Ralph Windle RW

From Russia with Love

God! I will pack, order my plane,
And get me to England once again.

For England’s the one land I know
Where a Moscow parvenu may go,
Make Kensington by ten to three,
And know there’s caviar still for tea.

By private jet to Luton town,
We Oligarchs are raining down,
Sikorski rotors idling free
To whisk us on to Battersea;
And thence by liveried chauffeur
To One Hyde Park or Berkeley Square;

Or other bijou pieds-a-terre,
Courtesy of Candy Bros, and where
Your media, oil or metals Czar,
Who’s dreamed of Xanadu from afar.

Continue Reading »

Tearaway

Branson is as Branson does,
All floppy-joe and levi;
Your fuzzy-round-the-chin-and-nose-
And-doesn’t-wear-a-suit guy.
Billionairish, late of Stowe,
Business up and surgin’,
Spawning music, travel though
Likes to keep it Virgin.
Not a friend of British Air,
Says they’re all deception,
Virgin’s being, as it were,
Immaculate Conception.
Ricky, Ricky Debonnair
Keeps the City swooning,
Now the Madcap Mariner,
Now hot-air ballooning.
Round the World in Eighty Days?
That went out with Moses.
He’ll be round and back, he says,
Before the Footsie closes.

Continue Reading »

Anita Roddick

She trades in Beauty, sells delight
In Earth’s old fruits for bathroom bowls;
Helps Nature put its shop to rights,
Ride high the skin-and-shampoo polls.
Yet Body Shop’s symbolic lights
Burn less for Bodies than for Souls.

Scourge of myopic Corporate Man,
‘Profits-with-Principle’ the prize,
She made old nostrums hit the fan
And Footsie dinos demonise
Such dangerously cool élan
For mixing Care with Enterprise.

She’s thrived, this Phoenix-from-the-Ash,
On constant gloom from City ghouls,
Tut-Tutting on the Cult-of-Cash
Writ deep in Holy Market rules.

Continue Reading »

Pray save us, Lord, if yet you can,
From pestilential Davos- Man,
This yearly helicoptering in,
Of those who made this mess we’re in;
Reprising hypocritic sorrows
That for the poor it’s ‘jam tomorrows’;
While hymning fat-cat Martin Sorrell’s
“They know WE’RE worth it” pseudo morals.

Whose World is it this rich man’s quorum
Dare name ‘WORLD’ Economic Forum ?
Where are the women who’d connive
To keep such sexist fakes alive ?
How many cocktail hours elapse
Before their obscene earnings gaps
Stir to some late reluctant action
This self-indulgent feckless faction ?

Continue Reading »

Only Connect

He talks of art in a turbine’s blade,

Of the poem in a jet of steam
Says beauty’s about in the pulsing flow
That powers the electric beam.
Insists there’s room in a craftsman’s kit
For the spanner and the dream.

He’s dared wax lyrical about
A dam. With great bravado
Lobbed Stephenson and Faraday
Up there with Leonardo.
Turned down the tired old Hobson’s choice
Of chips or avocado.

That autobiographic mix
Of early scouse with geordie,
Has charmed the technologic socks
Off Chinaman and Saudi.

Continue Reading »

A Tyrant and a Playwright Came…

 

With quite modest antecedents I’d inclined in youth

To an adolescent’s yearnings for the Right and Truth;

But, making it to Oxford, learned a life’s better spent

More in wooing than in rueing the Establishment.

Fell in love with most things media, made a dead set at my Jag,

Got my Second politicking on the student rag.

 

With such mandatory trinkets I was set to shine

Among intellects a little less acute than mine,

But with ‘bureaucrat’ engraved upon the old C.V.

Continue Reading »

‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment…’

When a Chairman makes a million per annum
– one per annum,
Helping half-an-earth to smoke itself to death,
– self to death,
You can understand his knighthood, for to ban ’em
– for to ban ’em,
Might well strangulate our economic breath.
– nomic breath.

Furthermore, if you can offer ’em insurance,
– em insurance,
At a premium that boosts yer Eagle Star,
– Eagle Star,
Then it follers that your corporate allurance,
– rate allurance,
Makes a Government think what a Czar you are.

Continue Reading »

Saucerer’s Apprentice

Lord, bless these Sugar wannabees,
Grant them the ‘Go’ to knock the Knuchies,^*
The gift of gall to slither past his
Trick-or-treats for boardroom rookies.

Make each the one who most aspires,
Exudes the spunk and compost-mentis^**
To weasel round one last ‘ You’re Fired’,
Become this media-gog’s Apprentice.

Tell not such feckless guys and gels
The real world keeps rotating;
That Management by Decibels
Long dropped out of the ratings.

Ask not who beebed him to debase
‘Apprentice’ – long a word of honour,
Downgrade it to this charmless chase
For the new style TV corporate conner.

Continue Reading »

Our Business Gurus

This is a song to celebrate Gurus.
Not the retiring kind who sit cross-legged among the kookaburrus,
But Gurus of the Business-Con-Fraternity,
Hyping the Hot News on the Corporate Highways to Eternity.

Prophetic pushers of The Panacea
Which every Bain and Booz consultant craved to hear,
As each new Shaman of the Corporate Zen
Reincarnated Arthur Andersen.

Stand by, though, for the new, improved mind-slammer,
The next big Buzz-Wow after Michael Hammer!
Surfing the deep, cool Cyberspace to greet us,
Behold Pre-Emptive-Total-Excellence-Renewal-Systems (PETERS),

Which next should save us from the yawning
Boredom of actually managing and performing.

Continue Reading »

For England and Saint George

I am your very model of a Bank of England Governor,
Inspiring just the right degree of enviable love and awe.
To the hoi polloi I’m ‘Eddie’
But, as Edward the Unready,
Suffered much frustrating waiting from the chap before.

When at last I scooped the pools, they had but little doubt I’d hanker
To be the more teutonic type of Fuhrer Bundesbanker.
Independence I had wanted
Since that late and unLamonted
Chancellor both blew the gaffe and dragged his anchor.

Continue Reading »