Tag Archives: performance

These Helpful Robots – A Piece of Short Fiction

Let me catch it, pass it to you. Intense rain rolling down the windscreen of the bus, caught by the wipers, pass it over, the windscreen wipers, just for a few seconds, clearing the windscreen of the rain, halting its downward flow, the torrents of rain on the bus windscreen, two wipers, one on either side, working in unison, let me catch it, pass it to you. These mundane and helpful robots entrance me, mesmerise me, I hope the driver doesn’t see me staring in his rear view mirror and think I am staring at him, let me catch it, pass it to you, back and forth they swing, back and forth, as the bus passes through deep puddles, hear the water in the wheel wells, it’s absolutely torrential, let me catch it, pass it to you, let me catch it, pass it to you.

          I have vivid memories of being a child on the back seat of my parents car, which would have been an Austin 1100 or a Austin 1800, there were no seat belts in those days, no buckles, and the seats felt like leather but probably weren’t, they were comfortable, the seats, I remember being in the back seat with my parents in the front and we were probably driving from my uncles house near the airport home along the dual carriageway, because it had rows of streetlights which I recall so vividly, these streetlights lit in the dusk and lined up like robot soldiers, they looked so pretty, these street lights, and there were electricity pylons with electricity lines slung one to the next, and they had these ceramic separators to stop the lines from touching, and when I was a kid in the back seat of that Austin 1100 I’d look at these ceramic separators and it looked like they were moving along the electricity line, it looked like they were moving back and forth, back and forth. The streetlights would curl away following the route of the dual carriageway. And then it would rain, and the rain would tumble from the sky as if flung down, and dad would put on the windscreen wipers and I would stare at them, let me catch it, pass it to you, let me catch it, pass it to you.  And the rain on the windscreen would smear the view, spoil the symmetry and the order of the row of streetlights, the ceramic separators moving along their electricity cables, that these mundane and helpful robots would do their best to clear a view so that I could see the ceramic separators doing their own thing and the streetlights like soldiers protecting us from whatever was gathering in the autumn dusk, on this rainy day, near the airport of one of the busiest cities on the planet, and it’s no wonder that I’ve always found beauty in the urban environment, it’s no wonder that I’ve been able to assign personalities to inanimate objects.

          Let me catch it, pass it to you. I wonder if the bus driver thinks I am staring at him. He’s sitting there safe in his cab concentrating on the road in front of him. He doesn’t know that I am thinking of my dad.

Cola Tin – A Piece of Flash Fiction

Today I went and sat on the terrace of a restaurant / bar on the seafront, at a picnic table, with a book and a Coca-Cola that I had ordered from the bar. I was reading the book and drinking the Coca-Cola, which had been my intention when I’d decided to go to the restaurant / bar. It was a bit breezy, and I was worried either the glass of Cola, or the tin that they’d given me, would blow away, but both were heavy enough not for this to occur.

          But the more I drank the Cola, and kept tipping it into the glass from the tin, the more likely it became that the tin would blow away in the breeze. The trouble was that I was also reading the book, which meant that I didn’t have a spare hand to hold the tin while also turning the pages of the book, and if I let go then the pages would flutter in the breeze and I’d lose my place. I had my bag on the table, which I tried to use as a rudimentary wind-break, but this was insufficient, and the Cola tin, now that it was less full, kept wobbling in a worrying manner.

          When I decanted the last of the Cola into the glass, the tin was now prone to rolling off and clattering on the floor of the terrace, and I didn’t want this to happen because I’d have to put down the book I was reading. I thought about putting the tin into my bag, but I considered that this might look odd to the other customers and to the staff, even though there was a logical explanation. It was a lovely sunny day, but it felt chilly in the breeze, and I hadn’t brought a jacket.

          The book was an account of an Arctic expedition to measure the sea ice and it had some fascinating passages about the way that the ice flows around the Arctic Ocean, and another section which detailed the way that the magnetic North Pole has moved over the years, wandering from the far north of Canada in an easterly direction. I must admit that I am not entirely sure what the magnetic North Pole is or why this is important. When there’s no wind, I can read the pages uninterrupted without having to worry about losing my place in the book. I am drawn to books or documentaries which take as their subject the frozen North and I wonder if this is because of something primal deep within me, and a need for exploration, or maybe I just like being away from other people. The nose tusk of the narwhal is slightly off-centre because it isn’t a tusk, but a very long tooth. I learned this from the book about Arctic exploration, the one that I was reading on the terrace of the restaurant / bar, while also worrying about the cola tin.

Sofa Phobia – Live in Penzance

Here’s a video of my poem ‘Sofa Phobia’, filmed earlier this month in Penzance. It’s true, I do have a phobia of sofas. They’re disgusting things. It’s nice that I can laugh about these things.

Oh when the Goose is Amorous – A Poem

Oh, when the goose is amorous,
Willing to express his tender romantic inclinations
To Mrs Goose
And love is quite the possibility,
Goose poetry forms in his mind,
And words take on extra meaning
To which he gives voice,
To goose sonnets and goose odes
To explain his heartfelt love.
He takes a deep breath 
And strikes her gentle shoulder
And says
HONK

A storm of words cascades through his brain!
He eulogises the sweetness inherent in Mrs Goose
That she should set afire his soul
With burning lust,
That he should softly purr this tender refrain:
HONK

And Mrs Goose is turned on by his words,
Turned on by the subtlety of his eloquence
And replied with great charm
And a keen eye for erotic repartee
HONK

William Shakesgoose with his feathery quill
Penned odes to love which on the page he did spill
Explaining what it mean to be alive and be free
That even today we should proudly quote he
Standing proud on that Elizabethan stage and proclaiming
HONK

Oscar Wildgoose, with a fey wave of his wing
Could reduce a room to laugher with his legendary wit
For language danced at his beck and call,
Such hilarious put downs and Bonne mots 
For he was often heard to quip:
HONK

Flying to Belgium
The pilot just happened to be a goose
Came over the tannoy to give us
The expected arrival time in Brussels
HONK

A crowd of sexed up male gooses
Gathered outside the vehicle hooter testing facility
They’re getting ever so wound up
By the sky sexuality of the
Noises coming from within.
Oh, baby baby,
Talk dirty to me.
HONK

Goose literature 
Translated for a feathery audience
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
HONK
Les Miserables
HONK
The Canterbury Tales
HONK
Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu 
HONK HONK
(It’s in two volumes)
And perhaps
A haiku
HONK

The man of my dreams, so butch and fit 
With a face like Adonis and the body of a god
Oh, I said to him, sing for me, Stefan,
Give voice to your
Rampant masculinity
And he said
.
.
.
.
HONK

Impending Headache (1992)

In 1992 I was 18 years old and wanted ever so desperately to be a writer. I was inspired by anyone who could make me laugh. Douglas Adams and Clive James were both very important in my writing aspirations.

I’d been writing the Bill Board books since 1985, (see my previous blog,https://professorofwhimsy.com/2025/06/18/my-writing-career-part-2-the-bill-years-1985-2022/). In 1992 I was studying, or I should say, ‘studying’, for my A Levels at Strode’s’ College in Egham, Surrey, and the idea came to set the next Bill Board book there.

It was incredibly fun to write and I enlisted the help of various friends and classmates. My friend Damian designed the cover, and I included quotes from various friends throughout the novel.

The story was very slim. Bill and Justin go undercover at a sixth form college to stop criminal activity. The plot was just secondary to the endless jokes and wordplay, a lot of which, looking back, weren’t very clever at all.

So here are some of the pages of that pivotal work!