Elizabeth May, current leader of the Green Party of Canada, is running in the London North Centre by-election today in an attempt to be the first Green Party parliamentarian in Canada. In her honour, here’s a bit of Flanders and Swann:
Misalliance
The fragrant Honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun
and many other creepers do the same
But some climb anticlockwise,
the Bindweed does for one,
or Convovulus, to give her proper name.
Rooted on either side a door
one of each species grew
and raced up to the window ledge above
Each corkscrewed to the lintel in the only way it knew
where they stopped, touched tendrils, smiled
and fell in love.
Said the right-handed Honeysuckle to the left handed Bindweed
‘oh let us get married if our parents don’t mind we’d
be loving and inseparable, inextricably entwined we’d
live happily ever after’ said the Honeysuckle to the Bindweed.
To the Honeysuckle’s parents it came as a shock,
the Bindweeds, they cried, ‘are inferior stock,
They’re uncultivated, of breeding bereft
We twine to the right and they twine to the left’.
Said the anticlockwise Bindweed to the clockwise Honeysuckle;
‘We’d better start saving
Many a mickle mac’s a muckle
Then run away on a honeymoon and hope that out luck’ll
take a turn for the better’, said the Bindweed to the Honeysuckle.
A bee who was passing exclaimed to them then;
‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again
Consider your offshoots, if offshoots there be,
They’ll never receive any blessing from me’.
Poor little sucker, how will it learn
When it is climbing, which way to turn,
Right, Left, what a disgrace
Our it may go straight up and fall flat on its face.
Said the right-hand thread Honeysuckle to the left-hand thread Bindweed
‘It seems that against us all fate has combined
Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling Columbine
thou art lost and gone forever
We shall never intertwine’.
Together they found them, the very next day
They had pulled up their roots and just shrivelled away
Deprived of that freedom for which we must fight
To veer to the left or to veer to the right.