Not much longer

Practically speaking there's loads to be done, which is unfortunate as I can't stand up without feeling dizzy, can't actually do anything. So I fold myself up today, and I sleep.

Nasty little bug this.

The Bonny Man, or For Richard

FOR RICHARD
Be you as sweet as your face, bonny man?
Be you as sweet as your face?
Soft the white roses that shower on your bones
Some speak of mercy and some speak of thrones
prayers of respect and of grace
But be you as sweet as your face, bonny man?
Be you as sweet as your face?

Be you as sweet as your face, bonny man?
Pensive and gentle and wise?
Bloody the bruises that weep on your hands
Red and white thorns torn deep through the lands
Murder behind those mild eyes?
Be you as sweet as your face, bonny man?
Long past the telling of lies?

Dreams cannot harm the long dead, bonny man
Woven their tales round your hall
Lost as your horse on the marsh raddled ground
Fierce as a boar while the long blades surround
Nine to the head end it all
Dreams cannot harm the long dead, bonny man,
soothed by the flowers in your pall

Whatever was done
By setting of sun
No more can they hurt thee, at all.



Well, this is pretty mediocre really, Richard undoubtedly deserves better, but I wanted to get something finished before he is interred at Leicester. It's like having a thick grey paste between my thoughts and the edge of my skull. Annoyed with myself. Whoever heard of a cold that stops you thinking?

The Man from Dudley

Apart from a perverse desire to pin a Brummie accent on Richard III, I wouldn't call myself a devotee. He's fascinating in many ways. It has always struck me as incongruous that the king who believed in progressive concepts like Blind Justice and Presumption of Innocence, the man who had the law translated into English so that all his subjects could understand it, would be so daft as to have the kiddie princes killed. He must have known it was a destroyer of reputation and a beacon for all his enemies. He would have produced the boys to deny the rumours if he could. He couldn't and neither could he trust an investigation, or he would have ordered one. No, escaped or dead, he knew they were gone.

My suspicion is that this king, seemingly set to be an exemplar, fell into temptation. He personally was far away; perhaps he ordered someone else who ordered someone else...perhaps Richard was a ruler capable of developing the society around him in fair, excellent, extraordinary ways, an almost enlightened man subject to one great weakness: the common ruthlessness of medieval kings. It seems a strange juxtaposition of characteristics, and not entirely convincing. I don't quite like it.

It becomes more difficult to imagine when looking at the soft features of the facial reconstruction, hearing English as he might have spoken it. He has no look of villainy about him, which is probably why Henry VII had to paint him up so badly - the Tudor was hardly boyband material. Will did say, 'One may smile and smile and be a villain,' but then Will said a lot of things. Even the most gifted can be touched by propaganda. Happened to Will, happened to the man from Dudley.