Beauty and the Beauty

   for Pippa

My mind still in the past,

I sat inside the Village Hall,

transfixed by Pippa as the Prince,

who, seconds earlier, before

the cloud of smoke, had been The Beast

(perhaps even more magical than

when Adrian had made a jug

of milk clean vanish down his sleeve).

Reminding her of this, I’d written,

‘You changed – from Beast to Beauty? – in

a puff of theatrical smoke.’

‘I turned into a handsome Prince!’

she wrote, by way of a reply.

I sat there thinking to myself:

those bloody Freudian slips, eh?