Category: Places

Ealingianki

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Fot. Mateusz Skwarczek / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Ealingianki

I watch two Polish women
Talking small-talk, fluently, –
Talking waiting at the school-gates
For the bells of half-past three.
They’re talking English, with an accent,
Till their girls are free –
That’s their SSB-tongued daughters,
With a hint of estu’ry.

They’re talking both in English,
Until suddenly their not –
As their code-switching switches
For their mother melting-pot.
They sound conspiratorial,
A fiendish Polish plot !
Or is it me they talk about ?
They’ve seen I’m in earshot…

Except if course, it’s just their talk,
As back-and-forth they flow –
Why shouldn’t they ?  And then I think,
Well, do they even know ?
As their Polish moves to English moves to Polish,
Round they go,
With their small-talk that is too-big
For one language to tableau.

Then all at once, the school-gates open
And the classrooms spill,
And they gather-up their Londoners
To walk them down the hill.
And I hear my daughter’s SSB,
With a hint of of Polish-frill,
That she’s picked-up from her classmates
As they teach her how to trill.

Grounds for Divorce

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Photo by Simon Gough on Pexels.com

Grounds for Divorce

Highbury Stadium – once was the time
When the very mention meant Arsenal.
But you threw that away for some sponsor or other,
Your history’s turned to a farce, pal.
And White Hart Lane has hardly fared better,
And Goodison fell by the way –
Where next ?  Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge,
Where memories no longer play ?
I get it, you needed to move, to expand –
And you don’t give a fig for the past.
You’d even let wither the name of the club
For a chequebook sufficiently vast.
Yet imagine Milan, but without the San Siro,
Or Barça decamped from the Nou.
And imagine your shiny new ground with an old name,
To carry your heritage through.

Kafé Wiënna

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Photo by Valeria Boltneva on Pexels.com

Kafé Wiënna

I saw a trendy cafe, with nothing but delicacies on show – so I checked them out, and took a seat, so that I could practice my German when I paid. I ordered a piece of cake, but it never arrived, to my cost. It seems, my earnest order was at once lost in translation…

Ich sah ein angesagtes Kaffeehaus, mit lauter Delikatessen ausgestellt – also checkte ich sie und setzte mich hin, um Deutsch gut zu üben, während ich zahlte.  Ich bestellte mir ein Stück Kuchen, doch bei mir kam nichts an, auf meine eigenen Kosten.  Es scheint, meine aufwendige Bestellung ging auf einmal in der Übersetzung verloren…

I saw a trendy Coffee-Haus,
With loud delicious-eatings out-displayed –
So checked I them and placed me down,
To German good to practice, as I paid.
I ordered me a chunk o’cake,
But at me came not at, on my own cost.
It gleams, my busy order went
On one-once in the meta-setting lost…

Incase you’re wondering – the umlaut in the title isn’t an umlaut, it’s a diëresis…

West Country & Western

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Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

West Country & Western

I was born where the Avon bends,
The Tamar darts and the Dart up-ends,
In a parrick you might miss at night,
Where the Otter and the Parrett fight.

I was born where the stones stand-up,
When my Pa taught me to long-man up,
To roll my arrs and burr my talk,
And fly my mane like a horse of chalk.

You might-be even hear the fiddle-folk
Beneath the sunset glowing cliffs of red –
You may just hear the bleat and croak
From herds of raw-wools singing low,
And spinning-out their thread.
From this side of the Barrow,
So it’s said,
Tomorrow’s days ahead.

So come and take a trip with me
Upon the Highway 303,
The outer-limits of outdoors
Await between the downs and moors.

It’s said we don’t like strangers round these parts –
By grockles, I’ll be bound…
Don’t fret, we hamlet folk won’t fuss,
Cause who could be more strange than us?

You might-be even hear a banjo twang
Beneath the moonraked moonlight, down our way.
You may just hear a lively gang
Of applejacks upon Midsummer night,
If you should stray.
From this side of the Severn,
So they say,
All Heaven comes to play.

Jungle Familiar

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Photo by Pok Rie on Pexels.com

Jungle Familiar

“Here in the Amazon, expect to see creatures
So unlike anything you’ve seen back at home.”
So the tour-guide promised, in our cabins in the jungle,
That were concrete-free with no trace of styrofoam.

Twenty structures or so, I reckoned,
And only reached by the river – no roads.
With the sounds of the rainforest right on our doorstep,
With monkeys and parrots and cicadas and toads.

But…around the huts, some things were looking
Just a little too familiar – too much like Blighty,
Like dandelions, growing wherever they can –
I’m unure – should they abhor or delight me ?

I heard some chickens in a coop, and honey-bees –
And I’m willing to bet they’re the same damn species
As thrive in Britain, like the white-bloomed clover,
And the stands of reeds on the river’s beaches.

So, on our way here we passed through Manaus,
With its pigeons and its mallards and its sparrows and its rats.
Now, I didn’t see those out here in the jungle,
But I do see a peregrine falcon – fancy that !

And there goes the buzzing of a common house fly,
And there’s a daddy longlegs – and a cockroach on the roam.
And a cat to catch mice, and a dog to keep guard,
And the humans, of course.  We’ve some of those at home…

Beyond the Creek

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Beyond the Creek

How can the World’s End by in Chelsea ?
Is Zone 2 beyond the pale ?
Some claim that further Westwards is Fulham,
But just cos we’ve got legs, there’s no need to pull ’em….
Clearly the whole world stops in Chelsea,
Where only the fools and the buses sail –
For who takes a trip past the Cemet’ry’s ridge ?
Or dares to cross over the Stamford Bridge ?
But wait…are there council tenants in Chelsea ?
Have Thameside views been built at scale ?
Is the King’s Road home to the oik and churl ?
Now that truly is the end of the world…

Albion Away

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I asked AI to have them looking up at the cathedral, but here i think they’ve just spotted a pigeon…

Albion Away

(A Tale from the 80s)

From teenage holidays in Spain,
Back when they were the latest thing,
To Saturdays on terraces,
To sing-out for our lads.
Three-nil, five-one, always winning,
Charging down the wing –
First the League, and then to conquer Europe,
Further than our dads.

Rome in April, that was special,
Even though we lost,
And Bucharest, beyond the Iron Curtain –
Why resist the pull ?
For how else could we working-class boys
Learn of santé, skål, and proost,
And countless castles and bazaars
In Bern, Zagreb, and Istanbul,

Our girlfriends likely had scant int’rest
In our fate this season,
Yet they’d sometimes come along to see
The other-worldly show.
And finding out the other fans were just like us
Was always pleasing,
Drinking with the Finns and Greeks
From Sparta Rapid Dynamo.

I wasn’t sure about the title of this one – I didn’t want to suggest any specific team.  I did consider Avalon Away, but that sounded awkward.  And in the end, I can only think of two Albion teams, plus a couple of Scottish ones, and none of them one is exactly renowned for their European prowess…

Industrious Insects

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Industrious Insects

The busy bees of Manchester
Are busy hoverflies –
They flit about the branches there,
In black-and-gold disguise.
Perhaps they’re all more working-class,
Republicans in tile and glass,
Who swing their clubs to earn their brass
Across the smoky skies.

They may not make the honey,
And they may not make the wax –
But they pollinate the money,
And they pay their aphid tax.
They have no queens, they have no hives,
They live their solitary lives –
But close together, each one thrives
On cotton, silk, and flax.

Timid Tectons

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The Basel earthquake of 1356 by the ever-busy Anon

Timid Tectons

Britain sits at the heart of its plate,
So far from the faultlines, far from volcanoes.
Though Arthur’s Seat and the Giant’s Causeway celebrate
How we once had those
Britain sits where the crusts are thick,
Though they used to bend, as the Great Glen shows.
And Lincoln lost its cathedral spire, when a final kick
Gave some glancing blows.

Head up West and See the Lights

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You won’t believe how many times I had to ask AI to genenrate this image before it managed to spell it right…

Head up West and See the Lights

The neon lights of old Piccadilly-dilly
Used to be so bright and silly-silly,
But the screens have sprung-up willy-nilly –
Boringly displayed.

Now there’s nothing but advert-a-go-go,
Shouting products from ho-hum to so-so.
Art and style ?  I’m afraid that’s a no-no –
Over and over replayed.

Sell more junk food, flog more bling-bling,
Scream more news, from Bronx to Beijing-zhing,
Punching eyeballs, all for kerching-ching –
The goods must be obeyed.

The hungry billboards are always on-on
The Eiffel Tower needs a new Citroën-tron.
Buy buy buy till the stuff’s all gone-gone –
As long as the profits get made.