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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