HEIDI HAIKU MP

The day Heidi cried
Crocodiles wept real tears

Of hollow laughter

EPiSODE FORTY-ONE: THE END OF THE DAY WiTH THE PRESiDENT!!!

The President went to sleep very, very, VERY! content, do you get that? That's three God damned very's, OK. He had been one lucky SOB that day in so many ways, so many ways, folks. He had not been jailed, nor had any of his immediate entourage, nor even his extended family. No fish today. That's #big fat ZERO! Nada. He had pinched the fanny of the First Lady on LIVE network television, and gotten away with it. And he'd had the very great pleasure of firing someone else who thought that he had been indispensable.

There were 310 million privately-owned guns in the USA and still, he was STILL alive. Incredible day.

There were one thousand seven hundred and ninety-five days just like this in his contract with the Merkin People.

Sleeping good, folks, sleeping good.

GUIDES FOR CHAPS: No. 47 HOW TO SPEAK TO FOREIGNERS WHO AREN'T JOHNNIES

Where are you from?
Is it your first time here?
My son went to Vietnam on one occasion.
So, quite a strange experience I imagine.
What have you found the most strange so far?
The weather/ the roads?
Have you got enough clothes with you?
I think, some English people like to wear little
in the way of clothes, just to show off!
I've been here many years. It is a lovely place to be in as well.

Have you been to the old part of town? Very expensive!
Have you been to the river? The boats? Oh, the punting!
Have you watched people doing it?
It is not easy.
I live in a village just outside Newmarket.
I don't think Vietnam is very keen on horse racing.
Newmarket is the centre of horse racing in England.
I am running a trip to Ely where there is a very large cathedral.
A cathedral is an extra big church.
Have you had one of our leaflets?
This is designed for international visitors.
You can go on our website to see what else there is.
A soul?
Ah, Seoul. In South Korea?
No. Arse.. oh. Leave you alone?


Ok.

STORYCATCHER

It was not so many years ago that the Storycatcher stopped plying his trade. Time was he would cast his net to and fro, in the back streets of Bethlehem, behind the gin palaces of SE1, along Black Country gutters, outside two-up-and-two-downs in Macchu Pichu and throughout the length and breadth of The Valleys - collecting fragments of tales, strings of anecdotes and flights of fantasy in his wake. He had a point to prove back then. Pensions were index-linked, health care was real and the benefit system less mythical.

But after the great defeats of the 70s and 80s, the stories changed in nature. The immigrants' tales from Grunwick, the bitter odes of Orgreave, the feminist lore of Greenham wove a richer fabric of bravery and despair than any account of social democratic content. The legendary might of industrial unionism was largely a media construct. He had boxes and boxes of internalised Fleet Street tale-telling and reams and reams of narrative stream from union leaders in the House of Lords in a lock-up in West London. It stank of beer and B & H. Then there was the usual kitchen sink Stalinist rubbish, which he used for propping up his broken futon.

His friends thought him eclectic and/or workerist. Even catchers who did Nottingham, Ireland and black & white in the 60’s, thought he’d taken it too far. Nevertheless, most considered his oeuvre worthy of consideration. He had garnered the begrudged respect bestowed on a somebody; he had a unique selling point, a dedication that came from compulsive obsession. From the East End of Glasgow, he would discover accounts of sublimated aggression and tenderness of such passion the empathy machine would sometimes clog up. He used to have to unblock it with the unsold editions of Oxbridge educated authors from the Home Counties. The slipstream enema enabled him to carry on collecting, until the Poll Tax revolt had everyone singing bad Country & Western again. The youth, into anti-Christian hip-hop butt-crack humour, got locked into ASBO nano-narratives. Your mama. Form over content again. It was a low point for the Storycatcher.

He suffered a nervous breakdown after the Soweto school strikes. They built a wall around the township with their stories and wouldn't let him in. Although he was much taller and had a white beard, they'd mistaken him for Chevy Chase.

He had his highs. Once in Barrow-in-Furness, his story bag burst. To soak the overflow up, he had to go back with a trailer and four hobbits that were on disability, but did a bit of cash in hand. He released The Northern Volumes into the wind on Primose Hill. Pangs of middle-class anxiety and guilt-induced asthma attacks led to record admissions at University College Hospital for a Sunday afternoon.

It was an act of regional narrative terrorism. It was Bader Meinhof meets the Brothers Grimm Up North. Weary of tales skimmed off the top of the consciousness of the litterati in Highgate, Hampstead, Manhattan, San Fran, The Boulevards and the Left Bank, he had grown manic. The attractions of Brick Lane, the Dominican Republic and the Colombian Sunday Football League held his gaze in the mid-90s, but before long he pined for the classic again: the once-upon-a-times of his youth, the familiar ring of security of a happy ever after, the nostalgic verisimilitude of a Northern European forest, the long held certainties of magic bean reproduction and fortuitous outcomes.

These days the kids’ stuff was mostly mopped up by the mythmakers and fed into the semi-literary nuggets machine along with corporate excess, fat, preservatives, sugar and breadcrumbs. It was finger lickin' formulaic fodder, highly processed and anodyne. Nothing but hollow structure; it lacked flavour and texture. The instant feel-good rush would wear off fast and leavin' you wanting more - like a soul hungry for conflict in a Janet and John reader. Five or six hundred pages of substance, but no meaningful content. I'm lovin' it... not. Froth for the materialist cappuccino, not staples for the intellectual mill grist. He had to switch off the judgement call-back on his mobile he was so anti-PC.

His latest catch had been the toast of the storytelling festival that was held every August, fictionally speaking. He enthused about the new schools of Scottish social surrealism and gumshoe Jafaican punk till he blew up the pretension meter Roald Dahl had rigged up at the back of the stage. Irvine Welsh, Voltaire and Dashiel Hammett kidnapped him and strapped him into a chair. They restored his critical apparatus by placing a Sicilian kiss on his forehead. As Peter Lorre pulled the trigger, the party gun let out nothing more deadly than a BANG! flag and cap of gunpowder. But the context, the noise and the idea was enough to set off a cardiac arrest in the Storycatcher, who was a DOA on the repeats of Chicago Hope on ITV3 that afternoon, replacing Quincy as a mark of respect.

His acolyte, Recycle Boy, who accepted the Posthumous Award For Postmodernist Achievement on the Storycatcher’s behalf, said that he would be doing his bit to resist carbon copies, the omission of truths and the globalised fiction that passed for fact these days -  to polite applause and embarrassed coughs all around.

Only time would tell, its own story, as usual.