Hello child, welcome to life!

This will seem a strange and fearful place to you, no doubt, a jumble of shapes and colours at this stage which you won't have the knowledge or vocabulary to put a name to, nor the ocular capacity even to see clearly.

And to be truthful, you're not actually seeing things anyway, but imagining, the black box we call the brain in the darkness of your skull making up stories of what it thinks it sees from messages sent by your eyes, your ears, the surface of your skin, the tips of your fingers.

These tales aren't always correct. If you are wise you will learn, at some point, to stop a moment and question their veracity before accepting them.

But that skill is years away in your future. For now, you just need to breathe, stick as close to the person who feeds and gives you shelter as you can, relax and take it all in. It feels a scary place, true, but believe me you have arrived at a point in the planet's journey that is safer for humankind than it has ever been.

You should know that you are the product of several thousand years of the struggle, graft and tears of your ancestors. Some will have lived very short lives, enough only to procreate before they expired; others to have had lives that were long and eventful. Some of those ancestors will have been lucky, with plentiful food in their bellies and a sound roof over their heads; others not so fortunate, scrabbling day-to-day to find or grow or earn enough money to buy the nourishment needed to sustain themselves and raise their young, at least to an age when their young could look after themselves.

For the most part you're not likely to experience the level of struggle they endured. Be thankful for that, use the time this gives you to experience joy. It’s your duty, almost, to make the most of such happiness - if not for yourself, then in their stead. They worked hard to survive so you could be born; celebrate that hard work by living the best life you can possibly manage.

Alison Mott

(In the style of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Hello babies. Welcome to Earth', shared by Humanists UK on the anniversary of his birthday).

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

Compassion (in the style of A Nail by Anon)

For want of compassion, proper funding was lost;
For want of proper funding, a doctor was lost;
For want of a doctor, an appointment was lost;
For want of an appointment, a prescription was lost;
For want of a prescription, medication was lost;
For want of medication, good health was lost;
For want of good health, a life was lost;
And all for the want of a little compassion.

Alison Mott

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

The Doctor, 2023 - An Ode

Let me to the doctor go,
My pain gets worse, ‘should not be so,
I will a quick appointment make
by telephone, my hands now shake!
Am I in luck? It’s down to fate,
ten seconds past the hour of eight.

I’m in a queue, I’m put on hold,
The minutes pass, I’m growing old!
After what seems to be an hour
the phone goes dead, I have no power
to recover my urgent call;
My patience now, begins to pall.

The second time, a lady’s voice
intones a sort of ‘multi choice.’
Press button one, or two, or three,
there is no charge, the call is free;
We’re pleased to tell you while you wait
‘Your call is valued!’; (I’m number 8).

I’ll listen to the choice again,
wrestling with increasing pain.
I’m tempted now, by option six,
let’s see what a human voice can fix!
I’ll tell some person all the facts -
Computer, you can now relax.

‘Hello, and welcome to the surgery,
How can I help? My name is Marjorie.’
‘A doctor I would like to see’,
And Marj’ is saying, ‘Get past Me!
Are you calling about yourself?’
(No, it’s about an aging elf!)

‘A few small checks before we start;
have you a problem with your Heart?
We ask our patients to ‘book on line’
It saves you money, and also time.
The doctor has a lot to do ...
Did you say blood clots in your poo?'

David Taylor, June 2023

Photo by Miryam León on Unsplash

Evita, or not Evita - that is the question!

Anybody could see that the understudy was making a right hash of the role of Evita, her requirement to learn and practice the words to the main role as well as her own clearly having been bypassed.

‘What is that strange song you keep singing?’ the director bellowed in the interval. ‘It’s not at all what you’re supposed to sing!’

‘It’s from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ the girl replied, blushing. ‘I thought if I sang it to the Evita tune, no-one would notice the difference.’

 

Alison Mott, 4^th Jan 2024

Evita, staged at Curve, Leicester in January 2024 (where in fact an understudy drove 150 miles on the last weekend to cover the role and gave a fantastic performance!). Photo: A Mott

See an article about the real understudy saving the day here.

To be, or not to be, a Viking …

I had a go with an app, yesterday, which shows what you would’ve looked like as a Viking. I uploaded a photo to it, taken in the park last September, and within minutes it had popped up an image of me with long thick plaits and deep brown un-spectacled eyes, but otherwise (in my opinion) looking much as I once did back in my twenties.

Looking at it, I guess that ‘Viking Me’ would be in her twenties, too - the prime of her life. Google tells me that 35% of women in Viking England didn't survive beyond thirty years of age, with thirty-one to forty-year-olds considered middle-aged and anyone over fifty classed as old. At my age – sixty - I would probably have been dead.

Quite interesting, when you consider the British government now expect me to work until I'm sixty-seven!

I ran out of blood pressure tablets on New Year's Eve, so discombobulated by Christmas and trying to remember which day each day of the in-between week actually was that the fact I was on the last packet escaped my notice. So I ordered a new prescription online, and popped in to the chemist yesterday and again today to see whether, against the odds, it had been actioned.

It was, ‘Nothing's come through, yet,’ yesterday, but, thankfully, a ‘Yes’ today. I've never worried about not taking them on the odd day here and there before but hadn't felt a hundred percent on my walk into town earlier, and after my elder brother’s heart attack a few weeks ago, have begun to worry the medication’s more vital to keeping me alive than I'd previously assumed. Indeed, it could well be the reason I've even made it to the age of sixty, when my Viking ancestor-esses generally didn't.

So I was grateful when the assistant said, ‘yes, they’re here!’, adding, ‘do you pay for your prescriptions?’
‘No,’ I beamed, ‘I'm sixty!’, the fact that I get them for free a relatively new and pleasant experience, and still something of a surprise, given my retirement age having been extended.
 
‘My apologies,’ she said, and ‘no problem,’ I replied cheerfully, and I left the shop with a big smile on my face. Because while I may not look like a twenty-year-old Viking warrioress, it's good to know I don't look like a twenty-first century old crone, yet, either!

Alison Mott

Image created by app on gagdonkey.net

'To hear the angels sing'

In the annual pre-Christmas meeting in heaven God sat at the head of the table, with the angels gathered round. It was, as you might expect, quite a big table.

‘There’s only one item on the agenda today,’ said Gabriel, Chief Angel and secretary to the meeting, ‘and that’s what is happening to Christmas on earth these days.’

‘Well,’ God remarked after a moment’s reflection, ‘we have to agree it has changed somewhat since the events in Bethlehem all those years ago. Then it was Mary, Joseph, and the lad himself, some shepherds - representing the poor and outcasts of the world, three wise men – showing we don’t mind the wealthy being involved, as long as they are generous, and several animals – to show the whole created world matters. What was happening was a quiet celebration of a birthday.’

One of the angels raised a hand. ‘Excuse me God, but isn’t that birthday what we see being celebrated in churches at this time of year?’

‘It is, and I have to say it is a very pleasant surprise to see them still, some two thousand years since the first. But they are now very much a minority.’

‘What do the majority do then?’ It should be said she was a very new angel and this would be only her second Christmas.

‘Some, on the days before, celebrate with pub lunches with people from work, others, on the night before Christmas have rather a lot to drink, and many wake up on the day after Boxing Day unable to remember much about the previous two or three days. Oh, and many folk, of course, don’t celebrate Christmas at all as it is not part of their religion.’

‘Is there anything we could do to change things?’

God smiled rather sadly. ‘There is one thing I wondered about, given how awful things are in parts of the world at the moment. There is a hymn written almost two hundred years ago by a chap called E. H. Sears, an American Unitarian parish minister, and known as, “It came upon the midnight clear.” There are two lines from the third verse I’d like to write across earth’s sky, near to where the star shone all those years ago;

          O hush the noise, you men of strife,
          To hear the angels sing.”

'These seem to me to be words the world needs to hear.’

The meeting ended and the angels quietly went to rehearse their singing.

David Parkin

Image by Liz Waddell, artist

You can see more of her artwork at www.lizwaddell.com

In a Damp December (in the style of Christina Rossetti)

In a damp December
we had had some snow,
I was going for a walk
but my friend’s dog wouldn’t go.

The skies were grey and murky,
the snow began to slush.
I went into town instead
to beat the Christmas rush.

Went into a café,
windows full of steam.
Had a nice hot chocolate
with marshmallows and cream.

I walked under Christmas lights,
not the trees I’d planned,
but it was still a social time
and I heard our town’s brass band.

In a damp December,
though we had some snow,
I wrapped myself up for a walk
and I’m glad I chose to go!

Alison Mott, Dec 2023

*In the style of Christina Rossetti's 'In the Bleak Midwinter', published in January 1872