From wars to television, presidents to motorists, all have come within the scope of The Northen Echo's weekly Four Liner. As a new book brings the best of these poems together, Nick Morrison talks to the man behind the rhymes.
Here's the story of
Motorway Fred
First he felt drowsy
Then he was dead.
FROM such beginnings was an institution born. This was one of the first Four Liners composed by Stan Walinets and published in The Northern Echo. And while it may be simpler than many of his subsequent compositions, it still has that combination of humour and substance that was to become his hallmark.
President Bush, the NHS, computer games - all have come in for the Walinets treatment: to be encapsulated in a four-line poem. No subject is too important, none too trivial, all are worthy of that gentle mockery, often disguising a cutting barb.
Stan's Four Liners have been published weekly in The Northern Echo since 1997, with more than 300 examples now brought together in a book. But the early days were far from easy, he recalls.
"It used to be very difficult and I would sit miserably half the week, thinking 'What am I going to do?'," he says. "Gradually, I got more faith in myself and more used to it and things would suggest themselves.
"Now, I deliberately leave it until almost the last minute, to make sure I try and get something topical."
Stan, 71, started writing in the mid-1970s, and his first short story won a competition judged by novelists Beryl Bainbridge and Sebastian Faulks, but he says thinking of the rhymes for Four Liners gives him a particular pleasure.
"I used to be very fond of limericks, and I used to doodle around and put ideas into four lines. I like making rhymes up, so it developed from there.
"I think it comes from having a rather sluggish mind. People say things to me and whilst I'm waiting for it to sink in, the first thing my brain does is to think of something that rhymes with what they have just said," he says.
He admits that when he started the Four Liners, he knew little about poetry, and much of it was learned along the way.
"I have learned a lot about poetry and scansion, which I had never thought about before, and I have come to enjoy finding just the right word, that not only means what I want it to mean, but also has its emphasis in the right place.
"The bit I have come to enjoy most is the challenge. No matter how complex the thing is, I bet I can get it into a Four Liner. People reading them might disagree," he says.
His politics are left-wing - he's a Labour Party member, although somewhat disillusioned with Tony Blair - and he's an unabashed liberal on social issues.
"I'm very concerned with the hypocritical and cynical attitudes towards sex and anything to do with sex. We're confronted with sex left, right and centre, because it sells things, but the minute you try and look at sex directly you're told you must not. Hypocrisy surrounds this kind of thing," he says.
After a career as a social worker, largely working with youngsters going through the courts system, via a false start as a clock-maker and a stint as Father Christmas at Harrods, Stan retired early through ill health.
He came to live at Mickleton, near Barnard Castle, where he lives with wife Renee, and is vice chairman of the village hall committee, and author of a book on the village's history. He's also a member of Wear Valley Writers' Group, and has been commissioned to ghost-write an autobiography, although the subject must remain secret, for now.
A keen motorcyclist, he got his first bike at 16, and his passion for two-wheels above four is evident in some of his Four Liners.
"I often think a car is like being surrounded by television screens of the passing countryside, but on a bike you are in it. I just love the feeling of it," he says.
* The World According to Walinets (Iron Press, £6), will be launched at Ottakar's in Darlington on Thursday at 7pm. Admission is free.
The book is available from bookshops or from Iron Press, 5 Marren Terrace, Cullercoats, North Shields, NE30 9PD, £6.75, including p&p.
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