More Parking?

A text came through on my phone
telling me that my car was coming
to the end of its parking time and
did I want to extend the time it
was parked?
Yes, I thought, I do? I would really
like that.
There was a number and I called.
The recorded message asked me
the reg number of my car and I
tapped that in. The message then
asked me to tap in how many hours
I would like to add on. I tapped in 4.
The message said that this was an
invalid number. So I tapped in 6.
The message said that this was an
invalid number. So I tapped in 2 and
the message said, ‘The call is ended.’
I thought that’s a pity, I was just getting
to enjoy it. I found that I was strangely
attracted to the efficient but urgent tone
of the woman talking to me. I liked the
way that she seemed to be so good
at getting things done. And now this.
Out of the blue: the call is ended. I
wondered if it was something about
the way I tapped the keys. Was I a
bit clumsy? I know that I had just eaten
a sandwich and maybe she had picked
up the whiff of mayonnaise on one
of the numbers. And it wasn’t as if
it was me who had been in touch
in the first place. I figured that she
must sit there all day, day after day,
texting people telling them that they
can extend their hours and then snubbing
them with that ‘The call is ended’ thing.
Maybe that’s what she’s into. She likes
saying, 'The call is ended.'

Grandmother

I'm not American.

One day

my grandmother 

packed her bags

in America

gathered up her children:

got on a boat

and came to England.

There's a photo of 

my grandmother 

with her three children

on board the boat

that came to England. 

They are standing or sitting still.

The boat is moving,

taking them from America to England.

They are standing or sitting still.

Their world is changing:

no more America

London, here they come.

My Dad is one of those three children

standing still for the photo.

He is changing.

In a few days time

he will land in England

and that's where he'll live

from then on.

I'm not American.

My Mum and the Flower

My Mum and the Flower

My dad said that my mum 

had some secrets.

‘One time’, he said, 

‘when she was a girl

at school they said that

it was ‘Harvest Festival’

and all the children had to bring in flowers.

Well, remember,’ said my dad,

‘your mother’s family were very poor,

they couldn’t just go out and buy flowers

and they didn’t have a garden

they just had a back yard.

Now all this made your mother 

ashamed. 

She didn’t want to be the kid in the class

who didn’t bring in flowers.

And she wanted to fit in.

So, do you know what she did?

She slipped into the Park,

 the one just in front of the 

Bethnal Green Museum

and she nicked a flower.

Now, don’t tell her I’ve told 

you that. 

She still feels bad about it

but you see she was so worried

about going to school and

being the only one who didn’t have 

a flower that she was desperate.

So she nicked one from the park.

Now don’t tell her I told

you about it.

And don’t ever tell anyone, will you?’

‘No.’

Oh I have. 

My Dad and his Uncle Sam


When my dad was a boy

he shared a bedroom with

his Uncle Sam.

He didn’t talk to his Uncle Sam


‘Why not?’ I said.

‘Because I brought a hat home

from the market

and he turned it inside out and

back again.’

‘And you didn’t talk to him

because of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ever? You didn’t ever talk to him

ever again?’

‘That’s it’




‘So when you went to bed

how did you decide who would

switch out the light.’

‘We didn’t have a light.

There was no electricity in the

bedrooms. There were candles.’

‘So who decided who would

blow out the candles?’

‘We had one each.’




‘Just as well.

Otherwise you would have had

to talk to him.’

Mr Mensh Books

Mr Mensh Books


I’m not sure that the estate of Roger

Hargreaves would give permission but

sometimes I lie in bed imagining a

special series to go with the Mr Men

books...they’re Mr Mensh books,

a tribute to my parents and

all the words they called me.

Some people are going to meet for a meal. 

Let's say it's a meeting. 

At Mr Kvell's place.

Remember him. He comes later:

Now the people:


Mr Shlump - the guy who turns up for the meal

in clothes he’s been wearing all week.

Mr Shloch- the guy who turns up for the meal

in clothes he’s been wearing all year

Mr Mommser - the guy who you didn't want

to turn up for the meal

Mr Shpilkes - the guy who’s worried about what's going to happen at the meal

Mr Tsirres - the guy who’s got reason to be

worried about what's going to happen at the meal because he’s in

trouble

Mr Shtuch - the guy who’s also in trouble but

it’s a bit more trouble

Mr Dr’erd _ the guy who’s in even more trouble

Mr Mittandring - the guy who’s in even more trouble

Mr Dreck - the guy who’s crap

Mr Nebbish - the guy who looks like he’s turned everything

into crap

Mr Varkakhte - the guy who looks like he’s crapped himself

Mr Bubkes - the guy who talks rubbish about the meal

Mr Pisher - the guy who is rubbish

Mr Bubbele - the guy who is so much of a mummy’s boy he’s a grandmother’s boy

Mr Shmerel - the guy who’s a bit of a fool

Mr Shlemiel - the other guy who’s a bit of a fool

Mr Shmendrik - and another guy who’s a bit of fool

Mr Kvell - the guy who’s very proud of his son for having made the 

soup

Mr Kvetsh - the guy who moans about the soup

Mr Chup - the guy who slurps the soup

Mr Shmalts - the guy who’s dribbled the soup down his front

Mr Shnorrer -the guy who wants your soup

Mr Chap - the guy who grabs your soup

Mr Chazze - the guy who can’t stop having soup

Mr Shmooze - the guy who sweet-talks you to get your soup off 

you

Mr Zhuzh - the guy who says he could turn a lousy soup into a good soup

Mr Knakke - the guy who thinks he knows more than Kvell's son 

about how to make soup

Mr Meshugge - the guy who talks nonsense about the soup

Mr Kibbitz - the guy who wants to have a chat while you’re having 

the soup

Mr Yachner - the guy who can’t stop talking about the soup

Mr Gantse Magilla - the guy who talks about every single thing 

that’s in the soup

Mr Gubba - the guy who tells you how to make the soup

Mr Ganuf - the guy who nicks your soup

Mr Shtum - the guy who keeps quiet about the guy who nicked your soup

Mr Kishkes - the guy who says that soup gives him a belly-ache

Mr Plotz - the guy who has his soup and laughs

Mr Greps - the guy who has his soup and burps

Mr Fotz -the guy who has his soup and farts

Mr Bocher - the guy who’s reading a book about the soup.

Mr Gantse Macher - the guy who owns the soup factory

1955: The Lone Ranger

When I was a kid, we had no TV.

Just imagine that: no TV! How did

we live?! Then one day the TV arrived.

Two guys brought it in. It was huge.

Like a wardrobe. It was bigger than them.

They struggled to get it in through the door.

It was massive. Only the screen...was tiny.

It was about as big as a slice of bread.

And it wasn’t colour. Do you know what it was?

No, not black and white. Black and white

hadn’t been invented yet. It was grey and grey.

And you couldn’t really see what was going

on. All that happened was there were smudges

moving across the screen. Some of them were

light grey. Some of them dark grey.

My favourite programme was ‘The Lone Ranger’.

There was a tune that went with it,

‘William Tell’s Overture’. We all learned how to

sing it, going:

daddle an, daddle an

daddle an dan-dan,

daddle an, daddle an

daddle an dan-dan

daddle an daddle an

daddle an dan-dan

daddle aaaaaaan, dan-dan!

The Lone Ranger had a mask.

You could never see his eyes.

We used to make a mask with our fingers

so that we looked like the Lone Ranger.

At the beginning of every programme

a voice said: “A fiery horse with the speed

of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Yo Silverrrrrr!’

And a light grey smudge - that was the Lone

Ranger’s white horse - went across the screen.

We all learned how to say: “A fiery horse with the speed

of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty HiYo Silverrrrrr!’

Then in the programme, the Lone Ranger did all

sorts of good deeds but at the very end he would disappear. No sign of him anywhere.

There would just be two people standing there

and one would turn to the other and say,

‘Who was that man?’

And the other would say, ‘That was.....the Lone

Ranger.’

We all learned how to say that. We used to say it to

each other in school.

‘Who was that man?’

‘That was...the Lone Ranger!’

And then the music would come back:

daddle an, daddle an

daddle an dan-dan,

daddle an, daddle an

daddle an dan-dan

daddle an daddle an

daddle an dan-dan

daddle aaaaaaan, dan-dan!


That’s how exciting things were in 1955.

Fossils and my brother

My brother works at the Natural


History Museum in London. He’s a


fossil. No - sorry, I got that wrong.


He looks after the fossils.


Looks after the fossils? What sort


of job is that? I mean it can’t be very


hard, can it? They’re just stones.


They don’t jump at you, like if you


were looking after a tiger. Imagine


that, you come down in the morning,


there’s a tiger. You go up to it, and you


say, ‘What do you want to eat?’ And the


tiger says, ‘YOU!’. That would be hard.


No, my brother looks after fossils. I went


into his room forty years ago and there


were four fossils sitting on a shelf. I said,


‘What are you doing Brian?’ He said,


‘Looking after the fossils.’ I said, ‘They’re not


going to jump off the shelf, are they?’


He said, ‘You never know. That’s what


I’m here for.’ I went to his office the other


day and the four fossils were still there.


On the shelf. I said, ‘Brian, the fossils


are still there!’ And he said, ‘Yes.That’s


because I was here.’


If ever you find a fossil and


you don’t know what it’s called,


you might pick it up and


shout at it: ‘Dave!’ ‘Melanie!’


and it doesn’t answer - then


you can take it to the Natural


History Museum in London and


you go up to one of the people in uniform


and tell them you’ve got a fossil


and you don’t know its name:


‘Dave!’, ‘Melanie!’ - see it doesn’t


answer, and they send for my brother,


Doctor Brian Rosen. He lives in a cave


underneath the museum, he wears


a leopard skin bikini and he’s got a


great big club, and he comes up


from down below the museum, you’ll


hear him coming, ‘Ooof!!! Oooof!!!’


and suddenly the big double doors open


in front of you and there he is in his


leopard skin bikini and you can go up


to him and say, ‘Hello. I’ve found a fossil,


and I don’t know its name: Dave!


Melanie! See it doesn’t answer,’ and my


brother takes a magnifying glass out of


his leopard skin bikini bottom and it’s


one of those little ones, and he puts it


in his eye and it makes his eye go really


big and he studies it very hard and then


he says,’No, that’s not Dave. It’s not


Melanie, that is an ammonite.’ Or maybe


he’ll say, ‘That is a belemnite.’ and you’ll


be very pleased. And if it’s a really, really


good one, do you know what he does


then? He nicks it off you. Because if it’s


really, really good, it doesn’t belong to


you, it doesn’t belong to him. Do you


know who it belongs to? The Queen.


And if you go to Buckingham Palace


you’ll see that it’s stuffed full of old

fossils.

"Who do you think I was talking about?" - Corbyn and the latest.

There's an old Jewish joke that goes something like this: It's Tsarist Russia, and a young Jewish guy is running down the street shouting, 'Death to the tyrant!' The police pick him up and back at the police HQ they pin him up against the wall and say, 'Who were you talking about when you were out there in the street?' And the Jewish guy says, 'Who do you think I was talking about?'

Something yesterday and today is going on like that with Corbyn. He called some people who had 'berated' the Palestinian ambassador 'Zionists' and said they hadn't 'got' what Corbyn called 'English irony'. Most anti-Corbyn people seem to 'know' that Corbyn was 'really' talking about e.g. 'Jews', 'the Jews', 'all Jews', or even - from one prominent opponent of antisemitism 'an immigrant group'. I may talk of myself as being part of a minority, or that most Jews in UK have migrant forbears, but are we an 'immigrant group'? Perhaps. But either way, how do all these people know who the people berating Corbyn were. Where were they from ? How do they know they were Jewish and therefore 'signifying' 'all Jews'? How do they know that Corbyn knew they were Jewish and was deliberately signifying 'all Jews'? As we know, many non-Jews self-identify as 'Zionists' including Tommy Robinson, leader of the rapidly morphing 'nationalist' groups attacking Muslims.


Oh but hang on, the antisemitic trope is 'saying that Zionists are Jews'. So who's saying that Zionists are Jews here? Corbyn ? Or those accusing him of saying that? He says that when he said 'Zionists' he meant Zionists and in particular those Zionists who 'berated' the ambassador

If I've got any objection to what Corbyn said is that he culturally appropriated Palestinian humour and called it 'English' Even more ironically the ambassador's gag was about Israeli Jews having God on their side. Now who sang a song about that? Oh yes, Bob Dylan. I expect either Dylan or the Palestinians to be on to Corbyn about that. (irony alert).

For Bookmarks (after Britain First incursion)

It looks like we’ve got

yet another case

of guys out rooting

for the master race

invading a shop,

being a bit of a pain

trying to make ‘Britain

Great Again’

by pulling books off shelves,

refusing to leave:

‘what a tangled web’

these klutzes weave:

like bumbling old Boris,

what a decent bloke,

just happens to make

a passing joke

while kindly Steve Bannon

speaks for rationalism,

has a platform on Newsnight

for his Economic Nationalism.

Nothing to worry about

we just have to keep calm

It’s ‘Judeo-Christian war

‘gainst militant Islam.’

If you think that’s just

a load of old testicles,

Netanyahu said it

to the Evangelicals.




So what looks like

just a few books on the floor

is part of a picture that’s

telling us much more.

Anytime we think

they’re just having a laugh

let’s remember the joker

with the toothbrush moustache.

Many thought then

he was just a bit of a pain

who said he’d make

his country great again,

who many thought then

was just a funny face

not a man who’d convince

you were the master race.




We’ve been here before

with Griffin and Tyndall

who did their very best

to light and kindle

the fire of fascism

in every street

but last time they tried

they faced defeat.




Come summer, come winter

wind, frost or rain,

we stopped them before

we’ll stop them again.

The Wart and Toe-nail

In 1961 a guy called Wilkinson stamped

on the big toe of my right foot and a few

months later the nail fell off. It had

turned several colours before the day it

worked itself loose: red,purple, yellow,

green. Sometimes combinations of all

four, like a sunset over a city, infused

with sulphur. I kept the nail. It was in the

same cardboard box as the name-tags my

mother sewed into my PE kit, the medal I

won for winning the Metropolitan Walking

Club’s Novices Race, my father’s ‘US ARMY’

brass brooches, the drawer from an East

German wooden money box, and a stone

from the bed of the River Monow. I took

the box with me to university and when I

moved into digs run by a Polish woman and her

cab-driving husband, it was there alongside

my Anglo-Saxon poetry books. By then it

was beginning to twist and had turned brown,

and on the surface that had been next to the

quick of my toe, there was a curd-like residue

of something organic. This may seem unrelated

but on my right hand I had several large warts.

They had appeared there as a result of holding

the hand of someone who had several large

warts on her left hand. I shared the digs with

John who liked to probe around in the cardboard

box and though he liked the drawer to the East

German money box and my father’s US ARMY

brooches, he was sickened by the toe-nail. He

was critical of some side-whiskers that had

cropped up on my face and not at all keen on

the warts. He was highly skilled at doing the voices

of a sergeant-major reciting Jabberwocky, a

professor of Latin who translated and

recited the poems of Catullus that focussed

on fellatio, and Geordie women in a sausage

factory who had pulled down his trousers and

smothered his stotts in the jelly that was used

to make sausage skins. He was so good

at these voices that there were times he would

be doing the performance along with many others

long past midnight, at the very moment when I had

to be writing my essay on Anglo-Saxon poetry.

John wouldn’t leave my room and we

would hear the cab-driving landlord coming

home and his Polish wife greeting him like he

was liberating her homeland - a kind woman,

though not keen on the fact that when we washed

up in the bathroom sink (not a frequent event and

there were no other sinks to wash up in), bits of

spaghetti bolognese lingered in the plug hole.

There was nothing I could say, either funny or

hostile that would move John to leave. One night

I put the toe-nail next to the largest wart - one that

looked like the cross-section of a cauliflower on the

fleshy part of my middle finger - and walked

towards him. The doubling up of the nail and

the wart was so unpleasant for him that he left

immediately. Last time I saw John, he was living

on his own in a ground floor flat on the Marylebone

Road.

Details

A man read my book about me and wrote

‘Sometimes there’s too much detail in this

book and sometimes there isn’t enough’ and

I thought about the things in my life that are

very detailed, which I had mentioned like the

fact that I liked the sound of a blues harmonica,

being played over an electric guitar, so

maybe that was too detailed for him, or was it

the fact that a man called Jimmy looked out

at the lights in Hatch End station when he was

talking to me? That was also very detailed. And

then I thought about things where it wasn’t

detailed. Would that have been that I hadn’t

mentioned the colour of my brother’s hair? Or

was it that I didn’t describe the windows in my

secondary school? The more I thought about

these things, the more confused and worried

I got, thinking of the man reading my book,

saying as each page went by, ‘Too detalied!’

and ‘Not detailed enough!’ and I imagined him

with a lover and the lover saying, ‘Really? Oh

dear. How annoying. That is poor’ because

lovers can be very supportive like that, particularly

when you’re reading a book, though if you had

just had a row, you can imagine that a lover

might just act contrary and whenever he said,

‘Oh god, not enough detail’ the lover said, ‘Well

isn’t that you? Never satisfied with what you’ve

got. What do you want him to tell you, where he

was on the night of April 3rd 1954?’

And he would say, ‘Why don’t you respect my

judgement on things? Whenever I express an

opinion you jump down my throat like I don’t

know what I’m talking about...’ and it could all

get quite nasty very quickly.

History Exam

I was doing a history exam on the Tudors and

Stuarts and there was a question on whether

the Justices of the Peace in Tudor times were

central to how the Tudors maintained power

and while I was busy answering it, I glanced

down at the exam paper and there was a

question I hadn’t noticed. It said, ‘If you had

to choose between three different types of

toothpaste what would be the criteria you would

use to determine your choice?’ Then it had

some qualities of toothpaste and you had to

tick in whichever boxes mattered to you the

most. There was: ‘the toothpaste claimed that

it would whiten your teeth’; ‘the toothpaste

claimed to freshen up your mouth’; ‘the

toothpaste would help your gums stay healthy’

and ‘the toothpaste would help you see in the

dark’. I ticked the one about the toothpaste

helping me see in the dark because I thought

that would be very useful, particularly some time

when I was in the bathroom and the light’s not

working, not even in the little glass wall cabinet

where I keep my nail scissors and indigestion

pills, not that I’ve had indigestion for some years

now.

Broom

I went to this shop that sold household goods

and I asked for a broom and the man said, we

don’t sell brooms on Thursdays. Oh, I said,

that’s a shame. He said, yes it is, would you

like a bin? No, I said, I’ve got a bin. He said,

you could have another bin, everyone needs

bins. That’s true, I said, everyone does need

a bin. So much rubbish, he said. Yes, I said,

there is a lot of rubbish. And a lot of dirt. Yes,

he said, there is a lot of dirt and...that’s why

I need a broom, I said. Yes, he said, I bet you do;

with so much dirt around everyone needs a

broom. Yes, I said. Yes, he said. I thought

I had made some progress so I said, And

there really is no chance of buying...No, he

said, not on Thursdays. And I said, was there

a special reason why he didn’t sell brooms on

Thursdays and he said, no. He just didn’t

want to sell brooms every day. So I said,

could he move his non-broom selling day

to another day this week, like Friday or Saturday

and he said, Friday is the day that he doesn’t

sell bins and Saturday is the day he doesn’t

sell tea towels and he didn’t want to mess up

the timetable. I said, no, you don’t want to mess

that up, you’d be all over the place...what about

Sunday? I said. What about Sunday? he said.

You know, I said, what don’t you sell on Sunday?

What are you talking about? he said, why

would I not sell things on a Sunday? And I

said, no reason, no reason. And he said, so

you don’t want the bin?And I said, no, I don’t

want the bin.

Census

The census man came round and said

what are you? I said that I don’t fill in that

bit because it’s always used against people.

He said that’s not true, he said he always

filled it in and look at me. I looked at him.

He was black. I said, no I don’t fill it in and

he said that he would fill it in for me. I said,

you can’t do that because that would be

you defining me. He said that he could do

that, if the occupier would not say what he

was. I said, what will you put me down as?

He said he would put white. I said, well actually

I’m Jewish. He said that comes under religion. I

said I know it’s a religion. He said I can put you

down for that under religion, then? I said, well

you can’t actually because I’m not a religious

Jew. He said, then you’re not Jewish. I said,

I am and he said, I don’t have Jewish under

this other part of the form. No, I said, that’s

because someone somewhere decided that

I can’t call myself Jewish on the form. Well,

he said, I’m afraid that’s nothing to do with me.

No, I know it’s nothing to do with you, it’s do with

people who don’t want me to be counted as Jewish.

He said, Mmm. I said, have you got Irish there?

He said, Yes, are you Irish? I said, No, I’m not

Irish but some people who are not Irish say they are

Irish even though they’re not born in Ireland,

it’s a bit like that with me, only I’m not Irish. Oh, he

said, where were you born, because we could put

that. I said I was born in Harrow, I don’t think that’s a country.

No, he said, it’s not, but I thought if you were

born in Israel I could say you were Israeli. Yes,

I said, but I wasn’t born in Israel. No, he said,

you were born in Harrow. That’s it, I said, Harrow.

Camembert Factory

I once went to a Camembert factory.

There were hundreds and hundreds

of Camemberts. What they did was

pour milk into Camembert

shaped collars. Then, as we walked

along, we walked from Camemberts

that had just been poured, to

Camemberts that had been there for

one week, two weeks, three weeks,

four weeks, on and on until it got

to ripe Camemberts. I was 13 and I

had never eaten Camembert. I thought

that they smelled of old socks and

there was no point in going round a

factory that was making old socks

out of milk but I was with my friends

Mart and Chris; and Mart said that he

loved Camembert and each time we

stopped and the man said, ‘une

semaine’ (one week), or ‘deux semaines’

(two weeks) and so on, he gave Mart

some to taste and each time, Mart said,

‘Mmmm, this is great,’ and you could

see bits of the soft smelly milky stuff

on his lips and inside his mouth and I started

to feel sick but on we went, ‘trois semaines’

‘Mmmm’, ‘Quatre semaines’ ‘Mmmm’

and it got smellier and smellier and the bits

of milky stuff on Mart’s lips were getting stickier

and stickier and Mart licked his lips and you could

see his tongue was covered in the thicker slimier

stuff so that when it flicked out of his mouth

it put more creamy lumps on to his lips, though

it didn’t really flick as it was so coated.

Back

I went to the doctors and said I’ve

got a bad hip, my hip hurts. He said,

stand up. I stood up. He said, take

off your shirt. I took off my shirt. He

said, turn round. I turned round. It all

went quiet. I looked over my shoulder

at him. He was looking at my back.

It’s bent, he said, it’s curved. Is it? I

said. Yes, it’s what we call scoliosis.

Right, I said, who did that? You did,

he said. I did? I said, when? I don’t

remember curving my back. No, he

said, I don’t suppose you do. What

did I do, I said, did I lean? Possibly, he

said. But from what you’re saying, one bit

of me leant one way and another bit

of me leant the other? Yes, he said,

So have I got to lean back now? I said.

Yes, he said. How will I know when

I’ve leaned back enough? I mean, I don’t

want to do a whole lot of leaning back

and discover that I’ve leaned too far,

otherwise I’ll have to lean back again

the way I came from, I said. Good point,

he said, you don’t want to lean too

much. Is that it then? I said. Do you

smoke? he said. No, I said. That’s good,

he said.

Dog

One guy inherited a tiny plot of land and

there was an old vintage threshing machine

sitting on it, so he broke it up and burned it

and for a while he brought his kids over to

the plot and had picnics there but he seemed

to have got bored with that until one day

he came with a dog and put the dog on a lead,

tied the lead to a post and he leaves the dog

there now, all day and all night. Of course he

comes to feed it once a day but that’s it,

and the dog is quiet some of the time but most

of the time it barks. It barks at birds and there

are magpies and pigeons and turtle doves and

buzzards coming over, it barks when it hears

other dogs which is quite a lot of the time

because a lot of the people around have dogs,

and it barks when it thinks there are mice or

rats or voles or snakes or wild boar or badgers

or foxes or deer and plenty of them are coming

through and it barks at owls and there are the

screech owls and the tawny owls and the little

owls all around and it barks if you make a noise

like ‘Yeah, get in!’ if you score a goal, and it barks

at motor bikes and it barks at fire engines and

ambulances and it barks at flies and wasps and

hornets and it barks at spiders and butterflies

and moths and bats and beetles and caterpillars

and ants and it barks when it hears a walnut or

hazelnut or an apple or a pear or a plum or an

acorn falling off a tree and it barks when it hears

itself barking.

Flies

I know flies. I’ve camped with them.

I heard how they eat. A lot of them land

on things and put down their proboscis that

sits at the front of their heads. Some saliva

comes out and this starts to digest whatever

they’re sitting on. Then they suck the stuff

that they’ve started to digest back up their

proboscis. You can feel that saliva moment

just after they land on your skin, slightly moist,

slightly cool. Then there are the biting ones, that we

call horse flies. Their probosces are like daggers.

They jab that into your skin and suck the

blood up through the dagger. I thought I had

all this figured. The flies that do the saliva thing

are the ones we call house flies and the

bigger house fly type are blue bottles. And there are

some shiny green ones that love horse shit.

And the horse flies come in medium and large,

the medium ones are nippy and when they

land on you, you can hardly feel it, until they

stab you with the dagger. The large ones are

like flying caterpillars, fleshy and angry, and

a bite from them is like being attacked by a

fork-prong. Once I saw one by a swimming

pool waiting to get my shoulder. I grabbed a

flip-flop and threw it and it hit it, first time. End

of horse-fly. I’ve tried a hundred times since

and never got one. That’s it, I thought: house

flies and horse-flies. Then one day we were

sitting at a table and I felt something bite me

and I looked down and all I saw was a fly. But

that kind of fly doesn’t bite. A house fly. Then

there was another. These little house flies

were biting me. I got one and when it fell off,

there was a little drop of blood on my leg. I

picked it up and looked closely: its proboscis

didn’t have the little spongey saliva bit on the

end. It was pointed like a tiny needle. It was a

tiny horse fly disguised as a house fly. It didn’t

say it was a horse fly. It just turned up acting

like it was any old house fly but then did the

horse fly thing in my leg. Not just one of them.

There were hundreds of them. And under the table.

Always under the table.

Hornet

Every night at 10.19 a hornet arrives and

makes a great effort to get into the house.

It hunts for crevices but none seem to be

wide enough or deep enough and it withdraws,

and buzzes across another stretch till it finds

another potential hole to disappear into.

Sometimes it’s joined by one, two or even

three others and the air is full of their

deep droning. If I’ve left the door open

it will fly straight in and start hunting in the

kitchen. We shut the shutters at 10 o’clock

and that sorts it, though one time, our

daughter came into our bedroom at about

five in the morning and said that there was

a hornet in her room. She said that it had

flown above her head as she lay in bed,

flying from the skylight to the window. It must

have been there all night. The man next door

said that he was once stung by a hornet while

he was picking courgettes and his arm swelled

up like a balloon. The man who cuts grass and

hedges says he’s been stung by hornets and

it’s no big deal. I ask him what he puts on it

and he says nothing because it happens when

he’s out cutting grass and hedges. I told him

that he has to be careful not to annoy a hornet.

Hornets that are annoyed release a scent that

tells the other hornets to come straightaway 

and sting whatever it is that is annoying the one 

who’s released the scent. We scream when we see

them arrive at 10.19 and we hide. Or we ram

the doors and windows shut and peer at them

through the glass. The hornets see us and

come over to the glass and crawl in front of us

just a few millimetres from our noses. Once I

was sitting in the kitchen with the door open

behind me and the hornet flew in at 10.19 and

landed in my hair. It decided of its own accord

that there wasn’t a deep enough crevice there.

Another time I said that I would shut the shutters

to keep the hornets out but then just as I shut

the shutters I found that I had trapped myself

between the shutters and the outside doors

with the hornet. There wasn’t any room for me

to run away from it and it tried my hair. Once

again, my hair turned out to be not good

enough for it and it flew off into the night when

I got the shutters open. I imagined myself

opening my mouth and the hornet flying in

and deciding that at last it had found the crevice

it’s been looking for all summer, only for me

to close my mouth around it, finishing it off

with one crunch.

Glasses

I couldn’t find my glasses and went to bed

uneasy that I had left them in the cafe. It

seemed likely that I would spend at least

some of the next day, unable to read. In the

morning I discovered that I had left them out

on the table where I had sat reading the paper.

Several ants had climbed over them in the

night and when one hurried across the right

hand lens it caught the attention of the others

who thought it had suddenly grown and they

were surprised if not slightly scared. A fox

wandering past was just as surprised and

licked it off the glass but was then disappointed

that it turned out to be standard size.

The Pig-man

The tide of war retreated across the suburbs

leaving gas-masks in attics, a man with one leg

on the bench by the library, an air-raid shelter

in the park which one day, the kid with the

most nerve took us down and where we found

beds and broken bottles and imagined a life of

riley back in the days just before we were born.

After all we could go to the Empire restaurant

that had survived the war too, along with talk of

doodlebugs and uncles who disappeared in

places I couldn’t pronounce. The internet has

unearthed other leavings: piggeries. Sited, they

said on scrubland or in unused corners of parks

and I remembered how, amongst the nettles and

brambles, behind a fence made of old doors and

prams, in the air-raid shelter park, a red-faced man

in a dung-coloured coat, stood by a corrugated

sty, in the midst of stink. We called him the pig-man

and after our explorations in the dumps and streams

just as the lamplighter on his bike cycled round

pulling the lever with his pole and hook, so that

the gas mantles fizzed and lit, we hiked through

the nettles to get a look at the pig-man. We

cackled at him, as if he had no place in our park,

and this would rouse him to tell us to clear off out of it,

which made us cackle all the more till we hacked

our way out and left him with his pig, never

knowing that he had been part of what our

teachers called the war-effort.

How children speak. Do they?

There are a lot of misleading statements doing the rounds in connection with children's spoken language. First of all, we need to remember that no one speaks in what the Secretary of State for Education calls 'full sentences'. When we speak, we hesitate, interrupt ourselves (or each other), we speak over each other, we don't 'recapitulate' what the other person says and reply with short phrases or single words, we do 'ellipses' - that is we leave out a good deal because we understand each other from context, gesture, tone of voice, we use a lot of pronouns (it, she, he, we, I, etc and the words that go with the pronouns my, hers, his etc), we 'fade' (that is we don't finish a whole thought because it's clear from context or we change our mind half way) and so on.


Second, we should have a solid base line on any statements made by anyone talking about what children's language can or can't do. We should ask every time, 'what transcripts of children's speech are you using, that you base these judgements on?' and 'under what conditions did you make these recordings?' - follow-ups: 'were adults asking questions?' or 'were the children on their own?' 'Were they discussing or planning something together? were they engaged in imaginative or dramatic play?'

It is easy to think, as an adult, that we know how children speak based entirely on our own interactions with children and yet if you look closely and analyse how children speak when they are on their own, without adults present, discussing something that they need or want to discuss, and/or engaged in imaginative play, you see a very different picture. (We do this on our MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, when we do the term we call 'Children's Literature in Action. We compare children's responses to books when they are being asked questions by a researcher/teacher, and when we leave children to discuss a book, sometimes with 'trigger' questions on a bit of paper, or sometimes 'freely'.)

Please if you hear anyone (including me!) make any statements about how children speak, please ask the questions above.

In my experience, very, very few people do base their judgements on this kind of work. Least of all secretaries of state for education.