King Arthur's sleepless knights
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Your support makes all the difference.Dramatic and brooding, Tintagel is set on one of the wildest and most savagely romantic coastlines in Britain. The legendary birthplace of King Arthur is saturated in folklore ... gift shops, hordes of visitors and piles of plastic Excaliber swords. What, asks Liverpool poet Brian Patten, would Merlin and the original Knights of the Round Table make of it all if they were around today?
Tintagel in Cornwall mercilessly milks its connection with King Arthur and Merlin. The exploitation of any legend is fair game. But in a place with one of the wildest, most savagely romantic coastlines in Britain, the concentration on plastic Excaliber swords and the equivalent of the Excaliber Sup-U-Like and Happy Knights Take Away are depressing. What would the original inhabitants of Tintagel castle be doing if they were around now?
What are they up to now, those
medieval heroes?
Sir Lancelot, old and wheezy,
Sits in the back room of the
King Arthur Tavern;
His mind half gone,
He mistakes the glass of wine
shaking in his arthritic
hands for the Holy Grail;
Sir Perceval's a write-off,
Released under a care in the
Community Scheme
He's back in Tintagel
Embarrassing the day-trippers;
In the King Arthur car park
Sir Bedivere's arguing with the
grockles,
He's been short-changing them
again.
Sir Galahad's in trouble -
He's been slipping love potions
into young girls' drinks -
The blonde waitress at the
Camelot Cafe
Has shopped him at last,
Poor old geezer, mumbling
about sheaves and swords,
His innuendoes ripe as melons;
Guinevere couldn't stand him;
She gave up her job at the
Excaliber Sud-U-Like
And ran off with a prat from
the Cornish tourist board.
Merlin fared little better:
His magic reduced to trivia
He turned himself into a
million and one souvenirs
And opened a gift shop.
Perceval, Bors, Gawain, Morgan le Fay, the Fisher King,
The poet shamans, the whole
weird crew,
Wander back and forth
between the lands
Of the living and the dead and
the not-quite-sure.
Spectral creatures,
Glimpsed in Tintagel High
Street late at night
By a few solitary believers.
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