VERSE Part I

Bloggiana seems to have come over all poetic on us. The first I knew of it was last week when we were ambling down the lane, I on Nag, she on Dobbin. The day was still. No wind, light like sharpened slate, high cloud and the hedges dotted with red from rose hips and yellow from the leafy embers of a dying year. As we wandered along, our horses seemed to be telepathically in sync with one another so that their footfalls chimed exactly. Even the cars that shot from right to left in front of us on the bypass flyover seemed to do so in a rhythm, and then a freight train came and its jostling carriages lent yet another layer to the lilting jazz riff of our journey.

As we rode, we were silent and I guessed we were both listening to the rhythms when suddenly Bloggiana piped up with:

It’s a pleasure sublime
To go hacking in rhyme.

Crikey, where did that come from? I couldn’t help blurting out. But the waters closed over so fast, I began to wonder whether Bloggiana had indeed spoken or whether I had imagined it. We wandered on. The horses still walking in time, the cars still flickety-booming past in apparently measured sequence.

Next day the sky was equally clear and neither of us had to say a word because we both knew it was unquestionably the moment to go and enjoy another ride. Now the only cloud was scattered across the sky in streaks – like feathers strewn from the tail of a bird that had fled the wrath of the sun. It was still still. And the rhythms were once again mesmeric. And once again Bloggiana broke the silence with some unforeseen doggerel:

Let’s give it a shot.
Let’s try rhyming in trot.

This time I have to admit I was not at all sure how to respond. I mean it is not every day that one’s alter ego begins to talk in rhyme, I reasoned to myself.

And how wrong I was. For the following day and the following and the following, Bloggiana came up with more rhyming nuggets:

It’s such fun to ride
With a bit on the side.

I’ve a bloody good crack
When I go on a hack.

Bloggiana, what’s come over you? I couldn’t help asking finally. I mean, old girl, why this sudden passion for iambics?

Across a metrical haze, through lists and lists of assonant equi-vocab, in and out of limericks and haikus and stanzas and clerihews, Bloggiana looked back at me dreamily.

Do you know Piccalilli, I’m not at all sure. But frankly, she added with the slightest hint of mid-opiate rapture about her, there could be a nastier curse than being besotted with verse.

At this, I clicked Dobbin onwards. And went back to measuring the rhythms of the Eddie Stobart lorries on the bypass.