A handful of words in a peculiar order
Midweek’s here, they call it hump—
A Wednesday pause, a middle bump.
We glance behind at days now done,
Yet weekend’s not yet quite begun.
It’s that awkward sort of middle ground,
Too far from either end we’ve found.
Not quite enough to call it a win,
Not enough time to really begin.
But here we are on Wednesday’s hill,
Halfway up and onward still.
A little poem to mark the day,
As we push through the week’s halfway.
By Martyn Walker
Published in Letters from a Nation in Decline
Once upon a time—within living memory, though now spoken of as though it were some sepia-toned idyll—the local council was exactly that: local. A modest civic body, often dull, occasionally officious, but recognisably part of the community whose money it spent. One imagines the town clerk of 1958, sleeves rolled, spectacles perched, frowning over the drainage budget with the stoicism of a man who knows he will meet the ratepayers in the butcher’s queue tomorrow morning. He was not a visionary, a strategist, a consultant, or a “stakeholder partner.” He merely fixed the roads, emptied the bins, and ensured the library opened on time. He did so because the town needed these things, and because the town paid for them.
Compare that modest creature with today’s municipal apparatus, a body swollen to the point of deformity, draped in managerial jargon and trembling under a hundred mutually contradictory regulations. Instead of the honest if plodding civil servant, we have entire platoons of officers whose professional identity is built not on service but on compliance. They do not shape the town; they interpret guidance. They do not defend local interests; they “engage” with frameworks. Their task is not to steward a place but to satisfy a central state that increasingly views local government as one more branch office—an outpost of Whitehall’s neurotic empire.
The transfiguration began when successive governments, each convinced of its own modernising brilliance, decided that the real problem with councils was that they were too responsive to their residents. Better, they thought, to strip away those old provincial arrangements and replace them with uniform “administrative units,” reorganised, rationalised and sanitised to within an inch of their lives. The result was the 1970s map: fewer councils, larger councils, and officials less likely to know the names of the streets they regulated. Efficiency, we were told. Progress, we were told. It has been downhill ever since.
Then came the centralisers. Rate-capping, council tax limits, mandatory duties without matching funds: every lever was pulled to ensure that no local authority could so much as adjust a streetlight without permission from the capital. A Section 114 notice—local government’s version of sticking a “CLOSED FOR LACK OF MONEY” sign in the window—now hangs over dozens of authorities. The modern councillor governs nothing; he monitors a collapse, anxiously hoping that the Treasury might, in its mercy, approve a little more debt to keep the lights on.
And so to the regulations. If the older council was a steward, the modern council is a defendant—permanently awaiting judgement from a tribunal of auditors, inspectors, commissioners, ombudsmen, regulators and activist lawyers. Procurement law alone could cripple a lesser civilisation: tomes of directives dictating the precise choreography by which a council may purchase so much as a mop. The process is so paralysing that only the largest and most expensive corporations can complete it, creating a tidy cartel of outsourcers who speak the language of “KPIs” and “transformation pathways” while delivering services that are, at best, adequate and, at worst, catastrophic.
The tragedy is not merely the cost, though the cost is obscene. It is the culture. Preventive services, those quiet institutions that make a town bearable—youth centres, libraries, local works, the unobtrusive odd-jobbing that keeps a place civilised—have been amputated so that councils can funnel their remaining budget into statutory duties that grow more demanding every year. Social care now consumes the lion’s share of municipal budgets, not because councils have suddenly discovered humanitarian zeal, but because the law compels it and the courts enforce it.
Thus we inhabit the paradox of the British state: councils more elaborate than ever, producing worse public spaces than at any time since rationing. Potholes gape like geological features. Parks resemble the aftermath of a sullen strike. Planning departments take years to produce decisions that amount to artful apologies for not producing any decisions at all. What the average citizen sees is decay. What the average council produces is paperwork.
If the England of the post-war decades possessed a municipal ethic, it has been replaced by a municipal mirage: a swollen bureaucracy masquerading as governance, a system designed chiefly to protect itself from blame. It consumes money without delivering value, enforces rules without delivering order, and utters slogans about “communities” while retreating from the very notion of civic duty.
The state tells us this is progress: professionalism, standardisation, compliance, equality. But a town that cannot fix its own pavements is not progressing. A council that answers to Whitehall more readily than to its residents is not local. And a nation in which the simplest act of governance costs three times what it did half a century ago—and delivers a third of the quality—is not declining by accident.
It is declining by design. The design, as usual, belongs to people who do not have to live with the consequences.
When the state expands its procedures faster than its competence, decline arrives not as a crisis but as a schedule—issued quarterly, audited annually, and noticed by the public only when the bins stop being emptied.
The universe, vast and timeless as it turns,
One among infinite, where eternity burns.
Each atom, each thought, a unique, fleeting spark,
In the grand, endless dance of light and of dark.
If time is unending, if space has no edge,
Then what of the self, with no memory to pledge?
This life is a moment, a breath in the flow,
Yet in infinite cycles, we rise and we go.
The universe spins with no purpose or will,
Indifferent to wishes, yet wondrously still,
In this vast, restless cosmos, might we not return,
As the stars keep on burning, as the galaxies churn?
So perhaps we shall live, time and time once more,
In a universe infinite, with mysteries galore.
What can happen will happen, and thus we may see,
In the grand wheel of existence, the return of you and me.
Although the rhythm and subject of this poem differ, those familiar with The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson will detect an underlying current that owes much to that remarkable work.
This poem was written in 1974, during my time at Belmont School, Holmbury St Mary. It was inspired by a debate organised by our English Literature teacher, Mr Ballantyne. The topic was “Reincarnation is real”. I was on the team tasked with arguing in favour — no small challenge for an 13-year-old who had, at the time, no idea what reincarnation was.
To prepare, I retreated to the school library and began my research (encouraged and assisted by Mr Ballantyne himself). There, in a rather ancient encyclopaedia (I suspect it predated Britannica by several decades), I stumbled upon a passage quoting James Thomson (BV), which conveyed in essence the belief that death is final. Regrettably, I can no longer recall the precise quotation, and indeed The City of Dreadful Night offers so many bleak and masterful reflections that it is difficult to pinpoint which one it was.
Nonetheless, I remember vividly how deeply Thomson’s writing struck me. His sombre vision of life left a lasting impression. Over fifty years later, certain passages still linger in my mind — testimony to the power of his words.
You will find the full text of The City of Dreadful Night on Project Gutenberg. In particular, you may notice how the poem presented here draws upon the mood and tone of the four stanzas that begin as follows:
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
“While air of Space and Time’s full river flow
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:
It may be wearing out, but who can know?
“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.
“Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death.”
From throne to trowel, this poetic reflection traces the life of Puyi—from imperial captivity to peaceful obscurity—revealing how China’s last emperor found dignity not in power, but in planting a single flower.
It did not feel like exile. It felt like air.
Crisper than I had expected, colder than I had ever known. Outside the red walls, the wind behaved differently — it had no memory, no protocol, no need to announce itself. In the Forbidden City, even the wind bowed.
My shoes were wrong for this. Soft soles meant for silk carpets, not flagstones wet with Beijing’s early winter. I was dressed formally — not for ceremony, but out of habit. When you are Emperor from the age of two, dressing down feels like treason.
A general, or perhaps a policeman — it’s difficult to say who wore what in that period — motioned silently to the cart. A rickshaw. Not even a carriage. I didn’t protest. I stepped in. The wheels squeaked. Behind me, the vermilion gate closed. Not loudly. Just… finally.
I looked once over my shoulder, half-expecting some retainer to appear, to whisper “There’s been a mistake, Your Majesty.”
But no one came.
The gate, with its nine brass studs across each panel, was just a gate now.
The Japanese legation compound stood in the old Legation Quarter — a leftover from another era of humiliation, where Western powers and Japan had carved out slices of my capital and flown foreign flags above our soil. Now I arrived not as emperor, but as a guest without a kingdom. My welcome was polite, mechanical. They called me “Your Majesty” with the tone one might use to address a child who still insists on being called “Captain” weeks after losing his toy boat.
They offered me a modest suite — carved screens, lacquered panels, a writing desk too ornate to be useful. I tried to write once. A diary entry. I tore it up. It was all adjectives and no feeling.
Reginald Johnston visited once or twice, his eyes grey with something like pity. He had been my tutor, my friend, my bridge to the modern world. He had tried, in vain, to prepare me for life outside the walls. Now he stood awkwardly in the threshold, hat in hand, watching as the world he once translated for me now consumed me whole.
“You’re being treated decently?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “As a museum piece is treated.”
He frowned. “Don’t let them use you, Puyi.”
I laughed then — a thin, sharp sound. “Is there another option?”
The days passed slowly. I was neither free nor captive. Not a prisoner, but not allowed to leave without permission. The staff brought meals. Courteous, distant. The Japanese advisors came often. Polite at first, then more confident. They spoke of destiny, of restoration, of Manchuria.
“You were born to rule,” one said, eyes gleaming behind round spectacles. “And Manchukuo needs a ruler.”
I asked what “Manchukuo” was. He produced a map. A puppet outline of a country that did not yet exist. I was to be its emperor. A new dynasty, they said. Modern, orderly. Japanese-guided, of course — but mine in name. They called it a sacred duty to the people of Asia.
I stared at the map. I saw no throne. Just train lines, coal fields, military zones, factories.
But I nodded.
I told myself this was my chance to make something of the past. A bridge between eras. That I would rule wisely. That I would not be a puppet.
But deep inside, I knew the truth.
They were offering me a costume. And I, desperate for the applause of history, was too vain to refuse.
Nights were the worst. In the Forbidden City, I had often heard nothing but the rustle of robes and the distant call of drums. Here, the city was alive. Trams screeched. Men shouted. Radios buzzed with unfamiliar music. Beijing no longer whispered. It shouted over me.
I once ventured to the edge of the compound, where I could see the street. A child ran past, laughing, chasing a paper kite. He did not bow. Did not look. He had no idea who I was.
And for the first time in my life, I felt something close to envy.
Not of his freedom — I did not yet understand that.
But of his irrelevance.
They met me at the station in Changchun with banners and artificial smiles. It was 1932. Snow dusted the rails, clean and bright, like the surface of a lie. They had renamed the city Xinjing — “New Capital.” I was not fooled by the name. New cities are not built from steel and slogans, but from trust and soil. This had neither.
My arrival was staged like a play. Soldiers lined the route. Schoolchildren waved flags none of them understood. The Japanese officials smiled with the smug satisfaction of stage managers watching their puppet enter stage left on cue.
I was led to my new residence — not a palace, but a mansion. Square, sterile, built in Japanese modernist style. It had everything except history. No ghosts in the beams, no echoes in the stone. Just furniture polished to the point of absurdity, and paper walls that let in every sound except truth.
They called me “Emperor of Manchukuo.” But I was no longer even the shadow of an emperor. I was a figurehead for a nation that existed on maps printed in Tokyo and nowhere else. The cabinet ministers were Japanese. The military was Japanese. Even the food on my table bore the flavours of Kyoto, not Beijing.
I once asked to appoint my own minister of justice. The request was met with a pause, followed by a soft “We will consider it.” I never received a reply.
And yet — part of me welcomed the theatre.
I wore the robes. I stood on balconies. I signed decrees written in a language I no longer trusted. I delivered speeches full of rhetoric about harmony, progress, and Asian brotherhood, knowing full well the brother wore a sword.
The throne was a polished chair. The sceptre was a fountain pen. The empire was a lie.
But I smiled. I told myself lies too. That I was keeping China alive, even in exile. That I would regain influence. That I could guide the future from behind the curtain, like the old regents in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
But when I looked at my reflection in the lacquered black of my desk, I saw no Son of Heaven. I saw a young man rehearsing authority. A borrowed emperor, seated atop a ventriloquist’s stand.
My court was a museum. We paraded rituals whose meanings had vanished. There were still kowtows, still officials in Qing dress — but their eyes were empty. One courtier told me of his new Japanese watch, then bowed three times with perfect formality. Another drank heavily and muttered that “emperors are for calendars.”
Once, during a storm, the power failed. The lights went out. No one moved. I sat alone in the throne room, lit by a single candle someone had placed near the dais. The wind howled outside. I imagined the Japanese standing just beyond the walls, watching, smirking, waiting for me to panic.
I did not. I sat there, silently, until morning.
And that was when I knew.
I was no longer even pretending to rule. I was pretending to be me.
The empire ended not with gunfire, but with silence.
It was August 1945. The Japanese had surrendered. Hiroshima had been flattened. Nagasaki followed. I heard the news in fragments — a nervous official with cracked glasses whispered of “unconditional surrender,” his voice trembling more from disbelief than fear.
In Manchukuo, the Japanese commanders vanished almost overnight. Uniforms were stripped, flags burned, papers dumped into fireplaces that hadn’t been lit in years. The palace, once a hive of surveillance and staged ceremony, became eerily quiet. A few aides remained — confused, loyal, or simply too late to flee.
I was told to flee. “Your Majesty, we must get you to safety.”
Safety. An interesting word for a man who had never known what danger truly was.
They put me on a plane — a Japanese military transport, rusty and unreliable. It lifted from a makeshift runway with smoke on the horizon and my stomach full of dread. I was still carrying the imperial seal, tucked in a velvet pouch beneath my coat, as if I could stamp my way out of oblivion.
We didn’t get far.
The Soviets found us in Mukden. I had hoped they would treat me as a dignitary. Perhaps allow me exile. Perhaps hand me gently to the Americans, who, I told myself, might appreciate the novelty of an emperor.
Instead, I was loaded into a truck, then a train, then a grey building where my name had no value.
The Russian guards did not beat me. They did not speak to me. They watched. Like I was something in a jar.
I was held in a place called Khabarovsk — a military compound of concrete and questions. The food was bland but sufficient. I was not mistreated. Just… neutralised. I spent my days staring at frost-rimmed windows and wondering if they would ever call my name again.
They didn’t.
Weeks became months. The winter froze even my thoughts. I began to doubt I had ever been emperor. The court, the robes, the rituals — they felt like scenes from a play I had performed in too long ago to remember. I dreamt of the Forbidden City, but the colours were fading. The yellow roofs, the incense, the calligraphy — they drifted in my memory like petals on water.
One night I asked the guard for a pen. He didn’t understand. I mimed writing. He shook his head.
I never tried again.
Eventually, they handed me over.
It was 1950 when the Soviets, tiring of their Chinese trophy, gave me back. Not to restoration, as I had once fantasised, but to the People’s Republic — a country reborn in slogans and cement.
I was told I would be “re-educated.”
At first, I laughed. Quietly, but bitterly. How do you re-educate someone who had never been properly educated in the first place?
But I was sent to Fushun War Criminals Management Centre all the same.
There were no guards with whips. No chains. Just beds, grey walls, and a new kind of theatre — one where the audience and performers were the same. Each morning we woke, saluted Mao’s portrait, and recited lessons. We confessed. We critiqued one another. We debated ideology with the earnestness of drowning men describing the sun.
And slowly, something happened.
I stopped lying. At first in small ways — admitting fear, embarrassment, vanity. Then in larger ways — admitting complicity, cowardice, blindness. I read Marx not because I believed, but because I needed something to fill the hollow.
I swept floors. I cleaned toilets. I wrote pages of reflection, trying to understand how I had become so empty, so used to being used.
I began to believe the re-education was working.
Not because it gave me truth.
They gave me a grey uniform and a number.
I was no longer “Your Majesty,” no longer even “Puyi.” Just inmate 981. At Fushun War Criminals Management Centre, names were an indulgence of the past. We had categories now: traitor, collaborator, counter-revolutionary. I was all three. I wore it like a second skin, stitched by the choices I had convinced myself were survival.
My first task was to sweep the corridor. It took me two hours — not because it was long, but because I had never held a broom. The bristles caught on the uneven concrete, and the handle gave splinters. My palms bled, a quiet rebellion from hands that had once signed edicts on silk scrolls.
I thought the guards would jeer, or mock. They didn’t. They watched. Always watching. Like gardeners waiting to see if a buried seed would sprout or rot.
The real punishment was not physical. It was dialogue. Every day, group sessions. Eight men in a circle, stools arranged like a tribunal. We recited the “Three Critiques”: critique of the self, of others, of the imperialist past.
At first, I spoke in abstractions.
“I was misled by my advisors.”
“I was unaware of the suffering.”
“I was a child in the hands of stronger powers.”
But they weren’t interested in excuses. They wanted blood. They wanted my soul, or the admission that I had never had one to begin with.
So I began to say it.
“I betrayed my country.”
“I aided the invaders.”
“I let men die for the sake of my throne, which was not a throne at all, but a prop.”
The first time I said those words, something cracked. Not loudly. Not like a bowl shattering. More like the subtle sound of paper tearing down the spine.
I cried that night, in the dark. Not out of sorrow. Not even guilt. But confusion. I no longer knew what was true. Was I sorry because I understood? Or because they wanted me to be?
Months passed. Then years.
I kept confessing. First out of fear. Then habit. Then, unexpectedly, relief.
The act of confession became something like prayer. A form of worship — not to Mao, not to Marx — but to reality. To clarity. I began to recognise patterns in myself: the vanity of my boyhood, the selfish hunger for status, the constant search for someone to blame.
I once watched a fellow inmate — a former general — break down after admitting he had ordered executions for personal revenge. He sobbed like a child, then looked at me and said, “I thought I was serving order. I was just cleaning up after my own pride.”
I nodded. I understood. The line between order and vanity had blurred for both of us long ago.
One afternoon, I was brought before a tribunal. Not for sentencing, but for evaluation.
A man in a brown tunic — expressionless, his hair thinning — asked me, “What are you now?”
I replied, “I am a Chinese citizen.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not a monarch? Not a victim?”
I looked at the floor.
“I am… a man who once thought he was above other men. Now I am simply one of them.”
He nodded. Wrote something. The meeting ended. Three months later, they told me I would be released.
I left Fushun with no fanfare. I had entered a prisoner. I exited a man with a folded shirt, a toothbrush, and a modest pension from the state. The gate did not feel like freedom. It felt like air again — familiar, cold, and indifferent.
I looked at my hands. They were rough now — scarred from work, not warfare. Fingers once manicured by eunuchs now calloused by years of scrubbing floors and cleaning latrines. And yet, for the first time in my life, they felt like they belonged to me. Not instruments of ceremony or symbols of inherited rule — just hands. Capable, honest, and mine. I had learned how to use them — not just to sweep or carry, but to live without illusion. That, above all, was what re-education had given me: not truth, but the slow, merciful removal of every lie I had once mistaken for purpose.
I returned to Beijing like a man waking from a long illness. The streets were unfamiliar. Not because they had changed — though they had — but because I now saw them without tinted glass. I was no longer carried, protected, or observed. I was simply… present.
The old palaces had been turned into museums or offices. The alleyways buzzed with bicycles and vendors. No one bowed. No one saluted. Most didn’t look at me at all.
That, more than anything, felt like freedom.
I lived in a small government dormitory, a concrete building the colour of boiled rice. I was given a ration card, a basic stipend, and instructions not to “interfere in political affairs.” I had no intention of doing so. The only affairs that concerned me now were water, soil, and light.
The job came through a Party liaison — gardening assistant at the Botanical Institute. I was to weed, water, and prune. A peony bed in the south courtyard became my first charge. I tended it as one might an old friend who had returned after many years — quietly, carefully, and with unspoken regret.
One crisp morning, as I knelt beside a row of sweet osmanthus, a voice behind me said, “Your Majesty, may I?”
I turned sharply.
An older man stood there, lean, stoop-shouldered, his face weathered like dry parchment. He wore the standard blue Mao tunic, but there was elegance in his stillness.
“I used to serve you,” he said, with a gentle smile. “You wouldn’t remember me. Few did.”
I stood slowly. “You’re mistaken. I don’t—”
“No, no,” he said, waving the air gently. “I didn’t expect you to. I polished brass hinges in the Hall of Mental Cultivation. Daily. For ten years. We saw each other most mornings — though I doubt you saw me.”
He bowed, not out of deference, but familiarity. A habit he hadn’t quite shaken.
I stared. “You’re right. I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”
He smiled again, more warmly this time. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. You were a prisoner. A gilded one, but still a prisoner. Every meal brought on a tray, every opinion chosen for you before you spoke. You saw what they wanted you to see.”
His clarity startled me. “I thought I was ruling.”
“You were being managed,” he said softly. “That’s not the same.”
We sat on a nearby bench, the garden blooming quietly around us. He introduced himself simply as Mr. Shen. No surname, no titles. Just a name carried through decades like an old coin in a deep pocket.
I asked about his life.
“Uneventful, mostly,” he said. “Which is a kind of blessing. We were poor. Still are, in truth. But I married. We had four children. One died. Three live. One teaches maths, one drives a coal truck, and one —” he paused, chuckled, “writes slogans for the Ministry of Culture. He’s very clever. I don’t understand half of what he says, but it sounds patriotic, so I nod.”
I laughed with him.
He turned his gaze to the gravel path. “I was almost beaten to death once.”
I blinked. “By whom?”
“Japanese soldiers. 1942. Caught me with food I wasn’t supposed to have. It was meant for a starving neighbour. I said nothing. Took the beating. They left me half-conscious in a shed near the railway.”
He scratched the side of his neck thoughtfully.
“One of the younger soldiers returned. A boy, really. Barely seventeen. He was shaken. Said he didn’t agree with what had happened. Asked if I needed water.”
“Did you take it?” I asked.
“No. I gave it to him. He had a wound on his arm. Nothing terrible, but infected. I cleaned it. Told him how to wrap it.”
“Why?” I said, surprised.
Mr. Shen tilted his head. “Because he was human. And I didn’t want to carry more hatred. It’s heavy.”
I said nothing. He continued.
“Three days later, that boy came back with forged documents and whispered a single name to me. A Korean merchant who smuggled people out through a checkpoint. My wife and I took the risk. We walked three nights and didn’t look back.”
He rubbed his knees. “Sometimes one life is saved by another. Without ever knowing it.”
We sat in silence for a while. The scent of damp earth and chrysanthemum drifted on the breeze. I turned to him.
“Do you think I can still be… of use?”
He looked at me calmly. “You already are. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re speaking truth. You’re planting things that will outlive you. What more do you want?”
I sighed. “To know I was more than just a mistake.”
Mr. Shen put a hand on my shoulder. “You weren’t a mistake. You were a boy placed in an impossible role. Now, you are a man choosing a quiet one. That is something.”
That night, in my room, I picked up my small journal. I wrote just one sentence:
“Today, I met someone who remembered me as I was — and forgave me as I am.”
The peonies arrived in April, shy and swollen with promise.
They emerged slowly, with the kind of patience I had never been taught. First a green bud, tight and folded like a secret. Then a hint of blush, then pale pink petals that unfurled as though remembering something. I watched them each morning with the reverence once reserved for court ritual.
They were neither obedient nor indifferent — simply alive. They grew with no ceremony, no command. And they did not need me to bloom. My work was only to remove the stones, to guard against disease, to ensure water reached where it must. That, I had come to believe, was enough.
The old instincts still flickered now and then. When someone bowed a little too deeply, I stiffened. When I heard the word “Majesty” on the radio — even in reference to foreign royalty — my breath caught for half a second.
But those moments passed more quickly now.
I began to see people differently too.
A woman who worked the compost heap, hands stained brown to the wrists, taught me how to turn kitchen scraps into soil. A Party clerk, who used to draft propaganda posters, gave me a cutting from his grandfather’s orchid and said, “Even slogans need beauty.” The quiet girl from the herb garden read poetry aloud on Tuesdays, her voice trembling only when she recited from memory.
No one cared who I had been. Most had never heard of me. A few thought I had been an actor.
And in that anonymity, I found something extraordinary — not freedom exactly, but permission. To be.
I had never been allowed to be before. Not as a child-Emperor locked behind walls. Not as a puppet ruler blinking into cameras. Not even in Fushun, where I had to confess my soul in someone else’s language.
Now, I carried water. I turned soil. I spoke plainly.
One afternoon I caught myself scolding a boy — a volunteer who had crushed a patch of young chrysanthemum with his bicycle.
“You don’t understand,” I snapped. “That bed took two seasons to root properly!”
He looked terrified.
I stopped, realising how absurd I must have sounded. I exhaled slowly, crouched beside the damage, and showed him how to lift the roots gently, how to replant what could be saved. He listened, wide-eyed. I realised I was smiling.
Later, I wrote:
“Once, I ruled men who feared me. Now I teach boys to be gentle with roots. This is better.”
At dusk, when most had gone home, I often stayed behind. Not out of duty — I was no longer trying to impress anyone. But because the light in the garden was kind in the evening, slanting low and gold across the stone paths. Dust would rise in the air, catching the sun, and for a brief moment everything seemed suspended — like the final page of a story before the book is closed.
Sometimes I’d find Mr. Shen there, watching the light with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has earned nothing and regrets even less.
“You’ve changed,” he said one evening, handing me a flask of warm tea.
“Not sure that’s the word,” I said. “More like… unravelled.”
He nodded. “Then perhaps now, finally, you’re becoming someone.”
I often thought about legacy. Not the statues and names engraved in stone. That kind of legacy was too fragile, too prone to melting under a new flag. No, I had come to see legacy in a different way.
In the health of the soil.
In the bloom of a flower long after the hand that planted it has turned to dust.
In the young gardener who will one day step into my patch, dig with the same care, and never once wonder who planted the first root.
And that, I thought, was as it should be.
It began with a photograph.
Someone — perhaps a Party functionary, perhaps a former court hanger-on who had reinvented himself — had published a grainy image of me in a gardening cap, pruning shears in hand, beside a rosebush. The caption read:
“Former Emperor Puyi: Now a Model Citizen.”
It was meant as propaganda. Proof of the revolution’s success — look how even the last emperor tills soil beneath the watchful eye of the People’s Republic. But Beijing is a city of whispers, and whispers travel faster than any newspaper.
Within weeks, they started coming.
Not in crowds. Not with banners. Just one or two at a time. Middle-aged women with hesitant smiles. Men who lingered at the garden gate, pretending to read the plant names. Some approached quietly, with eyes full of history.
“Were you…?” they’d ask, almost embarrassed.
“Yes,” I would say, before they finished. “That was a long time ago.”
Sometimes they asked for my opinion on politics. I had none to give. Sometimes they wanted stories from the palace. I shared a few — gentle ones, uncontroversial. Tales of dragon robes and carp ponds. I left out the loneliness. The watching eyes. The hunger to matter.
One day, a man in a Western coat arrived with his daughter. He bowed slightly — the kind of bow that had muscle memory behind it.
“My grandfather worked for you,” he said. “He called you the ‘quiet boy behind the yellow screens.’”
I nodded. “That sounds about right.”
He held out a photograph. It showed a young boy — me — standing beside an ornate table, face blank with duty, hands too still.
“I just wanted to thank you,” he said. “For being part of our history.”
I looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then handed it back.
“Better to be part of the soil now,” I said, pointing to the chrysanthemums behind me. “At least those bloom on time.”
But not all the visitors came with soft intentions.
One woman, perhaps in her fifties, stood glaring near the peony bed for over an hour before finally approaching.
“My father died in Manchukuo,” she said. “Fighting the Japanese. He blamed you.”
I swallowed. “He wasn’t wrong.”
She seemed taken aback.
“I didn’t know him,” I said, gently. “But I know what it is to be used.”
She stared at me for a long while. Then, almost reluctantly, said, “He used to grow peonies, too. In Hebei.”
She didn’t smile. But she didn’t spit, either.
And then she left.
I discussed it later with Mr. Shen.
“They come to see a relic,” I muttered.
“No,” he said. “They come to understand what history means when it’s no longer in a book. You are not a relic, Puyi. You are a footnote with breath. A name that still answers.”
“I wish they’d forget me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Then why did you answer her?”
I had no reply.
That evening, a young woman — no more than twenty — came with a sketchpad. She sat quietly on the far bench, drawing the late-blooming roses. As she left, she walked past me and said, “Thank you for tending the garden. My grandmother always said emperors were cold. But flowers are not.”
I smiled. “They’re not. But they bruise easily.”
“So do emperors,” she replied, and walked on.
In the weeks that followed, I noticed fewer stares. The novelty faded. The soil remained. The blooms came and went. The visitors stopped asking questions.
And I was grateful.
Because I was beginning to realise:
When people stop needing your past, you’re finally allowed to have a present.
Autumn brought the smell of dry earth and rotting leaves. The chrysanthemums held out longer than expected — gold and deep crimson — but even they surrendered eventually, their petals curling inward like old letters sealed and forgotten.
I found the season oddly comforting. There was no pretence in decay. No ceremony in falling leaves. Just the slow and honest unraveling of life’s excess.
It was then that I began to think more often about my name.
Aisin Gioro Puyi.
Son of Heaven. Lord of Ten Thousand Years. Last Emperor of the Qing.
Once, those syllables had summoned palaces to attention, caused ministers to kneel, and filled rooms with the sharp rustle of silk against marble.
Now, they lived only on faded calligraphy and bureaucratic records. Even the local Party office referred to me simply as “Citizen Pu.” Sometimes, on forms, I signed “Aisin Puyi.” Other times, just “Puyi.” Once, I forgot and signed only “Pu,” and no one corrected me.
A gardener by any name, after all, still weeds the same way.
But names mattered, didn’t they? Names were how history remembered you — or didn’t.
The name “Emperor” had long since detached from me like a title deed to a house that no longer existed. Sometimes people still used it — mostly older folk, out of habit, not loyalty. The younger ones found it curious, even amusing.
One boy, no more than sixteen, once asked, “Did you really believe you were chosen by heaven?”
I thought about it, and said, “No. But I believed I wasn’t allowed to question it.”
He nodded with a wisdom beyond his years. “That’s how most people feel about fate, I think.”
I began to sort through my things.
I owned very little — a few books, some tools, an old photograph of the Forbidden City taken from the air. I folded my spare tunic. I sharpened my pruning shears and oiled their hinge. I made small notes in the margins of my gardening ledger.
There was a time when I imagined writing memoirs — grand volumes in gold-trimmed covers, filled with insight and imperial dignity. Now I thought perhaps a single page would do. Not about the throne. Not even about the war.
But about the peony.
How it struggles in its first year, confused by the shock of transplantation. How its roots twist against stones, slow to settle. How its first bloom is modest — hesitant, even — but if tended with patience, it returns stronger each spring.
There was a kind of metaphor there, I supposed. But I had long stopped pointing them out.
One evening, Mr. Shen found me beneath the ginkgo tree, a rake in my hand, my back aching.
“You should rest,” he said. “You’re not young anymore.”
“I was never young,” I replied, wincing slightly.
He chuckled. “That’s true. You skipped straight from cradle to crown.”
I sat on a nearby stone, brushing leaf dust from my sleeves.
“Do you ever wonder how they’ll remember us?” I asked.
Mr. Shen rubbed his chin. “I think most people won’t. At least not properly. We become names in textbooks. Or anecdotes. Or nothing.”
He paused.
“But memory isn’t legacy. Legacy is what you leave growing. What flourishes when you’re no longer looking.”
I looked at the ginkgo’s golden fan-shaped leaves scattering around us.
“I hope they forget me completely,” I said, “but keep the flowers alive.”
He nodded. “Then you’ve already succeeded.”
That night, I wrote one final note in my journal:
“There are names carved in stone. And there are names whispered in spring when something blooms and no one knows why. I have no interest in the stone.”
It bloomed late.
A rose — small, ivory white, almost shy — on the far edge of the western bed, where the soil had always been stingy and the sun reluctant. I hadn’t planted it. Not directly. Perhaps it was a graft from an older root, or a survivor of some careless gardener’s forgotten trial.
But there it was. Unexpected. Unasked for.
And quietly perfect.
That morning, I knelt beside it with the care one might offer a relic or a final confession. I touched a petal — soft as breath — and let my fingers linger. It trembled slightly under the weight of the breeze, or perhaps time.
I didn’t call anyone over. I didn’t record it in the garden log. I simply watched.
Around me, the city moved — bicycles on gravel paths, distant loudspeakers reciting slogans, the slow sweep of a broom on concrete. Beijing in its new skin.
Inside me, there was no longing.
Not for palaces. Not for ceremony. Not even for forgiveness.
I thought of the men who had bowed to me. The women I had married but never truly known. The courtiers, the generals, the Party instructors, the guards. Even the Soviet interpreter who once told me I spoke Mandarin like someone reading an opera libretto.
And then I thought of Mr. Shen. Of the compost woman. Of the boy who crushed the chrysanthemums. Of the girl who read poetry. Of the rose, quietly defiant in the stubborn soil.
And I smiled.
When I stood to leave, I plucked the rose — not for display, not for ceremony — but as a gesture to the life that grows when no one is watching.
At home, I placed it in a small jar. No water. No vase. Just a cracked ceramic cup once used to rinse brushes in the palace school. The rose stood perfectly still on the table as I made tea.
That night, I dreamt I was planting trees. Not alone. Not for an empire. Just planting.
And no one called me emperor.
And no one needed to.
When I died, there was no parade. No black horses, no imperial wailing. Just a modest cremation and a government-issued notice of passing:
“Citizen Pu Yi, aged 61.”
But the garden still stands.
And every few years, a single white rose appears on the western edge of the bed.
No one knows who planted it.
But it blooms just the same.
No throne remains, no court, no crown,
Just whispers in a northern town.
Where once he ruled, now silence grows—
His legacy: a single rose.
In Tianjin’s heart, on Anshan Road,
A garden where his story slowed.
Jingyuan, the Garden of Serenity,
Holds echoes of his identity.
From emperor to gardener’s grace,
He found his peace in this quiet place.
No longer bound by royal decree,
He tended plants with humility.
Visitors come, the curious kind,
Seeking traces he left behind.
But find instead a tranquil scene,
Where history and nature convene.
No monuments of marble stand,
Just blooming flowers by his hand.
A testament to life’s repose—
His legacy: a single rose.
Jingyuan, once Puyi’s residence, now serves as a museum preserving the memory of China’s last emperor and the serenity he found in his final years.
In a room without air,
no fire was struck—
only eyes meeting silence.The world braced for thunder,
but one man listened
to the stillness between shouts.He did not flinch.
He did not roar.He said — not now,
and the fuse went cold.
In a world fuelled by narratives of conquest, where glory is often bestowed on those who press the button, pull the trigger, or march forward, it is rare to find the hero who is remembered for doing — nothing. Yet, in October 1962, as the world hovered on the brink of nuclear annihilation, a soft-spoken Soviet naval officer named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov made a singular choice: not to strike back.
That choice may have saved the world.
The Forgotten Officer on Submarine B-59
During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet submarine B-59, armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, found itself cornered by American destroyers in the Atlantic. Mistaking depth-charge signals for the onset of war, the sub’s captain and political officer voted to launch. Arkhipov alone refused.
He held the authority to veto. And he used it.
By insisting on restraint and persuading the crew to surface, Arkhipov likely prevented a nuclear exchange. He bore the consequences of surfacing in silence, without accolade, and returned to service as if nothing had happened.
Grace in Defeat
The act was not cowardice, nor was it a victory in conventional terms. It was a moment of calm wisdom in the middle of chaos. Arkhipov knew he might be court-martialled or disgraced. Yet he stood still. He accepted humiliation. And in doing so, he preserved peace.
History barely recorded him. His story only emerged decades later, long after his death in 1998. And still, most do not know his name.
The Man Who Refused to Win
Arkhipov’s story reminds us that the true measure of courage may lie in restraint, not retaliation. His is a legacy of moral clarity — a refusal to escalate when all signs screamed for reprisal.
Sometimes, the greatest hero is the one who chooses not to fight.
And the world turned on his silence.
Today I came across a fascinating poem which reminded me of Interrupted, something I began during Covid but could not find what I was looking for. The magical power of suggestion found in Bogdan’s she died by the time childhood ended is exactly what I wanted–I just didn’t know it. You can read Bogdan’s poem here, and next are my thoughts on this vespertine lyric.
It’s Schrödinger’s cat wrapped up in art as if sculpted by Michelangelo on his best day
It is a modern existential lyric in the surrealist tradition, composed in restrained free verse and reads like Schrödinger’s cat rendered in verse—an exploration of uncertainty, consciousness, and transformation—wrapped in the kind of artistry one might expect if Michelangelo had turned to poetry on his most inspired day. It stands suspended between states: life and death, waking and dreaming, real and imagined. The girl from the shade is both maternal figure and metaphysical idea; the whistling both lullaby and flatline. With sculptural precision and emotional restraint, each image is carved into the page rather than merely written, revealing a depth that rewards quiet contemplation. It is not only a meditation on mortality, but also an argument that what we believe to be illusion may, in the final moments, become our only reality.
The beauty in the words flows with grace and subdued pace. Contemplating them reveals a magic, let me show you what I mean:
He dozed off into the warm sun sets a tranquil scene. He’s relaxing, maybe even sleeping, but there’s a tension: the shade at his head / but not touching him—as if death is approaching, near, but not yet arrived.
It was her hand that touched him introduces a figure—the girl from / the shade—which could symbolise death or some archetype of comfort. She’s maternal, nurturing: she breastfeeds a child, she whistles wholesome tunes. There’s both sensuality and innocence in this image.
The girl he knew was not real / but no longer cared—this is crucial. He knows she is a vision, maybe a figment of his imagination or a hallucination as he slips into unconsciousness. But by now, he no longer cares—he has let go.
As the light above him / was shaded by heads looking down on / his face—this places us beside his body. Others are gathered around him, implying he is physically dying—perhaps outdoors, as people gather to mourn or tend to him.
The whistling grew / into a single interminable note—a masterful line. The comfort of her music gives way to the flat, continuous sound: the note of a flatline. The emotional tone pivots here, from ethereal dream to stark finality.
He knew she will / soon be real—this is the final paradox. She wasn’t real in life, but she will be in death. She represents whatever the dying man is moving toward: peace, a memory, an afterlife, or simply nothingness personified.
Everything will be—a beautifully suspended ending. This last line evokes a metaphysical calm, or perhaps a return to unity. The verb “to be” is left without an object, suggesting completeness beyond definition. It’s one of those endings that feels like both a full stop and an opening door.
She was the postmaster’s daughter—
fifteen, and serious about everything.
Even laughter.
We spoke of love
like people twice our age
but felt it
like fire at our fingertips.
I remember her hand
on my arm
when we agreed
not to rush.
Both virgins.
Both afraid
of what forever might cost
if we touched it too soon.
We gave each other
everything
but the one thing
we wanted most.
We shared time
in hours
on benches,
by rivers,
between letters,
through windows.
When Denmark called me
and Edinburgh called her,
we said the right things.
We meant them.
For a year
our voices travelled the length of Europe
on wires and stamps.
Then
one day,
nothing.
No letter.
No call.
No reason.
I rang her house.
They’ve moved,
they said.
No forwarding address
for a girl who still lives
at the edge of my life
in a memory
with her hair tied back
and a promise in her pocket.
Not all love stories end.
Some are simply
interrupted.
The Old Man Remembers Robyn
I am 85.
There are days
I can barely stand
without remembering
how she stood beside me,
barely sixteen,
looking serious
about everything.
The mirror gives me
this brittle husk.
But behind the eyes—
that boy is still there.
Still hoping for a letter.
Did she marry?
Did she cradle
grandchildren
the way I cradle mine—
with reverence,
with joy,
with the weight of a life
earned?
Sometimes I hope
she forgot me quickly.
That another boy
with steadier hands
gave her the love
I only promised.
Sometimes
I hope she didn’t.
That’s the cruelty of memory—
it edits nothing.
She is still fifteen.
Still waiting.
Still unkissed.
If I find her
on the other side,
I pray
she is older than me.
Lined, wise,
eyes full
of stories I never knew.
Not the girl
who vanished.
Not the girl
frozen by farewell.
Because I loved her.
And I would grieve,
even in death,
to see her again
and find
she never lived at all.
The two poems in this sequence, collectively titled Interrupted, form a quiet meditation on love that never faded, only vanished from view. They chart the emotional arc of a single man across a lifetime—from the intense but restrained devotion of youth to the reflective yearning of old age.
The first poem captures a rare kind of early love: one chosen for its restraint, not repressed by fear, but shaped by mutual understanding. The speaker and Robyn are adolescents with a bond strong enough to resist the immediacy of desire, trusting in the value of a future they were never given. When Robyn disappears—without explanation, without closure—the relationship isn’t broken. It is, simply, interrupted. Memory becomes the only place where she continues to exist.
The second poem, written from the vantage point of old age, returns to that interruption not to reanimate the past, but to ask the one question that has lingered for decades: what became of her? It is a poem not of regret, but of compassionate longing. The speaker has lived fully—marriage, children, grandchildren—yet the fate of Robyn remains an unfinished chapter. His greatest fear is not that she forgot him, but that she never lived beyond their final moment. He does not want to meet her again as a girl frozen in time. He wants to know that she, too, lived richly, aged with dignity, and became someone beyond his memory.
Interrupted is poetry in the lyric tradition—sparse, emotional, and precise. It allows stillness to speak. It mourns nothing explicitly, but in its quietness, it holds immense feeling. The poems are not an elegy for a person who died, but for a story that was never allowed to finish. And yet, by writing it down—by holding Robyn in language—the speaker gives it a kind of completion. Not all love stories end. Some are simply interrupted.
They gather each year to honour the Earth,
With banners and buzzwords and questionable mirth.
They chant “follow science!” with glassy-eyed cheer,
But the method they follow? It’s nowhere near.
They assume, then predict, then assume what they guessed—
If it fits what they feel, it must be the best.
They model the sky, they model the sea,
But test what they claim? That’s heresy.
They worship the models like relics in glass,
Forget every dud from the decade that passed.
And still they parade with unfounded pride—
While science itself sits shunted aside.
Let’s go back to basics, like Aristotle once taught:
“Test your idea—or it’s not worth a thought.”
You can’t prove it’s true just ‘cause you hope or you care,
But one bad prediction? That truth isn’t there.
Yet here we are still, with graphs in a stack—
The famous old hockey stick stubbornly back.
Its blade defies logic, its shaft splits the skies—
A medieval warm-up? Deleted. Revised.
And thus, the believers, in labs and in suits,
Build castles on sand and declare them as roots.
If a storm hits the coast or a summer gets hot,
“That proves it!” they cry. (But of course it does not.)
Where’s Feynman’s demand to “bend to the test,”
To discard the idea that performs second-best?
Where’s Popper’s sharp blade to cut through the fog,
To banish the sacred from the scientific log?
Instead we get headlines and Parisian scenes,
Of leaders who fly in on CO2 dreams.
A standing ovation, champagne in their hand—
Then off to Davos to lecture the land.
This isn’t science, it’s pantomime stuff.
The numbers don’t add, and the method’s not tough.
They’ll say “the consensus,” and smugly they grin—
But if thinking is outlawed, how can we win?
Science is doubt. It’s question. It’s test.
It’s not your emotions dressed up in a vest.
It’s not the applause of a well-funded team—
It’s asking the question that shatters the dream.
So this Earth Day, pause. Take stock. Look again.
Are these prophets with laptops or children with pens?
Let’s teach them the method, the rule and the way—
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll earn what they say.
Let’s bring back the rigour, the courage to doubt—
To test every claim, to throw the weak out.
Let’s shame the lemmings, restore the domain,
Let’s Make Science Great Again.
I wrote the poem, then I wrote an explainer, then I realised the poem is redundant. Then I realised I don’t care what you think anymore, so the poem stayed.
Old Jerry ran a factory tight—
A little creaky, but mostly right.
He made fine parts for clever things,
Like wind-up ducks and copper springs.
One day he said, “It’s time to go—
I want a boat, perhaps Bordeaux.
I’ve earned my stripes, I’ll sell the shop,
And let the private buyers mop.”
They came in suits, with dazzling grins,
And PowerPoints with hockey pins.
They talked of “synergies” and “scale,”
Then fired poor Lizzie from the mail.
They closed the canteen, sold the van,
Rebadged the soap to “Corpé-San.”
They shrank the team and doubled goals—
Then pocketed the workers’ souls.
But wait! A voice from Dave in tools,
Who once mistook some files for mules:
“Why sell us out to suits and ties,
When we could own the enterprise?”
An EOT, friends, is not a trick—
It’s not just shares, it’s ownership.
It pays the founder just as well,
Without the need for sharks to sell.
It locks in legacy and pride,
And keeps the best folks on your side.
It gives the team a proper stake
In every part they build or make.
There’s tax relief (yes, quite a sum),
And zero cost to staff—not one.
The firm buys shares, the seller’s paid,
And futures aren’t just sold or swayed.
So next time suits begin to swarm,
And whisper “Let us help transform…”
Just stop and think—before you deal—
Remember this:
Time wounds all heels.
Having thoroughly investigated the advantages of Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) compared to traditional Management Buyouts (MBOs) or direct corporate acquisitions, I can see no compelling reason why any business with 50 or more employees should consider a different route. The benefits to the owner, the employees, and the long-term integrity of the business are both significant and fair.
Please note, I do not sell services from these pages, nor do I host advertising. I am genuinely impressed by the potential of EOTs to deliver fairer outcomes for all parties involved. If you are a business owner who has come across this note and would like to learn more, feel free to contact me directly at slurps.mammal-3t@icloud.com (I know, but it’s what Apple gave me as a ‘spam reducing’ discardable email redirect).
PS. Groucho fans will understand the last line of the poem. Thank you, Groucho Marx—for the laughter that disarmed, the wit that endured, and the humility that defended. You made us laugh, and in doing so, you helped keep us standing.
Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) are a UK government-recognised succession option allowing a company to be sold to its own employees. Rather than a management buyout (MBO) or trade sale, an EOT gives control of the business to the workforce—preserving culture, protecting jobs, and delivering fair value to the owner.
An EOT:
The Earth, the Moon, the mighty Sun,
Three bodies bound, yet each one spun,
To dance in patterns vast and true,
A clockwork waltz in cosmic blue.
The Moon, a mirror, cold and bright,
One-four-hundredth of the Sun’s great might,
Yet placed so perfectly between,
That solar halos can be seen.
A burning crown, a ghostly ring,
That bends the light, a fleeting thing—
The shadow cast, a measured veil,
A story told on cosmic scale.
And soon again, the world will gaze,
As twilight falls in midday haze.
On August 12th, in twenty-six,
The Sun and Moon their magic mix.
From Iceland’s shores to Spain’s embrace,
A fleeting night will take its place.
And Castellón, a golden land,
Will darken by the Moon’s own hand.
At half past eight, as day still glows,
The Sun hangs low, the shadow grows.
A veil of dusk will flood the skies,
As daytime dims before our eyes.
For ninety seconds, night will reign,
A ghostly crown, a silver chain—
The corona’s fire, soft yet wild,
A ring of light, the heavens’ child.
And though the Sun will rise once more,
This fleeting dark we can’t ignore.
A hush will fall, a gasp will rise,
As day dissolves in star-lit skies.
Yet even now, the dance goes on,
The balance held, the rhythm strong.
The planets move in silent grace,
Their orbits tied in time and place.
Beyond, the stars like diamonds shine,
Yet each one dwarfs our burning line.
A billion fires, a billion years,
Their light still flickers as it nears.
A universe of measured chance,
Of weight and balance, time and dance—
As if some sculptor’s careful hand
Had shaped the sky and drawn the land.
Yet here we are, so small, so brief,
Awake within a world of grief,
Yet blessed to see, to think, to know,
That stars still shine, and rivers flow.
So gaze in wonder, ask and seek,
For space is vast, and we are meek—
But in its vastness, thought takes flight,
And minds can touch the edge of light.
Verbal Alchemy 