When BB was an unlikeable bb

Recently The Crow posted about calligraphy. I mentioned my interest but said it had always been beyond my uncertain hand and that I was flogged repeatedly at school for bad penmanship. This horrified her and she asked what sort of school I had attended. Well, it was fee-paying and, despite my cowardice, I could see some link between the crime and the punishment. What was less easy to accept was when I was flogged for having feet that were bigger than those of the geography master. Lucy admitted herself guiltily amused by this.

The Crow has reason to attach emotional content to handwritten letters and urged me to consider leaving mementos more permanent than a million forgotten emails to my daughters and grandchildren. I may well do this, always assuming I believe they can read what I’ve written. But my memory was sprung. Upstairs in the loft is a box the size of two house-bricks, packed with the letters I sent my mother during my two years’ national service.

While I was training in Wiltshire I had my portable and typed everything. In Singapore I was reduced, like everyone else, to airmail sheets. These consist of very thin paper and I suspect the ballpoint ink has migrated. The letters are over fifty years old and I have never read them since I slipped them into the postbox at RAF Seletar. I was a callow, cynical, self-regarding airman (qualities which have not entirely disappeared) and I am pretty sure I do not want to re-visit that version of myself. However, perhaps my descendants may enjoy examining the feet of clay belonging to the authoritarian figure who impinged irregularly on their lives.

I get the feeling this wasn’t what The Crow had in mind.

Vlad the almost unbelievable

Sonnet – Forked tongue
The mirrored Vlad said this: My thoughts proclaim
My genius, I write at least with “talent”,
(Ironic quotes to mark a word so tame)
But childish chat is my profound lament.

No media man, he asked inquisitors
To write their questions on prosaic cards
Then, face to face, the hopeful auditors
Endured a long exchange for dull rewards.
The eccentricity was rightly earned:
While Luzhin and The Gift were Russian born,
Lolita’s acid laughs, so deftly turned,
Blow like a zestful Yankee auto horn.*
Oddness explains a dearth of oral skill;
Two voices make speech harder to distil.

NOTE I have Plutarch’s authority for using a rhyming dictionary. Rhyming, he says, is an artificial constraint and therefore this is not cheating. One of the several online dictionaries I use threw up the bizarre final three words of the asterisked line. It seemed ungracious to reject this Autolycan gift.