Double Dactyl - Higgledy Piggledy Acceptability

Double Dactyl poetry. I hope whoever dreamt this discipline up had lots of fun. According to Wikipedia, the inventors were Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1951. I’ve written lots of poems in various forms and in freestyle, but never encountered Double Dactyl until now. I’ve made an effort and enjoyed playing with words, as I always do. I haven’t completely adhered to the strict rules, but some rules lend themselves to be broken. After some non-starters and others not for sharing, I give you my best three.

Floppetty moppetty
Boris de Vaudeville
Thought he could win
With his clown grin

Scary, like The Joker
Hedonistically
Singing and dancing
Off with his head. Next!

Make of this what you will. If you know me, you’ll understand. I don’t intend to offend, by the way.


Dibdabdoo scribbdabdoo
Emily Bronte
When did you get him,
That special one?

Perhaps your brother’s traits
Identifiable
I gave him my heart
Many years ago.

Of course it’s about Heathcliff. My first introduction was the black and white ‘Wuthering Heights’ film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon when I was eleven, or twelve and long before I read the book. Future English Literature classes took me into studying the book, which is a firm favourite of mine and goes way beyond the end of that 1939 film.

Pippitty flippitty
James Callaghan
Thought it was funny
Not easy to count

In pounds, shillings and pence
Decimalisation,
That was the answer,
Totting up money.

I will always be thankful for decimalisation. In 1963, I cried my eyes out while a horrid teacher yelled at me for getting all my ‘money sums’ wrong. Shillings and pence, pounds, shillings and pence, was just a mass of confusion to my seven and a half year old brain. Someone raging at me wasn’t going to magically make me get my sums right. Family friends came to visit one weekend, probably to see the new baby, my sister. Their daughter was a little older than me and we went off to play. I asked her if she could do money sums and felt delighted when she happily showed me. She taught me very well. Everything clicked into place. I was grateful to her and didn’t fear my teacher anymore. I volunteer in the same school. I often go into the very classroom where I spent miserable times. I’m glad things are different for today’s children. All the teachers are lovely, none of them are scary. Perhaps I should ask the children about that. In later years, I worked in an office where everything revolved around money and payments, including wages. By now we were using ‘new money’, decimalisation had taken place a couple of years earlier in 1971. Thank goodness. I couldn’t have done that job in £sd.

Have fun writing Double Dactyls.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Circus - Excitement and Anticipation

Piccadilly Circus, 1972. My friend and I felt like we had landed somewhere exciting. We were staying a long weekend with my family in Roehampton. Encouraged to go out and have fun, we took a bus then a tube and eventually emerged from the Underground at Piccadilly Circus. It was the hottest day ever and we went straight to Boot’s the Chemist for deodorant which we liberally applied in the nearby public convenience. My orange loon pants with navy blue pleats and a navy tank-top was my favourite and most fashionable outfit at the time. The trousers were made of stretch towelling – beach clothing, really – too heavy for such a hot day, but I loved them so much. (Except one night when I wore them to go ice-skating and they soaked up gallons of surface water, but that’s another story.) My friend was dressed more sensibly in shorts. We shopped on Carnaby Street, watched a busker, looked around Soho, sat on some grass in the shade and eventually made our way back to Piccadilly Circus and the tube station for the first part of our return journey to Roehampton.

It was fun when I was seventeen, but London like any major city is too busy, too fast moving and loud for me so I’m not a regular visitor. Exceptions have been made to go to see The Moody Blues a few times at the Royal Albert Hall or the O2 Arena. Well, of course I’d go then. There was another time when there was no holding back.

The Prince Edward Theatre, 1978. Evita. Tickets like gold dust, but lucky me. There is only one Che for me and that is David Essex. No one else can sing ‘Oh What a Circus!’ with such passion, giving everything to the exceptional lyrics of Tim Rice who perfectly captured the media circus of the time.

I was a child when my family moved to Blackpool. One of the first places I remember being taken to is the Tower Circus. Mid 1960s and animals were still a big part of the show, horses, elephants and am I imagining sea lions in the water finale? I don’t remember if lions featured. My favourites were always the clowns with Charlie Cairoli.

At around the age of seven, I latched on to books by Enid Blyton. I discovered that I could read something other than ‘the green reader’ or whatever my school reading book was. Still in the infants, I’d moved on from Janet and John and found that I didn’t need to read out loud to understand the text. Book after book came my way, Secret Seven, Famous Five, lots of the Mystery series, fairy stories, and somewhere in the middle, before the boarding school tales from Malory Towers or St. Clare’s, I read the circus stories, Mr Galliano’s Circus, Hurrah for the Circus! and Circus Days Again. They began with the arrival of the circus folk parading through the town and setting up camp. Excitement and anticipation grabbed me in the first paragraph and carried me along the chapter as the author introduced characters, illustrating each one with her vibrant description as she did all her books and I loved it. Circus Days Again is the only one of the trilogy in my possession. All of my Enid Blyton’s are treasured.

On that long weekend in London almost fifty years ago, someone joked about Piccadilly Circus and how wise we were to come home before dark. We didn’t know what they meant and we didn’t ask because we were two worldly, clever, independent seventeen year olds.

I found this poem:

Piccadilly Circus At Night – Street Walkers

When into the night the yellow light is roused like dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in the midst of the downs,

Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in expectancy to meet

The luminous mist which the poor things wist was dawn arriving across the sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town has driven so high.

All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory.

Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian’s pavement-roses are gone, and now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of the town-dark sea.

D H Lawrence (1916)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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