Torn between porn and nostalgia: The sad decline of the English cock

(Just another cock and John Bull story…?)

First, this:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

Philip Larkin wrote those lines, in 1972, in a poem called ‘Going, going’.

Now, it may be said that Larkin was a bit of a moaner and never happier than when complaining about the sad state of civilisation, while badmouthing his parents,”They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do,” (or when adding to his impressive porn collection.)

Still, the poet had a point. To paraphrase Prince Charles, you can blame the Nazi bombers for destroying a fair amount of English buildings but not for the kind of soulless crap modern architects have been littering the landscape with, after the war.

Also, there now must be more McDonald’s, CFK, IKEA, Pizza Hut and Starbucks outlets spread around like a deadly flue virus than there are squashed hedgehogs livening up our ever filling roads.

(World War One’s big member drive)

So, like Larkin, we can’t do much more than sigh & hide in nostalgic strophes or one-handed porn-inspired strokes and moan about things in a frantic if impotent manner.

Talking of which – about impotence, that is and not of rueful rhymes or the power of porn: Here’s another sad example of the decline and fall of the British empire that once stood so proud and tall:

“A comparison of the 2008 population — using data from a variety of sources — with the first census in 1881 shows that the number of Cocks has shrunk by 75 per cent.

Cock, Daft, Death, Smellie, not to mention Gotobed, Shufflebottom and Jelly: they are all surnames that would have caused their owners considerable embarrassment over the years. A new analysis of British surnames reveals how names with rude overtones have seen the sharpest decline over the past 120 years as their owners have changed them to something more innocuous.”