A poem about cheese

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” G K Chesterton

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The challenge is to tell a tale

That makes one long for Wensleydale,

Or maybe pen a line or two

That calls for Brie or Shropshire Blue.

Of course it never should be said

That there’s no place for Leicester, Red.

And could you ever be so silly

Not to try a good Caerphilly?

Was ever soul so lost or deader

That would ignore the claims of Cheddar?

The land of Shakespeare, Blake and Milton

Is famed for Lancashire and Stilton.

Perhaps it’s once more time to foster

A taste for good old Double Gloucester.

It surely would be far from fair

To spurn a piece of Camembert.

Or will you go for something rarer

Like Trappista or Graviera?

Some folk say you can’t do better

Than Mozzarella, Yarg or Feta.

Can I hear you shouting louder

For Emmental, Edam or Gouda?

Or are you only merely thinking

Bishops should be eaten Stinking?

One only hopes that lines like these

Have made you want to eat some cheese.

 © John Welford

Shakespeare 400 years on

“Four hundred years is a long time”, said Polonius. “It’s a long time to be dead”.

“I know”, said Shylock. “But he left behind a few things to remember him by. You and me, for example.”

“Very true”, said Polonius. “And not just us. There’s Falstaff, and Prospero, and Romeo and Juliet, and King Henry V …”

“But Henry existed anyway”, said Shylock. “Bill Shakespeare didn’t invent him.”

“True”, said Polonius, “but nobody thinks today about Henry V without remembering the Shakespeare version, however inaccurate it might be”.

“And ditto for Macbeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar and a few others”, said Shylock. “But does it matter?”

“Not really”, said Polonius. “It’s the drama that counts. As my mate Hamlet says, ‘the play’s the thing’”.

“Your mate?” said Shylock. “Didn’t he stick a sword in you in Act Three?”

“Indeed he did”, said Polonius. “But it was a case of mistaken identity, so I can’t really hold it against him. And I always come back to life for the next performance, which I’ve been doing the past four hundred and more years, just like you”.

“And that’s the point, isn’t it?” said Shylock. “People have been talking about us for four centuries, which they wouldn’t have done if Bill hadn’t created us. And he gave us some great lines – how about my ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed; if you tickle us, do we not laugh’; I love that line.

“I’ve got some good ones too”, said Polonius. “I particularly like ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’”.

“Hang about”, said Shylock, “that’s my whole profession gone for a Burton there.”

“Perhaps you should have followed my advice”, said Polonius. “Moneylending didn’t do you much good, did it? You ended up losing the lot.”

“At least I was still alive in Act Five”, said Shylock. “And it would have been a pretty boring play without me as the villain of the piece.”

“And there’s something else to think about”, said Polonius. “I wonder if there are people today, four hundred years on, who are making up little stories about you and me and all the other characters, and having all sorts of fun as they imagine what we might be saying to each other had we really existed?”

“Come off it”, said Shylock. “You don’t think there’s anyone around who’s that daft, do you?”

© John Welford

Mr Jakes

It being the first of October, and Autumn definitely in the Forest air, I took myself down to the pub for a lunchtime pint to cheer myself up.

The usual crowd were there at the Duke’s Head, but I took a table in the corner and comforted myself with a pint of the local brew. I caught the eye of one of the regulars, whom everyone simply calls Mr Jakes – if he has a first name there are not many people who know it, so we just call him by his surname. He doesn’t seem to mind. Mr Jakes doesn’t mind anything very much; he’s our local “philosopher”, but not generally guaranteed to cheer you up.

Mr Jakes came over. He noticed what I was drinking – “Reverend James” it’s called, dark and bitter. It suited my mood, and probably his, knowing the sort of man he was. But today, he surprised me.

“Look out of the window”, he said. “What do you see?”

“Trees”, I said “Changing colour, losing their leaves, getting to ready to shut down for winter.”

“Like you, you mean?” he said. “Do you think you’ve reached your Autumn? Are you now lean and slippered as you look forward to second childishness?”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that”, I said, “But you might have a point”.

“Well think again”, he said. “I know I’ve got this reputation for being an old curmudgeon, but deep down I’ve got another side, and I love Autumn. When you take a second look at the Forest I think you will too, because each of those trees turning a different shade bears a special message, just as if some lover had nailed it on with a hammer.”

He sensed my puzzlement.

“Listen”, he said. “A leaf on a tree is like a little factory. It uses sunshine to make sugars. It draws in carbon dioxide and shoves out oxygen. It does that all through spring and summer, but then it decides to retire and it throws off its green work overalls to reveal what was there all along – the real leaf in its true golden or red colours. It now does nothing at all but enjoys being what it is and shows itself off to the world as it dances in the breeze. It’s the best time a leaf could have – no work, all play.”

“And your meaning is?” I asked.

“That could be you,” said Mr Jakes. “You’ve finished your working days and you now have your Autumn to enjoy, being just what you want to be and doing just what you want to do. You can put on a show, let people know what you’re good at, start something new that you’ve never done before, go to those places you’ve been to before. Or, to put it another way, now that you’ve reached your Autumn, life can be just as you like it”.

© John Welford

Random meetings

When I worked in London during the late 1970s I had a number of random meetings with people who were in the public eye, but these encounters had nothing to do with any action on my part that might have been expected to lead to them. I did not move in exalted circles – I merely went for walks at lunchtime along the same streets that people far more famous than I also happened to be using.

I therefore had to apologise to government minister Willie Whitelaw, with whom I once collided in St James’s Park, and I spotted Michael Foot limping along on his way to an Indian restaurant. A car stopped to allow me to cross the road – the driver was David Hockney. I popped into a bookshop where Frank Muir and Dennis Norden were signing copies of one of their “My Word” books – there was nobody else there, so I had a five-minute chat with them.

In another bookshop Spike Milligan was signing books. I bought a copy of “Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall”, which he duly signed. “You’re too kind”, I said. “Sometimes three kind”, he replied. On the way back to my place of work I passed Leon Trotsky eating a hotdog. OK – not the real Leon Trotsky but an actor having a break during filming in Carlton House Terrace.

It might sound as though these meetings all happened on the same day, but that is certainly not the case. However, it would have been quite something if all these people been together at the same time in the same place and the meetings had not been so random after all.

Michael Foot and Leon Trotsky might have got on quite well together, although the conversation could have become somewhat heated if Willie Whitelaw, a well-known supporter of Margaret Thatcher, had joined in.

Muir and Norden, who had both been in the RAF during the war, would probably have exchanged stories with former Army man Spike Milligan.

“How long were you are in the Army?” Frank might have asked. “Five foot eleven” would have been Spike’s response.

And what about David Hockney? How well would he have fitted in with the other members of this strange assemblage? He would have been the youngest one there by some margin, the only one who was gay and the only one who would have refused to do military service.

However, maybe he would have seized the opportunity to stand back and observe and perhaps he would have saved the observations for a later piece of art. It was not long after my imagined get-together that he developed the technique of making art from joined-together photographs – so perhaps he was standing to one side and imagining a “joiner” of Muir, Norden, Milligan, Whitelaw, Foot and an actor playing Trotsky?

Random meetings can lead to all sorts of consequences, whether real or just in the artist’s or writer’s imagination. Being alive to such imaginings is what counts.

© John Welford