Happy Dogging New Year via a statement from Go and a transposition of a Wordsworth sonnet

 Happy New Year everybody!

It was in another world – a world we were part of, as it happens – that Go (a character that runs through the ‘English Strain’ project) issued his New Year announcement to the dogging community and to those who practice the dogging lifestyle. The post-Brexit largesse that would allow the newly-liberated populace of Bressex (that’s Britain’s new name) to fuck each other’s brains out in the open air didn’t materialise (as we knew it wouldn’t), and the dogging community and those who practice the dogging lifestyle, particularly in Kent (home of Sir Thomas Wyatt and subject of some of Wordsworth’s most patriotic and idiotic sonnets), have not had a grand time, what with lockdowns and Covid regulations, lorries queuing up, and pesky foreigners arriving on its chalky littoral. So, cast your mind back to the New Year 2018, when Brexit was replete with promise, like a pig’s bladder full of shit, and enjoy Go’s apocryphal statement to that essentially British community (and its lifestyle), apocryphal because, although dogging features in the poems, this document is a separate feature:  Pages: Christmas Message from the Right Hon M. Go, secretary of Rural Affairs, the post-Brexit Dogging Agency (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) .

 So, one of those Kentish sonnets by Wordsworth, 'Vanloads of Libertines', ventriloquised by me, transposed into something othery and Brexity, seems like the best way to wish you a happy new year. On this video I read it (past tense).

On this post, you may read the text. (Present tense)

Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote my final transposition of a sonnet by Wordsworth (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

But you can also compare it with the original, with which it appeared in International Times:

‘Poems of National Independence – Liberties with Wordsworth’ | IT (internationaltimes.it)

The very last poem of ‘The English Strain’ will be appearing in International Times soon! (Future tense!) Until then, read about Book One of 'The English Strain', The English Strain here .

Book Two, Bad Idea, is talked about here .

You can buy both books so far here: Pages: How to buy The English Strain books one and two together (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

Book Three, from which the above poem comes, is called British Standards. Unpublished, it is best described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html