A Trip to Auld Reekie ('Edinburgh')

Yesterday was disasterous. I decided that Dundee as a whole was unsuitable as an arena for poesy and literary experimentation. The city is a cultural wasteland! After all, it has only produced and inspired Don Patterson, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, W. N. Herbert, Bill Duncan, A.L. Kennedy, Rosamunde Pilcher, Kate Atkinson, Mary Shelley, and other such ignoble figures. I decided Auld Reekie ('Edinburgh') would be a better city to loose my genius upon the world, for Auld Reekie ('Edinburgh') has produced a great many renowned literary figures such as William Douglas-Home, who wrote the screenplay for Follow That Horse! (1960).

I composed a short piece to mark the occassion of my departure from Dundee.

And so it was that at 8:03
I left the ancient City of Dundee
For Edinburgh to show off my genius
(I took the reasonably priced Megabus).

When I arrived in Auld Reekie ('Edinburgh') an hour and a half later, I discovered that I had picked an ideal time to arrive. Had I come a few months later, there would have been an enormous city-wide festival of the Arts running, which would involve an abundance of street mime artists and interminable student reviews. This would have quite ruined the tone of my more serious and sombre work.

Inspired by my good fortune, I boldly marched down the Royal Mile (equivalent to 320 falls and 8 furlongs) and chanted my poem - I sang it to the tune of the Murder She Wrote theme to better attract the attention of passers-by. I am afraid to report that every publican along the route produced a plate of peas and hurled it at me.

Another failure. Now that I am back in Dundee, I will go door-to-door with my poetry in order to reach people at a personal level - I now believe people have been put off by my big public displays. The Scottish psyche does not tolerate such over-the-top ostentation.