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ARTS AND CULTURE

Election week poems

  • 17 August 2010

Two triangles We were just leaving Singapore for good when the Tiananmen Square thing happened. The Singaporean Chinese know what oppression is and what to do about it and for days they lined up for miles outside the  Bank of China which was next to our office to take out their life savings (and maybe get a better interest rate somewhere else).

We were busy finishing things up and I looked down from my office window and I saw four Chinese Singaporean bank guys on the roof of their building doing Tai chi out of sight of the queue on the street.

Now whenever I see that Tiananmen square guy on the TV in front of the tank with his shopping bag or whatever I can't remember what happened to the three of them the tank the guy or the camera man or who backed away first.

All I can see is the silent line and these guys doing Tai Chi. –Mark Carkeet

Election time in Derbyshire The surprise of big blue skies hung out to dry, the old spa town of Buxton just a sunlit slab of limestone, laid out cold in the moors' deep ditch, inscribed with windy streets, three stories deep.

The slopes are steeped in springwater, chilling the air where the Duke of Devonshire once declared there had to be an opera house, pleasure gardens, and the world’s biggest dome over his stables, like some provincial Kubla Khan in tweed and jodhpurs.

The dome's still there — a big white wonder of glass and steel, but if you try to take a picture, guards in fluoro jackets will 'ask' you to delete them, calling you 'sir', like some fallen superior on remand, as if the Duke still ruled the roost; which he does, in a way.

It's election time, after all, and the town's awash with posters of the local member, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, come three weeks time. He went to Eton, did our George, like three-quarters of the future bench. Down here, that doesn't even seem unnatural.

Up on the hill, outside the blackened town hall, the markets are out, and between the cut-price toilet rolls, the cheap wet wipes and the stovepipe polyester florals, two actual human beings are standing firm against a cruel wind, clutching a cardboard 'Labour' stand, handing out papers which look quite blank in this washed-out, colourless Derbyshire sun.

They're elderly, unstable, probably a couple, their cheerful eyes sprung like steel against the cold, their hands arthritic, resigned; their grip carrying no conviction. Concentration lapses. People fail to see. This has never been a Labour town.

Eyes water. Wind leaps. One leaflet escapes, cartwheeling down past the Town Hall and on past the Public Art Gallery, all the way down