The first signing I did for one of my own compositions was on a 52-stanza poem I wrote for crew members at the end of a film called The Trial which we shot in Prague in 1992. I used an odd verse metre I discovered used occasionally in The Hunting of the Snark which was not just a simple ABCB rhyming couplet but had a double internal rhyme in the 1st and 3rd lines, thus:

Muesli is a platter of mixed vegetable matter,
A triumph of Swiss peasant cuisine.
To rolled oats in a pan add nuts, raisins and bran -
It'll make number twos quite routine.

(that's not Snark, or course - it's mine.)
I took various misadventures that we'd had on the shoot and put them altogether, with a few of my own inventions involving Clangers and the Charge of the Light Brigade (sound familiar?) and a few observations on bodily functions (see above) which were then, and are doubtlessly still the charming mainstay of crew chatter. Here's a verse about a half-finished cathedral in the coal-town of Kutna Hora where we filmed the sequence involving Antony Hopkins as the priest, fresh from his success as the movie world's favourite serial killer:

A house-of-God located in Kutna Hora that's truncated;
it was wealthy until that dark day,
when the mines that had bought her filled up with cold water,
and they had to stop building half way.


The Cherubs inside it are gilded one-sided,
above the altar the depicted last feast,
in the house of the Creator we set up a theatre,
and made Hannibal Lecter the Priest.


I gave copies of the verse out on the final shoot day and they were, I think, generally well received. The best boy asked me to sign the copy I gave him with the flattering comment: "You might be a writer one day." He's right: I still might be. In any event, he thus has the first signed work of a Jasper composition anywhere in existence - eight years before I was published.