It was National Poetry Day last week and we can’t stop celebrating it, especially now that all those students are harnessed back in their faculties and student bars.
Here’s ‘Scruffy Students’ to help them settle in to their new term (or semester or whatever’s been concocted for them this year). Thanks to my favourite postgraduates and our illustrator, Paul Warren for the inspiration!
Scruffy Students
Sporty scruff
Sparky scruff
Just pissed up in the afternoon
Scruff.
Beery scruff
Hippy scruff
Permanent student in a beetle
Scruff.
Lecturer scruff
European scruff
We’re all mates together in a rugby scrum
Scruff.
Lectures seminars
Tutorials workshops
Doubting supremacist knowledge
Scruff.
The only unscruffy ones are the Arabs, Africans and Chinese.
Do they know something we don’t?
There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman
There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman is an anthology of poetry from an irritated England and marks the many sources of irritation faced by the average Englishman or woman these days – everything from the railways to referenda via what ever it is the young call music these days.
It was launched on 31 January 2020 – the day when the UK left the European Union and when the phenomenon known as Brexit finally, we liked to think, finally evaporated and all those years of frustration, anger, sheer disbelief and irritation all come to rest. But as Chairman Mao once said about what he thought the effects of the French Revolution were, it was way too soon to tell.
But its two authors – Nick Owen and Janice Owen – have become accomplished at becoming irritated at many facets of life in England over the years and hope that you, dear reader, will find some solace in knowing that you are not alone when it comes to feeling frustrated, pissed off, angry or just good old fashioned irritated.
Being English though, means we’ve just reached a level of irritation and aren’t quite ready to riot. Yet.