Work Moderately, Play Moderately
Our tendency to compromise
Our choreographed shedding of inhibitions
Our sheer ordinariness
With some notable exceptions
Our eccentricities are conformist
We are neither ‘sir’ nor ‘card’
Everything in moderation
We neither work nor play hard
Far from wild and reckless
We rely on rare risk takers
We are cautious and unadventurous
Not really movers and shakers
Oh, our English dis-ease
That others misunderstand as such
As long as they don’t bother us
Thank you very much!
*Almost all this text is manipulated from pg 551 of ‘Watching the English’ by Kate Fox – so, being English I must talk about the weather…
35 and Relief
Sweat trickled down my chest
My eyes were sweating too
The storm clouds soon disappeared
The skies now a whitish blue
I never thought it could happen
To feel my sweating teeth
Thank god, the temperature dropped
To 35 and relief
Giles in the World
In economic globalisation
We seldom wonder where
Our vegetables are grown
Nor do we even care
Trade among our nations
Faceless labour makes
Can you name your farmer?*
And what their effort takes
*This inspirational line is also from ‘Watching the English’ which I had just finished reading and then started on Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed, whose introduction page led to this….
New Settler
A self-exiled society
Had taken one step away
Yet he had taken two
The certainty of isolation
He lived his life day by day
Without his common crew
A sacrifice for greater good
To show them a better way
Stood upright and true
Asserted his true condition
Wherever his hat may lay
Somehow he always knew
He stood by himself
With little left for him to say
And nothing left to do
1994ever 