Things what I wish I'd wrote

The big news story yesterday was Health Secretary Matt Hancock being caught in a romantic, nay, seedy clinch with his special adviser. We can only imagine what she’s been advising him on. Actually. No. I’d rather not imagine anything. Only so much upset my NSAID-addled tummy can take.

Not unexpectedly, loads-a funnies immediately appeared on social media and in news reports. I suppose because if we didn’t laugh we’d cry, rage, spit, and assassinate the hypocrite who ordered the rest of us to keep apart and not to embrace or he’d slap us with a disproportionate fine. Dan Wootton for the Daily Mail put it best when he said:

 “At a time when you would hope his mind was on getting the UK out of a catastrophic pandemic and brutal lockdowns, Hancock was thinking of the latter half of his last name.” 

Not a good week for Hancock; he was also embarrassed by Dominic Cummings’ claims that Bo Jo called him “f - - - - - g hopeless.” I wonder if Hancock’s ‘special adviser’ will one day report to the press that he was a hopeless f - - k.

Moving on quickly, The Daily Star’s headline the day after Cummings’ grenade was:

“Hopeless bloke said hopeless bloke is hopeless, says hopeless bloke.”

A mate of mine said he wished he’d written that, but I got lost with the number of hopelesses and whether the punctuation was quite right. Nothing like a colon to get in the way of a good joke. But I did think it was an apt example of an excessive tautology.

Now then. Cummings was the subject of a jibe I did compose. I was reading through the Queen’s birthday honours list for my periodic purgatory of seeing which of the “f - - - - - g hopeless” had been gonged for doing nothing more than their well-paid jobs. Matthew Gorman caught my eye, Carbon Strategy Director at Heathrow Airport, who’s been awarded an MBE for services to the decarbonisation of aviation, at which I snorted:

“That’s almost as daft as awarding an MBE to Dominic Cummings for services to discretion.”

Several other funnies were made this week in response to reports that the Sussexes had declined to use the title Earl of Dumbarton for baby Archie because they were worried about him being called dumb and being bullied. Twitter lit up with alternative titles such as the Earl of Wokingham, and Duke of the Scilly Isles. But it was the BBC’s Nick Robinson who appeared to refer to Harry and Meghan as Dumb and Dumber that really made me chuckle. Simple but effective.

Talking about simple but effective, here are a few classics that always resonate with we wannabee witty writers:

“I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.” (Apocalypse Now)

“You’re going to need a bigger boat” (Jaws), which inspired the Calendar Girls’ quip: “We’re going to need considerably bigger buns.”

“Face it girls. I’m older and have more insurance”, from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. The title of the book/film is as wonderful as the one-liner!

And from Pretty Woman, "I'm only using him for sex!"

Bo Jo is full of ‘em (or it), but his cheekiest is: Incredible how people called Salmond and Sturgeon are quite inimical to the interests of Scotland and Scotland's fish.”

And I adore Prince Charles so have to include, “A monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

And who doesn’t yearn to have written any of Eric Morecambe’s wisecracks:

“Tea, Ern?”

“I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”

“The average man could be replaced by a hot water bottle.”

Then there’s poetry. So much great stuff I so so wish I’d written, but I’m going to focus on just one poet – the late, the great, the American Emily Dickinson. My kind of poetry, not modern-day prose clumsily chopped into short lines with no rhythm, no rhyme, no lyricism. Emily D’s poetry is lilting, reflective, unpretentious, accessible, embracing. Even though she wrote a lot about death, these poems are still works of great beauty. One of her most popular is The Chariot:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
 
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
 
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
 
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
 
Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

I was so into Emily D when we lived in the States that I remember one afternoon when we were driving out somewhere, a couple of lines ED-style popped into my head from nowhere. I knew without checking that she hadn’t written these lines. I had. There and then. I rummaged messily through my handbag for a pen (I need to stress here that Hubby was driving, not me) jotted the lines down on an old drug-store receipt before I forgot them, and kept on writing without trying. The following was the result. Having wished so often that I had written Emily D’s poems, now I had done the next best thing, written one that could have been written by her. I later showed it to my Dad without saying anything. His response was, “Ah yes, Emily Dickinson. I don’t think I know this one.”

 THE DINNER GUEST

He was an uninvited guest
The night he came to dine;
He sat beside the lady fair
And deftly sipped his wine.
 
Yet he refused to taste the food
That lay upon his plate;
Instead he listened closely to
the lady on his right.
 
As always with unwanted guests
His welcome he outstayed.
Whate’er the lady wrote of him
Her indulgence he betrayed;
 
For when he took his leave of us
Well after eventide,
He took the lady by the hand
And kept her by his side.

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