The first poem I studied in secondary school began: "The pig lay on a barrow dead, motionless". Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' ensuing nine sickeningly graphic, non-rhyming stanzas made me want to vomit and scuppered any chance that Wordsworth, Byron or Shelley might offer the key to my romantic soul. It was not surprising, therefore, that the death of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney a…
Funeral Blues
Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She will always be Margaret Hilda Thatcher to me. You see, for well over a hundred years now, when the English have entered Polling Booths to vote in a General Election, they have in the main been faced with 3 candidates - Conservative, Labour and Liberal (or hyphenated Liberal or hyphenated Labour or…
House warning
The expression "Moving House" is the sort of English up with which Winston Churchill would, famously, not have put. In point of fact, moving a house is exceptionally difficult and, other than in natural disasters, very rare. Believe me - I know. Every weekday evening for a year and a half I used to speed out of the office car park…
God save the queen from taxes!
The Queen (there is only one "Queen") was often lampooned in the 1980s TV series "Spitting Image" . It starred a bunch of incredibly elastic, outrageously exaggerated latex puppets. My favourite sketch had the Queen at her desk, surrounded by her totally dysfunctional latex family, writing Christmas cards to foreign countries. Completing the last card she announced…
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
Alex Salmond, the bank manager-faced First Minister of Scotland, has been making headlines lately due to a referendum planned for 2014 to decide on Scottish independence. What a pity. On a visit to Westminster Abbey a few years ago, I collared a verger and we went on a hunt for the grave of Andrew Bonar…
Greatest Britain
What makes Britain great? There is, of course, no single answer (and the French would suggest there is no question), but the nation that gave the world its principal parliamentary system, its principal international language and (sorry, Yanks) its principal sport must have something in its national DNA that sets it apart from all the…
Tax Break 