Dear Jane

They were all there

the mayor,
the countess of Portsmouth,
the local MP
all to take a velvet cloth
off a statue of a woman
that died 200 hundred years ago.

Me, I had nothing better to do.

So, I started talking to the man to my left.
"We don't get much excitement in Basingstoke," I said
"No, well, we had a riot in 1877. They shut the pubs," he said.
"Bloody hell, I am not surprised, I said.
"Had to get the army in, he said.
"And there was that time they buried the woman but she was not dead."
"Must of been like night of the living dead," I said.

I kept looking at the statue

and hoping that there was no statue underneath
and that perhaps a dwarf or a pantomime horse was underneath and they would run off
up the road shouting,
"We fooled you, we fooled you!"

But instead they pulled it off and there she was:

the woman who had been dead for two hundred years
and would now have to spend eternity
rooted like one of those trees around her
here in the Basingstoke.