don't confuse the narrator

old chestnuts

Horse chestnuts hold pale torches high
in green spread fingers and old wisteria
writhes around wrought iron
in a blue-teared cascade.
Throughout the city,
elm trees sway, scattering
indifferent confetti.

These lines have been retrieved and re-vamped from a poem called Flowers for an Easter wedding.

It was written some years ago – in Spain, which accounts for the elms, and for why it’s so out of synch with the English flowering season – and I think it was published as a three stanza piece with 15 lines.
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irrelephant

In London for a few days and I see they are having an elephant parade.

This is the only one I have got close enough to photograph so far, and although bright enough in himself, he didn’t go far towards brightening the dingy turning off Oxford Street where he was located.
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political ambiguity

It’s the first time in decades that I’ve been in the UK for a general election, and I’m finding all this uncertainty absolutely fascinating. Maybe the fact I don’t have to live with the aftermath – at least not as a resident – helps.

I liked this quote from the BBC lunchtime television news today:

[The Liberal Democrats] must decide who they want to govern.

In normal speech, at least, that is delightfully ambiguous, and conjures the idea of the Lib Dems keeping their coalition partners, whichever party they might be, on a very short leash.

Technically, that interpretation probably demands the use of “whom”, but how many of Britain’s electorate would distinguish the grammatical forms?

magnificent

Political commentary is a bit dry, so I’ll add this photo to brighten the page up a bit.

The tree was grown from seed and although it’s about twenty years old, it’s been kept small and is only about six foot tall. It has around ten flowers each year.

The slightly strange framing here is because the photo was taken ‘blind’ from underneath with just a phone camera.

The photo prompts me to post a fragment of a collaborative poem from a couple of years ago. I really should go back and worry it into some kind of shape, but, for the moment, these are the last few lines:
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political priorities

On the BBC lunchtime news today they were talking about the new MPs at Westminster whose attempts to find their way around would be hampered by the fact they don’t know if they are part of the government or the oppostion.

I was particularly taken with the comment that they’d be:

learning how to use their new laptops, learning how to use their new phones and learning how to do their expenses.

Just think how much more confident the public would have been in the political system last year if MPs had been taught how to claim their expenses correctly.