Not A Blog Archive 2010
A Stroll Around The Ruins
Well, it's time for that end-of-year piece that no-one wants to read and I don't particularly want to write. But I'm not sufficiently free-spirited, blasé and counter-cultural to finish the year without it, so here it is.
2010 then. The Last Year of the First Decade. What about it?
Well, I might as well start it with me. After all this is my website, and the natural-born cliché that personal websites are merely there for a combination of pathetic exhibitionism and surreptitious (and not-so surreptitious) promotion must be adhered to as the 'done thing'.
So. In terms of personal achievement, it has been as blank a year as the one before it. I have not yet been discovered as the natural successor to Alan Coren or Paul Jennings, and am beginning to wonder whether my strategies anent such an uncovering may have been somewhat misplaced. One article (yet another obituary) at Transdiffusion is a poor return on the year.
Even in terms of the minutiae of my life, there are 'projects' (to give them a term far more significant than they warrant) which I wanted to push on with which I either haven't been able to progress or have simply dropped through flagging interest.
I have lost one good friend during the year, and lost another with whom I had not been in touch for a long time, but who was nevertheless a large (literally) figure in my late teens. This latter loss, however, was compensated for by it being the mechanism which brought me back in contact with an old friend from even further back.
My health has been its usual variable self, culminating in spending the whole of the Christmas weekend in bed, and going through a spell in late-August where I experienced - for the first time as far as I can recall - a gut-gripping fear that I would die at any moment.
The blame for that can, I'm certain, be laid at the door of what has been happening in work this year. I adverted to this here, but I'm still not in a position to go into any detail over it. I'm hopeful that this may not be the case for very much longer, however, and early 2011 may bring some suitable revelations.
Right, on to the matters of this happy land.
Whilst it was perfectly clear that Labour was never going to hold on to office, it was far from obvious what the outcome of the voting was going to be. In the same way, while it was clear that a majority did not want Labour to become the largest party, it was obvious that there was no mandate for the Tories to govern outright. Consider that: even with an economy supposedly in meltdown; even with an unpopular Labour leader; even with a Labour Party still notorious for arrogant authoritarianism; and even with the slants of the corporate media almost entirely with the opposition; even, as I say, with all that, Cameron still couldn't get near even a bus-ticket-thin majority. That this was a serious failure on the Tories' part was curiously underplayed in the media coverage of the days which followed the election. Instead, the Bullingdon Boys were considered the obvious Government-In-Waiting.
That there was going to have to be a pact of some sort was numerically inevitable, but what we ended up with was not. As I maintained at the time, a Lab/Lib Dem coalition, with each party bringing their Northern Ireland appendages along, and with enough given to enable support from Plaid, SNP and Green MPs on confidence and supply motions, the Tories could have been kept out of office. Cameron would then have been seen justifiably as the fourth successive failed leader, the Tories would have lurched even more unambiguously to the Right, and a genuinely progressive mood in government might have prevailed.
That is not, of course, what occured. The reason being that the leading figures in the Liberal Democrats - Clegg, Cable, Laws, Alexander - were all part of the Orange Book clique which had brought down Charles Kennedy and who were, without exception, disciples of the same sort of neo-liberal economics which typified the Reagan-Thatcher Axis of the eighties. They had too much in common with their prospective partners to be able to resist the marriage. And thus we ended up with a government with enough of a majority to get it through to 2015 and where - irrespective of the occasional restiveness of LibDem MPs - it would take a mutiny of party-splitting proportions for it to lose office.
So we had our All In This Together coalition government - just our luck, the first genuine Coalition since the nineteen-thirties, and it has to be a coalition of Millionaires Row and Hayekian ideologues. And yet the régime was still permitted to get away with presenting itself as 'progressive'.
We have seen in all too short a space of time just how 'progressive'. It took Thatcher's swivel-eyed madness over two years to produce something of the reaction in the streets which the Coalition has managed in scarcely six months, but the method is much the same. Although the industries are no longer there to shut down on a massive scale (due mostly to the policies followed by all their predecessors back thirty years), you can achieve the same effect (and get the IMF and their fellow economic terrorists cheering you on in similar style) if instead you start closing down large chunks of the public sector, promising that by-now poisoned-beyond-usefulness word 'reform' of public services. 'Reform' means in the mouths of these ideologies exactly what it has meant in the mouths of their precursors - top-down ideological posturing, sell off what you can get away with selling off, and close down the rest claiming that it isn't (in some never-too-precisely defined way) economically viable. The marketisation of public goods which had slowed somewhat under Labour was now to be accelerated again, and carried through with the same callous, careless zeal as it had been twenty-five to thirty years before. The fake-Libertarians of neo-liberal economics rubbed their hands and prepared to party like it was 1979.
And if you can't attack those who are not One Of Us directly by destroying their jobs, you can do it indirectly by screwing up their prospects for the future. And so the Education Maintenance Allowance, which had enabled large numbers of sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds to remain in full-time education, wasn't just cut; it was removed altogether within a very short timescale; so-called 'free schools' ('free' in the sense that groups of middle-class pushies, religious nutters and corrupt businessmen were to be free to do much what they liked with the education of children, but given large sums of public money to do it) were rushed in to a combination of yawns and derision; and, most significant of all (at least in terms of its consequences so far), university tuition fees were to be as much as tripled.
The reason why this last act has been so inflammatory is because it stands diametrically opposed to everything that the leadership (if one may use the term) of the Lib Dems claimed to stand for during the election campaign. Doubts which had already emerged about the rôle of the party in government - but which were dismissed as being part of the inevitable compromise which is required when forming a coalition - were thrown into sharp relief by such a volte-face. It came to be the considered opinion that Clegg's people had gone into government largely to get into government, and that no turnaround on even the most clearly-stated principles could be ruled out if it meant staying in office. It was impossible to see what 'moderating' influence they were possibly having on a set of policies which had clearly been determined on cold, ideological grounds as an attempt to finish the destruction of the public sector as it had been understood since 1945 and before which had been the primary derailed programme of high-water-mark Thatcherism. Indeed, the Lib Dems could be seen - if one wished to be kindly to them - as being naïve Saint Sebastians, wheeled out to take the arrows while the theoretical extremeists hid safely behind them. And all they could get in return for this was a proposed referendum on a change in the voting system not to one which the Damn Lobs had been pushing for years, but merely to one which would be at least as bad in terms of its lack of legitimacy.
The true incendiary element regarding tuition fees was, of course, that the Liberal Democrats had succeeded in attracting the votes of tens of thousands of students in the election because they were the only one of the main three parties in England categorically to commit themselves to not raising fees. It is this betrayal which has given the subsequent protests much of their bite.
This is what will make the coming year interesting. Because we are in the early stages of an attempt to complete the Thatcher project. Indeed, with the news that even the forgotten figure of Michael Heseltine is being brought back, we seem to be entering the recreation of our land as a sort of nineteen-eighties theme park, complete with rides on the Ghost Train, where the skeletons of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbitt (the latter isn't dead, of course: merely, un-) dance and moan, the spirit of Nicholas Ridley emits foul, obfuscating smoke over everything, and the train falls off the tracks just before the end of the ride due to corner-cutting on the maintenance.
The protests have already started, and the response to them has been predictable. We have seen once again that a large proportion of the major police forces of the UK are beyond all control other than the overtly political, and the tactics which were roundly condemned earlier in the year have now become cemented firmly into place as Standard Operating Procedure. People have been injured physically, psychologically and legally by what amount to little more than a corps of militias; the widespread abuse of power and process which we were told would fade into history along with the Labour governments which produced them have instead been augmented and intensified, with those who had claimed the high ground for themselves as champions of Liberty under the previous régime being found strangely silent (yes, Henry Porter and David Davis MP, I'm looking at you).
And the media, who were in similar high-screech mode about the oppressive nature of the 'ZANuLieBore Police State!!!!' have - having been willing spreaders of the poisonous meme that There Is No Alternative to huge cuts in public spending - reverted to type in seeking to shore up any and every point of the establishment view of the world by scorning, deriding, insulting and just outright lying about those who had had the effrontery to take to the streets or to begin campaigns of targetted protest and occupation against the rulers to show that another way of proceeding was possible. So students are dismissed as 'middle class' (an interesting and potentially suicidal gambit from, say, the Daily Heil) and 'pampered', largely because an ageing rock-star's whelp was seen draped over a flagpole and trying unsuccessfully to set fire to something (a piece of advice; if you're ever at Glasto with Charlie Gilmour, don't rely on him to keep you warm). The sneers and smears were - shamelessly and shamefully - also carried out by a supposedly impartial broadcast news outfit calling itself the BBC, where a disabled protestor who had been dragged out of his wheelchair and halfway down the street by a band of publicly-funded thugs was subjected to what amounted more to an interrogation or set of allegations than a proper journalistic interview by someone who - one would have once hoped - would have been trained in certain basic standards (like good manners).
It mattered not. The protestors were - the media agreed - all ungrateful trust-fund brats who hadn't realised that we lived in a democracy where everyone is free to express their views peacefully so long as they agree with the official version, and if they got maced, tasered, crushed and beaten - yea, even unto emergency surgery, which the same police will then try to deny him - then 'they were asking for it'. And, if they weren't, then they were just unfortunate, naïve patsies being led astray by shadowy leftists, anarchists or even the dreaded Muzzies.
The New Brutality is stalking our streets, and the trouble is that many of us remember what happened the last time, and will know that we have never properly recovered from its poisonous effects. The sprouting of officially-sanctioned (if sometimes just by a nod and a wink) demonisation of those who dare to challenge the given story, the setting of people against people, the debasing of our public communication into little more than a series of "plug-ugly, sub-animal yells" (© John Cooper Clarke); we've been here before - under occupation by a tribe of froth-lipped jackals.
Although I have been greatly heartened by the fact that people have been taking action, and that they have done so by organising almost completely independently of the established processes, I can't claim that I'm over-optimistic that they will continue or that they will have any long-term effect if they do. For one thing, the public - having been softened up by being told by every main political party and via every conceivable orifice of the corporate media that "There isn't any money!" - will not need much manipulation into reverting to their time-honoured standard behaviour comprising in equal measures bovine passivity, ovine flock-think and the sort of snarling at strangers associated with a medium-sized mongrel with sore balls. All that will be needed for that to happen will be for a sudden announcement of a 'major terrorist threat' to enable that favoured tool of the ruler, the 'crackdown', to be put in place without too many people kicking up a fuss. And the media can be relied upon to do their part in those circumstances, of course. For another thing, strong attempts are already being made by those on what calls itself with ever-decreasing justification 'The Left' who feel that organising 'progress' is their job and theirs alone to seize control of the movement. Whether it be middle-class apparatchiks such as Aaron Porter (who must surely be a future Labour minister in waiting, such has been his combination of cowardice and opportunism), existing political hacks inside and outside Parliament (such as the darlings of the think-tanks and blogs such as Osler, Akehurst and Denham), or the shuffling dinosaurs at the head of the major (Labour-affiliated) trade unions, I can't think of anything more likely to neuter the possibilities of progressive change in this country at a critical juncture than the protests and their organisers being co-opted or absorbed by such examples of persistent, consistent failures of nerve and principle exhibited in those structures. Those who have organised and taken part in the protests up to now must be the ones to take them forward, and we must not allow the patronising and belittling sneer-merchants of The Lost Years to dissuade us from giving them our full support.
Turning (at last, you might be thinking) to elsewhere, and the failure of the Great Experiment™ continues to become apparent. So much has American democracy now become suborned not only to the military-industrial complex but of that complex's nexus with small-brained regressive fundamentalism, that one is forced to abandon all hope for it. If ever there were a living, breathing, snarling embodiment of what Yeats meant when he wrote:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
then early-21st-Century America is irrefutably it. All radically progressive political inclination has long since been squeezed from it by the desperation of those who still (without any objective evidence) call themselves 'Liberal' to gain power in whatever way possible, even if this means that - once they have gained (however nominally) that power - they can't (or daren't) do anything with it. So we see how Obama, just two years ago the Great Hope, muddled through the first half of his term seeking something called 'bi-partisanship' with a Congressional Republican Party which has had no interest in anything other than the sabotage of anything which smacks of anything other than 'business as before', with the inevitable consequence that - come the mid-terms - the far-right (which now means the whole of the GOP, any remaining liberal tendencies there having long been expelled in favour of millenarial pottiness or hard-line Libertarianism) made substantial gains. Although it was very slightly encouraging to see that the worst of the ass-hats didn't get in, and that their presence may have actually been counter-productive, the successful astroturfing of the Tea Party is still likely to be a major factor in the political debate there for many years to come, especially is it is being promoted by some of the nastiest presences in the media seen in a major country since the collapse of the Third Reich. If not prior to this, Obama is the deadest of Dead Duck Presidents.
Thus we have the besetting contradiction of the US becoming increasingly apparent; that a people whose governmental and military organs stamp around the world proclaiming their gospel of 'freedom' will nonetheless and without substantial complaint line up at airports to be groped by minor functionaries in intimidatory uniforms because it's the 'patriotic' thing to do; and that a country which has long declared itself a country of laws not of men doing everything it can - up to and including actively promoting murder - to bring down a man and an organisation which has dared to reveal that those laws have been broken by those men time and time again.
One might hope for a Second Revolution, but the only likelihood of that comes from either the aforementioned Libertarians who are so in thrall to the cult of Ayn Rand that they cannot - or will not - see that their theories fall into uselessness once brought into contact with any situation involving real, live human beings; or from the Bible-bashing extremists and their Nativist allies who wish to create a monocultural theocracy from sea to shining sea.
Speaking of a society obsessed with militarism, religious extremism and racial ideology brings me, of course, to Palestine. That no meaningful peace is possible in that land should now be obvious enough. Abbas is a fake president of an illegitimate government ruling by decree, whereas the winners of the last legitimate election there - as troubling as some of their policies are - cannot make themselves heard above the screaming of the Self-Righteous State and those paid by it to spread disinformation and encourage blackmailing guilt abroad. The current Israeli régime is led by the slimiest political operative this side of Peter Mandelson, with a foreign minister who - indicative of the lack of talent amongst the Sabra - is a cheap little import from Bessarabia with an unfortunate tendency to say what his government really thinks. Alongside this, the Arab states around Palestine comprise a series of puppets or buffoons, none of whom give a wet fart for the atrocities going on on their doorstep. For as long as Erets Yisra'el is confident of retaining its $3b a year subsidy from the American taxpayer, and as long as it has the owners of the loudest media in the West on its side, there can no be no going forward, especially as that State adopts an increasingly violent turn of rhetoric, as well as passing laws - supported by many of their so-called wise men - which bear troubling resemblances to those passed in another land not so many years ago, whereby property cannot be sold or even rented to anyone of the 'wrong' race, and oaths of loyalty are required specifically to the racially exclusive nature of that State.
As for the rest of the world, the sinister gerontocratic murderers in Beijing continue slowly to accrue power and influence both in the developing world (with an ever-expanding mission to bring Africa firmly under its influence) and in the West (where it controls large chunks of the economy). India and Pakistan continue to lob rocks at each other without them seeming to care what happens next so long as their side ends up on top. Afghanistan remains ungovernable even by Afghans. Attempts at progressive politics in South America are under constant threats from the old élites backed with good ole American know-how (as developed in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatelmala).
And all around the developed world, populations whose main level of blame for the current economic situation lies in their gullibility for the sweet-talking of fraudsters are being told that it is they, rather than the out-of-control financial sector or the manoeuvering property speculators, who have to take the shit. Iceland, Greece, Ireland, the UK, with others undoubtedly to follow.
It could be a hot year ahead, folks, but cold steel could be at the heart of it.
Happy new year...
One Hundred Years
My father, William Alfred Stapley, would have been one hundred years old today.
He isn't, of course. He didn't get all that near it, dying a few days after his seventy-eighth birthday. But as my own lifetime goes on, I find myself thinking more about his life, and how he shaped me.
He was born at Mount Zion, a farm on the outskirts of Brymbo, shown on this picture.
(He was once asked by some supercilious prat of an official for his place of birth. My father, being a bit of a gamester, truthfully said "Mount Zion". To which the official told him to go back to his own country. This is funny, because Dad didn't look Jewish.
He was the second child - and eldest son - of Harry and Mary Stapley, who lived in a terraced house at nearby Rhos Y Coed, and who went on to have eleven children.
Dad was raised at Rhos Y Coed, and at the age of fifteen went to work in Brymbo Steelworks as his father had done before him. The family then moved into a three-bedroomed house on the then-new Penygraig estate, where my grandmother lived until nearly the end of her days some fifty years later. Indeed, through one of those quirks of fate, it's the house I'm sitting in as I type this, the tenancy having - with a small gap - gone through three generations of the family.
Dad didn't work just at the steelworks during this time: he would also do seasonal work on farms around and about, including up the Vale of Clwyd as far as Ruthin. It was here that he learned the smattering of Welsh which he handed on to me as an unwitting preparation for my own learning of the language. Moreover, the steelworks itself closed completely during The Great Depression, forcing him to seek employment elsewhere. He re-trained as a pipe fitter and spent a couple of years or so working at British Celanese in Hertfordshire, where he also developed a sideline in being an amateur entertainer. He used to tell us of the times he'd performed for what was called a 'minstrel troupe' during that period.
He was also a useful sportsman - football and cricket for preference. He played football for the Brymbo Green club, and cricket for the village XI. Two anecdotes I recall from his days on the field:
1) He was team captain, and had been displeased with the performance of the batsmen in the previous game. So, when the batting order went up on the board for the next game, they found that Dad had completely reversed it, putting the tail-enders in first. Poor Donny Ruddy - a real 'rabbit' in cricketing parlance - was reduced to a nervous wreck even by the prospect of opening the batting.
2) He was once fielding square of the stumps (on-side or off-, I forget which), when the ball came quickly along the ground just to one side of him. The batsmen - seeing that Stapley, W.A. had turned his back, seemingly to watch the ball trundle to the boundary, set off for an easy run or two. Only to find that Dad had foxed them; he'd picked the ball up first time, waited for the batsmen to set off, then threw the stumps down. He claimed (and why should I disbelive him?) that he had been nick-named "The fastest hands and feet in North Wales" for this and similar feats.
I still have his old cricket bat here. It's bound in tape, but it's still as solid as when last he used it in the Forties.
He'd had other adventures as a young man. He once drove a car back from Ruthin - presumably in the days before you needed a licence - which didn't have a steering wheel. He steered the machine with a Stilson wrench. When you consider that the notorious Nant Y Garth Pass lies between Ruthin and here, and bear in mind what it must have been like seventy-odd years ago, you wonder at how close he came to grief.
On another occasion he did, crashing his motorbike into a post-box partly hidden by a hedge. This led to serious injuries, including losing most of his teeth and becoming permanently deaf in one ear. He claims that, while he lay there in hospital, he wrote on the chart:
"Here lies the body of William John (*);
His bike stopped, but he went on."
(*) His middle name wasn't John, it was Alfred, but you trying finding a rhyme for that.
Brymbo Steelworks opened up again at the onset of World War II, and Dad went back to work there. Some of his brothers were called up for the military, but Dad - either through his motoring injuries, or through being in a 'reserved occupation' - stayed to make the steel. It was almost certainly here that he met my mother, a miner's daughter from the Moss (just over the ridge from the works). She was spending the War working on the steam-hammer in the smithy.
It would perhaps be unseemly to point out that they married in something of a hurry in February 1946 (my brother being born just over six months later), but they stuck at it and stayed married for nearly forty-three years. Not that it was easy a lot of the time. Indeed, for the first five years of their married life they weren't even living with each other. There was a dire shortage of council housing in the post-War period, and as neither of my parents had the sort of connections in the Council's housing department that enabled others to jump the queue, it was 1951 before the family was able to be together in the house in which I was born some years later.
(I can't be sure, but the way my mother is holding her hands would suggest that this is either an engagement photograph or it was actually taken on their wedding day)
Instead, my father lived with his parents, my mother and brother with hers. Dad would walk the mile or so to Cerney House nearly every day to see them. I know this, because he kept a diary at around about this time, which I found after his death. I won't give any details (for one thing, I no longer have the diary - my mother presumably having thrown it out), but it was very clear that he was devoted to his family.
It may well have been a reaction to the conditions he found with his parents. It was clear to me as a child many years later that Dad, despite (or because of) being the eldest son, was not his parents' blue-eyed boy. Relations with his father (who died a couple of years before I was born) were always painted as being rather chilly, and his mother seemed to be similarly cold towards him. It was obvious throughout that Dad found his wife's family far more amiable and welcoming than his own.
Not that my parents' marriage, long as it was, was without its tensions. For one thing, it must have been very awkward only to have started living with each other after half a decade of marriage. For example (and this is a story my mother told against herself), she tended to be a bit chatty over breakfast (not a grievous fault, but an annoying one all the same), until Dad one morning cried out in despair, "For God's sake, woman, will you put a bloody sock in it first thing!". Their characters seemed to me as a child to be somewhat at odds with each other; she was very ordered and orderly, he was a bit more relaxed about things. She would plan things carefully; he would sometimes act on a whim (to her great annoyance), whether it was an impulse purchase or just going off to a football game. Money was tight for much of the time (even though Dad was a skilled worker as a burner in the steelworks), which didn't help. They would have the occasional horrendous rows which could lead to my mother storming from the house and not returning until evening. She also once threw a plate of sausages at him when he said he didn't want them.
My favourite story is another one she told against herself. My mother lived in a state of permanent mild dissatisfaction with her circumstances in life, and would often launch into a catalogue of disenchantment, telling Dad how so-and-so across the road had had a new such-and-such, how Mr-and-Mrs-Wotsit up the road and gone to such-and-such-a-place on their holidays. Dad would let the clockwork wind down and, when she had finished, gave her a meaningful look and said, "Ah, but have they got it on the table, girl?".
Domestic harmony was not assisted by the fact that my father could be the most annoying, aggravating, contrary cuss you could imagine. This he used to devastating effect on me as a child when I was trying to tell him something and he would constantly interrupt me. I suppose he thought he was trying to teach me patience; it just wound me up to screaming pitch, I'm afraid.
Anyway, my sister was born in 1955 and Dad doted on her as you would fully expect. It would be difficult for anyone to imagine, therefore, how devastating it was when she was diagnosed with leukaemia. Trips back and to to hospital in Liverpool played havoc with them all, and I don't think Dad ever got over (and why the hell should he have?) my sister dying early in 1958. It was a subject he tried never to talk about thereafter.
(I have a theory: at the time of my sister's birth, Dad was working at the Capenhurst nuclear facility near Chester. I have no proof, only a suspicion, that Christine's illness may have been connected with this).
Anyway, perhaps as some perceived last throw of the dice, I was born in 1962. This meant that my father was fifty-one, my mother thirty-seven, and my brother fifteen. The effect of this from my vantage point was that I was brought up as virtually an only child (with all that often implies) and by parents who were significantly older than those of my contemporaries.
The Generation Gap™ is often bad enough without such considerations coming into play but, growing up, I always found myself feeling that whilst I was quite obviously spoiled rotten, I was at the same time subject to stricter conditions than my friends. I was indulged, but the boundaries were far more tightly drawn. This was undoubtedly true, but looking back at it all, I don't think now that that was much - if any - of a disadvantage in the long run.
I think I may have been a bit of a puzzle to my father, if not something of a disappointment in some respects. Here he was, steelworker and son of a steelworker, who had also worked in the coal mines, having a son who was a whimpering, weedy brat with no interest in the same, rugged pursuits as him; sport (I was a long time coming around to any interest in it at all), fishing (I've never to this day quite seen the point of standing up to your oxters in cold water waiting for some dumb creature to snap at a worm, especially when you could go to Macfisheries and get a nice trout for tea), and making and repairing things.
And here was his forte, by the way. He would make things; in wood, brass, whatever. He would make little tables, or brass knick-knacks (some of which I still have). He made what was famously known as The Truck, a little flat-bed hand-cart which could be used for carrying firewood, rubbish, small items of furniture, or what have you. This sturdy creation - which he made in the late Sixties - actually outlasted him. And he made a miniature version for me. He also made my go-karts. One day, I must tell you about these magnificent machines. He turned a small snooker table into a bagatelle/pinball board, and he took a wind-up gramophone, put magnets on the turntable and a plastic cover over the top, which you could put ball-bearings on and watch them whirl around as the magents spun.
He was also extremely able at repairing things. It's difficult to get across to a lot of people below the age of, say, thirty, how important it was to be able to repair things in an age when consumer goods of various sorts were far less reliable and much more expensive to replace than they have been latterly. If you had the reputation for being able to fix a wide variety of contraptions in a satisfactory way, the whole village would beat a path to your door. Dad could fix electrical goods, clocks and watches; he could repair furniture or ornaments; and as I said, he could make things. He would seldom turn down anyone who came to him with something he might have been able to set right, and would seldom take money for it, which led my mother to warn him that he was being taken advantage of, which he probably was but didn't care very much. Doing something mattered to him, he wasn't the sort to be content with idleness.
Of all his talents, this is the one which I would have liked to possess, or at least to have in a greater degree than I do have. Oh, he could also draw a bit as well, which I envied, though this skill passed to my brother rather than me. Until the coming of the computer, I could scarcely draw a pair of curtains.
He was musical as well, and as my mother's singing was rather less than tuneful (her own father, when Mum was working in the smithy, would refer to her satirically as The Harmonious Blacksmith), I'm glad I inherited what little talent - and greater love - I have for music from him rather than from her. He could play the melodion, the mouth organ and the bones, and bought a small electric organ as much for his benefit as for mine (he seldom got a look in at it as a result of it being mostly in my bedroom, and I'm sure it was only a long lack of practice which made his playing not quite up to church standard).
What the advanced age of my parents compared to those of my friends meant, however, was that in what one might call the 'cultural' sense I received a far broader and deeper upbringing than my classmates did. My parents' musical tastes were those of the Thirties and Forties rather than those of the subsequent decades. On the one hand, this meant that there was a conservatism of approach which made me seem odd to my contemporaries, but on the other side of it, it perhaps made me more broad-minded and more likely to seek out the different and the odd than they were, possibly as a reaction to those constraints.
Apart from my general weediness, he may have been rendered quizzical by the amount of time I would spend reading (a vital skill which my mother ensured I had mastered before I had even set foot in a school). He was no reader himself (although he had some books on birds, fishing and knot-tying that I remember flicking through with scant interest), confining himself mostly to the Daily Mirror when trying to figure out how to get that elusive First Dividend from Littlewoods.
None of this meant, however, that words weren't important to him. They were, but specifically in the way you could play with them, and use them subversively and surreally. This is perhaps his most important cultural legacy to me. When he would recite:
"I saw a bird upon a bough.
If he hasn't shifted, he mustn't be there."
it would give me a sort of thrill compounded with unease that something like language, which I had always taken to be a solid foundation (I was as over-ordered as my mother in that respect if in no other) could have those underpinnings mildly shaken by the most minor of twists. Add to that such nagging conundrums as:
"A man jumped over a river. Where was he when he jumped?"
to which my answer of "In the air" was met with "No, that was after he jumped", and my response of "On the ground" was countered with, "That was before he jumped" (the correct answer being, of course, "In his boots"), and you can see him trying to train my mind to deal with the world as it was, rather than what I thought it was from the things I had read. Of course, he also did it simply to annoy, stymying my frequent objections with one his favourite phrases, "Now stop your argufying and contrathraping!".
As I grew into - and through - adolescence, the conflicts between us began to emerge more obviously. More than ever I felt limited by the boundaries which had been set for me, but the possibilities of kicking against them seemed more limited still, as I lived in fear of the flat of Dad's hand even more than I feared my mother's international-standard sulks when I had crossed her. Let me set it straight, in case there should be any doubt in your mind, dear reader: my father was no brute; in fact, he was a very even-tempered man except when those standards he felt were sacrosanct had been breached. He didn't have to hit me - or threaten it - very often; as I said, I was a wimp (a babby doll, as he would call me in exasperation), and feared punishment at home as I did in school. It was an old-fashioned approach, as one would expect from someone who had been brought up either side of The Great War, and I don't reproach him for it, really.
But this is no moment for settling old scores, real or imaginary. There are other, more worthwhile things to remember about him. His withering opinion of the pop stars of the late Sixties for example, summed up in his frequent complaint, "You hear them singing, "I Love You, I Love You, I Love You!", and there it is in the papers the next week: "Divorce!"!". Or his weary sigh when the newspaper or television news had brought fresh evidence of Man's inhumanity to Man, "What's the matter with people, I say?".
He was a teetotaller, and had been ever since a bad experience with farmyard cider as a young man, and it was always amusing to watch the fight he put up against having a small glass of port and lemonade to see the New Year in. He always gave in, but that was as far as it went for him. This did not stop him, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, from bringing back small cans of lager from retirement presentations he'd been to, and handing them to me with the solemnity of a tribal elder administering some rite de passage. I only learned my lesson at the age of nineteen, and white rum was to be my downfall.
There was his love of walking. Even when he was in his late sixties and retired, he would walk the four miles into Wrexham just for something to do, and would frequently walk all the way back as well. This was a continuation of an old habit: he had become involved with Brymbo Steelworks Football Club shortly after it had been founded in the Forties (he ended up as a Life Member), and was known to walk ridiculous distances to watch away games. To Ruthin, for example, a distance of some fifteen miles. More than that, people he knew would stop their cars and offer him a lift, which he would cheerfully refuse, much to his acquaintances' bemusement. I can't say that I could ever equal his distance record (I think I got up to six and a half miles once), although I too used to do daft things simply to follow the team (I finally got interested in sport - as a spectator only - when I was about twelve, and I was helping to run the Club by the time I was nineteen).
There are so many other things I could have told you but can't, either because I'm not clear on them, or because I never asked. He was a fund of anecdotes, and what he told me may have been somewhat embroidered (I refuse to concede even the possibility that he was making them up).
For by the time I had got the stage where I was interested enough to ask him more about his life, he was in no real state to be of help to my curiosity. As he neared his seventieth birthday, he was struck down by a condition of the inner ear - perhaps some delayed further effect of his encounter-at-speed with the post box all those years before - which caused him to suffer from a sort of permanent mal de mer. For one who had been so fit to suffer such a fate was unseemly, unfitting and grotesquely unjust. He also became almost totally deaf, which rendered any sort of communication with him difficult.
I will draw a veil over his final years, save to say that seeing him plunged into a state of near-permanent gloom with his self-confidence stripped away from him made me inwardly scream with rage to the very heavens, and may well have crystallised my view that - if there were any gods - they had an attitude which was scarcely more elevated that that of a malevolent, maladjusted child. He died just over a week after his seventy-eighth birthday in December 1988.
I look back on what I've written, and - not for the first time - I find myself unsure of what the hell it was that I wanted to say. Was it to try to explain to myself how I came to be how I am, and what Dad's part in that may have been? Possibly, but I'm not at all sure what it might be about me which reflects upon - or has echoes of - him. I look in the mirror, and I can't really tell whether I look like one of Dad's family, or like one of the male members of my mother's. Sometimes I think the one, sometimes the other. Temperamentally, I feel the inheritance is just as split, as I suppose it was always likely to be, so no revelations are forthcoming there. Perhaps it would be for someone who knew him and who knows me to be the judge of it. If so, I'd be grateful if they kept it to themselves.
No, perhaps the whole, the sole reason for writing all of this is to mark something of the life of a man who, whilst never famous, was remembered well by all who knew him; a man who, although of lowly status in the world, could be as noble as any wise man or potentate; and a man who, for all his faults, tried to do the right thing as often as possible and help other people when he could. And those aren't things which should ever pass from memory.
Or perhaps I just wanted to say, "Happy birthday, Dad".
Abs-heard
A colleague of mine has what we are now obliged to call 'a hearing deficit'. In other, older words, she's completely mutt in one ear.
She also has a son who's a science teacher.
Getting ready to come to work this morning, she was in the kitchen with all the associated background noise. Suddenly she heard the TV newsreader announce:
"A boat full of science teachers has sunk off the coast of Australia".
She had a moment's concern, but then remembered that her son was nowhere near Australia. Then she wondered why the BBC were suddenly taking such a prominent interest in the doings of her son's fellow professionals; after all, it's not as if the mass media show much concern for science teachers at any other time.
Grabbing the remote control, she put the text service on, to read the headline:
"A boat full of asylum seekers has sunk off the coast of Australia".
A Life Well-Lived
Another obituary, but a somewhat unusual one: the scientist Richard Dawkins' obituary of his father John, who died recently. Written with the degree of affection one would expect, but also painting a picture in words of the remarkable patriarch of a remarkable family.
"Surely...
...you're not dead?"
"I am. And don't call me Shirley."
Leslie William Nielsen
Actor
b. 11 February 1926, d. 28 November 2010
Another Day
Given that - in this Age Of The New Economic Sado-Masochism - we Are All In This Together, and notwithstanding the fact that it will cost our already-screwed economy billions of pounds in lost production, we are to get an extra public holiday on 29 April 2011 to mark some sort of corporate-dynastic merger which is being signed that day.
With this in mind, I have now amended the UK version of JudgeCo™'s 2011 Calendar to take into account this thoughtful little gift from our masters.
Take A Tip From Me
I've made a slight change to the Links page so that a little description appears when you put your mouse cursor over the link.
Yeah, I know; BIG deal!
Swan Up
Went for a short walk this afternoon, as the weather was too good to be sitting in the house trying to think of something to do.
I find that Brymbo Pool has a new attraction:
Breaking News...
Safety Alert In Catalunya As Pope's Barbecue Gets Out Of Control
Count The Days (Once More, Even)
Well, it's time to make JudgeCo™'s famous calendar available once more.
A few notes: I've changed the layout from previous years, just to see if it works (and, on the whole, I think it does); I've been a bit more artistic with the design itself, which means nothing much more than each file being over 6MB and that it'll use more ink when you print it off; and I know that I've used foxgloves for June for the second year running, but I was so pleased with the way the picture came out that I had to use it.
As before, there are three versions: a plain one with no public holidays marked; a UK version with the UK-wide holidays noted; and a US version with federal holidays shown.
All you need to do is click on the appropriate icon below and download. Then all you need to do is print and bind.
Enjoy! (And there will still be people downloading it next October if previous experience is anything to go by)
Monkey See...
The sentiments are familiar enough, but I've seldom come across it so aptly expressed:
"Somebody once told me a story about a troop of monkeys. They were all climbing something and the alpha monkeys or management, were in front and the normal ones, worker monkeys if you like, were lower down. The alpha monkeys looked down and all they could see were a lot of smiling faces. The normal monkeys looked up and all they could see were a large number of arse-holes."
Eating To The Sound Of Trumps
I did something potentially momentous today...
...or momentarily portentous. I forget which.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you about it. So here's a funny story from a member of my ISP's forums:
"There I was sitting at this table covered with a posh cloth, plate of tiddly cakes in the middle, and a bone china cup with funny liquid in it.
"The band was just striking up with a noisy piece and I wanted to pass wind, carefully timed it to a high noise bit and passed a rip-snorter, took a finger cake and was just about to place it in my mouth, when I realised every one was staring at me.
"Then came the realisation: I was listening to my iPod."
"Bottomless Wonders..."
"...spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end."
Benoît Mandelbrot
Mathematician
b. 20 November 1924, d. 14 October 2010
"Tell David Cameron..."
"...that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him."
Claire Berenice Rayner
Nurse, Author, Campaigner, Humanist
b. 22 January 1931, d. 11 October 2010
Big Ten
Right, I've put the curtains in the wash. Now I've got to get some gardening done.
The date? No, nothing special about it. Why do you ask?
Musings
Muse The First: This is probably not the time, but I have to say that I never found Norman Wisdom at all funny. I had the same problem (if problem it be) with Tommy Cooper; they both fell into that category of performers which my mother would dismiss under the label "too soft to laugh at". He was big in Albania, but then the Shqiptarë have never had much else to laugh about. Still, ninety-five's a good run out, and if he brought some amusement to people then good luck to him.
It does enable me to slip in a favourite Urban Legend about an Anglo-French conference discussing some thorny issue. The arguments went on and on until one of the Gallic representatives declared, «Nous avons besoin de la sagesse du Normand"» (trans. "One needs the sagacity of someone from Normandy"). This was turned by the translator into, "What we need is Norman Wisdom".
Muse The Second: Coming home on the bus this afternoon, there was an infant. This is usually bad news, but I was sitting quite close by and watched him - he'd be well under a year old by my guess - as, standing in his mother's lap, he gazed out of the window at the passing scene with an expression of wonder and delight at everything he beheld; a huge smile and big, shining eyes.
At what point do we lose that capacity for being so open to the simple beingness of the world? And why do we have to lose it?
Admin Notices
As it's getting to that time of year again, I'm beginning to prepare the JudgeCo™ Calendar for 2011, which I hope will be available before the end of the month. To this end (and to avoid confusion, not least to me), I've taken the 2010 calendar from the site, and the links currently go to a holding page. The new calendar will be announced in due course with a lot of unnecessary hoop-la.
Bizarrely enough, as I've noticed over the years, there still seem to be people downloading the calendar in October, the point of which I simply can't see.
I'd also like to say hello to whoever it is in Burkina Faso who seems to have taken an inordinate interest in visiting in the last month. Thanks for calling by.
Oh, and to the four people during September who somehow ended up here after loading their search engine of choice with the phrase 'pussy mound'; I hope you found what you were looking for, although you obviously didn't find it here.
Muffled
The sound card on this PC has a number of environmental effects on it. You know, "stone corridor", "bathroom", "auditorium", that sort of thing.
I now discover that it also has one called "padded cell".
I've made a mental note of that - I may need it someday.
A Fable, or "It's Like A Jungle Out There"
I cannot credit the author of this, but I'm told the original is in Portuguese (which may account for some slightly out-of-whack language), so muito obrigado to whoever devised this sad - but all too true - tale of what has gone wrong with the working environment for so many of us.
Click the image to start.
Paging Dr Freud...
I do worry about where my mind is taking me sometimes.
I went to search for something about external hard drives just now. I typed it in and hit 'Enter', only to find that nothing came up in my search engine of choice.
It was then that I saw that, instead of typing "external hard drive", I'd typed "exteranal hard drive".
It reminds me of a story I heard from the broadcaster and academic Laurie Taylor, who taught at a secondary school in London many years ago.
It was near the end of term, and the teachers were all sitting around in the staff room, trying desperately to come up with something original to put on the report cards they were all completing.
Suddenly from the French teacher sat at one of the tables came a cry of, "Good God Almighty! Look what I've just written about Salmon!". Salmon was, how you say, a 'pretty boy', and remarks to this effect had been made from time to time.
The French master went on, "I meant to write 'aurally erratic'...".
"...I've written 'eerily erotic'!"
The History They Never Teach
Those who control the flow of information control the minds of the populace.
This is obviously true in the case of the day-to-day transmission of news by the 'mainstream' corporate media, in bed as they always are with those who govern. So it is that we are led to believe six impossible things before breakfast television (e.g. Tony Blair is not a war criminal, the police are not on rather more than nodding terms with outright cynicism and corruption, the spivs and gamblers of high finance are not to blame for our economic problems but that the poor, the unemployed and the disabled are. You get the picture).
But this is as true of the past as it is of the present. Those who decide the history curriculum of our schools, those who decide which historical documents are made available (and to whom), are the ones who determine what view of the past is given to us to believe.
Yesterday marked the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of what has come to be known as The Blitz, at least as far as London is concerned. As I don't have a television set anymore, I don't know whether the TV channels were full of the usual version of events we have come to believe as the truth, but I suspect they were.
You must know the story by now: plucky Londoners picking up their lives and marching straight back to work; people still going on with their normal social whirl - the parties, the theatre trips, the dinner parties. Churchill and the Windsors visiting the East End to show their concern, with Elizabeth Windsor claiming to be glad that Buckingham Palace had been bombed because it meant that she could "...look the East End in the face".
The trouble is that much, if not all, of the above is sheer bollocks. The East End took a far more devastating hit than any Palace ever could; the people of those communities found that, far from being looked in the face by their rulers, those rulers were cavalier in their 'concern' for the plight of ordinary people, even down to ordering that the Underground stations be surrounded by skeins of barbed wire and locked up every evening to prevent anyone using them to shelter from the bombing which took place night after night for weeks.
The response of the ordinary people of the East End (and elsewhere) - the people who had been worst hit by the years of economic disaster preceding the war, and who had seen their rulers cosying up to all three prongs of Fascism in Europe - was to take matters into their own hands, as detailed in this fine piece from Michael Walker.
Of course, those who promote - and those who mindlessly accede to - the 'official' version of events will dismiss such a piece as being 'biased', or even 'counterfactual' (both code words for "we don't want to believe that this happened"). But then, they would. It upsets the settled, set-in-aspic story which our rulers wish us to have. A settled story is no longer controversial, it doesn't disturb the even tenor of the ruling classes' claim to a sort of divine right to continue ruling.
The end result is that - just as in the corporate, embedded media's reporting of today's events - we are fed a diet of falsehood about the past, even of that past which is strong in the memories of people still alive. By being thus fed, be it by the media or in our schools, we are made accepting of, and docile towards, the 'official version', however partial, however misleading. And so our path to the truth and to a proper understanding of where we come from, what we have come through, and how we have come through it, can be blocked by barbed wire, just like so many of our public footpaths, and like the Tube stations were to the many thousands of poor Londoners seeking shelter seventy years ago. And for much the same purpose.
How Many Pinheads Can Dance On A Theologian?
A few months back, I posted a clip of the author Philip Pullman defending himself from those who would censor his work because it may undermine organised superstition.
In the clip, Pullman suggests inter alia that his critics are perfectly at liberty to write their own books.
Well, it seems one of them has. One 'Father' Gerald O'Collins, who has apparently been immured in the Gregorian University of Rome for the last thirty years, has written a response to Pullman. Well, not so much a response as O'Collins' volume is not fiction - at least not in the way the term is commonly used - more of a diatribe against the author.
I haven't read Pullman's book, and I suspect that I shall never read this priest's reply either. Especially in the light of this quote in The Guardian:
"O'Collins criticises Pullman for "picking, choosing and changing" what he wants from the gospels, altering the story "over and over again in the interests of his own 'truth' or ideology", making historical errors and conducting poor historical research."
So here we have the fine sight of a writer of fiction being excoriated for being selective with his material, altering it in line with his own ideas, and simply making things up by someone who is:
- A Catholic priest
- A Jesuit
- A theologian
I humbly present this story to you as the leading entry for the Irony Of The Year Award.
Apparently...
...ZZ Top are touring again:
A Brief Musing On Culture
Shortly after posting this late last night, I went to bed. But I found the experience to be so...well, unsettling (is there no word which is the positive equivalent of 'traumatic'?) that I found sleep hard to come by.
So I lay awake until gone three pondering on the nature of culture and its dissemination in our world today. And, although I wouldn't be so foolhardy as to chime with that notoriously self-satisfied editorial in The Times which said, "It is possible to look on the present with undisguised satisfaction" (I think it was just before the Wall Street Crash or some similar catastrophe), I really do think that we live - in terms of our access to culture - in as close to The Best Of Times as we are likely to get. And the primary reason is the World Wide Web.
I mean, consider it: for centuries, culture (as we still tend to use the term) was the preserve of the wealthy, the powerful, the favoured few. Great works of art such as paintings and frescoes were created at the behest of the contemporary princes of the world, and were intended solely for their own enjoyment (even if an adjunct of that enjoyment was simply in putting down either their rivals or their underlings).
Music (with the obvious exception of the rude chants of the serfs, or folk music as we now call it) was created at the urging, and under the patronage, of the great kings, princes, popes and merchants. The idea that the peasantry would be able to hear those works - and that it would be nourishing for them to do so - would have struck these rulers as dangerously subversive.
Literature similarly. After all, up until very recently - in historical terms - the vast majority of the population of even the most advanced societies was illiterate. Sure, the lower orders could enjoy their folk-rhymes or poems or stories transmitted imperfectly via the oral tradition, but these forms were by their nature transitory - vox audita perit, vox scripta manet - and were deemed to have no lasting merit.
Even into the age that we now seem to be emerging from, popular access to culture (however one may wish to define it) was not direct. For paintings and sculptures of merit to be seen by the public, there had to be places for them to be displayed. For books - fiction and non-fiction alike - to be available to the public, there had to be publishers and booksellers. For music to be widely heard, there had to be concert halls, theatres, publishers and, latterly, companies willing to issue recordings. And all these required money or the wherewithal to provide the infrastructure.
Thus it has been that the general public's access to culture in almost all its forms has been controlled by a few gatekeepers, who will only make available what is likely to turn to their advantage, either financially or ideologically. For this is no mere capitalist phenomenon. Whereas the great corporations - or even small publishers - of what used to be called The West would seldom issue any culture which would make them a substanstial loss or bring them discredit in the eyes of either the public or the market, so too their equivalents in the great State bureaucracies of The East would publish nothing which did not have the imprimatur of The Party, or which was likely to go against whatever minor amendment of policy was currently holding the ring (the same is equally true of far-right régimes, of course).
And so, we - hoi polloi - were circumscribed as to what we were allowed access to. More troubling was that we often had no idea that we were being limited. We just accepted that what was out there was basically all that there was. Oh, a tiny minority of hardy and foolhardy souls would trek beyond the boundaries set by the market or the prevailing ideological tendency in search of the off-beat, the off-kilter or the dangerously different, but those vistas lay unregarded by the mass, those fields lay untilled by the Common Man.
So it was that vast quantities of human artistic talent never gained exposure to a wide audience. Writers, musicians, composers, artists of all sorts found the gatekeepers uninterested in what they had to offer; either because it would not 'sell' or because if was too far away from the expected orthodoxies of their time.
And this is the great tragedy of it. How many great talents have fallen into silence or disregard, how many works which - if not in the Tolstoy/Beethoven/Rembrandt category - could bring a leap to the heart, a lift to the spirits, a tear to the eye or a shout of joy in the face of the world's aridities; how many have never reached us because of the inevitably self-serving attitude of those gatekeepers?
This is now - mercifully - changing. For the World Wide Web now does allow many (though by no means all) of those talents to put themselves out there, to make their work known, to give people all around this planet access to what they have done.
So the more forward-thinking musicians are by-passing the cold, dead hands of the record business and using the internet to distribute their wares; writers who know how deep are the slush piles and how sepulchral are the morgues of publishing companies are using online services to sell their work either in traditional paper form or electronically; artists, animators and video creators have seized an unprecedented opportunity to promote their 'product' to the widest possible audience.
As a result, those corporations and establishments whose business model depended entirely on their gatekeeper role continuing largely unassailed are in mortal difficulty, and instead of adapting to the new reality are lashing out like the stumbling dinosaurs that they are, either by spraying legal actions all over the place or by attempting (and often succeeding) to suborn governments into passing laws amenable to them, a tactic which they are pursing worldwide - check out the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for how far they're willing to go.
This wider access by creative people to a potential audience has its downside as anyone would be able to assess. Ninety-five per cent of it, it will be said, is crap. This is correct. But ninety-five per cent of it has always been crap. Just look at where I got the link to the Man Balloon clip, for instance. B3ta is a site which - to use its own description - "...is all about celebrating the best stuff on the internet". Its Messageboard is a place where anyone with pretensions to be able to draw or design can place their work. As a result, most of what goes on there is non descript, although some of the apparently worst material on there is done ironically and with an eye to the many in-jokes which always abound in such circumstances, especially the regular abundance of the CDCs (Crudely-Drawn Cocks) - bright magenta phalluses which can be made to adorn any existing image, usually with unhilarious results.
And yet, it is on B3ta and via B3ta that I have found some of the most amusing or intriguing pictorial material I could ever hope to find. There are examples of the simply amusing (the work of Prodigy69, for example); the clever (Mofaha's conflating of Mondrian and The Beano); or just beautiful (the Man Balloon).
The crucial difference between the old way and the new is that whether something is garbage or not (or simply whether or not something is worth seeing or hearing) is no longer the privilege of the gatekeepers to determine, but is for each and every one of us to decide on the basis of what moves or excites us, not what we are told should move or excite us. Art is not a democracy and never could or should be; in terms of talent, all are not created equal. Nevertheless, the best scenario is that in which all who can contribute can contribute and all who can partake of the results can partake of them.
I have never taken it as a given that the vast majority of people in the world are innately devoid of talent, and I am convinced that there are works of substantial artistic merit being created somewhere in the world nearly every day.
How fortunate we are to live in a time when those works can be so readily available to us. Which is why it is important that we do all we can to keep control of the web out of the hands of corporations and governments and allow the freedom - however imperfect - of people to communicate their thoughts and ideas to flourish.
Oops!
Apologies to anyone viewing some of the Archive pages in Internet Explorer recently, who found everything shifted off to the right of the screen. This was due to a coding cock-up by Yer Judge, who now feels quite embarrassed at making such a basic mistake.
**********
The Man Who Hit The Right Notes
Morris David Brough Pert
Musician and composer
b. 9 September 1947, d. 27 April 2010
It was while I was in sixth form at the tail end of the 1970s that I first heard (and heard of) Morris Pert.
There was a rather battered old record deck in the far corner of our Common Room and while much of the stuff that was played on it was pretty standard stuff for boys in their mid/late teens who fancied themselves as the élite of their generation - heavy metal from Zeppelin to AC/DC, prog from Genesis to Hawkwind via Rush - there were some who were a little more subtle and adventurous in their tastes.
It was one such who one day spun us an album called Product by a band that I'd never heard of, called Brand X. There was some interest to be garnered from the fact that the drummer on most of the tracks was one Phil Collins, but I found the material itself to be intriguing.
It took me a few months (money was tight), but I managed to get hold of a copy for myself, and it immediately became one of my favourite albums. The combination of interesting musical concepts and the enthusiastic yet nuanced way in which they were played was a winning one.
In due course - a matter of years, for the same reason of financial distress - I was able to get hold of the band's other albums. Morris Pert hadn't featured on their first LP, having been drafted in for their second effort, 1977's Moroccan Roll, where he made an immediate impact on their sound. Literally, as the sleeve notes credit him as being on, "Percussion and a vast number of bits and things that he hit while the tape was running, including: the Q.E. 2, Idi Amin, and undiscovered parts of Scotland".
But Morris Pert was no stereotypical drummer of the 'bash bash thump' school. He had spent the previous years working with such luminaries as Stomu Yamashita and gaining a strong reputation as a composer. He had subtlety in his playing and his composition - reflections of his quiet, self-effacing personality - which can be heard on the one Brand X album where he was able fully to demonstrate both aspects, 1978's Masques.
He was also much in demand as a session player, too: he appeared on much of Kate Bush's seventies and eighties output, as well as working with Mike Oldfield and Peter Gabriel (check out the dense and intricate percussion part on No Self Control on Gabriel's third LP).
Latterly, he retreated to his own home and studio in the very far north-west of Scotland to continue to record and compose to critical acclaim, and it was there at Balchrick that he died, leaving behind him a body of work which - whilst only bringing him the admiration of those who look deeper than the current trend - will continue to be appreciated.
Morris Pert's MySpace page is still up so that you can hear some of his work.
**********
It may seem somewhat inappropriate to add this, but a series of thoughts came into my mind whilst researching this piece. First off, it explains why I am publishing this obit all of three months after the death of its subject.
The truth is, I didn't know. I've remarked before that there few people quite so parochial as English metropolitan critics in the fields of music and the arts in general. The same may be said for the whole of the London media, even (or, perhaps, especially) the 'serious' ones.
That it took three months for an obituary of Morris Pert to appear in any major London newspaper is indicative of those newspapers' strong tendency to look in utterly the wrong direction. It seems that if you are, say, an obscure Slovenian sociologist, a barrister with a roguish sense of propriety, or just someone who once curtseyed to the Duke of Loamshire, you have a better chance of a speedy obituary in the Guardian, the Telegraph or the Times respectively than if you were a highly-regarded performer or creator of art who happened to labour under the handicap of being born in - or of living in - Scotland, Wales or any part of rural northern England.
Not that coverage in non-metropolitan outlets is necessarily better. Pert's hometown paper, the Arbroath Herald, began its obituary with a wonderful line describing Morris Pert as, "[o]ne of the most talented musicians ever to come out of Arbroath". I chuckled at this - as I suspect its subject would have done - but at least one can say that it showed a sense of engagement. The London Meejatypes can have no such defence.
A (Fish) Broth Of A Girl She Was
One from JudgeCo™'s Department Of Minor Serendipity:
No sooner do I mention the veteran Irish broadcaster Arthur Murphy here, than a news story comes through that one of Ireland's (and, most particularly, Dublin's) iconic figures may not have been what she has been portrayed as being.
For Sweet Molly Malone may not have simply traded in the shallow waters of the fishmongery trade, and that the appellation "Tart With A Cart" applied to her by the coarse wits of Dublin's fair city may have been rather nearer to the truth.
An earlier version of the famous song has been found, dating from the late eighteenth century, and contains such lines as:
"Och! I'll roar and I'll groan, My sweet Molly Malone,
Till I'm bone of your bone, And asleep in your bed."
This would suggest that the ould girl sold more than just the tails of cod and skate, and that any cockles and mussels (conspicuous by their total absence from the newly-rediscovered version) may well have been, shall we say, figurative.
In this reporting of the latest developments, I particularly enjoyed the deeply ironic comment of the Chief Executive of Dublin Tourism, one Frank Magee:
"Everyone knows that it is hard to believe that such activities, if they took place in Dublin in the late 17th century, were of a mercenary nature. The author admits to having imbibed drink, which is another unusual characteristic for a Dubliner, and so I believe his recollection of his night with Molly may have been clouded by alcohol. I believe that there is no evidence to suggest that Molly was anything other than a lady of virtue, who was smitten by the writer and may have shared her bed with him."
But what has this to do with Arthur Murphy? Well, back in 1959 he recorded a sort-of rock'n'roll take on the version of the song which has become most familiar to us today. It was released in Ireland and subsequently on Parlophone in the UK (R4523 was the catalogue number, it was the 'B'-side to Murphy's recording of Sixteen Candles, and mint-condition copies of the 45rpm and 78rpm versions are judged to be worth about £10 a throw). Moreover, when Murphy was doing his weekend stints on Radio City's Downtown show in the mid 1970s, he did spin that particular track once or twice. Which is how I came to know about it in the first place.
Which gives me an excuse to feed you a short extract of this forgotten gem. To hear it, click on the picture of Arthur below (courtesy of Brian Jones' Radio City tribute site) showing him with an alarm clock, as he was the first DJ to be heard on the station just after 06:00 on 21st October 1974.
Irony Aloud
The phone just rang. I knew it would be a sales call. It almost always is. I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Service, but their writ obviously doesn't run everywhere. Like India, for example.
On this occasion, the conversation (if such it could be called) went something like this:
Voice: HELLO! AM I SPEAKING TO MR STAPLEY?
Me: Speaking
Voice: OH HELLO! I'M CALLING FROM (Name of company withheld. Not out of a sense of decorum, but simply because I couldn't make it out. She was very, very loud).
Voice: OUR RECORDS TELL ME THAT SOMEONE AT THAT ADDRESS MAY HAVE ADSDSA FASSDEWREW WQEWQTDSLQKWEQ?
Me: Pardon? (It wasn't that I couldn't hear her, it's that I was holding the receiver a good five or six inches from my left ear by this point)
Voice: I SAID, OUR RECORDS TELL ME THAT SOMEONE AT THAT ADDRESS MAY HAVE ONCE WORKED IN A NOISY ENVIRONMENT? LIKE A FACTORY?
Me (resisting the natural temptation to shout): No, darling, I've only ever worked in an office.
Voice: OH, I'M SORRY. I'LL TAKE YOUR DETAILS OFF OUR SYSTEM. GOODBYE!
Click.
I couldn't find it in myself to be cross with her. She had a pleasing accent with a hint of the West Indies to it, and her cheerfulness seemed to be of the kind which has always appeared to me to be second nature to those of Caribbean origin rather than the usual version which is like fake tan applied over the essentially lily-skinned Eeyoreness of its wearer.
I found the irony of the nature and volume of her enquiry to be pleasing, so I thought I'd share it with you.
Gallery Update
After a slight delay, there are new pictures in The Gallery. I'm also considering consolidating it into fewer pages, but that will have to wait a bit.
Click on the link in the left-hand sidebar.
No shit, Einstein!
Sign on a gate near here:
Rather that than:
Off His Head
I have to admit that I could never see what was funny about a grown man going around all the time wearing a papier-mâché head and speaking in a high-pitched Mancunian accent, so the death of Frank Sidebottom's creator Chris Sievey underwhelms me a touch. But it does give me a pathetic excuse for an anecdote.
In the office about fifteen years ago, some of us were charged with the job of logging the receipt of tax returns. The temptation to look at some of them in more detail than was strictly necessary was difficult to combat, as it was a very tedious job.
One of my colleagues (you know who you are...Dylan) was perusing one return which showed that the taxpayer (as we were still allowed to call them in those days) had had a small amount of income through appearing on television. Dylan pointed this out, but instead of saying:
"Hey, look! This woman's appeared on the 'Frank Sidebottom Show'!"
he said:
"Hey, look! This woman's appeared on the 'Frank Bottom Sideshow'!"
Tweaks
I've made some small changes to the site's design. The images in the top bar are now about 20% smaller, which means that I've been able to change the stylesheets to enable the 'meat' of each page (e.g. that wot you is readin' now) to start nearer the top; which in turn means that you shouldn't need to do quite as much scrolling.
I also fixed an annoying problem where Internet Exploder was putting a gap between some of the icons in the navigation bar (left). Turns out there was a space in the code which wasn't immediately apparent, and that this was being (rightly) ignored by Firefox, but which IE insisted on parsing.
On The Road Again
Let me tell you about yesterday.
The weather - and other circumstances - having conspired to prevent me from doing anything very much with my customary June fortnight away from the deepening shit-pit of work, I really needed to get out of the house for a bit. So, shortly after ten on Tuesday morning, I donned my boots and rucksack and set off.
Before we go any further, here's a map:
(Start from the red dot at bottom centre and go anti-clockwise. You'll need to throw a six to start)
I took the old, familiar route down through the village - past the school and the church - then turned right just beyond the Old Vicarage onto Glyon Lane. Walking down past the kennels, I came to an odd sight just before Yord Cottages. There was one of those new-style metal kissing gates which had been installed at the end of the footpath which comes down from Halcog. Very good, except for one thing: there being no fence beside it, there was no need for anyone to use the gate anyway. Perhaps they're doing it by instalments.
I carried on past the cottages and past the end of the road I wanted to take. This rather wanton act was due to the fact that I wanted to see whether the buttress of an old railway bridge still stood a bit further down. Turning the corner by the old farm buildings, I could see that stand it still did:
The bridge once carried a railway line which looped off the Wrexham-Birkenhead line at Tanyrallt on the other side of the ridge, ran around the end of Windy Hill and led to the mines in the Moss Valley. I had last seen this wall in June of 1978 when, having had an 'O'-level exam in the morning, me and the future folk singer of note Annette Batty had walked home this way.
Having thus reassured myself that not everything from my past gets routinely demolished, I doubled back to Yord Cottages and turned right up Cae Pen Tŷ Road.
I stopped by The Windings - at one time a noted recording studio (Chumbawamba recorded part of their 1995 album Swingin' With Raymond there), but now seemingly a mere bed & breakfast place - and looked back up the hill. I could still see the end of my road:
Pressing on, I noticed - just as I had going down Glyon Lane earlier - that there was an awful lot of wild garlic growing at the side of the road. In fact, it was snitheing (as we say hereabouts) just about everywhere I went. It brought back another memory of my school days. Our school bus used to go along Minera Road (which runs parallel to the north of Cae Pen Tŷ Road). These were the days when coaches such as those supplied by W J Hanmer & Sons for our transport had opening windows and fanlights. From mid-May onwards - especially on warm days - the cry used to go up as we came up Minera Road from the Ffrwd: "Shut the windows!". This was because the wild garlic grew in profusion along the banks of the River Cegidog in Ffrwd Wood below, and the smell used to hit you like a club as you came up alongside it.
I dropped down Furnace Road into the small village of Ffrwd (The Ffrwd to us). As the name 'Furnace Road' would suggest, there was once industry here; ironworks, brickworks, and a quarry (which was the last industry to go, sometime in the 1980s). There was also once a plan to have a section of the Ellesmere Canal here, but work stopped after just two years at the tail end of the eighteenth century.
The village is odd in the sense that it straddles a county boundary. In the picture below, the houses on the left are in the County Borough of Wrexham, whereas the ones on the right are in Flintshire. The boundary runs down the middle of the road all the way from Pen Y Coed in the west to Ffrwd bridge (which is in the foreground of this shot), before following the line of the river further east:
The boundary follows the demarcation between the old counties of Denbighshire and Flintshire. It used to be said that you could tell when you had crossed the line between them with your eyes shut, because the standard of road maintenance in Denbighshire was so bad.
I then started the long, slow slog up Barracks Lane towards Cymau. As I said, there used to be a quarry up here, but this has now been turned into a nature reserve. The wild garlic again grows in multitudes at the side of the road, due to poor drainage and heavy shade. Further up, though, and having had a brief conversation with a horse grazing in an adjacent paddock, I found vegetation which was far nicer looking (and smelling):
I knew that Barracks Lane would take me a fair way eastwards of Cymau itself, and that there was a footpath which operated as a short cut into the village, but I decided to stay with the road and turn left up the hill at the end of it. I reached the welcome refuge of the seat by Ye Olde Talbot Inn just on midday.
A ten minute break later, I set off with the intent of visiting Cymau's parish church. However, walking along the main road, I came to Bethesda chapel (1860) with its attendant graveyard. As I've remarked before, cemeteries are eminently readable, and I was unable to counter my curiosity. Strangely, very few of the graves seemed to date from the last ten years, which suggests that either no-one dies in Cymau anymore, or some bureaucracy has deemed that no-one is to be buried there now, or that no-one would be seen dead in the village (which I consider highly unlikely).
Morbid curiosity slightly sated, I walked further along and turned left by the Post Office; down the lane which leads ultimately to the ford at Lower Lodge, but which passes the gateway to All Saints Church. The gate itself was padlocked, as it has been every other time I've been past it, but a stone stile gives foot access to the track leading to it.
All Saints is a curious building, looking like little more than a large shed with a bell on it. It is part of the Parish and Benefice of Llanfynydd, and appears to be without an incumbent clergyman at present. Further than that, I've been able to discover little.
I ate my lunch in the little grassed area in front of the porch, before setting off back up to the Post Office, and turning left onto the main road again.
Heading down to Ffrith (The Ffrith to us; we're as bad as the French for putting definite articles in things), I wanted to take the track leading down to the old pack bridge, but I wasn't sure where the track started, or whether the bridge was open (I'd heard that it had been closed quite recently for repairs).
I found the track, as it was signposted as a bridleway, but became temporarily flummoxed by the mechanism for opening the gate to it. I then remembered that I'd seen gates like this before, and all that was needed was to move the vertical handle which was sticking out of the top. I yomped on down the track, shortly reaching a stretch which descended into the gloom of the woods and which was, as a consequence, slightly soggy underfoot.
I finally emerged into a paved area, and found myself down by the river. To the north of the ford stands the pack bridge...
...and this I crossed onto the old Cymau Road. I wandered around the recreation ground for a while trying to find the plaque that Time Team had left there, but couldn't see it, and so I made my way out onto the main road through the Ffrith.
Ffrith used to have something in common with Ffrwd (apart from the definite article), in that the old Denbighshire/Flintshire boundary used to divide the village up, as it ran along Nant Y Ffrith and under the bridge which forms a very effective traffic bottleneck at the southern end of the village. However, a more recent re-alignment turned the border to the south east, and now only a few residences by Ffrith Hall fall in to what is now Wrexham County Borough.
Having marvelled at how difficult it must be to drive through the village given that the constriction caused by the bridge is further exacerbated by all the cars parked down the northbound side, I made my way up to by the Bluebell pub and turned left onto Valley Road. A short way up, I found myself in the shadow of this:
This is one of two viaducts which carried this stretch of the former Brymbo-Mold railway line. The other, a few hundred yards to the south-east behind Ffrith Hall, was taken down some years ago, leaving only the pillars standing. The line, which carried passenger traffic from 1898 until 1950, ran on an embankment above the village. Off to the right of this picture, the former station-master's house still stands. You can read more about Ffrith station and the line in general here.
Going under the viaduct led to the junction of two more bridleways. The one on the right goes up Nant Y Ffrith (the stream itself flows under the left-hand side of the bridge in this picture and behind the houses on that side), whilst the left-hand path goes up to Glascoed (The Glascoed to us - I did tell you, didn't I?). It was this path I took, not knowing - as I had never walked it before - in what condition it might be (I'd heard reports that it wasn't too good in places).
To be fair, the path is in pretty good nick except for the odd area which is a bit wet through not getting much in the way of sunlight. I slogged slowly up the slope until I came to this:
I couldn't figure out why there should be a bridge here when there wasn't - to the best of my knowledge - a road anywhere nearby, but it seems that there is a trackway here, possibly related to forestry work further up (*). Whatever its purpose, I took a short break here, before resuming my progress (the word is appropriate only in its strictest sense here) up the track. Said progress was hampered by the fact that it started getting steeper as it neared Glascoed Hall. I looked across to the east at this point and saw how far the houses on Mount Zion seemed from there, knowing that they marked the last couple of hundred yards of the journey.
Eventually, I emerged sweating onto Glascoed Road and freewheeled down to Glascoed wood itself, pausing only to try to make conversation with a couple of horses in an adjoining field, one of which seemed to have hiccups, or possibly hay fever.
Having followed the road through the woods, I was then faced with the long, steep road out the other side back onto Minera Road. When you're standing at the bottom of that hill, it seems absolutely infinite, and the only way you can do it is to put your head down, not raise thine eyes to the hills and hope that you'll remember to stop before you walk out into the middle of the main road. This I managed, clambered up the footpath directly opposite onto Pool Road and then coasted down home again.
Using my standard measurement method of a straight-edge of paper with marks on, I seem to have done just about six miles in a touch over five and a half hours. Not bad, all told.
More pictures from my latest peregrinations will probably appear in The Gallery (see left sidebar for the link) soon.
(*) I discovered later that it was a tramway to the quarries further up.
Tex Burke
Those of you who have been with this site for some time may recall my piece of just over four years ago marking the retirement of Terence 'Tex' Burke from HM Revenue & Customs.
The past year had seen him suffering from a serious illness, and it was with great sadness that I heard that Tex died in hospital this morning.
As I remarked before, Tex was my first manager in what was then the Inland Revenue, and his bluff good humour and sheer common sense (qualities in rather short supply in most of his equivalents today) got me through what was, at times, a sticky first year.
He was a very organised man; so much so that when a new office opened nearby, he was one of the people best suited to getting it up and running. For many years afterwards he controlled the office budget and kept the building's increasingly decrepit telephony system operating - a skill he passed on to me when the time came.
I last saw him at the start of March and, although it was obvious that his illness had physically diminished him somewhat, he was still very much his old self.
Through him, I came to know other members of his family, many of whom work (or have worked) in the same office; most particularly his son and daughter-in-law Tez and Wendy who were instrumental (if you'll excuse the pun) in providing me with one of the best evenings of my life just under a year ago.
I would be the first to deny any claims I have to photographic talent, but one of the pictures I'm most proud of is one I took at Tex's retirement 'do' which showed all the members of the Burke family who were working in our office at that time:
I will remember a bloody good bloke, and will be raising a glass in his memory this evening.
If you want to do something which might have longer-lasting positive effects, given that Tex was an avid bird-watcher, please consider making a donation to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (*) by clicking on the logo below (or, of course, by donating to the equivalent organisation in your own country).
Goodbye Tex, and thank you.
(*) My mind's not quite with it: the first time, I typed this as "the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds", which wasn't quite what I intended...
Rock Of Aged
Just received a spam e-mail from a record distribution company I once made the mistake of subscribing to, but who now claim that they can't remove my e-mail address from their database because they've got no trace of it (hmmm...).
It was headlined:
NEW DEVICE TO SUPPORT BON JOVI
Yeah, I thought, a fscking zimmer frame...
Hol(e)y Shit!
Or, to be more precise, holey Guatemala City:
(Photo by Paulo Raquec for the Government of Guatemala)
This is what happens when you get a tropical storm, unstable geology and poor urban engineering. Local media report that there's what's left of a three-storey building down there.
For all our artifice, for all our edifices, nature's hand cannot be stayed.
A Few Superficial Thoughts On The Nature Of Memory
If I have a fault - and I do concede the possibility - it's that I remember things too clearly.
This is not the unalloyed benefit you might think. For one thing, I have no power of choice in what I remember, so that my clearest memories are often of my greatest embarrassments, and these can come hurtling back to me without warning. If you ever encounter me in person and hear me going "la-la-la" quite loudly, it's because I'm trying to blot one of the buggers out.
I'm now at the age where I can have difficulty remembering what I did thirty seconds previously, but memories from ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago can be triggered by something and come back to me with a terrible clarity.
I'll give you a rather specific f'rinstance. At the moment, I'm listening to a lot of old tapes - of the reel-to-reel kind - as a prelude to digitising them just as I've already done with my cassettes and with my vinyl collection.
Most of those recordings are of the former radio programme Stop The Week, and the recordings date from the period 1981 to 1986 (I wrote an article on the subject of Stop The Week a few years ago). Now, between the time that I recorded them and the time when my old Stella tape recorder finally ground to a halt about fifteen years ago, those tapes were on what the radio biz calls 'heavy rotation'. But I haven't heard any of them again from that time up to now, because it has taken me until the past eight months or so to get a replacement machine and to get it working adequately.
Nonetheless, I have sat here most evenings for the last few weeks listening to them (and to recordings of other things) and have found myself remembering - sometimes with a high degree of accuracy - exactly what was coming next. Not just what point was about to be made and by whom, but often a verbatim memory, a playing back of a transcript in my head.
This is quite unsettling, because what it also does is to bring back to me where I was at the time I first heard it and - more disconcerting still - who I was at that point in my life. I am then overcome by a melancholy which is caused by another character trait to which I've referred before; namely, a hyper-acute sense of the passage of time. In the case of these tapes, I am sent back twenty-five or thirty years, to the time when I was young, when - however indolent I may have been, however dithering my sense of purpose - my life still had some potentialities to it, and some things still seemed possible. I am then brought face to face with my own serial inability to break out of my routines of habit, action and thought and actually strike out in some of those directions which were then in potentia.
And so a sense of minor existential despair descends upon me, as I contemplate the fact that I am now quite a way into middle age, have achieved little in general (and certainly nothing of what I wanted to achieve), and have an ever-strengthening sense of how little time I may have left, especially with a state of health which is not so much rude as 'mildly impolite'.
This is the reason why I have never been to formal reunions of anywhere that I've ever been a part of. I made a couple of early mistakes in making rather more informal returns to past haunts which warned me very effectively of the perils of going back.
First off, at the age of eleven. One day - in the November or December after I had started at the wretched dump - our comprehensive school was closed for the day. So, a group of us decided that we would pay a visit to the junior school we had left only a few months before. I don't think our presence was entirely welcomed by the teachers, and it culminated in the grand-scale embarrassment of the four or five of us who had blundered in to this misadventure being required to sing The Little Green Fir Tree to a classful of bemused - if not horrified - six-year-olds.
My next error of this kind wasn't quite as bad. At sixteen, I went back to the aforementioned comprehensive for some reason; some lingering sentimentality, perhaps, as I can't recall any practical reason for the visit. As I was walking down the covered way towards Bottom Block, the geography teacher who had also been my last form master was coming the other way. As he passed me, observing that I was dressed in my usual domestic shabby casual rather than school uniform, he grunted, "Drop out!" and passed on his way. I suppose he thought it was an insult, but I took it as a badge of honour.
I got better at it. After I had left the sixth-form college I attended, I had cause to go back to see if I could get hold of a copy of a college publication in which a poem I'd written had appeared the previous Spring. I was in and out inside about ten minutes, and I never darkened its late-sixties concrete façade again. I am mercifully relieved of any further possibility of going back there by the fact that the college changed its status and moved elsewhere.
Such experiences have led me not - at least, not so far - to go back to my alma mater, although given that the famous/notorious hall of residence I lived in for two years will be closing next year may force me into reconsidering this. I just know that there would be too many ghosts haunting those corridors, and that - worse still - one of those ghosts would be me in my younger form. I'm not sure I could handle the introspective gloom which would settle upon me for days if not months thereafter.
At one point in his multi-volume war memoirs, Spike Milligan gives out an anguished cry of "Oh, yesterday, leave me alone!" It won't. Amnesia or senility apart - and not even the latter necessarily either - we're stuck with all our yesterdays, the more so the more of them we accrue. I just wish that it wasn't the case that we can't actively select what we recall.
Blue...Orange...Pink?
A slightly unfortunate juxtaposition in The Namibian newspaper:
Tiptoe Out Of Power
The splendid Mike Power posted a photograph of our ex-PM on his blog. I was immediately struck by a remarkable similarity with another utterly bizarre figure who is still - unaccountably - an object of adulation by some:
Colour Coded?
If you merge blue...
...with orange...
...you get a sort of shitty colour:
A Calculated Risk?
As talks continue between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, it might be worth examining the arithmetic.
It is generally assumed that there is little chance of any workable coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems because their combined total of seats would still be a bit short of an overall majority. This may not be an accurate portrayal of the situation, however. Consider the following:
- The actual number of seats required for a majority in the Commons is not - as usually supposed - 326, but 323. This is because the five Sinn Féin members refuse to take their seats.
- Given this, Lab + Lib Dem = 315 seats.
- The Lib Dems would also bring the single Alliance Party MP with them (as the AP is effectively the Northern Ireland branch of LD). So, 316 seats.
- Labour would also bring on board the three MPs from the SDLP (as that party is traditionally allied with Labour). That makes 319.
- The Independent Unionist Sylvia Hermon usually votes with Labour in the Commons, and could no doubt be prevailed upon to continue doing so. 320. Just three short.
- Quite possibly, given the political balance of the coalition, the Green MP could be brought in as well. 321.
- If they go about it the right way, such a coalition could ensure that - even if they don't vote for the coalition's measures - the SNP and Plaid could be persuaded not to vote against them either. This would reduce the seat count needed for a majority to 315. That's assuming the DUP would always vote against such a coalition, which is far from being certain. If they too simply abstained, the number of seats needed for a majority would be a mere 307, although the larger the margin above that, obviously, the better.
OK. It's (to use that hideous phrase which has found its way into the mouths of so many people who ought to know better) a 'big ask' (sorry), and the primary pre-condition for it would almost certainly be the defenestration of Gordon Brown. Even then, such a grouping would be difficult to keep together. But all it needs to do is to hang together for long enough to get proper electoral reform on the books - not just the voting system, but party funding - and to stabilise things on the economic front, and then another election could be called under a new system and we could all take our chances again, but with the far greater likelihood that the spread of political opinion amongst the public would be better reflected in the results.
There are dangers to this as well, though, not least of which would be the perception - no doubt vigorously fanned by those newspapers who love to wrap themselves in the Cross of St George on behalf of their Australian and Channel Island tax-dodging proprietors - that such a government would be a conspiracy against the English. The Tories - having few seats in Wales and only one in Scotland - would assiduously support such an assertion (although perhaps not too overtly), and would stand to reap the benefits when or if that grand coalition collapsed or was dissolved. The neo-fascists of the so-called 'English Defence League' - in practical fact an alliance of radical far-righters leading a small but loud band of pissed-up football hooligans - would seek to take maximum advantage of it, although they would probably just concentrate on their usual behaviour of attacking their fellow English who just happened to be the 'wrong' colour. The BNP - an electoral busted flush after Thursday - might regroup under a less slick leader and take to more clandestine ways of promoting themselves. UKIP - the nineteenth hole branch of this section of our politics - would probably seek to gain from it as well (although probably not by attempting to recreate the opening titles from World Of Sport!)
And it would be without purpose to point out that such a coalition would, nevertheless, have the support of 53% of the English electorate in addition to at least 56% of the Welsh and over 60% of the Scots: such a simple fact would be drowned out by the high-pitched squealing of the foreign-owned media scenting a chance to promote their own agendas of mindless Atlanticism and xenophobia.
Nonetheless, it is a chance which is - on balance - worth taking. As much as I dislike the idea of putting venal clowns such as Jowell, Mandelson and both Upper and Lower Millibands (the former possibly even as Prime Minister) back into power, the alternative - a minority Tory regime with no mandate (in terms of number of votes cast) outside of non-metropolitan southern and eastern England) would be worse, in that it would be a return to the 1980s and all that that would entail.
Sometimes, you have to make the less worse choice.
Math And After
I got to bed shortly after 08:00 and stayed there until about four this afternoon. I might not have got up then but for the fact that I had something I had to do.
So, all the results are now in (Thirsk & Malton excepted, of course) and the first thought is that the original exit poll was more or less spot on. Which leaves the question once again of what went wrong with the Lib Dems. They were quite obviously squeezed in many areas, and combined some good gains in Northern England with some catastrophic losses in the south. They seemed to fare particularly poorly in Scotland in what was otherwise an 'as you were' election up there, with no seat changing hands from 2005.
Labour got a kicking just about everywhere bar Scotland, with big swings against them in central and southern England. What we seem to be seeing is the electoral geography in those areas simply reverting to its 1979-1997 pattern where - outside of some of the larger towns and cities - Labour were all but invisible. Only London itself did not see a substantial fall in Labour's share of the votes.
And it was probably London which did for Cameron's chances of a majority government. While they did make gains there, they weren't on anything like the scale that they needed to be handed the keys to absolute power. They should have been helped by a largely static percentage of votes in England for the far right, but those levels were so low anyway that they didn't make much of a difference in most seats; they would have won nearly all of them anyway.
Wales saw Plaid Cymru marginalised again as the attention was focussed on the Lab-Con battle. The Tories did pretty well from what was quite a low base point, but again it was nowhere near the twelve or thirteen seats they belived they could win. The Lib Dems stayed pretty static with only the loss of Loopy Lembit to a very strong local Conservative candidate. Labour lost a few, but salvaged something of their machismo by reclaiming Blaenau Gwent and holding on to Ynys Môn. They hold 65% of the seats on just 36% of the votes, however.
And here was the biggest loser of the night: the public. When one party can be within licking distance of the greasy palm with 47% of the seats on just 36% of the total vote, whereas another party can poll 23% and get less than 9% of the seats, something is very wrong with the system itself.
I have no real hopes of the situation changing, either. Although Cameron is extending a very general offer to Clegg today, the most the Conservatives are likely to offer is some woolly all-party enquiry into the voting system. 'All-party' in this case meaning 'dominated by those who don't want the current system to change'. Nothing less than a broad-spectrum campaign of public agitation is likely to push them beyond that, and I don't see that as being particularly likely either.
There is a fairly strong likelihood that we're going to have to go through all this again in the next twelve months, against a background of cuts in public services, rises in indirect taxation which will have a disproportionate impact on the already disadvantaged, and the further featherbedding of those at the top, and the concomitant social unrest which could result from all these would probably play straight into the hands of the authoritarian wing of the Conservative Party. This was what we saw in 1979 and afterwards.
Some small consolations from yesterday were the election of a Green Party MP, and the failure of the Niagara of smears, insinuations and outright lies from the right-wing press to get their boy into power.
For me, well my predictions from the start of the night were quite a long way off, but I can boast that I got 90% of my seat-by-seat predictions right. In the long term, I and my many fellow toilers in the public sector already knew what was going to be done to us, but it still remains to be seen by whom.
Election Night Live Blog
07:35: Right, I think this is as far as I can go. There are a number of recounts going on, and some seats haven't even started counting yet. This has been the craziest general election I can remember, and I've been watching them closely since 1979. It's quite clear that not even the shiny new Cameron Conservatives have managed to convince quite enough people that they're to be trusted with governing outright. It's also obvious that - with the exception of Scotland - no-one much wanted Labour to be able to cling on to power. The big mysteries of the past few hours have been:
- What the hell happened to the Lib Dems? Touted as about to make their big breakthrough, they failed to hold a number of their seats whilst at the same time winning one or two (Redcar, Bradford East) which no-one expected them to challenge for.
- How was it that the Conservatives managed to win some seats which were a long way down their wish list (Erewash, Sherwood) whilst failing to capture supposedly more easy targets (Birmingham Edgbaston, Wirral South)?
- Why was the system so unprepared for a large turnout that people were turned away on the stroke of 10 pm, or found that insufficient ballot papers had been printed (a mistake which wouldn't even have been found in a student's union election)?
- Who were the 1872 people who voted for Esther Rantzen, and are there enough psychiatric beds for them all?
At least it looks as if the Conservatives are going to have to govern without their customary arrogance for a while, although it wouldn't be surprising to see another election before the year's out.
I'm off up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire on this grey, damp morning. If you have been, thanks for reading.
07:09: I'm still here, but trying to catch up on results I'd missed earlier on. Also, trying to reach some sort of summing-up of the results so far. I intend getting to bed by 08:00 if I can...
06:08: Ah, lovely! There's now a Green MP! Well done to Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion!...
05:39: I've now been at this just short of eight hours, the sparrows are shouting at each other in the back garden, and the point where my neck meets my left shoulder is a small but intense world of pain...
05:26: Good to see Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke - two of the most ridiculous Home Secretaries in living memory - both having to find new jobs next week. Perhaps Jacqui can give her husband a helping hand around the house...
05:04: Tories picking up a lot of votes and seats in the Midlands. Sorry to see Dr Richard Taylor lose Wyre Forest. There will be no genuine independents in the Commons this time with Dai Davies having lost Blaenau Gwent earlier. How bloody stupid of the Lib Dems to field a candidate against him. And how do nearly two thousand people vote for Esther fucking Rantzen in Luton South?...
04:41: Some consolation to see that the appalling Phillipa Stroud didn't take Sutton & Cheam, although it was bloody close. Unfortunately, the wretched Nadine Dorries sailed home in Mid Bedfordshire, so there'll be no shortage of religious wingnuttery in the new parliament...
04:34: Sorry to see the defeat of Dr Evan Harris, one of the few MPs who had any real scientific expertise. I believe that he was the target of some fundemantalists, who will no doubt be happy with their work...
04:06: This really is all over the place. Lib Dems lose Rochdale (where they were incumbent, although notionally a Labour seat), but gain Redcar on a swing of nearly 22%. Someone on UK Polling Report has expressed the opinion that we are seeing a highly regionalised election. It's difficult not to agree. The South of England seems to be reverting to a pattern familiar to us from the 1980s, although one or two more islands of Lib Dems and Labour; the South West seems to be dividing between Lib Dem and Con more than for some time; the East Midlands seems to be heading largely rightwards; and Scotland seems to be piling them up for Labour. The prediction is still in line with the revised exit poll from the start of the night, but many seats in naturally rural Conservative areas have yet to declare. There are also some key recounts (Birmingham Edgbaston, I'm told)...
03:36: I've got a stiff neck, not eased any by the head-shaking I'm doing at some of these results...
03:03: So, five hours in and where are we? Very confused, I think. This is not how it was supposed to be. There has been no Lib Dem surge (in fact they seem to be doing pretty badly, especially in Scotland) ,the Tories are piling up huge swings but not taking that many seats as yet. Labour's vote has even increased in Scotland. I don't know what to make of it all...
02:24: In Wales, Labour regain Blaenau Gwent - not too big a surprise. Two big shocks, though: not only do the Lib Dems hold Ceredigion, they take it with 50% of the vote. This may console them for what happened next door, where the eccentric Lembit Öpik has been defeated by the Conservatives on a swing of over 13%. Now he can spend more time with his Cheeky Girl...
02:00: Little sign of that surge for the Lib Dems. In fact, they seem to be losing ground, especially in the South of England. They've failed to regain Guildford - in fact they suffered a huge swing against them. Troubling...
01:49: The Broon has held his seat, and Labour are piling up huge majorities in their Scottish heartlands...
01:41: Hmm, so I've still got a Labour MP. What a surprise. 5.8% swing from Lab to Con, though...
01:23: A lot more coming in now. Labour have lost Kingswood near Bristol, and have suffered large swings against them elsewhere. Plaid have taken Arfon (a notional Labour seat), but have failed to regain Ynys Môn, where the Tories would probably have finished a close second but for the presence of an Independent who was previously a Conservative candidate...
00:57: Big shock in Northern Ireland as Assembly First Minister Peter Robinson loses to the Alliance after the Unionist vote splits three ways...
00:52: The logjam appears to have been broken. LD hold Thornbury & Yate, but with a reduced majority and a sizable drop in Labour's vote. Labour hold Durham North. A big majority but again, like the Sunderland seats, a big swing to Con. They also hold Darlington, but their majority cut by nearly two-thirds...
00:46: A couple of results from Norn Irn: Sinn Féin hold Tyrone West and the DUP hold Antrim North (putting Junior Paisley into office in succession to his da')...
00:34: I don't remember such a long gap in declarations at this time of night before. I suspect that there are a lot more recounts in the offing tonight than we've seen since 1974...
00:04: I suspect that the final result of this election will not be clear for some time. Apart from the fact that Thirsk and Malton will not now be voting until May 27 because of the death of the UKIP candidate there, there are so many reports coming in of people not being able to vote (not just because of the time factor, but because of out-of-date electoral rolls) that legal challenges could drag things out for weeks or even months...
23:46: Result: Sunderland Central: LAB HOLD. Percentages and change: Lab: 45.9 (-4.2), Con: 30.1 (+4.7), LD 16.9 (+1.6). Now everyone in Sunderland can go to bed...
23:36: I've decided I need some music to get me through the night. Now playing: Steve Reich - Music For 18 Musicians...
23:30: Right, at last! Second result: Washington & Sunderland West: LAB HOLD. Percentages and change: Lab: 52.5 (-9.8), Con: 21.9 (+7.5), LD: 17.1 (-0.3)...
23:19: Why do constituencies vie with each other to be the first declaration? Surely it would be better to make sure that they got it right rather than first. But then that, as the late, great Robert Calvert put it, is the Spirit Of The Age...
23:13: The exit poll has now been revised slightly. Con: 305, Lab: 255, LD: 61. A distinction without a difference, methinks...
22:57: First result: Houghton & Washington South: LAB HOLD. Percentages and change from notional 2005 result: Lab 50.3 (-13.3), Con 21.4 (+4.8), LD 13.9 (-2.4)...
22:43: Reports from a number of constituencies of people being turned away from polling stations at 22:00 and being prevented from voting. Sheesh! Why did they leave it so late to go?...
22:30: Just for the sake of information, this is the first general election I've monitored without the aid of a television set. Instead, I'm switching between the BBC, The Guardian and UK Polling Report to keep up with things. I might look further afield as well, time permitting...
22:26: First result is expected to be Houghton and Sunderland South, an ultra-safe Labour seat, sometime shortly after 23:00...
22:07: Reports of a high turnout, and also of problems with missing postal ballots in a number of constituencies which could lead to challenges to the results in some places...
22:01: Exit poll gives Con: 307, Lab: 255, LD: 59. So, Cameron short of an overall majority, but near enough to try to govern, and near enough to try to do a cosy deal with the Ulster Unionists. I'm not entirely convinced by these numbers: the number of LD seats seems very low - a net loss, in fact. But it'll be about an hour before we get the first actual result in, so...
Preamble: Well, there we are. We've had our brief moment of illusory power (mine was at 07:20 this morning), and now it's a case of waiting. Voting ends in a minute or so, and then we'll have the dreaded exit poll to consider. Back in a tick...
It's In The Box
I suppose I should be leaving this until tomorrow night, but - short of incriminating photographs of Gordon Brown raping a disabled badger or David Cameron being revealed as a 'Borg - I don't see things shifting very much now.
While I connive at promoting an impression that I feel all politicians should have a plague of anal boils visited upon them for the entire time that they are in office, I am enough of an anorak to be very interested in electoral calculations (this is analogous to the fact that - having loved football for many years - I now detest what it has become, and my interest in it is merely historical and statistical). I have studied - in my crude, untutored way - the results of General Elections going back to 1979, and have spent quite a few evenings of late weighing up what I'm being told by the opinion polls (and making hefty reference to the fine UK Polling Report site) and balancing them against my own innate and learned instincts regarding how people tend to vote.
With this in mind, therefore, I present to you my prediction for Thursday.
We will see a hung parliament, with the following share of seats:
- Labour: 273
- Conservative: 269
- Liberal Democrat: 77
- DUP: 9
- SNP: 7
- Plaid Cymru: 5
- Sinn Féin: 5
- SDLP: 3
- Independent Unionist: 1
- The Speaker: 1
Now, I know these figures seem to be at variance with the narrative in the media and punditocracy that - at the very least - the Tories are going to end up as the largest single party and not too far from a position where they could form a minority government and try to brazen it out. My own figures concede that as a possibility, in that I assign to them a margin of error of ten seats either way for Lab and Con. But here are my reasons for the figures I've just given:
1. They're broadly in line with what the opinion polls are saying (adjusted for my own scepticism).
2. Just as the pollsters were surprised when the Conservatives won in 1992 when more people voted blue than had told the surveys, so this time marking your paper for Labour may be The Vote That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
3. In a contest perceived as being tight, there is a tendency for a sizable proportion of the electorate to play it safe. This is augmented by the view of the experienced that about ten per cent of those who vote don't finally make their choice until they're in the booth with the pencil in their hand, where the same tendency is likely to apply.
4. There have been reports of a sharp increase in people registering to vote. This would indicate the strong possibility of a much higher turnout than in 2005. This will tend to benefit the centre and left, as those on the right already have a higher tendency to vote.
5. Unlike in 1997, when the electorate's sense of disgust was focussed entirely in one direction, the general feeling this time is much less direct, and will tend to be against both the main parties in roughly equal proportion (Tory MPs were at least as culpable over the expenses business as their Labour counterparts, and their transgressions were more visible).
6. Just gut instinct.
So, all we can do now is wait and see.
On Thursday night/Friday morning, I hope to provide you with a First for The Judge, in that I will be what I believe is called 'live blogging', in that - on this very page - I will be posting regular updates throughout the night with interesting results and my comments. We'll see how far I get, but if any post shows a jumble of letters and numbers, this will mean that I have dozed off and am slumbering gently with my head on the keyboard.
Down To Earth
What's right with this picture?
Usually, at all hours of the day, this skyscape would be a web of vapour trails as passenger jets fly over us on their way into and out of airports at Liverpool and Manchester.
This evening however, there's not the slightest vestige of a trail - it's just pure blue sky and a little cloud. This because the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has sent a cloud of ash southward and eastward, grounding virtually all air transport in north-western Europe.
As usual, the media are trying to portray this disruption as some sort of catastrophe. Nothing, it seems, can be considered 'important' - or even significant - unless it causes some minor and temporary inconvenience to the middle classes, who have been carefully trained through the generations to believe that they have a natural, almost divine, entitlement to have their own way on everything.
Perhaps this is nature's way of telling them that it will not be mocked for long, and that zooming about in the skies on board the aeronautical equivalent of a sewer pipe may not be such a good idea in the long term.
In the meantime, enjoy some uncluttered blue skies while you can.
The Past Isn't Dead; It Just Smells
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer apparently claimed that smell was the special sense associated with memory.
I'm not inclined to take issue with him. An example from this afternoon will suffice as to why.
I was in the garden planting a new lavender bush (having first evicted the latest consignment of cat shit from the border). On my way back into the house I stopped by the wallflowers. I'd sowed these early last summer, but had got no more than three flowers out of the lot of them. This year, they seem to be far more chatty.
In an implusive moment, I knelt down, stuck my nose in one of the blooms and had a good sniff.
Immediately, I was transported back some forty years. The man who lived next door to me as a child (whom I called 'Uncle Hubert', although the relationship was more distant than the title might imply - his brother was married to one of my aunts) was a keen gardener. You can catch a glimpse of his handiwork in the photograph on this page.
Because our own garden was far more dishevelled and disordered a landscape - partly as a result of the fact that our garden (a corner plot) had been used by the firm which built the estate in the 1930s to pile up the rubble - I spent a lot of time in Uncle Hubert and Auntie Ada's garden. I wasn't really that interested in the plants, spending more time unsticking the snails from the red-brick wall at the far end or minutely observing the Crosville buses as they climbed up the slope, but that wall itself was usually the home of masses of wallflowers.
It was that scene and those memories which were so vividly returned to me for the first time in years merely by the act of sniffing a flower.
I've had similar experiences before. When I was eighteen, I went on a camping holiday with some friends (a story which is recounted in quite unnecessary detail here and here), and lying on the plastic groundsheet on that first night brought back memories of the pram I would spend much of my days in as an infant because the material (or at least its smell) was the same. That smell may well be my earliest surviving memory.
I've been wondering why smells should be so potent in this way, and the only thing I can think of is that although we seem to have devised very elaborate and analytical ways of describing what we see, hear and taste, we don't - for whatever reason - seem to have done the same for smells, and so their primal primacy has been left unmediated by more cerebral interpretations.
At least, that's what I intend to tell Arthur when I see him.
A Grave Error
Not being back in work until tomorrow and the weather being dry (albeit with a perishing north wind), I decided to walk over to St Paul's Churchyard in Pentre Broughton to see if I could find the grave of my maternal grandparents. I'd tried before, last August, but hadn't found it. This time I had more detailed instructions and got to it within a few minutes of going in.
I almost wish I hadn't now. After I'd taken a couple of photographs of the headstone (and what sort of primitive unease is it which causes me to wonder if it is quite the done thing to be taking pictures of a gravestone?), I looked at the stone one more time, and suddenly noticed something almost as disturbing. Can you spot it?
Oh, hell! And it's only been like that since 1983, hasn't it...?
Slouching
Well yes, it has been quiet here of late, hasn't it?
Part of it has been due to one or two things which I might grandiosely describe as 'projects' which have been keeping me away from me usual pithy comments ("I didn't know you had a lithp". Ed) on the world.
One of them is getting my archive of photographs sorted out (like wot I tried to do last year). Another has been completing the digitising of my vinyl. This is now complete, and covers no fewer than thirty six DVD-Rs (I've kept the .wav files as well as .mp3s). I may well put a full list of my record collection up here soon, just to show off how broad my musical taste (or lack of it) is. I'm also getting ready to start digitising all my old open-reel tapes, now that I've got hold of a machine that can play them.
Being easily distracted and having a short attention span, I got myself diverted into looking at a bit of family history. Apparently, it's possible to trace my father's family back to Sussex in the mid-17th century (and possibly before, although gaps in the fossil record have caused problems for those who have delved far deeper than me). It's possible that one of the signatories of the execution warrant for Charles I of England was a cousin twelve times removed, but it has proven difficult to be sure about this. I'd like to think so.
Apart from that, my lack of communication with my reader has been down largely to lethargy and one of my periods of "What's the fucking point?". I mean, here we are, the same shower of crooks are in power over us, a tribe whose avarice and power-hunger are outstripped only by their contempt for the views, the needs, even the lives of those they rule. We are governed by corporate interests; the State is building ever-tighter constraints on our freedom to move, to act, to think; it is colluding with 'entertainment' corporations to cut off people's access to the internet simply on the basis of allegations made by those same corporations; people are getting two years in prison for throwing an empty water bottle in the general direction of the Israeli Embassy; the rich get richer on our money, and those who provide front-line public services are having their redundancy terms slashed as a precursor to tens of thousands of those at the bottom of the pyramid being chucked out of work irrespective of which party wins the forthcoming election. What could it possibly matter what I have to say?
Except, I suppose, that I have not only a right but a duty to say what I think, in the same way that I view my ability to vote as a duty (even if this is reduced to writing "A pox on all of them!" on the ballot paper). There is nothing that gives the powerful a greater sense of comfort than the idea of the docile, complaisant masses, so anything which gives them a pin-prick of unease must always be worthwhile.
And then, of course, there's work. I don't think I would be exaggerating to say that this, at the moment, sucks like a Dyson on steroids. The trouble is that I am, for obvious reasons, very restricted in what I can say about it. Shall I just confine myself to saying that we are being run by a bunch of empire-building, self-aggrandising and self-important wankers, and leave it at that? Oh, and to point you to this blog which - although it often strays a little too far into the 'minimal state' standpoint beloved of those Hayek-groupies who misleadingly label themselves as 'libertarians' - might be a useful source of information for those who might want to know how bad things are in the Depratment these days.
So, now you know.
Daily Telegraph Cocks It Up Again
(Tip of the wig to The Register. And hello to everyone who has landed on this page having put "large hardon" into their search engine of choice. The Internet Police will be with you shortly).
On Cold 'Un Pond
(Sorry...)
It was much too nice to be stuck in the house this afternoon, so I went for a little walk.
It was surprising how much ice there still was around, in dents in the ground, in puddles and even - as you can see below - on Brymbo Pool.
What's quite amusing is to see the birds lined up at the edge of the ice as if they were waiting for a bus.
Today's Definition
Isobel, n. A line on a map connecting places of equal beauty.
Aliens!!!
Just stepped outside for a smoke, and saw something very odd in the sky.
First, two lights, orange-red in colour, coming from roughly north-east in a south-westerly direction. The lights weren't circular, but elongated, and they didn't seem to be moving at a uniform velocity; more of a floating motion. Indeed, the second one was catching up with the first.
The first one seemed to stop, and the second one gradually came up behind it and stopped just short of it (they were almost exactly due south by this time).
A third light had by now appeared on a similar vector to the first two.
The first two lights then faded out. The third one got to near where they had been and seemed to hover there for a time before it, too, faded out.
I haven't been drinking, and I don't 'believe' in UFOs (although - spookily - my broadband connection dropped a couple of minutes later!), so what could they have been?
This happened at about 2342 UTC and my location is Lat. 53.04N, Long. 3.30W.
Update (13/02/10): The most rational explanation I've had (thanks to Julian Hall on alt.fan.pratchett) is that it's Chinese New Year this weekend, and these were possibly balloons with lights in (let off by those celebrating) which were drifting with the wind.
Thing is, the nearest Chinese population of any size in that direction is Chester, which is about ten miles away by direct reckoning. No wonder the Chinese think they can put people on the Moon!
Update Update: Seeing as we're now on the subject...
Duh!
Have you ever heard a joke (or a clever remark) and laughed, but not been able to figure out quite where the joke is?
I have two examples: firstly, in Vivian Stanshall's legendary pieces on the gallery of grotesques at Rawlinson End, Sir Henry's butler, Scrotum, is referred to as "the wrinkled retainer".
It took me about a decade to see the joke there.
The second one comes from a 1980s routine by the American comic Emo Phillips. Talking about a woman schoolteacher, he says:
"She was, by and large....but anyway...."
I laughed at the time I heard it, and have laughed since (probably because the audience laughed - laughter tends to be contagious), but if anyone had asked me to explain the joke, I wouldn't have been able to do so.
Until yesterday afternoon, when I was standing at my back door. For some inexplicable reason that line came back to me, and suddenly I saw it, after twenty-odd years. What Phillips said contained an inaudible comma:
"She was bi-, and large....
Now I am - as the psychiatrists say - 'conflicted'. Whilst I'm very glad to have finally 'got it', I feel immeasurably dim for having taken so long.
Spiritus In Machina
The Judge's Odd Character Traits, #142b.
I tend not to be sentimental over people or animals. I recognise at some deep level that all biological constructs (such as ourselves) have built-in term limits, and we all have to go someday.
I feel differently about machines (using the term in its broadest sense). A few years ago, at the time of my last major clear-out, I had to send an old TV set, an old tape recorder, a couple of old radios, and various other bits of non-functioning technology to the municipal knacker's yard. I felt deeply uncomfortable about it.
When I defrost my elderly fridge-freezer and it comes back on again afterwards, I pat it on the top. I talk to my PC. I talk to my workstation in the office (although, to be honest, what I tend to say is as close to, "What are you doing now, you obsolete piece of shit!" as basic courtesy to my colleagues will permit).
In short, I tend to anthropomorphise 'things'.
Which is probably why I find this cartoon strangely distressing (click on it to go to the full-size original at xkcd):
(Tip of the wig to my old chum Alex once more)
Headline Of The Week
Aves Pro Tem?
A colleague of mine keeps hens. Or, at least, she did until a fox got in there recently.
The other day, I passed her in the corridor when she was explaining to someone what she intended to do next. Someone had offered to help out, she said:
"Oh yes, he's offered me some interim chickens...."
I burst out laughing. What a wonderful concept! 'Interim chickens' will, I trust, become one of those terms which, like 'part-time signals' and 'occasional tables' will result in the unavoidable question:
"What are they the rest of the time?"
Poster Boy
No internet meme but The Judge jumps on the bandwagon. So:
(You can make your own Cameron poster here).
Marking The Past
I've been having a bit of a clear-out here over the last half-dozen or so weekends. I'd been aware that there was an awful lot of clutter in the house, some of it dating back to when my mother was alive, and so resolved finally to do something about it, if only to clear some space for some more clutter of my own in the future.
This sort of activity can be a dangerous one for someone like me who combines a retentive memory with a keen sense of time passing; a combination which - unless severely checked - can lead to a near-crippling melancholy which can last for days. But it had to be done.
Over the few weeks I've been doing this, I became aware once again of some of my mother's strange tendencies not only for keeping things past their usefulness (although not as bad as the old woman I heard about who kept a cardboard box full of - as the label put it - 'pieces of string too short to be of any use'), but also for getting things she already had a sufficient number or amount of. That's how I came across three complete tea services in one of the kitchen cupboards. They wouldn't have been use to her, since she already had a couple of perfectly serviceable ones, and they're of no use to me because I never have people around to tea and I don't drink tea anyway.
Some things I've turned up date back still further to my father's day (and he's been gone twenty one years), and there are other items where I can't fathom quite how they came into our possession in the first place.
In this last category I include a random selection of old coins. Not just old pre-decimal UK ones (including my all-time favourite, the twelve-sided thrupenny bit), but some foreign ones. I thought I'd show you a couple of them just for the sake of interest.
First off is this 1935 50 Reichspfennig piece. This was the first of its denomination to be minted in aluminium (intended as a temporary measure but which continued), and the last to be minted without a swastika in the eagle's talons. The 'J' on the reverse means that it was minted in Hamburg.
Moving on to the post-war period, the Bank deutscher Länder was created in 1948 in order to run the newly-introduced Deutsche Mark.
Below is a 1949 10 Pfennig piece. The 'F' on the reverse indicates that this coin, made of brass-plated steel, was minted in Stuttgart.
All the rest of the junk I've unearthed is mine, of course, including this piece of technological history:
This Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A was my first computer. I got it for Christmas in 1988, and it was thought at the time to be quite the thing, complete with a massive RAM disk of 128KB (yes, KB, not MB). I got years of use out of this, mostly playing games on it but also doing some (very) BASIC programming to create programs which would tell you what day of the week you were born on, or convert imperial and metric units, or compose little tunes.
As you can see, even after over twenty years (and not having been used for a decade or more) it still works, although the signal output socket is a bit loose on it and I can't get my old portable TV to tune in exactly on the frequency it's putting out.
I just had to give it a go this afternoon, and here's a shot of the machine loading Code Masters' Fruit Machine Simulator. It's a measure of the comparative primitiveness of the technology that such a simple program should take about five minutes to load from a cassette (real smarties interfaced a floppy drive to it), but this only heightened the anticipation.
I also spent a bit of time later playing Arkanoid on it, although my skill level has fallen so far that I couldn't get past the third screen.
Snowed In
It started seriously snowing at about 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon. It was quite fine stuff, but there was a lot of it. It continued until about 9.00pm.
Did I find this depressing? Not a bit of it. You see, I was due back in work after my New Year break this morning, and given that I live about 800 feet up, there was a fair chance that I wouldn't be able to get to the office, especially given that I didn't see a single bus go by after about 4pm.
We also didn't get any snowplough action here last night at all. This is probably due to the Council 'prioritising' the main roads, meaning that a village with a population of about three thousand can just go swivel on it. One of the local farmers came along with his tractor late last night and shoved a bit of snow out of the way, but it didn't make much difference.
I nonetheless got up at my usual work time to find that the situation was no better, and that we had no chance of a bus service this side of lunchtime (as I type this, it's nearly 2pm, I still haven't seen a snowplough up here, let alone anything which could be categorised as 'public transport').
So having phoned in to the office with the bitterly disappointing news that I would not be able to take my place at the coalface today, and having thereby thumbed my nose at all those pompous pricks in lunatic fringe organisations such as the CBI and the Institute of Directors who are probably already moaning about the snow costing the economy £55squillion per minute (i.e., roughly equivalent to one bank executive's bonus), I decided to make the most of the opportunity to go out and take a few snaps (without snapping anything of my own, e.g. a leg, in the process).
The snow was deep on the sides of the roads, but if you kept to the tracks made by the tractor and the odd enterprising (i.e. 'show off') 4x4 driver it was OK.
So, some pics:
Pool Road.
Snow on the trees on Waterside Way.
The Pool, frozen over, with Minera Mountain in the background.
The Bottle Chimney.
