This isn’t the first time that I’ve written about my Fibonacci poetry on these pages but today, I’m particularly thrilled that I have ten new poems published in The Fib Review #19 which came out over the weekend. These poems, written to a syllable count taking self-imposed rules from the medieval Italian arithmetician, Leonardo Fibonacci, the so-called Fibonacci Sequence when a pattern is seen in the relationship between  numbers written to the pattern 1: 1 : 2 : 3 : 5 : 8 :13 : 21 : 34  etc. etc.  At it’s simplest the pattern means that each number is the sum of the previous two but you can, of course, reverse the order and do a whole number of variations. I’ve loved imposing this discipline on my poetry and now, thanks to the continuing support of The Fib Review‘s editor Mary-Jane Grandinetti, I have been writing ‘Fibs’ for over five years, forty-five of them published in fifteen consecutive issues of The Fib Review, the World’s leading Fibonacci publisher. Heres’ the link where you will find my ten poems plus a whole lot more.  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

This summer I’ve been sorting all my Fibonacci poetry into some kind of order, there are now 62 of them, and found that they sat together happily enough and, without being a literal narrative, they tell the story of my many brief encounters with people in my personal life but also in the years when I worked in television. Sorting them out and writing some to fill the gaps, it was a bit like putting together a photograph album so, it was not much of a struggle to call the collection, Brief Encounters. Some of the latest poems have been about meetings with famous people, some admired, some feared and some disliked. It’s possibly a form of poetic name-dropping but I hope it adds up to more than that. Not all the encounters were with the famous – some are friends, some strangers and, a few, are imaginary encounters with some of my fears and obsessions.

In Issue 19 of The Fib Review,  four of the ten poems deal with my meetings with the famous – vivid memories all. As all four are now deceased, it seemed like a good idea to memorialise those brief encounters among my latest Fibonacci experiments with minimalism. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

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So here we go again – the British Prime Minister makes an impassioned speech from what can look from certain angles as the moral high ground. He will defend the little islands known as the Falklands or the Malvinos and confirm his military muscle if Argentina threatens this last outpost of Empire. 

Diplomacy will go out of the window, this government’s speciality,  as it did thirty years ago when Mrs Thatcher saved her political reputation for her supporters at least by throwing everything into a bloody 74 day war. You can forget the austerity budget here in the UK too if Britain decides to escalate the aggression. It will be full steam ahead for our naval fleets and for any aircraft that we still own. I forget what we decided over those aircraft carriers – maybe we will build a new one after-all.

I know we’ve been there before, the Falklands that is, thirty years ago this year in fact but I wasn’t talking about the billions of pounds spent on defending that small British outpost since 1982 no, I was referring to our, and other countries’ enthusiasm for high principled warfare whenever oil pops up through a pipe in the ground.

Oil companies are expecting to fill 8.3 billion barrels with Falklands Oil in the waters around the islands this year whilst the small but aggressively named company Rockhopper Exploration Plc is asking one of the big oil companies for $2 billion to develop the Sea Lion field, apparently the islands’ first economically viable oil find.

If this project is as successful as the “experts” are predicting then all eyes will turn to that little group of islands – it explains why David Cameron is so keen to attack Argentina’s “colonial” attitude to what he sees as a British possession that lies 300 miles from the Argentine coast. 

Mrs Thatcher persuaded Britain last time that a Falklands War was a good idea, it will be a tougher job for the politically much less astute David Cameron. Mrs T had her exocet missiles but at least Mr C has a much more potent weapon – he can deploy the nation’s pin-up in the centre of things in the person of a sweet-natured prince, our very own Prince William in the role of a brave helicopter pilot. I can see the television reportage already.

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We love our knights here in Britain. There is something special about being defended from evil by these men in shining armour and long pointy swords. That’s why they are all going to the wedding of Prince William Windsor and the young damsel Kate Middleton, soon to be a bit of a Lady Guinevere herself.

Hang on a moment, I may have got this wrong.

I am told that the knights going to the wedding are not heroic fighting figures at all, nope they are mostly old geezers in funny hats with a few younger royals thrown in to flesh out the numbers.

How disappointing that there won’t be a few daring blades there like that heroic knight in the Monty Python film about the Holy Grail who carried on fighting even after his arms and legs had been chopped off.

Well, I suppose, one of those knights of the funny hats who manages to survive as many attempts at chopping him down is the Queen’s favourite son, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, rejected husband of the lovely Lady Fergie, and Imperial Envoy and Ambassador to dodgy businessmen around the World. He will be at the wedding.

Young William is also a knight of the funny hats as is his Dad, Prince Charles, a near-sighted Don Quixote who tilts at windmills such as modern life and who looks strangely normal in this outfit. The royal princes, also William’s other uncle, Edward (who has now given up working because his failures got too expensive) are just some of the honorary members of this noble order of knights known as the Knights of the Garter and they are obviously going to be at the wedding. They are not real heroes though, they are known as supernumerary knights as they are only included because they are royal princes – supernumerary indeed.

No, the real knights are people like this man:

Sir John Major, Lancelot to some but failed Conservative Prime Minister to many others. He is going to the wedding.

Another knight is invited who was never frightened of wielding a sword or a handbag:

The iron lady herself, former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The Order Of The Knights Of The Garter goes back to the olde worlde dayes of medieval England when knights were knights and peasants knew their place. The boss knight who gives out these knighthoods is the reigning monarch who, in the case of Queen Elizabeth is no stranger to silly hats.

It is odd how she looks perfectly normal in this gear whilst the others all look like prats. Anyway, in this week of so-called royal wedding fever, the Knights of the Garter business has caused a scandal. Why is it, even stout royalists, ask, why is it that the order of the funny hats get in to that wedding but the last two British Prime Ministers do not? If even the Syrian ambassador gets an invite whilst his government is killing Syrian citizens, how could the last two Labour Prime Ministers be left off the list?

Well, even though as former Prime Ministers, they will get those feathery hats one day, they haven’t got them yet and so, sorry loves, you can’t come in.  I suspect they are not bothered but it says two things about the British establishment. One is that it has become, once again, an aristocratic elite and the other thing is that it has shown its increasingly fumbling grasp on reality.

I bet William and Kate wish that they could have had that small Norfolk wedding after-all.

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As I have said before in these blogs, I am sure that David Cameron is a very nice chap who would like to do his best. Yesterday, yet again, he was telling us that he is feeling “incredibly optimistic” which was quite sweet but also quite scary as he embarks on the government’s hastily cobbled together plans for reorganizing the National Health Service. This is the Coalition Government’s style: rush in and get things done.

We didn’t, of course, know what we were getting at the last general election. Would it be Labour or would it be the Conservatives? No one really expected this Coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, not even them themselves. So manifestos had to be largely thrown away and the new government began a process of inventing policies as they went along like this new NHS plan. All we could see is that they wanted to do things quickly, change things, make an impact.

One thing they did promise before the election, well the Conservatives that is, was that they would move quickly on making major cuts in the economy even if they didn’t know exactly how they would do it. David Cameron is incredibly optimistic about this too and so our economy is being overhauled with a whistle and a prayer.

Behind all this is the ghost of Tony Blair who, in 1997,  arrived in office as a bright young thing full of great plans for the future and ready for change.

The trouble with Blair, well there were a lot of things wrong with him but that is another point, the trouble with Blair’s first administration was that it was frightened of doing things too quickly, frightened of scaring the City and frightened of scaring the middle Classes so it lost its great chance to change things whilst it was still popular.

David Cameron admired Tony Blair and would love to have his now derided “common touch” – none of the rest of us want another Tony but David is an old-fashioned guy. The one thing he is determined to avoid though is Tony’s big mistake.

So there will be no time for reflection, no time for details, no time for plans B – the Coalition is going to act quickly even if that means ignoring the experts and ruining whole swathes of the country’s infrastructure in the process.

Let’s hope that they get at least some of it right.

Margaret Thatcher, rather surprizingly, was an admirer of the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee who was responsible for introducing the National Health Service after the Second World War even though he knew that there really wasn’t enough money in the till to pay for it. He is reported to have said afterwards that he knew that if he didn’t introduce a welfare state that looked after its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”, no one ever would.  I would love to think that Mr Cameron had similarly great ideas but, as Margaret Thatcher said of the quietly businesslike Attlee, he was “all substance and no show.” not something we could say about Tony Blair or David Cameron.

David Cameron, as well as being “incredibly optimistic” is also, I feel sure, full of good intentions as were most British prime ministers when they were new to office.

‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’

Well, even her strongest supporters would say that she didn’t do any of that.

New prime ministers deserve a touch of optimism but they also need to get real. Government is hard, change in a modern democracy is complex and frustrating. If you are a bright new broom, like Thatcher, Blair and Cameron it is relatively easy to make big brash speeches of incredible optimism. If you have to try to pick up the pieces after them though, it is another story. Look at post-Thatcher PM, John Major and post-Blair PM, Gordon Brown.

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It has been quite an interesting week here in Lewes viewing the world from my sick bed as I go through the mildly pleasant recovering process after a bout of wolf-flu. It is cold and sunny out there but I have thrown a few more logs into my wood burner and coffee beans into my coffee grinder and sat back insulated from the hurly burly as I read the newspapers to see how everyone else is getting on.

I can tell you, folks, it looks like a mad mad world out there.

It is all about money.

Here in Britain, it has been the week when the government announced its “spending review,” telling us that we can no longer afford the welfare state and that we will all have to pay the cost of the massive deficit run up to bail out the bankers and other international financiers who nearly sent international capitalism through the floor with their recklessness and, I suspect, incompetence. Whatever the reasons for the country’s debt problems, we are all in for a period of austerity and, whether we like it or not, we are in the soft, inexperienced and beautifully manicured hands of our newly elected coalition government whose policies will dictate how long the financial crisis will last and what sort of society we will be living in over the next decades.

All hope is being attached to the prospect of private enterprise picking up the slack after the government has chopped 500,000 jobs which, in turn will probably lead to another 500,000 jobs going in dependent industries. Well the coalition is a conservative-liberal one, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the emphasis on private enterprise and the role of the individual in saving the nation. It is a vision of society much promoted by our former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, also in bed with wolf-flu, who was lauded yesterday in a speech by one of her most adoring fans, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch who praised her for her vision of Britain as “a society of citizens who are upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends, and robust against enemies.”

If we exclude the upright and loyalty to friends bits and, after-all those are the least accurate parts of his Thatcherite description of Britain, Mr Murdoch is painting a portrait of young Mr Wayne Rooney, formerly one of England’s most admired footballers.

No one can dispute that Rooney is energetic – well as long as he isn’t too shagged out after his away games with prostitutes during his wife’s pregnancy.

Adventurous too when you look at some of his most glorious moments on the football pitch.

His self-sufficiency has come to the surface this week too as he has ditched loyalty to friends in the interests, or so we are told, of doubling his mighty salary by moving to another football club whilst rubbishing his present one and his curent team-mates.

Independent-minded is a term difficult to attach to anyone of such limited intelligence but he has certainly stuck to his guns over what he thinks life is all about – money, fast cars, sex, football and self-promotion. He knows what he wants and he is going to get it no matter who he upsets.

He has told the legendary current manager of his football club, Alex Ferguson, that the club “lacks ambition” meaning that it is concentrating too much on home grown talent and isn’t sufficiently aggressive in the international cattle market for star players. Wayne certainly knows how to be “robust against enemies.”

So, as we have no choice now but to watch the developments in Mr Rooney’s career as well as the progress of the coalition government’s financial policies, we will have to see how this vision of the future will deliver here in Britain. Sadly, not all the people in our society who will be paying the cost of that national deficit will be quite so able to stand as upright, self-sufficient or energetically as a highly-paid 24 year old athletic genius.

Even if they could, would be want a nation of Wayne Rooneys? If our future is going to be painted in the image of Mr Rooney, Mr Osborne, Mr Murdoch and Mrs Thatcher, then I have suddenly lost my will to survive my wolf-flu.

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