Max performing at Soapbox, Edinburgh

British Summer Time

The daffodil peeks a cautious head,
Above the frosty flower bed,
Wonders, do I bloom chrome yellow,
To sway in sunlight warm and mellow.

But then it sees the flecks of snow,
Thinks it’s time for me to go,
And shrinks back down into the earth,
Quite postpones the Spring rebirth.

And in the parks and gardens bright,
Bulbs all follow Daffy’s plight,
And baron earth does greet our eye,
As we shuffle, moan and sigh,

To our bleak and daily toil,
Past the bare unbroken soil,
But smiling as we change our clocks,
Though wrapping up in gloves and socks.

Summer’s here, the Government says,
It’s official, longer days,
But the flowers shake their heads,
Stay beneath their frozen beds.

It’s not summer, you on high,
We’re staying put till next July.
But the men from Whitehall know,
It’s illegal now to snow.

So they tell the steely skies,
Please turn blue, but, big surprise,
Like Canute, their edicts spurned,
Their writs and sanctions duly burned,
As we mutter, what a bummer,
Another freezing British summer.

To A Mousse

Wee sleekit coorin’ timorous dessert,

Topped with cherries and a fresh cream squirt,

I see you tremble with anticipation,

As my spoon comes close to your sugar nation.

 

Oh, if ever a pudding could be blessed with legs,

Your fragile self but the whites of eggs,

And you cannot run as my spoon descends,

A lick, a lip-smack, and your life ends.

 

It is no longer a world of mousse and man,

But of empty bowl and whipped cream can,

So, pudding, reflect on the vagaries of fate,

While I lick my spoon and clean my plate.

The End of the World

Tonight is the end of the world, everything we know will be unfurled,
There will no longer be night or day, towns and cities swept away,
The evening sky will be torn with thunder, light and darkness ripped asunder,
And then?

Will we start again?

Will God build another Eden in the location once called Sweden?
Adam and Eve recast as platinum blonde, of herring and vodka fond,
But of a certain gloomy disposition,
perhaps God’s plan requires revision?

So let’s set Eden in the former USA, with the first family settled in the hay,
With a nuclear arsenal and bags of potato chips, an army, an airforce and a whole fleet of ships…

Or, maybe it’s better we just call the whole Armageddon thing off, and just leave life as it is
after twelve o’clock.

Nursery Crimes

Georgie Porgy, pudding and pie.
Felt so bad he wanted to die,
When a voice on the telephone said, My my,
Have you been mis-sold any PPI?

The True Story of Hamlet as told to William Shakespeare on his Visit to Blackpool in 1609

A geezer of royal lineage took a kip on the beach one day,
When his brother from the chippy poured some poison down his way,
And they found his rotted body and declared that he was dead,
Until he rose twice nightly, and this is what he said:

“Oh send for my son, Hamlet, who lives on Morecambe sands,
And tell the lazy bastard he’s got murder on his hands.”
So Hamlet took the Stagecoach bus and arrived in princely style,
And ran into his father’s ghost along the Golden Mile.

He was walking down the darkened front, looking at ‘illuminations,
And there was his old father, standing tall between the stations.
“Yer took yer bleeding time, me lad, get yer arse over to the tower,
And kick yer no-good Uncle out, before the bugger seizes power.

He’s poisoned my chip butty,and had a bit of the other,
And now the slimy bugger’s getting his leg over with yer mother,
So get thee to a nunnery, don’t stand there like a dosser,
Just get yer poisoned dagger out and go and kill the tosser.”

But Hamlet took his Uncle to the show at Central Pier,
And whispered, in soliloquy, “Lenny Henry’s here,
He’s doing his old material and a sketch about a king,
Let’s see if my old Uncle will find, of truth, a ring!”

But alas it all misfired, the show was quite a flop,
And Uncle stopped for donuts at the all-night coffee shop.
“Methinks this is not the reaction of a felon torn with remorse,
Unless the fucker’s lying, a possibility of course!

I’ll challenge him to a duel and put poison in the wine,
It’ll make a brilliant movie, that I can sell sometime.”
So they had their final sword fight, and quite a lot was said,
And every body in the play, they ended up quite dead.

The Next Big Thing

Attention readers! We interrupt the flow of comic verse to bring you The Next Big Thing:

The wonderful Emily Dodd tagged me in her NBT blog post last week and I’m pleased to use this opportunity to tellyou all about my new book, The Last Burrah Sahibs:

What is the title of your new book?

The Last Burrah Sahibs – a memoir of a childhood in 1960s Bengal

Where did the idea come from for the book?

This book has been with me for many years, but recently the urge to tell what’s essentially an untold story became very strong and I had to start writing it.

What genre does your book fall under?

Travel and/or memoir probably best describes it, but it’s so much more than just simply “My Childhood”!

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Well, Thomas Horn to play me at eleven, and, I think, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock to play my parents.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

A warm and funny evocation of the forgotten lifestyle of the British Raj in a period forgotten by history.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The Last Burrah Sahibs has just been published by the highly innovative Steve Savage Publishing.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Three to four months.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The best comparison is E M Forster’s A Passage to India

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Life

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

This is a really vivid book of a life that is now long-passed and would interest anyone with a yen for travel or who takes a delight in experiencing an unusual childhood.

The Writers I’m Tagging

Chancery Stone. Chancery Stone is the author of the gripping and addictive DANNY Quadrilogy, a brutal romance in the vein of Wuthering Heights and on the scale of War & Peace. Volume Three, the penultimate instalment, is out soon.

Andrew Murray Scott. Andrew is fellow Savage author and the creator of several award-winning novels and copious Scottish non-fiction.

Harry Giles. I met Harry some years ago when he was a boy reporter on an Orkney newspaper. He’s now a very accomplished poet and his pamphlet, Visa Wedding, is out soon.

Max Scratchmann. No, it’s not a typo, I’m tagging myself and my new copiously illustrated volume of comic verse, My Rubber Hebrew Nose.

Click each person’s name to find out more and discover The Next Big Thing!

The Last Burrah Sahibs