128th Society Lunch at Beeston Fields

The 128th Society Lunch will be held at Beeston Fields Golf Club on Thursday 20th September.  The bar will be open from 12 noon and lunch will be served at 12.45pm.  As usual, there will be no speeches, so those who have to get away should be able to leave soon after 2 pm.  However, there is no need to leave if you wish to stay; the bar will remain open and tea and coffee will be available.  As always, this is a very informal event and there will be plenty of time to meet up with fellow ONs, both young and not so young.  There will be one or two Society announcements and an update on Society events.  The 128th Society Lunch looks forward to welcoming you!

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts -
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Philip Larkin