Reel To Reel

Music At Night, Radio 4, May 1st 1968

(A harpsichord recital by my father, Alan Cuckston)

From a cupboard full of memories I did not share,

A store of music hidden on a reel,

Not catalogued or stored with any care,

Some minutes of your life I can reveal.

Hearing what they speak and yet conceal

The brilliance, the intellect, the flair,

Beside a tension none must sense you feel,

From a cupboard full of memories I did not share,

Some damaged now, beyond repair?

An obsolete machine now turns the wheel

And winds the tape on to its empty pair,

A store of music hidden on a reel,

Your playing now the means deep grief to heal,

Yet no intention of that kind is there,

Just pure musicianship expressed via brass and steel

Not catalogued or stored with any care,

But yet retained and so I dare

To dull my pain as by the heap I kneel

And bag up tapes to take to where

Some minutes of your life I can reveal

And sense the intellectual appeal

So lacking in this present day, so rare

When all is ‘relative’ and there’s a zeal

For dumbing down. I’ll send you out once more upon the air,

From a cupboard full of memories.

I cannot stop

 

I cannot pause to think at all

Lest I should weep and break the spell

And so I stretch to paint the wall 

And stoop to dip my brush again

And reach and daub and slap and then

Repeat the process, never stop,

Use a pole to reach the top,

Climb the ladder to the ceiling

Fill the cracks to numb the feeling,

Decorating can be healing.

Dressing For The Collection Of A Teapoy

How to dress when taking collection

Of an item from an auction,

Is not a matter on which much reflection

Is usually required,

But one yearns to be admired,

When taking possession of a teapoy.

One wishes to convey the air

Of a connoisseur

Who knows that next season teapoys will be de rigueur.

So one must spend time deciding what to wear,

And yet take great care

Not to give the impression 

One has a mad obsession.

Tweed is essential as a foundation,

And various shades of green,

Should be given consideration,

For shoes, a sensible brown brogue

Think of our late queen,

Rather than something from Vogue.

For you wish to imply

The object you’ve come to collect

Will be the star of next month's magazine,

And yet,

Somewhere you know and regret,

That the publication in question

Is the Antiques Trade Gazette. 

Britannia With Lactating Tits

 

Britannia with her sheltering wings

And constantly lactating tits,

Giving safety, food and things,

To all the world, not just the Brits,

She nurses them through all their ills

And cannot let them fly the nest,

Maternal duties she fulfils,

To her own darlings and the rest,

She doles out cake and sweets and jelly

As if Camilla Batmanghelidgh

Yes England must hug every hoody,

For England is a goody goody,

And needs to show the world the way,

For all the world has gone astray.

And England cannot be the Daddy,

Not the strict and hard papa,

For every man’s some kind of baddy,

Cares naught for what his children are,

Nor what they do, or think or feel,

Nor if they choose to skip a meal,

He cares not where his children play

Hopes they’ll grow up and go away. 

No, England has to be the mummy

Grow the whole world in her tummy,

Britannia with lactating tits,

Loving all the world to bits. 

Soft bigotry of low expectations

It's billowed by hot summer air,

And rides on currents of despair,

Then floats as feather to the ground

And lands as gently, with no sound,

Pretends to soothe not suffocate,

And wants the world to ‘tolerate’.

Comes rolling in towards the finish,

Gently eager to diminish,

Keeping expectations low,

It smothers, lets no talent grow,

Softly, kindly, no harm meaning,

Sweetly, blindly still demeaning.

On Prosthetic Legs And Opinions

The two most stupid examples from the clamping down on free speech in England in recent times have been the Christian woman arrested for praying silently in her head and the protestor arrested for waving his prosthetic leg at the police while airing opinions he had ‘no right whatsoever’ to hold. 

To shake and point prosthetic legs it seems,

Is just as dangerous as posting memes,

Don’t pray, don’t preach, don’t utter lines from hymns,

For doing so while holding certain views,

You did not first acquire from mainstream news,

Makes you a criminal so very vile,

You must be sent to gaol for a while.

When Christians and uni-dexters stand

On their three legs together, they’ll be banned,

Expressing sentiments we disapprove,

Refusing to back down and not to move,

Makes psychopaths like us feel very scared.

Opinions and artificial limbs,

Must not be held together, never aired.

Shopping For Logical Fallacies

 

I went shopping for logical fallacies

Since I felt I should own some myself,

And as I love castles and palaces

‘The Appeal to Tradition’ was first off the shelf,

And though I was almost spoilt for choice,

I decided to give ‘Bring back hanging’ a voice,

And in truth I can’t see any reason,

We shouldn’t, for murder and treason. 

But some people argued and disagreed,

And I felt a great, over powering need,

To sneer in contempt at such people as these,

So I bought an ‘Ad Hominem’ package to please

All those sensible people who feel as I do,

For we are the many and they are the few. 

Though I bought an ‘Appeal to Authority’

To have up my sleeve, just in case,

Although my side are in the majority,

We cannot afford to lose face

So I’ll back up my claim,

For this is not a game,

It is seeking to prove what is true. 

And all those who say that hanging is wrong,

Are potentially terrorist killers, I said,

If you listen you’ll hear the true words of their song,

Saving their own sort is really their thing,

It’s not that they don’t want the innocent dead,

They’re just psychos themselves, who do not wish to swing.

They may look sopping wet with their hearts all a bleeding

And speak of ‘good killers’ such as women ill used,

By violent husbands who raped and abused,

But ignore them, such tactics are very misleading,

I bought one myself, it is called ‘Special Pleading’.

So I’ll say it again we must take up the rope

Else the poor and the needy and those without hope,

Will move on from acts of petty crime,

To more heinous acts, with the passage of time,

Yet now I don’t want this idea to be right.

And feel rather guilty and can’t really cope

For when the assistant was out of sight,

I stashed in my rucksack a ‘Slippery Slope’.