The sudden, unexpected and bewailed death of John Peel has got me thinking about the very noticeable lack of thoroughly and obviously decent people in public life.
Peel was loved for his passionate and eclectic musical tastes, but just as much for the sense he radiated of being an uncomplicatedly and utterly decent human being. Stories of his modesty, friendliness and deadpan charm abound. Every one, told with wet-eyed fondness, only demonstrates the more how rare it is to find such qualities in the public realm.
There are plenty of people who you would, for one reason or another, stand a pint, though you've never met them in person. Peel was one of the few who you would expect to be good company while drinking it.
I was thinking about this on the way home last night. It struck me cold how very few people would make the list of being (a) a decent, essentially good person, (b) a person good to be around, (c) defiantly themselves and (d) in the public realm.
There are, despite appearances, plenty of good and fun people. Many of them are defiantly themselves (infividual, eccentric, call it what you will). It's just that, for some obvious reasons, there are almost none in the public sphere.
My shortlist was:
Desmond Tutu
John Peel (RIP)
Screaming Lord Sutch (RIP)
Douglas Adams (RIP)
Stephen Fry
At this point I found myself both struggling for names and rather gloomy.
Thank the stars, then, for glorious news that legendary Brazilian footballer Socrates, at age 50, is to join non-league Garforth Town.
Only this weekend I was discussing with a football journalist exactly why Socrates, a lanky chain-smoking socialist qualified doctor, was probably the most eccentrically decent person ever to have graced the World Cup.
With John Peel gone, I'm glad we still have the magnificent Socrates.
hello Bloggers.All I can say about this blogging business is that it is very hard work. Please can you wait until tomorrow morning when I will be posting an incredibly exciting article from the Daily Telegraph about radio masts
Boris Johnson is possibly the most troubling figure in modern British politics. He is a jolly, likeable, funny, bumbling old-fashioned Tory. By all rights he should have existed forty years ago. Compared to the ghastly parade of frosty-eyed Redwoods, Howards and Davises, Boris is, well, a human.
He can also write, with a Wodehousian novel ('Seventy Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors') the latest, probably knocked out, as Douglas Hurd has suggested, in three days flat.
I have a horrible feeling that Boris's new blog is going to have to go on the sidebar, to give me a chance to resolve my feelings back into a healthy hatred of the man, and in the meantime enjoy his puppyish prose.
Caveat emptor: Most of the blog appears to be written by Boris's parliamentary secretary, Melissa Crawshay-Williams, who does all of the fawning and who cannot correctly spell 'The Beatles'. Chiz chiz.
Whenever this new world of ours gets me down, whenever the violence of the economy or the scandal on the box makes me feel that it's all running out of control, I close my eyes and listen to a bit of folk music.
There's nothing in this world more reassuring, more likely to soothe the anxiety from my brow.
Because, let's face it, the murder rate in folk music puts New York and Cape Town to shame. I estimate it at one every four songs, with the rest consisting mostly of adultery, betrayal, kidnapping by the little people, shipwreck and, above all, early death. The life expectancy of a character in a traditional folk song can't be much more than 16 years.
After half an hour of this, I'm infinitely cheered, and ready to face anything.
It's spider season. All around the garden webs are strung across ivies, roses, everything, including the resolutely still-green tomato plant. In the centre of each is one of those fat mottled garden variety spiders. It's like a convention.
A couple of the more adventurous and acrobatic have even made the leap from one side of the garden to the other, spinning long tightropes way above head height.
When I was young, spiders were the one creature I couldn't bear. In the end, I decided that it was because they have altogether too many legs. It's difficult enough keeping two of the things under control. The spider's facility with eight limbs produced the childish conclusion that they must be a great deal smarter than anyone was giving credit for. And once you start seeing an intelligence behind those very non-mammalian faces...urgh.
Still, the spiders and I came to an accommodation a long time ago. Web placement is a negotiation based on usage: the common routes around the garden are quickly cleared by humans blundering into low-level webs. The spiders build them the next time slightly tucked away to one side. They still get their flies and I still get green tomatoes.
I have a suspicion that they look at me and think that, for a creature with only two legs, some of my behaviour betrays signs of something approaching intelligent life. Let them wonder.
If I could send one headline back in time, it would be this:
THATCHER MAY FACE 15 YEARS IN JAIL
Nearly the end of summer, and the final Test is upon us. It's been a wildly successful season for the much maligned England team, so now is very much the time to roll out the encomia before the good times roll to a halt.
Only one thorny issue continues to give trouble, aside from the miserable torrents of rain that will inevitibly disrupt the match. The question is: how best to follow the game?
It's easy when you're relaxing in the garden or in the car: you tune in to the immortal Test Match Special on the radio. Unusually for a sport, the television coverage for cricket is inherently inferior, unless you've taken refuge in a pub for an hour or so and just want to keep a lazy eye on matters as they evolve. The problem with the TV is that you have to watch it. With TMS you can actually get on with something else (such as painting a ceiling, as I will be doing tomorrow), radio burbling in the background.
For today, however, TMS is not an option. I could listen to it at work, but it would be more than a little rude, especially when people are trying to ask me questions. So the answer must be to follow the match online. This used to always mean the celebrated Guardian over-by-over report, with its deep wells of sarcasm and banter. However, like any such personality-led enterprise, it's become a bit of a caricature of itself these days: one too many sessions kept afloat by discussions of 80s TV shows have led me more and more to the scorer's delight that is Cricinfo's ball-by-ball coverage. Here, behind the rigorously formulaic descriptions, lurk knowledgeable and keen cricket watchers. This makes it even more satisfying when a hint of passion creeps out, like the sun sliding out unexpectedly between black clouds. I await eagerly each proclamation of 'good ball', 'close' or, best of all, 'Shot!'
Enjoy it while it's here: the winter tours almost always occur overnight for us, meaning that, in the morning, you skip straight to the end of day score, missing out completely on the developing drama of the day's play.
Three things to cheer up any sorry Englishman:
Ah, Daily Mail, sing to me of the internet.
I couldn't help noticing on the train this morning (over someone's shoulder, naturally) that the Mail ran two whole pages based on internet memes. One was the quite venerable Animals on the Underground site. The other was the rather thin Preparing for Emergencies I noted in the linklog a couple of days ago.
Two whole pages.
When he comes to write up his definitive history of the internet, it will be with gleaming pride that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be able to boast: "I built a worldwide network to deliver dirt-cheap copy to the Daily Mail".
Fair makes the heart beam, doesn't it?
I spent most of the last week watching my grandmother die in hospital.
I'm drained, emptied, exhausted. I really don't have anything coherent to say about her, or about the whole experience. More than that, I don't have anything about it all I want to share with the shadow world. I'm sure you understand.
Let me add, though, that the next person I hear criticising the NHS is going to get a piece of my mind. It's a common mistake to think that a hospital is there to provide treatment. It's not. It's there to provide care.
The amount of care I've seen in the last few days is extraordinary. It's both heartening and humbling, and I am immensely grateful on my behalf, and on behalf of my family.
I was listening this morning to, of all people, Monty Don being interviewed by, of all people, Bel Mooney.
Monty (a gardener) was fluent and passionate about the feeling of spiritual connectedness that he gets from gardening, and from just being in a garden.
It was quite clear that the garden he was describing was an English idyll sprouting cow parsley, chestnut trees and long green grass. It hums hot with all manner of insects, and implicitly involves a discreetly separated kitchen garden.
Well, I can see what he's getting at. It's the sort of vision with which I tease myself with increasing regularity. Sadly, my urban garden is more a bricolage of outsize paving slabs, raised borders, bags of green waste waiting for disposal and, predominantly, shed.
The shed is going, to be closely followed by half of the paving slabs. Then we'll see what those borders are made of.
We have made positive changes, but they are in the main chopping out odd and hopeful plantings that have gone straggly or died, and adding in Things That Will Do Well (such as potted hostas and lilies that are doing frighteningly well).
Now it is time to change the nature of the garden. I've been reading a fine book on growing edibles in urban gardens, and it's turned my head rather.
The first tomato plant went in a couple of weeks ago, and is looking splendidly hale. Yesterday, working from home due to the tube strike, I had time to go out and get lettuce seeds. The runner beans, peppers and beetroot might have to wait until next summer (particularly as we have yet to see how the cats respond to the temptation of tender young vegetables appearing on a kind of feline deli counter).
I can already almost taste, as a form of roundness in my mouth, the home-grown tomatoes (slugs and cats permitting). I am coyly eying reserved areas of flowerbed for tightly-packed crunchy green leaves. Unoccupied trellises promise that they can bear the weight of a full crop.
There does seem to be something in the soil. I don't think I'm alone in yearning after a life of bucolic fruitfulness. I sense that it's bursting up through the tarmac again, like the Slow Food movement and the gradual emergence of recycling into everyday life.
Alternatively, perhaps this need for the slow seasonality of living things is a human desire that's always there, and I'm just beginning to approach it.
On consideration, I prefer the latter for its implications of continuity with a past way that has, therefore, never really been lost. It makes me feel like a child again.
If only I carried a camera when running. I encountered yesterday the perfect image. A proper British fat lad, his blue shirt kept in communication with his jug-like jeans only by thick red braces, red faced like a builder's mate, was standing under a tree, looking accusingly at it. A slight gesture of the head acknowledged the assistance he was receiving from his mutt - a boxer, of course. It was busy dragging a six-foot branch to its master, the better for him to work out exactly where it came from, and exactly where to put it.
It was a picture story that could only ever have one caption: 'Sorted'.
We're we talking about cricket? I think we were.
This is the best online cricket game around. It's endearingly simple, smooth, and has some lovely touches. See what happens if you send a towering six into the scoreboard.
I spent a pleasant half-hour this Sunday asking a PE teacher from the Black Country how he teaches his sporting duffers to bowl a cricket ball.
Right now, from where I'm sitting, I can see a horde of (I suppose) seven year olds leaping around. Some of them are playing cricket, including one scrap of a lad whose old fashioned shorts look to weigh as much as he does. He's a good couple of inches shorter than his friends, at a guess second or third generation anglo-Indian or Pakistani. In his you'll-grow-into-them school shoes, he has the precipitous gait of a small animal yet to come to an understanding with its feet. But, whereas his schoolmates are lobbing the ball to the stumps in polite long-hops, this one fires the ball in like a pocket Darren Gough. He's getting such pace that on the rare occasions bat connects with ball, it fizzes out of sight like a swooping swallow.
I suppose I'm noting this because I followed some links posted by Mags about the D'Oliveira affair in 1968, which is on everyone's minds now because of the current Zimbabwe tour farrago.
One of the links is to a 1968 piece by John Arlott, that finishes with this wistful paragraph:
Secondly, within a few years, the British-born children of West Indian, Indian, Pakistani and African immigrants will be worth places in English county and national teams. It seems hard to discourage them now, for, however the M C C's case may be argued, the club's ultimate decision must be a complete deterrent to any young coloured cricketer in this country. The final thought on it, however, must be one of sadness and that in the selection the M C C have stirred forces - for both good and evil - whose powers they do not truly comprehend.
Of all the admirably barking pop stars thrown up in the 50 or so years of rock & roll history, in Britain we can proudly claim more than our fair share of moon-shouters. What's more, wheareas American musicians tend to go in for gun-toting (Phil Spector, Ted Nugent) or public breakdowns (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey), over here we tend to serve up unclassifiable eccentrics such as Vivian Stanshall and the self-designated third Earl of Harrow, Screaming Lord Sutch.
Alas, both are now dead. The mantle of oddness falls on the likes of the KLF's Bill Drummond (who, these, days exhorts people to do pleasant subsurrealist tasks like bake cakes and deliver them to complete strangers).
Head and shoulders above any others, though, is the 'drude' himself, 'Saint' Julian Cope. Literally head and shoulders, as it happened, during the Poll Tax riots, when our Jules reputedly wandered among the rioters dressed as a giant.
Cope came to notice in the early eighties with The Teardrop Explodes. It was only later, after going solo, that he went all interesting, becoming a devotee of prehistoric Britain. This culminated in his lavish and useful guide to visiting megalithic sites around the country (and included some particularly joyous essays, including "Why the Romans were so heavy").
It's nice to see Julian is still on top form, causing the evacuation of the British Museum. My eye was caught, however, by his theory of the goalkeeper as shaman. As any fule kno, goalkeepers are always themselves deeply eccentric. Cope suggests that this is not because they are peculiar loners, but because they're channelling the goddess.
"All those people gathered in an unroofed stadium [is] not unlike what must have gone on in pagan sanctuaries. The goalkeeper is the ultimate shaman, guarding the gates to the underground, wearing the No 1 jersey in a different colour and not seeming to be part of the team."
So that explains it. It's because he's protecting the underworld that, on Sunday last, David James looked as though he wanted the earth to open up swallow him up.
1) It's played by professional footballers
If that's not enough for you:
2) Euro 2004 is about to kick off, and that means one of two things if you happen to be be English (or to be fair, Dutch, Portuguese or Spanish): either your team will nosedive gracelessly out in the first round or, worse, they will deliver one excellent result, then be squeaked out by the French or the Germans in the knockout phase.
3) The Football League has renamed itself The Championship. This now means that the English Championship will be won by team officially 21st placed in the land, i.e. the winners of the old Division One, which is in turn the old Division Two. Likewise, teams who are playing in what was up until 1990 Division Three will now be playing in Division One, and those hovering near the exit of the league structure altogether will be only in Division Two. Got that? Another way of putting it is that in the late eighties the title of winners of Division One was being contested by Arsenal, Everton and Liverpool. Next season it will be contested by the likes of Bournemouth, Luton and Wrexham.
Contrast the drab money-accumulation of modern football with the renewed glory of English cricket: for the second series in succession they've won the rubber before going into the final test and, more gloriously, for the first time in living memory the best fast bowler in the world is an Englishman.
Football may be a funny old game, but cricket is downright peculiar.
England have tonked the West Indies for their first series victory in the Caribbean for 36 years. They are leading 3-0 after three tests; a remarkable scoreline. The Windies are in complete disarray, demoralised, staring in disbelief at the possibility of an unprecedented home whitewash in the four match series. Brian Lara, the Windies only remaining genuinely great cricketer, has scored 100 runs total in the first three tests.
So what happens?
Lara scores 400, reclaiming the world record for the highest individual score in a test innings. It is brilliant, unique, a ridiculous, fabulous end to an increasingly preposterous series. Lara, with the single most outstanding individual batting performance of all time, will probably lose the captaincy of the Windies because, in reality, his team have been thrown to the wolves in this series. If this makes any sense, it must be in a different world to our own.
This is what non-lovers of cricket don't really understand. It isn't the sluggish, endlessly unchanging mystery of repute; it's a constantly fluctuating and developing series of myths. That's why, for many people, Test Match Special is the true home of cricket. It's not just a bunch of old stagers chuntering away, talking gibberish about silly points and fine legs, and eating cake (though it is unashamedly all of these). It's a constantly evolving narration of myth. Devon Malcolm's "you guys are history" incident, David Gower buzzing the ground in a biplane, Bodyline, Botham at Headingley and a thousand thousand minor tweaks and chirrups of myth bouncing along in an endlessly amiable tide of observation, the trivial bumping alongside the momentous in a joyfully unjudgemental carnival of human nature.
The very best summation of this charmingly batty world is found in one of the late Douglas Adams' finest moments, where his interstellar travellers, Arthur and Ford, find themselves unexpectedly in the middle of a test match at Lords, sitting on a Chesterfield sofa. Adams, deliciously, switches to the commentators, telling us far more about cricket than about anything so silly as space travel:
"For those of you who've just tuned in, you may be interested to know that, er ... two men, two rather scruffily attired men, and indeed a sofa — a Chesterfield I think?""Yes, a Chesterfield."
"Have just materialized here in the middle of Lord's Cricket Ground. But I don't think they meant any harm, they've been very good-natured about it, and ..."
"Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment Peter and say that the sofa has just vanished."
"So it has. Well, that's one mystery less. Still, it's definitely one for the record books I think, particularly occurring at this dramatic moment in play, England now needing only twenty-four runs to win the series. The men are leaving the pitch in the company of a police officer, and I think everyone's settling down now and play is about to resume."
(Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything, chapter four)
The unimprovable line in here, typical of Adams, is "Well, that's one mystery less." Well played, sir. A perfect reverse (logic) sweep.
There will be uproar round the suburban Agas next week. The Archers is about to have its theme tune updated.
The tune, 'Barwick Green', was written by Arthur Wood in 1924, and has been in use on the show for 54 years now. High time, the producers felt, that the clod-hopping maypole dance was updated for the 21st century.
When it was revealed that the composer chosen for the job was Brian Eno, I got rather interested. A Music for Airports-style piece of ambient tinkling would be both modern and yet not depressingly craven in its attempt to make the tune funky. It is a maypole dance, remember. It won't stretch to funky.
Sadly, when the updating theme got its first airing (on the Today programme this morning) it was precisely as bad as it could have been. Mr Eno had obviously been given a brief to produce a 'phat mix'. The result was the original theme, played slightly allegro on a Casio keyboard, with a backbeat.
It reminded me of nothing more than those endless in-house reworkings of the themes to the similarly venerable 'Blue Peter' or 'Doctor Who', a lily-livered attempt to dispose of something outdated while not daring to actually replace the soporifically familiar music.
I blame it on the fact that Brian Eno is, apparently, a big fan of The Archers. Had he not been, the result might have been something worthwhile and listenable in its own right.
I, by the way, do not listen to The Archers. Today I'm even more glad than usual of that small consolation.
For Mothering Sunday I went back to the small town in which I grew up. Winding down the High Street towards the river is always a time-shifting experience. Each shop front is a veil behind which lurks the hidden face of its childhood version.
This bike shop was once the chemist. What was once the butcher's is now one of those peculiar petite clothes shops, the sort where there will never be another customer to keep the shopkeeper's oversolicitous eye off your browsing. The monumental mason once sold carpet tiles. The sportswear shop was, well, it was a different sportswear shop.
Just as confusing are the shops that have not changed. The old-fashioned hardware shop and it's offshoot over the road (selling an unsatisfying array of furniture oddments) are just as they ever were. The grocer's has evolved into a late-opening convenience store by such tiny increments that it is no longer possible to accurately reconstruct in the memory any of its previous incarnations.
The biggest change since my last visit only suggests itself very slowly. Dotted all down the stretch of the town are almost half a dozen small boutiques, offering a service I am sure was never available in the town as I grew up.
My hometown has a full handful of nail bars.
I feel such a stranger.
I've written about cricket writers writing about Andrew Flintoff before, so this, to me, has a giddyingly reflexive feel.
After last week's tumultuous demolition of the Windies, England are preparing for the second test. This gives both Derek Pringle in the Telegraph and Mike Selvey in the Guardian the excuse to write glowing reports of Flintoff's maturation from being the blacksmith's son to being the blacksmith himself.
Flintoff, as Selvey correctly deduces, has become the heartbeat of the team; the carthorse that also provides the gallops.
One phrase from Flintoff really caught my eye. In Selvey's report, he says of the slip-catching:
"Well, we are holding on to a few," he said. "With players such as the West Indies have, you can't afford to give them two chances. It is something at which we have worked hard and emphasised."
Did the farmer's lad really say "something at which we have worked hard"? I detect the journalist's punctilious syntactical manners at work here. It would just be too delightful if Flintoff is not only maturing into a cricketer of legendary proportions, but constructing sentences the end of which he knows at their beginning.
Sun, rain, wind and thunder rarely arrive in the correct order, but they timed their arrivals and departures perfectly this weekend.
We were down in Cornwall, for once. Distance and ignorance had suggested that Bude would be a good base for the stay. It turned out to be a Cornish version of Swanage, all amusement arcades on the front and sorry excuses for cheerful eateries. Still, we pitched up in a clifftop hotel well removed from all of that, and from the desperately polite town beach. Instead, we had a full eye-span of slate sharp cliffs and surf surging endlessly up rocky corridors of pebbles. That, if you ask me, is a proper beach.
The sun came on the morning journey to Tintagel. The castle and the headland were quiet enough for us to stretch ourselves out on the grass and fall asleep under the faint warmth.
The rain came later: all afternoon, all evening and all night. Proper rain, the sort you'd pay extra for. Made for watching through windows in the hours after getting in from a long, wet walk.
The wind saved itself mainly for the walking. The sort of ebullient wind where, in the end, you decide that a hood is causing more problems than it's solving.
The thunder came on Sunday, all the way from the West Indies, courtesy of strapping Steve Harmison, the Durham digger, skittling the Windies in one of the greatest spells of fast bowling of the modern game.
It does seem amusingly as though the prime minister may have neglected to tell the Queen that 'her' Crown Prosecution Service is to be renamed the Public Prosecution Service.
This implies with, as Ogden Nash would have it, shoddy flim and flam*, that as the service's job is to prosecute the members of the public, its job under the old title may have been to prosecute the Crown.
Ah, if only we'd realised before it was too late.
* I struggled to find a copy of the version of Nash's poem to link to, so here it is:
In mortal combat I am joined With monstrous words wherever coined. 'Beefburger' is a term worth hating, Both fraudulent and infuriating, Contrived to foster the belief That only beefburgers are made of beef, Implying with shoddy flim and flam That hamburgers are made of ham.
Occasionally, but just possibly with increasing frequency, the predominantly solipsistic nature of the web gives way to something genuinely communal, by which I mean that it offers something for real world, not online, communities.
The brightest of these projects, in Britain at least, is probably mySociety.org, if you can forgive it the supersmooth name evidently conjured up by a wicked sabbat of scripters and online marketers.
Today mySociety has proudly announced the launch of Downing Street Says. This is the official transcript of Downing Street's daily lobby briefings (as well as the PM's press conferences), in blog form.
So now you can check for yourself that Tony really did say both that he cannot comment on Clare Short's allegations (that the British government possessed illegal transcripts of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's private phone conversations) and simultaneously that 'we and previous governments have never commented on intelligence except to say that this country always acts in accordance with domestic and international law'.
Apply your mind: the two statements are not necessarily contradictory. It is quite possible for the British government to have legally obtained transcripts which were first obtained illegally by a third party, for instance the CIA. On the other hand, the statement that the security services have not breached international law is no more than an untestable assertion. At what point is it permissible for a third party, such as the UN, to insist on testing such an assertion? Must there be proof of a breach, or can circumstantial evidence suffice?
This is not a totally idle question. No country willingly announces that it has breached international law, yet many countries (not least Iraq) do breach it. What is the quorum for a decision that a sovereign nation can no longer be taken on its bona fides? A UN resolution? A UN security council decision? George and Tony making a joint statement?
If none of this speculation floats your boat, you can still get the official line on Tony Blair's night on a park bench.
Yes, I do, to some extent because of the Today programme, Newsnight, Have I Got News For You?, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the incredible depth of web presence, and the odd decent documentary. More than that, I believe in the Beeb because it is still, at some level, an organisation relaxed enough to allow creative people to be creative, rather than allow creative people to serve advertisers.
Also because, if it comes to a choice between Alistair Campbell and the Beeb, there really isn't a choice. (Nota bene Alistair, BBC coverage of the war in Iraq was indeed biased - towards the government.)
Mostly, however, I believe in the Beeb because it's a good sort of a thing to have. In truth, I don't just believe in the BBC. I believe in the idea of the BBC, which is both better (because it's an ideal) and worse (because it's just an ideal).
That's why I'll be having my say in the BBC charter review consultation. I suggest that you have your say as well. Send your comments by March 31st.
Sometimes a voice emerges from the gloom of government to ring with the sharp clarity of a bell across the land. Sometimes a poetical voice calls ministers to account, the powerful to heel, the thoughtless to hang their heads in shame.
Paul Marsden MP, representing Shrewsbury & Acton, does not possess that voice.
Here is Mr Marsden's cri de coeur on the Kelly affair, entitled "An English Inquisition":
Gentle scientist inventing silent killers, Through years of laboratory tinkering. Protected source on wicked bugs, Happy hours tending pink rose petals.Buffoon holds aloft this little mole,
Blinking in the row of bright lights.
He barely sees the quarrelling brutes,
Nervously wiping his white whiskers.Forced to walk the plank in parliament,
Distraught at demands for answers.
Political drama to cheap, sweaty hacks,
Torrent of black invective in the high court.Tortured game ends when the despair overwhelms,
An English gentleman bowing to torrid spectacle.
Family lose him to sound bite and paranoid PM,
As he takes a walk in the park by a river of red.
Chills the soul, doesn't it?
Disturbingly, there's more. Best stick to the political stuff, like this paean to William Ewart Gladstone, which starts off attempting a full rhyme of "Scouser" to "Lancaster" and never really recovers. Or Marsden's rebel yell against the party line, which seeks to keep the whips at bay with a rearguard action of confused imagery:
Crossing the party line to protect the frontier Land of hope painted in front of the home of the brave
Just, for God's sake, stay away from the steamy stuff.
I wouldn't mind those vast electro-magnetic metal-detecting tollgates in every shop if they were used for anything other than wasting my time.
I must, somehow, set one off at least every month. Every time I do (as tonight), I stop, turn around, and cast about for a security type person. Failing to find one who is as interested in the alarm as I am, I then have to bother some already harassed shop worker who, frankly, deserves a little better.
Now I've made them anxious. It's their responsibility to verify that I'm not a shoplifter, and am free to go about the rest of my life without a stain on my character.
They really, really don't want to go through several bags of shopping to locate the one magnetic strip (probably hidden on a small pack of AA batteries) not thoroughly enough zapped by a bored cashier. They tell me not to worry about it.
Off I go, leaving a trail of minor inconvenience, and setting off the alarm again.
I used to think that it was the act of stopping and offering my shopping for inspection that guaranteed, like a badge of compliance, I would not need to be searched. It's this frustrating logic that causes me to stop in the first place: a real thief would not stop, therefore I must stop to prove I'm not a thief.
Now I think this is wrong. I am reluctantly coming round to the idea that I simply don't look like a freelance stock-taker. When the alarm goes off, staff glance up and make a snap decision as to whether I'm worth the bother. I never am.
I should therefore not even bother to stop.
And that, m'lud, is my defence for the alleged shoplifting incident occurring in March of 2004.
Right now the only programme I'm following on the TV is Shameless, the foul-mouthed saga of a family of unemployed Mancunians called Gallagher (insert your own Oasis joke here).
I was looking forward to the return of Six Feet Under (peculiar saga of a pretty normal Californian family running a mortuary), but it turned me straight off with its indulgent new alternate-worlds gimmick.
So, raise up thanks to S. David of Madrid for the return tonight of the best worst programme in the country, Footballers Wives. It's back without Evil Jason, the only footballer more barrel-chested than Razor Ruddock, and still without an apology (or indeed an apostrophe) in any way, means, shape or designer colour.
And that's why I will be watching it. Most of the TV I make time to watch is programming that, in the argot, reckons itself. It's TV that tries to be very good. Unfortunately, that means that if it's merely OK (which being TV, is almost axiomatic), it's going to be a disappointment. Footballers Wives* is never a disappointment. It never misses, because its target is inches from its own nose. It is pure primetime TV, and to be admired as such.
Further, unlike most of the bread and dripping that fills the schedules, this isn't Reality TV (a diabolical oxymoron), Lifestyle TV (the whole superstore of cookery, travel and property programming that does nothing other than encourage feelings of inadequacy that can only be assuaged by spending money), or Tabloid TV (unspeakably offensive journalism). Footballers Wives is fiction, so it's actually supposed to be all made up. Huzzah!
It is what it is what it is, and that is trash. The fact that Mark Lawson thinks it's being clever is just further evidence that it's gloriously dumb trash.
The only thing that could possibly make it better would be if it actually had some football in it.
* That apostrophe. Look. If you're going to leave it out, at least make something of it? What about Footballers, Wives? Or even Footballers! Wives!?
I think Peter's guess is good enough to provoke the answer.
Julius Caesar first took the Oval at Kennington in 1849 when he made his first appearance for Surrey. Pseudonymous cricketers were not unknown (a famous gentleman cricketer of the previous generation went by the name of 'Felix'), but Julius Caesar was not an assumed name. His father, Benjamin Caesar, was also a cricketer, as was a brother.
Julius' career started well. He was a stalwart of Godalming cricket club, gained county honours aged 19, and went on to play in the first overseas cricket tour -- of North America in 1859. He also opened for the touring side against Australia in 1863/4 (not very well, it seems).
Over-arm bowling was still not the thing in those days, but J. Caesar was a fast round-arm bowler (the arm coming round the side, but below the shoulder). He got a creditable five-for in this glorious match -- Eleven Gentlemen of Godalming v. Twelve Caesars.
Capsule biographies of Caesar's life all mention his tragic later years, but I'm going to have to buy Geoff Amey's biography of Caesar, The Ill-Fated Cricketer to find out more.
I adore the little burble of street theatre you get when someone realises they've forgotten something.
Do they slow down first, checking their pockets or their memory? Or do they keep striding on right up to the moment when they've decided they've got to go home to retrieve it, lock it, or switch it off? Some people simply stand there a minute, either contemplating their own foolishness or making a carefully weighted calculation as to whether what they've forgotten is more important than missing their train or bus.
Then it's that rueful turn on the heel and the trudge back home.
What I really love about all this is that it seems to be one of the few occasions that the British, out in a public space, wish to put on a display for complete strangers. You will never, never, see someone turn right around and walk the way they were going without some accompanying dumbshow that indicates that they're not odd, they've just forgotten something.
There are a delightful array of displays in use. I list below some I've observed. I'm sure you've seen others.
1) As already indicated, the show of slowing down while ostentatiously drinking in the realisation that you have, in fact, forgotten something. Often accompanied by glances upwards (searching the memory) or scuffles of pocket searching.
2) Standing still on the pavement, looking puzzled and peeved.
3) Checking of watch. Pocket. Watch again. Glance at the station. Loud sigh.
4) Catch of the breath while coming to a halt. Thinking about it, then a visible slump of the shoulders as you ruefully turn around. I can't believe my memory has done this to me again.
5) Brisk about turn followed by a grim-faced stalk back past the following pedestrians, as if with an unruly toddler in tow. Tight-lipped, slight shake of the head. I do this all the time, you know. I'll never learn.
6) "Gah!", throwing, ideally, both arms into the air a fraction. This precedes, and is a warning of, the shameful turn.
7) For those nervous that passers by won't have fully understood that this is a forgetfulness/travel perplexity, there is the dance of indecision. Stop. Half turn. Set off again. Stop. Half turn. Think. Go back a yard. Stop. Turn. Turn again. Hand on head. Set off, at a dash, mumbling under the breath.
8) This morning I was walking some way behind a woman carrying a bag and a crook-handled umbrella. She stopped, hit herself on the head with the umbrella handle, then turned. As she passed me she was keeping up the mouthed monologue that doesn't need to be heard to be understood.
What's clear is that we regard the act of completely changing direction as bizarre enough to require public justification. We would rather perform the dance of indecision, exclaim aloud about nothing, strike ourselves, stand there waiting to be sure we are being properly interpreted, rather than simply turn around and walk back the way we came. What is it that we fear people would think? That we meant to do it? That we turned back for no reason at all? Whatever it is, it must be bad if we, the British of all people, would rather than just get on with it silently, instead put on a display that involves talking to ourselves in public.
Before I forget the moment entirely, let me record a thrilling moment from last week, on the night of the last full moon.
I returned home about seven in the evening. It was, unusually for the city, a silvery darkness. The usual urban backlighting of leached orange was strangely absent. It was a particularly clear night, and the moon must have been close.
As I stepped into the kitchen, lights still off, I could see it was illuminated. The windows were casting great milky boxes of light across table and floor. Though I knew it was the moonlight, the brilliance of it was so unexpected that I forced myself to check that none of the neighbours had installed spotlighting out in the back. There was nothing but the moon.
Then I sat on the kitchen step for a while and drank it in. It was gloriously like not being in London.
Word from The Deep North of trouble with builders, even friendly ones, reminds me of our decorator.
Late last year we redecorated in short order the kitchen and hallways. Rather, I redecorated the hallways, and, as I didn't have the time for the kitchen as well, we were put onto a friend of a friend who would do the kitchen for a reasonable price while I completed the woodwork elsewhere.
Nice chap. In fact, lovely chap. A fine decorator to boot.
By profession, I quickly discovered, a jazz trumpeter
All builders, decorators, plumbers, electricians and workmen of whatever stripe are whistlers. It is surely in the union rules, nestled between two sugars in the tea, thanks, and I normally don't carry those, but I might just have one in the van.
So, a whistler who is musical. That's alright, I thought, setting back to the woodwork. Makes a nice change, tunefulness. Perhaps he does requests.
Some hours later, the awful truth has long since dawned. The terror, like any good disaster, is threefold.
First, with his nigh perfect embouchure and practised projection, the chap can't half whistle at a volume.
Second, did I mention that he is a jazz trumpeter? The meandering freeform beebop riffing is impressive, but hard on the listener. A couple of times I spot a motif returning after half an hour on the sidelines, but most of the time I'm pressed to tell if we're still on 'Oh when the Saints' or if we've moved on to 'Fly me to the Moon'.
Third, Oh Lord, third, the chap has of course mastered circular breathing.
It is incessant.
In the end, I am reduced to ever more frequent mugs of tea (two sugars cheers) purely to enforce a five minute intermission.
Kitchen looks nice, mind.
Not making big waves yesterday, despite its size, was the Queen Mary II, as of yesterday the largest cruise liner on the water.
It demonstrates just how much Britain has changed that this ship, twice the size of the QEII, barely registered on the news reports. Yes, it's only a cruise ship, plying the Southampton-New York route for holidaymakers not travellers. Nevertheless the launch of a monster of engineering like this would, fifty years ago, have been the prompt for a round of chest-puffing around the country.
Is industry so dissociated now from our sense of national identity? With the constant decline in the numbers of people working in traditional industries, perhaps there's a corresponding decline in industrial achievements. I wonder what would today receive acclaim corresponding to, say, the launch of the QEII? A British winner on World Idol?
First encouraging new phrase of the encouraging new year:
A Slow Blue is a 'Hollywood' attempt at resuscitation, performed solely to appease family members whose expectations have been artificially raised by films and TV shows.
According to P & S Medical Review:
So called "slow codes" are performed on patients who have preexisting poor prognoses, but have full resuscitation orders. Slow codes, also known as "partial", "show", "light blue", or "Hollywood" codes, are cardiopulmonary resuscitative efforts that involve a deliberate decision to not be aggressive. In these cases, there is often discord between the expectations of the hospital staff and those of the patient and his or her family or health care proxy. The slow code has become an unspoken rite of passage for many house officers.
(All courtesy of Random Acts of Reality, a blog by a London ambulanceman, and hence good reading if you feel like scaring yourself a little)
On December 4th I wrote that "it's been a bad old twelve months for anyone with a soft spot for sixties British cinema". That was when David Hemmings died. Now Alan Bates has gone too.
Too fast, too fast.
Winter is coming.
If only winter in London was a little more like this, and a little less like, well, nothing in particular. The British Isles, with their freakishly temperate climes, manage to be chilly and damp, but in a vague way. It is rarely properly cold in the south, but it almost always fails to be warm. I remember my old geography teaching alleging that Britain has no climate; it only has weather.
And, by and large, that weather is limp and washed out.
That said, it's been raining a great deal recently. Last Sunday's weekly football was conducted in a wind-whipped rainstorm, the looming cloud cover spouting bathtub after bathtub onto the grass. It was both miserably foul and curiously exhilarating. Once we were running, the trickling clamminess of my top seemed less chilling. At the same time, my legs either warmed up or went completely numb, blocking out the pain.
I was irresistibly reminded of school sports, standing shivering on the rugby field at three quarter while the games master attempted to explain precisely why he'd blown up for yet another foul (knock on, handling in a ruck, offside, coming in from the side; plenty to choose from). At least this was preferable to tackling practice, always performed on the muddiest patch in the field.
Of all the things I thought I might end up repeating from my schooldays, I never thought it would be this.
Since we are having an nostalgic autumn of wildcat strikes and pay disputes, I thought I'd dig out one of William Morris' least starry-eyed ditties for the workers, electronically transcribed and released into the public domain by that marvellous creation, Project Gutenberg.
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
Come, comrades, come, your glasses clink;
Up with your hands a health to drink,
The health of all that workers be,
In every land, on every sea.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
Well done! now drink another toast,
And pledge the gath'ring of the host,
The people armed in brain and hand,
To claim their rights in every land.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
There's liquor left; come, let's be kind,
And drink the rich a better mind,
That when we knock upon the door,
They may be off and say no more.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
Now, comrades, let the glass blush red,
Drink we the unforgotten dead
That did their deeds and went away,
Before the bright sun brought the day.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
The Day? Ah, friends, late grows the night;
Drink to the glimmering spark of light,
The herald of the joy to be,
The battle-torch of thee and me!
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
Take yet another cup in hand
And drink in hope our little band;
Drink strife in hope while lasteth breath,
And brotherhood in life and death;
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!
(From Chants for Socialists by William Morris)
It's just occurred to me that had I taken my holiday a couple of weeks later than I did, I could have returned to the country without any awareness that the Tory leadership had changed, and that Michael Howard was now offering the electorate an opposition with something of the right about it.
There's a spooky Halloween thought.
I'm welcomed back to this green unpleasant land by someone trying to shove a packet of something into my hand at the train station.
I often wonder at the way the long and complex internal history of these isles is reduced to a simple procession of monarchs in our national stories, so I was surprised that this new product had been named to reflect one of the longest, bloodiest and still most emotive struggles for power in British history.
Jacob's biscuits have sensitively decided to name their new snack biscuits Jacobites. If ever there was, this must be one of those instances where a name was suggested as an internal joke, the MD loved it, and nobody had the guts to explain to them exactly why it would make the company look like fools.
Remember the '45, eh?
From the department of things you never knew you needed, and were probably right:
I don't think you need me to explain what you do with them, nor that it probably doesn't matter that you wouldn't be able to see them under a blouse or a shirt.
I'm just afraid that when I see someone with a flashing red belly button, I'll thoughtlessly mistake them for a walking answerphone.
I think the manufacturers have missed a trick. If you could switch the belly lights on and off by pressing them, it could provide an endlessly interesting way of making new friends.
Talking of cultural gaps (which I suppose we were), the Houston TV station in question has a marvellous tagline:
Houston...as it happens.
To a Texan this will, I can only hope, sound urgent, pacey, up to the minute.
I hear it in the British idiom, where "as it happens" is still used in the sense of "as it goes", "perchance". To me, "Houston...as it happens" sounds about as casual as is possible.
I like that very, very much.
There's a pitcher, but he runs at the batter, or batsman, bouncing the ball only once in front of the hitter, who strikes at the ball. If he hits it in play, he runs straight ahead to the opposite batting box, where a teammate then runs back and scores.They can run back and forth several times, scoring more than once before the ball is thrown back. The fielders are spread out, waiting to toss the ball back to hit the wicket to knock down the wooden pegs, or stamps, which produces an out.
That, in case you don't quite recognise it, is cricket as described by Carlos Aguilar of News 24 Houston.
It would be too easy to adopt some aggrieved stance involving Americans, cricket, and the word "tsk". Bear in mind, however, that the last time I posted on cricket the single, knowledgeable comment was from an American (including, for your money, an elegantly oblique reference to Martin Bicknell's finest hour).
The lesson I get from this is what happens when you have to describe something you barely understand to people who don't understand it at all. For a Texan journalist, this may mean trying to encapsulate some dodgy foreign sport. For someone else, it may be a philosophical, cultural, religious, technological or any other form of idea.
The entire piece could be seen as an extended warning on the dangers of the metaphor. Cricket is like baseball, except of course for the innumerable differences.
Sometimes, as in the joke about asking directions from a country bumpkin, the easiest way to get from A to B is not to start at A at all.
Readers of this rant last Friday will appreciate why the Daily Mail piece I reproduce here caught my eye.
ASYLUM SEEKERS WILL COVER LONDON BY 2005
The Government suffered a further blow last night as shocking new evidence emerged of previously unsuspected bogus asylum seekers hiding out in London. The sheer number of illegal immigrants is such that it could leave the capital literally swamped within eighteen months.
Mail reporters yesterday were able to visit one previously unknown location in central London where an asylum seeker, known as "David", has set up an extraordinary rent-free home. There, in full view of thousands of commuters crossing the Thames, this "conman" (© Daily Mail 2003) has built his very own glass penthouse with stunning panoramic views of the river.
Serious questions will be asked in Parliament as to just how this immigrant from the USA - a country not acknowledged by the Foreign Office's as one where its citizens may suffer persecution - managed to bend our lax benefits system so as to gain a prime piece of docklands location. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare was said to be shocked, adding "I think I can see him from my window".
Even worse, the riverside squatter is being allowed to live in the centre of Europe's largest city without even the most basic form of sanitation. His drinking water comes from a nearby water tower by means of a simple pipe, and his foul waste drops into the Thames itself. Only centuries ago the city was decimated by cholera and typhoid. Now the unmanageable asylum problem threatens an epidemic of similar proportions. And should the worst happen, it would threaten every man, woman and child living in a mortgaged property in the Greater London area not only with death, but with a resulting catastrophic drop in property prices.
Questions have been asked as to what "David" is doing here. His response to being challenged illustrates just what the overburdened and powerless immigration authorities are faced with. "David" has gone on hunger strike - he claims that he will not eat for 44 days and 44 nights, if that's what it takes. Faced with such do-or-die tactics, Ken Livingstone, David Blunkett and Tony Blair have chosen simply to sit on their hands. If they hope that the problem will go away, they are mistaken.
The raw statistics raise a prospect so chilling that it seems, on the face of it, incredible. Two weeks ago, the number of foreigners living in glass boxes by the Thames was estimated at zero. Today there is one, making for what mathematicians call an "infinite" percentage increase in numbers. If this rate is sustained, by Christmas the whole of the length of the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond will be blocked off by a wall of glass boxes containing beardy strangers, reaching up to a mile high. By the end of next year, London would be completely buried under the boxes, each containing a sleepy-eyed hoaxer, with just a hole in the floor for a toilet.
And yet the Home Office refuses to acknowledge the extent of the problem, claiming (continued on p.2; David Blaine 'not really able to levitate' claim, p.7; Picture, p. 9)
In which the author, noting the slightly hysterical tenor of the coverage of the heatwave covering Britain, suggests suggests that we all chill out by watching something reassuring.
In which, additionally, the author is discovered pacing his residence at three o'clock in the morning, hair down and trying to balance the need to open as many windows and doors as possible against the (little) encouragement needed by burglars.
Finally, in which the lamentably uncavelike build of London housing is bewailed across the capital as light sleepers discover that their walls have absorbed heat all day long and spend the short night busily radiating it back.
In the next sultry chapter: experiments with spraying the walls with water in the evening, and the disgorgement of the household into The Tent for the night.
If the heat continues like this for much longer, all stories will be Silly Season specials. Though few could be as perfect as the one about Plymouth Argyle FC signing a veteran left winger for the new football season.
Forget that I work with online content. For the next five days the internet fully justifies its existence purely through the following services:
The single-mindedly, unequivocably rubbish performance that England are giving in the first day of the first Test against South Africa is excellent news.
It means that I can safely consign the game to the dark recesses of the mind where performances of the national team usually lurk, looking dishevelled and dispirited. Any desire I had to eavesdrop on the score, discuss it with colleagues or even nip into the pub at lunch to watch, is lumpenly dripping away like, well, dripping.
Hooray! I will get so much more done this week, as a result.
Unless, of course, Dazzler and Freddie can start to enforce some bowling discipline, leaving Tresco and Vaughan something to aim at...
'The basic thing to remember,' growls Alan Moore 'is that, eventually, I am always right'.
Alan Moore continues to be a great interviewee. On continuing to live quietly in Northampton:
'Just sitting still in the 21st century is a very kinetic experience. Plus I've a certain kind of anonymity here. People treat me the way I was treated before I became famous -- with complete contempt.'
Oh, and he doesn't seem to mind that Hollywood regularly makes a complete Horlicks of his stories.
If you are ever struggling to explain 'that famous British sense of humour' to a foreigner you could do worse than point them towards Radio 4's evergreen 'antidote to quiz shows' I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue.
Sadly, you will probably have to explain the programme itself to them, as it is the comedy equivalent of Brain of Britain: parochial, wilfully obscure, self-regarding and deeply old-fashioned. It is also an extremely funny illustration of the national obsession with word-play, in-jokes and notably filthy double entendre.
The programme has been running for 30 years now with a virtually unchanged cast. If you are missing it (it's short run has finished for the year), there is a 30th anniversary website which contains some representative clips, though very little of 'Mornington Crescent', the well-known comedy game that is neither intrinsically funny nor, indeed, a game, and is perversely loved for those very reasons.
British humour; it's a mystery to me, too.
When the tattooed biker climbed through our bedroom window late last night, we were all mightily relieved.
The problem had begun a short time earlier, when a guest was making to leave. She struggled with the Yale lock on the front door, and complained that she couldn't open it. I gave it a try. The knob required no effort to turn, but it did nothing; it had become disconnected from the locking mechanism itself.
As I started to unscrew the lock from the door, I began to realise the extent of the problem. It wasn't the security chain, or the second lock further down the door. The problem was getting at the broken lock in the first place.
The frame of the door has a 'London bar' - a long metal strip running vertically and over the lock, to prevent the frame splitting if the door is given a good hard kicking. (You can also have a 'Birmingham bar', which runs down the other side of the door, to prevent it from being kicked straight off its hinges.)
The London bar has the side-effect of almost completely encasing the port for the lock, meaning that I couldn't even sneak a thin screwdriver in and force the lock back. The only alternative was removing the London bar entirely, which, as its only virtue is its strength, and the screws had been repeatedly painted over, was going to be a long job for which I was ill-equipped.
At this point, news was broken to the guest in question that there was no other way out. The front windows downstairs do not open. (This is London.) The garden backs only onto other gardens. (This is London.) There is no side door. (This is London.) Unfortunately, the only ladder on the premises is not long enough to reach from the first floor windows.
At this point, the more alert member of the household spotted a neighbour across the road, tinkering with one of his fat-pipe motorbikes in the darkness. With his shaven head, beard, leather jerkin and tattoos ('Millwall', 'Malice'), he is easy to identify.
He is, by trade, a locksmith.
A few minutes later, having fetched a more serious ladder and an extremely serious screwdriver set, he was up and in through the window. A few minutes after that ("About the time it'll take you to make me a cuppa") the lock was sprung and he was fixing the dodgy lump of metal that had been trapping us.
It was properly late by now, so there was just a short sit down, cup of tea and chat about the neighbourhood (the kid next door who rides into the road without looking; the scagheads who he has warned not to trouble this turning; the successful local campaign to oust some troublemakers down the road; the bloke down the other way who was 'adulterated' by his wife before dying of the beer). Then on his way, refusing all offers of payment, as I knew he would.
To me, this too is London. You take it as you find it.
I was twenty one years when I wrote this song I'm twenty two now, but I won't be for long People ask when will you grow up to be a man But all the girls I loved at school are already pushing prams
Billy Bragg is, of course, has always been a romantic. It explains his union choruses as exactly as it explains his many, many forlorn love songs.
I love you I am the milkman of human kindness I will leave an extra pint
He carried the tradition of political folk almost single-handed through the eighties in Britain. As such, it was no surprise that he was chosen by the estate of Woody Guthrie to set some of Guthrie's many surviving lyrics to music:
And all creeds and kinds and colors of us are blending Till I suppose ten million years from now we'll all be just alike Same color, same size, working together And maybe we'll have all of the fascists out of the way by then Maybe so.
Many people seem to have trouble with Bragg's foghorn voice. As if singing were a prerequisite for songs. Besides, who else could have carried off this Woody Guthrie lyric so perfectly?:
She said it's hard for me to see how one little boy got so ugly Yes, my little girly, that might be, But there ain't nobody that can sing like me
More than anything else, Billy Bragg carries with him a certain version of England that doesn't get much of a shout most of the time, and a certain English vision of life:
The Polaroids that hold us together Will surely fade away Like the love that we spoke of forever On St Swithin's Day
Billy is finally planning an 'Essential Bragg' compilation, and your suggestions for his five or so finest tracks are being requested. As the man has spent years trying to get people to vote, it's only fair to return the favour this once. My votes will be as above.
The rules for maintaining an urban residence are, I think, yet to be fully recorded. I thought it wise to make a start:
1. Your yoghurt should be live; your plaster should not.
Don't think I haven't noticed how frequently I am complaining about being busy. There's a mesh of reasons why this is the case, and some of them are very positive (interesting projects at work; reading and thinking plenty; beautifying the residence). Lest this blog turn into some great aggrieved sigh, let me highlight some of the great stuff going on in my world:
I cannot begin to tell you how much pleasure that last one, in particular, gave me.
I'm not going to speculate on the source of the English love of lost and damaged heroes. It may be that romantic Arthurian streak (the Fisher King; Launcelot; Arthur himself), it may be the loss of empire, it may be the consequence of our nostalgic association with nature. It may just be something else we envied in the Scots and Irish, and nicked for ourselves.
If you ask me, it's something to do with the fact that one of the very first things that the Victorians industrialised was the production of lost heroes. Livingstone, Gordon of Khartoum, Scott of the Antarctic, Shackleton, Oliver Reed (I jest, slightly).
As I say though, I'm not going to speculate on the source of this particular trope.* I'm more interested in the fact that this morning, with the royal right foot heading from Manchester to Royal Madrid, we have another English hero finding his role as an absent hero. The prince is heading over the water.
Paul considered the matter in terms of a modern slave trade. He's right, but in this particular case I'd prefer to see it as something akin to a royal marriage of old. The most eligible, most valuable royal child, the one who is adored as glamorous, if quietly disparaged as incapable of ever ruling the country, is packaged off to a foreign power in return for a chest of gold, a small island group somewhere warm, or the eventual conjoining of the kingdoms.
Well, let's not push the comparison too hard; suffice it to say that Beckham has been called to the top table, and there is going to be a very peculiar frisson every time he returns to blighty to head up the national team. The tabloids never quite saw him as a 'proper' English footballer, and now they finally have their justification. The backlash starts here (again).
The other story, of course, is that the marriage was made in brand heaven: both Beckham and Real Madrid are fiefdoms of Adidas. As someone presciently wrote way back in 1998, when Beckham was being pilloried for 'losing us the World Cup' [sic]:
"People will still make the easy protest of booing Beckham, but they know that they cannot touch him. They don’t own him. They don't have possession of his body. He does not have to sell it, 110 per cent, each week. Beckham's body has been sold elsewhere. The real owners are Brylcreem, Sky television, Adidas sportswear - the companies who have paid for the rights to his image and who pay for pictures of it to be put on to front covers and supermarket shelves throughout the country. Forgiveness is in their hands; and their hands are in their pockets."
* That, dear readers, was as fine an example of preterition as you're likely to see on the Internet on a Wednesday morning. Look and learn.
"Returning home, I chanced to bump into my friends Hermione and Ron. They seemed to find something unaccountably amusing, but refused to share the source of their laughter with me. Merely observing that this was the height of rudeness, I went on my way before saying anything I might later regret on cool reflection.
It was only when I had got home and was in the process of changing my tie that I realised it was now a kipper, soiling my shirt as it flapped about. It was no doubt the result of my miscast Pesca vivum spell. How annoying of my so-called friends not to bring it to my attention!"
That's right kids, the new Harry Pooter book is nearly with us.
Now I look it up, Collins claims that cove probably derives from the Romany kova, meaning "thing, person". I never would have guessed such a chappish word to be Romany in origin, but I like the generous latitude of meaning it implies.
Of course, the similarity of meaning to covey (a small group of people, by extension from a small number of grouse) is entirely accidental; one of those glancing blows of apparent meaning you get in a jackdaw language such as English.
Every time I see something like that I am reminded that the English ended up with Shakespeare as poet of the nation; verbose, eclectic, eccentric, syntactically obscure, coining more than the Royal Mint, and madly, intemperately punning.
Puns, let us not forget, only work if you have a lot of semantic variance spread over a small lexical space. Cove seems to be Romany, while covey comes from old French. Languages with fewer borrowed words obviously tend to have fewer opportunities for puns.
One upshot of this that pleases me: we should be looking forward to a whole new set of puns emerging based, particularly, on the increasingly visible Indian languages.
Until we do, keep taking the tablas.
It's easy to forget how much time we straddle.
This post last week sent me on a small trip back in time to my childhood. The reminiscence continued last night over barbecued trout and new potatoes with Paul, who grew up about 15 miles away from where I did. Both of us shared some basic experiences of the rural areas we knew as kids disappearing in the intervening period.
The fields across which I used to walk the dog, tractor ruts to the top of your boots, are now housing estates leading down to a marina where several million pounds worth of yachts now sit flatly, the waves being completely stilled by the cunning design of the outlet to the river.
I remember the first supermarket in the area opening up: a twenty minute drive to a great aircraft hangar of a building. Whenever I return home, walking down the High Street, I can recall the sequence of the shops put out of business by that supermarket.
Baker, butcher, greengrocer, dry goods, chemist, stationers.
The sugary smell of the chemist; all those sweets it used to sell to mothers trying to keep the kids quiet as they trailed round the shops in the same order each day. The fact that buying even bread would involve having a couple of conversations. Being sent down the road with a pound note to buy fags.
Sweet Jesus, I'm turning into Alan Bennett.
My eye alighted this morning on the word 'cove' in its secondary meaning of man or fellow. I can't have heard this usage in nearly twenty years, not since, as a kid, the examining doctor told me I was "a fair-skinned sort of a cove" and I should be careful in the sun.
Doctors, my doctor friends always tell me, live in a different world. I suspect that they can afford to live in the past. I don't necessarily mean that detrimentally; I mean that their profession affords continuity, a firmer grip on the time that has been traversed.
Almost nothing I do professionally or socially would have been the same twenty years ago. Buying fresh bread, hot out of the oven, now appears as a luxurious exercise only possible in expensive delis or 24 hour shops with pretensions above their station. It's difficult to believe that it was only 25 years ago that most mornings would involve someone coming back from the bakery, the bread warming their hands.
At last, proof that Tony Blair has retained his sense of humour over the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction brouhaha. Retailiating against arch critics Clare Short and Robin Cook yesterday, Blair said "charges should have evidence and there is none".
Naturally, this principle is to apply mainly when assessing the actions of earnest prime ministers of a devout anglo-catholic persuasion. When leaping to judge western-funded middle-eastern dictatorships, it need hardly be said, we can do without evidence as long as we have the judgement of, er, earnest prime ministers of a devout anglo-catholic persuasion.
I'd never stopped to think before about the way the British use the word "overseas" to mean "foreign countries". I suppose that Carribbeans, Australians and New Zealanders may also use it, but not (for instance) Canadians.
It's a rather romantic euphemism, now I consider it. "Abroad" (as in "she's gone abroad") is similarly coy regarding the actual, physical existence of other nations that insist on being not the UK.
This is fun. Bored, and going from Laura-Ann's tip,
When my former boss Neil Kinnock recycled this joke at my leaving do from the Labour Party – this time with me as the unsuspecting dupe – it took on its own reality. The rest, as they say, is history.
Part of the reason for this was that we had not fully comprehended the scale and depth of the problems we had inherited from the Conservative government. We found a desperate lack of investment in our core public services, and had to tackle the social exclusion and poverty that 18 years of Thatcherism worsened in Britain.
Sorry to be creepy but my chief ideological hero is Tony Blair.
Still, the man lists Zola's Germinal as one of the two books most influential on his career. He can't be all bad, then.
It upsets me what it takes to upset me.
It seems to require, more than anything else, an artistic juxtaposition. Understand what I mean here by 'artistic'. I don't mean an aesthetically pleasing juxtaposition. Far from it. I mean the sort of juxtaposition an artist would make. I'm afraid that plain old suffering isn't enough to provoke a reaction. It has to be set off alongside something else, an ironic comment, an oxymoron, to hit home.
I was walking this afternoon through London Bridge station. As so often, an Eastern European looking woman was sitting mournfully by a wall. She had two red-faced, listless children with her. The younger sat up looking at nothing much. The older was laid out across her lap, motionless.
I'm reconstructing this scene because I wasn't really looking. I was happily walking home, listening to some music, thinking about my Friday night. I, along with everyone else, pretended not to see the sorry scene.
I turned the corner into the new underground concourse in the station, where there is now a selection of small shops selling fruit, smoothies, coffee and the like. Two of the stalls were offering free samples to passing commuters.
I swung from blind happiness to almost incandescent, unfocused rage within a second, almost before I had a chance to think about it. What stays with me now is that I didn't react to the woman and her children, or if I did, I filed it in that self-deceptive category city people create which says 'You never know with these people.' I didn't react to the free food either, which is not nearly so shameful. I reacted purely and precisely to the physical proximity of the two images compared to the moral distance between them.
Thinking about it, maybe I did react along aesthetic lines. I can't see any way of denying it.
Worse, to my shame, by the time I got back to where the woman and her kids were sitting, they were in the process of being moved along by station staff.
Of the galaxy of organisations, quangos and networks out there doing the pedestrian work of tweaking everyday life in Britain, some have chanced upon names that are really far too good for them.
One is the Central Summoning Bureau, which in a just world would have been charged by the government with the tricky task of co-ordinating the efforts of devil-worshippers from Lerwick to Penzance, so that Beelzebub isn't been constantly double-booked for sabbats and the likes of Seir get a look in. In fact, the Central Summoning Bureau is merely responsible for your summons for jury service, which you may well consider to be the work of the devil, but still isn't quite as impressive.
My favourite, however, remains the gloriously named National Automatic Urban Network, which ought to be a bunch of situationalist pranksters, or at least diehard Futurists.
Sadly, it appears to be a bunch of measuring devices for air pollution. We, as a nation, are the poorer for it.
(If this is reminding you of the late Douglas Adams' wonderful The Meaning of Liff, you're not the only one. I really must get a new copy.)
I was born and brought up in Essex, which always gives people the wrong idea. My Essex is coastal, a mixture of marshland and arable on the gentlest of river valleys. The river itself is wide, muddy and powerfully tidal. On its far side, in the deep channel, timber ships come and go just as they did when I was a child. Over the rest of its breadth, up to seven rows of yachts are moored downriver for as far as the eye can see, swinging round with each change in the tide.
Childhood walks would invariably end up along the sea wall, with fields on one side and on the other the river. If the tide was low, great cracked slabs of seaweed-covered mud flat would be exposed. If the tide was up, the limpid water would wash up against the sea defences, and the smaller sailing boats that infest the river would tack right up to the sea wall.
The curses of a helmsmen berating the crew would sometimes erupt just below you as you walked the sea wall path, the boat having arrived through the slow swell almost without a whisper. Then the whipsnap and crash of the boat going about, the straining and singing of the ropes as the wind filled the sail again, and sometimes, with the wind up, the low hum of a fast dinghy just beginning to plane on a good reach.
There aren't many loud sounds on the river. There is the occasional klaxon wail creeping up and down the river valley. It sounds like an air-raid siren but in fact it calls the timbermen back off shore leave. The only other noises are the explosions that periodically boom across the water.
On summer weekends or Wednesday nights it's almost certainly the cannons that are used by the yacht clubs to mark the start and finish of races. When out on the water, race starts largely consist of timing the cannon perfectly. The helm waits for the five minute gun with forefinger over stopwatch, but it's the crew's job to keep an eye on the top of the clubhouse for the tell-tale puff of smoke. It's more accurate to call the gun from the smoke than wait for the sound to roll across the water to the far bank.
But there are still other occasions when larger, deeper booms echo across from the other side of the river. That, as all locals know, is where the Ministry of Defence still test explosives on one of the isolated river islands. I've never been on this island, but, as my Dad reminisced over a beer at the weekend, he has.
In the mid-sixties, he was racing Dragons; long, elegant wooden yachts with just a hint of the Viking about them. They managed to run this beautiful creature aground trying, as river racers always do, to steal extra yards in the slack water near the bank. Someone must have consulted the tide tables, because they quickly calculated that it would be eleven at night before the tide to rise enough to float them off the mud. There was nothing for it but to wait. They were, they realised, on the island owned and maintained by the MoD.
The group of them went ashore and, surprised not to be challenged, they made their way inland to the single, small village. There, on the green outside the solitary pub, the village was playing cricket. They filed past, meriting hardly a sidelong glance from the fielders. Inside the pub, fortified with the necessary pint, they enquired after food to keep them going through the evening.
The pub didn't serve food, but the old boy nursing his half in the corner did, nipping home and returning with a loaf turned into corned beef sandwiches for them. I didn’t need to confirm that he was paid in beer not cash.
I think the cricket match must have ended, because the next detail is that someone turned up in the pub with an accordian and started playing. The way my Dad described it, it must have been some kind of reel. The old boy got up and started dancing. He was, my Dad noted, wearing clogs.
Later, they got some of his story. He was eighty years old, give or take, and had lived on the island for the last sixty-six of those. At age fourteen, he and his brother had been orphaned, and he had been sent here to be looked after. His brother had been sent to a different family on the mainland.
What had happened to the brother? Oh, the old boy was told he lived there – indicating, back across the water, my home town. Going by name and age, my Dad realised the brother was the retired head of one of the town boatyards, one of the town names. The two brothers hadn't met since being orphaned, sixty-six years ago.
Sixty-six years and the width of the river.
My Dad glossed over the details of the night sail back with the words 'pretty exciting'. Racing yachts are not made to be sailed at night, but the journey was short, not much more than a couple of miles. The water always seems flatter, faster, more malicious at night. But they were all good sailors, and none got hurt.
The town lights would have looked sensational, a shimmering mirage, when approached in dark silence. At night, down on the water, they seem just beyond grasp, unreachably distant, like the past itself.
I don't usually think of my home town in this way, because, usually, this isn't how it feels to me. I can recognise it here, but it feels alien, somewhere I know implicitly, but have never visited.
I'm just polishing off Heaven's Command, Jan Morris' rather ripe account of the formation of the British Empire. The chapter on the obliteration of the native Tasmanians is particularly chastening, tragic as well considering that the early British settlers had only amiable relations with them.
By the 1830s, years of harrassment and killing for sport of the Tasmanians had reduced their number to around 200. These were rounded up and shipped to the smaller island of Wybalenna to be civilised and improved by missionaries, freeing up Tasmania for full exploitation.
They were improved out of this world. In 1876 the very last Tasmanian, the famous Truganini, died in squalor.
It's difficult to take in that this was the loss of an entire, distinct people. I can't do better than offer up two pieces that Morris quotes in the chapter. The first is a Tasmanian dancing song transcribed into English by a Victorian missionary:
It's wattle blossom time,
It's spring time.
Bird whistle.
The birds are whistling.
Spring come,
Spring has come.
Cloud sun,
The clouds are all sunny.
Bird whistle,
The birds are whistling.
Dance.
Everything is dancing.
Spring-time.
Because it's spring-time.
Dance.
Everything is dancing.
Luggarato, Luggarato, Luggarato
- Spring, Spring, Spring.
Because it's spring-time
The second is part of the catechism used on Wybalenna to help the Tasmanians find salvation:
Q What will God do to this world by and by?
A Burn it.
Q Who are in heaven?
A God, angels, good men and Jesus Christ.
Q What sort of country is heaven?
A A fine place.
Q What sort of place is hell?
A A place of torment.
Q What do you mean by a place of torment?
A Burning for ever and ever.
It's nice to know we had the destination of their immortal souls on our conscience. In fact, I think we still do.
Is the city of today what you imagined it would be? I note with disappointment that today's houses don't feature underground swimming pools, escalators and zoos, as I so confidently predicted in my quasi-Futurist period (age 8, Mrs Winter's class).
City of Tomorrow tells me I'm not the only one. Many links to many pictures.
Also through Boing Boing, the article by George Bush Sr and Brent Scowcroft on 'Why We Didn't Remove Saddam' published in Time magazine in 1998, but mysteriously unavailable in magazine's archive at present.
Perhaps it's because I'm engaged in reading Jan Morris' eccentric account of the eccentricities of the British empire, but I'm seeing imperialism everywhere these days.
Britain's rapid decline over the past century from imperial superpower to charming backwater couldn't be more vividly illustrated than by the tone of this article about the new Lonely Planet Guide to Britain. The new guide quoted as saying:
"Britain is just getting better and better. The food is getting tastier, the cities more attractive and the rich cultural heritage more accessible."
Marvellous. Makes you proud and all that. But note, if British cities are getting more attractive it is because they are still deindustrialising. They are having to move away from the raw capitalist imperative that threw them up in the first place (build a factory! build a slum to house the workers we need! build a hospital, some schools, public baths and a small park so they have somewhere to bring up the next generation of workers!). Now, instead, the cities are having to sell themselves as pleasant places to visit and live, part of the Great British service sector.
This interpretation fits perfectly with the assumptions of Independent Strategy, the authors of a report arguing that the US economy is in terminal decline. It's interesting that their thesis - that we might be approaching the dog days of the American empire - is not just economic in nature. One of the core assumptions seems to be that the rest of the world is so pissed off by the current US administration that scope exists for a multilateral withdrawal of the support the US needs in order to continue to function as it does.
Now, UN member states are not just going to call time on the US's massive levels of indebtedness. Each player has too much to lose, and it would require the non-US world to broadly agree on a complex course of action with no immediate way forward.
But a loss of spirit, a sense of vitality passing away from the US, a feeling that the zeitgeist has moved away from North America, would affect innumerable small business decisions that would combine to bring the empire down over, say, 30 years.
Undoubtedly I'm reflecting part of a widespread, ill-defined feeling that it's wrong for the US to act globally in its self-interest, as Britain used to do in its days of empire. But there is always an element that wonders if we aren't looking at the Empire's New Clothes. To quote again the Guardian article:
"America relies on the rest of the world to finance its deficits. The rest of the world was happy to do so when the US economy was strong and returns were high, but investors will put their cash elsewhere if America looks weak economically. America borrows hundreds of millions of dollars from the rest of the world each day to cover its savings gap and, under George Bush, US dependence on foreign capital is set to increase."
George W. Bush's $75billion war is, in the end, a war bought on the never-never. But 'never-never' is always jst a euphemism. Bush may not have to settle up, but his successors will.
Sometimes you ask yourself where all the time goes. (I know, I asked before, and I even got a sensible answer - bloggery, both reading and writing.)
I've been travelling in to work slightly earlier recently, and the emptier tube carriages give me a little more space to think and wake up (hm...cf. yesterday's post on space I suppose). Anyway, by the time I got in, I'd got my little Forthcoming list for the day worked out. It was:
1) My own fashion notes for the spring season in London (yes, really)
2) The great BBC Breakfast Babes battle update (current score, based on incoming search strings, in case you're interested, has Natasha Kaplinsky narrowly leading Sophie Raworth. Curses.)
Then I was lead back to two fine blogs covering British and world politics like proper, engaged, scurrilous grown-ups, and I was a little ashamed. So, micro-project of the week is to catch up on Davos Newbies and British Politics. There could hardly be a more interesting time to do it.
(Courtesy of A Blog's Life)
This Labour government's pursuit of illiberal legal measures continues unabated.
The Telegraph points out that, all quiet like, the law on the confiscation of proceeds of criminal activities changed yesterday. The new Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) now only needs to show that goods or money were illictly obtained, on the balance of probability. This means that citizens found not guilty in a court of law can still have their assets seized. Lovely.
Diamond Dave Blunkett himself is quoted as saying:
"The agency is coming after the homes, yachts, mansions and luxury cars of the crime barons. But this is also about cracking down on local crooks - well known within their communities for their flash cars, designer clothes and expensive jewellery . . ."
That'll make a change, don't you think? If this was being done by a Conservative administration, there would be a righteous uproar. Why nothing now?
Let's be clear: I'm not knocking army reservists. I wouldn't do it, and as they travel off to the Gulf, they must be very aware that some of them won't be coming back.
But the MoD's Sabre site does make me wonder: what are our 'commitments', and
Had you remembered that the consultation period for the Government's Entitlement Cards plans has nearly closed?
Neither had I, so three cheers for Stand's easy response generator. Or you could make use of the excellent FaxYourMP site, for this or any other issue of public concern.
Incidentally, my MP at the last election was Frank Dobson. Now it's Tessa Jowell. Is this an improvement, I wonder?
(Democracy imported fresh from Spain by Andy)
The short story is a notoriously difficult form to master, and few 20th century writers could be said to have really created magic out of it. Leaving aside the laconic North Americans (Hemingway, Carver), the few geniuses of the short story come from a narrow, world-bending tradition that starts with the universal Borges (though Borges himself would have pointed further to Stevenson, Chesterton and Poe, among others).
The tradition would include the serially imagined fictions of Italo Calvino, the speed-, acid- and Ubik-driven existential paranoia of Philip K. Dick, and the concept-punning machine that is Stanislaw Lem.
The only British writer capable of standing in such, frankly frightening, company is the High Priest of Heathrow himself, J.G. Ballard.
So, it's a banner day today, for I've got in my hand a copy of the new Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard.
So, delights such as 'The Terminal Beach', 'The Largest Theme Park in the World' and 1968's furious 'Why I want to F*** Ronald Reagan' are at last available in the same volume, albeit a 1,200-page onion-skin monstrosity.
There are, of course, a small handful of stories missing from the 'Complete', notably Ballard's gruesomely banal 'Jane Fonda's Augmentation Mammoplasty', possibly, now I think of it, for legal reasons. It's vile, hilarious and short - and if I'm bored at home one evening, I might put it up here as a sort of public disservice.
The Royal Society of Chemistry is looking for the perfect cup of tea (pdf).
Tea should, of course, be made with boiling water, no sugar, and should be very strong.
The exercise is in honour of the centenary of the birth of George Orwell, who did his bit for tea-drinking in his seminal essay A Nice Cup of Tea.
Two suggestions:
1. Ask Tony Benn, who reportedly drinks a pot of tea every waking hour of the day.
2. Refer to the all-knowing British Standards Institute. There you may search for the six-page standard definition BS 6008:1980, ISO 3103-1980 - Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests (but, sadly, not view it free).
When the history of the internet comes to be preserved in an atomic crystalline structure on the moon in three centuries time, there will be (short) chapters on e-commerce and libraries, a long one (sorry) on porn, and the rest of the space will be occupied by essential information, like where we got our joke shed calendars.
You don't expect to find arch, erudite British Modernist clothing stores in Holt, Norfolk.
Well, I didn't. I found Old Town Clothing on the web. Though I wouldn't mind popping by to check out the Marshalsea in Irish Linen.
The shop caught my attention because I was looking for a reference for The London Perambulator (see below), and found this curious range of t-shirts instead.
You wouldn't get Gap name-checking Blake, the Festival of Britain, Edward Bawden, Night Mail and Powell & Pressburger's extraordinary A Canterbury Tale.
Another great organisation you've probably never heard of.
The Land is Ours "campaigns peacefully for access to the land, its resources, and the decision-making processes affecting them, for everyone, irrespective of race, gender or age".
Amongst other things, it publishes The Squatter's Handbook. If your interest in property infringement is more historical in nature, they have details of the Diggers Trail.
You don't have to vote for Candidate's wonderful new album Nuada when you're helping 'Captain America' choose his album of the year, but if you've heard it, you probably will want to.
Everyone knows about the Angel of the North, particularly now that it has been unofficially adopted as an icon of non-London Britain. But there's always more to learn.
Every decade or so in Britain, a new political party turns up with the aim of capturing the votes of thousands of votors disaffected with the traditional parties. After the limited successes of the Referendum Party, the SDP and, erm, the Monster Raving Loony Party, the latest effort is being launched on the web.
The trailer will have got about as far as "Are you depressed by the state of our once great country?" before you decide (accurately) that it's aiming for grumpy Daily Mail readers. To be fair, that's quite a few votes.
I'm interested in the curious logo, a slanted map of the UK covered by the union flag. Isn't that similar to the Referendum Party logo? More to the point, why is the union divided into seven?
Devolution for Cornwall, anyone?
The track listing of this collection seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Scanning the listing in the shop, you pick up the good stuff (Reward by The Teardrop Explodes, Birthday by The Sugarcubes, Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only Ones) and ignore the fillers (Never Never by The Assembly for instance, or I'm In Love With A German Film Star by The Passions, which sadly fails to live up to its title).
Then you remember that perfect 3-minute pop songs by definition don't last as long on your stereo as overblown winsome dirges.
Anyway, not a patch on Songs in the Key of Z (for which continued thanks to Bis).
It's safe to look now.
After possibly the worst opening day's play imaginable in the Ashes, England are at least competing.
Even so, I'm glad I won't be at work on Monday, when the office Aussie comes back from holiday.
The Queen is supposed to have said to Diana's butler that:
"There are forces at work in this country about which we know nothing".
This seems vague enough to be tautologous (the Queen can't know of every force at work). In fact, it's a nice paradoxical syllogism.
1. There exists x (forces at work in this country)
2. But, we know nothing about x
3. Therefore, we do not know if x exists
Is the Queen a secret fan of Bertrand Russell's work on set paradoxes? Or does she just need to practice a little?