With apologies to Rossini, President McKinley, AA Milne, Gary Cooper, Pontius Pilate, the Long Johns Steinbeck and Ford, the Leaping Leonards Cohen and Bernstein, The Talking Heads, the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon and Christopher Durang

Signora, milady,

I know how it looks – blood and guts everywhere, a ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, Jack the Ripper — but appearances can be deceiving. This is not a simple ‘good guys versus bad guys’ situation like High Noon, or a Sergio Leone ‘spaghetti western’ with Henry Fonda muttering ‘Now that you’ve called me by name’, then bang-bang. (Tom Joad. Mama mia! Who’d have thunk it?)

It is nothing like that. The furthest thing from the truth. (What is truth anyway?)

This is no fairy tale, milady, no kiddie story like Winnie the Pooh or Alice in Wonderland. This ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around. This is la natura ‘red in tooth and claw’, like Darwin said in Survival of the Fittest. Scientific fact. One for sorrow, two for joy. I am alone, a bird on a wire, a drunk in the midnight choir. I’m depraved because I’m deprived. I blame my parents.

Doing what comes naturally is not ‘black and white’ like a chessboard, it is grey like a chalkboard. Non è vero?

L’antropomorfismo is the ‘heavy’ here, non io, signora, milady (and if you don’t mind my saying so, you look very smart today in that elegant old Barbour, very chic, very comme il faut), I swear on my mother’s grave, may God strike me down if I’m lying. I am definitely not trying to sell you a bill of goods. Scout’s honour! My mother’s grave!

…It’s not Tom Joad?

Julian George’s work has appeared in Exacting Clam, the Naugatuck River Review, Perfect Sound Forever, New World Writing, Slag Glass City, Panoplyzine, Ambit, The Journal of Music, Film Comment, The London Magazine, Cineaste andArt Review. His novel, Bebe, is out now in CB Editions. https://www.cbeditions.com/George.html He lectures on music for Open Age.