I am driving home on the dual carriageway. I have the car set on cruise control at 60 mph as I am not in a hurry.

I see in my rear view mirror a minibus approaching slightly faster than me and as we are about to go into a dip before there is a long hill climb up the carriageway. I know the driver will want to maximise the speed in that dip to help ‘slingshot’ the heavier vehicle up the lengthy incline. I consider going faster myself to allow the driver to make that increase in speed, but decide it’s not for me to make any adjustments. I’m on cruise, as I say, and quite content to stick at my speed in my lane, which is my right.

Sure enough, I see the minibus pick up a little speed, get near to the back of my car, but by this time we are moving out of the dip and up the hill. The minibus begins an attempt to overtake, but the cruise control keeps my speed at that constant 60 mph, and the driver in the minibus drifts back and has to pull in behind.

All the way up the hill the minibus is barking at my heels, matching my speed, and making one of those gestures motorists make when it hasn’t worked out for them. A gesture with the minibus rather than anything else. Indeed, the driver keeps both hands on the wheel throughout. But I can tell the driver is miffed by sticking so close. I don’t care. I’m cruising home, not having to make any adjustments, and at ease with things.

At the top of the long hill and just as the road levels out there’s my turning left to go home. The minibus is beginning to gain some speed, and I do put my indicator on so the driver doesn’t need to make another attempt to overtake, knowing I will be out of the way in a moment. As I move into the sliproad, the minibus begins to pass on the right. In fact, it’s at this point I confirm it is a minibus, rather than a van. I also then see the name of the minibus owner printed down the side, and I read as it passes slowly by, finally on its way having been kept in check by my determination not to alter my speed or course: Torquay Boys Grammar School.

Not an exhilarating win, but a small, existential triumph.

UKIP: Former leader Nigel Farage with a consistently negative rhetoric about foreigners/immigration has clear, singular impact on Brexit vote through the fear/anxiety generated by this; ‘new’ leader of Party Diane James resigns after 18 days; prospective next leader of the Party Steven Woolfe has altercation with senior colleague Mike Hookam and is hospitalised

Conservatives: current leader and Prime Minister Theresa May is elected by default when there is no opposition [also not elected by public to be PM]; senior Minister Michael Gove involved in blatant treachery during election campaigning; senior Minister Boris Johnson is instrumental in arguing for Brexit but evidence subsequently suggests he did not believe in/support this; Panama Papers reveal large number of Tory members with offshore financial dealings

Labour: Jeremy Corbyn is elected as Leader of Labour, twice, with massive majority on a mandate that reflects years’ of consistent and principled following; there are resignations from Shadow Cabinet posts and significant bickering within Party about political differences

Much could be added to each of these three snapshot views, and much I think to flesh out precisely the line I have taken here, elaborating on and consolidating the view reflected. I also accept others could select and present different information and viewpoints, but I firmly believe the essence of what I have presented is accurate.

The media representation of the differing levels of treachery and incompetence and infighting within these three political parties seems to me to focus mostly on Labour. I could of course be sensitised to this, but I genuinely feel the bias against is there. An example today was on the BBC lunchtime news: in looking at Corbyn’s emerging new shadow cabinet, the lead-in to this was about the apparent conflicts already emerging, rather than reporting the names and positions. A similar report occurred the day after Corbyn’s recent re-election: the BBC reported that a meeting of Labour First [‘Labour moderates’] held a meeting at a pub and, as stressed, so many attended they had to spill out into the street. Well, it was just a pub…..! I have written quite a detailed account of another similar example here.

I haven’t even mentioned Nick Clegg.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
hoping our like-ship never ends,
the agreeing comments and sharing too,
this approbation which comes through you.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
keen to join in one of the popular trends:
it’s National Poetry Day so I’m writing in verse,
my own ideas and not a newspaper search.

I send this message to my Facebook friends –
not the causes my posting usually defends,
and rather than a sonnet this set of quatrains
with digs at social media its satirical refrains.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
like a surviving library with books it still lends
after cuts – sorry, I fell in an onomatopoeic trap
of sharing heartfelt ideas others consider crap.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
without pictures of mac ‘n’ cheese or burnt ends,
no towering burgers, or platters of ribs and steak,
but a selfie of me in a hot-tub at a seaside break.

I send this message to my Facebook friends,
a public act of trust for the privacy it transcends:
insights or just asides perhaps best left unsaid
if adrift in cyberspace unliked as if an undead.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
with an apology to make some amends
for a preceding stanza so stark and serious
when it isn’t de rigour to post the imperious.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
hoping its mix of wry truths recommends
poetic warm readings with an incline to care,
tasty memoranda a metaphor to tear and share.

Sharing this here, a NPD poem I posted on Facebook: in a previous posting I urged people to ‘message’ poems to one another, this being about as apt a facility out there to fully utilise the theme of messages for this day. I’ll never know how many did.

Teaching ideas for today here.

Please don’t leave me

beached with other lonely ones
like a tombstone rising on a tide line
as a useless see-through windbreak
sucking a billion grains of sand

Please return me to

a machine marrying me to others
the reception of the receptacles
other transparencies
new possibilities for my future

Please don’t leave me

intruding in a sand dune
hidden like a trap
waiting to be drowned
emptied and forgotten

Please return me to

a new grip for drinking
those who’ll see me again and again
tidal waves of conveyer belts
plastic reinvention

Please don’t leave me

scattered by the random wind
with four centuries of dying
swelling whales like Jonah’s cries
digestible as poison

Please return me to

a better environment
seashore hands and filled anew
a broken link in the food chain
fresh thinking

One day to go until National Poetry Day and its theme of Messages, and here is another poem I have been working on using the ‘message in a bottle’ idea, linked to the current Surfers Against Sewage campaign for a national move to deposit return bottles, read here.

On the day it is also reported that discarded take-away coffee cups could each take 30 years to break down, these are no-brainer environmental issues and necessary suggestions for beginning to seriously deal with it.

This is another list poem idea that could be used in the classroom tomorrow, students perhaps engaged and enthused by the issue and expressing their thoughts and feelings in poetic messages.

This picture is of the lawn-damage my current cleverclogs mole is making – not going underground to erupt in mounds of dirt, which is the norm and thus making it easy to place traps to catch and kill, but rather skimming just beneath the grass and causing these random lines of damage without my being able to track or find any spot with a depth where a trap can be set:

The little bastard. I have written about my decades’ old battle with moles and posted about this here and here as well as this haiku about the last mole I caught and killed here. And I have no compunction about getting rid of these creatures because of the extraordinary damage a single one can cause, an aspect I have explored in my ruminating but cathartic poems because I do not normally or easily kill animals.

I think the poems are cathartic…

Mole Au Fait

This new mole is a submarine, a few slight mounds
breaking through the grass-arched tunnels like failed
periscopes, no holes in these with a depth to set my
traps which have caught and finished the others. A wise,
wily skimmer.  I could walk for hours along its winding
protrusions and still not lay the lawn back to its flatter
unevenness from that damage of years ago – and those
poems about give and take, growing older, life and death.
There’s no philosophy in this, but a seeming evolution of
tactic just as I had learned a new skill for slaying, and it’s
the taunting that angers me now the most: ribbed routes
plotting its underground joyrides that I never catch live in
the calculated journeys of insult. I wish I’d made my
gibbet years ago for a killer’s visible if mummified wins.

NB I don’t know if it is a well-known term: the ‘gibbet’ in my poem alludes to a keeper’s gibbet. On the large Suffolk farm where I worked many years ago, the gamekeeper was responsible obviously for raising and managing game-birds for their annual slaughter [I do think this is quite different to a mole invading my garden] but he also had to control the vermin on the farm. To demonstrate he was doing his job, the gamekeeper followed the tradition of hanging dead vermin from a tree where employers/owners could see evidence of his work being done.

[with acknowledgement to nationalpoetryday.co.uk]

I am continuing to plug National Poetry Day and my teaching [or for anyone] resources of creative writing ideas on the theme of messages for the day. I always support this annual event though this year I have put more effort in than ever, and the genuine hope is that as many as possible will be engaged in and encouraged to take part, writing their own poems and/or sharing others’ poems.

My following poem Messing with the Messages on National Poetry Day is a concrete poem that explores and plays around with the theme, and that is, I think, the essence of the day, to have some fun with writing creatively:

That’s fine.

That’s correct.

Yes, OK.

Yep, correct.

Oh my goodness. That’s despicable. That’s nasty.

OK.

No, that’s disgusting! You lying bastard. How could you?

That makes me sick. I want to physically puke.

Probably honest.

That’s an easy one.

You sick fuck! Where does this darkness come from?

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

I didn’t think that was possible!

I am appalled. Utterly appalled.

Well, you wouldn’t get that wrong, would you?

Another easy one.

Too easy.

Wow! You are the most contemptable person I have ever tested.

Wicked. Wickedness personified.

The devil incarnate. This is outrageous.

Scandalous!

I am lost for words.

On BBC News yesterday, one of the football agents caught on the newspaper film sting about football shenanigans was interviewed. He claimed the accusations he made on camera were all lies and to prove he was not lying about this now he would willingly take a ‘lie detester test’. He said this twice.