! The Forum

It's like trudging home after a heavy day at the workface, you open the front door and the house is rent with upraised voices - all the children adding new wounds to years of grievance; your eldest daughter threatens once again to go live with her boyfriend although she's under age; your eldest son despairs of girls 'not being able to argue properly'; the cry, 'that's not f a i r..' rings through the house; the younger ones still seek adults to be on their side, - for the moment - to dispense justice to the aggrieved, comfort the broken-hearted... Are you glad you came home without your usual stop off at the pub? It's all so familiar...dammit, you know very well you'll miss them when eventually it all goes quiet... but at least they certainly know about justice when it's not there for them... they'll be vigorous employees, trade unionists one and all, if and when they leave the nest.. Were the 18th century coffee houses from which emerged those tracts of endless literary abuse, sharpening their language on each other, just like this? 'A polarity of poets' might serve for a corporate term.