AUGUST 2022 

'Insomnia' by Louise Wilford [acrylic]

 

'Butterflies' by Louise Wilford [acrylic]

 

Tales from the first year of geriatric wedlock

Life With The Aged Ms 

 In the past few months, we’ve been having problems with the elders. I don’t mean the overgrown trees along the canal path, but our elderly mothers.

We hear this refrain from many people our age, and it’s surprising how often it’s worded like this. We’ve been having problems. Our lives have been disrupted. It’s so difficult for us. And these statements are, of course, entirely true – but they’re not the whole truth, are they? If it’s tough for us, it’s even worse for the elderly relatives themselves. And I have to admit that I’ve managed to sidestep the worst of the life-disruption myself so far, so I’m not complaining.

            My own mother is in her early eighties, though you’d never think it to look at her. She might not have the breath-takingly youthful good looks of Jane Fonda in Frankie & Grace (the result of good genes, an excellent plastic surgeon and a pact with the devil), but she definitely looks young for her age. She is also – like Jane Fonda – keen to not appear to be old. She won’t use a walking stick or a hearing aid, for instance, and she doesn’t like admitting she needs help. So it was no surprise that, when she fell in the garden a few months ago and fractured her ankle, she brought the washing in before she sat down on the settee for a cup of tea and ‘a bit of a rest’…

   

         Anyway, our niece turned up soon afterwards and insisted on taking Mum to A & E, where, several hours later, she lost consciousness and was whisked off to the Resuscitation Room as her blood pressure had dropped very low and they thought she might be having a cardiac event. It turned out it was ‘just’ a faint, but during the night her blood pressure rose very high, but stabilized next day. As they were more concerned about her heart than her leg, she ended up being released several days later with no follow-up appointment for her fractured ankle, no compression socks, no advice at all really. She then stayed at Niece’s house for several weeks.

            Though we did visit her there, and phoned her every day, I must admit that we dodged a bullet that time. I had invited her to stay with us, but unfortunately our spare room is up two flights of stairs. Also, mum would much rather stay in Niece’s four-bedroomed house where there’s a TV in the guestroom and full access to her beloved great-grandson and to Niece’s partner, whom mum adores.

            Weeks later, when she was back at home and her lower leg was still swollen, she did manage to make an appointment to see the orthopedic surgeon for a check-up and P went with her as I was at work. Unfortunately, the doctor was given the wrong set of notes and he began the conversation with the words:

            ‘So, you were drunk when you fell down in the street?’

My mum is a virtual teetotaller who would quite literally rather be mowed down by a car (while wearing clean underwear, of course) than fall down in the street the worse for drink. She was so shocked and confused by the doctor’s words that it was a good job P was there to listen to the doctor and put things right, as she heard no more of the consultation. She had her listening face on but she wasn’t hearing what he said because she too busy worrying that the entire hospital, where she worked for thirty years, now thought she was a lush.

In the car, driving home, she was obviously still worrying about it as she said to P ‘You know I never drink, don’t you?’. P, with his usual pedantic obsession with the literal truth, stupidly said ‘Well, you sometimes have a lager and lime with a meal in a restaurant, don’t you?’, which deeply offended her. Fortunately, he is as oblivious to my mother’s body language as he is to the fact that it is always a good idea to go along with whatever she says, so he didn’t notice he’d offended her.  However, she has told me on several occasions since that she interpreted P’s words as expressing solidarity with the doctor. In mum’s mind, the doctor actually thought she was an alcoholic, whereas in fact he had just got the wrong person’s notes in front of him. The mistake was cleared up swiftly – but not in my mum’s mind. Because when you’re in your eighties, you often just hear key words and fill in the rest based on paranoia. Her poor hearing accounts for about 40%  of our family miscommunication, the rest being accounted for by the fact that we’re all dysfunctional crackpots. Doctors should think about this when they talk to elderly patients.

I spoke to Niece some days after mum had gone back to her own house and asked her how mum’s stay had gone. I won’t repeat her actual words but suffice it to say that both she and her partner were relieved by her departure. Mum goes to bed very early as she likes to watch TV before she goes to sleep. Niece has a timer on the bedroom TV so that it automatically switches off after a couple of hours, by which time Mum is asleep. However, overnight, Mum wakes up frequently for one of her multiple trips to the bathroom and turns the TV back on when she gets back in bed – full-blast, due to her deafness! During her stay, Niece and partner, in the room next door, were woken several times a night, every night, for three weeks by the sound of reality TV programmes blasting out at full volume through the wall. Mum, of course, nodded off during this cacophony and eventually the TV turned itself off, but the whole rigmarole would begin again the next time her bladder demanded attention. Niece and partner felt like the walking dead by the time she went home. Astonishingly, Mum’s eight-year-old great-grandson slept through it all!

So, yes, we definitely dodged the bullet on that one…

One of the problems with visiting either of our mothers is the deafening volume of their TV sets (which, in my mum’s house, is always on – when we ring her, we can’t hear her speak due to the sound of Loose Women or Philip Schofield or Four In A Bed). The blistering heat inside their houses is another thing that makes people keep their visits short (which perhaps is why they keep it so high) – I don’t know about the imminent cost-of-living crisis, but I’m not sure how either woman can afford her heating bills at all. P took his mum for a stroll around the garden one day last week because the temperature had fallen to a pleasant 20 degrees and he felt his mum needed a bit of fresh air, but she went inside after three minutes complaining that it was ‘too cold'. My mum, who has Uriah Heap tendencies, claims that she rarely uses the heating as she just puts a thicker jumper on, but I’ve been to her house in the summer months when it has felt like Lucifer’s workroom. You expect to open the kitchen door onto a vast expanse of Saharan desert sand.

Anyway, mum’s ankle has now mended, and the focus has switched to P’s mum, who is about five years older than mine and resembles the grandma in the original version of The Beverley Hillbillies. I will call her Perdita, which isn’t her actual name but distinguishes her from my mum. Perdita has had a bad year, She spent several days in hospital in January having had severe abdominal pain which turned out to be gallstones. A few weeks later, she was rushed to hospital by ambulance after she complained about chest pains and light-headedness. This time, they fitted a pace-maker which at first completely depressed her. She told P that she couldn’t cope with it as she wouldn’t be able to carry all the equipment round with her. ‘I’ll never be able to leave my chair!’ she cried. It turned out that she thought that the monitors the pacemaker was attached to in the hospital were all part of the ‘stuff’ she’d have to cart round with her at all times!   

The change of scene in the hospital seemed to do her a world of good. She even enjoyed the food, feeling very pleased with herself for eating something ‘foreign’ (an egg mayonnaise sandwich), though it says something about hospital food when, on one occasion, she told P about how lovely the chicken was that she’d had for lunch before the nurse pointed out that it was actually a cheese omelette.

Anyway, a few weeks ago she had to return to hospital so they could conduct a scan of her lower bowel, which involved it being emptied first. Considering her age and general frailty, it was felt she might find this less traumatic in hospital than at home. The plan was that she’d be admitted on Wednesday, have the bowel-emptying prep on Thursday, and the scan on Friday morning, followed by a barium meal scan to check out her upper digestive tract. She would be discharged on Friday evening. However, hospitals being hospitals, the scan was delayed and they decided to keep her in hospital until Monday when they claimed she could have the barium meal scan. When P visited her after work on Monday, however, he was told to take her home. She could have the barium meal scan as an out-patient and they needed the bed, which begs the question of why she was kept in pointlessly for three extra days.

His mum seemed much more confused when he took her home than she had been before she went into hospital. She kept forgetting her address, and getting muddled about who Philip was. This was the Monday of the Great Heat-Wave. Perdita refuses to have her windows open day or night because ‘it lets muck in’, or to have any electrical appliance (such as her electric fan) switched on overnight in case ‘it causes a fire’. She drinks only tea, and will only drink water, grudgingly and occasionally, if it is slightly warmer than room temperature and in very small doses – she won’t have a glass or bottle by the side of the bed in case she knocks it over. So, by Tuesday morning, the hottest day since records began, she was already suffering from dehydration and was badly confused. She kept searching the bedrooms for her mother, who died decades ago, and she was surprised to learn that she had married her now-dead husband ‘in the end’ (?!). She had no idea who P was, which completely freaked him out, though she did suddenly become more lucid, just as he was leaving, and called out that she loved him – as she is an emotionally-repressed Yorkshirewoman, this in itself was pretty freaky!

To make it worse, she fainted on Wednesday morning and P had to phone an ambulance. The paramedics insisted she went to A & E, where she and P sat for six hours. Apparently, an elderly confused woman with possible heart problems and a history of TIAs isn’t considered serious enough to be seen any sooner than this. There was a woman with a broken arm in the waiting room who’d been waiting longer than them and who was still waiting when P was told it would be two more hours before his mum would be seen and he finally decided she couldn’t take any more and took her home untreated. Perdita weighs about five and a half stone wet through and had not eaten since breakfast.

The good news is that she has now returned to how she was before her admission to hospital. The general consensus seems to be that a perfect storm of events (being kept in hospital for three extra days, dehydration caused by the heatwave, the stress of a six-hour wait in A & E without food during which she refused to drink the water as it was ‘too cold’) led to her suffering a temporary blip. She now seems lucid and fully aware of where she is, who she is and who everyone else is. We were very worried that she’d relapse due to the series of visits she’s had to make to the GP surgery and hospital since her discharge – for blood-tests, to have her annual calcium injection, to have the barium meal scan, to have her pacemaker checked out, etc – but she has dealt with these things surprisingly well. She is now back to her normal level of batty, thank goodness, and has even had her tea at our house without incident (she normally refuses to leave her own house). 

She finds our Smart TV confusing (don’t we all?), but she was entertained by an ancient episode of Heartbeat and kept saying to me (as if I am a big fan of the programme, when in fact I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full episode in my life except in her company): ‘He’s a good actor, David, isn’t he?’. Whether David was the name of an actual actor or one of the characters, I have no idea, and I had no way of judging the performance of the man she pointed to as I have no idea how much the actor is like a gormless handyman in real life. I am fairly fluent in Perdita-speak, however, so I understood that she couldn’t watch Miss Marple if it ‘was ‘her I don’t like’ (sorry, Julia McKenzie) and that her outrage against ‘them things they make them wear’ refers to the tight-fitting undergarments worn by female TV presenters on early-evening magazine programmes, which Perdita believes they are forced to wear as part of their contracts so that they look slim under their tight-fitting outer garments. And I learned, for the 5,742^nd time, that she had to stop watching The One Show because of ‘her who is always screeching’ (apologies, Alex Jones).

Yesterday, Perdita was stranded at the top of her stairs when the stair-lift stopped working. She rang our house but P was having lunch with two of his ex-students in Sheffield – the poor man has been visiting his mum several times every day since the week before the school holidays started and had been round to see her that morning, so he deserved a break. It was unfortunate that the stair-lift incident happened when it did. Anyway, by the time he got there, her neighbour had helped her to get off the seat and had managed to twist it a little so it wasn’t blocking access to the staircase. When Philip rang the company who installed the lift, he was told it would cost around £350 for someone to come out to fix it as an emergency, but it turned out that it should have had a pre-paid annual service in March but they had never contacted Perdita about it. When the engineer turned up that evening (about eight o’clock – six hours after the stair-lift got stuck, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realise that Perdita’s house has only one toilet, which is upstairs), having failed to ring P first as he was supposed to, he told Perdita that the problem was a bolt which needed replacing but ‘they couldn’t get the parts’ as the stair-lift was now obsolete. He didn’t charge her anything as he couldn’t fix it, but he told her it would be fine as long as she didn’t swivel the seat round at the top. P of course couldn’t talk to anyone at the company about getting the stairlift serviced because it was the weekend. So we are now trying to convince Perdita that she needs a new stairlift, if only another reconditioned one, but it seems like a futile endeavour.

When I told P about Rishi Sunak’s intention to take money from deprived urban areas and give it to Tunbridge Wells, he said ‘The Tories must be in league with Stannah’.

 

'Cockerpoos' by Louise Wilford [acrylic]

 

'Pup' by Louise Wilford [acrylic]

 

'Fox' by Louise Wilford [acrylic]

DIFFERENT TYPES OF POETRY YOU MIGHT TRY: Comic Poetry

 Writing comic poetry

Everyone loves comic verse, and it is probably the most ubiquitous type of poetry there is. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Edward Lear, dirty couplets scrawled on a toilet wall or a merry jingle to round off an advert, there is something about humour in rhyming form that appeals to most people, even if they aren’t generally poetry lovers. Much children’s poetry has a comic element, for instance:

My Pet Pegasus

 

I love to ride Old Peggy,

above the garden sheds,

while all the other children

are sleeping in their beds -

but all the people down below

get horse poo on their heads.

 

by Louise Wilford

 

I haven’t written much comic verse myself but I will share some of my rather pathetic attempts here [see above!]. It isn’t really my forte, but I appreciate other people’s abilities in this genre. You can find lots of examples of superb comic verse on the following internet sites, and I urge you in particular to look up Brian Bilston’s work which is fabulously skilful and takes the art to a whole new level of brilliance:

https://brianbilston.com/

https://interestingliterature.com/2018/03/10-of-the-best-comic-funny-poems-everyone-should-read/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendy-cope

https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poems/other/limerick/

There are also many fantastically clever and witty song lyricists out there, from Cole Porter to The Arctic Monkeys.

Though it is perfectly possible to write a funny poem in free verse, most well-known comic poems tend to be written in rhyme, whether we’re thinking of limericks, clerihews, Lewis Carrol’s ‘Jabberwocky’, the very boring and excessively long satires of Dryden and Pope, the comical nonsense of Hilaire Belloc or Ogden Nash, or the fabulous wit of Wendy Cope. There are poets known for their skill with rhythm and rhyme, whose work often takes a turn towards humour, such as John Betjemen. And there are poets who are associated with intellectual, ground-breaking free verse who find themselves resorting to rhyme when they tackle humour, such as T.S.Eliot’s Old Possums Book Of Practical Cats.  So my first suggestion, if you are thinking of giving humour a go, is to give your rhyming muscles a work-out. There is something about a regular rhythm and rhyme scheme that instils certain expectations in the reader, setting up and delivering the punchline in a satisfying way. Sometimes, you can get away with very diluted humour as long as it rhymes – that’s my method, anyway!

              Start out trying your hand at short simple poems such as limericks. My advice would be to ignore the famous ones by Edward Lear as they often just use line one repeated as line five, which I personally feel is a cop-out – I think it is funnier to have an original closing line. Here’s one I wrote for a student:

There was a young student named Crook

who would never look into a book.

‘All your tests you will fail,

if you don’t read this tale,’

said his teacher. The student said ‘F***!’

 

               Another good way of starting to write humorous poems is to try out a parody or spoof version of a well-known poem. I wrote the following as a spoof of Marlowe’s ‘The passionate shepherd to his love’:

 

The Passionate Single-Father To His

Commitment-phobic Girlfriend

 

Come live with me and be my love.

I know you hate my place: I’ll move.

If you don’t like my dog or flat,

I’ll sell my home and buy a cat.

 

I’ll shower you with pricey stuff.

The Argos brochure’s not enough

to show the myriad things I’ll buy

to warm your heart and catch your eye:

 

a flat-screen HD-ready box;

ceramic straighteners for your locks;

Swarovsky crystal; white-gold studs;

Curry’s top-range of black goods;

 

an iPad dipped in purest gilt;

a new bed with a handmade quilt;

an iphone with a range of apps;

a tiny dog designed for laps.

 

I’ll strip the paper from the room,

cut down the hedge to banish gloom.

So, if these gifts my feelings prove,

come live with me and be my love.

 

I’ll laminate the whole ground floor;

I’ll tile the kitchen, paint the door;

I’ll tell my kids ‘Don’t make a sound!’;

I’ll stop my mum from coming round.

 

So if these measures can persuade -

and if your fears I’ve now allayed -

and if these words your feelings move,

then live with me and be my love.

 

 

 I later discovered that Cecil Day-Lewis had already written a parody of this poem which you can find here:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/come-live-me-and-be-my-love/

I’m sure there have been many others.

 

Another spoof poem I wrote took Shakespeare’s famous sonnet as its inspiration:

 

To My Dishwasher

 

Shall I compare thee to the good old days?

Thou art more handsome and more literate;

rough hands do shake the snarling suds of grey

and someone’s hands hath broken, now, a plate;

sometimes too soon the clumsy hand resigns,

and often is the gold chipped off the rim;

and every fair from fair sometimes declines

by chance, or egg yolk plastered on the trim;

but thy eternal logo shall not fade,

nor lose possession of that debt I ow’st;

nor shall I moan “It hasn’t yet been paid”,

when in eternal drains thy soapsuds grow’st.

  So long as I can sit and watch TV,

  so long lives this, and this gives life to me.

 

I still don’t own a dishwasher.

Another suggestion is to go for bathos. This just means anti-climax and is a basic tenet of humour. The following poem was written while sitting in a café at Cannon Hall, during a miserable day out:

 

July visit to Cannon Hall

 

The forecast said the weather

would be just a few light showers,

but the rain is falling steadily

like it’s set to last for hours.

 

The giant slides – roped off today.

The ice-cream queues – too long.

The café kitchen’s shut as some

‘electric thing’ went wrong.

 

The sheep races are cancelled

and the ferrets can’t be found.

The porcupines are lying low –

the meercats, gone to ground.

 

The outdoor climbing frames are wet,

the sandpit’s like a mire;

the swings and tunnels run with rain.

Kids slip off the zip wire.

 

We have two bags of pellets

to feed the shedded cattle.

So many folk are feeding them

that soon they’ll start to rattle.

 

Maybe the smelly rubbish bins

where we just saw a mouse

are simply an extension of

the mini-beast and reptile house.

 

It’s Cannon Hall in Summer.

The food is overpriced.

It’s £10 each for adults

but we can’t go on the rides.

 

All we can do is stand and drip,

and wait to spend more cash.

And when we take child home at five,

he’ll no doubt have a rash.

 

But when, much later, we look back,

imagine child at play –

we’ll think, with rosy fondness,

of that lovely July day.          

 

Another poem of mine which uses bathos (and which was published in an anthology created by the Open University’s Write Club) is the following:

 

I come from a broken home

 

I come from a broken ‘ome, luv:

it snapped when I were six.

I come from a town up north, duck,

a place out in the sticks.

 

Me dad ran off wi’ a teenage girl.

Me school were a run-down comp.

We med our own entertainment, duck,

wi’ on’y the rec to romp.

 

Me sister and I wore plastic shoes

picked out from a council box.

Our ‘ouse were owned be t’council, luv,

and the yard were full o’ rocks.

 

Me mum delivered Avon, duck,

the Pools and Tupperware.

She med our clothes on a Singer, luv,

knit scarves and cut our ‘air.

 

We’d get a balloon off the rag ‘n’ bone

when we giv ‘im some old weed;

our skippin’ rope were washing-line

an’ our pet were a centipede.

 

We didn’t ‘ave a phone, duck.

Fish fingers and chips fer tea.

The coke fire spat as we idly sat

watchin’ black and white TV.

 

I could say, though our mam was poor, duck,

she never let us go wi’out –

we’d allus ‘ave some chores to do

an’ we’d allus get a clout.

 

They were simpler times in them days, luv,

an’ a person knew her place:

it was right down there at t’bottom, duck,

wi’ a bruise an’ a mucky face.

 

I could say, though we ‘ad it rough, luv,

we all knew what family meant:

it meant bein’ hit wi’ a wooden spoon

an’ wishin’ yer lived in Kent.

 

 

This poem caused a family row as my mum thought I was deliberately misrepresenting my childhood, in public. People often don’t appreciate the way reality is mangled and exaggerated for comic effect, which is a serious consideration for any would-be humorous writer.

Notice how the use of colloquialisms adds to the (admittedly minor) comedic tone in this poem. The next poem uses colloquialisms too and is more or less a verbatim record of the messages my five year old niece, living up in Yorkshire, used to leave on our answerphone when we lived in London. Interestingly, this slice of real life caused no problems for my mum who actually framed it and had it on her kitchen wall for years!

 

Message on the ansaphone

 

'Ello? 'Ello?

Can I talk to Auntie Weeze?

I’ve gotta cold again

an I'm gunna 'ave to sneeze....

Would you like one o' me sweets,

cos it isn't time for bed?

I on'y like the pink 'n’s -

you can 'ave the green instead.

I'm wearin' me big slippers

wi' the rabbit on the front.

I've jus' phoned t'say

I'll get you some if yer want.

Me friend Casey's bin t'play

cos me mum said it's all right,

but she 'ad to go 'ome early

cos we always start to fight.

I've bin slidin' down me slide

an I've done a lot o' things -

I can swim now, Auntie Weeze,

if I wear me water wings.

I've gotta bran' new goldfish

- but it's on'y very small...

Can I talk to Uncle Philip

or is 'e at work an' all?

When you're next 'ere at our 'ouse,

you will 'ave to play wi' me,

but I'll 'ave to put the phone down

cos I need to 'ave a wee.

BYEEEE!’

 

As a brief aside, my mum used to get me to write short humorous verses for the Christmas cards she sent to her colleagues at the hospital where she was a nurse, and then she’d let her colleagues believe she’d written them herself!

              A final comment is that, while there are numerous clever and funny poems written for adults, poems which are wry or dry or filthy or mocking, hysterical or satirical, comic poetry, as I noted earlier, is a particularly useful tool when writing poems for children. Children often enjoy wordplay and lists and general daftness. Writing such poems is often good fun too. Here’s one I wrote for a small online competition run by the Suffolk Writers Facebook Group (I won first prize, much to my surprise):

 

Pink

‘I’m NOT wearing pink!’

cried poor Emily Spruce.

‘It’s a colour for babies

and strawberry mousse!

It’s underdone meat!

It’s bon bons! It’s puce!

No, I’m not wearing pink!’

declared Emily Spruce.

 

‘But pink is for sunsets,’

her grandmother said.

‘It’s for people to wear

who don’t want to wear red!’

‘But pink isn’t hip –

it has little street cred!

And it doesn’t look good

when you’re a redhead.

 

No, I’m not wearing pink,’

said poor Em, once again.  

‘I’ve never liked salmon,

or used a pink pen.

I dislike flamingos

and old pink-faced men!

And I’d never be seen

in the Pink Panther’s den!

 

No, prawns, shrimp and piglets

always need cleanin’,

and roses and pansies

are always just preenin’,

and pink Barbie dolls

have no sensible meanin’!

No, pink is a colour      

I’d NEVER be seen in.’

 

 NOTE: The poems I have included in this article were not intended to be set out in double-line spacing, but that's how they end up when I cut and paste them onto the blog.

 

WRITING TASKS:

1.      Choose a few people you know who have surnames which are funny in themselves or would produce good rhymes, and have a go at writing some limericks using those names;

 

2.      Choose a well-known rhyming poem – preferably a sonnet or a ballad or some other relatively simple form. Some suggestions: ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ (Herrick), ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ (Burns), ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ (Ben Jonson), Wordsworth’s daffodil poem, Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’.  Try not to choose a poem that is in itself intended to be humorous or parodic. Have a go at updating it, using the same ideas but in modern idiom, and following the same form as the original. You might want to write a witty parody, a silly spoof, a jolly pastiche or a gently humorous homage;

 

3.      Whenever you’re alone on public transport or in a café or on a park bench – anywhere you can listen in to snippets of other people’s conversations – jot down any phrases or sentences you hear that strike you as humorous. Then later try to incorporate them into a poem, or use them as inspiration, particularly for a comic poem written in your own regional dialect;

 

4.      Think of an outing or special occasion you enjoyed and imagine what it would have been like if everything went wrong.

 

5.      Write a humorous poem suitable for a child – this could be a humorous re-telling of a fairytale, or a warning about something silly, or you might choose one of the following titles for inspiration: 

 

The Day We Went To The Zoo

Auntie Muriel’s Apple Pie

Peel Me A Grape – I’m hungry!

The Wonky Armadillo

The Fly Who Couldn’t Find The Door

The Girl Who Liked Eating Beads.