Being English

Some poems never really get old, unfortunately. Years ago while at a writing workshop, I was warned to stop writing "topical" poems. The world moves too fast these days, I was told, and the turning cycle of publishing houses is slower than an oil tanker in high winds - by writing about political events, I was usually giving my work a six month "use by" date. 

This turned out to be rubbish advice (and possibly inaccurate nautical advice, though I'm no expert). While it's certainly true that political parties move at an incredibly swift pace, and the emergence of new figureheads and influential voices constantly surprises - I couldn't have foreseen Donald Trump becoming president when I first wrote this poem, though I might have had an inkling that Boris Johnson would eventually become Prime Minister - the underlying tensions seldom change that much. The political pendulum is constantly trying to find its natural resting place, and poems and works of literature which seem irrelevant one year can frequently become relevant again two years hence, however much you might wish that weren't the case. Sometimes all you need to do with political poems is swap the names of the politicians around a bit, and hey presto, they're relevant again and nobody is any the wiser.  

Still, nobody is actually named in this poem and none of the above really nails what it's actually about, but the lines "we are immeasurably, utterly sorry for every state of affairs/ but nothing must change" leapt out at me yesterday, and you'll know why. Apologies come easily to us as a nation. Shifting the entire narrative and instigating real change, on the other hand, often seems too frightening, too sudden and impolite, undoes far too much "tradition". Enough said, hopefully.

There's lots of bits of this poem I don't like anymore and I'd do it differently if I had to do it all over again, but that will never stop being a problem either...