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.