SOMETIMES life is poetry. I co-ran our Glastonwick Festival for the 26th time, went straight into a 12 day, five-country European tour, then over to the Isle of Wight to help my wife support her best friend and came back to an official looking letter: “Get your state pension.”  
 
Slowing down? I don’t think so! I am proud to have paid contributions for 43 years but am not retiring, in any sense of the word: I earn my living from my hobby, or perhaps more accurately by getting on my hobby horse, and shall continue to do so, laughing and raging, until I fall off.
 
And sometimes life is pooetry. Perusing the list of attractions offered in the Isle of Wight tourist guide I discovered a hidden gem — the National Poo Museum. I wasted no time in getting my arse over there, accompanied by my wife, and discovered a veritable cornucopia of brown delights housed in a former public convenience (where else?) within a Victorian fort at Sandown. 

Ancient toilets linked by piping so you could literally have a conversation into a big white phone, the opportunity to polish a (lion) turd, displays of poo from a variety of other animals including, yes, a rocking horse — that’s rare! — a “guess the animal” sniff station, a historical list of objects used for bottom-wiping, you name it.  In ’80s TV terms, the place was definitely worthy of a spot on New Faeces. (Sorry.)
 
Astonishingly, given their regular donations to the coastline 400 yards from our front door, our local water company had not provided any exhibits. So I serenaded the museum staff with my Southern Water anthem Brown Crown – the imminent collapse of Thames Water amplifying once again the need for the whole privatised polluters’ cash cow(pat) to be renationalised without compensation.  

They loved it. I bought a mug and a squidgy poo, as seen in the photo, and returning to our hotel I was moved to verse:
 
TO THE NATIONAL POO MUSEUM
 
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day/ Where thoughts romantic stir deep in the belly?/ No. One won’t find the darling buds of May:/ Exhibits here are browner and more smelly./ A hidden pearl upon the Isle of Wight:/ Jewel in the cleavage of its noble arse./ The history and mystery of shite/ Preserved for posteriority ‘neath glass.
 
They have asked me to be their Pooet in Residence, and I have accepted: there is a Poetry Seat on Ilkley Moor, and now I have one on the Isle of Wight. The snobbier end of the poetry world will doubtless say it’s fitting because my work’s a pile of crap: my retort is that they are a stuffy bunch of anal retentives who don’t know their arses from their (leather-patched) elbows. 
 
The national Poo Museum can be found at https://poomuseum.org/our-museum and, at a push, I reckon you should go. Regularly. 

One day soon, once water is back in the public domain, they should have a special Wall of Shame detailing the disgusting state privatised water profiteers have left our beaches in — and some stocks where the former CEOs can be pelted with the results.
 
And I’ll finish with a review of a double album which definitely isn’t a pile of shite!

Let The Music Speak For Itself is a compilation of Merry Hell’s very best songs: an uplifting, inspiring ride through 12 years of what I can best describe as furiously polite latter years Northern folk-punk rabble rousing with a couple of beers before bedtime. 

Loving The Skin You’re In, as they put it in one of their most memorable efforts.  
 
They have fire in their bellies, music in their souls and love in their hearts and they write phenomenal anthems for horrible times: We Need Each Other Now, Come On England and above all Rage Like Thunder. The last being very much from the same perspective as my own, astonished that so many of our generation have “mellowed out” and seeking to relight a fire which should be burning brighter than ever as the Tories wreck our world. 

I love this band. Shame the south is still a bit of a foreign country to them. We’ll have to change that! 

Let The Music Speak For Itself available from merryhell.bandcamp.com
For further info please visit https://www.facebook.com/attilathestockbroker and/or https://attilathestockbroker.bandcamp.com/merch