Times of War and Scotch

We were always doomed,
Brought down by warfare;
So too by drink
And how the one, by rage,
Is connected to the other.

And I never knew the heat,
Nor fear and courage under fire
Nor even felt the hatred;
Just my father’s words
Sanitised by his own grief’s
Memory and awkward silence.

Him the private soldier,
The later private man
Who bred me and my polemic.
With my strumpet pacifism,
Am I any better an old man
Than the old men who failed him
And now fail and fail and fail again?

So I drink a glass, pure Scotch mist.
Through which the world may seem
Marginally and more cheerfully doomed.

There, I say, is my boundless gallantry:
In a world that brims with jingo
For the stiff-backed patriots,
Every damned one, who rattle rusty sabres
And know not a farthing, not a dime,
About the misery they still would deal
And all the young men and women
They’d send to rot beneath the sods
In lands as barren as their hearts.

© BH 2015

---

After a doctored image of me on one of Robert Harman’s chairs, transposed to the brink of the Minch at Sandwood Bay, the title of this came up in response to it. So, thanks, Nathan, for the impetus to string a few words around it.

Sometimes you get an interesting result from that thought ‘Hmmm, that would be a good title for...’.

And there it is. Jaded, as usual. I blame the drink.

PS. There's a reference here to John Simpson, the BBC correspondent, I think, who always travelled with Glenfiddich when covering wars and other strife. He coined the phrase 'cheerfully doomed gallantry'. I can never raise a glass now without a wry memory of that. Cheers, John.