A limerick a week #127

🎶Land of Grope and Tory🎶

I have the unfortunate privilege of being represented in the UK parliament by Ross Thomson, a young conservative MP who has appeared, on more than one occasion, to show himself unsuited to public office.

As reported by The Scotsman:

  • His ‘off-duty’ antics while on a supposed fact-finding mission to Iraq deeply offended families of soldiers that had been killed there while on active duty;
  • He considered a clearly hoax smartphone app called “instantgrammes” to be something that seemed to make ordering class 1 drugs online “sound cool”;
  • He was obliged to pay back a travel and subsistence claim in which a friend stayed with him overnight at a hotel at taxpayers’ expense. This took place after discussing “possible employment opportunities [with his friend], which was followed by a drinking session in Edinburgh”.

Since then he has been escorted by police from the Stranger’s Bar in the Houses of Parliament over allegations of drunkingly groping other revellers, something he denies.

Although no action was taken subsequently by the police or the House of Commons authorities on that occasion (because no-one concerned had made a formal complaint) the latter may now take action over an earlier incident as an official complaint has since been made by a Scottish MP concerning that previous episode of alleged inappropriate behaviour.

According to the Daily Record, the complainant “was frustrated at what he saw as Mr Thomson’s denials about his behaviour [about the most recent allegations]”.

Meantime, the locals are revolting…

Here’s the limerick:

One cannot escape the furore
Or the lewd and libidinous story
‘Bout an errant MP
Whose downfall we’ ll see
In the heart-Land of Grope and Tory!

A limerick a week #126

A right pain in the a**e! 

I recently compared ailments with a friend:

À gauche I possess a gammy shoulder and a sore thumb-cum-wrist joint, whereas à droite it seems that I’m developing Dupuytren’s contracture in my hand, otherwise known as Viking’s finger or claw! (Oh, and I just broke a tooth.)

Meanwhile, my friend has just the one malady, a musculo-skeletal pain en bas à l’arrière which, I am told, is extremely uncomfortable at times.

So, does a chap just hang around feeling sorry for himself and radiate sympathy to a fellow invalid, or does he write a limerick?

No contest! Here it is (with my apologies to sensitive readers):

There once was a chap couldn’t sit
‘Cos he’d broken his bottom a bit.
He said that: “I fear
There’s a hole in my rear
And a crack that runs right down the back of it!”

(_x_)

Bonnie Dundee!

🎶and a life on the ocean wave🎶

Six weeks into the New Year and already a highlight that will take some beating. What was it? Only the Ocean Liner exhibition at the newly opened V&A Gallery in Dundee!

I have always liked art deco (well, most of it) and a great deal of what I like is integral to the golden age of ocean liners of the 1920s and 30s, so the exhibition was a real treat.

An armchair from the first-class dining room on the Île de France.
Side chairs and a lacquered side table from the Grand Salon of the Normandie, the supreme liner of the era.
Evening attire as worn by some of the beautiful people of the 1920s and 30s.
Gents’ dookers and ladies’ cozzies of the era.
A wall in the first of the exhibition’s salons festooned with original posters advertising ocean liners of the era.
Normandie. IMHO the most iconic of the ocean liners and an equally iconic poster.

The Normandie poster, above, was the inspiration several years ago for one of my own, used to advertise a meeting of the Marine Laboratory Science Operations ‘Coffee Club’ (including its venerable ‘Traybake of the Month’ competition), and incorporated the rather less-well-appointed Fisheries Research Vessel Scotia:

FRS Scotia, Le Club de Café et Le Traybake du Mois. Magnifique!

A limerick a week #125

“In my darkroom…

…when I see that print coming in the developer, it’s as if I win the lottery” (Don McCullin)

It’s approaching the time of year when students on the Gray’s School of Art ‘short course’ on black and white film photography begin to panic and wonder if they’ll ever get a print worthy of the end-of-course exhibition. I’ve got one, thank goodness, as it takes the pressure off, but I’d like a couple more.

I had high hopes for at least one other (my ‘ice-cream buddy’ has seen an early version of it and has asked for a copy when it’s finished!), but I have just spent a frustrating hour and a half in my own darkroom and can’t seem to get it right. Nevertheless, I’m already in awe at a couple of pictures that my friends on the course will be showing so I think that bodes well for the exhibition.

This has all coincided with a documentary on the veteran photographer Don McCullin entitled ‘Looking for England’ that has just been shown on BBC 4. He’s an interesting character, albeit of his era, who is renowned for his compelling, if at times horrific, photographs of various global catastrophes and warring outbreaks.

The Nikon F camera that McCullin was carrying when it famously stopped a Khmer Rouge sniper’s bullet when he was accompanying government soldiers across a Cambodian paddy-field in the late 1960s. He recounts the experience here: http://www.aaronschuman.com/mccullinarticle.html

The documentary is on the BBC iPlayer and worth catching if only to view the developing landscape of ‘Englishness’ throughout McCullin’s life from his street photography of the 50s and 60s to the modern day.

It also shows some clips of him in his darkroom, as he prefers film photography to digital:

I have a dark room, and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience; you can move anything you want… the whole thing can’t be trusted, really.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the programme also coincides with a retrospective of McCullin’s work at Tate Britain that runs until May (memo to self: organise that weekend away NOW!).

Here’s the limerick:

A photographer was heard to remark
That shooting with film was a lark.
‘Tis a thing that envelops,
Consumes and develops
And one that keeps you in the dark!

A limerick a week #123

I have a cunning plan … 

Is it just me, or does Theresa May’s Brexit Plan B look remarkably like her Plan A? Plan B, remember, didn’t exist. It couldn’t because it was her deal or nothing.

Aah! Now I see. ‘Tis her cunning plan! There can be no real Plan B, so we’ll take Plan A and simply call it Plan B. That’ll fool ’em, eh? Theresa May, the Baldrick of politics.

‘Twas ‘Deal or No Deal’, you see,
Until she invented Plan B,
But Theresa’s May-hem
Will soon overwhelm
Them both. So, how about C? 

 

A limerick a week #122

“En politique, une absurdité n’est pas un obstacle”

A couple of weeks ago it was the former UK Chancellor, George Osborne, that had me suspending both belief and disbelief. This week it is the turn of the UK’s Prime Minister to promote incredulity.

Having studiously ignored all the signs that her ‘deal’ with Europe on the UK’s hair-shirted and self-flagellating attempt to leave the EU was not only doomed to failure, but would end in unalloyed humiliation, she diligently continued her journey to a self-induced political disaster.

Even the Downing Street cat saw it coming…

The UK Parliament has inflicted upon her one of the greatest defeats a British Prime Minister has ever endured, but there is no thought of her resigning. Quelle surprise! Instead she wants to explore Plan B despite weeks of her proselytising that there could be no Plan B.

No reprisals!

The honorable thing to do would be to resign, “but” say her apologists “these are not ordinary days”. Instead we are saddled with a Prime Minister that has tasked herself to resolve a problem created by her own appalling lack of judgement when, clearly, she is a part of the problem and not the solution; regrettably, the same can be said of the Leader of the Opposition!

So what price honour in politics, these days? No doubt Theresa May’s supporters would claim Charlie Chaplin’s litany on her behalf, that “Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself”, but I prefer Bonaparte’s bon mots (in English this time) that “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap”.

A Prime Minister once tried to promote
A deal that she knew wouldn’t float.
The fruit of her gambles? 
Complete omni-shambles.
No surprise she got trounced in the vote!

Postscript:

As reported in The Scotsman, Theresa May stood  for election in 2005 “under a Conservative manifesto promising a second referendum to decide whether to overturn the 1997 result [of the Welsh referendum on its devolved government]” yet she denies the UK public a People’s Vote on whether to reaffirm or abandon Brexit now that the public is better informed.

In the same article, she is also reported as having “voted for a ‘wrecking’ amendment to the 1998 Scotland Act that would have struck down legislation creating the Scottish Parliament”; legislation that was enacted as a result of the devolution referendum. A contrary stance on the people’s voice to the one that she advocates now.

… just saying!

A limerick a week #121

Out on the pull…

I had my gym induction as a new evergreen member of the Aberdeen Sports Village this week. ‘Evergreen’ is the polite word they use for their ‘old farts’ subscription rates.

Happily, I am at the younger end of the old-folks age spectrum and, despite being unfit and overweight, I enjoyed the induction. Nevertheless, in comparison to the slim and trim youth for whom their bodies are temples, I probably came across more as Angkor Wat than gym bunny. Still, that made me laugh even more at one young bloke, a wannabe Adonis, who was clearly out to impress a couple of the svelte young female gym members and missed his mouth completely when taking a swig from his water bottle. ‘Twas an epic fail.

After my induction I had to take an unhappy sounding car to be looked at. It had begun to misfire and a warning light had illuminated to tell me the electronic control unit had put the car in to ‘limp mode’. The dealership is about a mile and a half from home, so as I was in sports kit I thought I’d jog back after dropping-off the motor. That was when I had my own epic fail and tweaked a calf muscle halfway home. Just like the car I was reduced to limp mode.

Still, putting together the collective misfortunes of the wishful thinking young Adonis and me, it inspired this week’s ALAW…

A muscular youth at the gym
Thought the girls would all fancy him,
But despite his best hustle
All he pulled was a muscle.
Served him right for being out on a limb!

 

A limerick a week #119

“A Chancellor who will be judged harshly by history”[1]

It’s a serious one this week, I’m afraid, and it was Osborne wot made me do it…

Anyone that read ALAW #116 will have been left with the advice that “sometimes the first thing you have to do is to suspend belief and the second thing you do is to suspend disbelief”.

I had to do that just a couple of days before Christmas when listening to George Osborne on the radio. He had the brass-neck to deny that his blueprint for austerity after the Tories’ election victory in 2010 had any rôle to play in the UK’s current homelessness crisis. Instead, he blamed ‘bad policy’.

Er, that would be policy related to housing, benefits and council services then? Policies that he and his chums in the Conservative Party have imposed on the UK over the last eight years!

And what was Osborne’s great contribution to housing policy? Well, from the Independent newspaper’s analysis it was this: In the end, aggressive monetary loosening from the Bank of England came to the economy’s rescue, along with one the Chancellor’s very worst policies, a “Help To Buy” scheme that stimulated consumer confidence in 2013 but only at the terrible price of perpetuating the country’s housing disaster. (See this, from the Guardian, to understand why.)

Homelessness not enough? Then how about the prison crisis, a crisis led by “budget cuts, poor political decisions and frequent changes of political direction” according to a former  Director-General of HM Prison Service. Or the crisis in special educational needs provision that is directly attributable to cuts in local government funding? Or the crisis in social care for vulnerable adults? Or the crisis in support for young people presenting with mental health issues? Or the wider NHS crisis with the lowest per capita number of doctors, nurses or beds in the western world?

Osborne’s political manoeuvre was to masquerade his ideological cuts to public services as austerity. “Money doesn’t grow on trees” was the ideologues’ battle cry! Except it did if you were a banker, with £435 billion ‘spent’ up to August 2016 on ‘aggressive monetary loosening’, so-called ‘quantitative easing’ (‘printing money’ in old parlance), to bail out the banks after their affair with the sort of casino capitalism engendered by Thatcher’s deregulation of the 1980s.

And it is Thatcher’s ideological experiment in neo-liberalism that has since been fostered by the likes of Osborne and his Bullingdon Club cronies.

“Trickle-down”, they said when “flood up” was what they meant and the great British public swallowed it hook, line and sinker; its 30 pieces of silver transformed during the 1980s into a few measly shares in British Gas or a short-lived and quickly spent windfall from building society de-mutualisations to be followed by a global financial collapse sponsored by sub-prime free-market think-tanks.

An austere political trope
Left the homeless with nary a hope,
So let no-one deny
That censure must lie
On the shoulders of Osborne the Dope!

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/george-osborne-a-chancellor-who-will-be-judged-harshly-by-history-a7135571.html