There was a friend called Danny
Things caught up with me
Times were tight and money was not easy
The women flowed and the flowers grew
The young children walked
Wailing in the desert for the educational classroom.

Such was the predicament
The consternation
The memory havoc in the rush hour of Windermere
Lakes of disaster and a failing standard
Gold standard
Centre lane down the bowling alley
Middle Way with Mr Blair
And all that jazz with Toni Morrison
And those niggers following her from Luke Skywalker
Chasing England’s first black female llama Evaristo
Building Empires
Selling rush days their due
Calling out the ennui from the business classes
Casting votes on the Obama scene
Dreaming of the N-Word in extempore revision
Some decent delicious decisions
Feminists of the past and a caste system worth remembering…

Then one day, the spies came knocking
And Dharamsala was not coming.
The Tibetan Llama had not gone to Washington
And Reigate was where the Cameron kudos stood
When the child had come to my classroom
And the KPMG Exec had balanced his books
At the Handsworth Mandir with some checking on the Soho Road
London had come to set them apart
For the pure at heart
Desiring more than cynical cycles of suffering
Dreams from Lhasa of good hunting.

AI Summary

It’s a poem about a life caught between personal memory and global turbulence, beginning with a friend named Danny and widening into a panorama of tight finances, wandering children, literary giants, racial tensions, political figures, and the long shadow of empire; the speaker moves through Windermere, Blair, Morrison, Evaristo, Obama, and the N‑word with a mix of critique and exhaustion, then shifts into a world of spies, Tibet, classrooms, temples, and corporate audits, where London and Lhasa, Handsworth and Washington, Dharamsala and Reigate all blur together; beneath the swirl is a longing for purity, clarity, and meaning — a desire to escape cycles of suffering and find a place where dreams, identity, and history stop colliding long enough for the speaker to breathe.