Tuesday 31 March 2015

The election campaign truly kicks off with Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac's angry, searing, elegiac polemic, "De Coalition an' t'ing: Part 1"

I was feeling a trifle melancholy last night, isolated in the top-floor study of our £3.5m Islington mansion. Tamintha and I had just returned from an election fund-raiser at Ed Miliband's place round the corner. The reason for my disquiet? It started early in the evening when Ed managed to slit his thumb open on a screw-cap wine bottle top: no idea how he did it, as they're supposed to be fool-proof. It got worse when he somehow gashed his lip while drinking from a perfectly ordinary wine glass. Then he burned his hand quite badly during an "ordinary bloke" photo op, trying to extract a tray of cheesy tid-bits from one of the cookers in their third kitchen. "Would you like me to drive you to A&E?", I asked as his wife applied a bandage. "The way I would answer that particular question is this..." he began, but then lost his train of thought as he momentarily passed out from the pain.

After we'd brought him round, I helped him downstairs to the Milibands' fourth reception room, where most of the 600 guests had gathered (it's a large room - more a ballroom, really), troubled by the thought that Ed might after all not have been the wisest choice as Labour Party Leader. That sense of doubt increased when I saw his relatively normal-looking brother David huddled in a corner of the crowded room with an old, wizzened, dreadlocked Afro-Caribbean gentleman, both laughing uproariously. Ed spotted them as well. He got very excited and started barging through the guests towards the pair, waving frantically. I followed. We had almost reached David when I realised that his companion was none other than our greatest living dub poet, Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac, or, as the world knows him, BZZ (or, as his close friends know him, Benji).

Ed opened his arms wide as if to indulge in a public (and entirely bogus) show of mutual affection with his brother - but, instead, he shrieked "Bob Marley!" and flung his arms around the startled poet. Disconcerted by this unwonted display of affection from someone who evidently didn't have a clue who he was, and possibly confused by the effects of the 12" spliff he was consuming at the time, BZZ grabbed Ed's shirt-front, shouted "Get off me, batty bwoy!" and drove his forehead with stunning force against the Labour leader's nose. There was an awful lot of blood, I noticed, as Ed once more lost consciousness and slumped on the carpet. Some of the guests screamed. Strangely, given that he had just seen his brother violently assaulted, David just laughed even harder.

The police were called, of course. And an ambulance to take Ed to hospital. After a long discussion with BZZ, a chief inspector announced that the poet had decided not to press charges against Ed for the new offence of "laying hands on a Person of Colour without prior written consent". I made a "phone me" gesture at Benji as he weaved out of the front door, still smoking his spliff, and he waved an upraised middle-finger at me (a sign that I'm truly accepted, despite being white).

It was very, very late by the time we got home. I went upstairs and sat disconsolately in front of my wall-mounted 60" retina-display iMac for a bit, reading the various news reports about Ed's unfortunate mishap - The Sun's "Beaker's Beak Battered by BZZ" was typical of the Murdoch press, while the BBC's "Assault on Miliband 'fault of Tories' says Ed Balls" struck the right tone, I thought.  There then pinged into my inbox an email from none other than the man of the moment, BZZ. It was a new poem. I read it. And then I cried. I cried a lot.

After a while, alarmed by my howls, Tamintha made her way up to my study and placed consoling hands on my heaving shoulders. "Darling," she said, her voice cracking with compassion, "I've had enough. I'm leaving you."

Bit of a blow. But Benji's searing indictment of five years of Coalition misrule, and the realisation that the Great Fascist Terror was finally, irrevocably over, and that, despite the fact that Ed Miliband is (as Tony Blair told me in confidence just last week) "a truly colossal prat", there could once more be a Labour Prime Minister in No.10 within a few short weeks more than made up for any disappointment Tamintha's unexpected and wholly unwarranted decision might have occasioned. Here is Benji's latest masterpiece. Read it. Reflect. Weep.
De Coalition an' t'ing: Part 1, Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac
Bruddas.
Last night came unto me a vision
Of de last edition
Of de never endin' soap opera dem call de Coalition
Whose legacy of indecision is regarded wid derision
An whose inanition
Has led to a collapse in de condition
Of dis country's economical position,
Left in top shape to de Tories by de grumpy Scotch who save de nation
An' give us salvation, from deprivation an' mass starvation
An' t'ing.
So I an' I would say
Dis now gwan lead to a fatal collision
Between DeCameron ambition
An'  Cleggy contrition
Fe Nigel Clegg mus fe to regret him ever to enter into dis sham marriage
Which open de gates of London fe de jackboot stormtroopin' of Norman Farage.
Cos fe all his yellow tie, Nick
Is really at a median point between between being thick
An' not so quick.
Why else him not see dat Gordon Huhne
In him souped up saloon
Was fe to battin' on a sticky wicket
Wid him dodgy attitude to de speeding ticket
Betta him stick
Wid him wife which dem call Vick,
At dat juncture,
An' wish him BMW have a puncture
Rather than fe to end up in de clink an' den shacked up wid an oddly asymmetrical rug muncha.
An as fe him other friends
Let's not we pretend
Dat in his skill to spot expense system flaws
Any one outscores
Laws
An as fe de proclivities of Oaten,
Even in de broad minded Grønmark blog, de details mus' surely must remain verboten.
An' in all dis profusion
Of confusion,
Donald Cameron, him act fe to exploit dis Lib Dem disintegration
By Parliamentary Prorogation, wid no consultation
In de expectation
Dat a grateful nation
In celebration
Will beatify him in a Tory Coronation
An' subject we to anuddah 5 years of Deprivation, Nuclear Proliferation,
Torturation, Discrimination, Unjust taxation, Working class sterilisation,
CIA-style techniques of Enhanced Interrogation
An several other unpleasant t'ings which rhyme with -ation which I can't recall right now cos me been at de herb.
Arise, Bruddas. The Horror! The horror! 
As Jeremy Conrad would him say.
But wait, Bruddas,
There is salvation
In de prospect of a Millerband Nation.

BZZ March 2015

2 comments:

  1. A very funny post. Thank you for a great laugh.

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    Replies
    1. You're most welcome and I'm sure Benji would say the same, if he were conscious.

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