Nigel Capel was long sceptical of the value of poetry. He was unconvinced that, with a few notable exceptions, poems could ever rival prose, with its utility, flexibility and scope for clarity. He had, after all, spent a lifetime working with prose as a tool of education and for the expression of both fact and opinion, for many years as an Army officer and educator. His leisure reading included non-fiction books, the occasional historical novel, periodicals, journals and, for the most part, the weightier newspapers. Except for a few unpublished short stories, his own output before retiring in 2013 was almost entirely concerned with his military or educational responsibilities. This changed after his retirement to include a full-length novel, a short monograph on his late mother's early life based on her own memories, a short book on the Lives of the Lords Hatton (Governors of Guernsey) and a cookery book. Gradually, a childhood love of rhymes and poems also re-emerged and became an appreciation of many forms of poetry. So much so that, in recent years, he has tried his hand at writing rhymes on various aspects of life, human nature and current affairs. Curiously, he even sometimes finds himself thinking in rhyming couplets. In the foreword to this short anthology, he seeks to explain his changing attitude to poetry before presenting a selection of his own rhymes - or are they all doggerel? Perhaps the reader can decide. Inevitably, the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic - and the British government's response to it - has coloured some of his more recent poems, as Brexit has done since 2016. This edition was intended for publication on Easter Monday 2020. It has been delayed by the impact of the ghastly Coronavirus pandemic on the whole process of publishing and printing and, of course, on virtually the whole of life as we had come to know it.