20. Hugging and Kissing

I am not a good kisser and never have been.  Well, that’s not entirely true because I am a great snogger; ask anyone.   No, better not; that’s silly.  Ask Caroline.   No, don’t bother, because I’ve just asked her if I’m a good snogger and she says that she can’t remember.

When I was 21, I had probably kissed five girls, ever.  Nowadays, if I don’t kiss at least five different women in the course of a week, it means that I had a quiet time and probably not left the house much.

In 1969, I visited David, somewhere near Windsor where he lived.  David was not a pilot (he could only just manage to ride a bicycle) but he shared a house with a couple of blokes who were and a couple of girls who were air hostesses. 

I noticed that whenever my girlfriend and I went to visit them, the kisses upon arrival and departure were showered around like ash particles from Eyjafjalljokull, as I perceptively and prophetically commented to David at the time.  “Never heard of it,” I remember him saying.  “You will, David; you will,” I told him.

At the time, I excused this rather forward, outlandish and bohemian behaviour of theirs as the kind of thing that people did when they ran the risk of disintegrating into a cloud of burning, mangled flesh on a daily basis in order to relieve their stresses.  It was excusable then, with them, just about.

What’s going on in society these days?  I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world but here in Cayman, the handshake between a man and a woman has virtually disappeared.   Things came to a head as far as I’m concerned last week when a woman working for an Insurance company, whom I had never met before in my life, put her hands on my shoulders and then hugged me as I left her office. 

Eh?  What the hell was that about?  This is getting ridiculous.   Only a year ago, a smile and maybe a handshake would have been all that was necessary or expected. 

Caroline and I were in a restaurant last week.  The eight people at the table next to us were having a great time.  They were all in their thirties and were clearly couples.   When they stood up to leave, their farewells took forever.  All the men kissed all the women and then all the women kissed all the men.  From my seat ten feet away I wanted to shout out, “Hey!  You’ve done that one,” as I am sure that they had lost track.

That was bad enough but then the women kissed all the other women and then, Lord help us, the men started hugging each other.  Two of them kissed the waitress as they left.  Are kisses acceptable in lieu of a tip these days?

I think that I’ll set that account as a maths problem for 6H, the class I help twice a week. 

1) How many kisses were there in total?  (Two people kissing counts as one kiss.)

2)  How many hugs were there?

3) Extension Work:  The gratuity was added at a rate of 15%.  If the total bill came to $600 and an extra $50 was left in cash, what was the calculated value of each of the two kisses given to the waitress?  (Calculators not allowed)

A couple of months ago Caroline and I were in a group of about twelve people, two of whom were female academics who had come over from the Institute of Education in London to run a course for Caymanian education administrators and leaders.   

Participants and partners met at the Ritz Carlton for end-of-course drinks.   Three of us were men and one of them had come with his fiancée.  I had never met her before but I had heard a lot about her and as I like him very much, I knew that I would like her too.

The two English academics were easy to greet.  Two firm handshakes and a smile did the job.  I know Caroline’s female colleagues very well; they know I don’t do kisses and so a nod and a cheery smile for each of them was no problem.   But, Lydia, Mark’s fiancée, was a different kettle of fish (sorry Lydia – unfortunate idiom).

I don’t know what was going through her mind as I stood in front of her.  She was probably thinking, “Oh no.  This ugly, fat old man is going to kiss me.  Ugh!”

I solved the problem for her.  I held out my hand and said, “Hello Lydia.  I’m Terry, Caroline’s husband.”   We shook hands and exchanged genuine, relieved smiles.  I hope she tells her friends and they start a trend. 

The first girl I ever kissed was Wanda.   She pronounced her name, “Van-da” with a ‘V’ and 35 years later the film concerning that fish was spoilt for me because of the way the name was pronounced.  

Wanda was in my class at infant school.  We were in Mrs M’s class and so we must have been five or six.   One day, for reasons that I can’t remember now, she and I were alone together in the classroom.  She came over to me and said, “Do you dare kiss?”  We exchanged kisses.  No lasting damage was done.

There’s always the possibility, however, that my anxiety about kissing is based upon an experience I had when I was 15 or 16.  A group of us, girls and boys, were at Gedf’s house one Saturday evening.   It wasn’t a party.  We just all happened to be there.  Gedf was christened Graham Edward David Fenn; hence GEDF pronounced "Gedfer" with a hard 'g'.

I’m pretty sure that there was nothing going on between any of us.   I know for certain that there was nothing between any of the girls and me.   We were all friends and nothing more.  That evening there was a girl amongst us whom I’d never seen before.  

Della was seriously, achingly beautiful.  I can’t remember now where she had come from.  She was probably someone’s cousin or maybe she attended the Convent school and was a friend of one of the other girls.

Fairly early in the evening someone suggested that we play Postman’s Knock.  There was a lot of groaning and giggling but play it, we did.

This was the only game of Postman’s knock I have ever played and this is how it was organised:

We all sat in a circle and a bottle was spun.  When the bottle came to rest, the person the neck pointed at was the ‘Postman’.  If the postman was a boy he left the room and all the girls were given a number from one to five.  

The Postman was then called back in and announced, “I’ve a letter for X.”  X then accompanied the Postman out of the room and 30 seconds were allowed in private for whatever took place.  Both of them returned to the main room and the bottle was spun again.  New numbers were given every time so the postman never knew who had what number. 

After a couple of rounds, my number was called by Maggie and I went out of the room with her.  She had pulled what I had thought was an unnecessarily aggrieved and tortured face when she realised who number three was.  

In the hallway we had thirty seconds to do the deed.  She was the first girl I ever kissed on the lips and it was not a particularly memorable experience for either of us but she is one of the five I mentioned in the second paragraph.

Eventually it was my turn to be the postman.  I left the room while the girls were given numbers.  When I was called in I announced that I had a letter for number ….. wait for it …. wait for it …. there were five girls and so I thought it would be funny if I said, … “Six.”

There was lot of laughter at this from everyone except Della.  She, I found out later, had realised the imminent danger she was in and had insisted on giving the numbers.  Despite protests, she had started at two and given herself number six. 

“Come on Della,” they said to her.  “Out you go.”

Della stayed put.  She looked me straight in the eye as she said to everyone in general, but to me in particular,

“I’m not playing any more.”

Maggie tried to help but certainly didn’t.  “Come on Della,” she said.  “Don’t spoil it.  It’s really not that bad.”

I still haven’t got over it.  Scarred for life!

19. Hesperody

I am elated.  I’ve written a poem!  Yes, I have, a real poem that rhymes and everything.  At the moment I feel like someone waking up after a bang on the head and finding they had acquired the ability to play the piano.  After all these years, I’m a poet!

I know virtually nothing about poetry but I’ve been on the Internet all morning and so now I am an expert.  The Internet’s great, isn’t it?  I think I’m going to set myself the task of becoming an expert on a different topic every day before lunch.

On April 4^th in Poetry in the raw, I quoted something written by WH Auden. 

“A bit pretentious,” I expect you were thinking.  “What’s a Philistine like Wilton doing quoting a poet?”

I’m going to tell you about someone who dwarfs Auden, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats and perhaps even, Pam Ayres.  

This is the opening verse to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a song written in 1931, with lyrics by Desmond Carter and performed by Al Bowlly.

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick.

Brunswick is in Germany.

Long ago, seemed as though

The town was getting verminy.

Desmond Carter is largely forgotten now and was never classified as a poet but his lyrics in this song and in those he wrote for many of the songs composed by George Gershwin, are sheer poetry.  Al Bowlly was a jazz singer and crooner who is mostly forgotten now too.

Okay, so Carter used Robert Browning’s opening line of The Pied Piper of Hamelin but look what he did with it!  He turned it into a thing of joy.  Fantastic!  If you can’t think of a rhyme, make up a word. Can you think of a word to rhyme with Germany?   I can’t.   

Carter did what Shakespeare did but Shakespeare’s inventions were necessary for the narrative and not for rhyme.  Desmond Carter was certainly no Shakespeare but he couldn’t half put a few words together.  

Shakespeare has been credited with inventing more than three thousand words and many may surprise you: blanket, generous, critic, educate, worthless, exposure, investment, noiseless, arouse, obscene.   Shakespeare even invented the word ‘torture’.   Hard to believe it - but he did.  (Don’t argue.  It says so on the Internet.)

The Spanish Inquisition was in its full throes during Shakespeare’s time.  It is possible that one day, guards walked into the cell of an accused man and said something like,

“Enough pussyfooting around.  We’re going to try something we’ve heard about from England.   It’s called torture.”

Except, they wouldn’t have said, “pussyfooting” because that word wasn’t created until the early 20^th Century.  (The Internet again)

The World Champion at creating and inventing words has to be Robert Burns.  In some of his poems, he made up a word at the end of a line for no reason at all and then had to create another word just to get a rhyme.  Just because he put an apostrophe in front of, in the middle of, or after a word doesn’t make it Scottish dialect!  There you are - I’ve said it - Burns’ poems are gibberish. 

Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flainen,

Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!

If those two lines from ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ aren’t total tosh, what is?  Burns’ apologists will try and tell you that ‘creeshie’is dialect for ‘greasy’, that ‘flainen’ is ‘flannel cap’ and that ‘hunder’ is ‘hundred’.  That means that as well as being a rubbish poet, Burns was also dyslexic.  He couldn’t spell ‘snow’ or ‘hundred’ but he could spell ‘white’ and ‘seventeen’?  Do me a favour!

Ah, that’s better.  I feel like the little boy who shouted out that the Emperor was naked.  Maybe it’s time for a complete reappraisal of Burns’ work and worth.  

I will be seeing Dugald and Joyce in a couple of hours and I will ask them what a ‘sark’ is.  Dugald wears a kilt occasionally and plays the bagpipes, often at the same time.  If they don’t know what a ‘sark’ is, I shall rest my case.  

I know that William Topaz McGonagall, derided today as the worst published poet there has ever been, would never have written nonsense like that.­­­  To deride McGonagall’s poems as the worst ever, is a dreadful slur.  His poems are all (unintentionally) entertaining.

What is the point of poetry?  It is not just for words to have the beauty and capacity to move us to deep feelings and emotion.  Poets are not solely charged with forming beautiful structures with words.  Another function of poetry is to entertain and that is exactly what the poems of William Topaz McGonagall do for whatever reason.  “The phrase “It’s so bad it’s good” was made for McGonagall.

I defy you to read any of his poems without smiling or maybe, sniggering more than once.  This is a verse from  ‘Beautiful Torquay’:

There is also a fine bathing establishment near the pier,

Where the tourist can bathe without any fear;

And as the tourists there together doth stroll,

I advise them to visit a deep chasm called Daddy’s Hole.

Or this, from ‘Descriptive Jottings of London’:

St Paul’s Cathedral is the finest building that I ever did see;

There’s nothing can surpass it in the city of Dundee

Wonderful!  If I had to spend ten minutes in a dentist’s waiting room, I’d rather read a couple of McGonagall’s poems than anything by Burns.   McGonagall also came up with this striking moral couplet:

For the stronger we our houses do build, 

The less chance we have of being killed.

You can’t argue with that.  An MP, intent on standing out from the crowd, could use it during questions to the Prime Minister:

“Would my Right Honourable friend agree with me, that the stronger we our houses do build, the less chance we have of being killed?”

Barratts, the house builders, should adopt it as their motto.  

All Burns has left us with really, is a dreary old song that is only ever sung when people are rolling around drunk at midnight on New Year’s Eve.   I have warmed to him a little recently upon discovering that he did write a couple of poems that contain very strong language indeed.  The first one that I came across is composed of two verses with four short lines per verse.  In that limited space, he has managed to include the ‘C’ word twice. 

Here is my poem.  I knocked out this ode to Caroline.  It took me nearly five minutes.  Do you think she’ll like it?

This morning when I spake with thee, 

Your face and laughter seemed to be,

A glimpse of temp’ry ecstasy.

Your mind and being, called to me

In affirmation of our love.

It matters not when melody,

Doth changeth into rhapsody, 

And plays with sense as remedy;

Will increased vibrant hesperody

Outwing a soaring, joyous dove?

I’m impressed with my first ever poem for these reasons:

1)	It looks like a poem.
2)	Five lines to a verse – much classier than four.
3)	It has the random and exotic punctuation that always occurs in proper poems.
4)	There is a pretentious contraction that an established poet might use, ‘temp’ry’,
5)	It sort of rhymes.
6)	It’s got a couple of archaic words.
7)	There is a kind of flow to it.
8)	It contains an invented word (hesperody).
9)	The second verse appears to everyone to be unintelligible bollocks but most really good poems are, aren’t they?
10)	There should never an odd number in a list.

However, the second verse is not unintelligible bollocks.   It all hinges on the meaning of ‘hesperody’ (pronounced, I have decided, “Ess-per-dee”) and as I invented it, ‘hesperody’ can either mean what I say it means, or it may mean whatever the reader wants it to mean.  I’ve decided to allow that too.   Consequently, it is now the most versatile word in the English language. 

It’s a Humpty Dumpty word. 

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”

My “poem” will have different meanings depending upon the mood you are in when you read it.  To some people, ‘hesperody’ could be a feeling similar to the bitterness, anger and resentment felt when you were kept waiting for over FOUR minutes standing in the POURING RAIN in a supermarket car park because your wife, who had the car keys, had stopped UNDER COVER to gossip with a friend she met on her way out – (possibly).  

Alternatively, you might interpret ‘hesperody’ as the feelings you have from glimpsing an object such as a delicate crystal glass bowl, loosely filled with wild flowers picked alongside a dusty rural lane in late summer, while walking through the Suffolk countryside among the ripened, swirling, golden wheat fields and with the sound of a solitary skylark touching you to your very soul, trilling in the sky above. 

Actually, my inspiration as I wrote it, was a neighbour’s car alarm going off.

My first and only other poem was written in March 1966 when I was a student in my first year at Durham.  When founded in 1832, Durham University only had Cambridge and Oxford as models and so copied most of their practices.  I lived in college and we all had rooms on a staircase.  I and about 20 other first year students, including five friends whom I still have to this day, lived on B Stairs in Hatfield College. 

There were two doors to every room and the outer door, The Oak, was closed when the person inside was not, under any circumstance, to be disturbed.  Anyone in this situation was said to, “Have his Oak up.”  (No!  Stop it!  Behave yourself.)

I used to put my Oak up every Saturday night at about 3:00 a.m. when I went to bed.  I could sleep all Sunday morning.   Up at 11:00, Ryvita and marmite for breakfast and then walk down to The Shakespeare for a couple of pints before Sunday lunch back in college.  

The Bedder on B Stairs of Hatfield College was Susan Dinsdale-Davis.   She would begin work at around eight on a Sunday morning, go into every one of the twelve rooms on our Staircase, clean, tidy, wash up cups and plates and make the bed.   Yes, we were spoilt.

Mrs D-D used to get very pissed off with those of us who still had our Oaks up at 11:00 a.m. because obviously, she couldn’t come in to do her work.   She wasn’t even allowed to knock on the door if the Oak was up. 

She was a lovely lady and I felt very bad at the way we took her for granted.  I wrote her a poem to try and make her feel better and also in lieu of an apology.   I think it reads now like a rip-off of someone, possibly A A Milne. 

Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea

With all her friends and her family.

They sat in rows of ascending height

And everything was perfectly right,

That memorable day, now when would it be

Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea?

It wasn’t a Monday or Thursday they came.

They couldn’t come Tuesday and that was a shame,

As Tuesday’s teas are often auspicious 

And the scones on a Friday are always delicious.

But it wasn’t a Friday, so when would it be

Mrs Dinsdale Davies came to tea?

Billy and Jamie and Annie were sick

When Mister D showed them a conjuring trick.

It wasn’t real magic but kids are naïve. 

They didn’t see teaspoons stuffed up his sleeve.

But, oh how they cheered, now when would it be

Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea?

Was it on Saturday?  Couldn’t have been.

Nor on a Wednesday, as then our routine

Is off to play rugby, so all that remain

Is one day a week when I can entertain;

So, it was a SUNDAY!  That’s when it would be

Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea.

And very nice it was too.

Dugald will probably tell me that it is closer to something by McGonagall than anything by Burns.  It was the best I could do but I suppose that McGonagall used that excuse too. 

Bugger!  It’s seven hours later.  Dugald and Joyce have just left.  They did know what a ‘sark’ is and described it in rather more detail than I thought was really necessary.  

Show offs!