Many of my worldwide fans will be aware that I ended my gainful employment some few years ago as verger at Selby Abbey. I thought it would be a good idea to try to atone for a lifetime's indiscretions.  Indeed I did this so successfully that I now sit one rung down from the fucking angels.

This is a poem about me and a friend of mine (actually he was the best man at our wedding) who has become a lay magistrate.; and he told me this story.

He was sitting in on a case involving a bloke who had shot a peregrine falcon.  The bloke pleaded "Guilty" and the Chairman asked him if there were any mitigating circumstances.  The bloke said "Not really" but explained that he didn't intend shooting the falcon - he had been shooting pigeons.  But as he took a shot at one the falcon must have stooped on its prey and he hit it instead.  (The pigeon escaped two deaths in the same second!).

After a quick discussion with his wingmen the Chairman agreed that, in the light of no other evidence, the case should be dismissed as an accident.

As he was leaving the court, though, he had a thought and said to the bloke,  "So what did you do with it?"

The bloke said that for such a beautiful bird to give up its life for no reason would have been a sin.  So he took it home and he and his wife ate it.

The Chairman nodded sagely.  But just as the bloke was about to exit the door he asked,  "So what did it taste like?"

"Just like swan" he said.

 

I moan these days about youngsters -

The chavs and the scuzzies and thugs;

Their swearing and gobbing and ASBOs -

Their smoking and drinking and drugs.

But I recollect I was no angel

And partial to that Special Brew

And me and my mate have knocked teeth out

And pissed in a doorway or two.

But I’m sure that time in the 80’s

When we got banged up in a cell

We never thought that years later

We’d have this story to tell.

Cos it’s hard to see into your future

And no doubt we’d drunkenly scoff

That he’d end up as a Lawman

And I’d be a man of the cloth.