For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  Neutrality

  ‘I’ll be a candle-holder and look on’

  Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene 4

  A feckless pastor in the Sunshine State

  Summons the press, sets fire to the Koran;

  With images of hatred in full spate,

  His bonfire, being broadcast, seals the fate

  Of blameless victims in Afghanistan.

  Time was, we tried to balance the equation,

  We weighed the pros and cons, not very well,

  Being even-handed between Heaven and Hell;

  Then closed the piece with an absurd evasion:

  ‘One thing is certain, only time will tell.’

  ‘I’ll be a candle-holder and look on.’

  Oh no, you won’t. The fierce phenomenon

  Of rolling news means those days are long gone.

  You can’t claim to be neutral any more

  When you’re complicit in a Holy War.

  Bad News

  I’ve seen it on the news and so it’s true,

  The camera of course will tell no lies;

  Dear trusting friend and dupe, if you but knew

  What I have learned, you might think otherwise.

  The sort of people whom the trade attracts

  Are those who think that they can best succeed

  At the expense of others, and don’t need

  To pay too much attention to the facts.

  I’d say, look carefully before crediting

  The authenticity of what you see;

  A multitude of sins lies in the editing.

  Beware the unholy trinity

  Of I, myself and me.

  I know a man of dubious honesty

  Whose practice was to stage some brave foray

  Shot in a peaceful suburb of Grozny:

  The actual war was several miles away.

  Another vain and self-regarding type

  Enhanced an ever-growing reputation

  With front-line exploits magnified by hype

  And stories which were marvels of inflation;

  His tales of people that he knew

  And instances of derring-do

  Were largely fabrication.

  It is an issue worth attending to,

  The incidence of electronic sleaze.

  The scoundrels may be relatively few:

  We used to think the same of our MPs.

  Strictly

  When I set out it was a simpler time:

  We thought we had a mission to inform,

  But then show business changed the paradigm;

  The new imperative is to perform,

  And puppet shows are going down a storm.

  These days it’s not enough to stand and state,

  The old composure has been shown the door.

  The modern way is to gesticulate,

  They’ve no idea what human speech is for,

  And journalism’s a branch of semaphore.

  I’d like to think that in the present rage

  Of showmanship the truth is still a factor.

  Probably not – for all the world’s a stage,

  And the reporter on it is an actor,

  His ego like a nuclear reactor.

  Where will this end? Sometimes it seems to me,

  If news continues down this road, consorting

  With all the nonsense of celebrity,

  The tinsel trappings and red carpetry,

  It will turn into Strictly Come Reporting.

  More or Less

  The golden rule for those reporting war

  Is not to be enamoured of the violence;

  They have to understand that less is more.

  The hardest art is that of writing silence.

  The whisper’s more effective than the shout,

  And many words say much less than a few.

  When I was asked, ‘What’s your report about?’

  I’d say, ‘About a minute forty two.’

  Golden Age

  For all those years the business worked just fine:

  Our film was shot and parcelled and air-freighted;

  The old technology left us alone

  To do much as we wished in the front line,

  The health and safety guidelines were all mine;

  Our speed perhaps was somewhat porcupine,

  But our reports were eagerly awaited.

  The good times ended when the mobile phone

  Arrived unheralded in the war zone.

  Next thing we knew (the interval was fleeting)

  We stopped reporting and we started tweeting.

  Haiti

  The poorest country in the hemisphere

  Is devastated by its largest quake.

  You think the aircraft engines that you hear

  Mean help is coming? That is your mistake.

  More than a million with their needs unmet

  Are crying out in unrelieved distress;

  The only fresh supplies they seem to get

  Are the unwanted convoys of the press.

  Legions of hacks are drawn into this trouble,

  And settling on it, much like flies on shit,

  Their microphones eavesdropping in the rubble,

  The worse it gets, the more they relish it.

  The press of course are watered and they’re fed;

  And leaving their humanity behind,

  They’ll venture out to walk among the dead

  And close their hearts to most of what they find.

  Of course they show concern and sympathy;

  Compassion is part of their stock in trade.

  They will impress with their sincerity,

  And if they can fake that, they’ve got it made.

  In such a scene a journalist at large

  Once wrote a script that was a pack of lies;

  The judges called it vivid reportage,

  And then awarded him their highest prize.

  With media reputations to be made,

  Some would prefer the rescuers to fail;

  Bad news is a commodity for sale,

  And journalism is the cruellest trade.

  Babylon

  Across the Caribbean Sea

  The steel bands lack variety,

  Playing the same tunes endlessly:

  Just Yellow Bird and Island in the Sun.

  Yet there’s another, deeper, scriptural one

  To keep an inner and eternal eye on,

  The pulsing legend of an age long gone:

  By the rivers of Babylon

  Yea we wept when we sat down

  And we remembered Zion.

  And we in our time need to be draconian,

  Because our own predicament,

  So far from being heaven-sent

  Looks downright Babylonian.

  Suffolk

  Dunwich beneath the sea; a castle wall

  Built of the flint and stones of Framlingham;

  The village graveyards’ In Memoriam;

  The timbered majesty of Lavenham,

  The graceful Swan, the firing of the bells;

  The Bull, the White Horse, Angel and Dun Cow;

  The Regimental quick march ‘Speed the Plough’;

  The landscapes in which Constable excels;

  The market towns without a shopping mall;

  The essence of high Suffolk, Redisham;

  The vaulted tracery of Elveden Hall;

  The fabled sciapod of Dennington,
r />   Which used its foot to shield it from the sun;

  The church at Blythburgh, mystical and lonely;

  The sign that reads ‘To Barsham City only’;

  The amber of Covehithe and the sea shells;

  The ghosts of aircraft haunting Stradishall;

  From Newmarket to Walberswick to Eye,

  The oldest fields beneath the widest sky,

  And still the greatest glory of it all

  Is that it’s on the way to nowhere else.

  Windfall

  ‘I am a lawyer from Burkina Faso;

  Following a raid by pirates off Bossaso,

  My client, a tribal Chief sadly deceased,

  Died wishing that your wealth should be increased.

  His next of kin lost in the tragedy

  Leave you, Dear Sir, his only legatee.

  I also have to tell you his largesse

  Is seven million dollars worth, no less.

  I need the details of your bank account,

  And you will then receive the full amount.’

  Isn’t it touching that the dear departed

  Of Africa can be so open-hearted?

  Or is it possible that piracy

  Does not occur exclusively at sea?

  Absurdistan

  Ingenious nations have devised a plan

  To make a profit from their fighting men:

  They park them somewhere in Absurdistan,

  And all the bills are paid by the UN.

  These are peacekeepers with so light a touch,

  They play their video games and volleyball

  Behind the wire and, soldiering not much,

  They might as well not be deployed at all.

  But they will bear the guilt if, nothing worth

  And looking only to their own defence,

  This land, one of the poorest on the earth,

  Dies a slow death at the UN’s expense.

  Congo

  Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was based on his experience as a riverboat captain on the Congo River in 1890. Roger Casement, later executed for treason, was the British Consul in the Congo Free State at the time.

  Heart of Darkness was his masterpiece;

  He lived it and he wrote it from the Congo,

  About the conquests of King Leopold

  And inhumanity of men to men.

  But times change: those were those and these are these;

  Under the shadow of Mount Nyiragongo,

  More lives are being traded for fool’s gold:

  The Congo’s even darker now than then.

  In this the Great War of the continent,

  A stain of blood on Africa’s great lakes,

  Four million lost their lives in a decade;

  Again, these times are these and those were those.

  There is no witness, Conrad or Casement,

  No one whose testimony awakes

  And stirs the conscience for a new crusade:

  The difference now is that nobody knows.

  Or cares – these are hard times for a crusader;

  The news is only where reporters are,

  The Congo is too distant and remote,

  The press have lost the nerve to operate,

  The darkness doesn’t show on their radar,

  They see it as a no man’s land too far;

  Its turmoil will not move a single vote

  In the short term – but long term, just you wait!

  Datelines

  It was the dateline that defined the antics

  Of us old hacks, incurable romantics:

  A sort of verbal picture frame or prism

  To introduce our kind of journalism.

  Filing from Africa became a race

  To find the most outlandish time and place:

  The winner was the man who opened one day

  With the immortal line, ‘Banana, Sunday’.

  Dubai

  Where once a trading post slept in the sand,

  Fantastic edifices scrape the sky;

  Forget the golden road to Samarkand,

  Behold the glittering city of Dubai

  In which Arabia meets Disneyland.

  A ski slope in a desert shopping mall –

  Such breath-taking excesses come to pass,

  That the sheer ostentation of it all

  May signify the pride before the fall,

  As in the time of Ozymandias.

  There’s alcohol inside the crystal glass,

  And girls from Kazakhstan patrol the bars;

  And yet the jihadists have passed it by,

  This shining soaring city of Dubai,

  As if it isn’t there. I wonder why.

  Iceland

  The Arctic island functions like a freezer,

  But also pulses with infernal forces,

  The hot spring, the volcano and the geyser:

  But none of these are bankable resources.

  This was the natural deficit that led it

  To trade casino-style in easy credit;

  And foreign trust funds spiralled into debt

  By risking all on Reykjavik roulette.

  You’d think that such a place would not be harmful,

  But you’d be wrong. The system failed because it

  Printed off paper assets by the armful

  And Mr Gullible lost his deposit.

  And there was worse, for following the panic,

  The savings meltdown and the market crash,

  The flow of credit and the ebb of cash,

  The Icelandic fury then became volcanic

  And covered all of Europe in its ash.

  St Helena

  The Saints are the island’s inhabitants.

  The world’s remotest island – cliffs of granite,

  The fortress where a dream of empire died,

  Is changeless since the time of Bonaparte.

  It is the biggest pebble on the planet,

  Defended by the ocean either side,

  The island jail that broke his stubborn heart.

  We fail our history if we idealise:

  Death stalked this rock. The churchyard holds the graves

  Of British officers who died at sea.

  More of a prison than a paradise,

  It was the home to slave masters and slaves,

  The final colony to set them free.

  The world’s first concentration camp was here,

  Established by the British for the Boers.

  Then it was violent and now it’s bust.

  The younger Saints seek lives and jobs elsewhere,

  There’s nothing for them on these barren shores,

  Only the relics of colonial wars

  And ghosts of admirals and emperors.

  Britannia rules these waves – but only just.

  Suez and Panama

  The two canals’ biography

  Is something of a mystery:

  One’s changing its geography,

  The other one its history.

  In Panama the aim’s to maximise

  And virtually rebuild the whole canal;

  With new locks of a super-tanker size

  And super transit fees the matching prize,

  It is the world’s earth-moving capital.

  Suez by contrast likes to let things be

  And just rework the past for all it’s worth;

  Erecting monuments to victory

  In battles that were lost in ’73

  Is easier by far th
an moving earth.

  Border Lines

  The Sykes–Picot agreement, reached secretly in 1916 between British and French diplomats, established the present-day borders of Iraq.

  A rule of war is that straight lines on maps

  Are auguries of subsequent mishaps,

  And those who drew them, such as Sykes–Picot,

  Were architects of an imbroglio;

  For boundaries were not so neat by chance,

  But ill-bequeathed by Britain and by France.

  Geometry is not in nature’s order

  And geography will make a better border.

  Mountains, rift valleys and remotest shores

  Are nature’s own impediments to wars;

  So countries with the wildest fluctuations

  Of border lines are the most favoured nations.

  Baseball

  They found a game remarkably like cricket

  Without the fine leg, cover drive or wicket,

  And turned it somehow (there are many theories)

  Into a strange and alien sport, of medium

  Complexity and unremitting tedium,

  Played by Americans and Japanese,

  Canadians and Cubans, none but these,

  And called it the World Series.

  Money Matters

  The Banker

  I have no prejudice or rancour

  Against the profiteering banker;

  But if he reckons that the onus

  Should fall on us to pay his bonus,

  Then I’m the Maharajah of Sri Lanka.

  Tax Demand

  Our hard-faced rulers urge that we should fund them

  By paying extra taxes to the Crown.

  We answer Nil illegitimi carborundum,

  Don’t ever let the bastards grind you down!

  Ballade of Old Age

  Declining years? So be it. We’ll decline

  The fashions and the fads that irritate,

  The excess of midriff and the lack of spine,

  The Twitter and the Facebook in full spate.