[Jayne Osborn]

Yes, this newspaper report sounds ridiculous I know, but if you wish you can read it for yourself here.
I think Fruitcake is a good topic, all the same.

Jayne

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Oldie Competition
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby Tessa Castro


Competition no 182
Dissatisfied customers, a newspaper reported, have been won over by companies offering them fruitcake in compensation. Please write a poem called Fruitcake, taking the title in any sense. Maximum sixteen lines.

Entries to ‘Competition no 182’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), fax (020 7436 8804) or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) by 17th October 2014. Please don’t forget to include your postal address.

[Nicholas Stone]

Sorry, John.

To vote for UKIP, all you need
Is two parts wit and eight parts creed:
Convince yourself (if e'er you can)
That Farage is a lovely man;
That Tories are an Old Boys' Club
Where Lib and Lab both serve the grub;
That "LibLabCon" is what they're called
(It can more easily be bawled);
That Europe, (ghastly though it is,
And more or less a total swizz)
Is more important than your life,
Your savings, your best coat, your wife;
That votes for Lab you make by proxy
Make their win seem far less poxy;
If you can tell yourself all this
Then you're a Fruitcake: Drool in bliss.

[John Whitworth]

Shame on you. Nigel is delghtful. So is Kit Smart.

Fruitcake

God walks on earth tall as a millionaire.
Nightly I see him, striding on the hill
About the holy business of his will.
I see the starshine tangled in his hair,
The perfume of his robe is everywhere,
He calls to me across the windowsill.
The moon stashed in his pocket and the air
Fraught with divinity, so sweet and still.

Most people say the world, the world’s the thing:
The otherness out there of sex and story,
The love of lucre and the love of friends
The plot and counterplot and happy ends;
They say the world’s the thing. Not I, not I.
Lord, let me fly to you. Lord, let me fly
And hide my head for ever in your glory,
My God, my Saviour and my Everything.

[John Whitworth]

And another.

Fruitcake

Our England’s going to the dogs.
I stand upon the Saxon Shore
And peer through ever-thickening fogs.
So many things that I deplore!
White robed, black bearded demagogues,
Each with his mute attendant squaw,
Chant their appalling decalogues.
It’s not my country any more.

Our politicians root like hogs.
Parliament’s rotten to the core.
The people are no more than cogs
Forgetting what their freedom’s for.
We clatter round in peasant clogs.
We sniff the stinking hellebore.
We cakewalk with the gollywogs.
It’s not my country any more.

[Nicholas Stone]

A fine poem, with many excellent points, though I'm not quite sure what to make of the penultimate line. It is a Debussy reference, rather than, well, a racial one, isn't it . . ?

[John Whitworth]

Oh no. It's racial, meaning, more generally, we ape the manners of foreigners. He's fruitcake after all. I wonder what the cakewalk actually is. G.K. Chesterton mentions it. Is it the way the great Vivian Richards used to move? Probably does still move, come to that. That would hardly fit with Debussy. More like Duke Ellington.

Chesterton was good on walks. One Father Brown story turns on the difference between a gentleman's walk and a waiter's. Father Brown stumped along, as I do rather these days. Chesterton, given his extraordinary weight, must have rolled.

[Ann Drysdale]

The Cakewalk is ... Well, here it is, together with its innocent references to an earlier equivalent of Bongo Bongo Land

You can skip the bit of interview at the beginning, but I think it gives a layer of context that adds to the blamelessness of its intention back in the day.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6pWXn9oYak

[John Whitworth]

If you imagine Jack Johnson, the Heavyweight champion of the world, in a white suit with a white top hat, then that will be something like what Chesterton had in mind. Black Pride if you see what I mean. Rather like Gay Pride. My Fruitcake chap wouldn't like either.

[basil ransome-davies]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6pWXn9oYak

Ha, that's the one Eliot ripped off for 'Fragment of an Agon'.

[John Whitworth]

Borrowed, Bazza, borrowed. Poets are Jackdaws. It's what we do.