Bard's life

Here's a bit of sinister fun for Hallowe'en ... TILL DEATH US DO PART I cannot stand my ghastly wife: instead, I love her sister, dear. The former one pollutes my life. The latter woman I revere. I’ve hatched a plot to rid me of my wife, I’ve simply had enough. I’ve put rat-poison in a cake: my wife is fond of sweets and treats. One slice is all she’ll have to take: rich cream will guarantee she eats then she’ll be gone and I’ll have Maud. It’s simple: just give fate a prod. Maud’s phoned me to my work and said she’s at our house to tend my wife who’s got the sniffles, gone to bed:  there’s germs around and flu is rife. I fear I’ve made a great mistake: Maud’s brewed some tea and scoffed the cake.  

At an early age it bec o mes apparent that one way to be sure of succeeding in the romance stakes i s to impress one's beloved with some extraordinary skill: playing the guitar, always seemed to work when I was a kid, though never for me with my total absence of musical ability.  Being good at sport was certain to garner popularity or, if all else failed, being a "poet" (or, more importantly, looking like one) was a pretty good bet.  At the fairground, too , there w ould have been opportunities aplenty to demonstrate one's desirability to the opposite sex through a host of daredevil activitie s like helter-skelter or the dodgems.  Prowess at the rifle range , too, would almost certainly have guaranteed a chaste kiss. KIDS He swears the air-gun’s fixed to miss, the moving target’s somehow rigged but still he pays and takes three shots, and misses.  She demands a kiss for consolation.  Then the slots, small change, fixed too,  by now he’s twigged it’s a...

It's said that we turn into our parents as we grow older. A FATHER’S REFLECTION          In my shaving mirror, increasingly, as I grow old, my father’s face replaces mine. As I erase the moisture, he stares back at me. His father’s son, he too took on his father’s brow, his father’s jaw, his narrow nose, cheekbones and chin. Now I, first-born son of that son, obey dictates of Nature’s law as fine lines autograph my skin. So here I stand, the mirror a lake. He signals, from the other side, a gentle smile, a loving wave,   while I stand here hardly awake with soap and razor, bleary-eyed, forgetting that I need to shave. That thread that links us binds us tight yet spirals outward, upward still, to moor my daughter as she sails up through life’s thermals like a kite, her bright ambitions to fulfill. Through generations blood prevails and we retain some small imprint of our begetters, yet display our own uniqueness, our own guise. We carry then, ...

Situated in a picturesque valley in St Andrew’s parish, The Little Chapel is a popular tourist destination and one of Guernsey’s most well-known landmarks. Originally constructed in 1914, and planned as a miniature version of the Rosary Basillica at Lourdes, the chapel was built and demolished twice before the present version was finally completed. Decorated with seashells, pebbles and broken china, this unique building measures just sixteen feet by nine feet, has room for about seven people, and is thought to be the smallest consecrated church anywhere in the world. LITTLE CHAPEL On full-moon nights the Chapel glows with holy light. No tourists now, with cameras or summer clothes or catalogues to tell them how the Chapel grew, how earth and shards created, like a house of cards, this tiny masterpiece that stands here in a valley far from town; how loving, dextrous human hands raised it, from soil to spire and crown, through faith for spiritual reward, so long ago, to praise the Lord....

Lord Tennyson's narrative poem, The Lady of Shalott , first learned when I was at school, is an enduring favourite of mine. In our online world with its dependence on computer screens, I see a marked similarity with the life of that sad, imprisoned lady condemned to view the world only through its mirror image.   SHALOTT  A river, like a passing life, flows steadily to Camelot. Along its bank slim aspens grow,  wild irises, long-limbed loose-strife, and, hourly, sloops with cargoes go to that far place where she dare not. She moves within a spartan room where silence like a boulder-weight bears down on her. She may despise her morning’s work upon the loom: a woven history of lies, at best half-truths, half-told too late, but if she does, she puts aside such sentiments and turns again to watch the world swim in a mirror where shadow-shapes, like fishes, glide and, daily, mysteries occur. A curse demands she must refrain from gazing on the world beyond her tall, arched win...