Blind Date

Tags

Blind Date, British Library, Roman de la Rose

(British Library MS 4425 Roman de la Rose)

 

There’s no chance

of having a blind

date round here.

A Book By Its Covers

Tags

Apocalypse, Blind Date, Bowdlerise, Derren Brown, G Wilson Knight, John Carey, Midsummer Night's Dream, paintball, rude mechanicals

Juniper came home and threw her school satchel onto the kitchen floor.  She had been behaving a little better since her mother had sent her and her younger brother to Salisbury Plain for a Derren Brown-type Apocalypse experience where they were hypnotised and had to learn altruism instead of going paint-balling as they had thought.

However, her mischievous nature resurfaced as she complained:

Mum, we’re reading a book in school about

bottoms; a woman who bonks a donkey.

They all take drugs, swap partners, sleep.. I shout,

Trendy ideology..a junkie

English teacher!  I’m going to complain

about giving teenagers such obscene

reading matter. I’m glad that I refrain;

it dawns on me that Midsummer Night’s Dream

is what she’s referring to.  They just lay

on a floral bank, I elucidate,

and fell asleep.

Well, that’s what they all say!

she retorts.  She thinks of it as Blind Date

with Bestiality.  Maybe her view

of rude mechanicals-(geddit?)-fairies,

is right and critically overdue;

should rank with G Wilson Knight’s, John Carey’s.

This is worse than any poppering pear.

Pyramus, Thisbe should be X-rated.

Bowdlerise Arden, lest it prove a snare.

How can Shakespeare be exonerated?

I turn around; cooly say, Whatever.

I suppose you thought that very clever.