The guide to nine utopias - II - Fast

The guide to nine utopias


II -- Fast

The traffic for your area: I'm Dan
Trailer--and with values falling on the roads
the slump extends its bite. This minivan
on the M4, which two years back exploded
to upwards of a million pounds is priced,
today, at half that sum--and it's not selling.
For young professionals, my best advice
is stay right where you are: your car's a dwelling...

of course you'd like to be nearer the city
but cars don't move and negative equity
means neither do you. If you want a family
saloon, forget that dream, keep your money
for a better year.--Now, on the wackier side:
we've found more film from when folk used to drive.

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The guide to nine utopias - I - Gastronomic

The guide to nine utopias


I -- Gastronomic

Stimpson's Authentic Fish-Flavoured Food Bricks
in FreshSeal packaging to keep the zing
for every mouthwatering bite. The pick
of every family meal, and just the thing
in your husband's government-issue lunchpack.
Or... for the under-prole whose budget's smaller,
try Stimpson's Value Algal Protein Stacks--
in Classic Crab-Effect, or New Trawlermen's

Choice. Perfect for soaking up dole-board gruel
or National Nutrient paste, and fuel
for long days on the work-farm shovelling
dung. These foodstuffs of the future lack nothing,
bring great economy, and we are proud
to provide the highest food content allowed!

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The Guide to Nine Utopias - introduction

The Guide to Nine Utopias - introduction


I have decided to bite the bullet and put up my second most ambitious ever poem...

This is a sequence of ten sonnets entitled The guide to nine utopias.  Ten sonnets is far too many to dump on you all in one monstrous post, so I am going to serialise them: a sonnets every three days of so, right up to the eve of the UK general election.  After that it will be only too obvious what sort of Utopia we've ended up with...

The idea for this sprang into existence, fully formed, while I was camping with my 60 or 70 of my relatives in 2011.  My relatives have nothing to do with this poem as they are far more utopian than the topics covered here.

This is going to be, of course, dystopian — as you may be able to tell from my little logo at the top right.  Do not think I'm a pessimist or anti-progress person, however.  I am quite the reverse, fully believing in progress and technology and equality and liberation and all that goes with those things.  My message is more subtle and I'm going to build on a point I come back to over and over:

Many people are naive and overconfident.

For example...  it is very easy to take the exact Lego bricks needed for a utopia, and build a world-class dystopia from them.  The Universe is a complex and subtle place, and generally speaking our leaders are simple and unsubtle.  This wouldn't matter if they knew they needed smarter people to advise them, but usually they don't.  Our leaders really should be followed by a little man who, like for a Roman general, has the job of continually whispering "Remember the Dunning-Kruger effect" in their ears.

However we don't have that, so yes: our leaders really are idiots and no: it isn't an illusion caused by us not seeing all the difficulties they face.  I mean sure, that illusion exists, but additionally they are idiots.  The best thing you can do as a member of the electorate is work steadily and ingeniously to ram the facts of their incompetence into their faces as often and as thoroughly as possible...

Be that as it may, we had some poetry going on here earlier, or rather we're going to in a day or two...  Watch this space.  As I am having to future-schedule the episodes, I may not be sharing them as widely as I usually do.  So if you want in I recommend liking my @IanBadcoePoetry Facebook page where every one of them will be posted automatically, via the power of the internet.