Spectator Competition: Midsummer

In Competition 3357 you were invited to submit a passage or poem including the phrase ‘The sukebind is late this year’, or similar. In Stella Gibbons’s comic novel Cold Comfort Farm the sukebind is a mysterious vine that flowers in midsummer, driving people into a frenzy which often leads to mollocking. Hence the heightened tone of this week’s entries. There were too many contenders to fit everyone in but George Simmers, Sylvia Fairley, Jennifer Hill and Frank Upton deserve a mention, as do Basil Ransome-Davies, Chris O’Carroll and Josephine Boyle (for her poem in which Seth the Hollywood star says ‘MeToo didn’t help my career’). The winners get £25.

The young men keep their gizzards dry

And close their lazy lizard eyes:

No pollarding of maids, I fear –

The sukebind is late this year.

The sap that used to burst the seam

Lies quite submersed inside the stream –

No swagger at the roosting gate.

This year the sukebind is late.

No quick kerfuffle in the copse,

No sudden scuffling in the crops –

The millers have no corn to grind.

This year it’s late, the sukebind.

The stooks and sheaves will rise in vain;

There’s something frowsty in the grain –

The leaves are dowdy, dusty, sere:

The sukebind is late this year.

Bill Greenwell

‘The sukebind is late this year,’ he said, ‘and tain’t just that. The dog-sorrel has gone furrity, and it looks as if the shrew-teazles have flitched, what with the water-meadow being choked with old-man’s-crotch.’

‘Is that bad?’ asked Flora.

‘Nay, lass, worse. My four cows, Lettuce, Hopeless, Boris and Phlegm, have all got the snorts, so it’llbe them for the knackers. Besides, yesterday there was a wildfire on Weaselsbreath Common and the flames blew over and burnt down the woodshed.’

‘Does Aunt Ada Doom know?’

‘Reckon she might. She was in there looking for something at the time.’

‘What on earth is happening?’

‘They say tis global warming or climate change, but I dunno.