Unpleasant Valley Sunday
Posted on Wednesday 4th August 2010 4:11 pm
Here in Four-by-Four land
the dominant force is bland.
These faux-Tudor piles,
arranged in cul-de-sacs,
are not the place for smiles
or even looking back
and wondering
how did it all become so
beige?
At what stage did these people
settle for a Purgatory-on-Earth,
planned as a paradise
and immediately lost
without any Miltonic eloquence?
These artless streets have redefined
mean without meaning to
and while intending, paradoxically,
to present the splendour
of a mythical English haven,
though corruptibly close to Wales,
with pale pink bricks
– red was too radical –
and bay windows,
and generous parking bays,
and shrubbery and grubbery
and rubber-necking nosiness,
plus extra comforts from
those nice catalogues you get
with the Sunday Express and Mail.
This is des res suburban
Chester style,
if the poet might risk
‘Chester’ and ‘style’
in the same line.
This place fills a depression between
Chester and Caldy Valley Roads,
where you’ll find Sorrel Drive and
Bluebell Crescent and other twee
roads better not travelled.
At its heart is the
Caldy Valley Nature Reserve
where nature is, predictably,
reserved; where even rainfall
is reserved and preserved
in dank flashes where
residents gather
on municipal pontoons
to reflect upon their
diminished lives.
Rachel Bond
Mon 6th Sep 2010 10:25
thanks for the invite to bards...will do best to make it for tomorrow x