A.I.

Maybe it's because I've been to see a strange and funny film this evening ('The Phantom of the Open'), or perhaps it's as a counter-balance to all the horror being perpetrated by the Russian state machine in Ukraine, but I'm afraid I've gone for extreme frivolity this time and a throwback to the days of punning schoolboy humour.

Interrogate any halfway decent search engine for possible meanings of the acronym  A.I.  and it should furnish you with well over a ton. The Free Dictionary, for instance, immediately rewarded me with one hundred and sixty four options, and there are some belters on their list. Artificial Intelligence, of course, but also Abrasiveness Index, Aggregate Income, Airborne Intelligence, Airbus Industrie, All Inclusive, Anarchy Incorporated (paradoxically), Arbitration Interval and Artificial Insemination. Guess which one I've opted for.

The Magic Roundabout's lovely flower-chewing Ermintrude

Maybe it's because I wrote a blog recently about the BBC, and the programmes we used to watch as kids between getting home from school and having tea, that The Magic Roundabout has been lurking around in my mind, and linked to that a murky memory of how, with typical schoolboy humour, we decided that if the lovely, flower-chewing Ermintrude were ever to be artificially inseminated, she might more appropriately be called Spermintrude. Hilarious, when you're thirteen, but on reflection not very sympathetic towards the animal in question - which led in turn to this hasty, but heartfelt and less-than-immaculate, poetic conception. I give you...

Spermintrude's Lament

Poor cow, she's never got to pull a real bull,

was never yet covered by a red-blooded stud,

nor felt her udders shudder in the after-thrill

of being penetrated by some pulsating pizzle.

It's all been coldly clinical, getting with calves;

the latex glove, syringe of anonymous though

most expensive Friesian jissom, a scientific act.

Where's the animal pleasure in that? Poor cow!

Maybe I shouldn't have bothered... but thanks as always for reading and have a good week, S ;-)