Oh woe is me, I can’t run any more, which amuses them at the club I ran for,
Blackpool AC, on the Lancashire coast.

It was renamed Seasiders Sizzlers, to appeal to that new breed,
the park runner – who got on my nerves, for, though you wouldn’t believe it now,
I really could run fast, so inwardly seethe when I hear them boast.

‘I’d be embarrassed to have been that slow,’ I gloat, and was ...

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I wanted to be the Bob Dylan of Ealing, and make my mark,
as a disenchanted emigrant of that London borough,
but couldn’t play the mouth organ, and the guitar barely at all.

My old English da, who’d wed a woman from the Irish county of Co Donegal,
hated my singing, preferring the forgotten Lancashire tenor Tom Burke,
son of an Irish coal miner.

He even wrote a book about him called The L...

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I dreamt I was on The Curragh of Kildare, that flat Irish plain,
where equine athletes train, and not far from where, in 1914,
Anglo-Irish officers staged a mutiny,
in protest against a British Parliament trying to establish home rule.

But the Angelus Bells, that daily national radio broadcast reminder of Catholic piety,
disturbed my day dreaming, and I made the sign of the cross,
but fell...

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Percy Plaice was a sage old fish, who loved to admire Blackpool’s scantily-clad women,
from a rock in The Irish Sea, until a plastic bag obscured his vision.

Alas, it contained several bottles of cider, and I’m afraid to say he became quite pissed.

Flapping his tail, he sang about his lost love, Mary the Dolphin,
who had left him, tired of his love of alcohol.

He remembered Mary as a sh...

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Have you heard of a TV show called Country Constable,
that popular TV crime drama, derided by some?

The villages of Sussex were favourite places, in which to set the series,
and I often watched them catch fictional villains, from my cottage in Pottle-Picklington.

My hit, Last train to Tangiers, a rare success during my singing career,
had enabled me to buy this bucolic retreat, hoping its...

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She was known as the Cat Lady, or to those with a wicked tongue,
‘Mad’ Mabel, for everyone knew about her love of the genus cuddly feline.

She’d christened her pet cat Flunnel, after Viktor,
a Bulgarian ship’s waiter,
who had trouble with English pronunciation.

They’d met on a cruise while she was looking for a husband, 
but Mabel, being a bit of a snob, opted for a smooth-talking Moroc...

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Jasus, it’s Christmas time, when the Saviour cometh, the reindeer sparkle, and Prince Harry appears with a photo of our late Queen,
who glares at his bride, Miss Markle.

Meanwhile millionaire footballers warm up for their match at Chelsea, looking down on their near neighbour, Fulham FC,
while just along the Thames, a busker sings, ‘Buddy, can you spare a dime?’

A football fan walks by and...

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Brent was hoping for a personal best in that morning’s park run,
in the beautiful city of Bath.

He was trying to ignore his partner Nimicent’s mindless chatter,
as she held onto Sophie, the all-seeing dog, who looked at them both,
and thought, ‘Every morning she gets me up, to watch him run, or is it jog?

‘Oh what a bore this is, in my day I’d watch my owner,
Niall Neverstops, run cross ...

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Major General Glutus Maximus rode his horse into a circus, to impress his fiancée, Aurelius Gentilitius.

Part of the Roman military elite, he went where his fancy took him,
and being particularly fond of theatrical performances, would often annoy impresarios and their audiences.

But on this occasion, alarmed by clowns and roaring lions, the nervous animal threw him onto the sawdust, where h...

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When I was a lad, I ran around the hills and fields of my native county,
now when I think about it, I feel sick, ’cos they were full of manure.

It has many beauty spots, does Lancashire.
Rivington Pike, guarding the Lancastrian Plain, Stonyhurst College,
that public school at Hurst Green, which produced Sherlock Holmes’
creator Conan Doyle, and my favourite, the Bowland fells.

But none ...

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Tenerife is calling, I can see Mount Teidie,
its mighty peak steeped in volcanic ash.

Can I land there, astride a balloon,
fuelled by my ego’s hot air?

I look down to where I used to parade myself, among my old flames on that volcanic beach, in flip flops and Armani shorts, wondering why I’d consigned myself to the bachelor shelf,
trying to look cool, then crying ‘Ouch!’
when the sand bu...

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He was the ‘comical’ artiste formerly known as Bill Bottom,
who was politely applauded at the ‘open mic’ night at Blackpool’s Dirty Blondes bar.

However, the reviews were savage, for crude jokes can only get one so far,
and he had chosen a silly pseudonym.
After critic Eric Leopard-White described Bill's act as ‘puerile,’
he set off for the English Lake District, to revive his creative spir...

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I flew to Rome and landed among pints of stout at O'Mahoney's Bar, along with a posse of British tourists.

Jamie, a Scotsman resplendent in a kilt, beamed with delight when the band played Whisky in the Jar.

But a stern-faced man of Kent commented, 'The Irish didn't help us in the war,' and the landlord looked furious.

Then a white-haired Italian stood by a fading photograph, featuring a ...

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Montessa the Mighty is out of sorts.

Shame, I was hoping to see her in shorts,
and learn from that little woman how to curse.

Why, her mum said she even swore at the nurse,
after emerging from the womb.

What a bundle of fun is that lady,
who hails from the land of Eternal Cloud.

It is rumoured she once showed that father of psychology,
Sigmund Freud, the sights of her home city of ...

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Micky Most, from Ireland’s county Mayo, became the toast of Kentish Town,
after he kicked a goal in extra time, to win a game of Gaelic football,
a cross between soccer and rugby.

But it was nothing to the roar that greeted Lachlan Lam,
whose right foot kicked the ball over the posts at Wembley,
to give Leigh the Rugby League Challenge Cup.

His old pal Walter had invited him along,
and ...

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He was a little kid from the back streets of the Shankill,
who became Britain’s leading exponent of a playwright called Will.

His name was Kenneth, and despite his fame,
he'll often revisit his home city of Belfast and relive childhood days, with his old pal Malachi, over a pint of plain.

But Ken can still recall the insults and hurled stones, the streets he was forbidden to enter by angry...

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‘Mad’ Mabel lived with her brother, ‘Red’ Mostravin,
the heir to a grand estate, which had seen better days.

He’d left the Army under a cloud – some say he refused to
attack striking workers in a time of industrial unrest,
and was a devotee of Karl Marx.

His old housekeeper, Mavis, watched him grow up,
under the stern rod of his father, General Sir Herbert Halfbreast.

He loved his sis...

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In my youth when the whims of women got me down, 
I would seek the company of ex-sergeant Eamonn McSwilly.

He’d fought at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus,
and would often do one of their war dances,
while drinking a pint of stout,
then sob into his glass, recalling the horror of
that misguided military campaign.

I would listen in awe, but it was myself,
a wet-behind-be-the ears young m...

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Do you see the man with the ridiculous 'tache,
behind women in corsets and flowery hats?

Some say he's a rake and a cad, and not very nice.

So take my advice, and avoid him at all costs.

He's not a gent at all, but a fantasist with no sense of smell,
who never washes his socks, as you'll learn
if you ever stay at Vose Hall.

The surroundings are splendid indeed,
and if he's feeling ...

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You will no doubt accuse me of being a charlatan,
when I tell you I joined a self-help group for troubled men,
to gather material for a would-be novel,
having won Best Essay Prize at Harrow public school.

I sat entranced as tormented souls unburdened themselves,
realising they are not alone, and reluctantly admitted to
being a misogynist (well, I had to confess to something).

I nodded i...

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All pop stars have their stalkers – while most
are merely a nuisance, others can be rather irksome.

Take the case of Rory Rocking Rogers,
my stage name, who became the victim of a
fame-obsessed denizen of the ocean.

While making a pop video in Ilfracombe,
that famed resort in the English county of Devonshire,
to promote new single, I’m Ravaged By Your Devotion,
the make-up lady told m...

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There’s a guy, festioned with headphones, acting strange in the library.

He’s babbles in tune to whatever he’s tuned into, at the computer terminal.

Outside, a dog wags his tail while Billy no-mates watches the short skirts pass by.

He’s outside a club called Funny Girls,
and is confused, ’cos the skirts are filled with hairy legs, making him wonder, ‘Am I hetro, homo, metro or bi?’

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Oh, mysterious Miss Coffee Cutie,
what do you think of when sipping your daily brew,
in the morning after the doctor has done his rounds?

You sit entranced like a cute mouse, ears a-twitching to the many accents,
from Geordie, in the north east with its castle that’s always new,
and that shrill sound emanating from our most musical city – you’ve guessed it,
the dialect known as Scouse.

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Why do all the Serbian football players in the
Euros tournament have an itch?

Abrofomitch, Saskovitch… do you get my drift?

Sorry for the repetitive rhymes, but we live in an uncertain,
dangerous world (you see I avoided that obvious one).

But according to BBC Radio Five Live,
discussing the football Euros campaign
goes before Brexit and its pitfalls,
in order of priority on its morn...

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I sat in the library wondering why my
fellow readers never seem to fall,
considering they do so much drinking, of alcohol.

Their hearts are failing under broken dreams,
but how many of those have they left sitting on late-departing trains?

Meanwhile the kids mock, alerted by a smoker’s cough,
whose dog barks at the weed, blowing off the Irish Sea.

Then O’Reilly waves, as he walks into...

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I'll tell you a far-fetched tale of Franny Frieloch,
that little Aussie bundle of fun from the
Australian city of Melbourne.

Her father, a German immigrant and inventor,
achieved fame for his self-inflating pillow,
used by gold prospectors in the Australian
bush, not to mention self-raising grass
fed with ant urine, to feed sheep in times of drought.

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I tried to look confident as I approached
Miss Veritable at the park cafe,
but stopped as I realised she was crying into her tea.

I called, only to be almost drowned out by the
band Massive Mouthful - tuning up for that afternoon’s concert, 
featuring a muscly rocker
with a voice like crunching gravel, 
who, according to the Acton Gazette,
well deserved his stage name of Mighty Marvel.

...

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‘Meet me in Londinium, before the legions arrive’,
I told a mysterious woman, whom I knew only as the Mystical Montessa.

We were both caught up in the nightmare of war,
as my countrymen fought the invading Roman army. 

Trapped between marching columns, we sheltered in undergrowth,
and I held her in my arms.

Persuaded that we were of like minds, lovers of the land and its lore,
she tol...

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I sat spellbound in the Dog and Whistle public house,
as my ‘friend’ Montessa ordered fish and chips, with baked beans,
and it suddenly struck me that she had a very sexy voice.

The barman was so stunned she had to ask twice,
unaware of him admiring her slender body, 
a result of hours on her mountain bike,
so she now fits easily into skinny jeans.

I’d applauded when she told those so...

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It all happened the day I attended the Hove writers’ group session.
Late as usual, I arrived as former headmaster,
Miles Meade-Mensum, was reading from his novel, Dilated Pupils.

I’d been encouraged to join the group by my therapist, 
who was fed up hearing me talk about a story
I was threatening to write.

It was about an obsessive nerd – me – who,
brought up by a bishop, spends his sp...

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A Dark Cloud
What am I doing here? I wonder,
making an advert for soap in a place called Masterful Canyon.

Seeking an answer, I get down and dirty amid cowering cactus.
But all I gained was a sore bottom, for cacti can be nasty.

I was startled to see a meteorite flash across the sky,
and hear a voice cry ‘You wouldn’t see that in Dublin,’
then saw an old Indian with a wooden box, full o...

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My schnozle is not well, due to the hot weather it oozes green liquid,
enough, in a desert of spare scrub, to fill a little well.

Lizards run away from it, suspicious of its effluence,
but the Texas scrub remains hard and prickly.

Then I watch what the Americans call ‘football’,
and cry ‘You call that a game!
I know where to go when I can’t sleep.’

On my return to England I’m told tha...

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After meeting Pedro the pedlar in Malle Mercados, 
I hired a boat to Peccadillo, where we sat and gazed at the señoritas.

But when I issued romantic invitations, they all said ‘Mañana’, 
yawned and ordered a round of café con leches
(which are coffees, don’t you speak Spanish?).

Then a woman called Dorothea explained she was a physiotherapist,
and I told her about the pain in my calf.

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‘Find me a chord and lyrics that scan,’ I said to the enveloping mist,
‘and a voice to suit a poetic man, so I can emulate my hero, Buddy Holly.’

‘Chuck in a love-stricken sweetheart, maybe a
western trucker hitting the road, miles of unending plain before him.’

I sat down and reflected that I’d loved to have played the 10-string tenor banjo,
just like that Dubliner Barney McKenna, but th...

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People scoff when I dig out my old reviews to boost a fading ego,
but I proudly boast to my contemporaries there was no one like me,
that old star of stage and screen, who almost became the ‘fifth’ Beatle.

Ah, but that’s another story.

As an actor, it hurt that some regarded me as a one-trick pony.
You see, being a handsome devil, I was often cast
as the romantic lead in our drama school...

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My motor car crept along, under the majestic shape of Co. Sligo’s prominent mountain, Ben Bulben, covered in an ominous black cloud, as I and the wife explored Yeats’ Country.

We filled up at Betty Hanharan’s, with a huge pot of tea to follow,
and met an old chap called Brian, whose delight it was to visit such a splendid county.

‘I’ll buy you a glass of stout,’ he told us,
‘down the road ...

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I sat in a quaint pub, guzzling its real ales,
and wondering how I could reconnect with Gabriela, my lost love, who was somewhere in Hicklegate, that famous spa town of North Yorkshire.

Then, staggering past the war memorial,
I was halted in my tracks by a preacher, and stood transfixed as he told me that ‘Jesus saves’.

‘Really?’ I said to myself, thinking that this town attracts some righ...

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I’m a talented fellow, full of grandiose claims, 
for instance, that I’ve climbed every mountain in the Lake District. 

So what, I included one which is only a hill,
and alright, I exaggerated when boasting about rescuing that adventurer Ranulph Fiennes.
You know the one, who walked across Antarctica braving snow and ice.

I didn't rescue him from an avalanche, or from plummeting over a pr...

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Flower power erupted in the gardens of Hicklegate,
when an old African lady visited the town’s beautiful parks,
and put a magical ingredient on the roots of its budding plants.

She’d obtained it from a mixture of Lesothian beetle droppings,
topping it off with a coating from some Congolese ants.

But former Royal Naval midshipman, Percy Picklethwaite,
smelt a familiar odour, that reminded...

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I ran 5000 metres on a running track in 14 minutes and 34 seconds,
a personal best by a country mile, but I didn't really enjoy
the cut and thrust of track and field, preferring the road and those fell races
where I could race down a gradual descent, leaping like a stag over rock and stile.

I liked to pretend I could mix it with the ‘tough men of the fells’, and pick up easy prizes.

Which...

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Her name’s Triumph, and she daily triumphs against adversity.

An African lady, she left her homeland, a dominion of this Disunited Kingdom,
to come and teach mathematics in the ‘Mother Country’.
Now, according to the warden of a Yorkshire park home, this old woman’s a ‘nutter’.

She waved her arms and said ‘Thank you very much’,
after crossing the road after getting off the bus.

That wa...

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I wash my hair in washing-up liquid, it saves the pennies while making it curl.
I thought it would make me look the part, as a roadie with a band called Everything But The Girl.

I’d joined after I was kicked out from my teaching post at Mulchester Marton public school,
after broadcasting radical views over the school radio.

I was vilified by the PC brigade and called an ‘old fart’, after m...

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I strolled along the Dingle, taking a break from teaching my psychology students,
who’d scoffed when I’d claimed, ‘Though I am of a logical bent,
I believe that there’s more to this world than you think.’

When who should I meet but a marvellous mermaid, sunning herself in the morning mist,
which is quite an achievement in itself.

Among the riverside detritus, she shone like a beacon in th...

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My name is ‘Buncie’ Billington-Brig, a genuine self-important old fool,
who loves to pontificate on society’s ills while propping
up the bar in my local, The Dancing Duck.

I was happy in my pomposity, as befitting a secretary of the Masonic Hall,
until the night subtle hints were made that my wife – chairwoman of our village branch
of The Keep Britain Pure society, was anything but.

Inde...

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As a rugby league fan, there are many tales I relish of the great game,
but none are as remarkable as that of the little lad who ignored the critics to fulfil his lifelong dream.

In a northern city not too long ago, Malachi Middlemound,
all five-foot two of him, harboured a secret ambition – to play rugby for his hometown.
But notorious braggart, ‘Bruiser’ Bill Billycan, would laugh, saying ...

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My story begins the night Heathcliff, that handsome literary invention of
one half of the Bronte sisters, popped his head into my tent above Withins Moor,
saying, ‘Budge over, she’s kicked me out.

‘I’ve been carousing at The Sleepy Shepherd, with my creator Emily,
but her sister Charlotte turned up, and she don’t half like her pints of stout.’

Filled with fear at this apparition, I hastil...

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I met an interesting fellow in the Mountains of Frustration, that remote but beautiful part of northern England, who told me he was a court jester, and proved it with a barrage of jokes and magic tricks, confessing, ‘I like to keep my hand in.’

‘You have a look of a chap I met,’ he said,
‘whose disappearance fascinated the nation,
that of the missing Match Of The Day TV presenter, Harry Shoot...

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As a young ’un, Little Rob was told he was too small,
considering he was five-foot nothing, to run and score with the oval ball.

But he wouldn’t listen, and forged his own path in the 13-aside game,
much maligned in this country, where soccer reigns supreme.

He brought a smile to the hearts of us rugby leaguers,
as he made the opposition big lads wish they could take an ‘early bath’.

I...

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‘I’m indulging in self-pity,’ I mused, reflecting on my latest attempt at seduction,
which hadn’t even got past the starting post.

Just like a newly-crowned king on his throne, I’d had admirers but no partakers in the court of romance.
One particular, dressed so alluring in a nurse’s uniform, used to glance towards me at the bus stop.

However, I was dismayed when I saw her with a good look...

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She was a ruddy-faced nun, banished to a convent to cure her habit of singing cheeky songs,
where she met Sister Superiorer McPeake, who saw in her a talent for musical theatre,
and turned a blind eye so the novice could sneak out at night to star in the Rocky Horror Show.

But one night, sobbing in the street, because she’d realised that
Christ was her only true love, she gazed at the stars ...

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