Down With The Kids

 

The past is another country

A crap one, like Belgium

Rife with brown-trousered tedium

Where no one sees disasters coming

Where the phones are big as bricks

Where men sleepwalk down aisles with their future ex-wives

Where the only telly is repeats

 

But don’t slag it off

Cos I was born on those streets

Where my gawky demeanour and penchant for munching

Made my peers jeer ‘Oi speccy! Oi sumo! Oi bumchin!

I heard that the bruise on your tricep needs punching

Now don’t you go dream of amounting to something!

I told you last Tuesday – or hasn’t it sunk in?’

These lads who led lives of fags, football and spunking

Who sat their exams and got straight As – in flunking

 

While girls deft as surgeons sat squeezing their blackheads

All strung out on burgeoning hormones like crackheads

They used boys like me for their sarcasm practice

I vied for one girl who seemed gentle and kindly

An angel, she’d surely have never maligned me

She’d never go ‘dickhead’ or ‘wanker’ behind me...

Oh the rolled eyes and wrinkle-nosed dry gagging gesture

She did to her friends when I tried to impress her,

As if she’d been licked by some rough-tongued molester

Like Caliban came from his cave to caress her

Or swarms of black locusts had tried to undress her

‘Get back to your books and Nintendo, professor!’

 

And so I jawed shut

Like a vault

Or a clam

Like a Transformer morphing back into a van

 

Fast forward

To now

And my ego’s intact

I’ve seen a girl naked

(seen several, in fact)

I keep my achievements impressively stacked

And when I’m a twat, well – it’s part of my act

 

And one day, I end up in a scene from my dreams

I’m up on a stage and the crowd’s mostly teens

And so mustering all my newfound self-esteem

I think: Right – time to show these kids just what ‘cool’ means

 

I thought they’d like me

I thought they’d admire me

I thought they’d be inspired

Aspire to be like me like I was some guy off the telly

 

I thought they might at least smile politely

 

Oh in my head, how they’d applaud

They laughed and howled and cheered

But in real life I got ignored

Cos they thought I was weird

The youngsters sat there looking bored

They made me feel a crooked fraud

Till something deep inside me roared:

I will not take this anymore-d

 

Okay, I’m not ‘down with the kids’

So I say

Down with the kids!

Drown ‘em like a sack of philistine kittens!

The kid gloves are off

It’s on

With the man-mittens

 

I don’t wanna be cool

I wanna be a curmudgeon

I’ll speak at your school

With its fresh dreams to bludgeon

‘The Oxford English Dictionary defines “teenager” as

Buhhhhh! Uhhhh!

Aged 13 to 17

You young minds who sit before me today

Are rubbish

You download your rubbish opinions like ringtones

Scoop rubbish maize snacks into bum-fluff edged gobs

A putrefied mackerel smell wafts from your pissy bits

You lurch between fury, indifference and sobs

Your clichéd McHeartbreak, your shrill swine-faced hissy fits,

Your feelings are rubbish

Glum zit-witted yobs

And even if one of you does become an astronaut

The infinite vacuum will press its thumb against your tiny visor

And not let go till you’re a joyless atheist

 

You still think death is other people

 

Children

Huge, freakish, ungainly children

You need to think about death more

I remember that I’m going to die

At least five times before breakfast

Which I take at 2pm

In my underpants

Playing Super Mario Sunshine on my Gamecube

While you’re stuck in a classroom that smells of pencils

And what do I have for my breakfast?

Whatever I like!

Pork pies in gravy

And Poppets

And booze

I can eat what I want!

I can drink when I choose!

Oh I think I’ll consume this huge vat of cheap wine

So I’m rat-arsed in time for the 3 O’Clock News.’

 

So fuck the kids

Well, don’t fuck the kids

But down with the kids!

Get off my lawn!

You’ve never heard of Teletext?

You don’t even know you’re born!

With your wi-mo i-hood my-isode nanos

And ability to hear through the ears in your knees!

No wait

I’m thinking of crickets

Yes...

Crickets

Their chirruping wing strokes as teens sit in judgement

And gag after quip after joke I make tanks

Grip my mic, but I know where they’d like me to stick it

Their faces as hard as a concrete abutment

Their afternoons measured in texting and wanks

 

So go on, don’t love me! I don’t need your approval!

I’d sooner fork out for a bollock removal

And if you should come crawling back on your knees

Bearing blog hits and Friend Requests begging me: ‘Please!

Without you the whole world is greyer and colder!

Look! Jenny has Tippexed your name on her folder!’

I’ll shake my head slow in the warm changing breeze

‘No,’ I’ll say, smiling. ‘Not till you’re older.’

This Is The Story We’ll Tell Our Grandchildren

 

Back then, you were a scientist

on the international space station

You did research on zero-grav botany

You’d sing Gershwin lullabies to your tomato plants and clematis

and peer out the portholes

looking down at the rolling continents

wondering where your house was

 

Mid-shift over Mexico a meteorite winged the hull

Trusses ruptured

Modules depressurised

Your two colleagues, Ralph and Yacob

and all their keepsakes got tipped into space like Smarties

You and your plants huddled

in the dark laboratory

breathing each other’s air

 

I heard the newsflash

I was sculpting an orphanage

from the cooling magma and black slag

of a volcano disaster

 

They said: ‘All the astronauts

are dead, except

for one beautiful botanist

who sings Gershwin to her crocuses,

but she is stranded and alone

and doomed as Betamax.’

 

I knew then that I had to save you

 

NASA said it was hopeless

In a statement NASA said:

‘It is hopeless

She will die in the darkness

using the last of her oxygen

to comfort a magnolia –

picture Ophelia drowning on dry land,’

and the spokesperson at the podium

paused

to wipe away

a single, gibbous tear

‘Also a rescue would cost too much

and it is against regulations.’

 

‘Fuck regulations!’

I yelled to mission control

as I hotwired the rocket

The engine started like a pilot light

and black-suited bureaucrats

scattered like money spiders

 

We gloss over the tedious details

like the thunk thunk

of my wrench against the bulkhead

of how you popped the hatch like a bank vault

our grimed profiles backlit by electrical fires

Whose idea was it to propel us back Earthwards

by detonating the oxygen reserves, darling?

Ha

We can’t remember

We were too busy learning the detail of each other’s corneas

while the basil-scented cabin began to rattle apart on re-entry

 

Cut to Chinese fisherman hauling squid nets

onto a trawler in the cobalt dawn

who pause

to watch a white star

cleaving the far horizon

like an arc welder’s spark

 

As we fall

the capsule crazies with stress fractures

We shed it like training wheels

We are upside-down

double-helixed in vines

 

We spin

Time slows to the clock key twist of our terminal corkscrew

We’re not going to live

so one of us thinks fuck it, whispers:

‘I fancy you.’

Doesn’t matter who

 

We touch down

near the Bikini Atoll

For the distant fishermen

it all happens in slow motion

There’s a flash as we hit the water

then the ocean opens like a century flower

 

One sailor briefly loses his sea legs

drops to his knees

 

We’ll suggest vaguely we rode home on a whale

that we were married at midnight in Honolulu

by a one-armed priest who looked like Jimmy Cagney

The colour of your wedding dress changes with each telling

 

Sometimes, a burning big top appears in the background

like a ghost ship

or a giant Christmas pudding

I never understood why you put it in there

but it’s my favourite bit

Nobody's ever asked me where I get my ideas from. I guess no one cares. But if they did, I'd say 'I steal them'. All my best stuff, in fact, all my stuff, is nicked from old dead guys and my contemporaries on the performance poetry scene. I rely on the fact that I'm a crap forger to disguise the theft. Up until now, it's always worked.

Another Tim Clare Original

Don’t fall for those honeyed homonyms
Funny dot com simulacra
Demand genuine Tims from your video retailer!
Make a solution
Two parts Appletize to three parts piss
Fling a flask of it in a faker’s face
His mask will slip like a pancake
And break, hissing
Listen
Counterfeits are stitched by blind Cambodian orphans
Apportioned unfortunate living conditions by foremen who force them past exhaustion
With coarse cotton thread
They sew pale flesh to head
Bind black frightwigs to fresh-boiled near-white pig skulls
Poor, unseeing mites
They think they make footballs!

Always check for the seal of authenticity –
Brown mole beneath the ballsack
Reject low-quality knock-offs
Say fuck off back
To the piss-poor purgatorial sweatshop you first emerged from
Awful slow-tongued homunculus
I’ve drunk the pus of bag ladies sweeter
Than the sad, ditchwater arse-crimes
You pass off as poetry
Go hunt for half-rhymes under a bus!

Thus the bloodline remains pure
But behind closed doors
Lies more than meets the ear
Sure, justice is blind
But let those with eyes hear
The near-silent violin
Of a felon
Filing the serial numbers off purloined sestinas
Respraying metaphors

O what a racket!
I’ve got this city sewn up like a wound mate
Cut and shut couplets? I glutted the market
Laundered one-liners I smuggled in fruit crates
Magistrates shut up, quills held to their temples
While eager goons ransacked the Wordsworth Estate
Pictured with heads of legitimate business
My verses get printed on pristine white presses
Sensitive rocker bombs hidden in Gutenberg Bibles
Get shipped to my rivals’ addresses
The kingpin, but no one can pin a thing on me,
My fingerprints missing from curious incidents
Furious officers hiss at the absence of evidence
Sure it can’t all be coincidence

But I know that nobody lasts long on the major list
And Morrissey told me the fate of the plagiarist
How quickly the sweetest of scams becomes flavourless
One day, some young punk ‘ll pull the same stunt I did
Shakedown the penthouse my bent verse provided
‘The code to the safe, mate,’ - click - ‘where did you hide it?’
My wife and my child tied up on the veranda
While robbers inside nobble every last stanza
I don’t lift my head cos I know what their plans are

They shoot to kill
I’ve no last words
But the silence is beautiful

And I still wouldn’t quit for all the bikes in China
I like this life, never found one finer
Yes this Lazarus business is a hazardous regimen
But the gift of the gab is a marvellous medicine
And I know that next week I might well wind up dead again
But I’ll rise from my slab reinvented like Edison
That greedy thief whose ten year plan
Filching bright bulbs from rivals’ heads and then selling them,
Lit up a nation and made him a legend, when
People call him ‘crook’ I say it’s irrelevant
Though I know he pinched patents, electrocuted an elephant
Not every change is heaven sent
That might sound strange to better men,
Yes, I’m a sorry specimen

But they’ll never ken the forger’s glory,
A stolen story
Told in tomb breath by a tone-deaf revenant
Raw, angry, stinking,
Like a womb-slick infant delivered in deliberate gory detail
Into this bright cave called life
Cos I might be a thief
But a thief is a midwife

Poetry does nothing
Poems change no one
I don’t care about that
I just want to put a show on
Prance like a prat
Chat out my colon
And so on
And so on
Conman patter round bootleg merchandise
Hand over coin you can purchase a paradise
Even believed it myself once or twice
Step up,
Find the lady.
So is it art? No.
Is it criminal? Maybe.
A trivial pursuit, perhaps,
But I know where the cheese is
Keep getting nailed then coming back just like my name was Jesus
Now words I stole from holy books
I preach to my believers
Cos many took my name in vain
But they were just deceivers
False poets
Late night heavy-breathers.
Hello? Who is this?

So put down your receivers
I’m done effervescing
If you love ‘em then thieve ‘em
Here endeth the lesson

Well, I think I'm going to start a new blog here:

http://timclare.blogspot.com/

It's going to be somewhere where I get to chat balls about the random morass of stuff that I'm interested in, and, y'know, work on the whole writing craft business. I'll keep on using my myspace blog for what I've been using it for thus far, namely, posting up all my performance poems in progress, along with the goofy intros that may one day blossom into lead-ins.

It's entirely possible that the new blog will peter out after a few half-hearted entries. We'll have to see. It's not as if the internet really needs another amateur hack responding with opinions to every world event ever, like a furious chimpanzee careening round its enclosure, flinging handfuls of its own shit. Indeed, a furious chimpanzee flinging shit would probably provide a more constructive contribution to global dialogue. Also, despite the bulging dossiers of evidence to the contrary, I do actually have better things to do than write heaps of inconsequential twaddle for perhaps half a dozen strangers.

So, in any case. Abortive project commenced. Failure in 3... 2... 1... *sigh*

Okay, straight up, I have various Googlegangers, but this guy is my favesies. www.clareforregent.com is all about getting Nebraska University behind Tim Clare's bid for Regent.

At first, I felt narked at my namesake horning in on my racket, what with his grey hair and his spectacles and his smirking Republicany visage. But then, I read his chill-ass campaign slogan: 'The Choice Is Clear. The Choice Is Clare.' You can't argue with that, can you? No matter what the merits of the respective candidates - for any position, frankly - once they've hit you up with the soundbite, you're gonna go with Tim Clare.

And it was inspiring. I thought: 'Hey, I could use this myself. Maybe I'd like to be regent.' Then I thought: 'What the fuck's a regent?'

Well, in America, I think a regent's a bit like a dean of students. He just looks after general welfare, probably gets invited to a lot of champagne dinners, makes a couple of keynote speeches every year, etc. Bleugh.

But in England, a regent is the guy who takes over in if the ruling monarch is too young, or if he or she is somehow 'incapacitated'. So a regent is blatos an evil adviser character who manipulates the young king with wicked whispers or slips venom in the aging ruler's mead and thus seizes control of the kingdom. Awesome. That's the kind of shit I can get behind.

So this is my contribution towards the Nebraska Tim Clare's bid for NU Regent, and towards my bid for total domination of the Western Hemisphere. 'Sir! Sir! Regent Clare summons you to his chambers immediately!' Ha. Also, I like the idea of people googling 'Tim Clare regent' and finding this poem. Because peeps are searching for Tim Clare all the time, doncha know.


Tim Clare For Regent

As prophesied, the Last Days came
The mountains fell, the oceans boiled
Great nations drowned in lakes of flame
Men screamed for God or cursed His name
And underpants were soiled
Flesh crunched with scabs, hair crawled with lice
It was, in truth, not very nice;
Yet – humankind survived somewise
In hidden coves and caves of ice
That echoed with their cries.

They cried like this:

'Who will lead us from our sorrow?
Who will harken to our prayer?
Who will forge a brave tomorrow,
Scourge the Devil in his lair?'
They seek him here, they seek him there
The choice is clear – the choice is Clare

His ears are firm, his chin is brave,
His breasts are muscular and wise
He uses broken glass to shave
He eats our firstborn sons in pies

And when it's time to phone a friend
On whose crisp voice can we depend?
Who wants to be a millionaire?
The choice is clear – the choice is Clare.

Whose riches rival dead King Tut's?
Who slugged a tiger in the guts?
Who kicked the Kaiser in the nuts?
Who turns coy mistresses to sluts?

What is this life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare
While one man calmly fucks a bear?
The choice is clear – the choice is Clare.

The choice is clear – the choice is Clare.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes! His floating hair!
His gaping hirsute derriere!

When first he sang, the angels wept
He laughs – ah ha ha ha! – at fools
He's welcomed everywhere, except
Within one hundred yards of schools

For he on honeydew hath fed
His arse a runny poo hath bled
As if the eye of God had shed
A single, pungent Bovril tear
O close your eyes with holy dread!
As from his pale and pimpled rear
It dangles by a russet thread
Between his bum-juice dappled thighs
With hints of ochre, mauve and red
The chocolate milk of paradise

Such craftmanshit! Such fartistry!
He defecates with rare aplomb
A standard stool's a travesty
Against his mighty bum croissant

As on and on his minions march,
His pinions arch, his nostrils flare,
He strops his talons on a throne
Of tattered skin and blackened bone
Within his citadel of stone
And passing countless hours alone
While tortured traitors writhe and groan
While foes to foaming hounds are thrown
He ponders all his wrath hath sown
How seeds of pain have slowly grown
To weeds the Reaper's scythe hath mown
The deeds for which none can atone
The bloodied virgin lying prone
The toothless, blind, abyssal crone
The goatchild playing the trombone
And blasting from that golden cone
One last apocalyptic tone –

He whinnies like a harpooned mule
Then slumps back in his blighted chair
The voices, fear, and poisoned air
The choice is clear – the choice is Clare

After years of feeling alienated by pretty much every magazine available in the UK, over the last few months I've finally found a monthly publication that suits my very particular needs. The esteemed organ in question is Chat, It's Fate, and apparently top of my hierarchy of needs is laughing at the misfortunes of the working class.

As the title suggests, Chat, It's Fate, is a spin-off of popular gossip magazine, Chat, devoted to magic, psychic powers, angels, ghosts and occasionally aliens. With headlines such as 'Get Rich Quick With Psychic Help' and 'I Screamed For Mercy As Evil Destroyed My Psychic Powers', it's not afraid of sensationalism, although, for my money, it still manages to project an air of comparative decorum when set against the backdrop of its far gaudier rival, Take A Break: Fate & Fortune, which, despite its impressive gaggle of extrasensorially-acute celeb übermensches, still feels the need to resort to puerile stunt-columns such as the regular 'Texas, The Psychic Horse'. Fuck off Texas, you equine gobshite. I need your insipid, pathetically vague prognostications like Russell Grant needs another cream horn. As if Mr Ed wasn't shit enough without the addition of dozens of post-menopausal women writing in to ask why their rescue cat won't come out from behind the dishwasher. What's that? You sense that things have been hard for me but over the next few months a new man's going to come into my life who'll teach me how to love again? Here's a two-word prediction for you: knacker's yard.

At first, as a reader I luxuriated in a huge Turkish bath of smug superiority, snickering at the credulous twats who write to an aura healer about their financial woes, and get told to wear purple, red and green, or the shit photographers who think lens flare is a message from their dead mum. But, as time went on, beneath my thick caul of self-congratulatory jism, I began to feel an odd, seemingly anchorless melancholy. I couldn't work out where it was coming from, but it grew and grew. Eventually, I realised that, essentially, every month, I was sitting down to chortle at some of the most miserable, desperate people in the country, getting exploited in their darkest hours by relatively well-off - sometimes loaded - charlatans. A lot of it was harmless - predictions about celebrity weddings, advice on spells to perk up your love life - but for every fluffy bit of crystal hoodoo there was some grief-stricken mum living in a caravan who'd lost her only son to leukaemia, who thought the plate of sandwiches that went missing and the feather she'd found on the passenger seat of her car added up to proof of his continued existence. The afterlife presented to readers is woefully inconsistent - people return as ghosts, go to Heaven, get reincarnated - and dizzyingly mundane - the dead wear clothes, live in bungalows, reappear to pass someone a glass of orange squash.

The more I read, the more it hit home how pathetically, tragically slight the evidence for survival of human consciousness after death is. Even in magazines with piss-weak reporting standards, keen to exaggerate and embellish, the ghost stories and 'contacts' with the other side are all such transparent bollocks that even Scooby Doo & Co would shuffle off in embarrassed silence.

It's really fucking sad. The saddest thing, really. Punctuated only by brief spells of delirious existential terror.

But wait up! What's this? Ah, everything's going to be all right, because I've appropriated the human condition as material for a comic poem. Let's all forget the horrendous truth and watch Bergerac, eh?


Who's John?

Now I don't do this often
But before I move on
There's a man here in spirit
Sorry madam – who's John?
I'm being told John
And a connection with Paul…
If I said the name Dave
Would that make sense at all?

Maybe David?
Bavid?
Yes, all right.
Yes, I'll tell her.
He's saying he's really surprised you don't remember Bavid.
He's showing me a gentleman
With a couple of

Eyes and a very long, uh,
A very, very long, white
Chin
That curled up and back on itself
Rather like an elf's shoe, madam
Who's Bavid
With a chin like an elf's shoe?

Could be Karen

Now I'm being shown a lady
I would say in her mid to late fifties
With two enormous ossified growths
I feel like they're bursting from the rear portion
Of her cranial cavity
Out like this
Like a pair of majestic horns
Only they're so heavy she can't lift her head
Would you understand if I said
That before she passed over to spirit
This lady would stagger the streets
Bent double with the weight of her huge antlers
Bellowing like a wounded sow
While kids pelted her with old satsumas and sticks smeared in dog shit?
Okay, well madam she says
That earring you lost last week?
Check down the back of the sofa.
Not the big sofa, the little one.
You checked there before but you didn't look hard enough.
She's saying: 'Look again love.'

Who's Ivanovitch?
Who's Norbert Schneider?

I'm being shown a fair-haired man
Naked
Hefting his thick, erect penis
Almost like a cosh

There's a young girl
Playing bagpipes
As she's forced at gunpoint
Through a carwash

I'm seeing six crayons
Some cheese at the circus
A nursery room papered with Socialist Workers
Was he into gymkhanas?
Did he live in an egg?
Could he trigger typhoons
With a switch on his leg?

Who's Milli Vanilli?
What's Home Alone 2?
Who's stuck on the A534
Outside Crewe?
Who whistled in Dutch?
Were you recently shot?
What's the cube root of pi?
Does stuff… happen a lot?

Would it really give solace
To talk to the dead
If your loved ones returned
Except all that they said
Was:
'You have a photo.'
'You've been quite sad.'
I mean, is Heaven so boring?
Is it really that bad?
What's it all like?
Can you smoke?
Do you poo?
Do you still have to work?
What does everyone do?

Or is nobody there?
Are those people just… gone?
Will I disappear with them?
Who's Tim Clare?
Who's John?

When Granny Tomásson filleted a salmon, it was like watching her slit open someone's face and pull out the lie.

She was efficient but not mechanical; every movement sang with purpose. Whether salting herrings, mashing flaked kippers into cream cheese, boiling lobster tails down to stock or spooning yoghurt onto a shrimp salad, Granny worked in silence. No radio, no bolstering traditional song of a fisherman's wife asking the sea to bring her husband safely home.

The gubble of scallops in seasoned wine-water, the squelch of lemon halves grinding into the juicer under her callused palms, the clang of a steel ladle catching the smooth lip of a saucepan - these incidentals cast the absence of noise into eerie relief, the way a single sprat performing agonised spasms atop a mountain of motionless cod emphasises the heaped dead beneath it.

Her favourite was poached plaice. She would stand in the kitchen, wreathed in steam, and rip bunched parsley with her fists. A squat, muscular woman with stuff silver bristles on her forearms, she kept her grey hair scraped back into a damp-yellowed muslin bag. She would work five or six hour stretches without pause, letting water condense on her brow instead of wiping it away.

And I would like to tell you that Grandpa Tomásson was lost to the wet white jaws of a storm, that a whale gnashed him from the deck in a sudden bite, that fragments of his little bottle-blue smack were found floating in Rekjavik harbour like cod bones in a stew, but the truth is, Granny Tomásson will not tell us. She just prepares food, knotted with determination, then sets the steaming dishes up and down the length of the big oak dining table, where they slowly go cold.

I took part in the Orange Unlit tour with Jont the other week. The vids are now up on Youtube:



Watching both these vids I was sick in my mouth a little bit. Like, obviously I don't think I'm shit, otherwise I wouldn't waste people's time thrusting my groin in their polite faces, but I forget how my voice actually sounds, as opposed to the luxuriant, goosebump-raising timbre I hear echoing through my own skull cavity. Still, the gig was fun, and I got to sleep on the Unlit tour bus, which was pleasant and relatively odour-free. So thanks to all involved, even though you're blatantly not going to be reading my piss-ant blog. Ha.

Scruples is a boardgame based around moral dilemmas. The website informs us 'Scruples makes players sweat as they ask each other what they would do in a moral predicament... [It] inspires hours of stimulating conversation and laughter. Get to know people in unexpected ways.'

In the game, players are asked questions like: 'You accidentally damage a car in a parking lot. Do you leave a note with your name and phone number?' Players have YES, NO, and DEPENDS cards with which to reply.

The website also includes a request: 'Send us your personal moral dilemmas. You will receive a free game for every question used in a future edition.'

I decided to have a go.

Dear Mr Scruples,

please find enclosed one personal moral dilemma to be considered for inclusion in the popular boardgame Scruples.

Would you one-inch punch a baby? No, of course you wouldn't. Not even if the baby was being a total dick. Punching babies is wrong. Nobody would punch a baby. There's no 'moral dilemma' there.

But what if the baby was Hitler? What if you had tried to go back in time to kill Hitler, but he had repeatedly overpowered you, so you were forced to go back in time again, to when he was a helpless infant? Would you punch a Hitler baby? Would you punch it in the face until it died?

No, of course you wouldn't. You might lose your nerve before the fatal blow, your bloodied fist trembling in a palsy of regret. Indeed, given the ironic vagaries associated with time travel, the trauma left by the early brutalisation you administered might prove to be the dark psychological motor that drove the entire Nazi regime. Punching any baby, even a Hitler baby, is wrong. There's no moral dilemma there.

You would smother a Hitler baby. Of course you would. You would grasp a heavy duck down pillow in both hands, lay it across the sleeping child's face and gently apply pressure. You would push and push until his little limbs lay limp. Smothering a Hitler baby would be sweet mercy. There's no moral dilemma there.

But what if, as the pillow descended, the child opened his blue eyes and whispered his first word: 'Friede!' - German for 'peace'? What if, by your very presence, you had somehow alerted this helpless suckling to his future atrocities, filling him with such remorse that he transformed from hate-filled monster to merciful humanitarian? Would you, could you, complete the act? Would you murder one of the great pacifists of the twentieth century simply to avoid appearing weak? No, of course you wouldn't. In doing so, you would become the very tyrant you sought to vanquish. There's no moral dilemma there.

But let us suppose, Mr Scruples, your time machine allows you to bring a second passenger back with you. Let us imagine that, unable to slay the nascent führer in his crib, you have the option of swaddling him in a blanket and spiriting him back to the present, to be raised as your own. Would you do it, and risk his stealing your time machine and returning the past armed with technological secrets, his evil regime now able to exploit iris scans, DNA testing, stealth bombers, CCTV, Global Positioning Satellites, electronic tagging and the almost limitless propaganda power of modern mass media in its march towards worldwide Aryan supremacy? No, of course you wouldn't. There's no moral dilemma there.

I mention all this by way of preface. In real life things are rarely so cut and dried. Here is my personal moral dilemma for possible inclusion in your boardgame.

As an eight-year-old boy, you kill your baby sister. You don't mean to - you just hold her Flumps pillow over her face to see what happens, and when you lift it away, you find out. Your parents think it is cot death. For years afterwards, their guilt makes them quick to buy you toys. You get a Castle Greyskull within the first two weeks.

Twenty-three years later, you use those self same hands to stroke your sleeping daughter's face. She is six months old. She has never whispered 'peace' in German.

My dilemma is this: Are people right when they say it's better to regret something you did, than to regret something you didn't do? What's the answer, Mr Scruples? Yes, no, or depends?