Tenerife is calling, I can see Mount Teidie,
its mighty peak steeped in volcanic ash.

Can I land there, astride a balloon,
fuelled by my ego’s hot air?

I look down to where I used to parade myself,
among my old flames on that volcanic beach,
in flip flops and Armani shorts,
wondering why I’d consigned myself to the bachelor shelf,
trying to look cool, then crying ‘Ouch!’
when the sand burned my feet.

The ocean is welcoming me, with its headlong surf,
after all, a flying vehicle is only a temporary refuge,
but there’s caves and rocky declivities to hide in.

With a following wind I could hit Marrakesh and hire a camel.
I’ll follow the old hippy trail, grow my lovely
locks and play the ukulele, like George Harrison,
that shy retiring Beatle.

His namesake Rex coached a ragged flower girl, Eliza Doolittle,
in that iconic musical film, My Fair lady.

Could he do likewise and make me a teller of tall tales,
like those comics at the London Apollo,
who never make me laugh?

Ah! The bloody BBC, they must be desperate.

So I flew back to the island, with a stowaway
in the shape of that Fair Lady,
pupil of the aforementioned Rex,
teaching the working class how to say 'bath'.

Then a sudden wind blew me off course,
and I crashed into the sea, so Eliza and I swam to a rocky cove,
but as the tourists passed by,
we listened in amusement as they talked about that ‘Bloody weirdo’,
who’d boasted about his hot-aired flying machine,
and I realised I shouldn’t have returned,
to this land of bikinis and pensioned-off wrecks.

The island of Tenerife was such a contrast to
London and her district of Whitechapel,
but Eliza loved to lord herself among the hoi polloi,
that means the ‘common people’,
a term synonymous with British culture,
but invented by the Greeks.

She was crestfallen when I told her we must leave,
for she was fascinated by this new world,
and asked, ‘Is there nothing real here?’

‘They don’t have a music hall, just something called disco,
run by a jockey, who doesn’t have a horse,
talking nonsense, playing Abba, is that Arabic?

‘Oh, and The Kinks, I’ve got a few of them
after riding in your flying basket.’

I laughed, ‘You want to try karaoke, 
that’s a whole new experience.’

‘Ah, are we so much better than your Edwardian world,
Miss Eliza Doolittle?'

‘Indeed no,’ she laughed, ‘in this so-called classless society
everyone puts on an act.’

We heard footsteps and laughter above our rocky retreat,
and froze our embrace, as a courting couple sniggered
at the Edwardian-dressed Eliza.

One of them enquired, ‘Is that a fancy dress?’

It dawned on me that I was, to those people above, an outcast.

So we quickly dug up the big envelope hidden in the sand,
attached the basket and flew away.

Frightened of the sun, we travelled by night,
avoiding the jet planes among the clouds,
alerting conspiracy watchers to a new kind of UFO,
until we hit Marrakesh, and smoked some weed.

I thought that would make me blend in,
for isn’t that what hippies do?

The enigmatic Eliza again paraded herself in
her Edwardian swimming costume,
for bare flesh is not accepted in this Arabian land,
and, as the locals trotted by on their camels, 
she laughed like a little girl,
‘I saw one of those at London Zoo, this really is a funny holiday.

‘I usually go to Southend.’

‘Please can I stay here, a refugee from my own time?’

I brightened up, replying, ‘Only if I can be your constant companion.’

‘Okay, I am single again, for my voice
tutor Mr Harrison has gone to Hollywood,
attracted by the Yankee dollar.

‘He passed us in something called Concorde,
that long airplane with a drooping nose.

'So it’s obvious he’s finished with the flower girl from old Covent Garden,
who’d never heard of disco, karaoke and cannabis.’

At this I felt giddy, and it wasn’t the dope which filled the air,
so could only whisper, ‘Yes please.’

‘But you might run away, again, in your balloon and hide inside a cloud!'

‘No I won’t, for I’ve finally come down.’