Does this sign at my local branch reveal Tesco’s subconscious attitude to good causes?
Category Archives: Mobile posting
FA Cup final
Poem
12th May, 2010
How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
D. H. Lawrence
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–
Presentable, eminently presentable–
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable–
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.
And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty–
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
(With thanks to Guy Hibbert, who is himself a poet, for reminding me of this.)
Nick Clegg’s argument
27 April, 2010
1. If nobody wins the election outright, I might hold the balance of power.
2. If Labour and Gordon Brown come third, they will have “lost the election spectacularly”.
3. It would not be legitimate for anyone who had lost spectacularly to run the country, therefore I could not work with Gordon Brown.
4. However I could work with Labour, even if they had lost spectacularly – as long as I can choose the leader.
No smoke-filled-room power-broking for Nick Clegg, then.
Only fresh, new, principled politics.