Not particularly mellow fruitfulness.

The world is in a very bad way. Proof? OK. Waitrose, the Glamorous Supermarket, has a new advert out. Carefully lit portrait shots of humps of bloody meat turning into Sunday roasts, fireplaces and hot pototoes, squally rain and cosy kitchen sponge cake makers… the famous Mersey side poet Roger McGough pottles on about seasons of mellow fruitfulness..only the riff, that sweet music mandolining and wheeling in the background is the Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ which I believe is a sonnet to heroin.

Hmmm.. What pray is the subliminal marketing message in that one then, mate?

DON’T’ ask about the BLOODY job!!! Still haven’t heard. However to distract myself I did overtime at CAB and I was given a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates by two Lithuanians hoping to set themselves up in the burger business. It’s a long story, all legal and life is sometimes most marvellous when we least expect.

Have a good weekend y’all! And just so that The Man cannot steal the sumptuous, extraordinarily beautiful poetry of John Keats to sell battery farmed chicken and spotted dick (tis a pudding..honestly ed) here is ‘To Autumn’ for you to enjoy in Technicolor (that’s TechnicolOR to you New York cuz) In the second verse Keats too turns to poppies... perhaps some poor media executive at Watirose was actually being clever?! Nahh..surely not...

John Keats: To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of Spring?

Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

-While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.