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Your support makes all the difference.If St Swithin's Day be wet
The rabbit gets a bit upset,
But if it doesn't come to much
He may just venture from his hutch.
Your Hengist and your Horsa,
Your Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Your Ethelred and Hilda,
Your Alfreds and Canutes
Expunged from education,
Not sexy any more,
As market-led exam boards
Desert the Saxon shore.
My teacher, Mrs Wigmore,
From long decades ago
Would rattle in her coffin
To learn that this is so.
The Saxons and their kinsmen,
She drummed into our heads,
Had given us our place names,
The "tuns", the "hams", the "steads".
Her picture of that period
In moot and fyrd and fold
Lit up the dusty classroom
When I was 12 years old.
And if we let the system
Steal centuries off the shelves,
We don't just edit history,
We're editing ourselves.
We're Philistines, we British,
And everybody knows it.
We opt for entertainment,
Our choice of viewing shows it.
But give a bit of money
And space to an Italian,
And how will he reward us?
A stuffed suspended stallion.
A dead horse on the ceiling -
It's hanging in the Tate.
A sea of culture calls you -
Come in, the water's great!
This priceless piece of sculpture
Will serve to teach our young
That only Art can show us
How horses should be hung.
They've put a poet on a train,
His name is Ian Macmillan.
They asked him if he'd do it,
He said that he was willin'.
A residency on the rails?
Good luck sir, from us all.
Now here's a brief commercial
(I hope Great Western call):
Hi. This is is your railway poem
For customers to Cardiff.
I'm sorry that it cannot rhyme
Until we get to Swansea.
Those who wish to hear a switch
Of metre before Newport
Should change at Bristol Parkway
Where an iambus is waiting.
This is due to shortages
Of syllables in Swindon.
This poem is running approximately
Three feet short. I do not yet know
Why it has stopped.
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