, that is to say. I’m not the mayor of Stoke, or anything like that (more’s the pity, the money she’s on). Not even one of Stoke’s literary lights (you didn’t need telling that, right?). Just an ordinary Colin, lucky enough to born at the right time, as presumably the person reading this, to see medical science improve enough to extend the average lifespan to nearer two hundred years, from the seventy-odd of a hundred years ago. Heck-a-do, even my mother’s still alive.

Still, it’s unbelievably fantastic to have lived see the changes a century have wrought. I admit, as a kid, I was often a little jealous of the stories my granddad told me of the things he’d lived through: two World Wars, technology advancing from horse-drawn carriages through to fast cars and jet planes in the space of a few decades. Rock music. Pop music. Seeing Michael Jackson in Tesco’s. (’Though his mind was going near the end, so I’m not at all certain of the veracity of the last one.)

Still. Eh?

I’d even missed the invention of the Internet. What was left to invent?

True, we still hadn’t been to Mars, and even the moon seemed such a long time ago some even questioned if we’d ever actually gone there. But then, what’s changed that much? Yeah. We got to Mars back in 2026 (what the heck-a-do for?), and even a moon of Saturn (don’t ask me which one), and there’s a probe orbiting some other sun, somewhere, but if there’s anything out there worth meeting, it’s still hiding from us, so I’ll not be shaking an ET’s tentacle yet-as-like.

But I’s reckon, and many who’re already thinking I’s as daft as a loon would grudgingly agree, this past century has been the best one yet. No World Wars. Hardly any car crashes, now that the things can drive themselves. (Heck-a-do, you can even drink yourself silly, whilst it does 150 down the motorway.) The brain chips, that originally just let you access the World Wide Web, literally ‘at will’, but now can link your mind to another’s so that you can actually experience their thoughts, their emotions, their every sensation.

Their death.

Sorry.

“Mum.”

“Theres, Son. I’ll carry on for you, whilst you gather yourself.”

“Thanks, mum.”

“It’s not all as rosy-do as my son has been implying. Take me. Yes, I’m still alive at the age of one hundred and twenty seven years, but those of us who were first to have their lives extended couldn’t have their biological clocks turned back so I’s been middle-aged for over half-century now.”

“And those lucky, and I’s use that word guardedly, enough to have their clocks turned back often chose ill-advisedly to be forever teenagers.”

“Who could ever have imagined being mother to a teenager for over fifty years straight?”

“Mum!”

“I’s was just saying.” Aside: “He’s a good son, but it’s still not easy.”

“I’s ready to talk about Betty now, Mum.”

“Alrights, Son.”

I’s was saying, these brain chips (“moccasin chips”, some have dubbed them), that let you experience another’s feelings, can be wonderful. Never before in the whole history of humankind has anyone been able to know as a fact, in every little detail and shade, exactly how someone else felt about them, and share an intimate moment, a romantic moonlight, a sad movie, anything, so completely and literally, with another human mind.

It sounded ghastly. Do women have minds? Surely, just a mushy, soggy, soppy bog of a place?

“Son!”

“Sorrys.”

But then I went to Tesco’s.

Brain chips were still expensive novelties then, not to be found on the shelves of your local supermarket. Not even a big, 24 hour opening, Tesco’s.

Betty, as she was named according to her name badge, was filling a shelf.

She wasn’t my type at all. Too slim, with elbows that could cut you. Short-ish blonde hair, average height. Nondescript.

I asked her where the jam was. (Why. Do. They. Keep. Moving. Stuff. Around?) She turned her face to look at me from where she was squatting, pulling bottles of orange squash to the fore, to put new stock behind.

Her eyes were green. It was all I could see at first. Then I noticed them crinkling into a smile as she registered the effect they were having on me. Her nose, cute, small, curved. Cheekbones high.

I flustered back to normality. “Hi, do you know the jam’s been moved to, please” I asked again.

She lit up the world with another smile again as she turned and led me to the new aisle for jams and other spreads. (Opposite frozen food cabinets, I ask you?!)

No, I didn’t drop to one knee and ask her to marry me. Or even ask for her phone number. Or when she was due to finish work, for a coffee. I didn’t work, or think, that fast back then.

Nor when I saw her in their on a subsequent visit.

Or the visit after that.

Allrights, or some time after that neither. But eventually.

Eventually, we did all the usual stuff. Cinema. Hanging. Coffee. Lots of coffee. Together, in the way couples have been together since the dawn of humankind, but in a sense alone. Unable to really enter our loved one’s soul, however long we gazed into their eyes, longing for that ultimate union.

But the century hadn’t been standing still. We already knew that we were going to be together for much longer than any couples in history before us, thanks to the improvements in longevity treatments. And millions swarmed to embrace the original brain chips that enabled them to get instant access, wherever they may be, with the World Wide Web, as it was still being called, and meant that as never before, people were never completely alone but could email, tweet, chat, blog, mind conference, phone anyone anywhere, anytime they wanted.

It came along at just the right time to sweep I’s and Betty along with it. We were never out of touch. Our spare moments either a constant chatter or shared silence. I suppose, if progress had stood standing, we would have grown out of the novelty, like an old married couple in the previous century. But, of course, it didn’t. Our frozen youth, increased lifespan, and advances in the brain chip technology meant that soon we had the ability to share our souls.

At first, it was just the ability to share emotions. Then, as the technology improved, sensations too, then thoughts.

Debate sparked about if this was truly a merging of individual consciousness and what this meant for the future of humankind. But who cared about all that when you could gaze into your loved one’s eyes and literally see yourself as they saw you, and feel what they were feeling, and communicate mind to mind, soul to soul.

“I’s never known what that like.”

“I’s know, mum.” Dad had just left one day, when I was nine, leaving us both alone.

It was addictive, I’s suppose, that degree of intimacy the chips made possible. Soon we were grabbing every possible moment to share each other’s sensations and feelings, wherever we happened to be.

My last memory of Betty was one such intimate moment. I was sitting on a bench in Hanley Park, as was, before Stoke became the most important part of the city. She, judging from the sensations I was sharing, was likewise sitting outside, enjoying the heat of the late-autumn sun on her skin, her breathing slow and relaxed, her mind stretching out to embrace mind when…

“Gather yourself, Son.”

“I’s okay, mum.”

GIRL KILLED IN LONGTON SHOOTOUT, the local news headline had been.

The sensation of pain had lasted an instant, then her mind was gone leaving a moment of confusion as my brain chip’s software reacted to the loss of connection. But I barely noticed it as my own mind was numb at the realisation as to what the sensations had meant.

Betty had been shot in the back of the head. A stray bullet smashing through the huge, floor to ceiling windows of the supermarket. Fired by a panicking gunman in a robbery going rapidly wrong.

A senseless death.

Some news commentators blamed a spate of violent heist movies that had been popular during the summer, when it turned out the gunman had been just nineteen years old and had once seen one of the films.

Local commentators said the violence was just a side-effect of Stoke’s new status as a Big City, a result of the city’s much increased population to three millions, and the huge influx of peoples, ever attracted to the Big City Lights, and the money and opportunities that inevitably swarm round any centre of commerce and power.

“Ay, it’s not the Stoke I remember.”

“It’s not the world anyone remembers, mum.”

But I guess mum’s right, it’s not the Stoke I remember either. A hundred years back in 2010 when, as a kid of ten, I got to see a big (for Stoke at that time), big outdoor concert, to celebrate Stoke’s first one hundred years as a city, in Hanley Park as was. There was just ten thousand people or so at that concert, and I suppose there was some minor pick-pocketing and such-as-like low-level crimes but it felt safe, and friendly.

Stokies are such friendly folk, the local ’paper’s letters page always said.

That’s still the case in some of the outlying suburbs, and small isolated estates like Park Green, built in the 2070s. But now it’s like any large modern city: millions of people living in their own social networks, remembering that they belong to the same city only for the big occasions, or not at all.

Still, I’s guess it’s a honour for Stoke to be becoming England’s new Capital City. Who’d have imagined that the decades of hostility against the London based government would eventually lead to an English Rebellion, insisting on a new Capital City, more centrally located, and that that city would be the once humble Stoke?

It had taken a good ten years for the city’s councillors to draw up the plans in the city’s bid to become the Capital. Betty had been excited, as the first artist’s impressions on the city’s website. Seeing the proposed Civic Tower, like a futuristic Houses of Parliament, to replace the London based seat of government. New public works of art. Extending the old Hanley Park, to host a concert to dwarf the one a hundred years earlier. New public transport links, including a 500k.ph hover rail link to Europe and Asia. A new stadium, “Fit for the Capital”.

Ay, I’s and mum have seen a lot of changes during the past century, not all good (heck-a-do, we’re in the hundred and fifty nineth series of Top Gear, for all that’s holy!). And more’s to come, I’s sure. But I’s still debating whethers to go to thats concert or no, without Betty.

“He’s’ll go.”

“Mum! I’s a hundred and ten years old, I’s sure I can decide for mysen.”

“Well, I’s sure Betty would’ve wanted you to.”

Experiencing something without another mind’s sensations and feelings to share, though? Without Betty’s green eyes and smile to catch mine. For upto another hundred years at that.

___________
©John Steele 2010, 2011
Sadly, there seemed to be no runners-up places this time round and my story didn’t come 1st, 2nd, 3rd (or “Commended”). I enjoyed writing it though, and present it above for your reading pleasure.

Confessions of an Op Knocks Failure

There can’t be many people who don’t know the successes of Stoke-on-Trent — like Jackie Trent & Terri Wade — but what about the miserable failures? Like poet-author, and editor of “The Bentilean”, John Steele…..or is it?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why the blummin’ heck am I going to audition for “Opportunity Knocks”? Such were my thoughts as the coach drew ever closer to Manchester.

I remember the trailers: “Send a SAE for an application form, to try out for the next series of Opportunity Knocks”. I remember being pig-sick of trying to overcome my hatred of writing long enough to make it as a writer. I remember the Bright Idea: send for a form and see if I can make it as a male Pam Ayres.

Afterall, what has she got going for her? A pretty face? A funny accent? A cute smile? Awful poems? Well, I’m not Bad Looking. Born and raised in the Potteries I must have a funny accent to half the nation. My cheeks dimple when I smile broadly. And I write awful poems! got everything, right?

Wrong!! I hate cameras, I almost have a coronary reading my stuff out at the local WEA Writer’s Workshop, and the only time I’ve been on a stage was as a dwarf in Infant’s School. And then it occurs to me: if I’m halfway successful at this ‘male Pam Ayres’ lark, I’d be right back behind my typewriter trying to bash out a bookful of blummin’ poems!

Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!!!!! (As they say in Bella magazine).

And the venue did little to calm me down. Big as a mountain on the outside (to a poor lad from Stoke), the Sashas Hotel was even bigger inside. And what greeted me as I walked through the doors? Lifesize stuffed animals! A polar bear, tiger, and stag to be exact. Jeez! I thought, I hope this isn’t the audience. It wasn’t. They were worse.

After having my Polaroid taken by a stick-insect wearing glasses, I was shown through double-doors, stauncly withstanding several hundred decibels of Rock Music, and into what I could only assume was a converted aircraft hangar, half-crammed with fellow starlets/loonies.

The ‘Why?s’ started buzzing round my head again, as I took a seat next to two singer-guitarist who called themselves “Just Variety”, and a fellow in a magicians cloak sitting next to another fellow sporting a wild, white wig, fishnet stockings, and a green leotard. For a moment I almost forgot that too-soon I would have to go out in front of these weirdos and make an even bigger eejit out of myself.

We were all crowded down one end of the hall, on three rows of chairs, some leaning on the back wall, some crowded up the sides, but all behind a long row of tables, seating soundman, small close circuit video camera, the producer, and several whose function I couldn’t discern. The stage was just a rectangle of floor, lit by four blinding TV lights, with not even any ‘wings’ to have yourself a quiet nervous breakdown in before going on. It was worse than a vindaloo and beans.

A hour and ten minutes of watching singers, dancers, and musicians, who were all far too good for my liking, and it was my turn. Thanks to my late arrival in Manchester I had missed my official time and had been sitting there hating every good act lest I should suddenly have to follow it, and praying when a stand-up comic went down like a lead life-jacket that I’d be next. I wasn’t. Not until some blond, middle-aged woman came over to me and said, “Richard” (for I’d called myself Richard Mears), “you’re on next. After this act, just make your way down the other side of the hall, and the stage manager will show you to your spot.”

Suddenly I wanted my mummy, and all to soon was given the choice of a hand-held or free-standing microphone instead. “Wait for your cue,” I was told. It came, I started, and another lead life-jacket hit the ocean floor.

Consistent to the end, I’d chosen to do “The Secret Service Poet”, which cries out at every line to be performed, and merely recited it. Worse still, it starts “Shhh! If my appearance surprises you, whatever you do don’t show it” and I was the most sensibly dressed person there! (All dressed in my black theatre front-of-house vol-ing clothes and a borrowed bright red bow tie) And then the poem was evidentally too short, as I had to tell them that I’d finished!!

Arrrrrrrrrghh!!! {again}

Still, I’d done it. Me, who’d never performed since the age of seven. And when I’d announced I’d finished, I had even been given a round of applause at least on par with my fellow failure, the comedian. And not a single thrown tomato! And when I retook my seat, I was in such a good mood I even spoke to somebody!!

What’s that you ask? Would I ever do it again? No. No…no…no…and a thousand, million, zillion times maybe.

___________
©John Steele 1991, 2011
Article originally self-published in The Bentilean Mini-mag Issue 2 community magazine. The poem, The Secret Service Poet, appears elsewhere on this website — here.

With You

With you
A grassy bed
A bright blue sky
Overhead
What do I
Care
For thistles
   creepy-crawlies
   herds of sheep
   and peeping toms?

With you
Your auburn hair
Dog-brown eyes
Firm breasts
(And the rest)
I don’t even notice
The bright blue sky
Overhead.

___________
©John Steele 1992, 2008
Self-published in The Bentilean mini-mag Issue 3, 14th February, 1992.

Oh, Your Top!

Oh, your top
makes Dolly Parton’s
seem as flop
as Bobby Charlton’s
It’s a sweet duet
It’s Somerset in spring
It’s Yorkshire puddin’
It’s Christmas stuffin’
It’s Bob & Bing
(When they sing)

Oh, your top
It’s a sure winner
Oh, your top
It could be slimmer
It’s a fact one day your double-act may pop!
but as long as you’ve still got ’em
Oh, your top!!

___________
©John Steele, 1992, 2008
Self-published in The Bentilean mini-mag Issue 3, 14th February, 1992.

The Futility of Philosphising

What is Life?
The Philosopher mused
As he sat all alone
In the wood.

And is there a difference
He went on to ponder
Between what is Bad
And what is Good?

And as he sat there
The sun overhead
Moved steadily across the sky

And the day-light fled
And the night-time sped
Di-urnally on by.

And the living things all around him
Biologically, went through their seasons
But still the Philosopher silently sat
Searching for Cosmic Reasons

And the years turned into decades
And the decades rolled on by
And the sun continued its neverending journey
Westwards across the sky

Now the decades have turned into centuries
And the Future is rapidly shrinking
But still, there in the midst of the wood
The Philosopher’s skeleton
Sits
Thinking.

___________
©John Steele, 1989, 2008
Published in issue 1 of Bentilee Voices magazine, Spring 1989.

A letter from Tesco DVD Rental

I wrote the following the other week, to a friend, in response to a mailing from Tesco DVD Rental. You are meant to imagine the middle class couple from The Catherine Tate Show whilst reading it.

I got a letter today from Tesco DVD Rental.

Red it was.

Bright red. Printed with Christmas snowflakes.

Snowflakes. And it’s only turned December.

Addressed to me.

Me.

Not “The Occupier”. Or “To whom it may concern”. Or some such. But specifically to me.

Me.

So they know who I am.

Know all my shopping habits, what with their Tesco Clubcard.

So they know me.

And the letter was addressed to me.

“We know exactly what you want”. It said.

Those very words. “We know exactly what you want”.

“…three months of Tesco DVD rental…”.

They weren’t wrong.

Three whole months of DVDs falling through my letterbox again.

90 days. Of free DVD rentals. Twice a week. Three if I was lucky.

I’d have to be very lucky.

Just visit their site and type in the voucher code on the plastic card they’d included.

A plastic card.

They’d gone to that much trouble. It was red too.

A voucher code away from 90 days of free DVD rentals.

A magic card. A wonderful card.

“I’m sorry but our records show that you’ve already had a comeback offer and you aren’t eligible.”

Then why send me the card?

The Evil, hope-raising bastards.

___________
©John Steele 2009

Fishy Thought

If fish travel around in schools, howcome you never meet a herring with ‘O’ levels?

___________
©John Steele, 1990, 2008
First used as a filler item in The Bentilean, December 1990.

The Eighth Rate Poet

I am the eighth rate poet
Doggerel’s what I write:
Cliched, commonplace, rhyming verse;
Humdrum, dull, and trite.

Aye, if you want poetical rubbish
That scans and rhymes, a bit
You could find no better person
Than me, to write it.

For I’m the King of Doggerel
The Monarch of all that’s bad
In poetry, sublime and comical;
The humourous and the sad.

I make Pam Ayres seem like Shakespeare
Ms Jennings seem like Keats
Cause I’ve never heard of iambic pentameter
Or other such metrical feets.

I rely purely on instinct
And, most unfortunately
I am completely and utterly without any sense of rhythm
As you can plainly hear.

And when it comes to rhyming
Cliche’s my middle name
Cause there’s alway a breeze
Blowing through the trees
When I lie, at my ease
Under the moon
In the month of June
Beside the river
Where bluebells quiver
And daffodils prance
In sprightly dance
As I glance
With inward glee
To be in such
Good company.

So, as you see, at the end of the day
When all other poets have been de-versed
It will still be safe to say
That the Eighth Rate Poet is the worst!

___________
©John Steele, 1988, 2008
Ms Jennings is the poetess referred to in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as the worst poet in the Universe.

The Haggler

The Devil sat on my shoulder
And offered me all Bentilee
From Willfield right down to Twigg Street
Fenton fields, transmitter, and tree!

Course! He wanted somethin’ for ’em
As anyone would, wouldn’t you?
But He said my sould would do nicely,
Plus a 10p deposit in lieu.

But I knew I could more if I bargained
Cause my father had sired no fool
So I demanded free beer in the pubs
(Plus the girls of Berryhill School).

Well, He relented at once to my hagglin’
Then said in His serpent-y drawl
“You can have all the women you want to
“And hold orgies in Harold Clowes Hall.”

“You can even make St. Paul’s a casino
“And gamble, for money, ’til dawn
“Then settle down with a beer and the telly
“And watch videos of violence and porn!”

Well, I can’t say I wasn’t a bit tempted
But I fought it with all of me might!
(Well, ’til He saaid I could dine out at SIZZLERS
Every lunch-time, tea-time and night!)

Then me will-power just turned into jelly
And I felt myself falling to Hell
So I shouted, “O.K. you can have me…
“…if you just chuck in breakfast as well.”

___________
©John Steele, 1990, 1996, 2008
I wrote this solely to include various local place names into a poem and was subsequently asked to read it out on air when I was invited onto Radio Stoke to speak about the launch of my self-published community magazine, The Bentilean. I still can’t decide whether the last line should read “breakfast” or “Bucknall” (another place name). Incidentally, what I referred to as “Fenton fields” are in fact known as “Berryhill Fields” but I didn’t know that at the time. The reference to “the girls of Berryhill School” was included in small tribute to the favourable attention I seemed to elicit from some of them when, aged 15, I used to take walks down a former railway line that took me past said school grounds — in stark contrast to the complete indifference I seemed to elicit from any of the girls I’d been to school with the past umpteen years. I felt less flattered when I plucked up the courage to speak to a couple of them though and found they thought I was 19 years old because I was tall (and not going to school, I suppose).