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Jan 22
IN FOG EVERYTHING IS THE GHOST OF ITSELF...SO IT IS.

alas poor Scrooge
I knew him
a fellow of infinite jest

a lover
of all things
Christmas

why he wouldn't say
boo
to a ghost

the kindest
caringest
loving
loan shark
in all of this here
dreary town

kept me going
through hard times
even though my life

was only
rust & dus
rust & dust

"People
mutht be
amuthed!"

he'd always say
in that Sleary way

wot happened
to the old
geezer

why there is not
a body
doesn't know dat

ended up Marshallsea
Debtor's prison along
with old John Dickens.

ya know
Charlie's
father

for want of
an unpaid baker's bill
a good man was lost

to his self
drove him mad
it did so it did

now that Marley
on the other hand
'ard as nails....

*

HARD TIMES was at one stage possibly going to be RUST AND DUST. And of course it is Mr. Sleary in HARD TIMES who professes: "People mutht be amuthed!"
Dickens' dad John was the one who was sent to Marshallsea for not paying his baker's bill.
Scrooge going to the light side of course will be the ruin of him as a money lender 'cos he has become just too too nice and let's everyone off! Marley instead of being dead...'dead as a doornail" is very much alive and horrible to boot.

As well as being as "myriadminded' as Coleridge proposes to be and as humorous as could possibly be...old Charlie just wrote beautiful English! I always remember the section with great affection of how the house came to find itself in the street it was in in A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

As I do of the beautiful section in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND when in talking a bit about...mist Chapter 57 if ya wanna look it up.

"The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water."

That sticks in my head as pure poetry and whatever the story is what I really really remember!

You can now see how and why my title is concocted as I wanted to pay homage to those words and to get a chance to knock around with Charlie and his cast of characters.



"They were gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again."
Donall Dempsey
Written by
Donall Dempsey  Guildford
(Guildford)   
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