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By Karen Hayes has won the Foreign Voices Poetry Competition

This competition ended on 30 November 2017 at midnight GMT

In the Netherlands, if I say I’m a writer, they look at me with concern. ‘Does it pay?’ is one of their responses. Another one is: ‘I’ve never heard of you.’ It’s quite different in the British Isles.

I was in London with E on the weekend before the terror attack. She was visiting for the first time. I had made up my mind to show her as many sights as possible within three days. In my city. I may have moved from London to the countryside but still London remains my city.

Prince Charles wants to do battle with the grey American squirrel. There are too many greys in the UK and this is to the detriment of the native red squirrels, which are threatened with extinction. Prince Charles wants to attack the grey squirrels with Nutella. This prompted the locals to start talking about Nutella & Camilla.

As you may know, I’m no longer living in London but in Malmesbury. It is a picturesque, yet quite a lively town. That’s because of Dyson, the hoover specialists: their head office and research lab are located on the edge of the town.

Instalment 58: Among the tall poplars on Bekkerveld pastry stall Bisscheroux has been
put up for the yearly Christmas appeal ‘Eat oliebollen (Dutch donuts) to
fight hunger in Africa.

I’ve always said that I would never go to a reunion, but there I was, in a restaurant on a foggy December evening in Nijmegen. I had travelled from the West of England to my birthplace in the Netherlands to be among my classmates from primary school. The boys (and two girls) of more than forty years ago.

Here in Malmesbury, the place where I’ve been living for a week or two, nothing much happens apart from the fact that the first person who was eaten by a tiger in Great Britain (in 1703) is buried here. The odd thing is that I, a dyed-in-the-wool city person, really like it.

Instalment 57: This Ash Wednesday, in the Good Shepard church, a queue of hatted ladies crawls towards Reverend Uncle Peer.

I’m going to exchange London for the English countryside. The type of area that organises competitions for growing the biggest vegetables.

Instalment 56: Miss Tempelman asks the children to take a pencil in their left hand and use it to draw a picture of God.

Recently, when I had forty minutes to spare and was smoking a cigar outside Brussels South railway station, I thought: these are not the most wonderful of surroundings. In other words, quite a few oddballs were hanging around, but a relaxing cigar is enjoyable.

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My apologies to Dutch readers. This time, it’s a very British subject. Read on at your own risk. My apologies also to British readers. It’s a very British subject and I’m a Dutchman living in England, so read on at your own risk.

Winner of the Poetry & Politics Competition

At one time I was a very traditional boy. I was a senator in the cadet corps of the Royal Military Academy (Dutch acronym KMA) and in my spare time I wore a blazer with the KMA emblem. And I had put my para wing on my pyjamas and swimming trunks.

Instalment 55: Around 3 o’clock Axel’s father disappears into his shed with his son’s bike, stubbornly staying silent.

Instalment 54: The ‘I’m not talking’ campaign launched by Axel’s father from his TV chair on Christmas Eve, is only being interrupted by granny Reuser.

I had wanted to write about a course in Humming-at-Important-Moments. Imagine: you are the PM and you’ve just announced you’re resigning; you point towards the building behind you, which will be occupied by someone else tomorrow, and what do you do next? You walk over the threshold humming a tune.