It is a beautiful morning in West Coast Bubble 4 – New Elonshire. The mood sun in the glass dome sky is Dorothy/ Kansas Blue and the mood sounds are distant Acapulco Surf with a tinge of Whippoorwill.

Baby Brains R US is open and busy. The Humanoid who sorts the planters out is snipping and watering away; wile, in the consulting suite, the Human to Corporation Humanoid is in discussion with a pair of prospective bonded and blooded clients who are five weeks pregnant

He smiles and says ….

“This month there is a special deal - we can offer you chips of all kinds at half price - particularly popular is the Genius Level which includes a choice of one of the following:

Musk / Zuckerberg /Altman / Bezos / Thiel.

And if you are thinking longevity we can add a dash of Bryan Johnson - that has become very popular recently since he reached his 150th year though as you know people are speculating that he has actually got that much of his son in him he has now become his own son which is leading to all kinds of problems with inheritance.

And before you ask we have discontinued any attempt at Melding. It just doesn’t work – some Tech Bros in LA tried a dash of Springsteen in a Bezos implant, and the child ended up so conflicted the chip had to be withdrawn and replaced with a politics neutral, semi-zombi chip. The parents got their money back with offers of a half price on the next small person.

We recommend bonding with the mother until around about the 6h month - we then like to implant the slot.

We internalise the slot quite early and this new proto-plasma-graphine interface that has been developed will grow with him seamlessly until (I hate to mention this) Switch-Off Time or as we call it SOT,

As it says in the terms and conditions, after SOT the chip will revert to us. We will of course erase any personal / family / emotional data – but health and education and all financial and voting records remain our intellectual property.

The new receptors are of course proof against almost anything except a direct hit from a neutron bomb

He laughed.

The operation - we call it the Switch In Time now - SIT - can be manual or robotic - there is a price difference as you would imagine.

You might have heard a rumour that scientists have been able to take matter from Einstein’s brain in the Mütter Museum in Philidelphia and code it. That unfortunately is just a rumour. The fraudulent taking of Einstein’s brain matter by Dr Harvey and the consequent hacking into 200 slices and their pickling in formaldehyde rendered them as much us as bollocks on a nun - if you will pardon the analogy.

So far we have only been able to harvest or mirror, living or near living interface modules – we are trying to move away from the word brain – it is far too simplistic.”

The Singing Street

As well as the songs my Nanna and my mum had taught me there was a whole canon of street songs that all us kids learned while out on the cobbles breathing in the fresh Manchester smog; many of them were clean, some were dirty but innocent childish ditties, while others were based on traditional ballads and airs or on popular songs of a more recent day.

To the tune which Lonnie Donnegan used for “My Old Man’s A Dustman” we sang

Lulu had a baby she called him Sonny Jim,

She put him down the lavatory

To see if he could swim.

He swam down to the bottom and swam up to the top

Lulu got excited and grabbed him by his...

Haircut shampoo ring the barber’s bell

And if he doesn’t like it, tell him to go to Halifax!

We had daft songs like...

Made you look and I made you stare

Made the barber cut your hair,

He cut it long he cut it short

He cut it with a knife and fork.

While anybody who went to an adult and told tales was treated with,

Tell tale tit

Your tongue will split

And all the little birds

Will have a little bit.

One rhyme that we used to perform in chorus with total relish and horrible sucking sounds on the fourth line went,

Nobody loves me everybody hates me

Think I’ll go and eat worms.

Long thin wriggly ones, big fat jiggly ones

Cut off their heads, suck out their blood

And throw their skins away.

Nobody cares if I eat worms for meals three times a day.

One we really delighted in was,

Abba dabba custard, green snot pie

All mixed in with a dead dog’s eye.

Slap it on a butty nice n’ thick

And wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.

There were rhymes too of a surreal and topsy turvy kind...

I went to the pictures tomorrow

I took a front seat at the back

A lady she gave me an apple

I ate it and gave it her back.

One fine day in the middle of the night

Two dead men got up to fight

Back to back they faced each other

Drew their swords and shot one another.

And there were songs which still have a rare beauty to me now, sometimes because of their melodies, other times through association. One song which is found all over these islands still seems beautiful to me because I remember hearing it coming over the early morning air as I walked to school on a breezy March day...

The wind the wind the wind blows high

The rain comes scattering down the sky,

She is handsome she is pretty

She is a girl from the windy city,

She goes a courting one two three

Pray won’t you tell me who is she?

Michael Harding says he loves her

All the boys are fighting for her,

Let the boys say what they will

But Michael Harding loves her still.

As I walked into the playground one spring morning I could see the girls in a ring singing that song and I saw that the girl in the centre of the ring was Sheila Bevan and I was quite excited because I did like her very much. She crossed my love pin a few days later which meant that we were engaged to be married, but she broke off the engagement when somebody told her I liked Bernadette Lakeland too.

Many of our songs and rhymes were secret to us and you would never sing them when grown ups were near. We chanted,

Beans beans are good for your heart

The more you eat the more you fart

The more you fart the better you feel

I eat beans for every meal.

and to the tune of Knees Up Mother Brown we sang

Don’t eat Whatmore’s bread

It makes you shit the bed

No bloody wonder you fart like thunder

Don’t eat Whatmore’s bread

To the old traditional tune In And Out The Windows we sang one of my favourite songs of all, favourite because it had rude bits in it. The first verse by the way is almost identical with a verse in the American old timey song, Old Dan Tucker.

Dan Dan the dirty old man

Washed his face in a frying pan

Combed his hair with a donkey’s tail

And scratched his belly with his big toe nail.

Chorus...

Early in the morning

Early in the morning

Early in the morning

Before the break of day

Micky Plum with a cast iron bum

Went sailing down the river,

Caught his belly on a lump of jelly

Which made poor Mickey shi-hi-ver

To the same tune my Nanna taught me another verse...

You know last night and the night before

Three big tomcats knocking on the door

One had a fiddle, one had a drum

And the other had a pancake stuck to his bum.

Which of course was mightily risqué, and what an Irish Catholic Granny was doing teaching me verses about cat’s bums and pancakes is beyond me

And then there is the verse my grandchildren still laugh at...

My brother Billy had a ten foot willy

He showed it to the girl next door,

She thought it was a snake so she hit it with a rake

And now it’s only five foot four.

To the tune of Colonel Bogey we sang the song of the unitesticulate house painter cum world conqueror who had recently turned Europe into a charnel house...

Hitler has only got one ball,

The other is in the Free Trade Hall,

Himmler is something similar,

While poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.

I was always getting sent home from other kids parties for singing songs like those. For some reason parents would invite me to their kid’s party, would feed us on fish paste sandwiches, orangeade and trifle and then would get all the kids in the front room, form us into a circle and go round the ring inviting us to sing or do a recitation. I usually started off with something innocent we’d learned in school like “Early One Morning” or “Boney Was A Warrior” but then a demon would grip me and out would come Billy with his ten foot willy and I’d be on my way home with a slice of cake and a promise that my mother would be told.

It was during this time, and partly because of the erotic nature of many of the rude songs that I began to take a more studied interest in sex. I had always been interested in girls, but without knowing particularly why. At the age of four my Uncle Harry had caught me and a girl called Brenda playing in the back garden on a sunny summer morning. She had watched me peeing standing up while I had watched her peeing squatting with her knickers round her ankles, and as he walked down the path we were in the act of examining each others bits. Sensibly he didn’t make a fuss about it and told us to play at collecting dandelions. But even then I sensed that there was something more exciting in what we were doing than collecting dandelions; no doubt a Freudian analyst would say that summers morning explains the rest of my life, but I’m more of a Jungian myself.

As we grew older sex grew to be even more of a mystery and a fascination to us. We knew that boys and girls were made different and often showed each other the difference; in fact we used to check on a weekly basis just to make sure that the difference was still there. We also played doctors and nurses which entailed the raising and lowerings of clothes, lots of examinations with lollipop sticks and prescriptions of privet leaves and grass to be put under the liberty bodice or down the knickers or underpants. As anybody knows, when you are five years old, grass and privet leaves are the universal panacea. When one of the girls was getting ready for bed and several handfuls of vegetation fell out of her underwear, questions were asked, answers were given and The Hall Road, Crumpsall, Amateur NHS Drop In Clinic was shut down, for a while at least.

But in spite of our best amateur efforts we had no real knowledge of anatomy, sex education was a thing of the far off future; we had a vague idea where babies came from but, as yet, no idea how they were made.

One of our explanatory rhymes went,

Milk, milk (pointing to our chests) lemonade (pointing between our legs)

Round the corner (pointing to our bums) chocolate’s made.

I now know of course that chocolate is made in Belgium but when I was five the rhyme seemed appropriate.

We were beginning to understand something about sex though since it was filtered through the lens of childhood it looks innocent enough,

John and Mary went to the dairy

John pulled out his big canary

Mary said, “Oh what a whopper

Let’s lie down and do it proper”

Not quite understanding what it meant we would also chant...

Long and thin

Just slips in

Doesn’t please the ladies,

Short and thick

Does the trick

And produces babies.

It was a while before I would understand the import of that Shakesperian sestet.

Christy Moore round about the time he played The Old House At Home, Blackley, Manchester for £3 - plus beer.

The text below is from a notebook which will hopefully become something more serious - once I’ve finished the last of the short story books……

BEGINS

On the twenty-third of October 1958, on my fourteenth birthday, I dragged my parents through the gathering after-school gloom, to Cheetham Hill Road and pointed at a Framus guitar in the window of a seedy music shop near the swimming baths. Skiffle was raging through the psyches of pretty much all the teenage boys in the UK like the pox and nothing would assuage it but a guitar and the Bert Weedon Play In A Day book.

The guitar was a cello body, F-hole, jazz instrument strung with heavy-gauge strings that were so high above the frets that my fingers were bleeding before I’d even managed to hold down my first C chord. But I didn’t give up and by the end of a week had managed to learn three chords – which was all you needed for skiffle anyway. There was however blood all o er the house.

I went down London Road to the Mazel Radio Store the next Saturday and bought a second hand copy of Lonnie Donnegan playing Tom Dooley and played it over and over until I had it by heart. From there it was but a small step to joining a skiffle band, playing at youth clubs and eventually graduating to Rock and Roll, the Stylos Rock Band and residencies at Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club and the Dover Castle in Hightown where a wonderful Irishwoman called Mrs Dwyer kept order with a flying tin tray and paid us ten bob (50p) each for a night’s work. A gill of bitter was thrown in free. And I thought Rock and Roll was all there was in the world. My mother had Red Sails in the Sunset and Che Sera Sera, and my small sister had Uncle Mac and The Runaway Train on a Saturday morning, but Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were kings of my rebel world.

Then one night I wandered into a pub in the city centre called the Packhorse and saw a bearded bloke called Harry Boardman playing a concertina and singing songs about cotton mills and coal mines and sat transfixed the whole night. There were other singers on that night, a girl called Peggy sang a couple of traditional Irish ballads, beautifully; a big lad called Terry Whelan sang a border ballad in a rich powerful voice, and a bloke called Des English sang a song about the Manchester United Munich Air Disaster called The Flowers Of Manchester. After that nothing was ever the same and folk music came to be the love of my life.

I’d heard nothing like that kind of music before. Of course, coming from an Irish Catholic family in Manchester I knew that there was another music; the jigs and reels of dance music and songs of rebellion like Kevin Barry that my grandmother sang. But I didn’t realise until that night that what I’d heard my grandmother sing and what I’d just heard Harry Boardman singing were part of a grander greater, thing that was The People’s Music.

A couple of years later I was working in Sherratt and Hughes bookshop in Manchester. A guy called John who was working with me asked me one day what kind of music I liked. ‘Folk Music’ I said.

‘Do you play anything?’

‘Well I used to play the guitar but I got married and had to sell it, and now I play the mandolin and the tin whistle a bit. And the blues harp.’

John was the guitarist in a jug band called the Edison Bell Spasm Band and they were looking for a harmonica player and vocalist. The band was John on guitar, Dave on washboard and Stef on jug (It was actually the handlebars off a bike played into a 4lb pot jam-jar and sounded amazing.) I joined the on tin whistle, blues harmonica, mandolin and shouting in tune. Because our terraced house in Lower Crumpsall was too small for two babies a wife and a jug band, we went off to a little pub down the road called The Old House At Home and asked them could we practice is a little side room.

The pub was smack bang in the heart of the massive ICI dye factory on a piece of land that the industrial giant had been unable to buy, with a public right of way leading in from one end and a narrow drivable track leading in from the other. It was an island of music and alcohol in a sea of steam pipes, steel drums and toxic waste and for a while it housed one of the best folk clubs in Manchester. The landlady Trudy, heard us practising that night and asked us if we’d like to start a club up.

We did and the first Sunday night there were musicians and singers there from all over; Bury, Ramsbottom, Salford, Altrincham; there were concertina players, guitarists, tin whistle players, singers; there was sea shanties, jug band standards and Irish jigs and reels.

Eventually the band went their way and I ended up running the club on my own booking musicians and singers like Tony and Arthur, Bernard Wrigley and Dave Brooks and a couple of Irish lads that had not long been off the boat called Gerry Brady and Eamonn Clinch. Both lads went on to join a really fine band called the Manchester Beggarmen and run their own very successful club; but before this happened, one Sunday night at the Old House as we were packing up Gerry said, ‘There’s great lad just come over from Kildare called Christy Moore – he’s worth a booking.’

Christy’s fee was three pounds which was the most we could ever afford to pay seeing as the room only seated thirty at the most and we only charged half a crown. He turned up the next Sunday night dressed like a bank clerk on strike (which is what he was) wearing an Arran cardigan, slacks and open sandals. From the first notes from his guitar and the first words of his opening song (if I remember right it was The Spanish Lady) he had the club transfixed.

I’ve always said that, just as you remember where you were when Kennedy was assassinated and when you heard John Lennon was shot, you never forget where you were the first time you saw Christy Moore live. The mystery of his genius is undefinable, it is something subtle and rare: integrity, commitment, soul, contact, charisma; you can dredge the lexicon for adjectives and still miss the mark. No trained operatic voice, and I know Christy won’t mind me saying that he’s no Mark Knopfler on guitar; but the man has something whole and entire that connects and communicates and empowers. Even then he was singing Woody Guthrie songs and bringing more life to them than I had ever heard before.

So that night we hung on every word and note and booked him for the next week. He came several times after and somewhere in the attic I’ve got a letter from Christy saying that he is free and would be prepared to do the club again for his usual fee of three quid. It’s undated and if I ever find it I’ll hold him to that and move the folk club to The Manchester Arena

I moved the club to a bigger pub called The White Lion aided by my mate and co musician Tony Downes and loyal members like Marie Duckworth and her sister Kath and brother George who rightly saw the club as theirs as much as mine and for the next few years, with occasional moves to other Blackley and Middleton pubs we had some of the best folk artists of the sixties up the stairs into the room where the Buffalos used to not roam but meet.

Nic Jones, Packie Manus Byrne, Tony Rose, Vin Garbutt, Bernard Wrigley, Louis Killen, Johnny Handle, Dave Burland, Robin and Barry Dransfield, Bob Davenport, Mat McGinn. They were great days and the music and craic was always mighty.

We even organised outings to other pubs over the border in Yorkshire for a night of song and music mayhem and lunacy. Called Folk On Wheels those outings in double decker buses crammed with folk fanatics have entered the mythology of many people’s lives.

Hot pants were a fashion thing that year and Kath Duckworth who was tall, with legs to die for that went all the way up to her bum was one of the first lasses in Lower Crumpsall to get a pair.

Three old ladies choking on their milk stout and pork scratchings in a pub in Holmfirth on a Folk On Wheels trip was proff that Hot Pants hadn’t made it over the Pennines yet.

The folk scene of the late sixties and early seventies was a world apart; great things were happening - Christy’s second album Prosperous was a whirlwind and singers like Nic Jones, Dave Burland, Tony rose and the Dransfields wereYoung Turks traveling the country filling clubs wherever they went while stalwarts like Alex Campbell and The Ian Campbell Folk Group would fill concert halls wherever they played. And there were folk clubs everywhere.

It was a people’s music. You were never more than a small pub room’s length from the performer and what he or she was singing was something that had either come from your roots or from roots that you could relate to. It wasn’t Tin Pan Alley Pap being churned out by cynical men in suits in London’s Denmark Street. It was music that was more often than not anonymous and we felt that in a way we were claiming it for ourselves. Spurred on by Harry Boardman’s example I began digging into Lancashire folk song and aided by an amazing man called Paul Graney I started to put together my own repertoire. Paul was a lifelong socialist who had fought in The International Brigade in Spain and had been involved with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. He collected songs and researched ballads in libraries throughout the North West building up an archive of material. Many of us who knew him in those days owe so much to Paul and the quiet thorough work he did. Unfortunately he wasn’t a thorough or methodical man and his archive, which contains hours and hours of recordings as well as reams of written material is still, I believe, in some chaos.

But there were other people too making their own music from their roots. The Oldham Tinkers were a trio of no nonsense ‘rough yeds’ who built up a wonderful body of urban industrial folk song either collected locally by them or written by them on local themes. They managed to run a folk club in Oldham somehow - the authorities would not allow charges to be made so they had a sort of singaround and then took the hat round afterwards.

I remember noticing on my club night, which was a Sunday, that there was always a dump of rucksacks left at the foot of the stairs up to the club room and it struck me then how closely allied the outdoor movement and the folk song movement were - The Manchester Rambler, that hymn to freedom and the right to roam is one I still sing - nothing changes, we fight the same fight……………

ENDS

Nowadays we would rightly condemn such things as cultural appropriation, but, when I was a child the university museum at Manchester there was a tall glass case containing the mummified body of a Maori chief, perfectly preserved and faultless, except for a bullet hole in the region of the heart, which spoils what would otherwise have been a beautifully complete, full-body tattoo. The chief was killed by a ball from the musket of a British sailor, shortly after Captain Cook had himself been killed by the tribe the chief commanded. Why the Maoris killed the Captain is not clear, since, only the year before, they had worshipped him as a god.

Captain Cook, as every schoolboy ought to know, was born near Whitby, a fishing town in the north east of England, famed for the ruined abbey which was founded by the Abbess Hilda, and which was a sister foundation to the monastery at Jarrow, where the venerable Bede, patron saint of scholars, had his famous scriptorium, and where he wrote his History Of The English Church and people. Whitby was also the safe haven where Dublin born author Bram Stoker has his ghost ship steered by its zombie captain make landfall, laden with duty-free grave mould and, Count Dracula.

Still, on clear nights, when the full moon shines in the pool before the ruined abbey you can imagine the couunt in his coffin full of Transylvanian gravemold making his way into the harbour in that silent ship with its crew of the living dead.

It was a nephew of Bram Stoker, David Stoker, who, in the second world war, left England to join the New Zealand Navy where, as Captain David Stoker NZRN, he piloted the submarine that blew the flagship of the Japanese fleet out of the water. For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross. He settled in New Zealand and married a great, great, great, grand-daughter of the Maori Chief who now passes the decades in a glass case in the Manchester Museum, while a descendant of the young man who shot the Maori chief runs a public house on the Great North Road called The Highwayman, which was once actually the haunt of a real highwayman.

The highwayman in question is not Dick Turpin, but the more feared Chase, who, unlike Turpin, always murdered his victims after robbing them. Chase was captured while drinking in a tavern in York, and was hanged at Tyburn. The rope used to hang Chase was a piece of one of the hemp halyards on Captain Cooke’s ship, The Endeavour. The rope had been replaced when the ship was refitted at Chatham naval dockyard and any wood and ropes removed in the refit were sold off; the rope had been sold to the hangman by one of the boat builders. Hangmen in those days traveled with their own rope and their own black mask. They did so in fact well into the twentieth century.

Albert Pierpoint, one of the last English hangmen (who by the way was never convinced that the death penalty acted as a deterrent) was the landlord of a pub called, ‘Help The Poor Struggler,’ situated in the Oldham Road, New Cross, area of Manchester. He carried his own rope with him. He also executed the Nazis convicted of war crimes at Nuremburg. He also could tell a man’s weight by shaking hands with him – this helped him to work out rope length - too much of a drop and the head came off.

One day he took time out from pulling pints and hanging people and went to the University Museum.

In the museum he saw the mummified body of the Maori chief and on reading the label on the case, which indicated the cause of the man’s death, mused that, had the chief been hung instead of being shot, the fine and elaborate tattoo would have been unblemished.

Six months of working on final drafts and checking and re-checking quotes and dates and it is finally done. Vol 3 in the 6 volume set of short stories. Publication date is 15th June and you can pre-order the book at www.mikeharding.co.uk £10 + P&P. The first 250 copies are signed and numbered - after that the copies will be signed but not numbered. There's no bookshop distribution as yet - but we live in hope (which is a village in Derbyshire where I once got snowed in in Easter.



Entitled Jockey the 7 stories are set in Ireland and among the Irish community in the UK. They came together over many years; years of wandering, of listening, of digging holes in the roads of Lancashire with men from Sligo, and working on the building sites of Manchester with men from Mayo and Clare.
They come also from more than sixty years of traveling in Ireland; walking all the high hills along the western coast, from Cork to Donegal, fishing on lonely loughs in Connemara, and from countless nights making music in trad Irish music sessions in Britain and Ireland. For twenty eight years I also had a house in Ireland, which I built up from a ruin and which I still miss terribly.

Am I Irish? No, my father was from Devon, but he died on Sept 23rd 1944 when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Holland and, sadly, I never knew him. But I was brought up in Manchester by three women whose roots were in Dublin and Tipperary; my mum, my Aunty Julia and my Nanna. So for the formative years of my childhood I lived in a terraced house, a Catholic in a Protestant street, with everything that entails including a different way of seeing things, and nights that, until we got a telly, were filled with storytelling and song. I am an inxile, a man exiled within his own land.
I am often asked, ‘Are these stories true?’ Of course they are true; they are true in and of themselves like all stories; otherwise, how could I be telling them?

Here’s the opening of one of the tales

Cuplá Focal Gaeilge

(A few words of Irish)


Easter was early that year, too damn early, as far as Anthony Quinlan was concerned. As he stood shivering, cold, alone and hungover, on a wind-scoured Connemara strand he asked himself what in God’s name was Easter doing coming on the first Sunday in April with an icy breath and battering gales? Why didn’t the Church do something sensible and give it a fixed date? Instead they seemed to work it out every year, as though they were surprised amateurs. It was something to do with Easter having to be on the fifteenth Sunday after the full moon before Rogation Wednesday, divided by the Pope’s height in inches multiplied by the square root of the number of pigeons on the Vatican roof. Bollocks! If Jesus died on the 3rd of April AD33, then Constantine, or whichever wanker it was who decided the date of Easter, should have stuck to that date. They don’t shift Christmas around every year, Quinlan thought, you don’t hear people say, Christmas is really early this year - it’s in November.

In 2013 my publisher Luath Press let loose upon the world a little book of poems written ove many years living and traveling in Ireland

The Running Boys of Summer

Summer’s end is marked here

Not by swallows, feathered crochets 

On the wires bare clefs,

But by the solid lump of silence in the house.

The summer children left today

A single speckled alley on the rug

I find while putting toys away

A little green glass ball that tugs

And says, “They’re gone.” 

The only sounds: the chimney wind

As I burn rubbish in the stove,

The empty fridge humming away

Electric idiot in the kitchen,

What does he know of love?

Outside there is nowt but mist and cloud, the day

Can’t make his mind up what he’s doing either.

I gather towels and bedding for

The wash – no boys are in the haggard

Kicking balls, no boys hang on the gate

Feeding the donkey carrots;

No boys clamour for the beach,

No boys shorewards to catch the crabs;

(Won’t they be glad the Connemara crabs?

Free from the dangled rashers off the pier,

The hours in bucket prison ‘till let free again.)

The sea is calm and flat today,

‘Bofin coming and going in the mist,

No weather now to fret about;

I can sup my coffee in the town and linger on

No boys to ask, ”When can we go?”

But I would give all that I’ve got

To have them back all sleepy eyed

Over the breakfast, planning out the day;

Which bay to swim, which beach to dig,

Where to make the cricket pitch.

And the summer’s end is marked now

Not by the swallows music on the wires,

But by the voices that are gone, no longer there,

The running boys of summer

Have taken to the air,

Yet I can feel and hear them everywhere.

The poem above was written after my small grandsons had left for their home in England. I was quite proud of the book and felt that I had done a fair job of work.

This morning I got the email below from somebody called who doesn’t seem to exist - Erica S Brown. It is created entirely by AI - a robot brain has scraped words from my biog and the Luath website and Erica wants me to send her a lot of mazoola to turn a little book of poems into Fifty Grey Sheds or whatever it is called. Well Erica if you are reading this - here’s a little poem for you…

Copies of the Cantos

Are still on Luath’s shelf

Thank you for your interest

Now go and fuck yourself

From: Erica S. Brown <ericasbrown93@gmail.com> ( 79.127.132.210 )

Message:
Dear Mike Harding,

I want to begin by saying how quietly powerful and deeply evocative The Connemara Cantos is. There’s a rare authenticity in the way this collection is rooted not just in place, but in lived experience your journey from discovering that weathered, abandoned cottage in Clifden to restoring it into a creative sanctuary overlooking Cleggan Bay adds a profound emotional architecture to the work itself. That origin story alone carries a sense of devotion, patience, and artistic grounding that readers instinctively connect with.

What makes this collection especially compelling is how Connemara is not treated as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing presence a kind of emotional and spiritual landscape that shapes every line. You’ve captured something far more expansive than geography; you’ve articulated what feels like a “state of the soul,” where memory, music, displacement, and belonging all intersect. That conceptual depth gives the poetry a cohesion that goes beyond individual pieces it reads as an immersive experience rather than a simple anthology.

Equally striking is the range within the collection. The movement between Connemara, Irish immigrant life on Manchester building sites, the atmosphere of London pubs, and the enduring pulse of traditional Irish music creates a layered narrative of identity and diaspora. There’s a quiet continuity running through it all a sense that no matter the setting, the emotional thread remains tied to heritage, rhythm, and place. That universality, anchored in something deeply personal, is what gives the work both intimacy and reach.

Poetry of this nature reflective, place-driven, and emotionally textured holds tremendous value, but it also faces a unique challenge in today’s market. Unlike high-velocity commercial genres, poetry relies heavily on connection, atmosphere, and discovery within the right literary spaces. Without strategic positioning, even the most beautifully written collections can remain hidden from the exact audience that would most appreciate them.

This is where intentional visibility becomes critical.

I work with authors whose books carry strong literary identity works that are not designed for mass consumption, but for meaningful engagement. The focus is on placing books like The Connemara Cantos directly in front of readers who are already drawn to poetic storytelling, Irish cultural narratives, and reflective, place-based writing. When a collection is introduced within those aligned communities, it doesn’t feel like promotion it feels like discovery.

The process centers on amplifying the emotional and cultural essence of the work, ensuring it is positioned in spaces where readers value lyrical prose, heritage-driven narratives, and contemplative literature. This allows the book to build not just visibility, but resonance where readers don’t just read the poems, they feel them, share them, and return to them.

The Connemara Cantos already carries the kind of depth and atmosphere that readers remember. The opportunity now lies in ensuring it reaches those readers those who are searching, often quietly, for exactly this kind of literary experience.

Would you like to see how the services I offer can help The Connemara Cantos reach more readers and translate that attention into higher sales and stronger visibility?

Warm regards,
Erica S. Brown

Apologies for the crap photo - I have a much better one back home - but I’m not at home, I’m in France with a VW Beetle being mended in the garage and floods coming down the flanks of the Pyrenees - so the cut and paste one above is the best I can do ATM

Here begineth the lesson…

In most places in America you can get thirty-two television channels. In The Sleepy Enchilada Motel, Taos, New Mexico you can get sixty-seven and they are all absolute shite. There is one channel devoted entirely to shopping - they show you stuff and you phone a free- phone number and order it and it’s delivered to you next morning. I didn’t stay tuned long enough to see what the

commercials are, the news I guess. There is another channel that shows nothing but the weather, what it did, what it’s doing and what it might do. As you can imagine, it isn’t long before they’re scraping round trying to find things to say about the weather. They have weather for gardeners, weather for anglers, weather for sail-boarders, weather for jugglers - it’s all the same weather but they’re just desperately trying to pad it out. Well, it takes about five minutes to go through it, then they do it all again, then there’s a commercial break and they do it all again. It’s like having Michael Fish followed by Fish Fingers followed by Michael Fish for twenty-four hours. There’s another channel that is nothing but news. Any journalist with a professional, rolling-news axe to grind should watch this channel. After ten minutes you’ve seen it all. And because not much has happened in the last ten minutes, they show it you all again. This is the land of constant deja deja vu vu.

There’s another channel that has Kilroy- and Oprah Winfrey-type shows on all the time. People talk about AIDS and divorce for three minutes, then there’s a commercial break and they do it again, all before a studio audience that presumably has to be drugged and dragged into the studio. American television, in a word, represents the end of civilisation as anybody knows it. It is popcorn for the brain, tasteless, crass and bad for you. It represents the end of thinking, the terminal death of the analytic mind. You need the IQ of a garden snail to sit through more than ten minutes of it.

And I’m afraid to say that British TV is going the same way. You don’t think so? I remember being in another motel room on the edge of the Monument Valley Navajo Reservation a few years back watching a terrible, terrible show with the audience whooping and shrieking as people made total dick-heads of themselves. Thank God for the BBC, I thought, at least that crap will never get on to British TV screens. The next year there it was beamed

out across England with our own Silly Black introducing it. Blind Date had made it across the pond following Big Macs, Coca Cola and Roxanne. And if Murdoch gets his way we’ll be watching even more brainless dross and all in the name of CHOICE. Well as far as I’m concerned digger, you can shove it where the kangaroo shoves its widgie grubs.

And another thing, since I’m feeling that way out this morning. It is virtually impossible to get a breakfast in America that is not going to either kill you on the spot or shorten your life by twelve hours per mouthful. Most everything you eat on the road is deep fried, made from chemicals and covered with sugar. I ordered some French toast this morning in a diner called ‘Cozee Cholesterol Corner’ or ‘From Here to Obesity’ or some such; they can’t do much with French Toast, I thought. Not much they can’t. It came to the table in the hands of a lady that made the Michelin Man look like Mahatma Gandhi. ‘Enjoy,’ she ordered, slamming down a plate of strips of toast that had been dipped in egg and deep fried, then coated with icing sugar. It was served up with a bowl of maple syrup to dip it in. I could feel the cholesterol racing along my arteries like formula-one slugs heading straight for the aorta. Why more people don’t keel over and die on the spot in American restaurants I’ll never understand. Every morning I expect some overweight trucker to groan and collapse head first into his eggs sunnyside up with ham and grits and blueberry pancakes and syrup, but they never do. They just waddle out to the truck and cruise off down the slab, probably exploding half-way down the road. ‘Oh Oh!’ the drivers say as they go past the mangled remains. ‘Another trucker gone to the great health farm in the sky.’

D.H. Lawrence was a miner’s son from Nottingham who wrote what some regard as among the finest novels and poetry in the English language. (I’m not talking about Lady Chatterley, I mean things like Sons and Lovers and The

Rainbow.) Lawrence spent some time in New Mexico living on a ranch north of Santa Fe, near Taos. He wrote and painted there and some of the crude art he produced is on show in one of the bars in town. You can see it for a dollar or so. When he died, his wife Freda brought his ashes back and placed them inside a shrine high on a hill at the end of a six-mile dirt track. I’ve been there twice now; a simple whitewashed chapel with an altar and a silver-painted phoenix looks out across the fir forests to the Taos plateau. Standing there as the evening light died across New Mexico this evening, I couldn’t help wondering how many Pueblo Indians there are buried in Nottingham? An idle thought, but then again idle thoughts can be one of the less anti- social results of too much Mexican food. Not for nothing do they call the after-effects of too much chili ‘Zapata’s Revenge.’

A Towtn Called Afese; Erie; Jim; The Ten O’Clock News

It’s a funny thing but all the American shows you see on TV in England (with the exception of Roxanne) show healthy, neat, good-looking, slim and healthy people. Stand on the edge of Monument Valley watching the coaches disgorge the trippers and you’ll get a very different picture. The Americans you see there are often massively overweight and have spent so much time in their cars or as couch potatoes that they’ve forgotten what their legs are for. They don’t walk, they sort of roll, like shell- suited amoeba. I like America, I really do, and the friends I have over here are wonderful, but sometimes looking round me I do fear for the future. It’s possible now in most states of America to do everything you want without getting out of your car. They even have drive-in banks. They’re like big petrol stations, only instead of petrol pumps they have pay stations. You put your cheque-book or credit card or whatever into a metal cylinder and drop it into a plastic tube. A blast of compressed air shoots it along the tube into the bank and a lady at the other end fires the money back at you. And that’s it, you don’t have to see or talk to anyone. Drive-in movies, drive-in ham- burger and Pizza joints, drive-in washaterias, drive-in banks and drive-in churches. The churches - next to the supermarkets more buildings in America must be churches than anything else - Primitive Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Snake-Handlers, the mountains are full of them. Seven million people in North Carolina and four million of them are Baptists. If they carry on this way perhaps Americans will start to evolve into a legless life form that passes its life spending, eating and praying. Who knows - watch this space.

On the way to the Grand Canyon a few days back I passed through Tuba City. I like the name. Tuba City - it’s like calling somewhere Saxophone Super Mare or Euphonium on Crouch. Americans are pretty good at giving their towns strange names, it’s a kind of folk art. There’s a place in Pennsylvania called Intercourse and another small town close by called Paradise. It goes almost without saying that there is a well-photographed signpost bearing the legend ‘Intercourse to Paradise’. There’s a town I drove through in New Mexico called Truth or Consequence. It’s called that because a game show of that name advertised a prize of several thousand dollars for the first town that would be prepared to change its name to Truth or Consequence. And the small town in New Mexico took the money and changed. I heard somewhere that the original name was Crap-Head City and that nobody was too upset about the new name but I’m not sure if I believe that.

Still, Truth or Consequence does make me wonder if Cleckheaton fancies changing its name to Blankety Blank or Leamington Spa to Busman’s Holiday? The mind al- most boggles. I’m sure if there was enough money in it Basildon would become Blind Date.

The friend I’m staying with here in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, is the poet and photographer Jonathan Williams, who spends six months in the Smoky Mountains and six months as my neighbour in the Yorkshire Dales. He’s a great collector of folk art and curious bits and pieces, author of books of poetry like Get Hot Or Get Out and collections of odd bits of unconsidered trifles and ephemera such as the following from a church wall in Stalingfleet Church, North Yorkshire; ‘Without the friendship of the Happy dead how should we bear our life?’ He heard me talking about Tuba City and showed me a collection of American place names he’s picked up over the years. The list is too long to print in full but here’s a selection. These are all the names of real towns in America - Possum Trot- Ordinary - Skullbuster - Pig - Chicken Bristle - Araminta Ward’s Bottom - Boring - Rabbit Hash-and my favourite, Monkey’s Eyebrow.

Traveling along the long, seemingly endless roads of Utah the other day I overtook an RV. RV stands for Recreational Vehicle and they are basically enormous motor homes. America caters for RVs brilliantly. You can pull into RV parks with full ‘hook-up’ and in five minutes you are on mains sewage, electricity and water. I traveled from Las Vegas out across Death Valley in one five years ago with the fridge stocked full of Mexican beer in case I broke down. At least I wouldn’t die of thirst; ‘Highway patrol to base. We’ve found him Captain. He’s been twelve days lost in the deserts of Death Valley. He’s still alive but he won’t come in unless he can bring the purple elephant and the green and pink crocodile with him.’ The RV is a good way to see America and in fact a lot of Americans coming up to retirement age simply sell up and buy one and spend their last years traveling, just seeing America. But what impressed me was that the RV I passed this morning was being driven by a guy who must have been in his eighties. There was a motorbike clamped on the front and a sign on the back that read:

Too old to work - Too young to die Just cruising the road - Bye bye.

Only in America.

A Bridge Called Eric

At the moment I am working flat out finishing edits on a new book - which is why I haven’t posted anything for a while. I came across some jottings I made while on a USA road trip thirty years back and I thought you might be interested in a Limey’s look at the States back then……

I’m tapping this into the little Apple somewhere over Des Moines, Nebraska on my way to New Mexico from Chicago via a stop over in Utah. I’m over here taking photographs and recording music for a future TV series. But the craziest thing is that the hardest part about getting here was the journey to Manchester airport this morning. I’ll go early, I thought, and avoid the traffic. So I ordered the taxi for eight o clock. Thirty-five minutes later we were still stuck in the coagulating traffic on the M56 westbound. Excuse me for being stupid but why can’t the road engineers concentrate on one lump of motorway at a time and throw all their men and machinery at it until it’s finished? Why do they cover miles and miles of the motorway with cones, close it down to one lane and then set one man and a boy and a pickaxe at work for three years. In Germany they do such stuff overnight and have the same number of men who built the pyramids working away at it - and they lost the war! No doubt the men at the Ministry Of Slow Works will have an explanation for it all.

Anyway enough of that moaning. I’m always amazed, coming back to the States, how different the place is from Britain. For all the Coca-colanisation, the Big Macs, the TV programmes and the baseball caps we have in the UK now, America is still a world apart. Where else other than the USA would you find a town like Avon, Colorado where they have a Bob Fest every year? It all began when somebody asked for ideas for the name of the new town bridge a couple of years back. There were all kinds of suggestions like John F. Kennedy Bridge and Bald Eagle Bridge but the winner was Bob. So the bridge is called Bob and each year on the anniversary of its naming there is a Bob Fest and men called Bob and women called Bobby come from all over America to meet other Bobs and Bobbys and there are Bob-e-Ques when they roast Hot Bobs and you can Bob for Apples and other such fun things. Then at the end of the Festival, they all line up, thousands of them in front of the Bob Bridge, to have their photograph taken. Then they go away again until next year. Don’t laugh – remember we have Beefeaters and Cheese-rolling.

There is a positive cheeriness about many Americans that I actually like. A lot of English people feel that Americans are somehow shallow or false because they tell you to have a nice day or invite you home after knowing you for seven and a half minutes. I like that kind of thing. I like the open nature of many Americans. A few years back I was down in the deep South in Louisiana, down in cajun country. Mark Savoy lives there, he’s a great musician and accordion maker who runs a fabulous music store. Shops in America often have signs on the door saying, ‘No Dogs. No Shorts. No Sandals’ in an attempt to keep up what they must see as some kind of standard dress code.

Mark’s store has a lovely sign. ‘Dogs -no problem, Shorts - no problem, sandals - no problem. No Soul - stay away.’ I like that man.

Utah can sometimes be a problem for a man like myself. Being a Mormon state, a lot of hotels and restaurants are ‘dry’ ie. without alcohol. Suffering a case of near terminal thirst one Sunday night, I drove around the desert area near Zion National Park looking for a bar. As the light died I found a single-storey shack on the edge of nothing, a busted neon sign weakly flickering on the glowing dusty desert night sky telling the world this was Patsy’s Trucker’s Heaven. I went in. The bar was full of men who made the wrestler Giant Haystacks look like Jimmy Clitheroe the squeaky Lancashire Dwarf. None of them had necks, their heads just sort of slid into their shoulders. A silence came on the room as I walked in, all pale and touristy and bespectacled. ‘I’ll take a beer,’ I said in best Roy Rogers/ Crumpsallese. A big man next to me stared at me as though I’d flown in on the eight o’clock UFO from Tralthamadoor or Beetlejuice.

‘Where you from buddy?’

‘England.’

‘Don’t get too many folks from England round these parts.’ I began to wonder whether I’d have to go and find a gun and meet him at high noon on the dusty road outside when I suddenly noticed an anti-nuclear poster behind the bar and then say the CND symbol on the mirror.

‘What’s that about?’ I asked.

‘The lady who used to run this place just died of cancer of the thyroid. Only one way you get that kind of cancer - strontium ninety. Only one way you get strontium ninety is fall-out from nuclear testing. We hate that shit!’

I don’t suppose you’ll doubt me when I tell you that it ended up with guitars and mouth-organs and I had a new best mate called Tommy who played a mean banjo. He told me lots of the other very heavy looking goys in the bar were poets or painters and not actually truckers. So I asked Tommy if he was an artist.

‘Sure. I’am a deconstructer go out in my pick-up truck with a six-pack and a chain saw and You know those installation artists like Crisco - the guy who wraps mountains in silk?’

I nodded.

Well – I’m a De-Instalation Artists. I Go out at night with my chainsaw and I cut down billboards, you know, those big advertising things you see at the side of all the roads. Man I hate that shit. They make America look so goddam ugly!’

So, as I travel onwards towards Taos, Colorado and the Grand Canyon I will think of Tommy and The Utah, Chainsaw, Good Taste Massacre.

I Married A Monster From, Blackpool Lancashire, AKA Outer Space

Roswell, New Mexico is the heart of UFO country. More people here have had close hen counters of every kind than you can shake a stick at; which is why the place has not just one but two UFO museums. In 1947 there was a mysterious aircraft crash on the hills just a few miles outside town. Something flying low had gone into the desert mountains and locals, thinking it was a plane from the nearby military airbase, phoned in to report an accident. The military came out and, according to local mythology, found a flying saucer and four dead aliens. A press officer at the air base gave out a press release in which he actually admitted that the military had taken a flying saucer and four space men to the Roswell base. Later he was forced to recant and claimed that it had all been a mistake and that what had come down was a weather balloon and there were no bodies at all and he hadn’t been feeling well when he’d come out with all that nonsense about little green men. Of course it was too late by then and people began to suspect a cover-up and ever since there has been controversy over ‘The Roswell Incident’. A few locals claimed to have seen the bodies being carried to a truck and the man who made the announcement later went back on his word again and said that it was all true and he’d been forced to counter his first statement. I don’t have a clue what actually happened at Roswell in 1947 but I do know that people find it a lot more exciting to accept a conspiracy theory than that somebody just went off his tree for half an hour and made the whole thing up. Dozens of books have been written on the subject and Roswell is now the centre of UFOology which is why it has two museums devoted to the subject. I walked into the one on Main Street and wandered round looking at photographs of things that looked like Dutch Caps and pudding basins shining over the desert and as I was reading something about a farmer from New Mexico who was taken up in a saucer by four men in silver suits, a lady in her seventies came up to me.

‘Have you had your picture taken with Ralf?’ she asked.

‘Ralf?’

‘That stands for Roswell Alien Life Form,’ she said, ’he’s in here’, and I followed her into a dimly lit room where a little creature about four foot tall with spindly limbs, a pear-drop head and big googly eyes was stood under a spotlight.

‘Course he ain’t real, he’s just a model. But that’s exactly what the bodies looked like they took from the crash. You go and stand by him. I’ll take your picture.’

And I did. On the way out with my polaroid of me and Ralf safely in my pocket, she asked me where I was from.

‘England,’ I said.

‘I married one of them,’ she replied.

Immediately I thought of Ralf.

‘An alien?’ I asked. In New Mexico anything is pos- sible.

‘Well sort of. He was a kind of alien. He was an Englishman from Blackpool called Akroyd. And she showed me her badge. ‘Lorraine Akroyd’, it said. So if any of you Blackpuddlians want to know what happened to Fred Akroyd late of Seaview House, Scrofula’s Terrace, Blackpool, he married a lady called Lorraine who takes pictures of people with Ralf in Roswell, New Mexico. Only in America.

I met a bloke in a bar last night and we got talking in the way you do in bars. People like to chat to find out about you and, more importantly, tell you a bit about themselves. Tommy was a builder who worked for himself building interesting architect-designed houses out in the hills. The great thing about the south-west is that there’s so much space that people are very largely allowed to do their own thing. They build houses with towers and castle walls or build them like Mexican cantinas or ranches and nobody minds. It’s all down to the individualism you find here; artists and writers have been coming here for years, ever since D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O’ Keefe in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, and it has produced a very special kind of artistic climate. There are probably more painters, writers and photographers here than in any other area of America.

Lady Chatterley’s Adobe Hacienda

In most places in America you can get thirty-two television channels. In The Sleepy Enchilada Motel, Taos, New Mexico you can get sixty-seven and they are all absolute shite. There is one channel devoted entirely to shopping - they show you stuff and you phone a free- phone number and order it and it’s delivered to you next morning. I didn’t stay tuned long enough to see what the

commercials are, the news I guess. There is another chan- nel that shows nothing but the weather, what it did, what it’s doing and what it might do. As you can imagine, it isn’t long before they’re scraping round trying to find things to say about the weather. They have weather for gardeners, weather for anglers, weather for sail-boarders, weather for jugglers - it’s all the same weather but they’re just desperately trying to pad it out. Well, it takes about five minutes to go through it, then they do it all again, then there’s a commercial break and they do it all again. It’s like having Michael Fish followed by Fish Fingers followed by Michael Fish for twenty-four hours. There’s another channel that is nothing but news. Any journalist with a professional, rolling-news axe to grind should watch this channel. After ten minutes you’ve seen it all. And because not much has happened in the last ten minutes, they show it you all again. This is the land of constant deja deja vu vu.

There’s another channel that has Kilroy- and Oprah Winfrey-type shows on all the time. People talk about AIDS and divorce for three minutes, then there’s a commercial break and they do it again, all before a studio audience that presumably has to be drugged and dragged into the studio. American television, in a word, represents the end of civilisation as anybody knows it. It is popcorn for the brain, tasteless, crass and bad for you. It represents the end of thinking, the terminal death of the analytic mind. You need the IQ of a garden snail to sit through more than ten minutes of it.

And I’m afraid to say that British TV is going the same way. You don’t think so? I remember being in another motel room on the edge of the Monument Valley Navajo Reservation a few years back watching a terrible, terrible show with the audience whooping and shrieking as people made total dick-heads of themselves. Thank God for the BBC, I thought, at least that crap will never get on to British TV screens. The next year there it was beamed

out across England with our own Silly Black introducing it. Blind Date had made it across the pond following Big Macs, Coca Cola and Roxanne. And if Murdoch gets his way we’ll be watching even more brainless dross and all in the name of CHOICE. Well as far as I’m concerned digger, you can shove it where the kangaroo shoves its widgie grubs.

And another thing, since I’m feeling that way out this morning. It is virtually impossible to get a breakfast in America that is not going to either kill you on the spot or shorten your life by twelve hours per mouthful. Most everything you eat on the road is deep fried, made from chemicals and covered with sugar. I ordered some French toast this morning in a diner called ‘Cozee Cholesterol Corner’ or ‘From Here to Obesity’ or some such; they can’t do much with French Toast, I thought. Not much they can’t. It came to the table in the hands of a lady that made the Michelin Man look like Mahatma Gandhi. ‘Enjoy,’ she ordered, slamming down a plate of strips of toast that had been dipped in egg and deep fried, then coated with icing sugar. It was served up with a bowl of maple syrup to dip it in. I could feel the cholesterol racing along my arteries like formula-one slugs heading straight for the aorta. Why more people don’t keel over and die on the spot in American restaurants I’ll never understand. Every morning I expect some overweight trucker to groan and collapse head first into his eggs sunnyside up with ham and grits and blueberry pancakes and syrup, but they never do. They just waddle out to the truck and cruise off down the slab, probably exploding half-way down the road. ‘Oh Oh!’ the drivers say as they go past the mangled remains. ‘Another trucker gone to the great health farm in the sky.’

D.H. Lawrence was a miner’s son from Nottingham who wrote what some regard as among the finest novels and poetry in the English language. (I’m not talking about Lady Chatterley, I mean things like Sons and Lovers and The

Rainbow.) Lawrence spent some time in New Mexico living on a ranch north of Santa Fe, near Taos. He wrote and painted there and some of the crude art he produced is on show in one of the bars in town. You can see it for a dollar or so. When he died, his wife Freda brought his ashes back and placed them inside a shrine high on a hill at the end of a six-mile dirt track. I’ve been there twice now; a simple whitewashed chapel with an altar and a silver-painted phoenix looks out across the fir forests to the Taos plateau. Standing there as the evening light died across New Mexico this evening, I couldn’t help wondering how many Pueblo Indians there are buried in Nottingham? An idle thought, but then again idle thoughts can be one of the less anti- social results of too much Mexican food. Not for nothing do they call the after-effects of too much chili ‘Zapata’s Revenge.’

The Poem (ish)

“We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” comes from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita Verse 11:32), where Lord Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) reveals his multi-armed form to Prince Arjuna, declaring himself as time—the destroyer of all. It was famously quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer regarding the atomic bomb.

“They all hate us anyhow

So let’s drop the big one now”

Randy Newman

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”

Albert Einstein

Abydos is a temple site on the banks off the Nile. It was believed ,by the Ancient Egyptians, that the souls of all the dead gathered there to make their way into the underworld. It has a terrible atmosphere to this day. Helen Arbiter – A Vicar’s Wife In Egypt 1920

Chapter One

Come with me to Egypt, evening, Egypt, Abydos,

Eleven short clicks from the Nile (give or take.)

We shall sit in our air conditioned coach

Waiting. A train of chew-cud, arse-breath shambling camels

Ambles past; small children dig the dirt, kick paper balls;

The streets are quiet past Death, a mangy dog

Crossed with cuts and scabbed with sores

Scutters across a tract of waste.

In its own dream the sun has met the desert dust

And washed the sky with blood. Against the dying light

Tall palms are silhouettes, cutouts jagged,

Unmoving in the breathless air.

The call of the Muezzin rings out loud

Across the unpaved streets, mud houses.

Back in the air-con bus we wait and wait and wait.

The drive blows his horn and in the distance something grows

From a cloud of dust and urchins and we are shown

The young American couple who are always late

Hurry through the dust, laughing aloud, in their designer clothes,

Handsome, svelte and yet somehow ersatz.

Their whole being — an act;

We are just extras in their film:

She in a solar topee bound round with a trailing scarf;

He a linen suit a handmade shirt, a Panama hat,

Hand made two-tone shoes – and a silk cravat.

They are a fiction, playing out Death on The Nile,

It is a bogus game with just one act but many scenes.

“Sorry to keep you waiting” they give a half-smile

As they gain their seats, their apology as faux

As her roaring twenties shingle and his co-respondent’s shoes

The Arab driver says nothing, just throws a switch

And with the hiss of a thousand snakes the doors close to.

Back at the paddle-cruiser moored close to the shore

We change for dinner, some of us.

Feluccas tack upstream, shadufs

Lift water from the Nile up to the thirsty land.

The legend says the souls of all

The dead come here to Abydos to await their call.

They flow between the temple columns and descend

Into the underworld.

To be judged, weighed on the scales and sent to hell

Or heaven. A dying donkey trots along the bank

Stirring the dust carrying rushes and a man

Side-saddle the boats stern paddle churns the mud

The gong calls us to dinner

And we carry all our histories inside.

Later, the dinner tables cleared,

Waiting for Poirot, we all take

Our digestifs out on the upper deck,

Night cloaking all our world, the stars that shone

On Jesus and the ass, shine on us too.

We talk about our jobs: Australian nurses on a trip

Forgetting for a while the nightmares they are living through;

A retired banker and his wife, a retired teacher,

A financier or two

A Welsh couple on honeymoo who does nothing but booze

A Canadian mother and daughter who do nothing but cruise.

And then the cutouts from the movie speak. Without a blush

Or stutter and quite proud in fact, showing their perfect teeth.

They tell us they are targetiers, their job simply to pick

Which towns and cities will go first when the sun

Falls from the sky in globs to melt buildings,

Turn people into ash, when the dead become the lucky ones.

Uncle Sam’s chickens, with their Christian smiles

Their film star haircuts. I remember

Then the story of the war criminal Werner Von Braun,

Who hanged men from crane jibs to encourage

Hitler’s slaves to work a little harder. He came

From Germany special despatch, the V2 secrets

Safe within his brain. He had hatched the rockets that had rained

Silent on London and sent so many to their graves.

He settled in the USA more valuable than the Truth

Living the American Dream he settled

Washed his hands in Pilates silver bowl, pulled on

The Emperor’s New Suit of his new life.

So much so the Disney channel had him on TV

To explain how a modified mass murder weapon

Could take men into space, and even to the moon.

Oppenheimer’s babies, scorpions in a bottle,

There we sat, glasses of Bombay Gin,

Ice sparkling in the glass, on the edge of Abydos,

The souls outside making their way to the underworld

And two on deck taking a holiday from

The heavy lifting work of playing God.

Next morning they go early for a walk along the Nile’s bank

Later we hear a hubbub and a caterwauling

Children’s shouts and women’s bawling and we see

Our two Gods running like mad fools along the bank

Rained on by clods of camel shit and donkey shit

And people shit and stones. They make the gangplank and are pulled

On board. The Captain, a handsome man

Is smiling as we cast off and head out into the rivers median

Far from the shit-throwing kids.

Our two Gods are in their cabin showering

Bruised and baffled. It turns out that we moored

Not just where they assembled all the souls,

But where all the mothers washed the family clothes

And they were not too pleased.

And as we sit

Out in the sun and hit the main current

The Vishnu’s reappear fresh showered in cool linen

Order Screwdrivers and sit down and Owen

The Welshman says, “Don’t worry, once you’re home

You can get your own back, show ‘em whose boss.

You can take your Mont Blanc fountain pens and draw

A small bulls eye round Abydos.”

The poem below is from my book of poems Fishing For Ghosts and is about the arrogant way that, England divided up Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation and part of the Ottoman Empire and created what became Iraq with a simple swipe of a pen nib. But you have to remember that the Empire was run by public school boys who eat arrogance every morning with their porridge.

BTW the Union Jack, so beloved of flag-shaggers was called The Butchers Apron by many of the conquered nations - for obvious reasons.

The Last “K” In Kirkuk

Kids at “ The Flicks” we loved the cowboy films,

Bouncing on the dusty seats as they spun the reel

And shafts of light and dark made stories on the silver screen.

There were big fights with Indians and Outlaws and

The Texas Rangers. In that world the Cavalry

Always arrived in time, the goodies wore white hats,

The baddies black – and that was that.

Often the films would open with a map

Of Mexico or Texas, the debatable lands,

Indian territory; lines drawn with a pen, freehand.

Then a flame would crawl relentlessly across the chart,

And we knew that this was where the real epic would start.

Just so two men with a ruler and a pen

In secret talks (as Europe sent its sons

To slaughter, a generation drowned in lies and paper)

Unpicked an Empire. Carrion crows in suits,

Monsieur Picot and Sir Mark Sykes with great

Urbanity cut up the crumbling Ottoman cake.

And now the scholars scour, decode the secret screeds;

Historians pore, destroy their sight

Unraveling the web: the treaties, declarations,

The Arabs, Zionists, the League of Nations.

And still it comes down to just this: two men, a map.

And in that room in Downing Street

A handsome man, (silky moustache,

Bright eyes, an element of dash,

How ironic that his name was Mark!)

With a ruler and a chinagraph

Drew lines of fires to come across the chart.

Bred in the bone, born to the breed

Sykes smiling in the waning light, said, ‘Look,

I should like to draw a straight line from the “e”

In Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk.’

Many years ago I was driving near Pigeon Forge, Kentucky and saw a massive bra flying from a flagpole ahead of me - I later found out that this was to tell me Dolly Parton was at home.

I fell in love with that woman then and am still entranced by her - she gives books to children, she writes great songs, she isn’t ashamed of where she came from or over proud of who and what she is now - you’d have to be a hard-hearted bastard not to love this woman. And this morning - sitting in a house in a cloud hung valley in the Pyrenees, reading about Trump’s massacre of 150 innocent Iranian children I came across this and suddenly the day grew brighter.

https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/why-a-tennessee-childrens-hospital-was-named-after-dolly-parton?

If there is a paradise, and I ever make it through the gates I want to have my mandolin with me and I want to play some tunes with Dolly Parton and tell her how much great music and how much hope she brought to the World.

I haven’t written much here for a long time because my attention has been taken up with re-writes and edits of a set of short stories for my next book and that, and bits of traveling have just crowded everything else out.

I want to take time here though to tell you a story – it’s very short but it illustrates why we are where we are, in one small specific little world – that of special needs education. I’m not going to bother explaining or justifying the need for special education, because any nation that dares to claim the mantle of ‘civilised’ should look after those who are different, who are going through trauma, or who are falling through the system; that’s what we humans do. If you don’t agree with that then the rest of this short piece will mean nothing to you. Here’s the story.

About 20 years back I went to give a reading in a bookshop in a neat small town in the far south of England. It was part of the town’s annual Literature Festival. . The people who came seemed to enjoy themselves and at the end of the reading I signed a lot of books. As the queue for signing came to an end I noticed a woman who my wife would describe as ‘very Harvey-Nichols’ at the end of the queue. She had five or so books in her arms, and, was I was signing them, she said that she didn’t read much and the books they were presents for friends. Then she told me that she was my appointed chauffeur for the night and would be running me to my hotel which was a short way out of town.

I piled my suitcase in the back of the biggest 4WD/SUV I have ever seen and climbed into what looked like the cockpit of the International Space Station. She switched on her sat-nav and a human being spoke to her – not a robot – a real human being who guided us out of town and round road works, with up to the second commentary and personal notes (asking her how her husband was and how one of her horses was). The woman had a long chat with what was obviously a flesh and blood co-pilot in the dashboard. I realised then as I saw the greatly be-jewelled hands on the steering wheel, that I was in quite another world entirely.

Once we had cleared the one-way system and road works the woman started talking to me. The conversation I had with her was one-way and was basically an A-List of all the ‘famous authors’ who she had piloted to their beds. I won’t beat about the bush: the woman was both incredibly rich, and thick as mince. It is possible to be both. I have met plenty of the ruling class in my time, but they usually manage to at least give the impression that they were born on the top shelf: not so my chauffeur (chauffeuse?) her accent was more Birmingham than Balmoral. I asked her did she work and she said no. Then I asked her what her husband did.

‘My husband is a very, very clever man. He used to be a bricklayer but he has built up a business from nothing. He buys big houses and turns them into special places for children; naughty children and those with special needs.’

I asked her how many places he had and she said.

‘Oh I don’t know. He has lots of them. Dozens here and lots more in other counties. He is incredibly successful and that is because he is a very clever man.’

I was glad that we landed, at that moment, outside the small country hotel where I was staying because my blood pressure was at pressure-cooker scale.

I think of that woman and her self-made millionaire husband every time I see articles telling us how much SEND is costing us. People will tell you that input from the private sector was needed. True. But it was needed because the public sector was underfunded and was being starved of money with the cynical intent of turning it into a business. Don’t look for plots or conspiracies – privatisation has been a given for the last fifty years. Thatcher began it and Blair her love-child carried it even further with his PPF. The privatisation of health and education has been a salami-slicing gradual takeover, and if Farage gets into No 10 you can kiss what is left of the NHS goodby. Business is business and if you want to take over another firm or a public asste like the water companies or the NHS, what do you do? You attack it in the press and run it down physically and reptationally until it is ready for takeover; this vulture capitalism began in the USA, Tiny Rowland and Jimmy Goldsmith brought it here and it has been working its way into our common weal ever since.

From the woman with the enormous SUV to Baroness Mone and her £200 million fraud is but a tiny fleck of time. The sovereign individuals that run the game want us to believe that this is the natural way way of things, and that woke lefties like me are the cause of all the world’s woes. No; most of the world’s problems are caused not by the poor or those physically or neuro divergent but by the Mandlesons and the Thiels the Musks, and the Farages and the Trumps and the Mones of the world.

PS

For a more intelligent and informed read on special needs education check out anything by John Harris who writes for the Guardian – he knows root and branch and he writes so well.

I was sifting through some old files the other night and came across a sheaf of corrected proofs for one my books of poems, and I remembered how it was photographs like the one above that inspired the poem below and the short story, The Wrong Door in my last book, As The Sky With Stars. I was working as a bus conductor in Manchester when the story of the bodies on Saddleworth Moor broke, and the whole city seemed to be a web of related stories and rumours.

I still think of how one small act – the wrong turning, a train missed, a page turned – can spin our own little worlds out of orbit. Some wrong turnings can be of more import than others; imagine if Trump’s mother had a headache the night he was conceived or that bullet had missed Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. George Orwell wrote an essay on the English Murder - I used his title as my starting point. The rest is true – but for the turn of fortune’s wheel I wouldn’t be sitting here tapping this out on the keyboard of my Macbook Air - come to that, if Steve Jobs dad, John Jandall hadn’t met Joanna Schieble …..1

The Art of the English Murder


And they were trawling the city’s Sargasso
In the midnight’s shining, fast as fishermen,
No oilskins, just a soiled tweed jacket and a fake fur coat.

‘Like a drink son? D’you want a smoke? Go ahead.
It’s cold the night right enough, d’ ye want a lift?
Yer sleepin’ rough? We’ve got a warm wee bed.’

Black ice on the tongue, the eager eyes
Seeing no sea nor any star-lit thing,
And a smile that swam from somewhere deep and still.

How many nights, a sprat in their city’s pond
Had I swum out beyond or through their mesh?
The Rembrandt, Nick the Greek’s, the Union,
My sea lane echoed theirs, one pot-luck pulse away.

But currents shifted me into slack water,
So that bright lobby and incongruous axe,
That sudden world’s-end shift from new found mate
To Hammer House of Horrors, sailed on by.

So, like slick ships that slid by softly in the night,
Those fishers of men moved on, shooting dark nets on
The shimmering, lamp washed streets. ‘Name’s
Ian, this is Myra. Want a lift home son?’


And they were trawling the city’s Sargasso
In the midnight’s shining, fast as fishermen,
No oilskins, just a soiled tweed jacket and a fake fur coat.

‘Like a drink son? D’you want a smoke? Go ahead.
It’s cold the night right enough, d’ ye want a lift?
Yer sleepin’ rough? We’ve got a warm wee bed.’

Black ice on the tongue, the eager eyes
Seeing no sea nor any star-lit thing,
And a smile that swam from somewhere deep and still.

How many nights, a sprat in their city’s pond
Had I swum out beyond or through their mesh?
The Rembrandt, Nick the Greek’s, the Union;
My sea lane echoed theirs, one pot-luck pulse away.

But currents shifted me into slack water,
So that bright lobby and incongruous axe,
That sudden world’s end shift from new found mate
To House of Hammer Horrors sailed on by.

And, like slick ships that slide by softly in the night,
These fishers of men moved on, shooting dark nets on
The shimmering, lamp-washed streets. ‘Name’s
Ian, this is Myra. Want a lift home son?’

I’ve been fairly quiet recently – that’s for a couple of reasons. Firstly I’ve been preoccupied with the final texts of a new book of short stories and, secondly, because I’ve been away in Scotland for the Dick Gaughan concert at the Royal Concert Hall Glasgow where a full house cheered to the stars and gave the man a standing ovation as he walked on stage to join us in the last two songs of the night. The final song Freedom Come All Ye, written by that other great Scot Hamish Henderson, was the perfect way to end a tribute to a living legend. I’ll write more about Dick in a full posting soon - Working Class Hero No3. Meanwhile – about the new book.

The book is called The Jockey and is Vol 3 in the series of books of short stories: Vol 1 is Specky Four Eyes, Vol2 is As The Sky With Stars. The Jockey will be published at the end of March.

The eight tales in The Jockey are all either set in Ireland or in the Irish communities in the UK. One of the stories set in the UK is called The Last Of The July Barbers, and it tells the story of Séamie Lennon, a man from Mayo, in his late thirties who comes every year from his home in Bohola to earn much needed money working the hayfields in a farm in the Yorkshire Dales in the North of England.

The Irish lads were known locally as The July Barbers because ‘they came each year to shave the fields.’ They slept in barns or byres and worked the haytime in the Dales before going back home at the end of summer in time (hopefully) to save their own hay. The mother of one of my Yorkshire Dales friends, a farmer’s wife now in her nineties remembers the same men men coming each year to her farm and remembers them with fondness, in her case the same man came for several years. The story, as the title suggests, is about the last of the Irish lads to come to the Dale and the narrator is a man who was a child at the time so the tale within a tale is about change and culture and love and time now gone.

My first book of poems (published after I’d sent my work in under an assumed name: Christophe O’Neil, contains the poem below. To explain a little….

The poem kicks off in the 6/8 time of the trad Irish jig; then it falls into a jumble of words as the lads tumble into the farm and, with the morning comes the long hard graft of the mowing and raking.

“Six miles to mass” - because the nearest Catholic church in one case was six miles away.

Methody ranting - Methodists hymn singing.

Penyghent is one of the three peaks of Yorkshire and one of the few remaining Celtic topographical names in that area.

Crough Patrick is a holy mountain on the coast of Mayo and a place of pilgrimage - the main day being the last Sunday in July when some will climb ’The Reek’ (the mountain) barefoot.

The picture above shows Irish lads (in their best suits) standing to be hired at Hawes Hiring Fair 1964. It’s from a book called ‘The Irish In Britain’ - pub. The Guardian.

The July Barbers 

From Mayo, God help us, each summer they came, 
And stood to be hired in Salt Kettle Lane, 
And the farmers would pass with a swagger and a nod,
A hand slap, a wink, the chink of a few bob, 
To drink 'your man's health' and the bargain was struck,
Binding them to the land. 
The truck picked them up when the pubs had all shut 
And tipped them, drunk and staggering, 
Into the lamplit yard, their beery breath 
Wreathing round the moth-danced flame. 

Then it was weeks of scything, raking, turning, loading, 
Sun Up to the edge of light, 
When blood spilled, ran, and filled the sky, 
And men grew field-long stalking shadows. 
Sleeping an hour they rose, swilling the night 
Out of their eyes at the trough, washing  
The gall of loneliness from their mouths, 
The smell of bacon fingering the air 
As mist smudged a heron on the river and a curlew 
Bubbled at the orange ball that rimmed the fell. 
Sunday, six miles to mass, on foot, 
And six more back, then a few pints and the crack, 
Three hours of bed and another rising, 'God bless the work!' 

Some nights they sang in Irish beneath a shaking moon, 
Moving through the watery light 
Over a land fecund with seed and fruit. 
They combed the hayfield mowing to the lilt 
Of an old ballad, and called God's blessing on 
The field’s pan-scrub chin, well razored. 
‘Tis a shave will last all year mister!' 
 
Later, from the barn the farmer heard
The soft murmur of Gaelic chanting, 
'Like bloody Ju-Ju it sounded, Methody ranting.' 
Peering through a crack he saw them kneel 
Circled in the lamplight, as horny fingers, 
Scythe-segged, told the Rosary through 
And Penychent  became Crough Patrick. 

The Jockey will be published in book form at the end of March - and will cost £10 plus P&P. Nat available in bookshops yet but available online www.mikeharding.co.uk We will take orders once the book has gone to press.

Now that Rudolph and the other reindeer are back in their shed, and Santa has got his boots off and his feet up before the fire, I’m back to signing and posting out the last of the signed and numbered, limited edition (250 copies) of Vol 2 of the short story books. Why self publish? I am often asked. Well the writer of a book, unless he or she is particularly famous gets 10% of the hardback price and 5% of the paperbook price of the book. Publishing the books myself means

a/ I get about 50% after expenses and

b/ I have total control over the design and the editing.

If all goes to plan I’m hoping that all 6 of the titles will sell out and then I’ll do either a box set or a “Collected” edition at some future date. Vol 3 is up to first serious edit stage and should be out on St Patrick’s Day this year. The next 3 are already in pretty good shape so the whole 6 should be out by Christmas 2026 – unless Trump’s ICE gangs come as far as Yorkshire - which they may well do.

Anyway enough of that - the main reason I write is because I have to - the stories are burning to get out there, and I’m getting a lot of pleasure, and learning a lot about the craft, from working on these little books. I get writers cramp from time to time both from writing the books - which I always start in longhand with a fountain pen on sheets of A4 unlined - and also from signing the books and addressing the envelopes. Why don’t I get somebody to do all that? well I actually like to see where the books are going (one went off today to Esperance, Western Australia) and I feel when I sign and post them that I am actually a little more connected with the reader. Also the people at Settle post office are a jolly bunch and do a great job.

Tomorrow night I’ll be heading into Manchester for the Irish tunes session in The Peveril of the Peak, a great old Victorian pub in the heart of the city. There I will play and learn trad Irish tunes on the mandolin and will drink pints of Guinness both real and zero, and, if all goes to plan, the writers cramp will vanish. I have written to the Pope (who I think is a good egg) and asked him if he can cannonise Arthur Guinness retrospectively but so far have not received an answer. The books are available from www.mikeharding.co.uk £10 plus P&P - signed in my blood. (Actually it’s Quink)

BEGINS

Donald Trump said on Saturday morning that US troops had carried out a “large-scale strike” on Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple has now been indicted in New York on terrorism and drugs charges. Trump has accused Maduro of running a “narco terrorist organisation”.

However, the legality of the operation has been called into question – with even some of Trump’s allies suggesting it violated international law.

Geoffrey Robertson KC, a founding head of Doughty Street Chambers and a former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, said the attack on Venezuela was contrary to article 2(4) of the charter. “The reality is that America is in breach of the United Nations charter,” he added. “It has committed the crime of aggression, which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime, it’s the worst crime of all.”

ENDS

The US is going to claim it was endangered by a country of narco-terrorists and therefor employed the “first strike / attack as defence” policy that got it Mexico, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and control of

OK so now it’s our turn

The US is now aligned with Putin’s Russia - anybody who doesn’t see this has been asleep for the last 10 yrs.

The US hates the EU (and all the countries within it) because most of those countries are to some degree liberal democracies (I except Hungary in this).

The NATO alliance - set up by the US and basically a first line of defence for the US and also (by design) a constant threat to the USSR is no longer needed for America’s stategic ambitions as defined in their latest defence paper.

But….

The US has bases in the UK which render them basically US Property- from the spy stations at Menwith Hill and Fylingdale to the Nuclear bases in Scotland and E Anglia.

Culturally the US has brain-washed generations with tawdry TV demeaning UK culture with with a great overwash of shite from John Wayne to Liberace and Tom Cruise a and its current deranged Dictator has directly attacked the BBC

For the cultural and gastronomical crimes of American football, baseball caps, Coca Cola and McDonalds alone we have the right to demand they give us Texas and all its oil - at the very least.,

The US is after our NHS - I doubt that there are many doubters on this issue

The US also of course gave us Woody Guthrie, Jazz, the Blues, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Robert Frost and a few other its and pieces - but come on - look at the size of the place! Set that against Europe with its countless painters, composers, writers, philosophers, musicians intellectuals, inventors…..etc…. and the US is looks like a crackerbarrel country – good at bombing but never won a conflict on its own and got its arse well kicked in Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan.

And don’t give me WW1 and WW2 - The US did’t come in until we had done the heavy lifting and then only to garner the spoils. It’s avowed aim in 1917 was the destruction of the British Empire - which while not a bad ambition was only fired by the desire to create an American Empire.( FFS how far away from Washington are Hawaii and Alaska?)

For the crimes against humanity that it has committed in its bombing

For the crimes against international law and human decency it has committed against sovereign nations Argentina/Brazil/Chile/El Salvador, Panama and now Venezuela.

For the CIA hit in Persia (now Iran) which deposed a legitimately elected PM and replaced him with the puppet Shah (for oil and aided by MI6)

For it’s meddling and undermining of most of the countries of the Levant

And for shite chocolate, toasted marshmallows and the crimes against good taste it has committed via Hollywood, McDonalds and baseball caps on back to front etc etc

I think we should bomb it tomorrow.

Or at least capture Trump and stick him in a cage in London Zoo - but not too near the more dignified animals - it might upset them.

In Britain there was a massive groundswell against the coming war led by Labour and the Unions, by Liberal newspapers like The Manchester Guardian and a burgeoning pan-European women’s movement that was fighting for suffrage and for an end to all wars.

I was struck forcibly reading the piece again by how close we are today to that July/August tinderbox of 1914. I have typed the salient points in bold.

BTW I am of the opinion that there was really just One World War which stretched from 1914 to 1945 with a slight lull in the battle during the 1920s the western world was never not at war.

BEGINS

The larger truth of the tragedy of 1914 is that the economic, political, and diplomatic systems across Europe were defective, and all the Great Powers shared in these systemic defects – the New Imperialism, social Darwinism, economic nationalism, ethnically conscious chauvinism, a creeping militarism that looted national treasuries, weak international institutions, and a new popular press that debased political culture and poisoned the popular mind.

The febrile political atmosphere was also the creation of men of property who were engaged in a common revolt against new schemes of income-related taxation. Some of these men funded a dangerous radical turn in conservative politics that sought salvation from trade unionism, socialism and democracy in a histrionic ultra-nationalism and even in war itself. Finally, tilting the Continent toward tragedy was the presence of so many mediocre men in high places running the game of brinkmanship, the characteristic products of class-bound societies. These were the forces and perverse ideologies that built toward the disaster. And they were to be found across Europe, and beyond, in 1914.

Source:

Easy-Going Procrastinators – Ferdinand Mount – London Review of Books – 8 Jan 2015

Trump, Putin, Farage, Musk, Bannon, Trade Wars, Racism, Social Media, mediocre men running the show and using racism to inflame the pop. - all are but echoes of what was happening in 1914. Who really knows how many millions of lives were lost 1914-1945? And the post war settlements settled nothing - Stalin / Churchill / Eisenhower carved the World up at Yalta and all we got was the Cold War and proxy wars like Korea, Suez and Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing changes until we make a change - until then the ones who will lose the most will always be the Common People, never the rich and the powerful. And meanwhile the planet burns.

(BTW – The Kaiser, The Tsar and King George were all blood relatives.)

PPPPS

The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) ... ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?

Prince Lichnowsky - the Kaiser’s ambassador to London July 1914 - Quoted in Margot Asquith’s Diaries ibid.