THE SALESMAN SANS LESSEE

[With apologies to Keats]

Oh what can ail thy arms at night

When you’ve spent all day loitering?

The icing’s melted on the cake.

There’s a fine thing!

Oh what can ail thy arms at night

Now that another month has gone?

Your Parker fountain pen is full

And no report is done.

I see you really want to know

With wrinkled brow, what there was new

As Sinclair got more adipose

In Hong Kong’s zoo.

I met a client in Taipei,

Of horse manure the braggart filled;

His thirst was long, his purse was tight,

Cor, I was wild!

I made a beeline for Bangkok

And Borneo – the Tropic Zone,

They treated me as one bereft

And gave me moan.

I set forth then by SIA

And travelled all day long,

Hoping to find better things

Back in Hong Kong.

But all I got were aching feet

and sinal pains (and earache too –

For sure a language strange they speak

In Hong Kong’s zoo).

So then I took me to a spot

Where people meet, in Singapore,

Hoping they could me advise

What I worked for.

And found myself in Bugis Street

Midst drag-dressed beauties – woe betide! –

Who would not lease a single box

Or an open side.

I saw pale Lines and agents too,

Pale clients – death pale were they all.

They cried: The Salesman sans Lessee

Has come to call.

I saw their vast ships in the port

With empty sails all gaped wide,

Then I awoke and found me here

On London side.

And that is why I write so rare

And spend my time a-loitering.

Though the icing’s melted on the cake.

There’s a fine thing.

On a flight from Singapore to London, March 1981

I owed my daughter Caroline a letter and decided to fill in some time on a flight back to London from Hong Kong via Singapore with this apology in verse, written as if a progress report to my Company.  Bugis Street was notorious in those days for being an area occupied prominently by trans-sexuals and transvestites.  Most of them seemed to be trying to raise the money to go abroad for a sex-change operation.  The area still exists, but - the last time I saw it - those particular denizens seemed to have disappeared.