On the Nothingness of My Generation

Post temporarily deleted while I see if i can work into something more sensible!

Left Wing Histories

Which make up, alack, the vast majority of published works on post-war Britain, are to be avoided at all costs, for they never, ever, say anything new or interesting.

Here is a ten point guide to the average "People's" or "New" or "Cultural" history of Britain, 1945-2000:

1) People were nice before 1979. During this period, most people (apart from the right wing press and the paranoid agents of the state) were in favour of social justice. Social justice means very high taxation, excellent wage deals for the public sector, and, generally, successful strikes. This point stands despite the fact that most people were racist, sexist, homophobic fucks, before 1997.

2) The "media" are uniformly against left wing politics, and have engaged in a vast number of intricate conspiracies to bring down said politics since 1945. This is despite the will of the people, except where it is with the will of the people, in which case the people are fucking bastards. Examples include: Harold Wilson, who was in no way paranoid, but was a real victim of an extreme right wing country (in which case why the fuck was he PM then); John Stonehouse (in no way a criminal, more a victim of the right wing press); and, of course, Tony Benn, misinterpreted as a proto-Commie since 1966.

3) Conservatives are cynical, Labour supporters "idealistic". This is a key, recurring trope in lefty histories of Britain. The "Tories" have always and everywhere, cleverly used their total control of the media (see above) to defeat the will of the People. Elections won by Labour attract no comment, elections won by "The TORIES" are because of unfair voting systems.

4) Trade Unions were the victims of a cynical population hungry for personal greed over personal justice. Nuff Said.

5)Left Wing extremists are just comedians, whereas right wing extremists are nasty fuckers. Leaving aside the fact that the IRA, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader Meinhof Gang were all variants of lefties, this seems a bit crap anyway when your best argument is that Ross McWhirter kept some "dodgy" political company.

6) The IRA were forced to bomb loads of innocent civilians. See above.

7) Everyone before 1997 was a racist fucker. Common proofs of this thesis include: The Black and White Minstrel Show, Love thy Neighbour, the NF, and anyone who happened to say anything lefties don't agree with now. This, apparently, proves that we are much nicer people now. And guess what's to blame....


8) Greed. The 80s were totally about greed, and in no way about trying to improve yourself and your family, and even if they were that is fucking well bad enough, you selfish bunch of cunts. Everyone carried MASSIVE mobile phones and wore REALLY SHARP SUITS apart from the three million who didn't even have a job. So on the one hand everyone was really poor, and on the other hand everyone was a greedy fucker. By the way, success=greed; so anyone earning over an arbitrary sum an average lefty historian considers "enough" is a cunt. Or "was" a cunt, as these fuckers are almost certainly all dead of a greed induced coronary by now. By the way anyone who didn't support 46% pay claims by certain unions was a selfish fucking cunt, whether or not he was a self-employed nobody working *exactly* to the timetables of the unions in 1973. SO it goes that the argument was between those interested in social justice, and those keen on loading themselves with Bentleys and 24 carat gold. There was no in between. By definition.

9) Before *spits* Thatcher, everyone agreed that the State should run all industries for our benefit, and that people should just shut the fuck up, pay their taxes, get what they're given, and like it. Or be fascist bastards. And as anyone who drove an Austin Allegro, Maxi, Princess, Ambassador; a Rover SD; knows, nationalised car industries produced indisputably brilliant vehicles. After that bitch, some top-hatted cunts made us think that only the rich had the right to anything at all. Thatcher herself famously said that the poor should die and painfully[subs- find ref, will you, I'm off to the pub].

10) Doctor Who was loads better under "The Consensus" than after.


Point No10 is, I am afraid, easily refuted: in Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor says, being urged by Sarah to destroy the embryonic Daleks: "Do I have the right?" and, in fact does not do it: a Dalek does, belatedly. Under our liberated regime, he would of said: "Of course I have the ****ing right, are you a ****ing extremist or something???" Subsequently he would have ditched Sarah as "Insane-Sar" and led a galactic campaign against anti-Dalekists, writing articles in Gallifrey Guardian against her. And rightly so. Anti-Dalekists have far too much power, indeed are parasites (c the BROTHER damn his government-shilling hide, of the AUTHOR of REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS*)

Well, despite the unfortunate expression of right-wing extremism in Genesis of the Daleks: VOTE WILSON!

Through a timewarp. As I am about to do. In 1964, 1966, NOT 1970, Feb 1974, NOT Oct 1974. Oooh, I'd get such a turn-on voting Wilson in Feb 74. Holey Moley my post-war political interest has become pornographic, I do believe I am getting a 26.8% bone on - hey Hal, you can inflate me by that much in August 1975 alright!!! Obviously I'll vote Heath with some reluctance in Oct 74 but I'm sure you'll understand my decision: I don't really fancy another Christmas by candlelight (yes yes, ok so the last one was under the Tories) but these clowns have done nothing to prevent it, and the NUM and other unions are supposed to be their mates. They're supposed to have the ears of the union leaders (and this was supposed to be a parliamentary democracy -2008 Ed).

Also I'd NOT VOTE CALLAGHAN IN MAY 1979 if this requires my execution then fair enough. I'd vote (shield your sensitive socialist eyes, dear reader) THATCHER (oooh, couldn't you just hear me say it????? Even with your eyes closed???)

But I would have voted Callaghan in 1977. Not 1978, but 1977; then it still looked as if Labour could achieve what the Tories (ssssssss!!!) never would be able to. This, again, is a weird point against a democratic society; that you would vote for a party, or not, based on its record of taking on non-democratic institutions: such as those that had, bizarrely, power over who an employer could only employ people based on their union affiliation (it is TRULY alien to a free society that a union could demand your membership before it let you join the employ of a third party; it is weird that a union could think a secret ballot undemocratic; it is sinister that a union should demand the right to prevent people who do not belong to to it from working). No, I would have voted Labour in 1977: out of sheer defeatism. In 1978 I would have begun to waver but would not have voted Thatcher; in 1979 I would voted Thatcher whatever 21st century leftwing historians were later to make of her views on race. Oddly enough this is now really important among "social" historians of the late twentieth century: the views of leftwing politicians who truly believed that British people should not be able to vote for different parties, or own their own houses, or make money, or do anything for their children beyond aborting them are rather less publicised.


As far as I know Mrs Thatcher never professed her admiration for a regime which had deliberately and knowingly murdered millions of its citizens: hence, unlike Tony Benn (another fact which *always* escapes lefty historians) she earns my support. Yes she supported Pinochet but against those who always thought that Soviet Russia was alright, and by the standards of the cold war, it's somewhat small-fry. I'd love (St Eric of) Hobsbawm to explain to me why millions of deaths in the service of socialism were ok but Pincohet's Chile was an abomination. She (Thatcher, not Eric) loses it for what happened in the first half of the 1980s; she loses my respect and support for that dire, terrible period of alienation that continues to blight us today: but, like Eric Hobsbawm on a rather smaller scale, I will never be a trophy for anti-capitalists, and I don't have 20 million deaths on my conscience.


But Mrs Thatcher made my childhood; she brought me up amid the violence, the hate and the threat of melted milk bottles. Mrs Thatcher was not my milk snatcher; Mr Callaghan, Mr Benn and Mr Foot were my milk snatchers: men who apparently "believed" that not being in a union made you a cunt, that being a miserable little cocksucker who just wanted to pay the fucking bills made you a selfish fucking bastard. The hate and the violence, was, of course, the produce of Messrs Attle, Macmillan, Wilson and Heath as much as it was of Mrs Thatcher: but oddly enough, when things went bad, all turned out to have been rosy in the post-imperial garden until those fucking(monetarist) Tories turned up, like a rash of nettles.

Well, Mr Foot, Mr Benn: your boys will be dealt one hell of a beating come 2010: and if the Tories have any sense at all, they will scour the universities for, and purge them of, the scumbags that to this day proclaim that wanting your family to be comfortable is grossly irresponsible selfishness. Hopefully they will impale, alive, those life-sucking academics who believe they have a right to tell every other fucker what to think while taking the taxes of all those bastard (capitalist) voters, with their little small businesses, their internet operations, their stupid ideas for money making schemes: because lefties know better don't they? They know all you fuckers are just cunts, that you should be destroyed while you pay for their little articles, their closed-shop journals, their air of total smugness.

Fuck them. Despite my authoritarian old Tory tendencies, fuck all public-parasites, destroy all tenured twats, kill all of those arsewitted historians who all preach to the same, tiny audience, and receive all the plaudits that the daily shrinking audience of the Guardian can muster.

Fuck them right off, and let's build a world we actually want, not a world we're told we want.

For a start we can slash taxes on sex.

You mean there aren't...what the.......oh. I'll get my...er...




*Fuck me are you an idiot or something: David Aaronovitch.

Beauty

As is well known, I adore beauty, especially free flowing curves, gorgeous waves, inward and outward movements, slides, bodies you can slip and down on, full bodies and things you can really hold and be held by.

Accordingly here is the only thing in the world as beautiful as women:




And it's called The European Cup and *not* The Champions League Trophy or some such rubbish.

Football eh? Sex, more like.

A Good Review

By way of a return to blogging more sober both of temperament and of blood-alcohol level I though I'd post on Nineteen Eighty Four.

As some of my readers might know this is my favourite book; the first classic I read and a book I still try to read some of every day. I have read it probably ten or eleven times all the way through. Heck, even the title is brilliant. And has inspired David Peace, which can't be a bad thing (anyone who can write AS BRIAN CLOUGH and pull it off, is doing a very good job).

So it was with genuine delight I read a review, from 17 June 1949, in the Spectator, reprinted in this week's rather OTT 180th Anniversary Edition, of this very novel. The review was written by Robert Kee, a man I know not. But here I will use his comments as a springboard for discussion and NOT fisk them, as I think they are essentially right, and an object lesson in how to write a fine review of a profoundly significant book in very few words. I will not quote the whole review, but use excerpts to aid my thinking.

He writes:

...you could hardly care less about Winston Smith. Certainly he has his moments of humanity, though these are not often to be found in rather flat love affair with his co-rebel, Julia.

This is fair comment. The books hardly tries to draw Winston as a man, but this is implicit in the deliberately clumsy name of Winston (Churchill- ie exceptional man) Smith (everyman). Orwell is not attempting, at any stage, to write a psychological-realist novel, or even to put a realish type of character into a situation to explore either human or situation. But this is entirely the point. Winston is not a man ("...you are the last man..."), but a diseased product, like his ulcers, of a uniquely oppressive society, to whom "the German Nazis and the Russian Communists" came close in method, even if neither had the honesty to go the extra philosophical mile. The "spirit of man" Winston later cites does not exist, and he goes under, just like he should, just like they all do.

Winston is not a hero, but Robert Kee is right to look for one. It's just that there ain't any; and Winston is not even a full human being, as these do not exist anymore, such is the oppression. They exist only among the proles; hence Winston cannot make any real contact with them - the scenes with him trying to get something real out of the prole in the pub are suffused with the sense that Winston has no idea how to relate to an old, unideological man, has no means of making a connection, and no genuine inclination to try. He admits failure quickly, and leaves. Winston is the man with no teeth. He is a living and for a while angry denunciation of the entire concept of the "personal as the political", in his desire for a wholly personal sphere uninterrupted by Party slogans: unfortunately it is impossible, and his sexual activity is a deliberate act of rebellion as much as it is of lust, or love, and so he proves the miserable interventionism of the disrespecting slogan he tries to destroy. He has the Party in his cock, to put it crudely. Though having said this, his memories of childhood are stirred as much by his relationship as anything else: Julia does seem to be gradually making him human (though we never learn enough about her to know if it works both ways, the poor cipher).

And Julia - barely drawn at all as a human, except as a vaguely sexist "slut" character of a type which could have come out of any novel of the mid C19-to mid C20; Orwell chooses to draw her rebellion as wholly physical and to give her no intellectual content at all. Is Julia a fantasy, or is she a lazy stereotype? Either way she is hardly a character. We learn absolutely nothing about her Room 101 experience at all except that she "was a textbook case" (O Brien) and that "'I betrayed you,' she said baldly." She hints about somethings they do to you that you can't resist - but that is it. Why is Julia so physical and so inconsequential?

I suspect because Orwell is making a wider point about the debasement of humanity and of the necessary limiting of relationships: but one could also argue because he doesn't give a toss.

To use the technical term.

Kee writes:

...although Nineteen Eighty Four is a parable of humanism, strangely it is not the human beings who count.

Which is precisely the point. There aren't any anymore. They're gone. Even the ones who think they live. It is a case of the narrative style reinforcing the narrative intention. Some critics feel that Orwell just doesn't really do people, which is maybe fair enough, though I think the narrator out of Coming Up For Air is sharply drawn, as are many characters from the essays.

He goes on:

...For this reason [the human beings not counting], strictly as a novel, it must be classed as a failure. But it is not 'strictly a novel.'


This is perhaps the most important aspect to grasp. As Kee writes, it is "novel, satire, and thriller". He is right that the depths of totalitarian regimes hardly come as a surpise to the intelligent reader of 1949 (and it deeply patronising and wrong of us C21 readers, ignorant of these things, to imagine that we know what Orwell meant better than people who in many cases would have survived two world wars). But what Kee misses is that the regime that is ultimately open about its lust for power and its desire for the same is unique. All such regimes pretend, even to themselves, as O Brien points out, that they are doing it for some kind of good, however evil that may be: only the Party is open enough to admit to itself that it does it for power and control. This is precisely the importance of the concepts of blackwhite, crimestop and doublethink. For the Outer Party member they are ways of survival (only by exercising them judiciously do you stay alive), for the Inner Party member they are levers of power (by changing the enemy or the pages of The Times week by week and challenging everyone else to forget that it was ever different, while being able to do it yourself and also to know that you have changed it: "I do not remember it" says O Brien of the photo he has thrown into the fire). Levers which the Inner Party member is fully aware of. And at the same time not aware. Not because it would destroy the edifice of their power, but because it is fun, and because it seems more convincing. Power is power over self, after all, as much as it is power over other selves. Kee also assumes that the novel must necessarily be about humans. But if you were writing a novel where there really weren't any, as we understand the term, you wouldn't need to. You would need to draw relationships in a different way, and give people desires impossible for the British reader to understand through their utter mundaneness: ie the desire to write a diary or to have sex with someone who's not your separated wife. Orwell's task is to render all this extraordinary, even knowingly wrong-but-really-right: it's a damn hard job and he gets it, in my view, because you watch Winston getting totally lost in his diary writing (the account of the cinema visit starts with a carefuly deliberation over the date and ends with no punctuation and with grammar slipping out of control): as he enters a kind of political-panic attack, knowing that every word takes him more inevitably towards death, he knows he must, somehow, get it all out. Because once you've chosen death you might as well do it properly. And oh, it gives so much, intoxicating life: Winston's diary writing is an orgasm of life.

No wonder people like Robert Kee look for a novel they can relate to and don't find it. It's a different world: as genuine a science fiction novel as was ever written. But that's a subject I don't intend to get on to...

Kee's complaint that "[Orwell] suspends the plot for 30 pages of Trotsky-Goldstein-Orwell analysis of contemporary political trends" is well founded and is a major reason why Nineteen Eighty Four is not a novel, just like John Galt's 120 pages of Atlas Shrugged count against it too; but if you are looking for a novel then fuck off and read Lucky Jim or something, because Nineteen Eighty Four is surely intended as everything Kee complains of: it contains all these elements, to be all of humanity in a book about the death of humanity. It crams them in to show the variety of thinking that will be lost: hence it morphs, shifts, adapts its style for "novel, satire and thriller" but never quite sticks to one of these targets and is instead what is was surely intended to be: a passionate account of a world where the only passion is power.


I think this must look like I have fisked Robert Kee's review of June 1949 but that is not my intention. In many ways I think he skewered this brilliant, essential book, in just a couple of hundred words. It's not a novel. If you want a thriller or a love story, or a satire, yeah you might get some of those things. But it doesn't hold up as any of them. Instead it holds up as a mixture of styles, which tries to cram in a vision of a faded but loved humanity while divesting the people and words in it of as much as Orwell can properly get away with. It is a novel, not about people within a totalitarian society, which I think is Kee's fundamental error,but about a world with only totalitarian people in it - a novel about a changed world with changed people.

And we love change. Just love it.





*Edited a little to remove some nonsense in the final paragraph.

More Dishonest Bastards

A report out yesterday from "Wembley", actually a front for a group of fascist Doncasterites, suggests that Leeds lost the play off final.

Well.

Someone hasn't been doing their research well. A study earlier this year by B Remner, "Leeds Are Fucking Amazing" showed that Leeds actually should have been in the Premier League; and another large-scale study, "Fuck Me This Is Shit" by Bye Tsurl-Egs, showed that the act of Leeds' being in League One was inherently unfair. Attempts by dishonest Man Utd fans to discredit these studies were roundly dismissed by impartial, peer reviewed publications such as "Fuck Everyone Else: Leeds Are Ace" and it is only reactionary fuckwits on the other side of the Pennines who don't think that Leeds should be in the top flight.

Attempts by "Mad Mans" to perniciously discredit the achievements of Leeds have failed, or rather have not failed. But in terms of truth, some sort of right, they have failed. The position of Leeds in League One AGAIN is an injustice, a testament to the power of bigotry. It is the right of all Leeds fans to be in the Premier League, and the constant distortion of this right by men in suits, or rather fuckwits in shorts, is an affront to the control all Leeds fans ought to have over their own team.

Like A Train Passing In The Distance

Is how my blogging is currently being received by all people; I don't really mind that, as I blog for entirely narcissistic reasons, as I've said in blogposts passim. I couldn't care less whether my readers hold my political views or not, so long as they read mine, and for a few seconds are here, subsumed in my will for however long it takes. I've no stomach for the modern violent assertions of the primacy of ideology, or the selective use of "evidence", such as small scale studies by one's ideological allies, that somehow get, unchallenged, to be part of legislation; or the equally selective rejection and adoption of emotive arguments (I trust I will never again hear a progressive complain about private education, given how much emphasis they put last week on "Parents would do anything for their children" as a justification for creating spare part humans). Incidentally, I really am going to need that liver, so if anyone would like to create a liver-embryo could they please do it within the next 10 years?

I am, as I have said many times before, a tenth rate mind. It is the best and brightest of our apolitical world who are the most aggressive, the most dishonest, the most ideologically driven.

Yes I *am* an ideologue, but I am also an idiot. So it has little bearing on life what I think. Our greatest minds do not want more civility or self-control. They want less. They really do want more destruction and more division, especially within that bastard grouping, the family. The most intelligent people in our society envisage a technological version of slavering over hacked out thighs of mutton in freezing caves, with mouths dripping with blood. They like it. They want savagery and selfishness. They want us to love power and to understand victimhood as a political entity, not a physical state. Meanwhile the physical state of the individual is increasingly limited, satiated as it is by the endless, state approved orgasms; of speech, thought, movement and association the state has little to say beyond "prove who you are and that you have done nothing wrong". Gargling with ecstasy, and its withheldness, its escapology, its temporality, I find I have nothing to say on those matters. There isn't enough time. Only time for glorious oblivion and its means.

For only now does an individual really become part of the collective: when it really needs it to survive, or to do what it has been told is necessary to survive. Create such a condition and you create the means to ultimate and permanent power. Hold the individual in a state of permanent desire and you control them, perfectly. In the past this was understood well, in relation to hunger. Our governments now know that they cannot control access to air, water and food; so the next most powerful drive is that towards orgasm. Let it flourish, bring it forth wherever it may be thought of; let it hold and move people away from any notion of control. For the less they control, the better for us.

Hence a C21 tyranny would make sexual liberation its first port of call, and would not, as Orwell would have us believe, suppress these desires in the hope of somehow sublimating them.

Because, literally, no-one will give a toss when they are aware that the rulers want them to engage, wherever and however possible, in one of the few genuinely animalistic drives we have.

Then, of course, we will come running to the benevolent state for abortion, treatment, whatever. It will keep us needing them.

Not that I'm bitter or anything..

Sexcrime

You'd think I could get some, somewhere, wouldn't you?


Or, at the very worst, goodsex?


But instead every day I wearily pull on my Anti-Sex League sash and put up posters about Artsem.

Oh how those marches satisfy me, and the long lectures on "Ingsoc in Relation to Chess".

Crimespeak Update:H Rodham Clinton, Yet Another Whinging Times Editorial

Comrades, it fullwiseseems that Inparty womans are viciouswise speaked. Comrades, why goodspeak Inpartywomanwise? Inparty womans are victims, comrades, historywise: all Inparty mans crimethink so all inparty womans suffer crimethink. Even when Inparty man goodthinks, he crimethinks. Why is this so, comrades? This is because all mans are crimethinkers. All mans must be goodwise wordful. If Inparty woman crimespeaks or ungoodduckspeaks, Inparty mans must be goodthinkful. Elsewise mans are crimethinkers.

Comrades, Inpartywomans only goodspeak, specialwise RFKwise. Error impossible. Crimethink, crimespeak, unexist Inpartywomanwise. Facecrime also muchwise is redneck-placewise. This must suffer execute quickwise.

It is, comrades, doubleplusungood to crimespeak of Inparty womans. All criticism is crimethink. Goodthinkful partymans duckspeak Clintongoodness. UnClintongoodness speaks must be executeful.


Be ware, comrades, that Outpartywomans, Thatcherwise, must fullwise suffer crimespeak and crimethink, as they are unpersons. Words "bitch", "cunt" and "I hope she dies a fucking painful death" are fullwise goodthinks.


Editorial writed by some total twat whose name I fullwise unrecall.

The Friendless Desert

Haukin the Active Man (out of Piers Plowman) - he really is a type who just recurs, given our general discomfort with living, our need to fill the hours, our dislike of actual existence. And business, we call it modern survival, we give it the status of god, and we leave our minds at its feet, and use it as the reason for living nothing at all. We claim to be hunter-gathering, but all we do is build our own reputations, in the hope that when someone actually gets round to burying us, everyone else will really give a toss how high we went in our companies, and how much we earned, and how sorry we were we didn't spend enough time at home.

It is odd, that a species so given, and uniquely, as far as we know, to consciousness, should spend so much time escaping it. There are many types of escape, from drunkenness, to highs, to sleep, to sport, to death. Ultimately, all lead to death, inasmuch as all are intended to while away time - to bring death closer. This is what is meant by boredom. The desire to die, the fear of mere existence. There really is nothing of which to be afraid, unless you count self-awareness as a disease, as we seem to do.

Hence I have no interest in Haukin and his mates. I can occupy myself happily for hours just being. I love being; it is just life I loathe. There is no problem with my being. I love the feel of aching in my limbs, of my pulse in my throat, or my pulse in my wrist, I love the pain of my muscles. I can feel them, those parts of my body built with the remains of other bodies. I have so many birds and sheep and cows in my legs and arms. I don't mind as much as I should, that i cannibalise the parts from other beings to reduce the entropy in mine. If only Haukin and his pals would piss off and leave me alone, instead of demanding a monopoly on time and a unique interest in energy and intellect.

I like the idea that I am a locus against entropy.



"The Pharos Project!"





I build order and pattern; perhaps I am a CVE of embodiment, keeping the universe from total collapse for a mere x years. Or maybe I will in my turn become sheep and cow and tree. It doesn't really matter. Even as an Xtian it barely matters. I may dislike life, and try to be pissed as much as possible, but the thought of any real kind of non-existence, such as that represented by business, and the pull of busy-ness; fills me with dread.

And I am a capitalist.

Imagine that.

Another Day, Another NuLab Ideologue Speaks

This time it isn't the feminists in govt, but the Children's Commissioner, Sir "Al" Aynsley-Green, (linked to above) who's made some kind of career through promoting children as a breed, or race in themselves, under constant threat from everyone else, slagging off parents and generally standing for a kind of "liberation of children" ideology. This time he is worried, because the new powers to search for knives will "antagonise" youths. He has, however, been remarkably quiet about the youths actually killing each other, except that the biggest danger he perceives, apparently, is adults "demonising" the little darlings.

It says everything about our progressive rulers, that they are actually afraid of a few scumbags with blades.

Or is it that they're just happy for the rest of us to be afraid of them?

I mean, a caring, progressive government could have no interest in casually promoting or ignoring violent crime, could it? Not while it's so keen to criminalise thoughts and rubbish bins.

It wouldn't want its law abiding citizenry to be more wary, less secure and more fearful, would it?

What would it have to gain?

Next You'll Be Telling Me It's 1990

Which is what the Tories are effectively saying at the moment, politically and economically. There are two reasons why this is a bad idea.

1) It ain't.
2) 1990 was under their watch.


I say "under their watch" rather than "their fault", even though we all know that 15% (for two minutes in September 1992) interest rates &c &c were all the responsibility of the Conservative Government and Mrs Thatcher, whereas the current problems are global and nothing to do with Labour.

Lest we forget, life was actually *utterly shit* in 1990, whether or not you blame the Tories. The UK was on the verge of another wave of riots, which in fact dissipated into the endless whinging "radicalism" of the 1990s and 2000s but apart from one instance in March 1990 didn't quite fulfil its "potential". The property bubble had well and truly fucked itself, leaving shedloads of people out of work & home, and Nigel Lawson looking like a post-resignation cunt. Inflation went on its merry way towards 10% (which I think it reached in the autumn - in those days I was fascinated by the 26% it had reached in August 1975). The weather was wholly fucked, with one day of my school life being devoted to watching trees having their backs broken by a hurricane while the howls of a nuclear firestorm whirled overheard (or that's how it sounded). In the summer the bastard sun never seemed to set, the fucker just going on and on. England lost on penalties for the first fucking time. Mrs Thatcher was wholly powerless and quite out of touch, unable to set any kind of agenda as first Lawson (89 I think) and then, devastatingly, Howe, turned the knife; in Howe's case, during a televised Parliamentary debate, with Thatch listening not quite impassively from the front bench. All this was achieved without Neil Kinnock needing to draw breath. Even then he was a self-satisfied bastard and even my 13 year old self knew he had fuck all to be self-satisfied about. Except Militant.

War in Iraq was looming and, consequently, fuel prices were rocketing.

Er....

Oh yeah - Ian Gow was murdered by the IRA. Now we're all mates.

So things do change after all.


Post title brought via XTC and "The Big Express" - can't recall the track, I think it is "Everyday Story of Smalltown".

A Seventeen Point Six Percent Swing

Obviously I'm delighted by the Tories' victory in Crewe and Nantwich, unlike the bizarrely titled "Telegraph Columnist" Mary Riddell, who is already giving herself nightmares about what terrible things may come to pass under a Tory government utterly in hoc to a fundamentalist Christian worldview; such as (cover your ears, or eyes) another vote on abortion. Given that her side won all this week's debates convincingly, and that, accordingly, children are wholly viewed as the playthings of already existing beings in law and morals*, it's hard to escape the view that her fear is based upon the existence of dissent itself; the cognitive dissonance currently being felt by self-righteous lefties with a massive sense of entitlement up and down this benighted isle of ours. It was the debate itself that frightened her, the actual reality of people who don't see life as she does; hence all the God-bothering bogey men lurking just around the next general election. She is right to worry. It will be awful. We'll all have to go to church every week. Pre-marital sex will become a crime, except for Catholic priests, and women who have abortions will be executed. That bad? It'll be worse. For, lurking under Cameron's friendly facade lurks an extremist Etonian who'll actually criminalise poverty and, even worse, might just seek another reduction in the abortion time limit, possibly to as low as 22 weeks. Fucking hell.

Anyway.

Here are some more things TD would like to see a 17.6% swing to:


1) His knob.
2) His bollocks.
3) His brain.
4) Doctor Who.
5) England cricket.
6) His bank balance.
7) The actual size of his knob, in inches.
8) His alcohol intake.
9) Ditto.
10) And again. That makes, er, 52.8% overall in favour of alcohol.


Incidentally, why do NuLabour think that what you eat and drink must be the legitimate subject of public policy but that what you fuck must not be? Have they not heard of STIs or of abortion (er...)? Is it really ok for the likes of Dawn Primarolo to tell us, effectively, that any number of abortions is alright but that people having a few jars must stop, fucking well stop now?

Well, bollocks to that. I'll defy our collapsing autocrats with another tin of crap, cheap lager. And fuck any politician who cares deeply about what I put in my mouth unless it happens to be part of someone else's body (in which case it's a positive choice).


As if that were actually *realistic* anyway. I should stick to being pissed and not really venture into sexuality. Frankly, I would make an asexual plant look like a slut. The fucker would be out in the pub with his mates, knocking back the Stellas, and he'd go "oh look there's TD!!!!" and all his bastard dandelion mates would laugh and raise their glasses. Fucking twats. There's even bloody daisies laughing at me, the fuckwits. While snogging their girlfriends and copping a feel of her tits. I can hear the wanker pansy telling me I am a "fucking virgin, fucking virgin"** and giving his girlfriend a smack on the arse for good measure while I try to sneak up to the bar under my huge collar, almost silently ordering a pint.



*Sooner or later I'll need a liver...

** No conclusion is to be drawn on TTD's sexual experience from this piece of semi-sober whimsy.

Football, Bloody Hell

Hey that was really cool. There really is nowt like a good penalty shoot-out, especially when it goes into sudden-death penalty. Poor John Terry's abortive attempt practically handed the trophy to Utd and Anelka's did.

And Sir Bobby Charlton was first in the line for a medal. Good on you, Sir Bobby, and on all of your teams of 58 and 68.

The Echoes of Your Footsteps on the Stairs

The point of this line*, is of course, that although it points to the love between Winston and Julia it really refers to the approach of Thought Police Agent Charrington. For the entirety of their love affair the sound of footsteps has haunted them, even if they have not thought of it: it is a bleakly cynical satire on adulterous relationships in a free society and a bitter denunciation of the impossibility of even innocent relationships in an unfree one. Indeed, since the moment Winston put frown to face, many years before he put pen to paper, he has awaited the moment of discovery. Critiques of Nineteen Eighty Four routinely, and rightly, comment on the paucity of Julia as a character and on the one-dimensional nature of their relationship. Of course, this is part of the point. Winston says: "I hate purity." He wants a relationship dominated by sexual attraction: remember he loathes Julia and is convinced she wants him to die, before she slips him the note. His hate turns to lust turns to love. His lust is rebellion (whereas for us it is the affirmation of our world's values - I think (shlock horror - Orwell was wrong here). For both Winston and Julia, lust is an affirmation of existence, love comes later, if at all. Though it does: in a riotous haranguing of the doctrine of ideology, the infirmity and yet strength of the body ("as applied to artsem") is enough to give Winston colour, vigour, to defeat his ulcers. His eventual love is defeated, not by weakness, but by sheer instinct.

There is a sequence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the Knight, about to take his rightful execution, flinches as the blade is lifted. The Green Knight taunts him as a coward but the point is precisely that his reaction is not cowardice, but that of a living being, that of life in the onrush of death. There is nothing you can do. It is part of the glorious ache for freedom of life.

So it is with Winston. He loses nothing, does nothing, in Room 101 but succumb, briefly to the inevitable. It does not mean love does not exist, or freedom; it means that humanity is beautiful enough to be defeated by brutality. If it were not, it would live with brutality and be, itself, evil. Hence O Brien plays him the tape of his promising to "throw vitriol in a child's face" and breezily waves away his assumption of humanity. Winston, naively, as anyone (maybe - probably- I don't know) in such a world, assumes humanity comes from a single or the single deep feeling at one's heart. He carelessly discards other values - or, maybe more pertinently, has never known them.

He would not betray Julia. Of course he would; he says that only because it is uppermost in his mind, as it is in hers. She loves him, for reasons never quite made clear. He loves her too.

But he is not, until Room 101, properly confronted with what he knows the Party has held against him and all other Party members since time immemorial: the thing he *most* fears. This is no big deal as far as the Thought Police are concerned; it is just a matter of locating it in any individual.

*Which opens the possibility of a Mule type character (out of Asimov's Foundation) being the one to defeat the Party - perhaps??*

In that final place Winston merely accepts what he has so far learned and not quite revised properly; that the kind of love that is required is self-abasement, a kind of religious worship, but of the ecstatic, mystical kind, such that the personality is moved out. It is not betraying Julia that does this, that is just a side effect, it is the facing of one's worst fear.

So it is that fear is a vital element of life, for sound self-preservation reasons (we are organic and irrational after all, and *not* machines); for some that is avoiding jam, or The Jam, or spiders, or spider diagrams, or whatever. Facing our fears - and by extension, the "talking cure" is not the way to go - these things are suppressed for a reason.

Suppressing his fear of rats, he loves and enjoys Julia in a room he *knows* to be crawling with the fuckers. Face to face, as it were, he cannot exist at all. He is destroyed, not by his actof betrayal but by his entirely human, or even entirely animal, instinct. This is precisely what the Party are attempting to demonstrate: you are an animal, and a piss-poor one at that ("if you are a man, Winston, you are the last man"). Let us liberate ourselves from the purely animal in our enjoyment of your suffering. It is this which moves us beyond lust into a realm of abstract power. We have changed you, which is what we wanted to do; over and above the infliction of pain, it is the fact that we have changed you that matters. That, not the "making him suffer", gives power. We have power, we change you. We change all.

So the people who desire change desire power.

Sexcrime, like thoughtcrime, is insidious. It creeps slowly into your marrow until you no longer realise it is there, but it is sinking your blood into a firey earth. Sexcrime becomes your being, into your dreams and your work; it slow-burns your heart into nothing. Sexcrime is all, in a free society.

When you have had enough of thoughtcrime, that is.




*from the soundtrack to Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) by Eurythmics.

Love in a Void

Love in, love in, love in a void, a void in love....

Sometimes you just have to accept that you need to shut up, sit down, and let the people who can actually write crystallize the sensations you so desperately want to articulate.

In the above case, Siousxie and the Banshees. Again.

Crimespeak: A Times Editorial

TD wishes strongwise for ingsocvic, doubleplussoon. He fears crimethink. Comrades, all newthinkers fear crimethink, certainwise. Crimethink is strongful and painful. TD bellyfeels ingsoc but ownlife is doubleplusdifficult stopwise, when crimestop and blackwhite fail. Comrades, we must, speedwise, identify crimethink. It powerwise attacks thinkcentres and bellyfeeling. A goodful sign is facecrime. Comrades, facecrime plus often happens on BB-sight in telescreen pics. BB-sight causes think crime in plusmany persons. Even, comrades, to the unbellyfeeling of ingsoc. Persons, crimethinkers, oldthinkers, Eurasian spies, crimespeak at BB-sight. Not even crimethink, quickwise as that must unexist. Comrades, what is crimespeak? Crimespeak is ungood speaks about BB and Inparty mans and womans. Also Inparty womans AirstripOneoutful. Crimespeak kills Inparty hearts and uncompletes revolution. Unrevolutionwise, childs live hungrywise. Persons are unfree. Crimespeak is ungood words about BB, crimespeak words which make BB painfeel. BB painfeels when crimethinkers address BB insult-wise. Insult-wise speaking reveals crimethinking and capitalist tendencies from the Dale-Staines-Mail-Telegraphite centre. This centre viciouswise owns all speaks. This centre unfeels duckspeaking. This centre wants BB execute fullwise and speedwise. Comrades this certainful is, if Dale-Staines-Mail-Telegraphite centre is unsmashed!! Forward comrades, with TD: execute destroywise capitalist centre and make childs unhungry in revolution!!!


Comrades: Fullminded be of the dayexecutes. Victory Square, 1900. Richard Littlejohn dropful, Polly Toynbee gunhanded beside poles. Bigscreenful, loopwise.



Editorial writed by Magnus Linklater.


with thanks to Inner Party Observer.

Poor Nyssa

Oh well at least she had some nice music.

Good Question

Is there a proper answer?

For The Love of Big Brother

I worship power: oh yes I do, I love powerful beings, in their strength and their decision-making genius, and their rights, oh when I see them exercising their rights it makes me quiver; how they turn and move and destroy. Destruction is the greatest act of power, after the ability to make another suffer. To make another suffer must be as great a display of power as any, but to destroy one - fabulous. Unmake me, unwind me, untie me, let my threads fly into the corners and leave me to settle into the floors. Spill my mind from end to end of the world. Anything can create; very few have the ability to destroy. It takes a certain kind of tidy mind.

Oh the love of power is the end-point of a type of narcissism, the obliteration of self and the dedication to a thing you can absorb yourself in, regardless of who you are (indeed the idea is to subsume one into the other so that it becomes virtually invisible).

Without power there'd be no light; no hospitals, no schools. Someone needs power: power needs someone.

Not me. I just receive it and I look on in awe.

Coool.

Hey, not only am I a part time member of the real world, and a substitute on the bench of technology, I also have an Ipod. How cool is this.

I have synched (how 80s is this word) all my tracks. Guess what I'm listening to?

Here's a clue. The track begins with "C" and ends with "hange."


Fucking magic.

You've Just Joined the Human Race

Not through mere existence: this is a ridiculous way of determining humanity. After all so many manners of subclasses exist and are disposable.

Which reminds me. I haven't put the bins out. Bugger.


Oh well.

No, I mean having a thoroughly shitty day at work, thereby reinforcing your status as a piss-poor cog in a broken wheel, your utter irrelevance, your wholly needless work which could and should be done by someone else: and then your relaxing into the not entirely fanstastical but certainly phantasmagorical world of alcohol. Oh truest of the true joys, oh maker of purpose, oh braver of cowardly feelings. Oh you salve my fear by making it real, oh you fantasise for me and bring it all through like a vomit of anxiety (with bits of fear-carrot).

Life without booze? Fuck me.

Or rather - there's the problem. Some bloggers write about the troubles of having sex, others are 13 again. *

Oi. Lawrence. Fuck off. Just because you don't have sex, it doesn't mean you're not a man. You're a fuckwit and your books are shite so just fuck right off back into the arseaching syllabus you came from. Where the fuck are my Sillitoe, Orwell, Amis (Sr & Jr), Larkin, Hughes (yes alright), Plath; where the fucking hell are my Greene books, my copy of Unman Wittering & Zigo; my Eliot; my VHS of Threads, my blog. Where is my blog? My Blog!!!


*Are yuz caalin me a fuckin vorgin?**

**Erm, for the avoidance of doubt, this post refers to my lack of sex in the modern age, not throughout time.***

***Not that that should be a problem to any discerning readers.****

****Not that I'm worried or anything.

I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own

It might be nice sometimes, but other times it is dark, cold and there is noone to love; it bleeds concern and sucks adoration through a straw. This time is an illusion which entices you into living; at other times you know, for certain, that life means nothing but a progress towards soil, even a race. You know that your greatest end is as part of a beautiful tree, even though you know that this is environmentally unfriendly. But if you let yourself stay, and rot, you will be such a tiny part of so many lovely plants: your brain might even be part of the trunk of a giant oak, surveying the degredation year by year. How magnificent - for one's body and self to become part of a more permanent England than even New Labour had in mind when they set about fucking it up as the home of racists and fuckwits, the worst of all places - where they came from.

I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.

What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.

Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.

Fever breathe your love on me.

I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.

Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.

The Movement of History

I make no excuses for projecting my own thoughts onto the world in this post. I have little else to go on, for am I no real historian nor thinker.

We live in a constantly changing world, or so we are told, and it becomes part of our day to day survival to cope with that change: we need to change our ways of living, speaking and thinking to ensure we are not separated from the community, although the community itself is increasingly vague to us. We know some people, sure, but few of us could honestly say we share the views and assumptions of the people in either our real, physical locality or our internet habitat: however much we leave approving comments on blogs we like there will always be the divergence of views caused by thought, independence and history.

For such a changing world the movement of time seems to be remarkably solid. I mean that very quickly the past, or other ways of living, begin to seem unlikely, even impossible; from tiny things like the changing coin to the vast sand-shifting of ethics. Our experience, though varied, seems to be immersed. It did not take long of governance by New Labour for a Tory government to seem almost unthinkable, and for the long years of Tory dominance of politics to seem less than a memory. In many places, with silent pits, the memories would be strong: I mean culturally, even philosophically: in the years 1999-2004 (roughly) I think, the assumptions, arguments, practicalities of Conservative government were so alien to the commentariat and swathes of the public (including, to be fair, myself) as to be meaningless, irrelevant, unexisting.

I don't know if this is making sense but the point I am making is that I think the changing world, in certain ways, makes us unable to remember. It keeps us mired in the present, and thinking of the future (at the moment), with particular regard to global warming, in a kind of fearful fascination. I would have thought we would remember more sharply things being different because it wasn't that long ago: but this is partly what is driving us to worship youth: it is not just beauty, or sexuality, or ability, but the fact that it is, at any given moment, youth which is best attuned to the state of the world at that point, best able to cope, completely unconcerned by trying to adapt. Youth fits, it works. The rest of us find it harder because we are (to greater or lesser degrees) different from the world we live in.

So the study of modern history assumes a keener aspect, and becomes more popular because it is history, it is the story of real or nearly real people in a world we can see has changed. Other types of history (say, medieval) are about other worlds, and so don't interest us so much. Modern history is about our world. The nazification of the school history syllabus and of the bookshelves is a testament to the fact that we are still trying to understand our cultural origins in that time. We see our society as evolving from that, rather than before - take the notion and enacting of human rights, though it may have its origins in the Enlightenment or French Revolution, the key document of our time is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I think there is also a powerful part of our culture that still cannot understand how it all happened and why it all happened.

I've written on this idea before of course - that the twentieth century is not quite over, and that, possibly, we are suffering some kind of extended anxiety problems caused by 45 years of living under 4 minutes' notice of destruction (ok it was a bit longer than that until the early sixties). But that isn't entirely what i mean here. I mean a culture (though it is so mixed now as to make even the singular noun questionable) which has come into existence only five minutes ago, furnished with a history that it does not remember, but it does remember being at one point in time and at that nexus emerging into something resembling life. From there it has turned, shifted, slid, slanted and cracked so that we just do not, really, remember what it was like.

I don't mind if you think this is a lot of contradictory, muddled cobblers. It is a kind of live-thinking exercise, no pre thought has gone into this post at all except a vague sense that i'd like to put finger to keyboard. If you like it, great. If you don't, also great.

The Girls They Love to See You Shoot

Sometimes...if it is the right time; if it is too soon, they don't. Obviously. Easier said than, er, well, you know what I, er...

I wonder if the great Gang of Four realised this application when they penned the title lyric of this post. It seems to ironize the entire song, the entire surface meaning of an otherwise easily comprehendable track. What's the point?


I wonder why I am hinting at my sexual failings over the internet. It is that truly odd mixture, that bizarre conflation of the intimate and the professional that one gets with the internet generally and email and blogging generally. Why do we find this space which is at once private and at once so utterly, tantalisingly, public? It is the day by day equivalent of the party you used to go to where you'd occasionally find someone who didn't even know your name, or who couldn't even see you, but was still interested in you, and the feeling, if it was that, was mutual.


Oh, well, it is the way it is. My arms ache, my tummy aches, all the bits of my body with no muscles ache, I am weak and stupid and in pain.

Exercise kills.

Kids - just say no to the gym!! Have a pie instead!

TTD: An Apology

Over the past few weeks this blog may have inadvertently given the impression that TTD was a fit and strong man. Posts which contained statements such as "I am as fit as fuck" and "TTD is a hunk of human steel" may, perhaps, have inappropriately contributed to readers thinking of TTD as a juggernaut of muscle and a 747 of the rower.

I would like to make it clear that if I have given any such impressions then I have erred; but I would also like to make it clear that is my readers who have been on trial here, not me( c Steve Richards, Indescribablyshite) - references to alcohol, crisps and lying around on my arse should have given intelligent readers enough clues as to the truth.

Which is this. I am a tub of lard.

I say this is in the light of new research evidence, which emerged tonight in the course of TTD attempting to use a new machine in the gym using tricep and abdominal muscles. The research suggests, I am led to believe, that TTD has fuck all muscles above his thighs (even his knob barely functions) and hence is a booze-fuelled fantasist, not an athlete.

If any readers have formed the wrong impression, then I apologise from the depths of my liver.

On Pseudonymity

Forgive me if I derive this post entirely from one by CBI on the subject of identity. He outs himself, with, in his view, good reason. I will not presume to comment on his decision.

I am not outing myself: firstly I do not accept any ethical principle that says you must identify yourself to have a view - very few societies have ever accepted this and we seem to find enough value from Anglo Saxon poetry without whinging about the identities of its writers. Either the writing has interest, or it doesn't. It smacks of a different, controlling impulse to demand that people give you personal information before you consent to read their writings. Of course, it is your right to demand that, just as it the writer's right to refuse. Even in the semi-anarchy of the blogosphere, we still hold to market values. Yay.

Secondly, as might be guessed, I am a raving idiot and I don't especially want everyone in my life to know this. I am happy with some people knowing it (two, to be precise) but everyone else can fuck right off, as a narcissist I want a public space to go on and on about all sorts of crap without anyone saying "ew, I don't think much of your blog..." well tough - fuck off. You're not even going to find out so you can piss right off.

Also, of course, I can swear. I love swearing. It gives me such a sense of futile transgression and belated but wholly stereotypical rebellion.

As a teacher I also have this lovely space where I am not expected to be a socialist. This is a relief beyond belief. I can say "Mrs Thatcher was great" and I don't need to say "THAtcher", spitting the entire contents of my saliva gland onto the grateful listener (it is interesting how people love to see you flobbing the great woman's name). I don't need to make excuses for Jim Callaghan, or go on and on about how wonderful the UK was in 1945, 1950, 1966, etc and how 1979 was in fact the peak of a settled, equal society.

These things are nigh on compulsory in education. It is a myth that private school teachers are less lefty. They just think state schools are for all the other fuckers, not them. I have had some truly bizarre, recursive arguments with colleagues in a private school who would tell me private education was wrong but could not, for the life of them, see what was wrong with their working in the system.

Some of them even lived in private roads. But they thought making any decisions on your children's education was evil.

Anyway. I stay pseudonymous for the final, and most important reason: I like it, it gives me pleasure.

So there.

Carving Chunks Out of Your Psyche

I've just realised it.

Why I've always been afraid of doors which open by themselves, blank televisions, corners, darkness and corridors.


1978.

I could hear a drilling, a powerful electric noise, I ran towards it, pushing the door, or was the door already open, towards the television, a long way away, which was closed, and the noise carried on, I screamed and screamed and no-one picked me up or did they and the noise carried on.


It was "Brill the drill", our next door neighbour in Sutton drilling the hell out of the wall.

Or maybe I am wrong and it is not a memory but a projection, and the door is not opened by me but by someone else, and the corner is powerful and another tv-type screen is blank and someone screams but it's not me but I am there, sort of. The television is very, very important. But it is off. The door opens, by its own accord, or by someone, and there it is, there's the picture.

It's not a memory but a warning, or a prediction.

And people wonder why I find the US version of "The Ring" the most frightening film ever.


Someone drilled a hole into my head without ever knowing me.


And the picture?

I don't want to put you off your tea.

In Loving Memory of a Name

...forgotten, not lost....


How lovely. Colin Moulding always had a better touch for _real_ life than Andy Partridge.

Frightening Television

By which I mean the rash of children's programmes of the 1970s and 1980s with genuinely affecting, even disturbing content: not just violence but supernatural or psychological horror, and programmes which had nothing to do with horror at all but whose title sequences were themselves weird or slightly disturbing (like Picture Box or Near and Far). For example: Changes, Chocky, many editions of Dramarama, Knightmare, Running Scared, Grange Hill at its best around 1986, Doctor Who of the mid 1970s and mid 1980s (Lytton's hand being crushed in Attack of the Cybermen being a prime instance) and more.

I don't have an explanation for this phenomenon as such, nor as to why we're not so keen to produce it today, though I think the brutality of mid-80s Doctor Who has an awful lot to do with its time - I think it was reflecting it, quite deliberately. There seems to be an ethereal strain to some popular culture that sets in around 1981 and lasts for four or five years, you can hear it in some of the electronic pop music of the time as well. I've often wondered if Peter Davison (whom I admire) was cast as Doctor Who precisely to be insubstantial - for what reason I am not really sure.

How on earth the PIF "The Natural Born Smoker" ever got allowed onto tv screens before 9pm amazes me, let alone broadcast at circa 5pm during CBBC in 1985. I recently saw this for the first time in 22 years on You Tube and it continues to horrify me, even to regress me, and I remember sitting in that living room, all alone, with the bizarre, vile character unfolding before my terrified eyes. I am certain I only saw it once - perhaps it was pulled.

At least it formed the inspiration for my first piece of published writing - in the school rag a few years later.

One memory eludes me to this day though and after hours of fruitless googling I am beginning to wonder if it exists at all:


An ordinary house in a suburban street; a boy hears a noise from upstairs and opens a brown door (I think labelled "Mark iv", leading into a long, rocky tunnel with some kind of computer and a hooded figure who then reveals a grotesque face.


I wonder if I am conflating The Deadly Assassin and something else here but it feels like a powerful memory, even if I can barely recall it. It has been with me a long time so I am sure there is something to it.

Can anyone help me with this?

I'm So Macho

Yes it's true, TD is a hunk of human steel. According to my rowing machine, whose readout this morning said "fuck me you're caning this, fucking hell you're as fit as fuck why don't you fuck off onto the fucking cross trainer or summat".

Also I've got muscles the size of Jean Claude van Damme. I mean each muscle is the size of him.

And I ran. I ran so far away, I ran all night and day (c Flock of Seagulls, 1983). Well, ok, 1.64 miles but for a fat old cunt like me that's a pretty good effort. Indeed it's world shaking, or so all the other gym members thought as my flabby arse was pounding the living fuck out of the gym - and get this it is pretty well made, as it was a WWII air base then a training centre then a USAF air base - it was all built to withstand some kind of megatonnage (I'm guessing not direct - more likely to take the flak from Brize Norton, even assuming a prevailing wind and bearing in mind the nearness of Cheltenham and Fairford - we're talking FallOut City here - kind of, I'm told there's still loads of the place underground that still works).

And ghosts, ghosts that wander the underground passages and ancient hospitals, the ghosts of people who never had the chance to die rather than the people who did. These ghosts stalk the designs and the roads, they wander up and down in front of cars and when you play your retro 80s tracks; they fade in and out among the leafless trees and they want you to fall back, to forget the nice new estates here and remember you were going to take all kinds of injuries and that you'd have very, very little time even though you thought you were nowhere.

From the hilltop you can see the Chilterns, and Andoversford, and Malvern. A 15 megaton blast (in a war circa 1965, before they realised that more damage would come from smaller and more conentrated blasts) would be seen here whether it hit Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol, Oxford, Reading, Cheltenham, Swindon or even London. The fireworks would have been truly astonishing.

You'd have just about had enough time to enjoy it before you died, that is, if your eyeballs hadn't melted.


Oh well.

Nineteen Eighty Four is Bullshit

...after all, Winston Smith is shown smoking during the lecture on Artsem, given by the bloke out of Revelation of the Daleks who was Eleanor Bron's secretary....

so Orwell was completely wrong! Again!


What a wanker.

It's 1995 Again...

...which is what you feel listening to the BBC today. No sign of a new era, or the relief of getting rid of a bored, boring administration in London or anywhere else, such as we got in 1997: instead we've got all the typical BBC crap of giving people with no expertise in politics like the shit presenter of the shit sports-comedy show on Radio 5 "Fighting Talk" the space for gems like: "[Sue Mott]...he's locked in CCHQ...[shit host] let's hope so..." of Boris. The casual, even causal, non-political slagging off of Tories that used to be a staple of 1990s BBC output while the Tories were the decadent, corrupt party of power. All they've done now, to deserve this, is win. That's all it takes. Indeed the shit unfunny host of Fighting Talk called his regular "AOB" slot at the end of the show "Boris" on the assumption that everyone would wish to slag off the new Mayor of London. As two of them did, the other two refusing to comment.

Anyone who thinks the BBC is not biased is ignorant or is a liar. Check out the BBC website for its references to the "series of articles" published by the Guardian urging people not to vote for Boris and its wholly stupid "other newspapers did the same" supporting evidence. I saw, or read, no evidence of the Daily Telegraph's long series of articles urging people to vote for Boris: it's not even on the stupid hack's radar: he was writing solely for his mates in North London.

They are gutted: expect the BBC to do their damndest to make Boris's tenure as Mayor uncomfortable. The Tories must both privatise the BBC and conceal their intentions until election time - as it is, we're going to see some real hardcore flag-waving for Labour over the next two years; if the Tories announce any such plans the Beeb would doubtless resort to subliminal red-rose images during CBBC.

"As I was going to say before I was interrupted..." as Gordon Brown did not need to say during his Toady interview this week.

My own fave this week was Radio 5's trailing of a report on immigration by "the think tank the IPPR", never, to my knowledge, mentioning that it is, quite openly, a Labour think tank. You can always tell when a "report" (which rubbish seems disturbingly often to be the lead news items on Five Dead) says stuff they like because they don't identify its origin. We get "the IPPR" or "the Joseph Rowntree Foundation" but "the right wing think tank Civitas" although, to be _scrupulously_ or even _radically_ fair, they have failed, recently, to identify "the Tax Payers' Alliance" as right wing.

As a matter of interest, why is the most important news of any given day often the results of a report by an NGO into a subject whose opinion you could predict after 10 pints of Stella? I could count on the glasses of one visit to the pub the number of damnfool times I have heard this shit: as if anyone with half an-alcohol swamped braincell couldn't tell that any given report by Greenpeace is going to recommend that we all give up on land, even the trees, and fuck off back to the oceans. Recycling our clothes first, of course. Or that any report by the IPPR is going to tell us that immigration is wonderful and also to reinforce what Labour told us in 2004 about East European migrant workers - by some staggering coincidence.

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't really give a fuck about immigration. I do give a fuck about biased "national treasures".

Five to one that Ken Livingstone gets his own show on Radio 2,4 or 5; is a regular guest on Question Time; is a rent a quote on all news bulletins; is even invited to take over from Jimmy Armfield summarising the football when old Armfield is kicked out for being a stupid old twat (which he is NOT, emphatically, but which phrase reflects my expectation that someone of his class, integrity and intelligence is barely even relevant to today).

Fuck it, two-to one. And I might even pay out early.


UPDATE: Fuck me I have forgotten English tenses. Any English graduates please feel free to advise me accordingly.

Bollocks

Damnit I can't think of anything to put. Fuck. My amazing creative genius has deserted me leaving no reason to blog other than sheer, honest to God narcissism. Well here we go then.....

er...

Fuck me I'm tired. I had some weird dreams last night about alien invasions and nuclear wars, and they've fair knackered my poor old brain, whatever is left of it.

Blimey

Stats for April show that _some people_ read TTD, and _a few more_ visited pages. This is remarkable and is almost solely due to that amazing chap CBI.

It was also an amazing month for posts, if I say so myself, with my creativity being at its refulgent best (c Will Self). My posting has been, by turns, funny, poignant, mysterious, witty, intelligent and thoughtful. I put this down, as my readers are aware, to the magical influence of the northern European psycho-active drug stella, found only in all retail outlets north of Paris. If I have interested anyone, at any time, it is all down to stella. My one true, my faithful darling (though I forgive her numerous flirtations with other men and women, I know she remains my own).