Happy Birthday – 2nd draft

Tomorrow is this daily poetry adventure’s second anniversary, and have I got a treat for you !

Several years ago, a friend of mine was devising a piece of amateur theatre which I stage-managed, based around the laying of the first ocean-spanning telegraph cable in 1858.  His work was pretty experimental, but he had wanted it to be a musical of sorts and there were a couple of songs in it.  All of which got me thinking about writing a sequence of lyrics around the topic, a sort of soundtrack album to a film that never got made.

I should mention that that first cable failed after only three weeks and had to be replaced in 1866, but don’t look to these poems for too much historical detail.  There’s some, but it’s not a documentary.  And anyway, it’s dramatically more satisfying to imagine it as a single event with a false dawn and speedy follow-up.

So, starting tomorrow and continuing over the subsequent twelve days I present to you the The Transatlantic Cable !