Parodies of songs, poems, and prose styles. These use mimicry and exaggeration to explore—or poke gentle fun at—their targets.
Glasto People
With apologies to Jarvis Cocker
She came from Leeds, she had not done her roots
She worked the tills at my local Boots
That’s where she picked on me
She told me that her back was aching
I said “Pardon me, but my heart’s not breaking”
She said “Fine!”
And then in thirty seconds time she said
“I wanna live like Glasto people
I wanna do whatever Glasto people do
Wanna sleep with Glasto people
I wanna sleep with Glasto people like you”
Well, what else could I do?
I said “I . . . I really don’t think so”.
–June 2025
Peep Show on Consciousness
Mark: Look, Jeremy, a physical duplicate is a duplicate simpliciter, OK? There’s no magical qualia dust, and the fact that David Chalmers has cool hair and a leather jacket doesn’t change that.
Jeremy: Yes, and there are no colours or sounds or feelings, and we are all dead inside. Well, that may be your world, Mark, but it’s not mine!
Super Hans: Panpsychism, Mark. That’s where it’s at. Fucking atoms buzzing with qualia. Electrons tripping their nuts off. Quarks on acid. Mental!
Johnson: My brain is a qualia-free zone, Mark. I want my neurons spiking hard, producing top-quality management decisions, not lounging around watching Netflix in the Cartesian Theatre.
Sophie: That’s right Mark–you’ve no phenomenal properties, and you suck the phenomenality out of everyone else. You’re a qualia vacuum cleaner that hoovers up all the inner life around you!
Dobby: Gerard and me have built a robot that thinks it has qualia! We’re going to take it to TSC and get it to argue with David Chalmers.
The Walrus
With apologies to Thomas Hardy
New Year’s Eve, and eight in the morn.
‘Now it is having a wank,’
A tweeter said as we stood forlorn
In a queue at the old food bank.
We pictured the big brown walrus
Where it lay like a drunken lout,
Nor did it offend or greatly appal us
To think it was rubbing one out.
So soft a sight folk would scorn
In these years! Yet, I’ll be frank:
If someone said, one wintry morn,
‘Come; see the walrus wank,
‘On dull wet cobbles in Scarborough bay
Where strange things come ashore,’
I should go with him all the way,
Hoping I might see Thor.
January 2023
Monochrome Mary
With apologies to Paul McCartney
Ah, look at all the lovely colours
Ah, look at all the lovely colours
Monochrome Mary
Studies a book in a room where no colour is seen
Has never seen green
Stares at a printout
Knowing the facts of the brain and the tricks of the psych
What is it like?
All the lovely colours
What do the brain scans hide?
All the lovely colours
What would she learn outside?
Good News
With apologies to Tom Lehrer
Well, I’ve got some good news for everyone:
There’s no need for you to fear the atom bomb;
We’re not going to fry as death falls from the sky,
And we won ‘t all be blown to kingdom come.
For . . . . . .
The Corona bug will kill us all —
Young and old, fat and thin, short and tall.
It will wreak its devastation
Through every tribe and nation,
And we’ll all be post mortem by the fall!
There ain’t going to be no World War Three.
That’ s good news, I am sure you will agree.
We’re not travelling head on
To nuclear Armageddon
And death by radi-o-activi-ty.
For . . . . . .
The Corona bug will kill us all —
[etc]
But though the atom bombs will not go off,
They’ve brought us to this pass, sure enough.
If we’d built more ventilators
‘Stead of fighting folks who hate us,
Then we wouldn’t all be checking out with a cough!
For . . . . . .
The Corona bug will kill us all —
[etc]
Spring 2020
Jonathan Meades retells Hansel and Gretel
A house in a forest is deracinated, unplugged from the amenities of modern life — gas, electricity, sewerage. It’s aesthetically deracinated too, and the sylvan architect has a license to experiment with forms and textures — in this case, those of gingerbread. It was an arts-and-crafts pastiche of Bavarian vernacular — sweet and sickly, pernicious alike to immature aesthetic sensibilities and juvenile dentition. On the threshold stood a witch, hook-nosed and crafty — a Levantine stereotype as terrifying to bien pensant fin-de-siècle liberals as aged female ailurophiles were to Matthew Hopkins.
February 2018
Imagine
With apologies to John Lennon
Imagine there’re no qualia
It’s easy if you try
No feel or what-it’s-likeness
Just plain old cog sci
Imagine all the zombies
Being just like us
Imagine there’re no inverts
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing for Mary to learn
And no hard problem, too
Imagine all the people
Being illusionist
You may say I’m a quiner
But there’s nothing wrong with that
I hope someday you’ll join us
And learn what it’s like to be a bat.
June 2014/October 2017
Twelfth Night Fry Up
If breakfast be the food of love, fry on;
Give me egg sandwiches; that, saturate,
The arteries may harden and so die.
That rind again! It had a greasy look;
O! it turned o’er my gut like the white scum
That forms upon a bowl of last week’s gravy
Congealing and crudding o’er. Enough; no more;
Tis not so sickening, as it was before.
–1994/5
