Here, to lower the tone, is a little something that Philip Larkin wrote on the, er, challenges of personnel management...
Administration
Day by day your estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile and who a frown,
And girls you have to tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants you'd most like to pull down.
It seems Larkin wrote these lines after discovering one his prettier library assistants canoodling in the stacks with her boyfriend.
It's a piece that could have found its way into either or both of the little anthologies I bought the other day, being both short (and actually rather sweet) and funny.
Cause of obesity:
ReplyDeleteThey fill you up, your Mum and Dad,
They may not mean to but they do
They give you all the puds they had
And add some extra just for you.
Thanks. Not true of my childhood, alas – my mother, not having much of an appetite herself, had no idea how hungry growing boys get and never seemed to give us enough. Still, I've never had a problem with obesity...
DeleteWhat a distressing but accurate expression of a certain sort of sexual misery. How much it seems of the past, though. Perversions have leveled up and transmogrified in our Internet world...
ReplyDeleteYes – innocent times (relatively). Misery with a side order of fun, I think.
Delete