Obama!

I was going to save this for the inauguration, when it would be strictly correct. But what the hell, strike while the muse is smokin’ - as I believe Lord Tennyson used to say...

*******************************

Black In The White House

There’s somebody black in the White House
And not just a cleaner or nurse -
Though, granted, there’s quite a big clean-up to do
And the patient can’t get any worse.

There’s somebody black in the White House
I don’t mean a Powell or Rice,
A monger of war or a sour neo-con,
But someone who seems rather nice.

There’s somebody black in the White House
By “black” I do not mean “covert”
But someone whose skin, until now, wouldn’t win.
Yes, the guy at the top can subvert.

There’s somebody black in the White House
It’s one giant leap for mankind
At last the New World has woken itself
And is leaving the old world behind.

There’s somebody black in the White House
Though some of us still have our fears,
Let’s hope it’s not like Thatcher's time as PM
She set women back fifty years.

"Sorry, I'm washing my hair..."

To the Spoon and Syringe, my cosy local, for a pint of bitter. The delightfully downmarket barmaids, Chlamydia and Paploma, are agreeable company, and one can assist in drowning the sorrows of some colourful regulars. There is none more regular than Michael, a self-confessed "subscriber to a 'frequent failures' scheme". He may be the unluckiest man I have ever encountered. For years he has been sighing that he doesn’t have a partner and the girls and I have always lent a sympathetic ear, despite the certain knowledge that only a blind zombie would willingly walk up to him with open arms. So imagine our surprise when he announced recently that he had a date. A woman called Susan had expressed an unlikely interest in him in the library. They were going to go for a Chinese. We were less surprised when, two nights later, he was in again, shuddering over the evening in question and complaining that Susan was dull, unkempt and smelt faintly of halibut. Furthermore, she wouldn’t leave him alone and had called several times that day suggesting another assignation. “What can you say to someone who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer?” he wailed. I dashed home to compose this response on his behalf…

******************************

Song of the Reluctant Date

"I’d love to step out with you Susan, I would
But I don’t have a clean pair of socks
My hairstyle’s not looking as sharp as it should,
And there’s something quite good on the box.
I’ve two pounds and eighty-nine pence in the bank
And creditors haunting my door;
I’m not getting out much these days, if I’m frank
I’m certain I’d be quite a bore.
My small-talking skills would shame Jonathan Ross
For Strictly Come Dancing I can’t give a toss,
Such cultural hardship, alas is my loss,
Just please don’t call up any more."

"I’d love to come dine with you Susan, it’s true
But an auntie in Hendon just died.
There are tax returns back to 2002
Needing urgent attention tonight.
I’m keen to cut back on consumption of oil
So won’t take the car or the bus,
And I’m just getting over a terrible boil,
You wouldn’t believe all the pus.
I’ve foresworn all flesh, all fish and all veg
I’ve given up drinking, I’ve taken the pledge
I’m impotent, flatulent and out on this ledge
I can’t see a future for us."

"I’d love to make love to you Susan, you slag
How many more hints must I give?
Your face is three frogs in a polythene bag
I only have two hours to live.
Repellent impulses I never fullfil
Are really quite few and quite minor.
Satan’s my master and tells me to kill
Anyone with a vagina.
You’d not like my home life, not even a glimpse
I hang out with terrorists, paedos and pimps,
I’m a keen vivisector of puppies and chimps
And collector of decorative china."

(Sound of someone ripping out their SIM card...)

Shakespeare, swordplay, wordplay!

My esteemed colleague, Mr Braxton Hicks MRSA, consultant anaesthetist at The Royal Merkin Hospital, until he was unfairly struck-off for some minor infringement of a supine patient, has, in his enforced retirement, become something of an authority on British literary history. We have got into the habit of staging an informal book club one Wednesday each month, just Hicks and myself poring over some knotty text and pouring out a great quantity of cognac. Our discussions can become heated – sometimes culminating in fisticuffs and, on one particularly hazy evening, the wielding of a samurai sword – but we usually come round the next morning in total agreement. Throbbing head pain is a great unifier. If nothing else, these stimulating sessions have reawakened my interest in the great poets. And I have come to respect them as a fellow toiler in the metric mines. I don’t think we can overstate how relevant some of these great writers are to our times. In fact, I have been moved to write about one of them myself….

******************

Regarding William

Let's take time to marvel once more at The Bard,
That fellow was truly unique.
He coined several hundred original words
We use every time that we speak:
Like "cellulite", "herring" and "trillionaire",
"in-tray" and "bidet" and "bra",
And everyday phrases like "What's over there?"
And "Look what you've done to my car!"
What would we do without "chemical loo",
"Douche-bag" or "detox" or "torte",
Those words that enrich this great language of ours?
Cry "server" and "genital wart"!
How strange to have lived in an earlier age
Where none of these bon mots were known,
'Til Shakespeare delved into our lexicon's cleft
To pluck out "cucumber" and "cellular phone".
Now love is conducted high up in the mind,
Not merely pursued down below,
Since William described true romance of this kind:
"Your butt is mine" and "you had me at hello".
When Juliet gazed from her balcony high,
As Romeo shinned up a vine,
She sized up her Montague chap with a sigh:
"My boo is fit, buff and fine."
Yes, much of our idiom's owed to good Will,
So much that is written, so much that we spout.
So much that is modern flowed out of his quill,
Yet still we don't know what he's on about.

Global Financial Crisis. Latest!

Money and I don't get along. We just can't coexist in the same trousers. It slips through my hands like Teflon-coated sand. 

But suddenly, it seems, I am not alone. Some of our greatest financial institutions are having trouble holding on to the slippery stuff. Whatever it may be. Nothing more, apparently, than a poxy bit of paper which, someone convinces somebody else, has some mutable value. It's a mind game: I persuade you that my bit of paper is valuable or desirable and yours is of less value and you need to produce more of yours to have one of mine. However, if, once you have one of mine, someone loses confidence in my ability to judge these things, they can arbitrarily decide that my bits of paper are worthless, thus forcing you to offload your bit of my paper before its spurious value is wiped out by someone else's rival bit of paper and its spurious value. Money is a giant con.

The stock market wobbles. The banks falter and merge. Financial gurus pontificate and foam. Governments step-in and bail-out. Venerable institutions tremble and buckle. And I find my interest dropping steadily. In the whole subject, I mean.

If I were ever invited to dinner parties, I'd be sick of talking about house prices. Technically, I'm a first time buyer, as I have never owned a property of my own, content to sleep on the floor of my surgery, when I'm not in the revolting apartment bequeathed to me by my late mother. (She just couldn't hold her arsenic.)

So that makes me one of the mysteriously cherished community of vainglorious fools who feel ever so entitled to own their own house, as if they can't be seen in public without the deeds to a 3-bed semi chained to their necks. And that's exactly what it would be were they to buy now. Go on, you deluded borrowers, keep on buying houses and see how great you feel in 25 years time when your Repayment-Only Mortgage finally "matures" and you still have to find the £400,000 you shelled out for your crappy new-build on an estate no one has wanted to live near for the last 20 years, but you had to, because the negative equity was so severe you were stuck there until the house's value bounced back, which it never did, and you've been working 80 hour weeks just to scrape together the repayments on the vast interest; working so hard, in fact, that you barely step foot in the precious house at all. 

Meanwhile, the shenanigans of estate agents persuaded people that it was financially canny to Buy To Let - "It's our pension! Pass the pinot."- and, as the number of available properties diminished, up crept the rents of the poor swine who weren't pursuing your ridiculous dream, but suffered anyway. 

If that's what "being good with money" gets us into I'm glad I'm fiscally dyslexic. Which brings me to....

*****************

Conversation In A Bank

“I’d like to take out a mortgage.
A mortgage?”
“A mortgage.
I’d also like an overdraft, a bridging loan, a bung."
“But sir, there is a credit crunch."
“A credit crunch?”
“A credit crunch.
No-one’s coming back from lunch,
For money there is none!”
“Have I walled into a grocer’s?”
”A grocer’s?”
“A grocer’s.
I thought this was a bank, sir, so please can you explain?”
“Indeed it is a bank, sir,
A fine old clearing bank, sir
But like a leaking tank, sir
The money in this bank, sir, has dribbled down the drain."
“I’m sorry I don’t follow,
I came in here to borrow, but
You’re saying, to my sorrow, There’s no money in the banks…”
“Have you heard of sub-prime?”
“Sub-prime?”
“Sub prime.”
“Is that a sort of sandwich eaten by the Yanks?”
“No, it’s a kind of mortgage”
“A mortgage?’
“A mortgage. The kind they give to people who can’t afford to pay.”
“I think I’m going deaf, sir.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Deaf, sir! Are you sure that what you said to me
Is what you meant to say?”
“Indeed, that’s how they do it, sir, in the USA.”
“But what’s that to do with me, sir?”
“You, sir?”
“Me, sir.
Because I fail to see, sir, why I have to pay?”
“Well, someone in the States, sir,
At most attractive rates, sir,
Handed on a plate, sir, loans to homeless types.”
“Large amounts of cash, sir?
Wasn’t that quite rash, sir?”
“Indeed, and hence the crash, sir,
Their shares have all been wiped.”
“And I’m supposed to care, sir?
I’m sure that it’s unfair, sir,
But that was over there, sir. And I am over here."
“The markets are all linked, sir
If one so much as blinks, sir
Another starts to sink, sir. That’s how it works, I fear.”
"Then we must say good-day, sir
For I refuse to pay, sir
To underwrite the gross mistakes of such a monied club.
I'll go and take my chances with a loan-shark up the pub."

Welcome One and All

A new blog every 30 seconds? Here's another.
(Pause)
And another.
(Pause)
And another. I'd better crack on before there's no internet left to write on.

Here's the good doctor's plan. Whenever I get a chance: daily, weekly, whathaveyou, I shall be commenting on the world around me. Often in verse. I shall be sharing with you the lifestyles of some of my close friends and people I have known, loved or loathed. 

And be advised, dear reader, that I reserve the right to change my mind at any time, revert to prose, water-colour or photographic likeness to express my boundless chagrin and generally mix it up, freestyle and get random. As I believe the youngsters say. 

Youngsters, pshaw. Cheeky wastrels the lot of them. In my day, if you talked back to your elders and betters in the way that kids speak today they'd have popped a cap in yo' ass. And rightly so. St. Listerine's was very tough for a private school. But matron was boffo with a 9mm. Taught us all a thing or two.

Anyway, let's get started.

Pull up a comfy something and enjoy.

**********************************

A Cause For Alarm

The woman upstairs is a nuisance.

Last night she set off the alarm

That signals a fire in the building,

That warns of unspeakable harm.

It was 2.17 in the morning,

A few hours before I arise,

And Carmina and I were enraptured

I was just diving into her thighs.

I was just doing something inventive

With a pressurised can of whipped cream.

And what made it all so much sweeter?

It was happening deep in a dream.

My fantastical self is a love-lord,

And Carmina was starting to scream.

I was egging her on with expletives

Yet this scream wasn't one of desire,

But the voice of a different siren,

The kind that alerts you to fire.

I woke with a start, my pyjamas

Were wrinkled and moist to the touch,

Steamy and gathered up under the arms

And dank in a bunch at the crotch.

So comfort and elegance weren't uppermost

At the moment I ran to the hall

To shut off the sound that assaulted my ears

And check on the safety of all.

I punched in the code on the wretched machine

With the red winking lights on the wall.

The silence was bliss, then I noticed the piss

That had started to run to the floor.

The reason was clear, I had registered fear:

That sound took me back to the war.

Just then at the top of the stairs was a voice,

Which timidly started to say,

"I really am sorry about all the noise,

My toaster gets carried away."

I don't know her name, but it's always the same,

A lousy excuse for the din.

I get so enflamed and I wish her ashamed

For the day that she woke up poor Grinn.

Then she gets to my floor, in the dim corridor

Stands a flustered old man, grey and thin,

A puddle of urine is lapping his feet,

His nightwear is soaked to the skin.

It is I, and I must be a miserable sight

She eyes me with pity but also a smirk,

The smug look of those who toast deep in the night

And don't have to get up for work.

I hate everything that she stands for, the cow,

Her dope-smoking boyfriend, her cat,

I've only got one thing to say to her now:

"I've shut myself out of my flat."