Zoom

A sixpenny lolly,

false memory has it red-white-and-blue

- it would, wouldn’t it?

Pattern B supported the Republican Cause.

Lady P held one in

innocent pride for some ads stickered

to the side of white goods

in sweet-filled corner shops on Memory Lane.

 

Citizens of the atom age,

we ducked and covered.

We can recite “Sir Isaac Newton tells us why”

all the way to the “grave”.

Our public information

came as cartoons, in soundbytes and rhyme.

They are still cartoonish:

our pantomime villains parade their ignorance.

 

One sixties-fag-end night,

ghostly figures did slow motion ballet

on the faraway moon.

Each day for a month,

we’d practice our moonwalks

long before Michael went white-face:

until something else

was the latest craze in the tarmacadam playground.

 

Look-and-Learn 1970:

special edition - a look at life in fifty years -

video phones, hover-vehicles

a nuclear-powered life, everything would have antennae:

no black-faces, not one.

Though the South African XI didn’t come that year

and Hendrix died alone,

on the front page: this was a Persil-washed future.

 

We grew out of it;

lollies, Look-and-Learn and forelock-tugging,

via laughing at the kid

who said ‘Big School’

on the first day in the quadrangle,

though we’d all feared saying something

to gain the mob’s attention

and become the bullied for the next five years.

 

We read densely written

books with no pictures,

even Ivan Ilich in the school library,

on rainy days and during prep.

We’d been deschooled long before the third form.

One fine day, one summer, at a corner shop,

I’ll see the Lyons Maid sign,

and buy one last Zoom to relive its sticky memories.

 

[Audio here, voice actor available for hire £10 per hour, will make himself unavailable for £15 per hour]