Ah, these soft Sunday nights.
All Creatures Great and Small —
stout tweeds and the warm certainties
we imagine our grandparents knew.
Not mine. I think they would have laughed.

My father’s father could touch his toes
with his elbows, you know?
Not Yoga – a roof-fall in the mine
that near broke his back.

And my mother’s father?
Irish. The labouring kind.
Not easy, being Irish – any kind of Irish –
in the England
of All Creatures Great and Small.

So don’t get me started
on Downton Abbey.

Yet still, we seek it, don’t we?
This thing we think we know,
this thing we think we’ve lost.
It’s like an ache,
and we seek it always in the past.

Each generation, the same –
not realising it’s a hunger
for a way of being.
Not an era.
Not stout tweeds,
nor Peaky-Blinder pocket watches,
nor that warm patrician certainty.

Keep calm, old boy. Carry on.
England of the Blitz.
Is that what you want?
You’d seek it there?
A hair’s breadth from death.
And jackboots.

Or would you resurrect the ghost
of Lord Kitchener?
You know – Your country needs you –
finger pointing, accusatory.
Coward.
Pointing you back to a time, that first time,
the dawn of mechanised slaughter.
Lions led by donkeys.
Seek it there?

But what is this loss you mourn, exactly?
Might it not be something we deny,
even as we search for it in the pockets
of our dress-up forties weekends?
Could it be with us all the time –
through the nine to five,
the long commutes,
the over-spilling emails of the present?

Is it not a shadow, tapping on our shoulder –
a shade from the underworld,
black-clad, mourning a future
we can no longer imagine?

It visits each generation, the same.
Points the way –
but not to Kitchener’s slaughter,
to the future.

No, no…

You must never go looking back, it says.