Tag Archives: shakespeare

All the world’s a garden centre

All the world’s a garden centre
  And all the men and women merely customers.
They have their checkouts and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts,
His visits being seven ages.

                                        First, the infant,
  Yelling and crying in his all-terrain stroller.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his gameboy
  And scowling morning face, bored by all he sees,
  Until the animatronic reindeer arrive in mid-September.
And then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
  With a woeful text to his girlfriend about
  How his mother had to stop on the way.
Next, the influencer, seeking a sausage roll
  And a power tool for his next ‘unboxing’.
Then the PR consultant, now behind the stroller,
  Feigning an interest in his wife’s roses;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
To the retiree, whose rose garden is his pride and joy,
  His wife mostly absent at the golf course. Last scene of all
  That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and such oblivion
  That you take the bus to the garden centre to shop for clothes.

Today

It occurs to me that if I were to suffer a minor injury today, perhaps through careless use of a carrot-peeler or (more likely) a soldering iron, it would have the compensation that thereafter I could strip my sleeve and show my scars and say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!”

Almost seems worth it. Especially if some of my friends would agree to hold their manhoods cheap in consequence…

Tomorrow

He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser