Welcome to my dumping ground
Any old curio might end up here
Enjoy furtling in the dump
Short and sweet for Father's Day.
My dad has always been great fun and much more beside, but it's the fun that I tend to remember.
What is a Dad?
'What is a dad?' they ask of me.
'It's clear.' I say, 'It's plain to see.'
A father's role is having fun.
All of the rest, is done by mum.
My dad had a hip replacement. This is the rhyme I sent to celebrate. A bit of nonsense to raise a smile., hopefully.
Hip Hip Hooray for the Hip
A wonderful thing is the hip
You need one to whip or to chip
And one is quite handy
If you’re feeling randy
When cruising on board a big ship
No hip and a hippo is po
Hippy hippo, py po, you know.
And out in the pampas
There’s no hippocampus
For hippos to learn and to grow
So it’s hip hip hooray for the hip
You can run, you can dance, you can skip
Life will be fab man
Now you can can-can
But I’d lay off strip tease for a bit.
Maybe hate is not the opposite of love. Both love and hate require passion, fire and obsession. Maybe the opposite of love is something else. This is a poem about screwing up and not seeing the consequences. It is not taken from personal experience.
The opposite of love is not hate
When she calls you a bastard and points to the stain
Then flushes your love letters down the drain
And pummels your chest and screams she’s a whore
And you’re dying inside and you hope above all
The opposite of love is not hate
She smashes the picture of when you were wed
And snatches the suitcase from under the bed
She trashes the bedroom, to grab what she needs
And you beg her to stay, then pray as she leaves
The opposite of love is not hate
She bashes the baggage to fit on the seat
And scatters your garbage all over the street
She sticks up two fingers, and slams the car door
But it can’t be the end, you’ve heard, you are sure,
The opposite of love is not hate
She quietly returns to collect her fair share
No picture, no keepsake, She just doesn’t care
There’s no fire, no passion no anger, no fight
Then you know it is true, you know they were right
The opposite of love is not hate
The opposite of love… is indifference
An extract from The Boy and the Briefcase and the Moose
Author Andrew Batty. Copyright 2021 all rights reserved.
Winston was:
A kid
A big kid
A big black kid
And he was strong
Maybe the strongest
No one really knew. He
Never fought
Never punched
Never got punched.
It’s not that he was chicken
It’s not that we were scared
It’s just
No one had a gripe
No one had a grudge
No one had a good reason to punch Winston.
It would be fair to say he was not an obvious target.
He wasn’t: girly, stupid or weak; nervous, timid or shy; creepy, slimy or strange.
He didn’t have: pizza pox, pig smell or a twitch; weird hair, a funny voice or annoying habits.
He was sound.
He was normal.
He was not an obvious target.
But then again, neither was I, or so I thought, but I still got into scraps, I still got beaten up.
I annoyed.
I needled.
I pushed.
Eventually, someone’s gonna push back.
Winston wasn’t like that.
He didn’t wind people up.
He got on with everyone.
He always said the right thing.
If someone pushed in front of him in the dinner queue, he wouldn’t say, ‘Get back, d**khead,’ like I did. He would say something clever. The kid would happily go back to his place in the line, and everything would be okay. No threats, no aggravation, no fight after school. No being beaten to a pulp before the RE teacher found me and broke it up. I wasn’t wary enough.
Not that anyone would have dared to push in front of Winston. He was after all a big, strong kid. Big, strong and black, although I don’t think being black made you more, or less, likely to get into a scrap at my school. I never noticed any aggravation between black and white. We seemed to get along just fine. There was just one incident I remember, one incident everyone remembered.
The school had its own black role model. Janet Johnson was head girl. She was tall and athletic with a smile full of teeth. I guess she was good-looking, maybe great-looking, but to a fourth year like me, she was just scary. Occasionally we’d see her, on her own, training on the playing field. One day she’d be in the Olympics, but at school she was really known for being a black belt in karate. Once, when we were queuing for dinner, Janet came down the corridor. ‘Hey,’ a kid shouted out, ‘he called you a “black b*****d”.’ She put her hand on the back of the offender’s neck and he crumpled to the floor, crying like a baby. I never heard anybody call anyone anything after that.
For me, Winston was well on the way to being the next Janet Johnson. He wasn’t a saint; no halo, no prayers, no eyes turned to heaven. That would have been weird, even if the school was Church of England. He wasn’t perfect; he was just good. He never fought, never even threw a punch. We really wanted him to. We wanted to see the piledriver those big shoulders could pound; to see the other guy after being hit by that. We never thought it would happen.
Winston did have one quirk, one oddity that set him apart. He carried a leather briefcase. A good- quality leather briefcase. The sort with a clasp at the top. You popped the clasp and the top popped open. This was at a time when the only school bag was a sports bag, with a zip. Adidas was the big name, and the three stripes were everywhere. A briefcase was unheard of. Any other kid who came to school with a briefcase would have left without it. But somehow, with Winston, it added dignity, and a certain authority. I don’t know why he had a briefcase; I never asked.