A cold end to the year. I went out for a walk this afternoon and found that The Pool was completely iced over, much to the annoyance of the birds who were trying to swim on it.
The batteries on my camera were nearly dead, but I managed to get a few shots in. This is the best of them.
Time for one of those tedious end-of-year pieces, I suppose.
On the personal front, I've had better years. True, I'm still alive and capable of getting out of bed of a morning, but the impulse to do so is somewhat lacking nowadays. This is because I had my job removed from me back in September due to nothing more than administrative convenience and the desperate need by the higher-ups to make it look like they're meeting their arbitrary targets for cutting staff numbers. So, no matter that I was bloody good at the job (producing quantity and quality), I had to go and be sent to do a job which is a long way beneath my capabilities and which is subject to all of the wilder idiocies which can be dreamed of by management consultants.
And, of course, we're at the start of A Recession (of which more below), which means that alternative, more satisfying employment is all but impossible to come by.
The one saving grace (apart from the fact that I've ended up working on a team devoid of 'moodies' and whiners) is that I went part-time, so only have to waste six hours of my day rather than seven and a half. This enabled me to start putting the garden in some sort of order after years of unavoidable neglect. There's a fair bit still to be done, but I've made a good start.
It would have been a better one but for the really crappy weather we had this year. I don't expect long, hot summers anymore like we had when I were a lad, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more than two or three nice days between the end of May and the end of September. But that's all we had. As a result, I never got to go anywhere this summer - not even a six-hour walk - and so my photography opportunities were similarly severely limited.
Slightly on the up-side, I had three more pieces published at Transdiffusion. One of these was described by an editor as the most erudite piece they'd ever published, and another led to an interesting link-up which provided another outlet for what little creativity I'm capable of.
There were the standard number of sad departures during the year, and 2008 seemed to be The Year That Comedy Died. Apart from the humorous columnist Miles Kington (January), we lost the brilliant wit and timing of Humphrey Lyttleton (April) and the very different passionate and perceptive comedy of George Carlin (June). Add in 'Utah' Phillips (May) and Harold Pinter (December) from amongst those artists whose political and ethical philosophies informed their life's work, and the fact that such nonentities such as Russell Brand are now thought of as 'the cutting edge of comedy', and it's been a good year only for the conformist, back-scratching cowards in the artistic world.
Which brings me on to the subject of The World And Things In General.
Here at home, we continue to suffer under a régime of repressed and repressing morons, who will not hesitate to interfere with our rights to free communication, open exchange of information, and even our fundamental right to privacy in our homes and security from attack from state or corporate agents therein. Still, in the face of their imminent demise, these thugs continue to believe that you can make entire populations 'virtuous' and conformist by Act of Parliament (or, more frequently, by ministerial fiat which by-passes even the most cursory of democratic scrutiny), and that we poor, deluded, junk-addled button-brains must be 'protected' from anything and everything which the régime finds (or pretends to find) vaguely unsettling - be it public protest against high-level corruption and illegality, the dangers of finding out that large sections of the police are effectively out of control, or even pictures of consenting adults tying each other up with ropes and whipping one another. There is no corner of our lives which they do not seek to control, and that itch is being scratched every single day.
And of course, we now have the early stages of a recession. A recession which was caused by the greed of the private corporations up whose rectal orifice the régime climbed over a decade ago and from which it refuses to be excreted. So it is that those buccaneers of 'free enterprise', who believed that they must be allowed to hold on to every last penny of their profits and bonuses and that government - or even the ever-vaguer notion of 'society' - were merely obstructions in the path of 'wealth creation', having sowed the seeds of their own downfall by their lunatic practices suddenly became supplicants at the table of intervention. And they got it, of course. Tens of billions of pounds of it. Of our money; the money of those whom the bankers and their conspicuously-consuming friends had been lulling and gulling for over a decade. They couldn't be allowed to fail. Meanwhile, of course, tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs as what is left of the real economy is allowed to go screw itself. We already had virtually no manufacturing sector left worthy of the name, but now other sectors are closing down by the day.
And the arse who sits on top of it all was the Chancellor Of The Exchequer who rumbled on about the benefits of having all those 'wealth creators' buzzing like flies around the Casino Of Shit known collectively as The City, who wittered on about the benefits of an expanded 'service sector' (i.e., call centres and burger bars) and the advantages of the glorious future awaiting us if we embraced the 'knowledge-based economy'. As a result, we import just about every physical good from low-wage, sweatshop economies and we can no longer even afford the imports, especially with an over-hyped currency now at parity with the Euro and only managing to stay there because the Yankee Dollar is suffering from the China Syndrome (i.e. it's only being held as high as it is - as low as it is - because of the Chinese banks' holdings in $$$s).
The response of the régime - apart from throwing our money at the crooks and chancers who brought us to this pass, of course - is to start the blame game. The poor, the unemployed and the unemployable are once again being targeted as being responsible for everything that has gone wrong, and it is they who must pay as Labour and Conservative parties engage in a contest of dick-waving over who can 'crack down' on the 'workshy' and the 'scroungers' and the 'dependency culture' in the most brutal fashion. We have been here before. We are going there again.
In other developments, the Americans have elected a non-white person as President. However, they have elected someone who is much a part of the standard pattern of Washington circle-jerking as any of his predecessors. His cabinet-in-waiting is a mish-mash of Clinton retreads (including the Marie Antoinette of Arkansas herself) and people for whom even Monkeyboy had no further use. Obama is going to disappoint all those liberals - especially in Europe - who seemed to think that positive, progressive change was possible in the terminally-corrupt cesspit of corporate favours which now constitutes 'business as usual' on the banks of the Potomac. We can adduce this not only from his stated commitment to continue the war on Afghanistan and extending same if necessary to Iran, but also from his response - which observers well-disposed towards him might call 'non-committal', but which the rest of us would view as the same old cowardice - to the ongoing atrocities being carried out under the sign of the Star of David on the hapless and defenceless population of Gaza.
This one has run and run, and will, alas, continue to do so. When the Palestinians conform with the demands of the world's major powers and hold democratic elections, only to be placed under sanction, embargo and siege because they had the temerity to vote for who they wanted; when the US and Israel connive at an attempted coup which splits the government of Palestine into a complaisant Fatah in the West Bank and a resistant Hamas in Gaza; when Israel then claims to be observing the terms of a truce with Hamas only to undermine it with an illegal blockade of Gaza and the continuing expansion of illegal colonies on the West Bank; when Israel nakedly breaks the truce by bombing Gaza when the world is watching the US elections and then accuses Hamas of breaking it when all Hamas said was that they saw no point in renewing a truce which wasn't being adhered to by the other side; when the State of The Self-Righteous People then uses a small number of attacks on it by puny rockets as a pretext for a rain of destructive ordnance from the safe distance of hundreds of feet up in the air which has, to date, killed hundreds of civilians and further degraded Gaza's precarious infrastructure; and when they've done all this and western governments make no more than mild tut-tutting noises and say it's the Palestinians' fault anyway, our tame (and tamed) corporate media parrot the Israeli line without even trying to present any other version of the catastrophe (other than to talk hand-wringingly of a 'humanitarian crisis' without describing the process whereby it has become one), and the soon-to-be-leader of the 'free world' says nothing for fear of offending the highly-effective lobbying groups he spent the whole of 2008 sucking up to; when, as I say, all this happens, you know that nothing has changed, nor is likely to change. The protégés of the planet's sole superpower will be given carte blanche to do what they will, whilst anyone getting in the way (either on purpose or by chance) will be silenced, be it by censorship (including that most insidious form, 'self-censorship'), bombs from 15 000 feet, or by having bullets pumped into your brain at point-blank range by 'security operatives' while you're taking the train to work.
In 2009 we, the people, will face many challenges. The economic bust will lead to civil unrest in many countries, which the powerful will seek to divert into setting people against each other and inflating xenophobia and intolerance, which they will then be able to use as an excuse for further restricting our right to hold those self-same powerful to account for their incompetence and criminality. Attempts at naked censorship will take another leap forward, despite the clear impracticality of doing it effectively for the officially-given reasons. The rich and powerful will seek increasingly to insulate themselves from all consequences of their actions in the past, present and future.
We must continue to be watchful, and continue to act wherever we can and however we can to defend ourselves from the increasingly aggressive and dishonest use of state and corporate power.
Due to an unfortunate failure of our recently-installed Bull-O-Matic™ Government Statement Obfuscation software, a recent press release by the Foreign Secretary, Mr David Verybland, to the effect that his Department had
"...long experience of giving a lead to the US Government on issues such as climate change, disarmament and human rights..."
appeared as
"...long experience of giving head to the US Government on issues such as climate change, disarmament and human rights..."
We very much regret the error, no one individual was to blame, lessons will be learned, etc.
The 78s conversion programme is proceeding satisfactorily, so I'd like to share another one with you. This is particularly for my American reader; a rendering of Sousa's Stars And Stripes For Ever by The Silver Star Band under the baton of the English composer Albert W Ketèlbey.
As far as I can ascertain, it was released in about 1916, and may have been linked to the Americans' entry into The Great War (although the flip side has a recording of Wagner's Under The Double Eagle march!).
As before, click on the image to download the file.
"...And May Flights Of Soup Dragons Sing Thee To Thy Rest"
Oliver Postgate
Animator and author
b. 12 April 1925, d. 8 December 2008
I'm not quite sure why I reacted to strongly to the news of Oliver Postgate's death. He was 83, and had had a great run. So why did I find myself in tears?
I could be all high-falutin' and say that it was recognition of the passing of one of the great talents of "The Golden Age Of Children's Television". That would explain part of it; but I suspect that it was mostly because another part of my childhood has gone from the world.
My first encounter with Oliver Postgate's work was probably at about the age of four or five, when Pogle's Wood appeared as part of the Watch With Mother strand on BBC1. Later, I was enthralled by The Clangers, but Noggin The Nog and Ivor The Engine passed me by somewhat, and by the time the legendary Bagpuss came along I was too old, too cynical and too worldly-wise to find any charm in it. My loss, I suspect.
The productions of Postgate and his Smallfilms partner Peter Firmin always had high production values for such low-budget, do-what-you-can-with-what-you've-got programmes, and one could only admire the quality of execution, and be utterly charmed by the stories and the way they were told.
Some might think them (and Postgate's narration of many of them) as being too cosy or gentle, but despite the dear-at-a-penny-a-ton opinions of the self-regarding cretins who have ruined children's television in this country over the last thirty years, what children want are good stories imaginatively told. With Smallfilms's output, this was invariably what they got.
What they also got (though probably didn't know or care about at the time) was an undercurrent of subversion. Postgate came from a long line of radicals, and this often found its way into his work. Without being all Mark Lawson about it, The Clangers were a sort of model Utopian-socialist society, and their swanee-whistle speech gave such a natural rebel as Postgate scope for slipping in lines which would give today's po-faced MBA television executives the vapours. In the following clip, listen out for the first line of 'dialogue' (at about the 55-second mark):
Yes, the Clanger says, "Oh, sod it! The bloody thing's stuck again!" When the first Clanger soft toys were produced many years later, guess what the Clanger said when you pressed his tummy?
Thank you, Oliver, for your imagination and sense of fun.
After a gap of a couple of years or so, I've put an e-mail link back on the Home Page. I'll be monitoring the spam levels for a while, and if it gets out of hand I'll have to withdraw it again. Oh, and if you have Javascript disabled, it won't work anyway. That is all.
It seems scarcely believable now, but just over forty years ago - when I was about six or seven years old - the only records we had in the house were a small and random selection of the old shellac 78rpm discs, and the only thing we had to play them on was - and I'm not lying here - a wind-up gramophone (that's phonograph to my American reader). It wasn't until my brother handed down his old 'Emisonic' that we got electrified, as it were - prior to that, 78s were all we could play because that's all the old wind-up and its thick needle could handle.
The records themselves were, as I've implied, a pretty incongruous bunch. I can't imagine that any of them were acquired new by my parents, although one or two of the later ones had belonged to my brother from the beginning of his record buying in the late 1950s.
Because of my tendency not to throw things away, I've managed to keep them all until now. This despite the fact that I've had nothing to play them on since my father's old Grundig radiogram (and that's another word you don't often see or hear nowadays!) packed up about seven or eight years ago.
Last week, though, I decided to buy myself an early Christmas present:
This is the Ion TTUSB05XL. I bought it from our local Maplin's - they've got a special offer going on it at the moment which has knocked £30 off the price. It'll come in handy for transferring my vinyl to CD-R for backup, but it'll also be a means of getting those old 78s preserved before they get beyond playability. This meant that I had to buy an extra stylus to play them, and the turntable itself doesn't play at that speed, but the Audacity software which comes with the turntable enables you to do the job after you've captured the original disc at 45 or 33.
I've started on the project already, but have had problems: a couple of the 78s are only 5½ or 6 inches in diameter and also have very small labels, so the mechanism won't allow you to get to the end of the track. The other problem is the condition of the discs I've tried so far. Let's face it, many of them are very old indeed (some over eighty years old) and had been played to death with the old steel needles. They're also absolutely bloody rammy (see here - fifth definition, please, not the first). I'm trying the standard method I developed when having to clean up old vinyl I'd bought at record fairs (which involves lukewarm water, bath soap, a flannel and a fluffy towel), and seem to be getting somewhere with that, but there's only so much you can do with them after all this time, as you will tell from what follows.
Some of these discs are old childhood friends and, given that they must nearly all be out of copyright a long time ago, I might share the odd one with you if only to try to explain why I turned out like this.
Eclipse Records were manufactured by the Crystalate company from about 1931 to 1935, and were 8" discs which were sold in Woolworth's (odd to think that my small collection of Eclipse discs might outlast the shop which sold them) at what would later be called 'budget' prices, i.e. cheap.
Lizzie, Come In And Shut The Door by Bert Layton is one of the label's earliest releases, and I played it a lot when I was a licklun - so much so that, although I hadn't heard it for at least thirty years, I could sing along with just about all of it when I transferred it to my hard drive the other night. As I've said before, music may be the nearest we can ever come to a working time machine.
I've done my best at cleaning the disc and the file I made of it, but it's still a bit ropey, especially near the end. Click on the image to download the file.
I have to say that the leaking of the BNP's membership list all over the internet has provided me with a bit of a chuckle, but at the same time some cause to ponder.
I detest those Führerprinzip-worshipping, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals - and if they are examples of the white Aryan race, then a meteorite strike may be our best hope - with a will. For all the smart clothing of its increasingly hangdog-looking leader, these are the same old turds-in-human-form which have comprised the Brit hard-right since the seventies, when the National Front were on the go. I also - though largely from the standpoint of taste - abhor their attempts to use Celtic-twilight mythology to justify their ideology, and their shameless attempts to mask their innate anti-Semitism by trying to jump onto the various campaigns for the rights of the Palestinians.
And yet, the data which has been released into the wild is, essentially, private information. As someone who stands firmly against all the State's current attempts to log, code, register and accumulate the most sensitive facts about our lives, I might be expected to say that the leak is a disgraceful breach of people's fundamental right to privacy.
Well yes, it is. But...
(I suppose you were waiting for that "but...").
The difference (if there is any) is that the State's schemes are - either de jure or de facto - compulsory. We have had little if any say in the setting up of the variety of databases with which those who hold power now (and will hold it in the future) intend to monitor the minutiae of our lives. Indeed, more and more evidence of both the cunning and the arrogance of our rulers emerges all the time; the latest being details of the measures that will be levied against those who refuse to have anything to do with the National Identity Register (one of which is effectively to ban them from leaving the country by refusing to supply them with a passport or a renewal of one) or those who don't keep their details up to date (a fine of £250 a throw, up to a maximum of £1000 with any five-year period, plus the prospect of having the bailiffs - who have recently been handed increased powers to do things like this - smash your door down and steal your belongings for non-compliance).
By contrast, membership of a political party (any political party) is a voluntary act, an act of commission rather than omission. If you volunteer for something, then you should at least go into it with your eyes open. It is rather difficult to imagine that all the people on the BNP's membership roll joined completely unaware that they were signing up to a party which has racial bigotry as its central plank of policy. Nevertheless, these people are now shitting a stick at the prospect of being 'outed'. Why so?
One would think that, if you were going to nail your colours to the mast in that way, you wouldn't mind people knowing it. Joining a political party as an act of will and then wanting to keep quiet about it is surely analogous with being a fundamentalist Christian evangelist and not telling anyone; you would be defeating the whole object of what you claimed you were doing.
The trouble is, of course, that the BNP is no ordinary party. Its policies (and you'll have to excuse my sweeping assumption here that they have more than just the one of "We 'ate wogs") and the people associated with it make sure of that. That is why membership of it is - if I can be excused the word - verboten for such as police officers and others in sensitive positions.
(For the record, I don't approve of banning political parties unless they have - as bodies - been proven to have been involved in serious illegality. I remember the thoroughly risible ban on the voices of members of Sinn Féin being broadcast over twenty years ago. Like the current tendency of the Castilian government to get one of its tame, Francoist judges to ban any and every organisation which emerges claiming for speak for the Basques, such actions merely make those who order them look like - to use a term from political science - a bunch of raving pricks. Likewise with the BNP - the best way of exposing them is to allow them to expose themselves. Every time they've managed to get enough sufficiently deluded people to vote them into council seats, those councillors have shown in short order that they would have difficulty finding their own gonads with a GPS system).
So why are the members of the BNP - apart from the ones whose membership is deemed incompatible with their employment - so far up in arms about their status being revealed that they are trying to use the Human Rights Act - which their policy states they wish to repeal because it was based on proposals drawn up by nasty foreigners who are all in the pay of the Zionist Occupation Government, or some such cack - in order to seek redress?
Perhaps it's because they know what such information is capable of creating if it falls into the hands of their opponents. After all, it's what the BNP and its various allies and splinter groups have been doing for years. There's an infamous website (no, I'm not going to provide a link to it) upon which have been published the names, addresses, phone numbers and - often - photographs of anti-fascist campaigners and their families, and even of journalists who have worked to expose the far right for what they really are. Frequently, this has led to acts of intimidation, threat or even actual violence against those who have been thus 'exposed'. Sometimes, what goes around comes around, and that must have given the closet racial supremacists a troubled night's sleep or two. Although I hope, of course, that nothing of that nature would happen to them, if only because I don't think people should drag themselves down to that level.
What is interesting about the leak of the list is the fact that it has not come from campaigning journalists or anti-fascist activists, but (apparently) from a disgruntled former official of the party, possibly as a way of discrediting Griffin, who is regarded by some elements of his gang as not being extreme enough. It's interesting in that it shows that the far right is just as factional and fractious as its equivalents on the left. And while they are fighting each other, of course, they're not trying to fight the rest of us and we can get on with living in the real world.
At this point, I must confess that the only reason for my writing this piece was to provide some background for the alien reader before linking to this wonderful re-subtitling of a scene from the movie Untergang (Downfall) by Chris Applegate:
For a while now (ever since the revamp of the site's design in the middle of last year) I've been unhappy with the Links page on this site.
Part of the problem was to decide exactly how I was going to redesign it.
Searching around the Net gave me a few ideas to work on. So last week I set to it.
Only to find, once again, that cross-browser compatability is a bit like Gandhi's description of Western civilisation, i.e. it would be a very good idea. What worked in one browser wouldn't work in another. Effects which looked one way in Firefox looked completely different in Opera. And, as ever, nothing worked properly in Internet Explorer.
After a few a days of testing (and swearing) I reached some sort of compromise with the grand ideals I'd set out with a few days before, and found what they call a modus vivendi; in other words, a fudge.
So, it'll work fine in Firefox and SeaMonkey. It'll also work in Opera (and in testing that, I found a couple of other issues with Opera, one of which is still outstanding and I can't find out what's causing it). It'll also work in Internet Explorer, but only after a fashion, because IE doesn't support the :hover feature properly. It'll still provide the links, though.
The new-look Links page should be released into the wild in the next day or two, although it might still get tweaked a bit as I go along.
I've also changed the links in the navigation sidebar so that they look more like buttons. Yeah, big deal. Looks OK, though.
President-elect Obama sends one of his team to southern Africa to spread the message of hope to the inhabitants.
He stands before a crowd gathered in a small, dust-blown town, and says:
"President-elect Barack Obama wants you to know that your concerns are close to his heart!"
The crowd shouts, "Ubangwele!"
The American goes on, "Barack Obama wants you to know that, as an African-American, he feels your need for prosperity and democracy!"
Louder, the crowd shouts, "Ubangwele!!!"
Finally, the aide cries, "Barack Obama promises that, when he takes office, he will make the ending of poverty and disease in Africa his top priority!"
Louder still the crowd screams, "UBANGWELE!!!!"
The American gets down from the stage and says to his host, "Well, I think that went really well! Oh, I need to go to the bathroom - where is it?"
His host points over to the left of them and says, "It's just by that stand of trees over there, but be careful you don't tread in any ubangwele..."
Having spent a large part of this blowy, rainy day trying to redesign the Links page (bloody Internet Explorer! Sodding Microsoft! Ever heard of 'standards compliance', you joiks?), and then doing a little Blogwanderung (coming across any blog made by an American and seeing how far down the page I have to scroll before they mention their Special Relationship With Gahhd), I thought I'd let you see a picture of someone else who lives here:
For the third year in a row, JudgeCo™ is proud to present its annual calendar.
I've been surprised at how many times the 2008 ones were downloaded: in fact, there seem to have been people who were still downloading them right up to when I took them from the site a couple of weeks ago.
There was a slight behind-the-scenes change this year. Instead of using Microsoft Publisher (which is still installed on my old Windows 98 machine), I thought I'd try using OpenOffice's Calc program which is installed on my XP rig.
Apart from the odd quirk which I hadn't been expecting, this seemed to work very well - especially as OpenOffice has an 'Export to PDF' function which Office 2000 doesn't.
(I daresay most of you use Adobe Acrobat to read .pdf files with. You needn't, you know. For some time I've been using Foxit Reader. It's a far smaller download, it doesn't bloat your system, and it does just about anything most people would need for reading .pdf files.)
The photographs are slightly smaller this year, which means that the files are only 3.4 to 3.8 MB in size rather than last year's mammoth 4 MB+.
The photographs don't necessarily reflect the time of the year the page refers to (although they were all taken this year), and don't range - geographically speaking - very far from home. This is because our shitty summer made it impossible for me to go anywhere further afield than a couple of miles.
I'm particularly proud of the April one, and I hope no-one is freaked out by the September one.
As with last year, there are three versions: a plain one, with nothing other than days and dates; a UK one which shows public holidays and when the clocks go forward and back; and a US one which shows federal holidays.
Click on your icon of choice below to download one. Hell, download all of them if you want! All you then need to do is to print it out and bind it.
So, Mr, Mrs and Ms America, you're gonna be voting this weekend?
Well done and good luck.
Now, this is not going to be a case of yet another silly blogger telling you which lever or button to press. After all, I'm a European. We've only had something which can reasonably called democracy here for about eighty years or so (the odd meandering off the path notwithstanding), so we haven't yet learned the most important lessons that your land - as the true home of democracy in the modern era - has to show us; namely that it is crucial to the health of a democracy for participation in it (and effective control of it) to be vested in the hands of the largest number of vested interests and corporate sponsors as possible - though we do seem to be catching you up quite nicely in that department at the moment.
Beside which, trying to tell - or even suggest to - a population one of whose most attractive features is its innate contrariness which way they should vote is a futile exercise. One of the English so-called 'quality' newspapers (that is to say, one not owned by Canadians, Channel Island tax-dodgers or Australians pretending to be American for business reasons) tried that the last time round, and it led to nothing other than an entire state going red when it just might have gone blue without the interference.
(Oh, and it's really rather confusing that your slightly more liberal party should be denoted by the colour blue and your distinctly illiberal one by the colour red; that's not the way we do things over here. Can't you do something about that?)
You see, I don't think it really matters which way you vote. Certainly viewed from over here it probably doesn't matter. Oh, I know there are many Europeans - perhaps the majority - who will shake their heads if you elect a mentally-unstable hypocrite and the Bridgegate Bimbo into the highest office in your land (or the third highest if you count the CEO of Exxon and Bill O'Reilly). It would be a head-shake based on the sort of sadness you feel when you see a friend who is determined to go on a path of self-degradation and you know that there's nothing you can do to stop them, because they have got to want to stop before it'll do any good.
But, lest you think that I am dropping hints here, I can't really see what it is about Obama that so many people over here are falling over themselves not only to praise him but to actually come over to your happy land and campaign on his behalf. The people who are doing this, of course, are on what may broadly be termed the Left, although given that these are frequently the same people who have spent the last decade or so supporting and campaigning on behalf of such well-known god-hating Commie faggots as Tony Blair, the description should be taken with the same scepticism with which you would regard the result of a WWE contest. These are the people who - shockingly - consider your forty-second President to be a cretinous, credulous numbskull and would consider almost anyone else to be preferable. Especially if that 'anyone else' happens to be of a non-white colouration and can be used as a means to absolve themselves (at least, in their own eyes) of whatever guilts to which they may be heirs. But then, what can you expect from liberals (a word which isn't a perjorative term here yet, but with the help of such clear-minded visionaries as Melanie Phillips it soon will be)?
Certainly, the junior senator from Illinois seems a personable sort of man who appears to be capable of some degree of independent thought and an ability to express himself cogently. Although that could all be just coaching, of course. I saw his speech in Philadelphia a month or two back - at the height of the Jeremiah Wright Affair - and thought it struck a pretty good balance between the combative and the cutesy-pie; enough to make the question enough of a non-issue to make his opponents seem like a bunch of hypocritical obsessives (which would be grossly unfair, of course, but this is politics were talking about here).
But then that's indicative of the problem. The trouble is, you see, that looking at it from here, although it's not difficult to differentiate between the characters of the candidiates (and certainly not difficult to separate their choice of Veeps-in-waiting - one of them doesn't have a single original thing to say, and the other is Sarah Palin) it's not easy to see what the real differences between the parties themselves might be. Many of us have long viewed the American political scene (at least, as it is presented to us by the media - ours and yours) with some bemusement. This bemusement used to be amusement, until we started to develop our politics in the mould of yours, and we too ended up with two (or more) right-of-centre parties constantly manoeuvering to exchange coats for a while.
I'm told you have voting machines in the US now. This is really rather appropriate, because the politicians that you vote for or against (and, it seems, sometimes doing the one when you thought you were doing the other) are little more than parts of a machine. The term 'machine politics' is, after all, yet another of America's great inventions. As a result, it doesn't really matter who you vote for: the same old cogs keep going round, the user interface will be revamped from time to time, but the machine keeps on running just the same as before.
The public faces of your parties may be enough to sway enough people, but the men behind the curtain keep chugging along the same old way. This is why I can't get enthused about young Barack (I call him 'young' because in political terms he is, and he's less than a year older than I am). Because I know that, for all his personability, for all his ability to get a message across, behind him stands the Democratic Party. The party of "Let's all vote for the Patriot Act", the party of Nancy "Impeachment is off the table" Pelosi and Harry Reid, the party of Joe "Vote McCain" Lieberman. In other words, the same bunch of cowardly hacks who not only permitted Bush 42 to emasculate your Constitution and Bill Of Rights (two of the most inspiring documents in human history), but encouraged him to do so (and to go much further) by their supine acquiescence to what they judged to be the mood of the times. If the US is nearer to being a police state now than at any time since the passing of the Posse Commitatus Act, then it is only because those in power during the last eight years have been allowed to push it that way with the aid of the Congressional Democrats (with the odd honourable exception such as Russ Feingold).
This leads to elections such as the one you are now having, where the substantive differences on policy are practically impossible to discern. In such circumstances presentation and image are all, and politics becomes less the art of the possible and more the art of the plausible. Hence the concentration on how much money the respective campaigns have raised, as if that was the point of campaigning at all. And, when the differences between the parties are infinitesimal, this leads to both sides trying to gain the slightest advantage in whatever way they can - including the illegal removal of voting rights for those deemed to be likely to vote for the other side. On the key issues - the economy as it affects the working and non-working poor alike, the environment, foreign policy - viewed from here, there isn't a significant change likely to come from changing the face behind the desk in the Oval Office - even if that face is of a different hue than usual. The machine will grind on, there will continue to be welfare for the rich and workfare for the poor, there will continue to be natural disasters whose effects will be exacerbated by official indolence, corruption and/or cheese-paring, there will continue to be the mad scramble to gain control of as much of the planet's resources as can be gained by armed force or the threat of it. And the rest of us will still wonder how it was that the Great Experiment was allowed to go so badly awry.
Because 'gone awry' it most certainly has. It's not a modern phenomenon, though; it's as old as lobbying special interests themselves. But what's the alternative? There are, I'm informed, other candidates running in this election, although even the candidates' own next-door neighbours could be forgiven for not knowing if they rely on the media for their information. Voting for one of them will make next to no difference to the result (despite Democrats continuing to whine on about how Nader cost them in 2000), but at least you might be able to salve your conscience by doing so. It would mean that whoever did get elected, you could always claim when things go (further) down the crapper that it wasn't your fault. Except that it is, because you (in the plural, as in y'all) have allowed things to reach this pretty pass, and unless you get active and dang quick about it, nothing will change for the better.
Anyway, as I say, I'm not telling you which way to vote - it would be counterproductive in any case, and I'm only an ignorant, backward, mullah-lovin' European pussy who doesn't have two hundred and thirty two years of history to learn from. Besides which - whatever I might think - although Obama looks as if he'll win just at the moment, we know that there's many a slip between the polling booth and the Supreme Court.
All I say to you is vote! And then when you end up with the same bottle of warm racoon's piss, but just with a different label stuck on it, try to spend the next four years thinking about how you're going to change things. Oh, and please stop lecturing us about democracy - we did invent it, after all.
I'm studiously avoiding blogging about work at the moment - it's too depressing for words.
Instead, here's the video for Genesis' (minor) hit single of 1981, "Keep It Dark", one of my favourite Genesis tracks. This was filmed at great expense (about 14 Dutch guilders by the look of it):
To follow up, here's Phil Collins' son Simon's 2007 cover version. Little in the way of visuals, but just listen - it's quite uncanny:
Update: I'm afraid the record bizscum have been at it again, and you can't hear Simon Collins' cover version here.
I also went for a walk on Thursday afternoon as well.
It was more or less the same walk, too. This is why.
I recently bought a new 2Gb SD memory card for my camera. I've had problems with it. Firstly, when I tried to review what I'd taken with it, the camera would lock up and the only way of getting it to work again was to take the batteries out for a moment.
The second problem made itself apparent after my Wednesday stroll, in that about half the pictures I'd taken (or thought I'd taken) weren't on the card when I went to upload it to the PC. So I had to do the same route again, this time with my old 516Mb card in.
I suspect that the camera can't handle the volume of data transfer between it and the card. I'm thinking about getting a more advanced camera soon.
Some of the results of my second (successful) outing will appear in The Gallery soon.
Evidence that even the more knowledgeable of us sometimes find ourselves in the category of 'system-proof idiot'...
A few weeks ago, I started having trouble sending e-mails which had attachments. The progress bar would go part of the way, then stop. I would then get a message saying that the SMTP server had refused or dropped the connection. This didn't happen with every e-mail which had attachments - just with most of them.
I tried everything I could to sort it out: I changed some configurations in Thunderbird, checked the router settings, created a new profile; nothing seemed to do the trick.
I asked on the PlusNet Community Forum and the Thunderbird Forum. I got either suggestions I'd already tried, or more ideas which didn't solve the problem. Searching around the internet, I found other people who have had the same issue, but with no solution.
Finally, one of the moderators on the Thunderbird forum (let's hear it for 'SK'!) insisted I check the router again, and refer to the manufacturer if necessary.
It was while browsing Netgear's own technical support forum that I found the answer (big hand to 'Adalessa' on that forum!) .
On the Netgear DG834, there's a firewall setting which allows the user to open or close Instant Messaging (IM) ports. I then remembered that I'd changed it from the default setting to 'Close' a few weeks ago because I don't use IM and so thought I could improve my security.
Well, I probably did, but only at the cost of the router firewall blocking most e-mails with attachments over about 300KB. Oddly, this was only the case with Thunderbird: Outlook 2000 on my old machine (via the same router) sent the e-mails OK.
I changed the setting back to 'Open' and tried sending the problem e-mails again (but to one of my own addresses). It went through without a problem.
Would someone pass the salt and pepper, please. I have a crow to eat...
The hot and humid weather ("puthery" weather, as they say in Staffordshire and thereabouts) is due to break in the next few hours.
I've done very little photography this summer. Basically, the weather hasn't been good enough for long enough and - when it has been good - there have been various other calls on my time.
Just a few minutes ago, though, I thought I'd better take a few snaps in the garden.
On the whole, it's been quite a disappointing summer for flowers. The buddleia globosa hasn't been its usual manic self, the weigala produced five flowers in early June and then sod all, and my two small but feral rose bushes have finally given up the ghost.
Still and all, there are still sights to be seen. Here are some of them.
Marguerite (Leucanthemum vulgare).
Fuchsia - "The world's most carefully spelled flower".
Hypericum.
Antirrhinum - "The world's most incorrectly spelled flower".
Stuck at home today waiting for the guy to come and change the gas meter, so I did some weeding on the front path.
After a little while, I noticed this cheeky young feller:
No fear in his mind, as he darted back and to picking up the woodlice and other creatures I'd evicted from the crevices. More than once, he came within inches of me, with a look of, "Well? Get on with it, then!". So I just had to capture the moment.
Hell, there's too much fun going out of the world again.
George Carlin was a disciple of the legendary Lenny Bruce, but whereas Bruce's take on the world and its mysteries was as laid-back and nuanced as the jazz milieu from which he sprung, Carlin was more a rock'n'roll comedian. The humour was much more hard-edged and far angrier. Whether it was the way in which the powerful abuse language in order to deceive, or the hypocrisy of the self-righteous of all sorts, or the perverting effects of religion, Carlin went for the target. He often hit the bullseye.
Update: At this point, there were four embedded video clips of George in action. Unfortunately, the first three have now been removed from their source, no doubt under pressure from the corporate police, the so-called 'rights holders' to whom, I would like to think, George carlin would have screamed a loud "Fuck you!"
This fourth clip, however, remains (at least for the time being), and I think it's more than germane to the occasion:
A completely invented occasion, of course. Much like those other well-known festivals such as Kiwi Fruit Fortnight, National USB Keyboard Month or World Scabies Year, it was invented by that collective of flagrant prostitutes called the advertising industry in order to sell what otherwise could not be sold.
As a result, I always felt uneasy about it. My own father was a no-nonsense sort of bloke, and it seemed totally incongruous to be showering him with toffees (or whatever) on one day a year; moreover, the fact that it was only one day a year led to me to wonder what he thought that we thought of him the rest of the time. That's the falseness of the occasion, of course, in that it seeks to concentrate into one day expressions and emotions which should be available or apparent at any time of our choosing.
That was a long time ago, though. At least in my case, because I have never had to be on the receiving end of such a deeply ambiguous event.
I have never seriously wanted to own a child. I have spent my whole life trying to evade responsibility, and have accepted it only when I have had no realistic choice in the matter. I have improved down the years to the point where I can just about shoulder responsibility for myself, for inanimate objects or for anonymous processes, but beyond that? People or other animate objects? Not if I can help it. The idea that someone else's well-being (be it a wife, a child or a budgie) depended primarily on me produces the waking equivalent of a cheese nightmare. This is one reason why what I laughingly call my career has reached a cul-de-sac: the next level up would involve that dreaded concept of 'management', and I know that I would take to such a thing like a duck to a vat of concentrated hydrochloric acid.
This is not to say that I haven't wondered, however. I've sometimes lain awake at nights pondering what parenthood would have been like, how it would have been if circumstances had fallen otherwise. I've even populated this experiment with three sons: one placid and stolid, one mildly hyperactive and artistic and one calculating and faintly sinister. Hell, I've even given names to these apparitions.
Something interesting about it, though, is that while I can imagine what these non-existent boys would be like up to the age of about twelve months, and what they would be like after the age of about twelve years, I cannot get any real grasp on what they might be like in the intervening period - the time, as it were, between learning to walk and learning to wank. I don't know why this should be so difficult: after all, it's not as if I was never there myself. But I have great difficulty remembering what we were like at that age. I mean, what did we talk about amongst ourselves? I sometimes overhear boys of that age walking past my garden and apart from being mildly aggrieved by the language (of course we knew those words ourselves - it's just that we would never have used them if we thought an adult might be within earshot: some people call this 'being a more open and honest society'; I just call it a sign of decaying standards, but some of us are getting old), the conversation seems to be about Playstations, football, television and not much more. It's certainly unreasonable of me to expect profundity from nine-year-olds, but were we as shallow as that in what we talked about? I suppose we were, although those subjects (or their 1960s and 1970s analogues) certainly would not have seemed superficial to us at the time - they marked the extent of our known universe. And we always wondered what girls talked about amongst themselves - except that we could be fairly certain that it did not redound to our credit.
And so the whole imaginary edifice collapses. But the vast majority of men have taken the matter beyond fantasy into the realms of the concrete, or rather the flesh-and-blood. All very well if they're intent on doing a proper job of it, of course, and the overwhelming majority of them do, let it be said. But it has long been a source of bemusement to me that the most important job in the whole of human society - namely the creation and development of the next generation - should be one for which there are absolutely no qualifications required other than the possession of the requisite anatomy. We rightly insist that someone who wants to drive a car, defend someone from being imprisoned for twenty years for something he didn't do (or, thanks to our increasingly extreme régime, imprisoned for six weeks for looking Muslim in a built-up area) or operate a nuclear power station should be demonstrably, provably qualified to do so. And yet producing other human beings (which in terms of the probabilities is a far greater potential threat to the world - think Mr and Mrs Hitler) requires only a few minutes of activity for which no training is required - except 'on the job', of course.
And what we often get is what we all too often see - the inevitable consequences of the work of unskilled labour. There is said to be, in this very village, one sponging herbert who has fathered five children on the same number of equally shiftless females, and has then left the responsibility for them to their mothers - and, indirectly, to the rest of us. There was an infamous case in the press a couple of years ago of another such complete waster up in the North-East of England who had reached a total of seven children by the time he was twenty one, had a criminal record as long as your arm and routinely ignored any attempt to get him to face the consequences.
(I saw his photograph - believe me, he was no work of art - except, perhaps, Picasso's "Guernica". I've seen many a good-looking girl going around on the arm of some guy who has a face like a dog's arse with a hat on. I've never understood human psychology in these matters, and I don't suppose I ever will now).
OK, perhaps I've wandered off the point a touch, but the fact is that parenthood is a reponsibility and should not be entered into (if you'll excuse the expression) without one being ready or willing to shoulder it. Which is why I decided many a long year ago that I should not breed. I would, I very strongly suspect, have been no good at it - I would have been a nervous, inconsistent and possibly even tyrannical patriarch. That sort of experience has its effect on children, and I didn't want anyone pointing the finger at me for the consequences. As I often find myself thinking when I see teenage males pushing buggies along the road, why screw up the lives of other people just for the sake of showing that your testicles work?
I suspect, however, that attitudes are changing a little. I don't know whether it's because of an increasing awareness of the problem of overpopulation (a far greater issue in affluent societies than elsewhere, if only because of greater per-capita consumption) or simply a less judgemental attitude, but people no longer look askance at the childless-by-choice as once they did. There was a time within living memory when a middle-aged man with no offspring was viewed with a degree of scepticism - not to say outright suspicion - with the unspoken assumptions found in this classic Marty Feldman sketch never far from the surface. Now it seems to be far more acceptable - indeed, laudable - not to procreate if you choose not to. I know a number of men of roughly my age who aren't fathers, and none of us has any longer to have the ready excuse of a non-standard sexuality to explain our status away.
So, if you have chosen to be a father, and to be conscientious about it, good luck to you - today and every day, not just when the marketing gangsters say so.
Three score months ago I brought forth, upon this webspace, a new website, conceived in vanity and dedicated to the proposition that everyone else was doing it, so why shouldn't I?
I think that that really was my motive, to be honest. Five years ago, our telephone exchange had just been enabled for broadband and I had changed ISPs from the lamentable Tiscali (although it was called LineOne when I signed up to it - for all of about ten days afterwards) to PlusNet, who were offering the best package - including 250MB of webspace for no extra cost.
It seemed a pity to waste, so I spent the month after signing up designing a site that would...well, what exactly? What was my intention in releasing yet another personal website into the wild?
I suppose I dreamt that someone who was Someone in the media or publishing would read the deep insights I was going to provide and say, "That's the guy we want for our..." whatever. I don't know why I thought this was in any way likely, given the impenetrable thickets of verbiage already out there. I would have had to shout like buggery just to get noticed.
Anyway, with the help (?) of Front Page™, I posted the first pages on 13 June 2003. The home page looked like this:
Actually, this is what it looked like after about five weeks of tweaking. I made the mistake right at the very beginning of thinking that the more I showed off, the more people would be drawn to it. The more animated .gifs, the more Dynamic HTML the better. WRONG! I was advised by those in the know with experience of web design (denizens of alt.fan.pratchett all) that "less is more", and smartarsedness was no substitute for readability and accessibility. And so the design swiftly changed, although it took well over a year for me to find a navigation style which was clean and easy to maintain.
And that's more or less how it stood, design-wise, until twelve months ago when I decided to revamp the whole thing using style sheets to replace the proliferation of tables. There was a lot to learn, and even now things aren't quite how I'd like them (there's a persistent alignment problem when viewing the site in Opera for example), but it's near enough for jazz. It's far easier to maintain and update now, although I now hand-code the site which means I have to check the HTML carefully to make sure it conforms to standards.
The gold-text-on-black format which was there from the beginning seems to have stood the test of time - except for one regular correspondent who claims it to be unreadable. I've told him to take his Ray-Bans off in future.
As far as content goes, an early complaint was "too many Rants and not enough Raves". Well, it's far easier to be motiviated to write by anger or disgust than it is by warm, fluffy feelings. The adrenalin isn't there in the same way. Nonetheless, I think it has balanced out pretty well down the years. In any case, I've come to the conclusion that there's not a great deal of point in my pontificating on The Great Stories Of The Day, because others do it better and they get more readers anyway.
The site has expanded from the basic three categories (Rants, Raves and Not A Blog) to encompass my interest in television presentation (The Viewing Room) and photography (The Gallery). This last aspect is the most complicated when it comes to updating, as I have to resize the photographs to usable dimensions (although fewer people are on dialup nowadays) and to include the map references I introduced earlier this year.
And the future? Well there's still room from some growth, especially given that the site's Welsh-language equivalent (which shares its webspace with this one) is now dormant as I no longer have the time or the inclination to continue with it. I'd like to enable printer-friendly pages, but that may mean more work than it would be worth: as far as I can see, each item would have to have its own separate page, and that's more than I'm willing to get involved with at the moment. And I really need to do something about the Links page - if I could only decide how best to do it.
Five years from now? Hell, I'll be in my fifties by then. Who knows?
Well, a month or so in, and how's my part-time status going?
Very well, thank you. In fact, it may be the best thing I've ever done in my working life.
My stress levels seem to have dropped, although I now find myself clock-watching at 11 o'clock rather than at 1. Getting in before 8am, as I have done every day since the change, means that I've not worked later than 2pm in the last five weeks. It's nice to be able to walk out of the door and leave my poor colleagues struggling through until 4pm or later.
It also means that I have two things I didn't have before: plenty of time, and enough energy to make use of it.
As one consequence, my garden doesn't know what's hit it.
I don't think it fair to say that I've neglected the garden in recent years. I've kept it reasonably tidy - at least, as tidy as it can be kept when you get the village's Piss-Heads Society (Junior and Intermediate sections) chucking their empty bottles and cans into it (or even throwing them at the house itself); or when our local neds-in-embryo stuff their cans and crisp packets into the hedge. But the truth is that keeping order on these few square metres of the planet require three things:
the time
the weather
the energy
Down the years, I've found that it is seldom that the three turn up together. The best I could hope for was a state of genteel siege, doing the minimum necessary to ward off major encroachment: cutting the grass, trimming the hedges and doing whatever tidying was feasible in the circumstances.
In the last month, however, I've gone at it with a will. In this, I've been very fortunate with the weather, in that we've had plenty of dry, even sunny, afternoons and evenings. As a result, about ten years' worth of remedial work has been done in less than thirty days.
First up was the job of re-establishing the flower borders around the front lawn. These had become overgrown by grass and a real eyesore, with a fuchsia bush, a lavender plant and a something-I-don't-know-the-name-of struggling to make themselves visible. So, at it I went with fork, trowel and sieve.
I've now discovered that, back-breaking though it often is, there's something immensely satisfying about gardening. It may be a throwback to my childhood, when I would mix earth and water in a bucket intended for sandcastles, sprinkle leaves and seeds into it as though making a dish for a cookery programme (I defy The Galloping Gourmet himself to better my Pâté de Terre avec Dents-de-Lion) and stir up the concoction before turning the whole lot out onto the garden to ooze away.
It may be about the smell of the fertile earth wafting up at you. That's quite a beguiling aroma, one which may speak to a primeval part of our consciousness. But not, most emphatically, when combined with another smell, and here's where my new-found gardening mania has caused quite a change in my world-view.
I used to think that cats were kewl, cats were stylish, cats were clean (at least in comparison with dogs). I have now revised my opinion. Cats are no cleaner than dogs in their habits - or rather, in one particular habit. As I have discovered, the one thing they absolutely love is freshly dug soil. They simply can't resist shitting in it. Every morning as I came out of the house to go to work, I could see one or more little gift of love from the local feline population. What is particularly galling is that I know that at least two of the little bastards come from homes where the family, from whatever motive, have almost completely concreted over their gardens. So, having been deprived of showing their true affection for the humans that they own, they come and dump in my flower beds.
This wouldn't be quite as bad if they maintained their mythical (as I now know) reputation for burying it afterwards. However, all the cats in this neighbourhood seem to suffer from an extremely poor sense of direction and judgement of distances. They'll scrape the hole, and then crap about two inches away from it.
I asked for advice from people in the know. Some suggested citrus peel, others coffee grounds. My father used to swear by a catapult, but you have to catch the fsckers at it for that method to work. I needed a passive deterrent. I tried sprinking a jar of pickle vinegar over the beds, but it rained a couple of hours later and washed it all away.
I ended up getting a container of cat-repellant pellets from our local B&Q. These are tiny little grains of clay impregnated with aromatic plant oils which are alleged to put off any visiting cat. So I sprinkled these handsomely over the beds. It seemed to work - except that the buggers then just shat in the middle of the lawn instead. So I had to scatter the pellets all over the grass as well. This is expensive, and I think it might be cheaper to pay the fine which would result from simply strangling the bloody mogs in the first place.
That aside, I've sown some seeds in the beds now. The night-scented stock, the alyssum and the cornflowers seem to be coming through, though I'm not sure about the calendulas at the moment. Time will tell, of course.
I've also tried to transplant some daffodils from where they weren't wanted. Now, it may well be that you can't transplant daffodil bulbs: it may well be against several Laws of Nature (and even a number of Guidelines) to even think about carrying out such a wanton act. However, I have formulated The Judge's First Law Of Carefree Gardening, which I hope one day will be anthologised alongside a similar sentiment by Arthur C. Clarke. It runs like this:
"Whatever you want to do in the garden, it's always the wrong plant, in the wrong place, at the wrong time of year. Go ahead and do it anyway: Nature has a sense of humour, and may well reward your impudence."
I'll have to wait until next Spring for the answer, of course. If I haven't been taken away by then for offenses involving a can of WD-40, a cigarette lighter and some very surprised-looking cats. Well, if James Bond can do it to a snake...
Bruce Duncan Phillips
Folk singer, storyteller and political activist
b. 15 May 1935, d. 23 May 2008
'Utah' Phillips was a very remarkable man. A writer and singer of songs about the stories which the rich and malign corporate shills who run America would like to bury forever: the struggles of the workers, the poor and the homeless; a teller of tales - some tall, most not so - about his years of drifting around on the railroad following his traumatic military service in Korea; a ceaseless campaigner for economic and social justice.
I won't go on, but just refer you to this obituary at the website of the Industrial Workers of the World, an organisation of which he was a proud member and whose message he sought to spread wherever he went.
Oh, and while you're here, sit yourself down and sample a slice of 'Utah''s Moose Turd Pie (preceded by one of the most wonderfully groan-making puns I've ever come across - it took me a while to get the joke, so if you don't 'see' it, let me know and I'll tell you).
I'm at a loss to explain how I got myself mixed up in it, really.
Apart from a recitation in the annual school Eisteddfod in my first year (I won), I'd kept an intentionally low profile at my secondary school. Not that this made any difference, as these attempts at unobtrusiveness totally failed to prevent my being the object of scorn and bullying for the whole time I attended the wretched place.
In any case, the school was hardly renowned for its artistic endeavours at that time. Apart from the school orchestra (which to the best of my knowledge never played publicly, and which was so desperate as to feature - very briefly - yours truly as a trainee third cellist), there was nothing which extended beyond the walls of the place. 'Outreach' was merely a word in one of the school's dictionary; probably on one of the pages which had been torn out.
So what, when I was within six months of my final escape from that academic Alcatraz, got into me to volunteer to take part in The School Play? Moreover, a play which was going to be performed for the general public?
I can only think that it was a combination of boredom and the attraction of having somewhere to go during the lunch break other than standing out on the Top Yard in the freezing cold. Because it was about December or early January when our English teacher Arthur Shenton first told us that he was intending to stage Robert Bolt's "The Thwarting Of Baron Bolligrew", and invited anyone who was interested to come to a read-through in his classroom at lunchtime.
Thinking a little further, I may have been talked into it by one of the other boys in my class, who had signed up for it already. Other people's enthusiasms have always tended to rub me up the wrong way and produce a strong reaction against whatever it is they're enthusiastic about, but possibly the realisation that the alternative was having to continue pratting about playing Square on the yard in the icy drizzle swayed me.
I can't recall at this distance what I first thought of the play when we read it through. I saw some of the funny lines in it, and may have dimly recognised the elements of the morality tale in it, but I doubt if my considerations ran any deeper than that. I wasn't doing Eng. Lit. for O-Level, so hadn't been introduced to any of that terrible analytical and critical guff which has ruined the consumption of artistic endeavours for so many.
I remember being quite disappointed when the parts were divvied up. I think I had my eye on playing The Duke, or possibly Dr. Moloch the wizard, but these roles were handed to two of the teachers who had decided to get involved, and I was reduced to the ranks of Knighthood. Even then, it was a comparatively minor role (although I did appear at the beginning, in the middle and at the end), and was chagrinned to realise that my part was that of an obsequious creep ("Typecasting", said Mr Shenton helpfully).
So, with the production scheduled originally for sometime in March, we set to it. Reading rehearsals took place at lunchtimes, but as time moved on and we reached the point where the action and general logistics needed to be sorted out, we found ourselves working after school and on Saturdays as well. This I found irksome, and had to be dragged from my bed one Saturday morning to attend. After the evening sessions, Mr Shenton would take some of us home in his car, and I well remember his old Renault 6 being unable to cope with the gradient by the Cerney in Moss with four passengers aboard. That aroma of singed clutch plate is hard to forget.
It became clear after a while that March wasn't going to be a realistic date for the show, and so it was put back a few weeks. This could have been a problem, as some of us were supposed to be revising for our O-Level exams that June, but I welcomed the opportunity to concentrate on something else at that time.
We moved onto the stage in the assembly hall (which doubled as the music room and the Old Gym) and the scenery and costumes started to take shape. The staggering resources of the Art department were brought into play, with the bits of the Castle being painted on to sections of board mounted on small pieces of scaffolding so that the Castle could be 'rebuilt' just by slotting them together. The costumes, too, developed from their original conception, with the Knights clad in cardboard armour skilfully painted in black with gold 'seams' and 'rivets'. Dr Moloch (Emyr Davies, the Chemistry teacher) sported a black robe (his own graduation garment if memory serves) embroidered with stars and crescent moons, and The Duke (played by the Religious Education master Martin Watson) was finely attired in an outfit which seemed to have been left over from a Gilbert & Sullivan piece. I don't know how he came by the tricorn hat, though.
The cardboard armour may have been a bit awkward to move in, but it was the green woollen tights which made me cringe. I mean, it was the look of the thing, m'dears! Not to mention the impossiblity of toilet breaks being taken at any time between Beginners and Fin.
It was great fun, though. Some of the players needed more instruction than others (Martin Watson was particularly helpful in getting me more fully into character), and all sorts of 'business' was added, often to producer Shenton's consternation. Colin Epthorp, playing the title role, had terrible trouble with the phrase "noblesse oblige", and I don't think he ever quite got it right.
There were things to be interested in away from the stage, too, and as my friend Nik Randles was doing a lot of the art work, I spent some time down in the Art Room, where my distracting presence proved too much for Nik's assistant Karen (later to become Mrs Nik Randles!), who scored a direct hit on me - albeit from close range - with a raw egg.
We were about as ready as we were ever going to be, and we held the final dress rehearsal on the Monday afternoon in front of an audience of kids from the nearby junior school. They were, on the whole, bemused and bored by the whole thing, and left before the end (but only because their school day finished before ours - honest!).
Tuesday, and The Big Night had arrived. I remember sitting up in the school library watching the parents and families pulling into the car park before scooting down to the changing rooms behind the Old Gym to pull my tights on and get laced into my cardboard. I don't think I felt any nerves, really: we'd been working on the thing for nearly five months by then, and I think my primary concern was, as Noël Coward put it, to remember my lines and not bump into the furniture.
As I recall there were no major hitches (bearing in mind that I only 'saw' the scenes I was actually in), although Colin Epthorp did get a ticking off from the producer for coming out with a (quite mild) oath as a sotto voce ad-lib. I couldn't see the problem, as the term used was quite in keeping with the Baron's character.
I don't remember much about either that performance or the second one on the Wednesday night. We all got it right about 98 per cent of the time, which is probably the best you can ever hope for in a theatrical production. The only fluff I saw was when Emyr Davies was making a speech of thanks after the final show, when he referred to the "lightning engineer".
I had very few enjoyable experiences at that school, and this is the only thing I look back upon with any degree of what could be called 'affection'. A few more details about it can be found here.
As for me personally, apart from a couple of appearances in rag review concerts at my Sixth Form College, I didn't perform in public in any way until I found myself singing (singing, if you please!) in a folk club over fifteen years later. But that, as they say, is another matter.
First off, can the media and the mediocracy please get their heads out of their arses and realise one important fact: hardly anyone outside of London gives a toss about who gets to be mayor. It's scarcely even that significant inside London, seeing as the Westminster hacks who set the system up were at pains to ensure that the office carried little ability to do any real damage to anything except the reputation of the individual holding it and, by extension, his party. In that sense, NuLab's capos may be quite relieved that when the preparations for the Olympics go tits up and public transport in the city grinds to a halt they can blame Boris.
It's been fun watching the metropolitan hacks squirm at the thought of Boris Johnson as mayor. How simply dreadful that someone they don't like should be elected by people without their deep insight and analytical skills!
Live with it, darlings. Only four years to go.
Johnson as mayor may well turn out to be very interesting. Despite my previous account of how I believe he came to have that 'bewildered baby' expression, I don't for one moment think that he is as stupid and incapable as the luvvy-press have portrayed him. He will also, at least, be entertaining, which is an accusation which could never have been thrown at the adenoidal trull he has replaced. Entertaining, that is, for that vast majority of the population of this island who don't live in London and who seldom if ever go there.
So a Tory won an election? Well, whoop-de-bloody-do!! Even by the law of averages alone, it was bound to happen sometime. And when the incumbent is a member of a party which has shafted its core supporters every which way in the last two years alone, it was always likely to happen.
(It's difficult to have any sympathy for Livingstone at all: it wasn't the meetings with Al-Qaradawi or his hosting of Chavez which was his downfall, but his crawling back into the fold of Blairism-Brownism at the very point when when that ideology-which-pretended-so-hard-that-it-wasn't-an-ideology was reaching its Tumbril Moment)
Looking at everywhere else, it was a horrendous election for Labour. Their hacks had been talking their chances down in any case, in order to take advantage of that ploy by which you predict a tsunami but - when it turns out merely to be a severe high tide with an onshore wind which wipes out a couple of small fishing villages - then claim that that proves things aren't that bad after all. It didn't work this time, because this time it was a tsunami. They haven't just lost seats to the Tories - part of the natural, swings-and-roundabouts rhythm of politics under our wretched electoral system - but have lost them to just about everyone else as well. Losing control of councils such as Nuneaton, where Labour had been in power for 35 years, and Reading indicate that the strategy of buttering up the middle-classes because you think your traditional support will vote for you anyway is finally turning around and biting its instigators in the arse.
If further proof is needed, look at Wales. Here, where traditionally Labour has been so strong in the former industrial areas that elections were seldom deemed either necessary or even desirable, the greater fluidity of voting behaviour which has followed devolution has produced interesting results: of the 22 unitary authorities, Labour now controls only two - Neath Port Talbot and Rhondda Cynon Tâf - and in the latter they lost nearly a quarter of their seats. They lost over half of their councillors in Merthyr, nearly as great a proportion in Torfaen, and lost control of Caerffili, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen as well. Add to that losing their last council in the north (Flintshire - over a third of their seats lost), and this was the long-awaited and thoroughly deserved catastrophe merited by a party which has been a by-word for municipal corruption, bungling incompetence and outright indolent spinelessness for three generations. That many of those losses were to independent candidates - although in Blaenau Gwent, for example, the 'women-only shortlist' row which cost Labour the Westminster and Assembly seats rumbles on - shows that something rather more than Buggins' Turn is happening here. This can only be a good thing.
The other parties don't have as much to crow about as they would like us to think, however. Despite the political situation, the Conservative 'fightback' is still spluttering, although it must be remembered that there were quite few councils in central and southern England being contested this year.
The Lib Dems flatlined as usual, and gained just one council (Sheffield). In Wales, Plaid Cymru (if that's what they're called at the moment) increased its count of councillors by over 25% but lost its only council (hint: don't try to outflank the other parties by doing what they would do, like closing schools). Oh, and ten neo-Nazis were elected as well, meaning no overall increase in the vermin population and that a grand score of 0.12% of councillors in Englandandwales are fascist scum. No need to panic just yet, I think, especially as the BNP's contingent have tended to prove themselves totally and transparently ludicrous when given the chance.
And me? Well, I've somehow managed to acquire a Tory councillor. It's been a long time since we had one of those up here, and I once again enhanced my proud record of backing losers when voting for the independent candidate (although it was, I must admit, one of those Polly Toynbee 'nosepeg' moments). He finished third in a field of three, being beaten even by the candidate for Labour (which party, last time it was in control of our council, deselected our much-admired councillor because she wouldn't toe the line when her constituents' interests were at stake, and tried to bribe, mislead, bully and threaten council tenants into voting to privatise their own homes - more on that here).
Our new councillor is the only Conservative representing the old industrial part of the county - the other four sit for rural areas to the east and north of the town - so it'll be interesting to see what happens with him.
With effect from next Tuesday, I will no longer be a full-time civil servant.
Instead, I'll be a part-time one.
I've always been reluctant to talk about the job I do. This is partly because it isn't remotely interesting to anyone else (indeed, it's become only intermittently interesting to me), but mostly because you have to be bloody careful lest you let something slip which will either piss off a colleague or will shine even the briefest, dimmest of lights on the way the Depratment has been generally screwed around with in the last few years.
So here's the deal, chums: you don't ask me in how many ways one of the major branches of the civil service has been re-organised, de-organised, outsourced, contracted out, just simply contracted, demoralised and placed into the hands of people who would be sacked from their local whelk stall for incompetence. In return, I promise not to tell you.
With that safely out of the way, you might be able to discern a certain cynicism in my attitude. Well, I enjoy the job I do. I enjoyed it a lot more before large chunks of the previous paragraph were applied to it, but there are still far worse things for an intelligent human being to be doing in our office than what I do.
Nevertheless, I'd been thinking matters over for a couple of years, and finally decided that I'd like to sample this "Work/life balance" that our masters keep talking about being committed to. In short, I'd quite like to have a life to balance out my work.
So I worked out the financial implications, and found that I would be able to manage it, at least for a year. I could get a temporary arrangement to go part time for a year, with the option of making it permanent.
Except that I soon discovered that I couldn't. Despite what our Human Resources (and I loathe that term; makes it sound like we're all just gravel) section say on their web pages, I was not to be allowed to avail myself of a short-term change in my contract. The sneaky reason is this: if they gave me a temporary arrangement, I could then insist on being given full-time hours back at the end of it. This they were not willing to do, and this is what set off a brief outbreak of "Grrrr!" on the Rants page a few weeks back.
I've got my union looking into whether Sand And Gravel (sorry, I mean HR) are allowed to do this, but after some further thought (only some of which involved happy fantasies of what I'd do with a small flamethrower and a one-way train ticket to Nottingham) I decided that I would go part-time anyway, and sod 'em.
The non-financial advantages were overwhelming. I mean, we've got Summer a-coming in (at least in name), and the chance to spend some time in the garden (and getting on top of same) was attractive. In the winter, it would mean that I would always get home before it got dark. And at every time of year, it would give me that nice warm glow which comes from being able to walk out of the building at about 14:00 and leave the rest of the poor buggers to it.
On top of all this, I'm fed up of getting up at half past six in the morning and not getting home again until half past four for no more reward than to be told that I'm being an inflation-busting economic vandal for wanting my pay to keep pace with price rises. I'll be forty-six next month, and I can think of more interesting ways of spending my time.
I know my pay will go down by 7/37ths now, and I know my pension will be crap. But it was always going to be crap anyway, and by that point I may be past caring in any case.
Liberation (even of the partial kind) feels good so far.
To Telford for an emergency team meeting today (a big "Hi!" to all at the JVW Fan Club), and after stopping off for lunch (another "Hi!" to all at The Buck's Head at Long Lane - nice jacket potato with double cheese and spring onion topping), we (that is, Derek my colleague and chauffeur and me) headed back north.
We had the radio on. It was Radio Two as usual, but with Matthew Bannister standing in for the ever more unbearable Jeremy Vine.
Interviewing the writer Kia Abdullah about her claim in today's Guardian that couples who start living together should sleep in separate bedrooms, Bannister asked her how things were arranged in her home. She replied:
"Me and my partner have not long been living together and we're already getting on top of one another."
Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttleton
Musician, broadcaster and cartoonist
b. 23 May 1921, d. 25 April 2008
Humphrey Lyttleton was a legend.
The son of a housemaster at Eton, he went on to become one of the world's top jazz trumpeters (no less than Louis Armstrong referred to him as "that cat in England who swings his ass off"), and continued playing right up to the last few weeks.
He spread the word on jazz in other ways, too, not least in his "Best Of Jazz" show which ran on BBC Radio 2 for over forty years until March of this year. I well remember as a boy of about nine or ten years of age listening to that programme and being given my entreé to jazz by his warm and knowledgeable enthusiasm.
My fondest memories of 'Humph', however, must be of the 36 years he spent as the chairman of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" (subtitled, "The Antidote To Panel Games"). Apart from sharing the chairmanship duties with Barry Cryer for the first series in 1972, he held the job continuously thereafter.
In the early years, he didn't have a great deal to do, being cast as a chairman in the traditional mould (although he would make the odd world-weary remark from time to time). It was only when Jon Naismith took over as producer in 1991 that Humph's role expanded. In fact, he become almost the star of the show, and his disgruntled, deadpan remarks were as enjoyable as anything that the professional comedians around him could come up with.
His real forte however, and one which surprised many, was his remarkable ability to deliver a double entendre. These were usually written by Iain Pattinson, and were made doubly funny by the fact that Lyttleton knew exactly how to deliver them: totally straight-faced, without any hint of a smile in face or voice, thus leaving the evil entirely in the mind of the listener. Written down, perhaps lines like:
"Samantha tells me she has to nip off to a rare breeds farm where they still plough with huge beasts of burden. She's become friendly with a couple of farm hands who are going to show her their gigantic ox..."
or
"Samantha has to go now, as she's off to meet her Italian gentleman friend, who's taking her out for an ice cream. She says she likes nothing better than to spend the evening licking the nuts off a large Neapolitan..."
may not look much. But they were delivered in such a way that they produced maximum hilarity. And this was in the pre-watershed part of the schedules!
All the things he did, he did with passion, humour and integrity. I mourn his loss, but I delight in having had the chance to hear him so often down the years.
Found what was causing the navigation bar misalignment in Opera (many thanks to PJ at the PlusNet Community Forums), but I still can't see why the item dates and images are shifted to the right in that browser.
Apologies to anyone who has tried to view this site with Opera in the last ten months or so.
When I revamped the site, I tested it in Internet Explorer 6 and SeaMonkey, and it looked OK (although I needed a completely different set of stylesheets for IE). I was pleased to note subsequently that it worked OK in Firefox as well.
I hadn't used Opera for a couple of years until a few nights ago, but when I did I found that the positioning of elements on the page was all to cock. There's obviously something Opera doesn't like about the stylesheets.
I went back into work after three days off sick to be told that one of the more interesting of my colleagues had died suddenly on Thursday afternoon, aged just fifty.
I'd worked with Chris Brandon off and on since I started in the Depratment seventeen years ago, and had always found him to be intelligent, erudite and helpful.
A Londoner by birth, he'd had to forego his desire to work in a library on the orders of his father, who saw the Civil Service as a secure career. I don't think the bitterness ever really left him over that, although Chris himself was a very peaceable man. Another apparent contradiction was the fact that, despite being a leftie of the best sort, he nonetheless read The Daily Mail every day. This was no inconsistency, however: as a leftie of the best sort, he liked reading a paper which was giving Blair a kicking long before the other rags joined in.
He was a source of many entertaining stories about his previous times working - as he called it - "down south", mostly in Luton and Dunstable.
He told one story of the spiritualist church he used to attend down there. One of the stalwarts of the meetings was a sweet old dear - let's call her Hettie - who was also very innocent and, as such, could come out with the most fantastic double entendres - which would have to be explained to her when everyone around her cracked up.
On one occasion, another member of the church had died, and Hettie stood up at the meeting to make the announcement. The departed had left a much-admired musical instrument to the church, so Hettie stood there and said:
"Our friend Henry has passed to the spirit world, leaving us with happy memories and leaving his magnificent organ to the church."
When the inevitable wave of unsupressed giggles passed through the congregation, she looked up with a pained expression and said:
"Oh, I've gawn an' dunnit again, 'aven I?"
One of the people Chris worked with was a similar innocent, but she was a Jehovah's Witness. She also had terrible handwriting. She once went to see a taxpayer - as we called them in those days - at the public counter. On returning, she left her notes of the interview on her desk while she went to the lav. Chris took a look at what she had written. What she thought she had written was:
"Taxpayer is a worker in a warehouse, who wants to know if he can claim for protective rubber clothing."
Unfortunately, what it looked like she had written was:
"Taxpayer is a wanker in a whorehouse, who wants to know if he can claim for protective rubber clothing."
The difficulty, as Chris was at pains to point out, was just how to explain to her why when she returned to her desk all her colleagues were in a state of incontinence.
Sadly, Chris' final years were blighted by ill-health, particularly bouts of severe depression, which was unfair on such a conscientious man.
Thanks for all the stories, Chris. Have a good journey.
Christopher John Brandon
Civil servant and cat-lover
The Daily Judge would like to point out that in a previous report of an unfortunate accident involving a Danish nobleman, a beach and an unexpectedly high tide, the name of the victim was, in fact, Cnut, and not as originally printed.
I always see remarkable things when I haven't got my camera.
On the way to work this morning, between the showers there was a particularly magnificent rainbow to the west of the road.
As we went along, I could see the end of the rainbow. It appeared to touch ground in a small stand of bushes about fifty metres away. I'd never seen a rainbow's landfall before. Magnificent.
There was a story about how a local nursing home had had a flag stolen from outside, and about how a local man had donated a spare one to take its place. There was a picture of him handing it over to a couple of ladies from the home.
Nothing remarkable in any of this, but the caption for the photograph was, shall we say, a little ambiguous. I've changed all the names for obvious reasons, but it went like this:
"Arthur Quinch presents a Welsh flag to Freda Botmow at Sunnyview Care Home to replace the one she had stolen."
This meme has been going around for a while. My chum Alex has done it, and I've had a complaint that not much has been added to the site recently, so this is how it works...
Go to the Wikipedia home page and click "Random article". That is your band's name.
Click "Random Article" again. That is your album name.
Click "Random Article" 15 more times. Those are the tracks on your album.
It was far too nice to be sitting in the house, so I decided to go out for a walk with the camera (which hadn't had an outing since late September).
Two problems: the first was the question of where I could go, having photographed most of the manor to death in the last couple of years.
The second problem was that I had a hell of problem getting my walking boots on. As I've mentioned before, my legs and ankles have swollen up (the latest on that, by the way, is that the ultrasound scan showed no problems. I've now succeeded in baffling two GPs, and - as they say in the newspapers - investigations are continuing). I had to substantially de-lace my trusty old Doc Martens before I could even get them on.
Having almost had recourse to a crowbar, I eventually set out at about 1:20 along the footpath alongside the old steelworks site. This is in a shocking state. The section nearest home is rutted to buggery, and the last two hundred yards or so is little more than a swamp due to the water running off the adjacent fields.
I came out at the other end carrying half a ton of mud, water and horseshit on my boots, and took this photograph:
We've already got a Mountain View in the village! We told the developers this. We might as well have been talking to the masonry for what good it did.
I went along Llewellyn Road to the top of the Fron (photographs to follow in the Gallery soon) and down into Tanyfron.
At the bottom, along came a bus:
I went down to Southsea and went up towards Ochnall's Bridge. This was my real target, as I'd promised myself - and you, dear reader - that I'd get some close-up photographs of it, it being a rare example of a skew-arch bridge (which is the only reason why it has survived when every other disused railway bridge in the area has been pulled down). Again, pictures on the relevant page of the Gallery ere too long.
I walked up through the Lodge and then decided to make the climb up to Pentre Broughton over the old railway track. I got there eventually, but part of the path which used to go up a set of wooden steps has long since gone the way of all things which aren't nailed down - and most of things which are - hereabouts, so it was quite a scramble, especially when faced with these:
I then walked down Station Road and Queen's Road. Oh, looky here! It's another bus!
I seldom take a watch with me on these bijou trekettes, because if I see what time it is I start hurrying. Just after seeing the bus, though, I checked the clock on my camera and saw that it was 3:30. The sun was starting to go down, so I quickened my step as much as I could comfortably manage, and got home at about 4:10. A very pleasant experience on a nice, mild winter's day.
Oh, and I managed to get my boots off OK.
Addendum (10/02/08): The Gallery pages have now been updated.
Miles Beresford Kington Humourist, broadcaster, musician
b. 13 May 1941 d. 30 Jan 2008
It's been a bad few months for lovers of intelligent humour. First was the death of Alan Coren back in October. Now one of his contemporaries (and former employees) has left us too.
I have to admit that most of my contact with Miles Kington was from his years spent playing double bass with the cabaret group Instant Sunshine, but being an avid reader of Punch in the late seventies, I came across his written humour regularly.
My interest was augmented by the fact that he grew up near here. Indeed, my sixth-form friend William, whose father was a bank manager, told us of how Kington - long after he had moved to London - insisted on keeping his account at the Wrexham branch because they issued bilingual cheque books, which always caused interest and amusement amongst his metropolitan friends.
I feel considerable regret now at not having kept up with what he was writing (the same thing happened with Coren to a large degree as well). Typically, one of the last things he did before his sudden death was to file his column for yesterday. I shall have to trawl through the archives of The Independent now to see what I've missed.
Got home. Letter from gas company. "Notice Of Disconnection"?! Unpaid bill. Never received bloody bill. Haven't received bloody bill from them since mid-October. Phoned gas company to complain. Waiting about five minutes listening to the gas company advertising how wonderful it is. Get through to human being. Notice Notice has different Customer Number on it to all my previous bills. Girl at other end says old account closed - can't readily tell reason. Girl puts me through to colleague in Billing Department. Much checking of addresses, postcodes and meter serial numbers. Colleague in Billing Department says he'll speak to his manager. Manager now not in until Monday. Colleague in Billing Department says he'll phone me back on Monday.
Walk to doctor's to get result of ultrasound scan on kidneys and bladder intended to find out why my legs have swollen up. Get to doctor's. Stick head around door. Surgery absolutely packed. Standing room only. Bollocks to that. Came home. Will try again Monday.
Put tea on. Boil-in-the-bag sliced beef in gravy. Bring pan of water to boil. Turn heat down. Put bag in water. Go back into living room. Five minutes later, go back into kitchen. Bag has a hole in. Saucepan now full of unappetising pale brown liquid. Wait until cooking time up. Pour brown liquid into sink. Bag which still contains the meat falls into the sink. Sod! Fish it out and eat it anyway.
I'm willing to part with this afternoon for a reasonable sum. Used notes only, please.
Bad news today at work. One of the people I have the most respect for in our office suffered a terrible loss when her partner died suddenly this morning. I don't know his exact age, but someone said he was younger than I am.(*)
This sort of thing makes me pensive. So here's the message:
If you love someone, tell them, show them. And do it now.
None of us knows when we might run out of tomorrows.
That is all.
(* Apparently he was older than me, but that's hardly the point)
Not A Blog Archive 2008
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