In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’.
In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’.
Betjeman’s portrayal of road rage in ‘Meditation on the A30’ — ‘You’re barmy or plastered, I’ll pass you, you bastard/ I will overtake you, I will — set me thinking about the misery inflicted by the London Orbital; those hours spent in a state of toddler-like fury with no discernible end in sight. I’m very fond of the A30, for all its faults, and wondered if perhaps the M25 has redeeming features I’ve failed to notice.
Not as far as the comping contingent is concerned. Here’s G.M Davies: ‘Where crazed boy racers alternate/ With gridlock and big rigs,/ And motorists propelled to hate/ Honk like demented pigs.’ You get the picture. David Silverman’s ‘sonnet on a bonnet’ gets the bonus fiver. The other prizewinners, printed below, net £30 apiece.
Apologies to John Plowman, whose adolescent Napoleon was wrongly attributed to Simon Machin in my report on Competition No. 2518.
O secretive, circuitous, sublime
Highway, whereon men’s private lives abound —
Are drivers merely players in the round?
Or cursèd modern mariners sans rime?
Through Hertfordshire, green, leafy, arable
Past Kent and Essex shopping mall and street
All human life …is this thy parable?
As you desist from separating wheat
From chavs, white vans from smart Toyota Ravs,
Nor chavs from chav-nots, e’en have-nots from haves,
‘On Thatcher’s Road, Society is dead,
So love thy fellow traveller instead.
For what goes round will come around, methinks’:
Is this thy song, elliptic, cryptic sphinx?
David Silverman
There are no oils, no perfect unctions,
no salves that pharmacists unshelve,
to soothe one, shifting past the junctions,
9 and 10, 11, 12 —
and heading home at five from Woking,
there’s an existential question:
will our tribe survive this choking,
slowly-throttling, thick congestion?
Only angels, white, seraphic,
could relieve us from our sadness,
trapped inside this hell of traffic,
somewhere in the four-lane madness.
We might as well be out in space,
hardly able to absorb it,
satellites who’ve run their race,
lost in London’s outer orbit.
Bill Greenwell
The corporate radials stop and soon grow cold
as one more peak-hour traffic jam, foretold
to last from Junction One to Twenty-Three,
brings every lane of traffic to its knees.
And middle management is held becalmed,
ambition and achievement all embalmed,
in each tin box, held fast in time and space
like freeze-framed runners in a frozen race
while ulcered underlings in anxious state
all curse and sweat and hyperventilate
at meetings unattended, targets missed,
at deadlines passed and PAs left unkissed.
For these sad souls the Universe has stopped.
And nails are chewed, teeth ground and foreheads mopped
awaiting just the clearing of one lane
to let the wheels of Life turn once again.
Martin Parker
Before the Dome adorned the Thames or London’s Wheel revolved
The London Orbital was built and traffic problems solved
As round the rolling motorway we travelled fast and far
The day we went to Sevenoaks by way of Potters Bar.
Going round in circles clockwise — anti-clockwise too,
At first seemed rather fun and quite a jolly thing to do,
Until, held up at Heathrow, we were driven round the bend
The day we went to Badgers Mount by way of Ponders End.
Eventually some extra lanes were added to improve
The ever-slowing traffic flow and keep things on the move.
But far from rolling like a stone we wound up gathering moss
The day we went to Leatherhead by way of Waltham Cross.
Then, like a varicose vein, alas, engorged by one long jam,
Gridlock blocked the motorway and stopped us like a dam,
And road rage overcame what once was happy-motoring mirth
The day we crawled to Chorleywood by way of Rickmansworth!
Alan Millard (with apologies to G.K. Chesterton)
As I go with the flow on the M25
I think how lucky Philip Larkin was to survive
When, listening to the radio at 70 mph on the M1,
He heard the Immortality ode and was undone:
Unstoppable tears blurred his vision
And his erratic steering threatened a collision.
Wordsworth’s dangerous words are not for me;
But I hear (when I put on a CD)
That baby talcum is always walcum, liquor’s quicker
Than candy, and parsley is gharsley. This makes me snicker.
Then the turtle, Americanly fertile, and Miss Rafferty in taffeta
Reduce me, at the wheel, to helpless laffeta.
I avoid, as Larkin did, a crash
(No thanks to Ogden Nash!)
And meditate on which kills more, at motorway velocity:
A fit of cachinnation or a gush of lachrymosity.
Ray Kelley
Competition No. 2523: Dickens on Dickens
You are invited to submit a review of one of Charles Dickens’s novels written by a character from another Dickens novel (maximum 150 words). Entries to ‘Competition 2523’ by 29 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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