Carolean Journal

On the eighth of September 2022, Elizabeth the Second, Queen of the United Kingdom (officially styled "by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and Sovereign of the Most Noble Order of the Garter") died. Or, less accurately but more as it would be understood by those who were inclined to understand it, The Queen of England died.

What followed, at least in the United Kingdom, was a protracted period of pantomime tragedy. Yes, the spectacle was predictable; but it contained some elements and details that somehow, often wonderfully, weren't. Such as Liz Truss's brief prime ministerial career. And the desperate pleas of morning newsreaders for royalist mourners to stop delivering stuffed-toy effigies of a marmalade-hungry Peruvian bear to the gates of Buckingham Palace.

I immediately sensed that the birth pangs of this new era (already dubbed "the Carolean era" after the new king of England, Prince Charles) ought to be documented before it slipped away on the frothy, moonlit tides of memory. Unpopularly by design, I chose to record my experience via the medium of poetry. Meandering, perfunctory, constrained only by an entirely arbitrary verse format and my own talent and perspective as an unemployed ex-professional writer living on the margins of society, and rendered into digital text by the clumsy fingers of the King of Landskeria, an unrecognized micronation in West Wales, in the medium of English, with occasional diversions into broken Welsh.

I wrote one entry a day (with some entries longer than others) for fifty consecutive days, until Friday the twenty-eighth of October, 2022, and then stopped. The work was a journal, and thus exists primarily as a personal record (of what I was up to) and a reflection (of what I was thinking about while doing it). But perhaps and even if only due to atmospheric conditions some of it might occasionally appear deeper than that surface reflection might suggest? I don't know; I'm only the writer.

HRH Alexander Velky I, October 2025

Carolean Journal

I.

The embrambled bank I disembrambled

Last spring has been busy;

So many hydra geists, so little zeit.

The new bathroom window

Framing the chaotic scene like a stamp

Commemorating some

Abstract masterpiece, loathed by the nation,

Still bears its blue foam squares.

II.

I run the notion of a half-mast flag

Up my actual flagpole:

The two bedraggled flags up there, being limp

In our wet windlessness,

Weep almost to reach the public footpath;

Thus, I hoist them back up,

Exposing us to charges of treason

And go about my day.

III.

Varnishing reclaimed parquet, encasing

Woodworm trails and nail holes,

Tiny pebbles trod into the chapel

Many Sundays ago

Before the congregation dwindled to

A business decision:

I'm sorry, Good Shepherd, it seems your flock

Has unhefted itself.

After five years living in this parish

I finally decide

To scale the hillside south of Foel Feddau

To seek the boundary stone

That marked where the abbot's land met the knight's

And the source of the Wern.

The latter, true to its name, is a marsh.

The former is long gone.

IV.

Index smoothing clear silicone sealant,

Paint drying round the frame.

Third coat—fourth coat?—the penultimate coat

Before it can decay

At its own pace. The TV's still not safe.

Netflix? Completed it,

M8—the winter looms long from this angle.

(No, I've not watched The Crown.)

I swear that sometimes here the wind blows down.

I am reading a book—

No, it's not about Neo-Nazis, Hugh;

It's about a giant

Istrian Slav who starts a rebellion.

(Such stories can be found

In all societies where it sometimes 

Feels like the wind blows down.)

V.

"Please don't bring any more Paddingtons or

Marmalade sandwiches

To Green Park" pleads the breakfast news–reader.

Second week back at school,

And Fury has Monday-morningitis.

Her bus-driver inquires 

After Sybil, gone to big school, who'd tend

To wish him "bore da".

VI.

I dream about destroying everything

And beginning again

But spend my waking hours constructively:

Painting, grouting, sealing,

Varnishing, more painting—outside this time.

I've been meaning to ask

The internet whether birch can be hedged

For about a week now.

A letter from the council threatening

To cut down our ash trees

And to force us to pay the tree surgeons.

Sometimes I wonder if

Civilizations slowly hollow out

Like an ash with heart rot,

And whether ours will crash abruptly down

Or shed a thousand twigs.

VII.

Weithiau, dwi'n hoffi sefyll ty ôl i'n

Drws blaen ni, yn gwenu,

Fel bod i'n NPC yn dy gêm di—

Dim yn angen dim byd;

A dim yn gwastrafu'r pŵer prosesu

Dy cyfrifiadur di:

Dim ond yn disgwyl i ti dod yn ôl

A chlicio arna i.

VIII.

Made fire, made flapjacks, half-filled rear wood-store,

Disinfected henhouse,

Made and ate experimental sort-of

Crumpet-burger lunch thing,

(Chorizo, gherkins and cheese, didn't work)

Didn't apply for job,

Repainted removable bath panel,

Washed, hung and sorted clothes.

IX.

Decided to leave the Labour party—

Not for moral reasons,

Nor for ideological reasons;

Simply because saving

Five pounds sixty seven a month seems like

Splendid value just now.

Started watching The Crown. Soon as we're done 

We can cancel Netflix.

Speaking of cancellations, they've gone and

Cancelled Owain Glyndŵr—

That is, the Owain Glyndŵr Day parade

They'd arranged in Corwen.

What's the name for the rule where the more the

World around you resembles

A Half Man Half Biscuit song title

The less you can be arsed?

"David Beckham turns to crisps and doughnuts"

Barks the BBC app

As I step from the bath, in what appears

To be a deliberate

Challenge to "Exit, pursued by a bear"

As the most ludicrous 

Stage direction in the English language.

I will not queue for you.

X.

Today to Ffynnon Ceisiad, Hebron,

To sit for the first time

In eighteen years in a mini-digger

And to operate one

For the first time ever. A dry stone wall

Needs repairing at home

And a friend from Welsh class stops by because

Our dog was on the road.

As Christina Rossetti once wrote:

"When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me." And I would add

To that: "Don't spend a day—

Like, a whole day, I mean 24 hours—

Queueing up to nod at

My coffin, because life is for living

And the dead can't nod back."

XI.

The Queen has gone to Narberth shopping for

Wine and pizza toppings

With one of the princesses while the King

Kneads dough and reduces 

Tomato sauce. The Queen has now returned

With Pino Grigio

And shredded mozzarella. No olives.

"You didn't say olives."

The King has gone to Glandy Cross shopping

For black olives and beer.

The King discusses supply chain issues

With the cashier in Spar.

The King has gone down the public footpath

Looking for field mushrooms.

The King finds a splendid Dryad's Saddle.

It is good being The King.

XII.

The King is ill; the King has taken to

Talking about himself

In the third person. It feels like a cold,

But it could be cancer.

The King is a cancer. (Not like that though.)

The realm is in distress:

Leaves are lining the gutters in crispy,

Sick deciduousness.

I go to my third church of the day, mine,

With a view to adieu—

But become distracted by the damp patch

On the red quarry tile

And the grave of that chap from Danperci,

Which must not be allowed

To collapse into that thorn bush. The Queen

And I put out the bins.

XIII.

The journal should end here, but it does not.

The stricken King survives

For now, and must continue his duties:

Operating machines,

Burying cables, laying water pipes,

Picking the children up, 

Cooking, cleaning, listening to podcasts,

Being ill, not being dead yet.

XIV.

The King brings the wrong text-book to Welsh class

Am yr ail waith, mis hwn.

The King is invited to contribute

To his friend's new podcast.

The King considers selling his records

And applies for a job

To help with the "cost of living" crisis

(And to fund a few gnomes).

XV.

The King welcomes news of an historic

Victory against the

Scoundrels who sold him the wrong Welsh text-book.

There is much rejoicing.

In the Passage Between the Passage and

The Back Passage, the King

Picks rocks from years-old landslip, picturing

A distant herb-garden.

XVI.

The palace coffers being close to empty,

The Queen elopes to Greece

Leaving the ailing King labouring long

Into the afternoon 

On his imaginary herb garden.

Broken crockery shards

Encased in mud for some forty-odd years 

Rest lightly on the sill.

XVII.

With the Queen away and the princesses

Over the hill, the King

Does what any king in his place would do—

Or so the King suspects—

Dons his overalls, fetches his barrow

And his favourite shovel,

And heads next to the broken concrete shed

For his cement-mixer.

Once the cement-mixer has been deployed,

Mynachlogddu brings rain.

Even when you are king, it seems, you must

Defer to higher things.

The King lights a fire in the front-room stove

And closes the windows.

The King decides to make chicken curry.

The dogs decide to help.

Yesterday (I forgot to say) I found

A mouse caught in a trap

By the copper water-tank in the mill

Beneath the defunct flag.

Its teeth were sunk into stale parmesan;

The lid had sprung the bar

And snapped its neck at the exact moment

That it tasted the bait.

XVIII.

The King is reading an old news report

Concerning his kingdom,

Published before the general election 

Back in 2019.

"What kind of idiot moves to a place

With bad internet and

Complains about it to the BBC?"

Inquires one commenter.

XIX.

The King finds one of his poetry books

For sale via ebay

For over three times its usual price

Despite being second-hand.

The King thinks of all his poetry books—

The couple of hundred

That have so far ventured beyond his realm—

And he misses each one.

Persuaded to stay inside by the rain,

The King makes shepherd's pie

Using parsley, same, rosemary AND thyme—

All dried, from small glass jars.

Letting the condensation out through the

Single-glazed sash, the King

Spies wet mortar on his herb-garden wall

Under fresh bombardment.

The King operates the hot and cold taps

Like an anaesthetist;

Except that he is the one in the bath—

The frog about to boil—

And he uses his feet, because his hands

Are writing this journal

And his teeth are rehearsing kingly smiles

He'll never dare deploy.

XX.

In-between mixing a drum of mortar

And laboriously

Poking it between piled stones with a trowel,

The King perambulates

His autumnal riparian kingdom

Gathering hazelnuts;

The nuts please him such that he soon gathers

Beyond his bounds. Bad king.

XXI.

The King forgets to breakfast one princess 

Thinking she could self-feed.

School picture day—already the worst day;

He delivers an egg

To her ysgol on his way to Welsh class.

The hazelnut harvest 

Augurs a bountiful winter. Alas,

The UK's imploding.

XXII.

To Haverfordwest for what seems like the

First time in a long time:

The King grimly notes the inflated price

Of Ferrero Rocher

And visits the library to pay a fine

But it isn't open.

Once back home, the King finishes painting

The east wing's south face white.

XXIII.

The rains come in and wash away the paint,

Or that paint not yet dry.

The King shovels muck from a drainage ditch

By the side of the House

And manages to speckle his coat white

Against wet pebble-dash.

The King's Rydale wax jacket will henceforth

Smell like Wickes white spirit.

XXIV.

The King's herb garden falls foul of scope creep:

A staircase is designed,

And a pipe is buried beneath flat stones—

A sort of patio-

Passage thing: perhaps a "passagio"

Muses the busy King,

Dimly recalling a time when he was 

Paid to come up with words.

XXV.

Fancying a pollarded ash as a

Remotely possible

Location for housing a receiver

For wireless Internet,

The King cuts a swathe along the border

Uphill through thick blackthorn,

Drags an aluminium ladder, climbs it,

And discovers "2G".

XXVI.

The King is reading Misha Glenny's book

On the Balkans. He learns

That at the Berlin Congress, Prince Otto 

Von Bismarck had to down

A whole jug of port before each session

To soothe his shingles pain,

Thus: "he spoke with difficulty among

Continual hiccups."

XXVII.

Rains attack Passagio's second tier

After mortar-brushing.

The plumber comes with a new—humongous—

Red expansion vessel;

The corner-cupboard cocktail-cabinet

Boiler-concealing thing

The King has made in the Inception room

Is rendered obsolete.

XXVIII.

The King tours the kingdom's municipal

Drainage apparatus—

Much of it in a semi-functional

(Though unrecognized) state.

Five years in to his reign, the King well knows

There's no greater pleasure

Available to humankind than that

Of watching water work.

XXIX.

To Ffynnon Ceisiad today for wood:

First to saw bits of wood

To bridge the gaps between Bwthyn Gwyntog 

And its unfixed bargeboards;

Next to borrow Uncle Mike's wood-splitter

To deal with the log-piles

Amassed around Landskeria this year—

Which are many, and wet.

XXX.

The King spots an otter's anal jelly

On a long river rock.

The King struggles to finish a poem

In Morrisons car park.

The King suffers expanding-foam blowback—

The foam gets in his eye,

And he rubs it with white spirit. The King

Relaxes in the bath.

XXXI.

Having split one cubic metre of logs

The log-splitter gives up

And thus the King must console himself with

The Sisyphean task

Of transporting logs from one end of his 

Kingdom to the other

Wondering whether the time is nigh to

Buy a much bigger stove.

XXXII.

The King redeploys his trailcam downstream

Hoping to catch a glimpse 

Of the anal-jelly depositor

On his nocturnal beat.

Having rearranged the woodshed, the King 

Erects what looks like

An operating table on which to

Inspect the log-splitter.

XXXIII.

The blue foam squares are gone from the window:

The bathroom is complete.

"Thus, it is all downhill for the bathroom

From here" muses the King,

Who spent the better part of the morning

Painting the frame before

Emailing Dwr Cymru to ask if they'll

Fell two of his ash trees.

XXXIV.

To Ffynnon Ceisiad for guttering—

The erection thereof—

And to return the broken log-splitter.

Winter is closing in:

Cell walls crumble to mush under the weight

Of sluggish electrons.

The King's application for a used

Chihuahua is rejected.

XXXV.

Half the Welsh class leaves halfway through the class

To protest a new mast

To be erected in Pantmaenog marsh—

Latterly called "forest".

The King attends an archaeology 

Lecture in Abergwaun.

(Did they have "heritage crime" in the

Last Glacial Maximum?)

XXXVI.

The King's nuts are drying on the Aga

But The King is concerned

By tiny new holes that seem to appear

Each time he mixes them—

Is one microscopic maggoty thing

Slowly gobbling the lot?

Not so says Google: eggs are laid in spring

But hatch at harvest time.

XXXVII.

The ventriloquist has sacked its dummy

For saying the wrong things

And the King is now so old that none of

This amuses the King.

"Democracy is weak and decadent"

He thinks but does not say

And dabs a dry eye and waves goodbye

To another dreary day.

XXXVIII.

Objects are reordered in the kingdom

For its greater glory:

A notable alder has lost a limb;

The wound gapes orangely.

The King spends morning drafting a statement—

Because what are words for

If not for marking the passing of days

And life and lives and ways?

XXXIX.

The King rearranges some guttering 

Such that any rainfall

To hit the south- and southwest-facing roofs

Will no more be discharged 

To flow beneath the Passage to Megashed,

But will be carried

The length of said structure and discharged at

The base of the flagpole.

XL.

"The Prime Minister is not hiding

Under a desk" we are told

By way of a gentle reassurance.

"The economy is

Not ruined." The King harvests three buckets

Of river gravel to

Line a drainage channel: this is not an

Economic event;

The King is engaged in activity

Unconnected with growth

And thus cannot help but feel he's shrinking

In stature in the eyes

Of his subjects—or would be if they had

Eyes; if they existed;

If their fairytales concluded: "They all

Lived growthfully thenceforth."

XLI

The King stacks wet ash logs in the woodshed 

While cawl slow-cooks indoors.

Yet jobless, he would fake his own death for

A life-insurance claim

But that he lacks access to a canoe.

At lunch he learns online

That yesterday's entry surpassed his 

Roman numeral knowledge.

XLII

The King's fingers are worn thin from working

Mortar into the wall

Of what—he remains hopeful—will by next

Spring be a herb garden.

Still no word from Cadw concerning the 

Listing application 

For his derelict woolen mill. Alas!

It's not easy being king.

XLIII

One of the princesses is home from school

For medical reasons

So the King force-marches her up a hill

To a rocky outcrop

With a glacial erratic on top.

The PM quits when they

Are halfway down. Later, the King makes quiche,

Burns his hand on a pan.

XLIV

Imagine being surrounded entirely

By a zombie empire

In its slow-mo death throes! The King does not

Have to imagine that;

Somebody has thrown a can of Fanta 

Into the King's garden.

"This is the thin end of the wedge" he thinks;

"Everything is orange."

XLV.

The King begins a list of broken things:

His external hard-drive,

His stove, the internet in Megashed, 

His chainsaw, the UK,

His espadrilles, his daughter's seal-shaped lamp,

His throne room (the plumbing),

That log-splitter he borrowed, the alder

By the mill-pond, his will…

XLVI.

Taking advantage of the calm between

Two bouts of autumn rain,

The King replaces the glass in two panes

Of the Southern Passage

And harvests a hazel rod to erect

As a pole for a screen

Depicting seven chakras in the room

Of princess number one.

XLVII.

A new prime minister has been declared—

Much like the new king was;

And he has no time to give a statement:

He is busy digging

A drainage channel down along the drive.

Besides—what would he say?

Why say anything at all? Sometimes no

Words are appropriate.

XLVIII.

A tear in the fabric of our Welsh flag;

It won't last the winter—

Not with the climate changing all the time

And these new storms with names:

It is retired to the woodshed, henceforth 

The Welsh embassy too.

One soggy flag still flaps atop our pole,

Its declaration made.

XLIX.

The King is on the flat roof locating

A hole between the tiles

Above the rear wall of Princess Fury's 

Rarely used bedchamber;

The high winds don't bother him because he

Carries a sheet of lead—

Which he will now fix beneath the snapped slate

With noxious chemicals.

L.

Not wanting to be accused of having

A favourite, the King

Spends most of this day in the loft above 

Princess Sybil's bedroom

Trying to wedge foam boards between rafters.

"Insulate Landskeria!"

Chant hordes of imaginary protesters

While the King saws foam

And the King is reminded by loft filth

And stray foam particles

Wedging their way into his eyes, his mouth,

His nostrils, of the time

He took a careless glug of cheap red wine

And swallowed a drunk fly

Only to cough it up three hours later—

No more, alas, to fly.