[John Whitworth]

OK Nice Subject Lucy. Now you just have to give me the money.

No. 2855: dead end job

You are invited to submit an elegy for an endangered profession. Please email (wherever possible) entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 July.

[Jerome Betts]

Withdrawn for tinkering

[Ann Drysdale]

Commercial need has rendered such as he
Irrelevant. Now there's consistency
Bred in 'em in the egg. They're sexed by sight;
The yellow ones are girls, the chaps are white.

The decline of the chick-sexer

[John Whitworth]

Sartor Resartus but not much.

The Milkman's Farewell

At the kerb forlorn, the milkman weeps,
Bleak on his float, while the terrace sleeps.
And, sloping-shouldered, as he goes,
His pallid soldiery in rows,
Helmeted harbngers of day,
Clink in glassy sympathy.
Squat and square, so fat and neat,
Shuffling solitary feet,
Dreaming the drench of the shredded wheat,
They sigh and seem to say;

Our broken-hearted milkman dances
The saraband of his life's lost chances.
A solemn measure intricate,
A mournful milkie's minuet.


*I am assailed by doubts. Is a milkman a professional person?

[Rob Stuart]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

*I am assailed by doubts. Is a milkman a professional person?

I would have thought so in this context. John. But what do I know?

I do like 'helmeted harbingers of day'.

[Jerome Betts]

Auto-sexing, Ann? How many of those breeds are around these days? However, my assumption that the sexing of day olds was now done by machine is clearly wrong and chicken-sexers are still in demand it seems. I'll have to keep the first six lines for some other occasion and scrap the last two. Wouldn't want to mislead any Spherean parents about their children's career opportunities.

[John Whitworth]

Thank you, Rob.

Does anyone remember this? I bet you do, Ann.

A Saggar Maker's Bottom Knocker

I was a Prince with any pot
But born to blush unseen,
For what I was, I now am not,
And what I had I now have not.
I mourn my miserable lot,
Replaced by a machine.
Of every walk I was the cock, a
Saggar Maker's Bottom Knocker

I was the Lord in Stoke-on-Trent,
The Sovereign of Staffs,
Wrapped up in measureless content,
A fearless, peerless, perfect gent.
The ladies cheered me as I went,
The King of all the caffs.
Prostrated now by Time's tick-tock, a
Saggar Maker's Bottom knocker

[Ann Drysdale]

No mystery, Jerome. You just cross a Rhode Island Red with a Light Sussex and the distinction happens automatically. The little yellow chicks grow up to be nice brown hens called Warrens.

If you are a smallscale poultrykeeper in an urban area, people grumble if you keep a cockerel, so you let a broody hen sit on her own infertile eggs for the requisite period, then go to a breeder for a dozen day-old yellow babies. Broody hens being needy and gullible, you can slip the living under, a few at a time, as you remove the rotten eggs. This also means that you have saved the babes from the battery, for which they are bred.

They make great companions. I had one called Elbidge (acronym for Little Brown Job, a technical term among ornithologists).

[Martin Parker]

With John on such form there seems small hope for the reat of us, though with trepidation I submit another long-gone occupation.


I weep for him who trains those circus fleas.
For all his livestock, sadly now redundant,
still kept in luxury and well-fed ease,
are every day more pointlessly abundant.

The skill with which they used to strut their stuff
with tightrope, parasol and glitterball
was one which kids once rated high enough,
but on today's scale do not rate at all.

For fickle fashion sings with siren voice.
Now Alton Towers, frightening and vast,
leaves most thrill-seeking children spoilt for choice.
The day of the performing flea has passed,

its circus vanished and the last crowd gone.
And yet the sound of distant fading cheers
and hopes for one last show still linger on
behind the trainer's curtain-call of tears.

[Brian Allgar]

Well, this is hardly an elegy ...

I had thought that we poets were goners -
No prizes, no money, no honours.
But thanks to dear Lucy,
The prospects are juicy;
A comp for a poem’s upon us.