Not A Blog Archive 2005
Date: 21/12/05
Ignorance Is Bliss?
Sometimes it's better not to know. Knowledge can bring disillusionment.
I've had just such an experience this week.
Listen to this. It's an excerpt from the track "Swallow" by My Bloody Valentine. It's been a favourite of mine from the first time I heard it on John Peel's show at the beginning of 1992, and it has been a permanent fixture in my Hundred Best Tunes selections ever since I started doing them.
Given the feel of the piece, and given the title, I'd always imagined pictures of birds (swallows, see?) in flight in a clear blue sky in a hot climate. Capistrano? Somewhere in that latitude, certainly.
Well, listening to the song the other night, I suddenly had the idea of finding out what the lyrics actually were, as they're very difficult to pick out. So, Google being my friend, I soon found them...
...Only to discover that the lyrics are:
Sweetheart
I want
To know
Your (all)
Now I
Swallow, swallow (love)
I close my mouth
Swallow, swallow (love)
Into my mouth
Close
The door
I want
You more
You can
Crawl down
Coming down
(Words and music ©Kevin Shields)
Oh dear, I thought. There go all my fancy images of the summer sky over a sandy Mediterranean shore.
It's a song about cocksucking. All right, it's still a beautiful song about etc., but the nearest it gets to the Mediterranean is that some people think that Fellatio is an Italian resort.
I shall try to live with this, just as I had to live with what happened with another song which features in my all-time-faves list, Bobby Goldsboro's "Summer (The First Time)". Here, at least, the sexual theme is explicit, but I had that song ruined for me for a long time by the words of a friend.
Way back in about 1983, we were sitting in the bar of The Nag's Head in Wrexham on a Friday night ('we' being a group of ex-sixth form friends who would meet up there from time to time). Although we were sat right behind the fruit machine, the juke box was still quite audible.
Someone put on Summer (The First Time). For those of you who don't know, it's a song about a seventeen year old boy losing his cherry to an older woman on the sea shore. It's beautifully done (the song, that is, I can't speak for the participants in the storyline).
I recognised the song immediately, and said to my friend 'Bill' Hancocks, "Oh, I really love this song!".
He listened for a moment, and then recognition flashed in his eyes. "Oh!", he said, "Isn't this the one where they go for a bonk on the beach?".
I swear it was five or six years before I could hear that song again without immediately hearing Bill's words.
Oh, well. I'll just have to swallow this one as well.
Date: 27/11/05
They're Pink...No, They're Green...No...They've Gone!
This is cool. It's also slightly scary.
Date: 21/11/05
The Last Roll Call
Alfred Anderson, Scotland's oldest man and longest-surviving veteran of World War I, died today at the age of 109 (full story here).
Mr Anderson was thought to be the last living witness to that remarkable Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing troops shook hands and (if the stories are to be believed) played football in No Man's Land on the front line.
An appropriate time, I think, to give you the lyrics to one of the most moving songs I know:
Christmas 1914 by Mike Harding.
Christmas Eve in 1914.
Stars were burning, burning bright,
And all along the Western Front
Guns were lying still and quiet.
Men lay dozing in the trenches,
In the cold and in the dark,
And far away behind the lines
A village dog began to bark.
Some lay thinking of their families,
Some sang songs while others were quiet,
Rolling fags and playing brag
To pass away this Christmas night.
As they watched the German trenches,
Something moved in No-Man's Land,
And through the dark there came a soldier
Carrying a white flag in his hands.
Then, from both sides, men came running,
Crossing in to No-Man's Land,
Through the barbed-wire, mud and shell-holes,
Shyly stood there shaking hands.
Fritz brought out cigars and brandy,
Tommy brought corned beef and fags.
Stood there talking, laughing, singing,
As the Moon shone down on No-Man's Land.
Christmas Day, we all played football
In the mud of No-Man's Land.
Tommy brought some Christmas pudding,
Fritz brought out a German band.
When they beat us at the football,
We shared out all the grub and drink,
And Fritz showed me a faded photo
Of a brown-haired girl back in Berlin.
For four days after, no one fired,
Not one shell disturbed the night,
For old Fritz and Tommy Atkins
They'd both lost the will to fight.
So they withdrew us from the trenches,
Sent us far behind the lines.
Sent fresh troops to take out places,
Told the guns prepare to fire.
And next night in 1914,
Flares were burning, burning bright.
The message came, "Prepare offensive.
Over the top, we're going tonight."
And men stood waiting in the trenches,
Looked out across our football park,
And all along the Western Front,
The Christmas guns began to bark.
© Mike Harding 1977
(Mike Harding has recorded two versions of this song that I know of. The original (and best) is on his 1977 LP "Old Four Eyes Is Back". It also appears on his 1989 album "Plutonium Alley").
Date: 07/11/05
Bubble, Bubble, Bubble...
Some things I find hard to believe.
This is one of them.
I mean, if you live in Calvados, Bikini or even Kendal, it might be OK to have something named after your home town. But this? What possessed some poor fool to give the name of a post-industrial Welsh village to something like a whirlpool bath? A bottle opener, possibly, or a syringe-clipper, but this?
And it costs from only £1552! In the real Brymbo, we usually find it more cost effective simply to eat a tin of beans an hour before getting in to the tub.
Date: 05/11/05
...And Another One...
Seen somewhere in mid Wales yesterday afternoon:
I suppose credit must be given for the fact that they knew there had to be an apostrophe in there somewhere...
Date: 01/11/05
Signs Of The Times, # Whatever
Went past the Wrexham branch of B&Q today. They had a sign announcing the completion of the store's refurbishment. The sign read:
I pondered this for a moment; indeed, I nearly walked into someone's garden wall. Can anything be less than fully complete? It's got to be both, surely?
I was rescued from the depression caused by corporate illiteracy by the sight of a garishly-accoutred estate car going past on the way to the nearby hospital. In large crimson letters on the back, it carried this poetic image:
Sometimes, I suppose, pedantry gets in the way of being transported to another realm of thought.
Date: 29/10/05
Brought To Book
This often happens: I go from having no new books to read to having my dressing table piled up with them.
I recently started re-reading my collection of Alan Coren books, for the first time in some years. I came to Coren as a result of a piece of his I'd read in a collection of humourous writing which was published in about 1977. I didn't know (and I really still don't) what it was which attracted me about his style, but there was something there. Over the years, I bought a number of collections of his pieces (originally written for such diverse publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Listener and Punch (the last of which he edited for some years). The odd one I bought new, having rediscovered him when I started at a sixth form college and found that the college library had a subscription to Punch. The rest I found in various second-hand book shops in Wrexham and Chester down the years.
One of the attractive aspects of his writing to me was (is - I presume he still does it sometimes?) his parodying and amalgamating of the styles of various authors. His parodies of Hemingway in particular are clever and amusing in themselves but, brought to bear on the appallingly sucrose works of A.A. Milne (in a piece called, wonderfully, "The Pooh Also Rises"), he reaches the apogee of hilarity. Furthermore, how about "Five Go Off To Elsinore"?
He could still bring you up short with a sharp pieces of real satire bordering on the best sort of journalism: one in which he describes going to try to find a place to live in Harlem in the early sixties is a biting example of role reversal; another, in which he muses on being thirty-five years of age, has stayed with me ever since I read it (at which point I was scarcely halfway to that point myself), especially his delineation of what he called Life's Little Irony Number Eight, namely, "there is no pleasure, however intense, which cannot be flawed by a brief reflection on its inevitable transience".
I've only got through part of his work from the sixties so far, and am starting to worry about whether I'll still find the books from the late seventies onwards as entertaining and provoking as I know I once did. Perhaps I'll let you know...
...or maybe not.
Then, all of a sudden, I have two brand new books sitting waiting for me to get to them.
This is the first:
Well, OK, it's not actually a new book, having come out about a year ago, but I always wait for the paperback. This started out as an exercise in economy, but has now been superseded as a reason by my infuriating tidy-mindedness: I have all the other Discworld&174; novels in paperback - it would spoil the run to have hardbacks sticking out of the bookshelf in the midst of the others.
(Not that I actually have bookshelves at all at the moment. My books are strewn around the floor of the back bedroom, because I haven't decided what to do with the third (and smallest) bedroom, having completely redecorated it earlier this year. Do I sand and stain the floorboards, or do I just resort to the expedient of carpet tiles? I had thought of the former (and doing the other upstairs rooms the same), but the amount of work involved has now quite put me off the idea. I'll have to do that for the stairs, though, as one would need the topological acuity of Escher to be able to measure them for new carpet).
Finally, this very afternoon, the latest book arrived:
It's going to be a fascinating read, not just because I worshipped John Peel just this side of idolatry (as this will ably demonstrate), but because Peel himself only managed to get up to about 1962 before his death, and it has been left to his widow and children to finish it.
I've been unable to resist dipping into it here and there this evening, and Peel's voice can be heard with total clarity in the first part. The second part seems to have been very competently and lovingly done by Sheila. I'm looking forward to reading it all once I've cleared the decks.
Date: 25/10/05
Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005)
"She sat down in order that we all might stand up" (Jesse Jackson)
Date: 08/10/05
More Pictures
I've added a dozen more pictures to the Gallery.
Date: 04/10/05
So, It's Goodnight From Him...
In some ways, it'd be nice to take the past twelve months back to the shop and demand a replacement.
Just under a year ago, we lost the greatest, most influential DJ of all time (John Peel), then my favourite stand-up (all right, sit-down) comedian of all time, Dave Allen.
Now, we have lost one of the most remarkable comedy performers and writers we have ever seen, with the death of Ronnie Barker at the age of 76.
For remarkable he was. He was not so much a 'comedian' in the modern understanding of that term: rather he was the embodiment of the earlier meaning in that he created characters which were rounded and thoroughly convincing within their context (be it a character sketch, a burlesque musical piece or a sit-com). Remember him as the wily but basically gentle-natured old lag Fletcher in "Porridge"? As the doggedly, doomedly determined Arkwright in "Open All Hours"? As that remarkable grotesque Lord Rustless (opposite an equally outlandish performance by David Jason as the gardener)?
Or perhaps your memories of Ronnie B. are tied up with the stratospheric success of "The Two Ronnies", in which he played a huge variety of characters: the middle-aged bar-room wolf engaging in double-entendres with a barmaid; the amiable optician with the appalling eyesight; or the series of ever-more bewildered spokesmen and ministerial incompetents addressing the nation.
In all of these guises and more, Ronnie Barker showed his true talents to the full. Not merely in his characterisations, but in the technical skill of his performances. He matched the art of physical comedy (his mere appearance as Patrick Moore's brother was a laugh-out-loud moment) with a virtuoso's gift for language and dialogue which came from a deep love of words (the ice-cream shop man going through a long list of the flavours on sale for the benefit of the customer - played, of course, by Ronnie Corbett - who, obtusely, wants a flavour they don't have - cheese and onion). And, of course, "Fork 'Andles"...
And, speaking of words (as if you could do much else with them), many of the very best of these were written by Barker himself, who must therefore be accorded a place alongside the criminally-under-rated Eddie Braben as one of the truly great comedy writers of the last fifty years.
All this, coupled with a thoroughness and work ethic which would put younger performers to shame; and alongside a self-effacing view of his importance (most of his work was submitted under pseudonyms - of which Gerald Wiley was the most used - so that his material would be judged solely on its own merits) was what made Ronnie Barker so very special for so long.
So, it's goodnight from him - and a goodbye, and much gratitude, from us.
R.I.P.
Date: 22/09/05
Hamster Wars!
Is this Bush & Blair's plan for new weaponry? And how long before Iran wants one?
(Thanks to Brander Roulett (aka Sablebadger) for the link)
Date: 16/09/05
Let's Get FFFZZZZZ-ical!
Yes, it's true: some people's dress sense is truly shocking, as shown by this news story.
Date: 15/09/05
Grand Re-opening!
Yes, it's a couple of days behind schedule (various issues getting in the way: validating the code on the pages being one of them), but The Gallery is now open in its revamped form!
Date: 11/09/05
While-U-Wait
I've just putting the finishing touches to the revamped Gallery pages. They should be up in a couple of days.
In the meantime, and in light of the news that government ministers are to launch a 'charm offensive' (well, they're guaranteed to get it half-right) to con the gullible into supporting the Database State, here's a nice little animation.
Date: 03/09/05
"Numbers, All Those Numbers!"
Never willing to let a fad pass by unexploited, JudgeCo™ proudly presents the latest in logico-deductive number puzzles!
Go here to play!
Date: 21/08/05
Everything In The Garden...
During last winter, I promised myself that I'd spend more time out of doors this summer.
Well, I've managed to keep that promise to some extent, which is one of the reasons why updates to this site have been a bit rare lately (the other reasons being laziness and lack of energy after the day's work).
This morning, I had some things to do in the house. Like, cleaning out the CPU fan and heatsink on this here PC (Yuk!), and doing a bit of minor cleaning around the place while self-same PC was being put through its fortnightly routine of adware- and spyware-scanning, virus-scanning (where the hell did those Trojans come from?) and a defrag.
It was the perfect late-summer's day - sunshine, but a pleasant light breeze to take the blunt edge of the warmth - so I decided to spend some time sitting in the garden. I dragged my somewhat uncomfortable deck-chair out and sat in the shade of the hedge - the one I'd spent all of yesterday cutting.
It's a nice place to sit. As I say, it's in the shade, and because there's a thick hedge between me and the pavement outside, no-one passing knows that I'm there. Not that I ever hear anything revelatory, mind. But I live in hope of that someday.
I read a little. I tried to push on through one of the more difficult parts of Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude", but reality kept intruding. 'Reality' in this case meaning a wide variety of extraneous noise: the small cement mixer being run by the guy across the road as he adds yet another strange structure to his backyard; the skirling of someone's hedge-trimmer somewhere round the back; the patter-patter-patter of the obnoxious, verminous dachshunds who inhabit the house behind mine, and who make my life a trial with their incessant yapping, as they pad around inside the large shed which constitutes their living room, play area and (for all I know) brothel; the sound of nine- and ten-year-old boys pretending to be police as they dash around on their bikes and scooters (not a realistic game, this - none of them has shot a Brazilian electrician as far as I know); and, of course, the cars. Mostly sad little eighteen-year-old needledicks who try to cover the inadequacies of themselves and their vehicles (elderly Vauxhalls and Peugeots usually) by playing rap very loudly (as a projection of an 'image', it's about as credible as Tim Westwood).
After a while, I gave up on the literature and sat watching the bees and butterflies as they buzzed and fluttered around the Buddleia, which in turn was giving off a faint but beguiling perfume. I saw what was either a honey bee or a rather large fly land on a leaf of the Cotoneaster (I think that's what it's called: my usual term of reference for it is 'bloody thing that won't stop growing') just behind me, and sit there grooming itself for some minutes. Agile creature: being able to use one's front legs to scratch one's back must be considered quite a plus. At least, I assume it was just fettling itself: I don't have enough in-depth knowledge regarding the prevalence of auto-eroticism amongst insects.
I carried on watching the Buddleia, and got the thought that it might be nice to have a few photographs of the butterflies, to keep as a reminder of warmer days during the winter months. So I dashed inside for my camera, put the batteries in, and plonked myself down in my chair again...
...and didn't see another butterfly thereafter. Fickle creatures!
After about half an hour, I gave up and brought the camera and the chair back indoors.
The weather's about to turn. It's going to rain for a few days, and be pretty windy with it by all accounts (though not for too long, I hope: there's a wedding in the family next Saturday). At least I took advantage of it while I could.
Date: 01/08/05
Ohhh! God!!!! Ye-e-e-e-ssss!!!!
Those of you who regularly stroll the wilder shores of the internet will recognise how funny and how true this is (Warning! Adult content)
Date: 12/07/05
25 Years On...
No, not this...
...although it's quite a neat album.
This week marks twenty-five years since the last time I took what might be called a 'proper' holiday.
Makes me sound like a proper saddo, doesn't it? As if I cared, of course.
It was a dark and stormy...erm...hold on, not that one...
It was July 1980. I was eighteen years of age. I had just sat my 'A'-level exams.
The original idea had been for the sort-of band of which I was a sort-of member to spend a week "getting it together in the country" (the 70s hadn't long ended - you can tell, can't you?). The bass player had an uncle who owned a farm, on which there stood an uninhabited bungalow which we might be able to use to rehearse.
Fortunately for the future direction of rock music, that idea fell through when we were told that we couldn't use the bungalow after all. Faced with the possibility of pioneering 'Unplugged' years before MTV came up with the idea or just having a straightforward camping holiday, we chose the latter path.
There were five of us in all: let's call them 'Me', 'Carl', 'Alan', 'Steve' and 'Bill', partly because those were their actual names (except for 'Me' who has never been called 'Me', except by me....oh dear...and 'Bill', whose name was actually 'Steve', but wasn't called that by us, and we already had a Steve, and life is complicated enough as it is...).
So, one Friday evening, we set off for the village of Brimfield in north Herefordshire.
The whole story can be found here. It says much about it that I was able to write this account down over a year later and with the thoughts, sights and sounds of that week still very fresh in my mind. I also wrote a crappy poem about it, but I won't try your tolerance any further.
Date: 25/06/05
Back In The Day...
(Have you noticed that phrase being used more often nowadays? I blame the Internet myself...)
I'm a bit pensive today. I think I know why.
It's twenty years to the day that I left University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (as it was called at that time). Not 'graduated' as such: I didn't consider myself to have graduated until I'd received my final results a week or two later. But Saturday 25 June 1985 was the day that I finally left the academic life and had to face the realities of a real world which I had very little notion what to do with, in, to, through or about.
I still have a clear memory of the day. It was cool and damp, with rain about - quite unlike the very pleasant weather we'd enjoyed for a couple of weeks beforehand.
My final exams had finished some three weeks before, which had left me to enjoy what little time there was left before I was ejected from the cocoon. Not that I was that reluctant to go: I had been inside the educational system for nearly nineteen years by that point, and had long since tired of it. This could be demonstrated by my academic performance from the age of about sixteen onwards, and especially at University. I had actually been thrown out of the place after my first year, so disastrously underachieving had I been. Somehow (desperation, possibly) I had managed to get back in, but had come close on at least one occasion to being banished for good - only the forebearance (and I'd tested that to the limit) of a couple of professors had kept me there.
Those last twenty days or so were little short of idyllic in a sense. It was a true freedom: there was nothing more which was left to be done, and nothing more could be done as far as the future was concerned. So, enjoy!
And I did. In this, I was fortunate in having some very amenable company. In my first two years of University, I'd lived in a Hall of Residence which is famous within my country's academic and cultural circles. When it came down to fixing my abode for my final year, though, the cost of eating in Hall had become a serious obstacle, so I had to choose elsewhere - somewhere where I'd arrange my own meals.
John Williams Hall was at the southern end of the promenade at Aberystwyth. My room on the first floor was not so much a room as a slightly extended cupboard; this the inevitable result of subdividing larger rooms from the Hall's previous incarnation as (I think) an hotel. It was about long enough and wide enough to fit in a single bed, an armchair, a small desk and chair and a wardrobe; but, goodness knows, only just long and wide enough. Indeed, I suspect remand prisoners would sue nowadays if they were put in anything as pokey as that.
Nevertheless, it enabled me to continue to live my rather sad, self-contained existence, enlivened only by watching people walking along the Prom. And, of course, watching the tide coming in and going out. One particular night saw a combination of high tide and onshore gale which cast huge plumes of spray over the top of the street lights at the northern end, sent small waves racing across the lowest part of the sea wall halfway along, and turned the kiddies' paddling pool not twenty yards from my window into a gravel pit.
One evening, late in the Autumn term, I was jolted out of my isolation by the racket being kicked up on the staircase outside. On investigating, I found most of the denizens of the ground- and first-floor rooms engaging in the extreme sport of trying to jump from the U-bend of the stairs onto the floor at ground level without breaking their ankles.
I don't think I was immediately observed leaning over the banister, but I was spotted soon enough, and invited to try my luck. I pleaded the weakness of my Achilles tendons (in other words, I wimped out). This event marked a turning point, however: a couple of nights later, back in my room with the light off, watching the waves with my customary melancholy, a knock came on the door. There stood the residents of the only room on the ground floor, inviting me down for a game of Risk.
I tried to decline, but they were too strong for me and so, not even knowing what Risk was, I went downstairs to the kitchen. Alan Hines and Martin Rookyard, you have no idea what a change you made to my life that evening!
I soon came to know some of the other stair-jumpers: Danny O'Dare, whose room was next to mine; and Greg Coombs and Tim Cappelli, who had rooms on the top floor.
Come the next term, I had discovered something of a social existence. Danny's room-mate had left, so leaving a double room with only one occupant. We turned this into a sort of lounge for the five of us (Martin also having departed), and it was here that we spent most of our evenings. We rented a TV and VCR (quite a radical thing for us to do), and sat around talking politics (Danny was on the wilder shores of the Conservative Party at that time; Greg was a left-wing environmentalist; and I was a rather faint-hearted nationalist - this made for conversations which could kindly be called 'interesting'); or playing Risk or Scrabble®; or listening to music or watching videos (Bo Derek in "Bolero" was an absolute hoot, as I recall). It was a bit like a commune, but without the lentils.
And so it ran for the remainder of my time there, with other people (Alan's girlfriend Lorraine - and her over-affectionate St Bernard dog Gail - staying for a time, as did Ian Jeffrey, young brother of one of Alan's friends (a promising artist - I wonder what happened to him?)).
(John Williams Hall, 1985. Click for the full-size image)
So the last three weeks of my life as a student were full of good company and pleasant times. This was what made leaving the place such a wrench when 25 June came around. Most of the others had already gone. Greg Coombs was the only one left on the premises, and I remember a great sadness in me as I shook his hand and said my farewell.
Greg is the only one I'm still (sort of) in touch with from those days (although his e-mail address wasn't working last time I tried it), and he's the only one I've met again since, as he visited me one frosty January day about five years ago. I kept up a vigorous and pleasantly disputatious correspondence with Danny until about 1990, by which time he'd moved from the far right to the far left and beyond, out into the universe of Anarcho-Syndicalism. I wonder where he is now, geographically and ideologically, as I haven't heard from him since.
As for Tim, Martin and Alan, I know nothing of what became of them. I hope it has been something good for all of them.
One of the character faults which has caused me the most grief down the years is the strong sense of the passing of time. Blessed (or cursed) with a good memory, bringing back those memories also brings with it a melancholy. I shall never be there again; it is inaccessible by everything except the inexact instrument of the memory. And how does one express that in any meaningful sense to others? This piece is one pathetic attempt to do just that, as I sit here, having fallen irretrievably into that category of people who are described in the obituary columns as having "never fulfilled their early promise".
Date: 16/06/05
"Snap!" Or, Rather, "Click! Whirr!"
(In the same way that trains are still called 'choo-choos' by those determined to patronise the bejasus out of small children).
Well, I finally stopped dithering today, and bought a digital camera as a belated birthday present to myself.
Once I've mastered it...you'll all be very sorry...
Date: 14/06/05
Well, I Always Knew It, Myself...
| Your IQ Is 115 |
 Your Logical Intelligence is Above Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Exceptional Your General Knowledge is Above Average |
A Quick and Dirty IQ Test
(Thanks to DJ Todd of Real Synthetic Audio for the link)
Date: 09/06/05
The Meaning Of Life (+1)
I hit 43 today...
...my case comes up next month...
OK, all silliness apart, I spent this morning wandering around Wrexham town centre, desperately hoping to find something worth buying myself for my birthday.
Wrexham might be on that list of 'clone towns' which there was so much talk about last week: you know, the places where the town centre has been generalised almost out of existence by thoughtless 'redevlopment' or mercantile shortsightedness. I don't know, I didn't check: but it wouldn't have surprised me.
But it's been like that for a long time now. Way back when, I suspect Douglas Adams might have visited: his Shoe Event Horizon was obviously inspired by a walk down Regent Street any time in the late 1970s. Then it was travel agents; more recently, shops selling mobile phones. Each successive wave lasting scarcely more than a couple of years before being replaced by a new fad (it seems to be 'empty shops' at the moment, unless I'm being very naïve and it is, in fact, some extremely post-modern marketing strategy).
Not that the shops which are left have all that to offer, especially if your tastes go beyond the dozen standard patterns of whatever it is you're interested in.
For example, I went in to two major book shops and what I think is the last remaining second-hand book stall in town. Nowhere could I find a single book by this man:
Stanisław Lem is one of the all-time great science-fiction authors. I've just been re-reading some of his work ("The Futurological Congress", "The Star Diaries", "The Cyberiad", etc.), and wanted more.
W.H.Smith? Nada. Waterstone's? Forget it. If it hasn't been made into a movie in the last two years, they don't seem to want to know. Much of his work seems to be out of print in this country at the moment anyway, itself testimony to the commodification of book-selling.
So, my wanderings proved fruitless (except for a punnet of strawberries). My imagination usually deserts me at such times anyway. I just did my usual shopping (plus one or two little luxuries - a tub of Iceland Cornish ice-cream, for example) and dragged myself back home.
For tea, I'm afraid I over-indulged (but then, what are birthdays for?), following a plate of chips, fried egg and baked beans with a sizable piece of my sister-in-law's home-made fruitcake, covered in hot custard. I had to have a lie down after all that.
And, in other news, my Buddleia globosa has decided to flower for the first time in about five years. I'm looking forward to seeing some butterflies around the place this summer.
(Buddleia globosa, as featured in my garden at the moment (bee not included))
Date: 17/05/05
A Day In A Life...
It had it all, in one way or another.
To start with, I got in to work at 7.45 this morning to find that the power supply to the building's computer systems had once again failed to recover from an external electricity failure. Much dashing around pushing buttons and turning keys, with people asking awkward questions, like "What's gone wrong with it this time?"
Succeeded in getting three quarters of it back, but the remaining bit refused to play. At this point, I had to dash off for a hospital appointment, leaving my esteemed colleagues to play 'Hunt The Trip-Switch'.
Up to the hospital for a 9 a.m. appointment with the opth...ophth...ohthp...eye doctor. It seems that one of the three doctors due to hold the clinics wasn't able to come in. It happens - even doctors fall prey to events. This meant that I was waiting until 10 before I got in to see the doctor. Very nice young Indian lady, slightly flustered by the morning's disruption, but charming nonetheless.
After about fifteen minutes of my artificially-dilated pupils having what looked like a miniature arc-welder shone into them, she pronounced herself satisfied that diabetic retinopathy had yet to show itself to any noticeable degree, and I departed with her injunction to "keep up the good work" resounding in my head.
Came out of the hospital. Oh dear. Sunlight. Bright sunlight! Aaaaaargh!!!! Pain!! Goodness knows what anyone made of this shambling, screwed-up-eyed wreck coming towards them. "Huh! Another *^&#ing smack-head!"
Back to the office, to find that the portion of the office which was still powerless (a state with which I can identify all too frequently) remained resolutely so. Not a spark. We awaited an electrician while staff from the affected area were dispersed to wherever else in the building they could get a working computer.
Now, just to explain: I work for a department of the central civil service. A few short years ago, some bunch of desperate bean-counters decided that it would be very 'efficient' to hand over maintenance of our buildings to a private company. This was duly done, and so the job was handed over...to a company based in a tax-dodge paradise in the western Atlantic. They, in turn, sub-contracted various aspects of the work to other companies. They, in turn...well, I call it 'Russian doll' economics (when I'm not calling it 'outright frigging lunacy', of course).
So, the subcontractors' subcontractor turned up. He pinpointed what he thought was the problem, and then tried to prove it by cutting off the electricity supply to part of the building hitherto unaffected (in order to demonstrate that there was no power going through that circuit anyway, despite the functioning of some eighty workstations on it at the time). One of our servers was going up and down like a bride's nightie until he was told to cut it out.
It being lunchtime by now, I trolled over to Sainsbury's to do my weekly shopping. I have formulated a general rule, which has long been strengthened by empirical evidence, that whatever line of products I start buying from Sainsbury's, they stop stocking it three weeks later. Now, it seems, I didn't even have to wait that long. Perhaps my timing was off this week, but there were a number of items I wanted which they simply didn't have (roast beef slices, for one; and their very nice spaghetti carbonara being another. This they'd had on a two-for-the-price-of-one-and-a-bit offer, with the consequence that there was none left by the time I arrived).
With what I did manage to find, I struggled back to work. I wasn't feeling too strong at this point: the eye business causing one of those pressure headaches that make you want to drive a nail into your skull (this being preferable, at least in ethical terms, to driving it into the skull of the person who caused the headache in the first place), and I resolved to finish early (3.15).
By this time the electrician, having failed to rune the mysteries of our completely shagged-out power infrastructure, had gone around unplugging things and then resetting the trip and hoping for the best. It seemed to work.
I got home, had my tea (Sainsbury's chicken chow mein), and then headed upstairs for a lie down. I woke at about 6.30 with symptoms of an oncoming hypoglycaemic attack, and ate the last chunk of a bar of Green & Black's Maya Gold to stave it off.
So, that was my day, chums. I've known better ones. And yet, I glance to my left and see the late-evening sky; clouds off-white shading towards pale lilac, a pale blue sky presaging a drop in temperatures if we're not careful; the branches of the oak tree, just coming into leaf, swaying slightly in a faint breath: I see all this clearly, and consider myself more fortunate than many.
Date: 08/05/05
Poll Position
I suppose some comment on the election is obligatory, given that I went on so much about it beforehand.
It is remarkable that we can still refer to ourselves as a democracy when you have a party elected to govern with an outright majority of seats on the basis of scarcely 35% of the votes cast, and a bare 22% of the total electorate. Voting reform is urgently needed, or else the turnout figures (very slightly higher than last time, due I'm sure to the perception that this was going to be slightly more of a contest) will continue to be low, as many people see their votes as counting for nothing. It is imperative that we restore the health of our system.
The actual result? Well, all in all, it could have been a lot worse. Blair's majority is large enough to enable his government to get things done without being sufficiently overwhelming to enable it to do what the hell it wants. This may be the end for the proposed ID card bill and (to some extent, at least) a restriction on New Labour's mad impulse to increase private profiteering in the public services. Although all that depends on being able to find thirty-odd Labour MPs with a backbone - not necessarily easy. We must be watchful on this front.
The Chicken Little act ("Vote Labour or else you'll get a Tory government!") was never likely to succeed. The electorate has grown too inured to wild claims from Labour to be fooled. The increase in seats for the Liberal Democrats was quite welcome, although there are problems with this, in that they did not succeed in depressing the Conservative vote in most of southern England. This means that the Tories are grabbing back seats which were theirs almost by Divine Right in the 1980s, and also that the seats the Lib Dems do hold in those areas are going to be particularly vulnerable to a further increase in the Tory vote next time. Their swings and gains from Labour were quite noticeable however, and the gain of Manchester Withington must be seen as a spectacular achievement. But Kennedy and Campbell's claims that we are now irrevocably in the era of three-party politics have been heard before, and heralded only failure later.
One or two pickings from elsewhere:
I was sad to see Simon Thomas lose Ceredigion. I knew Simon slightly at University, and he is a good man. I can't imagine what possessed the Cardis to vote for a Lib Dem candidate who doesn't live in the constituency and doesn't speak the native language of a large proportion of its inhabitants. But then, Cardis are an odd lot. I know - I lived among them for a while.
Peter Law's victory in Blaenau Gwent was, however astonishing it may be to those ignorant of electoral history, not without precedent. Back in the late 1960s, the Labour Party in nearby Merthyr Tudful deselected its sitting MP S.O. Davies, ostensibly on the grounds that he was too old (but really because he was pro-self-government - an heretical opinion in the Labour Party in Wales in the age of George Thomas). He resigned from the party, stood in the 1970 election as an independent, and defeated the official Labour candidate, remaining in office until his death in 1972.
George Galloway's victory in Bethnal Green And Bow was not that much of a surprise, given that the sitting MP was pro-war in an largely Muslim area. Galloway is a blowhard, but it should make for interesting scenes in the House. One rare cause for being sympathetic to him was the disgraceful way in which he was 'interviewed' by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight after his victory. Starting an interview with "What's it like to have removed a black woman MP from the House of Commons?" was unworthy, not least because it was irrelevant to the issues in the election - why not ask how it was that the defeated Oona King had been elected twice in a row by such a constituency despite being a black Jewish woman? It would scarcely have been less insensitive.
So, there they all are, all 646 of them, pootling away for the next four years or so, until they try to persuade us once more that we can't live without them.
Date: 04/05/05
The Politics Of Eeny-Meeny...
Well, tomorrow is the day. After a period of a few weeks which might more appropriately be called a 'camp pain', where the vows have been flowing more freely than at a Moonie wedding, on Thursday we will elect those who will claim to speak for us for the next four years or so.
I've found it far more difficult than usual to make my choice this time around. Not that I intend telling you which way I've voted in the past (although you might hazard an informed guess from reading this site). Voting is a strictly private act: rather like masturbation, except that you don't feel quite as dirty and let down as you do when you've just voted.
(My mother was quite the incorrigible gamester when she felt that someone was intruding into her business: once, she went to vote, only to be met outside by a distant relative, a well-known Labour Party member locally, who was counting them in to the polling station, then counting them out again.
Said relative was easy meat for anyone with a mischievous turn of mind. When my mother came out, the cousin said, "Which way did you vote?"
My mother deeply resented the effrontery of the question and so, wind-up mode set to 'maximum', she replied airily, "Oh, I couldn't make up my mind, so I voted for all of them!"
Collapse of stout (Labour) Party).
Anyway, what do I have to choose from? Well, in the main, there's globalised free-market capitalism, globalised free-market capitalism, not-quite-so-globalised free-market capitalism, globalised free-market capitalism with a smiley, and the sort of 'socialism' which tries to make itself out as an alternative but actually just plays hopscotch within the confines of...well, globalised free-market capitalism, actually.
Let's take the contestants one at a time, shall we boys and girls?
(Not, I might add, that I've actually seen any of the candidates walking down my street. In fact, this election has been notable for the lack of cars with PA systems, or even posters in house windows. It's almost as if everyone feels ashamed of having any party tendency any more. Which, given the historical tendency of the population hereabouts to vote for a geranium if it had a Labour sticker on it, may be an optimistic sign).
Labour: I think I voted Labour once. It was a
council election in the early 80s, and our winning Labour candidate
defected to the SDP not long afterwards.
It's not likely to happen again: I could not vote for a party led by a
man who should be in front of the International Criminal Court, and who
went on record as saying, "Look, you can't tax the rich: if you do,
they'll leave the country"; with a Chancellor who thinks that I and
over 100 000 of my under-rewarded colleagues are dispensable (we're
only 'back-room staff' who may safely be replaced with an ever-rotating
bunch of temps at five times the cost), and whose salary increases are
an annual excuse for him to appear tough; and with a candidate who
voted no fewer than three times for the ID Cards Bill which nearly got
on to the books recently, and which Labour has pledged to bring
straight back after the election. Our sitting member (if you'll pardon
the phrase) is a known eccentric, reputed still to keep a loaded gun in
his house in case of invasion by the Red Menace.
Liberal Democrat: In the words of Dennis Potter, "That perennial second prize for those who love to tickle, but are afraid to wound". Having supposedly opposed the war, they are nonetheless in favour of keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely; despite their attempts to outflank Labour on the left (admittedly not difficult nowadays), they are still in favour of the profitisation of our public services and would like to curtail the power of workers to defend themselves against idiot, thuggish employers still further: and they're led by a man whose idea of connecting to the public is to appear on TV comedy panel games.
Conservative: Puh-lease! I have had many
strange notions in my life, but pure and applied masochism has never
appealed to me. I remember their viciousness and arrogance only too
well from the 80s.
(By the way, our Tory candidate in 1997 was the remarkable Boris
Johnson. He did actually pay our village a visit during that campaign.
Alas for him, he had the idea of going into the shop which stood across
the road from my house. This was run by a fierce Labour supporter in
any case but, to pile the Pelion of embarrassment upon the Ossa of his
misjudgement, his entry to the premises also coincided with my mother's
presence at the counter. I'm sure the experience he gained in the
subsequent few minutes has stood him in good stead ever since).
Plaid Cymru: I'd feel a lot happier about them if their candidate didn't look a bit like one of those unfortunate student teachers we had to put up with in school in the early/mid-70s. You know the sort: three parts enthusiasm to two parts corduroy to one part Clearasil. Still, he's local, which might help him. Given his party's refusal to support the ban on hunting, he might need all the help he can get.
Forward Wales: It's quite fitting that we vote by writing an 'X'. This party seems to comprise ex-Labourites, ex-Nationalists, ex-Greens and exhales the bright, vibrant breath of the 1970s and the extinction of the post-war consensus. Exit stage Left.
Well, that's all folks! So, what to do? Not voting is simply not an option. Perhaps I'm deluded, but I still feel that putting that cross on that ballot paper is the only exercise of power most of us have, even if our loony electoral system renders about 75% of votes cast purely academic. I, for example, have never voted for a winning candidate in five parliamentary elections. I somehow don't expect this to change.
So, although I still say A Plague On All Their Houses, I shall be at the polling station at about 7:15 tomorrow morning to use what little right I have to influence events before setting off for another day of being shafted by little tin gods of management at work. I hope all those of you who have that right, wherever you are, exercise it when you get the chance - while you still have the chance.
Date: 02/05/05
The Election - Blair's Shock New Claim!
Date: 29/04/05
The Perils Of Idle Browsing
Rather bored this evening, not really wanting to carry on entering my record collection onto its new, how-the-hell-do-I-get-this-to work Access database just at the moment.
Decided to follow the path from Joe Gordon's blog around to other blogspot sites.
Not overly impressed, on the whole (but who the hell am I to say?): mostly the standard patterns of, a) things nicked from elsewhere; b) whining middle-class American kids; and c) people trying to sell you things.
Found a couple of little gems, though. Firstly, this picture, which appears on Celti's blog:
And then this story, taken from http://ticketholders.blogspot.com/:
Several centuries ago, the Pope decreed that all the Jews had to convert or leave Italy. There was a huge outcry from the Jewish community, so the Pope offered a deal. He would have a religious debate with the leader of the Jewish community. If the Jews won, they could stay in Italy; if the Pope won, they would have to leave.
The Jewish people met and picked the aged but wise Rabbi Moishe to represent them in the debate. However, as Moishe spoke no Italian and the Pope spoke no Yiddish, they all agreed that it would be a "silent" debate.
On the chosen day, the Pope and Rabbi Moishe sat opposite each other. There was silence for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers.
Rabbi Moishe looked back and raised one finger.
Next, the Pope waved his finger around his head.
Rabbi Moishe pointed to the ground where he sat.
The Pope then brought out a communion wafer and a chalice of wine.
Rabbi Moishe pulled out an apple.
With that, the Pope stood up and declared that he was beaten, that Rabbi Moishe was too clever, and that the Jews could stay.
Later, the Cardinals met with the Pope, asking what had happened.
The Pope said, "First, I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up one finger to remind me that there is still only one God common to both our beliefs.
"Then, I waved my finger to show him that God was all around us. He responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us.
"I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us of all our sins. He pulled out an apple to remind me of the original sin.
"He had me beaten and I could not continue."
Meanwhile the Jewish community were gathered around Rabbi Moishe.
"How did you win the debate?", they asked.
"I haven't a clue," said Moishe.
"First he said to me that we had three days to get out of Italy, so I gave him the finger.
"Then he tells me that the whole country would be cleared of Jews and I said to him, we're staying right here."
"And then what?", asked a woman.
"Who knows?", said Moishe, "He took out his lunch, so I took out mine."
Date: 22/04/05
A Guiding Light Goes Out
I'm not sure if I really had any feeling of belonging to any country back in my childhood. Living in an almost totally Anglicised village scarcely an hour's leisurely walk from the border with England, the notion of 'Wales' was one which hardly impinged upon my consciousness. Oh, we had about an hour a week of Welsh lessons in junior school, and we knew a bit about St David and the flag, but that was about all. For the most part we couldn't even get television from Wales, due to one of those interesting 'oversights' or sets of 'technical difficulties' which have always been the excuse given by the authorities for such deficiencies. I suppose we counted ourselves as British, that nebulous state of feeling that you were it without actually being able satisfactorily to define what it was.
I suppose the same lack of awareness continued into my teens, and I don't really remember the point at which it changed.
It could have been a fortuitous by-product of one of the absurdities of our education system at that time. At the age of fourteen, with one's entire class having taken virtually every lesson together for the first three years in secondary school, now choices had to be made. These decisions were far-reaching ones, in as much as they determined what you would study forever thereafter.
Some decisions were easy to make: Physical Education? Sod all that running about, I chose Music. Woodwork? No talent there at all, let's try History instead.
There was one choice which caused me some unease, though. In what disordered mind did the resolution formulate itself that, at that age, a child should have to choose between studying his or her own nation's language or studying one of the major languages of the world? Why was I forced to choose between Welsh and French?
Truth be told, the decision was made for me. Although my marks in Welsh the previous year were very good, I had somehow managed that year to get a scarcely-believable ninety-six per cent in the French exam.
So, I chose Welsh.
This was not merely the early sproutings of a tendency towards perverse decisions which was to go on to enrich my life whilst simultaneously impoverishing my finances. You see, in my third year, the French teacher had been a maniacal Parisian woman who was largely incapable of dealing with a class of twenty-odd hormonal explosions. Lessons frequently descended into farce (or even grand guignol), the bolder boys nicked exercise books from the cupboards and, for the more swotty of us, it became no joy at all. That this same woman gave me ninety-six per cent for a paper which included an essay about Wales beating France in a rugby international indicates either that she too had a perverse personality, or that she knew she was leaving the school that summer to start a family and was beyond caring. I suspect the latter.
So, I chose Welsh. This turned out to be wise in another way. La Parisienne's successor was, by all accounts, a fearsome harpy whose reputation caused her to be known universally simply as 'The Dragon', and whose methods probably led her charges to a deep Francophobia of Sun-like proportions.
I can't say I was that enthusiastic in my studies of Cymraeg in the subsequent two years. All that I am sure of is that it made my choice of A-level subjects easier when they came along.
Certainly by that time I had developed a firmer consciousness of what my identity was. I watched with impotent fury as I saw first-class arseholes such as Neil Kinnock stomping around the country campaigning against their own party's policy to provide some faint semblance of democracy to the way we were governed, leaving no smear unspread, no myth unmediated, in their desperation. And they succeeded, of course.
Through this period, there was one figure in our national life who seemed to stand head-and-shoulders above the dirt:
Gwynfor Evans had been leader of Plaid Cymru for over thirty years by that time. He had been the party's first MP after winning a by-election in Carmarthen on Bastille Day, 1966. He had been active on behalf of our nation and language since the late 1930s. He had led campaigns to stop the English War Ministry from stealing hundreds of square miles of farming land for bombing ranges. He had been a major figure in the attempts to stop a thriving Welsh-speaking community near Y Bala from being wiped out to build a dam to provide water for factories in Liverpool.
Through all this, he faced powerful and hateful enemies, particularly from the Labour Party, who ruled what amounted to a one-party state in many parts of our land. From the thuggish behaviour of his fellow councillors in Carmarthenshire, via the boorish arrogance of the Labour rulers of Liverpool Corporation at the time of Tryweryn, to his very first day as an MP, when an egregious Labour minister remarked how refreshing it was to see a 'fascist' in the House of Commons; right up to the end of his electoral career, when he had to suffer the infernal squeakings of a ninth-rate Labour candidate called Dr Alan Williams, the personification of Hobbes' description of human existence ("nasty, brutish...and short").
Throughout, Gwynfor Evans remained firmly committed to his beliefs and worked in whatever constructive and dedicated way he could find to advance them. His promise to fast to death unless the Thatcher regime kept its promise of a Welsh-language TV channel forced the so-called 'Iron Lady' into an embarrassing climbdown.
It was this towering integrity which made a patriot out of me. If someone could work so hard, be willing to sacrifice so much, for the cause of our nation's liberation, and without ever yielding to the temptation of intemperate words or conduct, then the least I could do was to lend my shoulder, however weak, to the wheel. Plaid is the only party to which I ever belonged (albeit briefly: I'm no more a party animal politically than I am socially).
I disagreed with him on some points, most notably regarding his outright, uncompromising pacifism, regarding it as naïve. But Gwynfor Evans was an example to me as to many others, and his leadership was crucial in gaining recognition by the imperial authorities of our rights as a nation; indeed, recognition that we were a nation at all.
Gwynfor Evans died this week at the age of 92, after a long period of ill-health and incapacity which was an unjust fate for one who gave so much. At least now, he is beyond all pain, and he remains our inspiration as we seek to gain that sovereignty which is rightfully ours.
Gwynfor, diolch o'r galon a phob hedd i chi.
Date: 09/04/05
Riding A Hitch
I suppose I have to mention The Wedding.
My feelings on the subject of monarchy and all that twaddle should be well enough known to my reader by now, but I did manage to suppress my nausea for long enough to enable me to make some comments:
1) The whole thing seemed to sum up the longed-for decline of the English monarchy in that it was understated to the point of being almost shame-faced.
2) It was deeply amusing to see all those aristos and their upper-middle-class hangers-on and arse-peckers turning up in a fleet of buses. I bet hardly any of these haw-haws had ever been on one before, and were no doubt baffled by the obvious lack of a built-in drinks cabinet.
3) The estimate of crowd size seemed to suffer from the usual
uncertainty. First it was
15 000, then 20 000. I can only assume they had the Police counting it.
You see, the Police in this country operate a variable exchange rate on
the subject of crowd numbers, depending on the reason for the crowd
being there. Thus, the numbers of people demonstrating against the
government of the day in progressive causes are always understated, at
an exchange rate of about 2 Real to the Plod. So a
demonstration against illegal war in which 1 500 000 people took part
will be stated to have comprised only 750 000 people.
Conversely, a demonstration in favour of mammal-mangling by country
landowners and their tame serfs which contained about 700 000 will be
stated to have been attended by 700 000 people.
It follows, therefore, that on occasions where a large crowd would
please our rulers, the exchange rate varies yet again, to anything
between 2 and 100 Plod to the Real. So, "a crowd of 20
000" in this context means somewhere between 5 000 and Arthur and Freda
Popplewell from Castle View and their equally elderly Yorkshire terrier.
4) I caught a brief glimpse of the 'blessing' (with the sound off,
of course). Blair was there, of course, wearing his 'I'm really
sincere and serious, me' face. But can someone tell me why that
wretched Parker-Knoll woman seemed to have had a head-on collision with
a porcupine?
And another thing: if the Church Of State's rules meant that they
couldn't actually marry in a church, how come they could have
what was, in the church's eyes, an unofficial marriage blessed
in a chapel?
But then again, as my compatriot Jan Morris has pointed out, god is
only invited to these things in his capacity as landlord, and as that
particular sect seems to worship crowns of gold rather than a crown of
thorns, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised to see 'special
arrangements' being made.
One final thought: it has been immensely gratifying over the last few weeks to see letters-page correspondents railing against the fact that Camilla will be "their" queen some day, and that they won't stand for it. Tough luck, tiara-lovers! Monarchism means never having a say...sorry!
Date: 26/03/05
The True Meaning And Origin Of Easter
Joe Gordon knows.
Date: 24/03/05
Oops!
It's only taken me about eighteen months to realise why the Gallery pages were taking so long to load, even on broadband...
...I will repeat one hundred times, "Changing the size of images on screen does not reduce the image file size on loading the page!"
Sorry folks. I've replaced the link images with proper thumbnails now.
Date: 11/03/05
The End Of Another Story...
There was great excitement in our house in about 1972. We finally rented a television set (those were the days when you had to rent because they were expensive and not very reliable) which could receive BBC2, the Corporation's flagship 'serious' channel.
(This was still black & white for us, though, not colour; although our slightly scatty neighbour Ada said that they were going to get a 'BBC2 aerial' "so we can watch The Queen in colour". No matter that they still only had a black & white set....)
Starting to watch BBC2 was a true opening of the eyes. There were documentary series, such as Horizon (mostly science and technology) or The World About Us (natural history and anthropology); rather 'highbrow' (remember that term?) quiz programmes like Call My Bluff (only a truly meritocratic network could host a programme about words where one team captain lisped (Frank Muir) and the other (Patrick Campbell) had a terrible stammer) or Face The Music (including that cultural icon, Joseph Cooper's dummy keyboard).
There were other strange delights, too. As a boy with what would now be called geekish tendencies (I can't quite recall what it was called at the time....Ah, yes! 'Weird'...), I was drawn to the Transmitter Information bulletins broadcast up to three times a day, and the Trade Test Colour Films, which didn't entirely fulfil their remit on a 20" monochrome Pye set, but it's the thought that counts. These films were often made by companies such as Shell or Philips as sort-of-but-not-quite promotional movies. Philips' Evoluon, about the technology exhibition the company staged in Eindhoven, was a particular favourite.
There were entertainment programmes too, mind. But whereas BBC1's and ITV's tended to be either down-home tat (The Generation Game) or just sitcoms from hell (Love Thy Neighbour), BBC2's had at least the veneer of sophistication and/or daring. The former quality was shown by the variety programmes which always seemed to be hosted by Kenneth Williams or Lulu, and which expressed their suaveness by featuring French singers and gave off the overwhelming aura of a boîte de nuit.
The daring, however, at least to my 10-year-old understanding of it, was exemplified by this man:
