Gobbets and Doggerel

I love Silbury Hill. During the investigations of the 1960’s, when it was probed with massive corkscrews and pipes, to no avail, that strange cone was often featured on childrens’ telly programmes like Blue Peter and Newsround. It’s unlike anything else in Britain, and it’s accessible. You can drive up, find a gap in the fence (there’s always at least one), and clamber up to the top…if it’s dry enough that you won’t slip.

But why was it built? On who’s orders?

We assume that Neolithic people didn’t travel much but of course they did… people always travel…and there’s plenty of evidence for international trade too.

So, one day this hairy travelling bloke… or hairy travelling woman…. arrives at a prehistoric Devizes pub in a Ford Transit, loaded with exotic spices, cuddly toys …and unguents… and gets talking to the local warlord who’s been fretting about his future long barrow burial mound thingy …and how, style-wise, the design is a bit two-thousand-and-late BCE.

The well-travelled hairy nomad scratches a 2-dimensional triangle on a bit of bone and says, “This is how real kings and queens do it out East, and it’ll be a lot better tnan your poxy old barrow. Pay me 5,000 bilberries and I’ll sell you this design…in fact for 10,000 bilberries and a lardy cake you can have the copyright!”

This local warlord is well happy… pays up, gets all the local unemployed lads and lasses to build a big pile of mud and chalk. It’s basically a very large pile of stuff that naturally settles into a cone shape.

No one in the town had ever seen a real modern pyramid, so everyone in Wiltshire felt very smug… as people who live in Wiltshire generally do.

The old warlord died and the tribe realised there was no doorway to shove him in… and no burial chamber either. After a few jugs of mead they stuffed him into the nearest overflowing long barrow and kept shtum. Well style isn’t everything and he’d been a pretty shit warlord.

Wiltshire folk have been a bit smug ever since.

Ok so it’s a pretty dumb theory but as good as some other stuff on the fake archaeology sites.

Next up in Archeological Bollocks…the Bronze age origins of the Cornish pasty or pastilla and its role in facilitating the Phoenician tin trade.

.

I don’t miss driving home from work
Parking up the road
Too worried to cover that last half mile
Waiting half an hour

Knowing that the wine would smile
Long before you asked
“How was your day?”
Which you did sometimes

I was grateful for that
And faintly hopeful
Even though anything more than “Fine”
Resulted in glazed eyes

The words that we needed were never birthed
but spoken inwardly
And loudly
In Pentecostal tongues

The fight we never had was a brutal attrition
Fought in damp shadows
At increasing range
Wielding sharpened jibes

The dams never broke
And you will never know
Who won

For we are both happier now

I keep your letter folded away
For a later that never came.
In a Jiffy bag
Along with an unwritten postcard of Lough Owel
And a Young’s beer mat with your number
Written with a pen you borrowed from Maria
In The Spread Eagle.
I kept them for a later
Where we would laugh at our luck…
Fuck…

…in  long dry summers.
At the end of a long green lane
In the shade of high Elm trees
On this horsehair mattress
That smells of tobacco

And now it is a later
Different to the one we willed
And could have owned
Where we are grey
And Elm trees are long gone
Like Somerstown
I keep your letter