I promised you all I would show you the way that Eric Hardy wrote ... many years ago I concocted couple of satirical birding magazines, and wrote a parody of his writing to put in them. I even made a few photocopies of them to distribute to the thronging hordes. You'll never believe this ... I can't find them. I know ... it's unlikely, but true. I'll have to write a similar thing all over again. So here's an imaginary bit of quintessential Eric Hardy writing .. Of course, I've exaggerated a bit....... I'm writing this from a municipal Birkenhead bus shelter in the pouring rain ... that's how I like it. Lots of posh cars are shooting by, and I wave my stick at every one of the capitalist thugs. Having spent the whole of the weekend roaming the Mersey Marshes, I've got plenty to report. Fearlessly. I started out from Heswall Bank at 3am on Saturday, getting my first moth on a shop window pane, a fine Mottled Condom, not at all common in these parts due to draining of their habitat ( discarded dustbins) by right-wing factions.. There were plenty more in the next couple of hours, the highlights being 3 Crumbled Hassocks, a single Dishevelled Monastery , 27 Old Fartingales and an outstanding but tiny Crepuscular Halfscarf of the rare variety " crustipants." This would have been enough for the whole day, but there was plenty more to come, all missed of course by the lazy, fattened-calf-scoffing plutocrats snoring in their criminally-obtained eiderdown luxury dossbags, propped up by gold and silver bedsteads specially reinforced to hold the disgusting mass slumped upon them. Even before dawn I was constantly regaled by the calls of the Resplendent Bosh-Owl and, of course, the Prannet, only rarely seen nowadays due to the racketeer farming "community" trashing the landscape, whilst also pleased with the sheer numbers of Bog Sparrows, unique to Birkenhead and its environs, which nest in outside toilets, mainly to avoid having their eggs stolen by rich bastards with indoor toilets, which will be the ruin of the next generation , who will inevitably be in the thrall of consumerism, and will never appreciate the sort of wildlife I was experiencing right then, such as huge banks of Mild Sludgeroot, Evergreen Nevergreen, Three-Petalled Murgatroyd, Swigglers Posyflower and the extremely unusual 27-leaved Clover, by which time the sun was over the horizon revealing revelations like a swarm of 43 Pratt's Cathartics, only the 307th I've ever seen, a flock of 344 Solitary-Birds on the sea wall, or what's left of it due to tidal surges caused not least by the fat-cat industrial giants pouring chemicals into our oceans, not forgetting fungi such as Dog's Arsebox ( with 2 fruiting bodies!), Ruby-Crusted Halfstagger and its close relative Rudely-Breasted Thricetwice, Dribbler's Architripe, Fumerolic Scrad and, rarest of all, the amazingly dull Grey-Flanged Palebum, all under threat from "academics" in their ivory towers who want them all lumped into one "superspecies" just so they can write pompous research papers about it and add to all the jumped up letters after their double-barrelled names, and then it was time for my politically correct breakfast of dustbin-crusts washed down with gutter-water and the dregs left in discarded bottles and cans , which, by the way, turned out to be a source of further interesting finds including the rare, beer-swilling millipede Firkinn's Unremarkable , an unusual- for- Wirral slug, Frangularia graspercraps and best of all, the Temporary Scribble, which only lives for 17 minutes and is mainly seen as a fossil in northern climes, but then it was time to move on to the University of Birkenhead to have a quick go at Professor Hartley Bigwig and let him know how overprivileged he was and that I know that his PhD thesis was copied out of a special secret book for toffs which is full of PhD theses that they can copy out, but he wasn't in, probably because he was at a swanky lunch with lots of other jumped-up copycats like him, so I spent a little while looking for rotifers in the nearby Dregsley Park, shortly to be demolished to make way for a new Stately Home for Viscount Crabbface and his snooty pals, but I was lucky to come across such specimens as Terpsicursus replicans, Ultracumbria vertiginensis and best of all, the extremely unusual Unspeckled Grummage, one of the few rotifers to be given an English name, and which has only been seen once before but unfortunately was quickly consumed by a most unexpected Harpy's Upjerkin, which was well outside its normal range in Scabshire, where I have spent many productive hours dredging the extensive canal system looking for it's 87 species of Lamprey, so far totally unknown to science, but predicted by me in the Liverpool Echo 37 years ago but totally ignored by the usual blinkered fossils with posh connections in the Science Museum where I first noticed a most unusual specimen of the Dubious Mattress overlooked by the doddering old fools whom I have denounced for many years ........... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I think that's quite enough to give you an insight into the way his mind worked. And now, the Music spot ... I think Roy and Eric would have got on quite well... I thought I heard the sound of my name and I looked back down behind me And with hair like the ripened wheat she came, sure as the west wind to find me And just for a moment I wished my life to see our friends all around us And I turned to her but I held my breath in the far Norwegian mountains. For there we stood two children of spring as everything seemed to be gleaming Her looking breathless clean out of my mind and me with my crazy dreaming To think of my friends underneath the same roof in one common destination When all we do is remain aloof like we have no close relation. And love is my torment and I'll take when I can But I'll give in the moment when you are my woman and I am your man. And I watched her makin' her first daisy chain as her nipples hung hard in suggestion And naked, gnat-bitten we drifted fain in the hazy deserved sensation And we dreamt of all the loves we'd known and we never never thought of the sorrow With forelocks wound over primrose down in the wood by the emptin long barrow Two silver greenflies to flicker the backdropping, lush of the emerald springtime To lust for a moment in love of another is dust on a dragonfly's wing. And love is no torment for we'll give when we can And we'll live in the moment when you are my woman and I am your man. And the blackcap sings and the forest rings, the nettles tall around me With shafts of sun and moving things and poems fast and slowly And fantasies of luscious thirst for new lust and fresh waters to seek it Like diamonds set in realities of skies drawn back in secret But somewhere out there with my heart in her care and her prayers in the breezes that caught them She sits like the earth as I fly to her arms like the showering yellows of autumn And love is no torment for we'll give when we can And we'll live in the moment when she is my woman and I am her man. As far as anybody can remember, the last section of his fictional "article" ,which you will I am sure have noticed is an unbroken sentence, continued as such for another 7057 words, an unprecedented and record-breaking sentence which filled the whole of the next day's Liverpool Echo, even ousting the Crossword.
2 Comments
Graham Hulme
8/13/2018 07:12:34 am
yes he was quite a character! A few more things about him:
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8/13/2018 08:09:51 am
Yes indeed. You, of course, had the great good fortune to get his wonderfully rambling radio broadcasts from your Elevated Mansionand Special Spiral Staircase.I think I might have a couple of tapes of it that you did .. somewhere. Thanks for the comment .. my first.
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