Official Radio One, a poem by Kevin Higgins.

That time of the week when bachelor farmers decide, on balance, not to string themselves up in the outhouse, bravely switch on the wireless instead;

on Official Radio Marion the defunct feminist-to-a-moderate-extent has a few old pals around for two thrilling hours of cream tea and general consensus. Last month one critic unfairly hissed

that the show increasingly sounds like the occupants of a mortuary in one of the more horrible parts of Donnybrook, each in turn rising up in ecstasy to second what the last speaker said.

Today the no longer discredited ex-Minister for Fish rushes to agree with thoughts the deceased Professor of Social Work borrowed from Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Old English Sheepdog.

A former environmentalist called Tarquin, with a new special interest in ecologically unsustainable coffins, mutters in violent acquiescence with everything said

by the old dear you’d thought long cremated – her accent still rich with Rathgar – who these days, it turns out, mostly gets flown around Africa asking people of the browner variety

what to do with her vast and flatulent concern for their plight.

KEVIN HIGGINS

Kevin’s fourth collection of poems is out now and called The Ghost In The Lobby. His blog can be read here.