The Tin Drummer

Fans Criticize Police

2010-11-10T11:50:00.003Z

Fans caught up in trouble at a football match in Plymouth have blamed a "low-key" approach by police.

At least 20 people were arrested on Tuesday evening at the first Devon derby between Plymouth Argyle and Exeter City for more than eight years.

In other news:

Bear criticises lack of woods presence - I had to take a crap on the street, he says.

Pope criticises lack of Protestants in Vatican area

Etc

Ain't That Peculiar

2010-11-09T21:10:00.003Z

Crossposted onto Severnside

How, exactly, do you turn a romantic, soulful song into one that barely celebrates the beating of hearts, let alone the complexities of living?

And, more to the point, how do you thereby reinterpret the song for your age, giving it the empty heart of your own time?

And, worse, how do you suggest something of the reality of timeless emotions in a bounded and digital era?

Well, the first thing you'd do is splice the rhythm of the song, so that it functions like a set of punctuation marks. The next thing you'd do is introduce instruments that don't exist. The final thing you'd do is give the vocals a portentous, pretentious tone, ensuring that you're driving them with a kind of stuttering, halting deliberation.

You'd also have the most talented bassist of his generation doing his thang.

You'd end up with a piece of music that communicated the changing of times. It would mix human emotions with political realities and physical technology. It would show that music can morph itself. It would build the anxieties of a culture on the verge of profound, permanent change in which the individual becomes a piece of malleable information, to be created and discarded at the whim of whoever is controlling it, with the expressiveness and emotion that makes us human in any age. To seek digitalisation and to embrace its dividing arms is what has driven us, in reality, since around 1943 (Colossus), but certainly since 1971 (the Intel 4004) and accelerating from 1981 onward (the release of the IBM PC). It's hard to say for sure, but it's a fair bet that Steve Jobs's attempt to take over every single element of our lives has its roots in that movement.

I think that sentence was meant to be ironic.

In any case, serious or not, it is not a party-political point. This is a point about the changing world circa 1980. Regardless of who was in power, we were destined to become 0s and 1s.

It was what we would have wanted...

You'd start with this:

And you'd do this to it:

New, Non-Politically Partisan or Sweary Blog Started

2010-11-03T21:28:00.003Z

Yes, I've decided to start a new blog, with Ms Drummer, in which I write for the first time *under my real name*.

But in the spirit of the new Coalition era, I'll not be whinging about the govt (though I could do plenty of that if I chose). It'll be what I wanted TTD to be, before I got obsessed by NuLab.

I note that several bloggers have given up since the erection: LFAT, Mr Eugenides, to name but, er, two. Mr E is the real loss, for although LFAT was reasoned and liberal, Mr E was the genuine voice of anguished anti-NuLab sentiment.

Centre right blogging was born in the UK out of a sort of proto-Tea Party movement. It was born and flourished on the basis that NuLab were in charge of the country and the world's biggest media organisation (ie the BBC) and that they were virtually unchallenged, given that the Tories were so crap. This was something like 04/05. Blogging really took off during 06, when the Tories got their act together. Then the Left got really sorted, with outstanding blogs like Liberal Conspiracy doing what the left do best: agglomerating voices against an enemy. Then we were back where we started: voices in the dark, shouting at each other.

You need a certain nerve to be a political blogger, one I never had, despite being referenced once by the Staggers as a Tory blogger...I never wanted what I became as a blogger, though I asked for it right enough.

Where do I stand today, as if matters? Well, I was happy enough to see the end of NuLab, but I don't really know what to make of the new govt. Part of me sort of hopes to see elements of the Tories and Lib Dems merge.

The new party could be called something like...oh I don't know..The Liberal Party, maybe?

Anyway. The new blog is being set up and written with Ms Drummer, who is some way to the left of me. That's probably part of it all.

It's here: http://severnside.wordpress.com

I may keep open TTD for random witterings when I'm in from the pub or whatever I want to write. But I'll also refer readers here to new posts at Severnside.

Thoughtcrimes

2010-10-02T11:13:00.003+01:00

Well, I've messed around again with the posts I wrote for the blog on Nineteen Eighty Four. I've revised, added and expanded them up to 21000 words and published them on Lulu. So if you're interested, follow the link at the side. It's all pretty basic in presentation but then I always was crap at art.

Severn Gurls

2010-08-31T00:40:00.007+01:00

I thought, given that Katy Perry is signalling the death of postwar western civilisation through her evil song _California Gurls_, that I would try to persuade myself and anyone who wishes to read that life goes on. Building, making things, creating families goes on. Even after Katy Perry and her festival of zero.

Well, to be honest, it's not easy.

Because sun-kissed skin so hot it'll melt your popsicle, even though or perhaps even because it's so self-contradictory, so utterly meaningless given its stated objective, its clear innuendo-meaning - because that is so shit, language seems to have been finally shat out after a 50 year curry and 50 years of crap, factory made lager; because, ultimately, even pop music has conflicted itself in its own greatest exponents, and they, as they speak, have called for erectile dysfunction in the midst of "undeniable" hot sex teenage girls -

because of all that, meaning has now finally been flushed down the karzee.

Meaning has finally, thankfully, been disowned. We no longer need a word or a phrase to correspond to an idea.

Think about it, you twats, think about it: a pop song asks to you want to fuck teenage girls. Then it tells you they're so hot your popsicle will *melt*. You will just go soft, just sort of being there.

I really don't think that it means you will come in your pants.

Really. I don't.

It means the literal opposite of what it intends to mean.

Language is dead. Words have no purpose.

Katy Perry killed language.

Dante is too dead to save it; Chaucer too ironic; Shakspear too involved in non-existent persons;Pope too into the sounds of words; Austen in ghastly inter-human relations;Dickens in the...the...play of words, pictures and sentences. After Dickens everyone is toying with their own history. Plath is killed doing it, Hughes after having sex with words; Larkin hates words too much; Roth just has too many of them. Orwell thinks words mean something, for fuck's sake; Hardy thinks they are about how there is no God (probably) and Amis (jun) veers from the play of words to the play of his memories.

Shit.

Language was killed by Katy Perry. She sliced it open with an auto-tune.

Open and its guts spilled into the air, to be eaten by the Eagles and vultures and Beatles and flies and Airplanes and to be left alone, token gut by chitterling, to fly away.

Fly away.

Nu-Heimat

2010-08-18T22:08:00.004+01:00

Well, time moves on and if TTD didn't, he'd be dead.

Accordingly, the world of TTD has changed and now the village of Hill is the Drummer-heimat (yes, he changes his past, just like the Party). Sadly, Hill is too small even to merit a single nuclear warhead, although both Berkeley and Oldbury-on-Severn both count, probably.

The closest serious target then, apart from the two nuclear power stations (alright, alright - only one, and even it isn't sorted yet), is Thornbury.

Wikipedia defines Thornbury thus:

which seems about right.

The Air Attack Warning

2010-08-17T23:28:00.003+01:00

Well, while I'm here (not I'm not pissed, just couldn't sleep), I thought I'd update the world on the TTD Doomsday Clock. This interesting device measures the nearness of Threads to my imagination. At the moment it is quite close: the ideas and vocabulary of the teleplay are constantly at hand. For example, on Saturday the Thornbury Tesco suffered a powercut. Clearly my first thought was that a nearby nuclear explosion was to blame. It turned out to be rain. There was no need to panic buy, and no chance of hearing Five Live interrupting their premiership coverage to tell us that a US Carrier had been sunk in the Persian Gulf.

Bloody hell- the end of the world, as read by Richard Bacon. It's enough to make you seek out the prompt radiation.

This might have been influenced by a recent re-reading of Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence. This is an intriguing book, published in 1985, which posits a nuclear war as seen from er, the banks of the Severn (the other side from Berkeley and Hill). In this novel, written for teenagers, there are explosions at - Bristol, Oldbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester - everywhere. And the destruction is so complete that mutations become dominant from the next generation onwards. These mutations eventually form the basis of a new species of human, one with the memory of nuclear war embedded in their psyches. The curious thing about this novel is that there is a strong biblical subtext - this is a kind of Noah's Ark, except that the flood was caused by us, given space by God to do so, for reasons of his own, namely the new, superior race that was to emerge. In short - we, homo sapiens, had failed. We were to be allowed to fail in order to be destroyed by our own hand. The replacements, a kind of cross between Stone Age man and the Tomorrow People, would not repeat the mistakes.

Or so the story went. A silly one, at the end.

I also re-read Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters last week. This is a collection of 5 short stories on the subject of nuclear war. 3 are crap, two are good. The worst bit, actually, is Amis' introduction, which is typical 80s Amis, when he was still full of his own shit. He routinely denounces writers he doesn't agree with as "subhuman" but does not appear to have done *any* research on his subject beyond reading Jonathan Schell's book on it - he hasn't watched Threads or the Day After or The War Game, for example. Like a lot of writers, he pulls bits of quantum theory out of his arse and pretends he knows about physics and maths. He also completely gets geopolitics arse over tit and confidently announces we cannot possibly defeat the Soviets on any level, nuclear or otherwise, ever. This was written in 1987.

"Formal First"? Fuck me, Mart, not in maths, mate; not in maths.

I also had the deflating experience of re-reading The H Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter, which on a second reading turns out to have been copied straight out of Threads, and to have utterly mixed up 80s and 60s Civil Defence, and to have snuck in some shit references to Reagan and Thatcher as wanting to prolong the Cold War - how dishonest can you be? I mean really, how much of a liar do you have to be to think that Reagan, who instigated and carried through summit talks with Gorby with the ideal of getting rid of all nuclear weapons, just wanted to keep the conflict simmering for ever? And Thatch? Did she *really* want a strong USSR in perpetuity? Bollocks did she - she wanted it defeated by its own subjects, as it was (and the forces of economic necessity, etc etc). Bloody hell - I'll say this for your lefty writer - they can be utterly, deliberately, ignorant.

In that respect, maybe Daisy Dukes and bikinis on top have their attractions after all.

The TTD Doomsday Clock stands at 11.42pm

Etc

2010-08-17T23:17:00.002+01:00

I forgot to mention that the Air Balloon is the worst-sited pub in the world. At the top of a hill, several miles from any settlement, at the interjunction of three stupid roads, all heading to or from Gloucester, Cheltenham or (shudder) Swindon.

Ghastly place, ghastly road.

Here it is, kind of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A417_road

California Gurls(Daisy Dukes, Bikinis On Top)

2010-08-17T23:03:00.006+01:00

Hi.

Yes, life is sweet and dandy, &c, &c.

But I've just downloaded, not entirely by accident, a piece of silence. You see, I thought I heard a clever, postmodern (tsk) satire on sexual politics this afternoon. I was driving up towards the Air Balloon, on my way back to the Cotswolds from the netherlands of South Glos, so I was kind of trying to drive at 80mph between a caravan and a lorry hurtling downhill. I had this idea that "Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top" was some kind of dazzling wordplay, some new style of subversion based on crap early 80s children's TV.

Accordingly, I downloaded the track.

But really, it isn't - not at all. It is 3.56 of utter, utter silence. Sure, there are ritual incantations about sun, palm trees, jeeps, sex on the beach (aha! ambiguity) and a bit by Snoop Dogg. But apart from that, it says absolutely nothing in 3.56. Not a damn thing. There isn't even any real music, just the "savage, barking rhythm" of the Two Minutes Hate.

Can you imagine how O'Brien would have reacted seeing Katy Perry on his massive telescreen?

Regardless of that, the fact is that the modern type chart music can sometimes conceal serious intent beneath the froth of a Belgian beer - namely, Bulletproof by the girl whose mum was out of The Bill and also Calvin Harris' I'm Not Alone. To name but two. They sort of take the vocabulary of drugsex music (hey, neat) and manage to coil a meaning around it - sometimes, like Bulletproof, a non-verbal meaning.

But this - this is shite.

I say that, but my guts actually produce more substance than this track does.

Luckily, I've also downloaded Jump by Van Halen.

Bill Haydon

2010-02-18T16:16:00.003Z

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this guy. I've just finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and listened to it on the radio, so clearly I've experienced quite a lot of Bill Haydon lately. Briefly, my problem is this. He's an absolute fucking bastard. I mean the bastard of all bastards. He is a role model for the younger men at the Circus, is No2, is generally idolised - and has been a Soviet mole for 20 years! Worse than that, according to the Radio 4 version, he reckons he's a Colonel in Soviet Intelligence!

If I am writing this with all the subtlety of a 4 year old who's just realised that the witch in Hansel and Gretel isn't as nice as she first seemed, then fair enough. But, even though it is obvious who the mole is from an early stage, the unmasking of the hero of all these characters is still a shock. It's a shock you feel on the other characters' behalf more than on your own. It's the betrayal, the smiling, charismatic betrayal he has carried with him all this time - and which has killed so many people along the way. The brilliance of his career at the Circus is vastly exceeded by the brilliance of his career with the Soviets. Bastard Bill Haydon, not only being a good spy and a brilliant mole, but being loved so much by everyone else. Being loved and cutting it to pieces.

When he is debriefed by Smiley, he gives nothing away, and only makes Smiley feel that Haydon as a man doesn't reall exist at all. This is awful, because you desperately want Haydon to be beaten up, kneecapped and shot. But - the novel is only vaguely about spies and spy rings. Its about love and hate. Smiley does not, cannot hate Haydon, Guillam has to make himself want to hurt him. For neither of them does revenge really enter into it - nor does Haydon expect it to. He expects to keep his good reputation, his history of service, his charisma - all intact. He's not delusional as such, merely un-self aware. Smiley loves Ann of course, and Haydon slept with her - not because he loved her, but much worse than that - on orders. Subverting love altogether. Haydon tries to communicate to Smiley some kind of love for the USSR but it only comes out as a frustrated aristocrat trying to influence the world when he knows his own country can't. Smiley's greatest gift in this book is his love - of Ann, of duty, of Britain, even of his colleagues at the Service (eg Connie Sachs).

Bill Haydon is a sore, but not a festering one - he doesn't itch enough for that. He doesn't make enough itching. As a result, will he achieve the fame and notoriety he wanted? Will he be loved?

Nope. Chances are, even if he hadn't have been topped by another man who deeply loved him, ie Jim Prideaux, he'd have been like Philby. A scalp, but one who doesn't quite know his place. And the historians he thinks will write his apologia, thanks to Smiley, probably will never get to know about him.

He will be nothing, the net result of his betrayals.

Of course, he's based on that cunt Philby, who ruthlessly exposed agents in the Soviet Union only for them to be shot, and who was convinced he was a Colonel in the KGB only to find that he was, instead, a largely washed up communist arsehole, who like all the other fuckers, drank too much vodka.

In fact, I hate Bill Haydon so much, I'm changing my name - to Bill Haydon.

Oi

2010-02-06T22:51:00.002Z

Argh.

Life takes its route, through sexual desire, into the tunnel of early middle age, where you worry about a combination of your body and your performance: in point of actual fact, you are neither a pornstar with a ten inch cock of almost infinite variety and adaptability, nor a non-wannabe train-spotter with a semi-hibernating cock of uncertain provenance and even less certain occupation (to the extent that even a putative mother in law might worry about the general occupation of your membrum virilis). In short - you are just a guy, just a guy.

You are the service module of any Apollo mission: you do what you can but you are never going to be the star.

Trees are cut down, hurricanes never come again and the modern world fades into oblivion; you and your friends vaguely recall a female prime minister and lots of strikes; you don't in fact recall a time when accepting a job was not your decision but the union in charge's call. You don't recall there being no point in holding savings of any kind. You remember the smiles but you didn't see the cynicism in them. You don't recall the violence of the picket lines that you did see on TV, even though you were a kid. You remember the sparkly, glittery music and television, the over-emphasised desire to escape at every single point. You really do not remember the concrete blocks from motorway bridges; the spittle; the dodgy deals; the illegality that seemed normal because there was no law that could contain this new age with its conflict between the two sides of the same belief: Self.

What is self?

the....

going to school, in the cold and the fog and the mist, just like going anywhere anywhen on this island.

Shiver: down the path to the bogs, the dirty concrete, the other person there - he was the boy who you never understood. There he was, trousers round his ankles; even then, at the age of seven, you knew that was not how males went for a piss. Went for a piss/ a slash/ a jimmy riddle/ a wee/ to see a man about a dog/ to strain the greens.

Went for a Martin. A Martin Amis.

Fuck me I think I have missed a trick in the last four years. Blogging has truly passed me by. What do you write? how do you write it? Who do you write it for?

Do you need pictures?

Do you need porn?

Obama Cancels Moon Project

2010-02-01T21:08:00.002Z

This is a strange story. While it seems to be the standard "recession causes cutbacks" thing, there are deeper considerations at work here too.

Firstly, it's clearly a reversal of the 1960s policies. When JFK committed the US to reaching the Moon, the subsequent president (Nixon didn't have time to do much about it) followed it through. In part, this was because LBJ was consciously trying to capitalise on the JFK legacy and somehow therefore ensure his administration wasn't dominated by the escalating Vietnam crisis. In that, he was only partly successful. Obama of course is trying to undo the Bush legacy in almost every way. And this project, so long term and so expensive, was designed as a Bush legacy thing - something for people to remember him by in generations to come. It wasn't a real aspiration in the way that it was in the 60s.

And the reasons for that is the second point. We're just not interested anymore. Our scientific interests are entirely to do with our bodies. Biology - that's what we want. From that point of view, our range of inquiry has narrowed. We don't look outwards now. No-one wants to go back to the moon: the practical benefits look slight; the costs and risks immense; and the sense of achievement it would bring is irrelevant - we simply don't value that kind of achievement. We are much more likely to condemn it as wasteful and so on.

Thirdly, the whole project seemed somewhat uninspired. The rocket was new, but the delivery systems were entirely based on Apollo, just with updated computers and guidance and so on. NASA's argument was to the effect of "why rewrite a hit" but it made the whole idea seem derivative and as if they were just going through the motions - very expensive motions, at that. Is this unfair? Perhaps. But for a project intended to be concluded some fifty one years after the original moon landings, using the same designs is strange. Were there really no other ideas?

While I deplore the lack of imagination in this decision, and the fact that it's all too predictable in an era that is not interested in anything outside its own genitals, the project was definitely flawed. If Obama and his government can come up with anything more interesting, I'd be all for it. It does look as if they are going for something they are condemning elsewhere -a private sector, private finance set of initiatives.

Who'd a thunk it?

Poor Piggy

2010-01-26T20:09:00.002Z

Proof, if any were needed, that the obesity crisis is a grave health issue.

Here we see the consequences of being overweight. Not only are you vulnerable to psychopaths levering massive rocks down at you, but you don't even get a decent death scene.

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch
exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy,
saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air
sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded
twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his
back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff
came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a
pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow
sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went,
sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.

"twitched a bit"?
"stuff came out"?
"like a pig's after it has been killed"?
"no time for even a grunt"?

Where is the dignity? The sense of a life lost? The utter senseless waste? The deep tragedy of the death of civilisation?

No - "stuff came out".

Piggy's death is made comical by the shape and bearing of his bloated body. Had Piggy been slim, like Simon, there'd have been real emotion in his death.

My students yesterday laughed at the death of Piggy.

Laughed.

Kids - don't eat that pie. It's not worth it -

Do you want a comical death?

Heart and Art

2010-01-21T20:24:00.005Z

It seems odd, and overtly narcisstic, to announce one's own continued existence: I still am.

It wasn't an easy 2009, and I had to seek help to carry on. I don't pretend to be free of the tendency to darkness and soil, but I stopped taking medication some time ago and have found someone who wants to knit themselves to me in perpetuity, and more, to carry my issue. You'd think such a violation of nature would bring pestilence, hatred, famine and disease - but apparently not: someone is out there who thinks that TTD could help make good people. Together, we intend to perform this act of bestial art.

This is more powerful than I could have imagined. It means that in such darkness as we now find ourselves naturally in, I look up rather than down - and that I find myself softening towards my previous life. If there were an eagle-eyed reader of this blog, they'd find that I've only ever deleted one post. All of my other hatreds are still here for the amateur psychologist to peruse. I don't regret those hatreds. It's a weird tendency of our world to shout "hate! hate!" when someone says something they don't like. We want to censor and stop. We want to prevent. All must be seen to be well.

And I proved one of the conjectures of my teenage years: hate and love really are very, very similar things. They switch and turn on a heartbeat.

You can really love someone with all your body, and feel the knot in your stomach at all hours of the day and night: then you can hate them the same way: then you can love them again.

All the reasons are the same, only inverted, or shifted either side of the equality sign.

You really can stand, leaning on the broom, contemplating the wreckage of your heart, and you really can pick it all up and glue it with pritt-stick. When you've done it, and you've wiped your hands, and you've scraped off the bits of glue that squeezed out the sides, and you've thoughtfully and carefully held the pieces still for far longer than is necessary, then you can say "I mended my broken heart".

People will never tell the difference. Honestly - they won't. There is no difference between a heart naturally malformed and a heart carefully put together with glue.

You really can walk into the sunset together, even though you have a limp and she has a club foot.

That - that's what life is really about.

Three Types of Simile

2009-10-31T12:30:00.004Z

Here's something I wrote while deeply bored some time ago. As you can imagine, I'm still desperately bored - too bored even to blog propely, though I've started posting again over at CTS. I had a volume of Hardy and a cup of tea to hand when I wrote it.

The first type of simile simply tries to invoke some genuine quality of a real object through reference to another object. The relevant cliché is “as hot as an oven”. With these “concrete” similes, the danger for the writer is that cliché is difficult to avoid; exaggeration also creeps up on you. But the possibility is always there for a simple simile of this type to contain other, hidden meanings or connotations. Take this example from Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Clock Winder’: “It is as dark as a cave”. Nothing too complicated there, the image is clear, the reference, obvious. But think for a while on the nature of caves. Claustrophobic, tapering into ancient rocks, the home of unknown streams, stalactites and stalagmites, the origins of human civilisation, hidden realms. The darkness of the very ordinary night Hardy is explaining now takes on a more psychological aspect. The depth of similes such as these is, of course, entirely up to the writer. But writers and students should be encouraged to think very carefully about the objects they choose to place into their similes.

The second type does the same thing, but invokes non-existent objects that people are nonetheless familiar with. For example: “Quick feet as light/As the feet of a sprite” from the poem ‘Signs and Tokens’. It is easy to see the reference, even though there are (as far as we know) no such things as sprites. The word “sprite” itself has become almost a metaphor for quickness and lightness. With this kind of simile a writer can convey some sense of numinosity or give an ethereal atmosphere to a scene or idea. A clichéd example of this type would be something like, “She looked like an angel”. A better one would be this, from Hardy’s poem ‘Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune’, “..sweet as angels’ laughters”.

The third type of simile intends to reference the object or quality only vaguely or slightly to anything, and is instead a satire, or a play with language for its own sake. This is exceptionally difficult to write appropriately. Most usually it is done to make the reader question the writing process and think about the difficulty of communication. It is mainly associated with modernist and post-modernist writing. An example would be “The years were like the cries of children”, in which a sense of fear is invoked, but otherwise the similarities are slight or non-existent.

These types of simile can also be adapted, extended or cut. Often a writer will slide the usual expressions into “hot like an oven” or “oven-hot” or “with the heat of an oven” or some other phrase. To avoid cliché and extend the image – though this has to be done with caution – a writer might take a simile like “she looked like an angel” and change it to “she looked like an angel, full of its sadness for humankind” – the idea being to give the object of reference more detail in order to make the image more complex. In the following quotation Hardy doubles his simile to give it more shades of meaning:
From tides the lofty coastlands screen
Come smitings like the slam of doors
Or hammerings on hollow floors

(from ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’)

Oh Who Am I (The Susan Howatch Edition)

2009-08-21T20:19:00.003+01:00

Well, clearly I'm not Charles Ashworth. Nor even Neville Aysgarth. It would be a minor blasphemy to put me as Jon Darrow.

I'd be massively offended if you called me Christian Aysgarth.

i'd be unbelievably gratified if you thought I was Lyle Ashworth (nee Christie).

Sadly, this is my destiny -

Eddie Hoffenburg, less the war-suffering. Oh how awful.

Bullshit Proof

2009-08-20T20:25:00.003+01:00

Here's what I will never be trapped by again:

1) The "soulmate" crap. That's about control, guilt and the pretence of tender-heartedness. If someone says it to you, ignore it. Falling for it is irredeemably beta.

2) The relationship shit-tests like "were you looking at her?" to which all possible answers are wrong. The best thing to do is to respond in kind, ie: "Well, of course: she's as hot as fuck".

3) The absence of communication. If she doesn't text you, that's her fucking problem. *Never* get trapped into sending loads of texts to a silent woman. She will loathe you for your spinelessness.

4) Sexual intimacy. There ain't no such thing. You are just number n. So, to some extent is she. We don't communicate souls in sex, however much hand-wringing Christian clergyman think we do. We just fuck like animals. At last we're learning how to do it properly. Remember that kissing is absolutely nothing at all.

5) Rows are good. If she gets cross with you, get cross back. Never, ever appease a woman's anger. Women hate craven, cringing men.

6) Never believe what a woman says about the type of man she finds sexy. All that stuff about kindness, intelligence, etc is all crap. Women are as sexually predictable as we are, and we find big tits and slim hips sexy, and they find big, dominating men sexy. Believe me, your reading of Heidegger will be utterly irrelevant to whether she likes your cock, and she will, whatever she says, not be turned on by your claim to be a poet.

Well, that's it. As you can guess, some of this is inspired by reading less savoury stuff about "game", but my experiences over the last two years (of steadily being battered into the ground like the beta I am) suggest that there is a lot of truth in it.

Women are not hard-wired to be caring, or loving, or care-givers or whatever. They, like men, are animals, and their desires and preferences are far more animalistic than we often think.

The title of this post is inspired by the extremely cool track Bulletproof by La Roux, which is 80s synth pop for 2009, with a video whose visual imagery is what many 80s groups would have made, had the technology allowed it. It shows that this kind of music really does have meaning: archetypal grid patterns, geometric solids, splintered images, too much lighting, asexual or androgynous characters (she's a mixture of Toyah, Hazel O Connor and Flock of Seagulls). I wonder if the grid patterns, reminiscent of laboratories and prisons, are trying to say something in particular...

And not a single whoremark arse tattoo in sight. No lingering cunt-shot either.

Even crap 80s synth pop had more to say about real life and real personalities than Lily Allen, whose failure to reach an orgasm is not really inspiring me. Nor am I rendered speechless by Black Eyed Peas' prediction of a great night's clubbing and sex. I'm also unprepossessed by Lady Gaga's somewhat tired attempt at edginess. Equally, Evacuating the Dance Floor could have had intriguing cold-war psychological subtones - but it doesn't. It's just shit.

Yeah, ok. I'm spending 2 hours a day in the gym right now. So I know my music. Thanks to TMF.

Cricket and Game

2009-08-11T18:28:00.003+01:00

OK. Here are some facts.

Strauss = beta
Cook = beta
Bopara = beta
Bell = omega
Collingwood = lesser alpha
Prior = alpha
Broad = alpha
Swann = beta
Anderson = beta
Harmison = lesser omega
Onions = beta

Watson = alpha
Katich = beta
Ponting = alpha
Hussey = beta
Clarke = alpha
North = alpha
Haddin = alpha
Johnson = beta
Clark = alpha
Siddle = alpha
Hilfenhaus = alpha

There's the problem. The England cricket team is populated by beta males.

Not Dead Yet

2009-08-07T21:44:00.003+01:00

No, not dead yet. Despite all predictions, of his arse, his head, his bollocks: he is not quite dead.

Citalopram is a soft but stupid drug, which makes you shake and makes you tired. Especially when you ignore your quack's orders to give up the booze. Then it's worse. You shake all day, you feel like death (oh the irony). Also you don't want sex. You want death more than sex. Heh. Death and sex are indeed two sides of the same filthy coin, with Edward VIII on it.

It's a fuckwitted drug, which makes you want to drink to calm down, even though you oughtn't to drink. Well fuck that. I feel great on citalopram and loads of Stella. Citalopram and no Stella then I feel like shit.

I seem to have the DTs!!!! Fuck me I have the DTs!!!

Alright. Well no-one cares about that. Well what have I been up to. I have spent the last two weeks throwing out year after year of my life. The tip is my second favourite place. They let me put my clothes, tea towels, videos, computers, anything. All my life goes into the skips there. Thirty two years of rubbish. Lots of it. Any sign that anyone loved me. The things I loved as a child. The VHS videos I spent years recording. The books I collected.

All gone. In a flash of bin bag, all gone.

My car, even. Gone even before I sold it, thanks to an utterly unscrupulous Ford dealer!!!

My poor little Fiesta. Don't get me wrong, I love my sexy new Focus, with its glorious, vast, curvy arse, and its tempting Pacific blue colour....but my poor little Fiesta which did me so well up and down the M4 and took me to Frogland 3 times....

*sigh*

Can one have an affair with an ex - car?? Is it ethical?

Oh but I'm still in love with my Fiesta and her little teardrop rear lights....her invitingly tight front grille....oh Fiesta, would you take me back, even though I abandoned you so?

No. I knew it. Even when you had gone when I went to pick up the Focus, I knew you'd moved on. You'd never have me back. Someone else was driving you. Someone else was getting their foot soaked because of your malfunctioning aircon, someone else was having to get in via the passenger door because the driver's side door was fucked, someone else was feeling your utterly lame braking. Someone else knew that your foglights were shit. Someone else knew that your brakelights never ever fucking worked.

Not the Ford dealer, thankfully, but, I guess, someone else. The someone who'd taken you out even before I'd sold you.

And the Focus? Yes she is as sexy as hell. Her tits (front fog lights) are fucking amazing and her arse...well, I've fucked it already. Twice. But you know she doesn't love me like you did. It's like her mind is on someone else, someone bigger. Someone who doesn't need to move the seat forward. Who doesn't need to lean to see the blind spot. Who doesn't need to move the rear-view mirror. Who can just park it in reverse with hardly needing to look. Who just knows where the front end of the car is when they do tight turns and that.

My Focus will never love me, I'm not man enough. And I still fancy the sexy little thong off my ex-Fiesta, not that she ever wore a thong but you get the picture.

Oh fucking hell, has ever a man had such a problem with his beloved cars??

She Blinded Me With Science

2009-06-13T21:46:00.000+01:00

Time for another experiment, dear readers. This time, unlike my previous posts on the subject of mind-altering substances, this one is entirely serious. Doubtless it will come as no surprise to my remaining readers (ie Cheeks and Matt), but I, along with half the western world, have been prescribed anti-depressants. I wonder what took them so long. My fear of doctors, probably. But it seems that things I thought were normal - utter lack of interest in career, trouble sleeping, rubbish concentration - are symptomatic of depression, along with a number of other things I've generally lived with for a few years (no, being right wing is NOT one of them). It was a self-pitying email to my mother that finally persuaded me -or rather she did - to see a proper quack this week. So I have spent the day enjoying the various side-effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. I was warned that during the adaptation phase the symptoms for which I am being treated may increase, along with other, rather more interesting side-effects. I started on Thursday.

Since then I have experienced:

constant low level shaking;
constant drowsiness but inability to sleep;
increased depression and mild suicidality (a word I thought I had invented many years ago, but it turns out to be real) - ie silly fantasies which I remember now having as a teenager - don't worry dear reader, it's just like being fourteen again, or eighteen, in my case;
palpitations & general increased anxiety;
anorgasmia (don't ask);
bruxism -(weeping and)grinding of teeth(though I get this anyway).

And it's true. It does affect your driving. I was struggling to find third and fifth gears. Or maybe the transmission on the old Fiesta is giving out.

I haven't quit the booze, though I have cut it in half, and I think probably that has something to do with it. The quack said I didn't have to give it up but the pack's instructions are fairly brusque on the matter. So I guess I will try. I don't feel like a drink anyway. I feel like breaking up with my Stella...

In other words, whereas I didn't feel too bad, just generally rubbish, now I feel utterly crap.

You might wonder why you are being subjected to this. Well. I went to the quack's because I am utterly fed up with what Will Self correctly called The Talking Curse in his book of short stories, Grey Area, and my mum insisted I do something about it, making her about the fifth in line from the ex, my dad, my landlady and my sister's boyfriend (don't ask). Talking through problems often makes them worse, activates and doubles the bastards, increases self-absorption and pity. And I've been there and done that, endlessly.

So I wanted something chemical.

But I can't altogether get rid of the urge to talk about myself.

So here it is.

Hey ho. Ten O Clock and I'm blogging on my bed. Alone.

That's Not All of It, By The Way

2009-06-04T11:39:00.003+01:00

That's only some of the stuff I wrote about 1984. I'll post a few more all in due course. Meanwhile there's a government collapsing somewhere...

The Disappearance of Syme

2009-06-04T11:38:00.001+01:00

This is an interesting moment in the book. Winston foresees it over lunch in the cafeteria - demonstrating a stronger grasp of the principles of Ingsoc than O Brien gives him credit for - but the lingering question is: why does this lover of Ingsoc disappear?

Winston's fear was that he was "too intelligent" - meaning that he understood what he was doing with the Newspeak dictionary, and why, but also that he spoke too clearly about the aim of the project: to narrow the range of thought by narrowing the range of vocabulary. Syme obviously thought - if he did at all - that his obvious goodthinking and his clear bellyfeeling of Ingsoc would keep him safe.

This is where he went wrong. He failed to exercise doublethink appropriately. In his conversations with Winston he should have made it clear that the aim of the reduction in words was to expand the range of goodthinkful ideas and to enable fuller discussion of the principles of Ingsoc, but instead he describes it in entirely oldthink terms: reducing the range of thought. As an Outer Party intellectual he should know that expressing truth can only be done with lies. Syme could have been promoted to the Inner Party, had they wished it; but instead, his open use of oldthink suggests that he is merely a cynic, and a genuine oldthinker. Remember that the greatest fanatics are the Inner Party members.

It kind of begs the question whether, in this case, it was necessary to have "the heretic here at our mercy", in the words of O Brien. What possible kind of re-education could Syme have needed? Apart from the obvious training in doublethink, it seems more likely to me that Syme, not in fact being guilty of an incorrect thought, would simply have been shot, no questions asked.

Could it be, however, that a clear understanding of the true principles of Ingsoc does itself constitute crimethink - when voiced by a member of the Outer Party? If this knowledge spread, then discontent and rebellion could follow throughout the Outer Party, leaving O Brien and his mates (of whom there are few) could be overthrown. The Party is a hierarchy, designed to freeze history with one group permanently in control - the Inner Party. Syme is not of the Inner Party, although one might question why such an intelligent character is not. It might be that Syme is not quite cynical enough, though his language does suggest it.

Most likely, the understanding of Ingsoc is crimethink when not tagged on to doublethink. Without that the danger of falling into contempt for BB is great. O Brien, being a fanatic, is in no danger at all: his doublethink strategies are excellent. Even here, though, O Brien is as clear as possible to Winston: "The object of power is power." O Brien seems to be able to face and discuss the evil at the heart of Ingsoc, and recognise it as evil, and know that he wants evil. Syme does not recognise that you need to hold this knowledge of evil and also to know it as good at the same time, in order to be truly goodthinkful. His words leave too much open to interpretation, too much that could make a Party member wonder or worry...

On the other hand, we know that Syme frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and that he was too open in his conversations. It is possible that in fact, despite his instinctive goodthinking, he knew he was in danger and killed himself (as Winston knows that many disappearances are suicides).

In the main, however, the disappearance of Syme provides Winston (and the reader) with proof of the evil of Ingsoc; they even murder their own faithful. There were always excuses for the purges of the Soviets - that they needed to secure the revolution - but if you murder your own, you do that in a display of power only. I wonder in fact if it was meant to be another part of the game O Brien was playing with Winston: that Syme's death was nothing to do with Syme, or little to do with him, and everything to do with the thought-criminal, Winston? Clearly when he first speaks to Winston he mentions it deliberately, even teasingly.

The Inner Party like playing games with humanity. That is what they mean by pure power, which is their sole motivation. The games are fun, exciting, rewarding, like hunting. But instead of just killing, first you turn the quarry into whatever you want it to be.

Syme is not really a quarry: more of a diversion. He stands for the wholly contingent nature of humanity and life under Ingsoc. He doesn't even get to stay on the chess team.

While we are on this subject, we could read Parsons as a sort of obverse of Syme. His devotion to Ingsoc is clear, his energies are directed solely towards it. He is a stereotype (more properly a comic stereotype) of the stupid fat man, whereas Syme is thin, weedly, and wiry. Parsons, unlike Syme, who is vaguely solitary (although he does hang around with slightly undesirable elements) has a traditional family. Syme disappears while Parsons is seen in the cellars of the Ministry of Love, before a rapid despatch to Room 101. Parsons will presumably either be re-arrested later, or his strength and stupidity will be put to use in a labour camp. The problem for Parsons is that he has clearly spent his entire sublimating his hatred for Ingsoc into love of it. His rebellion runs deeper than Winston’s because it manifests itself when his conscious mind is not available. Indeed, one could speculate that Parsons has shut down his conscious mind to be rid of it – this of course would be an extreme example of crimestop. “It’s just a matter of reality control,” says Syme. Parsons will probably be rapidly re-arrested and executed, because his story is more fun than Winston’s. Winston was never really a Party man, while if someone as clearly devoted as Parsons could be a thought criminal, well....The Inner Party would love that, and the Outer Party would be terrified. Parsons is also the way that Orwell demonstrates the control of the family: his children are ideologically aggressive, suspicious and most of all, love only the Party. Mrs Parsons is a sort of standing satire – as it does not seem right to Winston to call her “comrade” because she is the last old style “wife and mother” – a type that would be more recognisable to Orwell’s intended audience than to us.

But that is by the by. Syme and Parsons are opposites and complements, in their intelligences and apparent devotion to Ingsoc. Typically enough, Syme’s crimethink is suggested, or implied, by a subtlety of depiction that matches his fluidity of mind (his discussion of the project in Oldspeak terms – see The Disappearance of Syme), while Parson’s crime is the cry of the idiot who does not know how to articulate his feelings: in his sleep, he simply shouts “Down with Big Brother”. Incidentally, one would have thought that Mrs Parsons would have noticed this....Can’t be long before she is arrested too.

Winston sees Ampleforth arrested, Syme disappearing, Parsons arrested: with Julia, that means that almost everyone he has a conversation with during Parts One and Two is arrested (except Mrs Parsons). The thought occurs: are these people really arrested for their own thoughtcrimes, or are they all, like Syme, meant as amusing ways of making Winston even more afraid of the power and ruthlessness of the Party?

After Room 101

2009-06-04T11:37:00.000+01:00

Winston, purified, is supposedly filled with "ourselves" - meaning the desires and wishes of the Inner Party. He drinks, he gets up late, he hangs out in Chestnut Tree Cafe, he has a sinecure. He meets Julia and their meeting is awkward, punctuated by a lack of emotion, and precisely the inner hardness and separation that O Brien wanted and that Winston sought to escape from before the moment he first wrote in his diary.

In fact it is not quite the same, for Winston is now no longer aware of that isolation. He drinks heavily and he plays chess, and he worries about the news. His anxious thoughts are gone, but whether O Brien's confident statement that never again would Winston be capable of "ordinary human feeling" is correct is debateable. Take the drinking. He drinks heavily, freely, just like Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, and countless others while waiting to be re-arrested and executed. But why the drink? If you were full of the Party following Room 101 there would be no need. Is Winston trying to hide something from himself - disgust? anxiety? Julia? Is he completely capable of those thoughts but merely repressing them? That is not quite what the Party wanted, of course. But the prevalence of “synthetic gin” in Oceanic society suggests that this is another area, like prostitution, where the Party knows that is ideology cannot sustain itself in purity for long – because humanity has not been crushed, not been stamped on, only repressed, and will survive. Sex is necessary, alcohol essential to hide the experiences, to fill the emptiness of the Party (and it is, “fear, rage triumph and self abasement”) an emptiness, just like it is in real life.

O Brien highlighted "fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement." He mentioned love of Big Brother and loyalty to the Party - but "everything else we shall destroy - everything."

From the final lines of the book, which contrast with an earlier segment, before he was arrested, Winston, in the bliss of the news of military triumph, imagines the "longed for bullet entering his brain" - he delights in this vision, this fantasy of his own death, "his soul white as snow".

With his tears of love for BB and his joy at the news, together with his conquest of the "false memory" that comes to him there of a happy moment of his childhood, Winston has been hollowed out. O Brien has his wish, and Winston finally belongs to the Party.

And so he wants to die: because the Party want him to die, because they have engineered him to desire death at the point of his "perfection" - which is now, the very end. It is a reaction to his self-discoveries here: there is no self. Only the internalised Party and that, as intimated here and throughout the book, is a kind of living death. But O Brien does not look or sound dead, you might argue. No, but then he is a power-mad loony (c Private Eye), and so his type, as we have seen for the last million odd years, flourish in societies which destroy normal human beings.

Incidentally, the final point of the novel is made: the love of the Party is death. The theme of the novel has been "thoughtcrime is death" - as a totalitarian warning; but now we learn that it is this evil and hollow Party that is death. It is a re-statement of the vital values of civilisation and freedom. As readers we knew this already, as Winston used to know - but the point is made with the self-sacrifice of the hero, who gives up, finally, any hero status he had, even in the physical act of survival (which was intended and controlled by the Party of course) - and is scooped out, once and for all.

There is nothing left to do except fulfil the dream, which, we must imagine, would take place at any point of the Party's choosing following this moment.

Humph

2009-06-04T11:35:00.001+01:00

As no-one bought my Thoughtcrimes on 1984 book off of Lulu I've taken it off and I'll publish the original stuff here!

So here's a possible timeline for the novel.

1944 – Winston Smith born (probably). At this point the timeline has run more or less exactly the way ours has. Imperialism, the growth of socialist theory in the nineteenth century, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi seizure of power, World War II and later the atomic bomb on the two Japanese cities.

1945 – End of World War II. Winston remembers several years of peace in his childhood, because the atomic raid on Colchester came as a surprise. This (presumably) is a non-Marshall Plan Europe with heavy Soviet influence across the continent. It could be assumed that this period was hungry and tense until around 1950, when a few years of plenty set in: the ones Winston remembers as a child. Lemons were probably available in shops by then, for example.

1954 -55 Atomic Wars are fought between Europe, USA and USSR. Many major cities are devastated. This war Orwell clearly envisions as being fought with weapons of around 20kilotons – Hiroshima size. Small enough to leave some infrastructure intact, but large enough to devastate societies. These wars lead directly to Civil Wars, between the establishment (ie in the case of Britain the liberal democracy) and radical parties inspired by either the Nazis or the Bolsheviks or both (which is clearly the case with the Party). During the course of the Civil Wars, starvation becomes routine, the mess left over from the wars is not really dealt with, and the different sides begin the process of exterminating enemies (Winston’s memory of the ever present sound of machine gun fire). The wars lead politically to radicalisation (already far enough advanced to cause an atomic war), and perhaps psychologically to a deepening of the “hardening of outlook that set in around 1930” – as the desperation of survival would have been so much more intense after the radioactive aftermath of an atomic war. This could even be true physiologically: damaged psyches and minds could be the progenitors of true Party philosophy more than the ideology of the Nazis or Bolsheviks. The rearrangement into pan-continental power blocs begins to happen during the recovery period (ie probably almost as soon as the last bomb is dropped). It might be this struggle and psychological damage that causes O’Brien, probably in his early twenties at the time of the atomic wars, to carry the old, worn look that Winston notices so keenly. By the end of the wars, strong, radical parties of left and right are the only serious political movements. The Party is the strongest of these. It is probably an offshoot of a powerful pre-atomic war Communist Party.

1955-57 – The Civil Wars and the struggle for supremacy within the emergent Party and between different radical elements. The Party almost certainly possesses a strong paramilitary group as well as fearsome orators. Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford are leading lights in the struggle and eventual takeover. Rutherford’s cartoons inflame popular opinion. During periods of stability there are furious speeches and propaganda from the Party (and, one assumes, other radical parties – hence the “unintelligible proclamations...and gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour”). Starvation intensifies as no real recovery efforts are made. During this period the “confused street fighting in London itself” Winston remembers would probably have taken place. The Party takes sporadic control and begins eliminating opposition. Winston’s mother disappears, along with his sister, in 1954 or 1955. The latest possible date is 1956. His father had disappeared sometime earlier. Winston is removed to a “Reclamation Centre” – orphanages which grew up because of the Civil Wars).

1958-60 – The period of the Revolution. The Party defeats its enemies and takes control, though inconsistently at first and fighting continues. The Party then strengthens in control and eliminates the remnants of its enemies, begins purging itself and the population. Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford reach the peak of their power.

1958-59 – The Party already rewriting history, claiming in school textbooks to have invented the helicopter (by 1968-69 this has extended to the aeroplane). Winston is at school. Julia is born in either 1957 or 1958.

1958-59 (Assuming the dates in The Book are correct) - The Pan Continental Wars begin, to continue without interruption until 1984.

1960 - First development of Newspeak. The probable first mention of the word “Ingsoc” dates from this time. It could be that either the original radicals become secure enough to pursue their project more openly, or that idealists within the Party have been ousted by more cynical elements (ie in an analogue to the Left’s traditional view of the Russian Revolution). Most likely, Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford have simply tightened their grip and become extremely keen on power as a result.

1960-63 – First mention of totemic leader Big Brother.

1963 – Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford photographed at a “Party function in New York”. This date is significant because the three later confess to being on Eurasian soil at this time.

1965 – The second wave of Purges, led by the ideological associates of O’Brien. Last of the original Party leaders purged. Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford arrested. This is probably the time meant by The Book, when it says “...after the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle and Low”. Namely, the defeat of the original, probably more idealistic leaders (idealistic in the O’Brien sense of not wishing to admit to their true motives- and hence the successors of the Bolsheviks and Nazis).

1966-67 – Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford re-appear. Winston sees the three in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Rutherford’s cartoons still appear in The Times.

1968 – Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford are re-arrested and executed, the Party is now controlled by the same elite in perpetuity. Progress towards 2050 (total adoption of Newspeak and elimination of the past as an immutable object) commences in earnest.

1972-73 – Winston’s brief marriage to Katharine.

1973 – Winston holds the photo of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford.

1977 – Winston dreams of a man saying “we shall meet in the place where there is no darkness”: the beginning of O Brien’s games with Winston, which he does not realise until he is arrested. Winston must therefore have already been identified as a thought-criminal.

1981 – Winston visits the Proletarian prostitute.

April 1984 – Everything kicks off.

Summer 1984 – Winston released.

March 1985 – Winston and Julia meet for the last time.

Ideas

2009-05-30T10:14:00.002+01:00

What do you do with these?

I mean on a single, individual level. When you have an idea, what is the best thing to do with it?

Generally speaking, through years of hard experience, I'd say wait. Greater damage has been done to people, relationships, poems, novels, games of cricket, politics and indeed the entire world, by ideas that someone somewhere thinks are just amazing but is not prepared to stop and think about than anything else.

The same applies to sentences. If I'd stopped and really thought about that last but one sentence, rather than blurting it out while half looking out of the window at the really nice trees on this side of the Chilterns, I'd have reworded it and punctuated it properly.

The guys and gals who invented fire. Or discovered it. I bet they looked at it for a bit, scratched their heads and then used it in small, controllable ways. I'm prepared to bet that they did not, as soon as they could manipulate a flame, go and burn down all the forests.

On the other hand, MPs, given wadges of public money, did indeed take wheelbarrows full of it to the bank as soon as they possibly could. If only they'd stopped to think whether it was a good idea to toss themselves off on publicly funded porn.

Alas, they did not.

Also, it was not really all that long between the discovery of the neutron and the destruction of Hiroshima. Einstein did try to persuade Roosevelt to think about it, and look what happened. Mind you, lots of other people were thinking about it too.

But they just couldn't wait.

Now. It's a fair bet that many people, enraged by our government's unique mix of corruption, incompetence and authoritarianism spiced with just a little sexual libertinism, might be tempted not to vote Labour next week. You know, out of knee jerk rage or opportunism or whatever the buzz word is this week among Labour lickspittle lobby hacks who still have their tongues up Gordon Brown's increasingly sweaty arse.

But if they waited -

No, fuck it. Don't waste any time rethinking this idea, you'll only paralyse yourself by realising that they're all a bunch of bastards. So vote non-Labour (and non-BNP). Hey, good idea, eh?

But generally speaking, if you have any other ideas, like riding your bike without a shirt on, do think it through first, eh? Wobbly guts look best inside T shirts or better still inside shirts, jumpers and coats, which is where I keep mine. Not that I'm accusing Britain of being a nation of lardbuckets like myself, or anything.

PIF42 - Love

2009-05-25T22:05:00.004+01:00

Now, love.

Try to find someone who will love you.

You can survive a long time without love, but you will find that you become weaker the longer you go without it. Love is more essential to life than hate.

The time has now come to make everything ready for someone who will love you. This does not mean that hate is bound to come, but there is a risk of this, and we must all be prepared for it.

Keep your mind clear. Store unwanted thoughts in dark corners of the mind, where they will not disturb you.

Keep your heart open. Try to exercise it regularly and do not expose it to pain.

How much love is enough? Well, each person should have at least one other person they depend on.

You may not be able to love the right person. In this case you should examine your feelings carefully and try to ration all feelings so that they will last out.

And don't forget your sense of sympathy - or humour.

The internet will tell you what to do, when to do it, and how. Read the blogs and keep reading the blogs.

If however, you have had hate in your heart for more than five days, you should take it outside and bury it in a trench, and mark the spot of the burial.

Sorrow, Shame and Regret

2009-05-25T21:37:00.002+01:00

Frequently I've heard the argument that the point of blogging is, ultimately, about giving the one who feels powerless and unloved the ability to reach across the world and pretend, for a moment, that people actually care. After all, there must be a reason why bloggers commit their thoughts to the public space instead of a sealed diary.

In other words, blogging is for sad people.

I don't agree. I think there are political and philosophical bloggers who blog because they really do have something to say: they say it and people learn by reading it.

In my case, I blog when I feel like it, because I feel like it. Over at the other place I write more rationally and keep it sensible. Here I give free rein to things I would never write in a diary. Not because no-one would read it, but because if I know I am writing for myself only, I cannot write. I feel pretentious and sententious and my style goes to pot (stop laughing at the back there).

I can only put finger to keyboard if I think there is point: setting down thoughts does not count as point, since they exist in my head anyway and aren't going anywhere. So I need the sense that it will be read, if only by a robot, to make me write. And I need to write or I go mad.

So tonight I want to set down a few thoughts. Everything I am now suffering I deserve: I asked for it all, I made it all happen, I suffer through my freely chosen actions. I live in a cloud of sadness. I do regret things, even blogposts I could take down if I wanted but won't.

Not all of it is my fault, to be fair. But everything I feel I feel because I created it all. And there I was worrying I wasn't creative enough. Actually I am very creative. I take a good, strong, working body, a brain with enough energy to hold down two good jobs - and exceed all targets there - and to do an A Level in maths, a soul that tangles itself every day with the (non) existence of God and purpose, a heart that holds a woman, another one, and a third, all in love; this is a working personality.

Yet - it doesn't work. It just doesn't work, never has.

But here I come to set down exactly what I feel, and why I feel it, and why you should care, and nothing comes but lines of deleted text. I was all ready to write masses of self-justifying whining, paragraphs of explanations, pleas into the endless silence to reclaim what I have lost; and nothing comes. I cannot say it, despite the promise of an audience and despite the wish to lay down my sadnesses. With everything I have I want to write it all, and make it permanent, and give it to someone else. Somehow this will take it outside of me, or broadcast it to the right ears.

But they are turned away, and rightly so. And the world has its own problems. This is why some writers encode these things in "semi-autobiographical" novels, or those awful poems about the narrator, who is always the same as the poet.

Others stay silent, as they should, and as the world demands.

And the sadness dies with them, and is gone.

No Love Lost

2009-05-15T20:42:00.003+01:00

My silence, as well as being caused by the wretched busy-ness, has been a symptom of a wider dis-ease: not the anti-slumming on expenses that has suddenly brought democracy down to where it belongs, but something far more mundane.

The absence of love.

Indeed, just as my philosophy is that of an agnostic physicist circa 1907, so my understanding of love was that of a middle aged man with unspoken Christian tendencies in an Iris Murdoch novel. In other words, I believed, truly, that love was real and that you loved someone and they loved you and there was noone else and you'd fight things together as they attacked you (both).

I now realise that this is not true. In fact everyone wants sex, not love. Given that I was as faithful as they came (or, more to the point, didn't come); I am now shocked to hear the women I have been with since the end of the only relationship of my life tell me that kissing is just something you do; that you snog anyone, even if they're in a relationship, if you want to; that sex is just sort of a power game that you give and take from.

In fact, all of this makes sense, but I am kind of sorry to hear it and to know it. When I went on a date a while ago, and snogged my date passionately, I thought it was because we had a real connection, and were clearly soulmates (ho ho) - in fact it was because that's what you do - it's an indication of a date, a signal of an attempt to create a more than friendly relationship, but not sign that that relationship exists. In other words, the beautiful deep kissing that characterised my relationship, and that I thought showed I was starting a new one, is in fact a non-verbal way of saying hello, and nothing else.

Why am I making this fuss about kissing: well, you don't often see it in porn (or so I am told) and in my relationship you only did it to show love, lots of love, and you held each other and you felt soft and liquid and it didn't quite mean sex but might lead to it, or it might not, and it meant you were realigning your selves.

Since I started again I have realised that in fact no-one is ever faithful: that no-one cares and that no-one actually believes in any of that bullshit about soulmates. The women I've been with and the men I've spoken to all know the true score - that you find Mr or Ms Now, and you fuck them, then you move on, or you don't and you die alone. Either way, generally speaking, you die alone.

But no-one is under any illusion about faith, or faithfulness. Neither of these things exist, but are passionately held to in ignorance, in nightmares, in sleepy silences, in the careless looks. They stalk our sexy world, our freedom to fuck. Always there is the idea of who it is you want, who it is you believe in, who it is you live for, but hiding behind it is the one you want to fuck, and he or she is always there, in your mind and eye, always your eye, the one who will make you so hot, the one to satisfy you. And from time to time you will kid yourself that this somehow ties in with love (where in fact it creates it); you will use it to leave a relationship or start one. Your orgasms will justify the fact that you have no-one to sit and be silent with.

Nor will you ever have, ever again. Not if you live to be ninety will you find that person who will sit with you in silence and occasionally stroke your arm, while you both look at the sunset, or sit and read. But you will find the people who will fuck you, there will be lots of those. And so you will conflate the two, and then you are lost, lost in the traffic. The traffic and its endless lost libidos, its casting eyes, the traffic and its car-pooling.

Love is the one who will clean you; love is the one who loves you for what you have achieved and what you might achieve; love is the one who clings to you when they are at their deepest hell; love is the one you feel across the clouds, and you sense her settling down, you hear her prayers and wishes and you can't quite distinguish between them; love is the shared beating you both take one late summer's day.

Love is the thing you have for a bit; but only for a bit. Then they get bored, and the cock is better or the pussy is wetter. There is always bigger cock and wetter pussy. There are always bigger tits. There are always more rippling muscles.

And so eventually we kill our delicate tapestries of feeling because feeling is nothing beside sheer physical necessity, and even less beside sheer physical necessity amplified and falsified by cynical media. But we live by cynical media, who want us to want to die rich, so we buy all the lies because they're what we want to hear. Porn is a cultural religion, with its ultra clean lines, its plastic perfect bodies and its meaningless noises, some kind of quasi spiritual vocalisations that are lies, and that everyone knows are lies, but that make us want to be part of it: all in all, quite the profane version of the mass, as practised now, at the end of time, just another end of time.

All the cock.

All the pussy.

All the tits.

All the power.

Nothing. Nothing. No feeling, no love, no world, no time. just noise. Noise.

No love lost.

Alternative History Cycle

2009-04-23T20:14:00.003+01:00

Well I see that Jack Jones has died. Despite disagreeing with pretty much everything the old man believed, including that mass non-democratic organisations (which could compel an individual to join and which had no method of secret ballot) had the right to bring down democratically elected governments, he was one of the last of the ascetic leftists who used to dominate, generally for ill but for a kind of good-natured ill, the politics of this country. Let us be clear: Jack Jones was not for fat bastard MPs luxuriously feathering their own second nests with taxpayer funded porn; nor was he in favour of giving entry to government to people who had simply supported it: no, for better and largely worse, he was a leader of working people and led them according to his principles. We may have forgotten these: but in essence the word "principles" means " a set of deeply held beliefs", and Jack Jones worked with this bizarre concept, sometimes to the enrichment of his followers, sometimes to their disadvantage, but always with a view of what was right, even when it was wrong. At no stage did Jack Jones say "oh fuck it I'll just take what I can fucking get" like everyone in public life does now. Well yes he did "meet" representatives of the USSR, but what can you do? - The whole left was so utterly compromised by its half-hearted understanding of democracy that he was about as good as the bastards came (and continue to come today).

Anyway.

What if things had been different: if Jack Jones and his ilk had prevented, at the point of another anti-democratic strike, the proto-monetarist government (yes I know he supported it) of 1976-9 taking effect? What if we had slipped into outright socialism in 1976? Say at a flashpoint in the IMF thing..like, ooh, I dunno, November 1976? Around the 17th?

And from that date had the government stuck two fingers up to the IMF and embraced collective bargaining type socialism?

Come 1981, say, does anyone really think the country would have been at ease with itself? That the riots of 1981 would have never happened?

What, I wonder, would have been the case in, say, November 1981? Who would have rioted and why? Who would have got on and put their heads down?

What would have been the State of the Nation?

The Delusions of NuLab

2009-04-18T19:08:00.003+01:00

Yes, while everyone is now starting to see the bunch of bullying creeps for what they have always been, thanks to Guido and a timely mea culpa by Alice Miles in the Times a couple of days ago, Harriet Harman is still insisting that black is white (as she does with the Equalities Bill, which, in order apparently to combat discrimination, enshrines it in law).

Here are a couple of choice quotes in a small article on Yahoo News:

She continued: "Whatever anyone else does, we will not fight in the gutter. No-one in the Labour Party wants to see us involved in personal attacks. The Prime Minister has made it clear that this has no place in politics.

Um, yeeessssss. Sooooo, it's the "anyone else" who's been making up nasty stories about the opposition for the last few years is it? The "anyone else" who's been bullying lobby hacks all this time? And as for the PM making it clear....HE'S THE WORST BULLY OF ALL!!!

For fuck's sake man. Woman. This is ludicrous. It bears absolutely no resemblance to reality whatsoever. It's either a delusion or a lie. PArt of the problem with NuLab over the years is that they do not see the difference.

"So we will have nothing to do with smearing the Tories. But we will take them on, on their polices - past, present and future. The way to win is to fight on our values and principles."

Let's just get this straight Ms Harman, shall we. You WERE smearing them, you just got caught. Finally, you got exposed for everything you bastards have been doing for a decade or more - not just to Tories but to innocent members of the public (anyone remember the "racist" Rose Addis?) and even members of your own bloody party. For crying out loud, I know that certain religions have a mystical idea that the one thing evil cannot face is itself but this is ridiculous.

And this is saying nothing about the "values" of a govt which still thinks it was right to arrest an opposition MP for doing his job.

A Meditation on Snogging (II)

2009-04-14T22:10:00.000+01:00

That was even nicer!!!!

Love And Pride

2009-04-13T20:28:00.004+01:00

I now have very little of either: adult life seems to be a gradual stripping of pretensions. I see, in the light of the monitor, the creases in my skin, the folds of my ageing hands, the scars of accidental and deliberate wounds taking me back from the late nineties to the early eighties. The early eighties. John Nathan-Turner (dec'd) once wrote that he wanted to take Doctor Who "into the Eighties" and what he did was to cut the humour, cut the vagueness, cut Douglas Adams' Oxbridge surreal humour, bring in sharp and bright design, synthesised music, stories that made little or no sense but sounded cool or seemed cool on a first 25 minute week by week (no video initially) viewing, and a lead actor whose ridiculous vulnerability in no way fitted a trans-dimensional superhero.

JN-T got the 80s. He got them quick: The Leisure Hive Part One went out on 30 August 1980. It still looks pretty good today, apart from the Foamasi. I think if JN-T's Who had unlimited money, it would have been the definitive artistic expression of the British 1980s. JN-T got it, he saw it, he just never had the cash. Hence after The Caves of Androzani and drastically after Revelation of the Daleks, that vision was curtailed and abandoned. Oddly enough, just as the 80s began to generate money Doctor Who collapsed in an orgy of violence (Lytton's hands....), and nothing was ever the same again, instead becoming a fusion of outdated hippiness and slavering irony. But, there, in 1980, JN-T got it.

JN-T even got the dark turn of the 80s in 1984. Colin Baker was even cast and designed as an anti-Doctor, with his ghastly, evil costume and his character, which would weep over a dead sparrow but walk over a dead man (as JN-T put it at the time or in similar words). Season 22 was a fine cultural expression of Britain in the mid-80s: nasty, cynical, sexist and violent. Resurrection of the Daleks is the turning point here. But JN-T had seen it coming in 1982, with Eric Saward's script for Warhead - following that there was the turn of the sharp-edged coin - the children's show with the crushed hands, the suffocation, the cannibalism, the stabbing, the eating of the dead, the casual acid-bath murders, the drunk on his way to kill a man using the dying to make Daleks ("You forget, I am a doctor, when they torture me I'll know the name and function of every organ that pops out"), the presentation of violence-for-entertainment, the endless killing, killing, killing. Season 22 knows that dying is an art, like everything else: it does it exceptionally well.

And it did it at 1720 or 1745 on a Saturday: hardly adult viewing time. I remember Revelation of the Daleks Part One. I remember - the one and only time of my childhood - hiding behind the sofa. After Jim'll Fix It: mutated bodies, human protein, a vile boss of a funeral parlour, a lame and awful woman trying to impress this callous and selfish bastard. And a cynical businesswoman, a failed warrior, and bodies all over the place.

All good, family viewing.

It's not good and it's not funny. It's Doctor Who and it's 1985.

Also on tv in 1985: EastEnders, Threads (rpt), The A-Team.

The A-Team.

The A-Team.

I see the A-Team.

OMG! HOLS KICKIN OFF

2009-04-10T21:33:00.003+01:00

Woooow! I was like, at this big like placee - Jeeesus, do I have to do this? yeah, so shut the fuck up - , and some dude was like in red and he was kickin it like good, man he was the dude, he like held up this big bit of wood -oh my god I want to die - and then he _OMG_ kissed it!!!! Hey man what kind of porn wos tat? Funneee! Yeah man I was like wot? But then - er, I mean ven - he like did other stuff too - 2- like give owt - is this right? - bits ov bred. Peepl -that's fine - they like took ve brd and like ET it - fucking hell is it hometime yet? No fucking get on with it you slackwitted twat - and then it was like, all quit - you mean QUIET you idiot, no he's rite, quit is good, oh fuck I really really want to die - and then we like went home.....

cross posted from my Facebook page, but with unaccountable interventions from the Facebook staff.

Home

2009-04-10T21:12:00.001+01:00

...is where the heart no longer is, only the body.

Fortunately, the heart is only a small part of the body.

Scrape Away

2009-04-10T21:04:00.001+01:00

Oh, you need to get away

Oh, you need a change of pace.....

c Paul Weller, 1980

Family Guy is Really Unfunny When They Do That Whole "Liberal Politics Are Great" Thing

2009-04-10T12:27:00.001+01:00

Yeah...uh..that's it,really.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T09:55:00.003+01:00

For once Ive taken Lent seriously - I think, for various reasons, I've needed to this year - and have nearly completed my chosen observance. It's not been easy but it's not been the hardest thing to do either. This year Lent has helped me to examine myself and my behaviour in more depth than before, but whether it has helped me actually move on, or just bog myself down in introspection I can't be entirely sure. Trying to rid myself of strong feelings that are no help - a sort of compacted, curled up mixture of love and anger - has been a constant thread of these last six weeks, and hasn't really been successful, if I'm honest. But I've appreciated the dedicated time to focus on it. Lent isn't a wonderful time of year, to be sure, but it is a kind of ritual, a reminder, like other seasons, feasts and holidays, that there is a kind of narrative structure to life, and that we can grow as people by taking part in it. Ritual generally is a difficult thing to get hold of: I tend to think we have sublimated it into routine, especially the routine of work, because doing things within a pre-ordained structure does, sometimes, give us a kind of extra freedom to act. Routines give us location and stability and sometimes then the confidence to strike out on something, whether it be a project or a decision. Rituals act in a similar way. The other thing the two have in common is that to some extent they are shared experiences. Sharing a setting like this can also help with the stability and confidence you need to act.

Peace is a strange thing and I often think I run a mile from it. Last night I went to church for Holy Thursday and waited around at the end to watch the Host in the tabernacle - in imitation of the disciples waiting for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. The total silence was seductive, and I sat there for a while, trying to loosen the chunks of irrelevance and pained introspection that naturally clog my mind up in such moments. It worked, I sat there in a kind of meditative quiet, but then the rubbish came floating to the surface again, and unwilling to make the effort to continue, I left.

As an aside a recent article by Simon Barnes in the Times pointed out that sporting achievement - for anyone, regardless of ability - where you push yourself hard, and do what you never thought you could - was the closest we come in the West to a form of meditation, in that it involved emptying out thought and anxiety and focusing in entirely on the one thing, existence, whose possibilities you are exploring. I found his argument entertaining but again not relevant to me. Exercise - running for 4 or so miles say - is a constant lecture in pain by my suffering, lazy body. I watch the distance all the time, focus on mentally whinging about minor aches and irritations and eventually stop, sometimes having pushed myself to my goal, sometimes not. I can see the potential for meditative time in this, but it doesn't work for me.

SO here we are at Good Friday, the commemoration of Jesus' death, his fear of death, his submission, his faith, the curious modernity of Pilate, the waiting. Not my favourite day by any means (can't bear the fasting) but one whose rhythms and rituals make me think again about the meaning of faith and the possibility of sacrifice. Not that I want to think about it, or even think that I could ever sacrifice anything for another person...but then, that's the point, I suppose.

Red Dwarfs

2009-04-09T22:21:00.002+01:00

Real ones, I mean. These guys are very cool. They are 85% or so of the galaxy, but we can't see any with the naked eye, meaning that the sky we see is exceptional, not normal. They are between about 0.6 of the solar mass and something almost infinitesimal (but not quite - then you get brown dwarfs).

They burn, slowly and steadily, with surface temps of around 3000K and some of them, the smallest, presumably, with estimated lifespans of 6 trillion or so years. They just burn and burn and burn. They're not great candidates for inhabited planets because some of them seem to be a bit flary at times and a planet would need to be very close indeed to be "in the zone" for life.

These stars do not disturb the universe but are among its commonest objects; they make no waves, cause no black holes, but just plod on and on, in their little corners of space, doing their thing. For years and years and years. And we can't even see them as we look up at the night sky.

The forgotten men of the universe, quietly fiery, in every corner that is too small for us to see.

A Dead God Will Fall Out of the Telephone

2009-04-08T22:03:00.003+01:00

Why I hate telephones:

1) Bad news always comes via the phone.
2) The infernal feline attention grabbing ringing of the damned device.
3) The eternal possibility of a call in the middle of the night, bringing, inevitably, fatal or near fatal news. This has now happened to me 4 times I think.
4) The truly horrible, insistent, witch-on-crack like ringing itself.
5) Whoever it is, wants you now.
6) When really I'd rather speak to them at another time.
7) The disembodied voice at the other end is just that, a voice.
8) Phones make my bowels move.
9) Most phone conversations are ghastly, one dimensional affairs.
10) Since I last had friends, it now seems that people surf the web, check their texts, take other calls and generally do loads of stuff while they are supposedly chatting to you. What the fuck is this? Are you such a fuckwit you can't talk to another human being for 2 minutes without checking your fucking mobile? Jesus.

The title of this post is taken from a poem by Ted Hughes.

TD's Amazing Lifestyle

2009-04-08T16:37:00.002+01:00

I've just had a conversation.

On the telephone.

Beat that!

The Value of My Blogging

2009-04-08T15:52:00.001+01:00

$329 apparently.

Hardly seems worth it.

Gym Update No N.

2009-04-08T10:00:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd update the world on my progress. Here is my entire gym experience, summed up in one word:

Ouch.

Matt's Blogging Issues

2009-04-07T09:20:00.003+01:00

Well it seems that not for the first time Matt M has given up blogging. I've said repeatedly how much I rate his attitude and talent, so I won't dwell on that. But it made me wonder how I have stuck it out, with considerably less to say than Matt, for nearly three years. Here are a couple of ways I've managed it.

1)I couldn't give a rat's arse about it. I think this is important. I blog when I want to, don't when I don't. I don't care about stats, though it is lovely to have comments. Actually check that. I care about the comments, less so about the actual posting.

2) I say what I like. Actually this isn't true. One way I can stick it more easily than before is by staying out of the violent disputes which rage across the blogosphere. You wouldn't believe how much hate there is there: not just for politicians and those in power, but among those who just plain disagree. Real hate. So I tend to write nowadays about other stuff, though I allow myself a rant or two occasionally.

3) I blog when drunk. This is great fun. I feel sorry for anyone who has to read it, of course, but I like it.

4)I leave it fallow for weeks at a time. This hopefully gives me more ideas when I come to write later on. It also means I can't build a proper following but I don't mind too much.

I guess this isn't much use to Matt. But I hope whatever he does he gets back into blogging or serious writing soonish, because the shrillest voices are beginning to clog up the place now....

La Puissance C'est Tout

2009-04-04T22:18:00.003+01:00

As our civilisation collapses, with the inevitability of a 2+ solar mass star-type into its 1974 degeneracy limit, so we have idiot-savants queuing up to display their ability to take us fools into the abyss. Of course, they've been doing it for a while now but as they look more and more likely to lose their jobs in the reactive and productive recession, like a high mass giant puffing off its useless and pointless additional mass: they see their livelihoods dying and are trying to hold on for dear life - or in our case, dear death.

For, dear reader, let us not stint in our critique of leaders, managers and those "with responsibility". Let us not be fooled by the biting, savage crocodile tears, when their awesome burdens cause them to fire everyone else for their own errors: let us not be tricked by their aura of sadness, when it is their desire, fundamentally to tell other people to follow their own ideas that is to blame. These parasites, these viruses, which feed off the ability of others to work, the fundamental goodness and trustfulness of others; they slime their way into the consciousness and infect a healthy mind with their own neuroses. Do this, do that, believe me, follow me, I am right, you are fired. I felt nothing until I got the pleasure of giving orders. This is why in my private life I keep dogs. They live and they obey. They obey.

Let us not pretend we need these people: they led the C20 into unmitigated, unprecedented disaster. Let us, instead, cast them off, humiliate them, refuse - if necessary lose our jobs - let us stand up and say "fuck off": let us go, and walk away, and find some other poor pathetic animal to make them feel better.

Let us believe nothing of their credentials. This week, those with credentials killed four people for no reason. Those with credentials, entirely made up bits of paper which say nothing about life at all, kill and maim through their own selfishness. I talk not of real people like doctors, but of made up professionals, whose vocation has existed since the dawn of time and has worked roughly the same since then.

Someone waves their paper at you - wipe your arse with it. It doesn't matter how long it took them to earn it, or how much wasted energy it took. Wipe your fetid, sweaty arse on it. And smell your finger.

Why are we a nation of managerial parasites? Why do we all aim for it? Why do we, apart from paying the bills, because there are thousands of ways of doing this, want it? Why do we want to tell other people what to do for a living?

Really, why?

ps 1974 degeneracy pressure reached at the point where inflation exceeds growth by n%, where n= productivity over debt.

Lonely Heart Ad

2009-04-04T22:05:00.002+01:00

You Are: Six feet tall, six five in heels, with breasts that are each larger than my head: you have tattoos on your crotch, lower back and left breast. The tattoo on your crotch says "Sex" or it might say "fuck". You have no hair on your body at all except your head and eyelids. You have an IQ of 220 and passed A Level maths at the age of 10. You have degrees in literature, philosophy, maths and physics. You are professor of maths at Cambridge but in your spare time you are Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

I am: 5 nowt, bald, with a gut that would shame Buddha. I have an IQ of a shade over 0, a microscopic knob, and I last precisely one push in bed. Any more than that and I come instantly. I make a weird "heurgh" noise when I come. I don't have a job. Instead I blog as "the fat cunt" and I sneer at passers-by when I know full well they look at me piteously.

Are you the one?

Tin Drummer's Breakfast, by David Peace

2009-04-04T09:50:00.002+01:00

I am delighted to announce this guest post by David Peace, who has rendered my breakfast this morning in his own inimitable style. Enjoy!

Hunger. The constant rumble rumble of my empty stomach. Empty. Fucking empty. Always fucking empty. I walk downstairs hearing the birds outside. They sing. Sing for others, not for me. Not for Tin bloody Drummer. Because that's who I am. Who I always am. Tin Drummer.

Tin Drummer.

I cut the bread. Slice. The knife catches the light. I stuff the bread into the toaster and put the kettle on. It is the most warmth I will receive today.

Today they will laugh and jeer at me, when I arrive at the gym. Spiteful, hateful place. They hate me for what I am. Tin Drummer. Fat bastard, they will say. Fat bastard, their looks will say.

The kettle boils. Steam. Mist. Obscuring the day before me. I pour the boiling water into my mug. Boil, Tin. Boil. Boil.

Boil.

I spread the butter on the hot toast. Flatten it. It fades away. Fading. Always fading. My butter. Tin Drummer's butter.

I eat the toast. Hot. Burning, burning, burning.

But I don't care. I never care about hot toast.

Because I am Tin.

Tin Drummer.

He's Fucking Codding, is Clough

2009-04-02T13:27:00.002+01:00

On re-reading The Damned Utd, before going to see the film.

I think the novel is a brave attempt to write as someone else. Someone who was, in a way, public property for a long time, partly out of choice. So one of the difficulties for the author is that people already think they know this character. The temptation for the writer must then be to try and uncover new things about the man: but he is recently dead, and so emotions and relationships are raw, and unbiased evidence thin on the ground. How do you get round this? You let the man himself speak - copy interviews and columns - and you invent a personality. In this case you have an author whose speciality is State of the Nation type stuff. So your invented personality contains elements of what you understand to be the contemporary culture, and what you believe to be key elements of the time. In this case: despair, anger, and collapse generally. These become, in the case of Brian Clough, the dominant elements of the characterisation in the novel.

However I don't think David Peace is deliberately casting Clough in a bad light, or defaming him, as far as that is possible: I think he is trying to pinpoint the essence of a man through his time, and through his greatest failure. In a way, how we deal with failure is key to how we develop as people. By showing the range of emotions at this time from despair to a kind of false hope, to a thirst for vengeance, the author is simply drawing a kind of human life. It doesn't mean that he hates Clough, or thinks he was overrated, or whatever: but that drawing a crisis in someone's life is a more valuable exercise in creating or re-creating their character.

It's a good book, at times falling a little flat - the segments on the death of Clough's mother are brief and you don't get a deep sense of how this impacted him - and sometimes veering into pretension (the repetition. It repeats. Again and again it repeats. Over and Over. Over), but is an excellent imaginative novel and also a great contribution to cultural history. Read it.

Me

2009-03-26T09:31:00.002Z

~A story written in about 10 minutes, from a title given in Creative writing club yesterday~

I was sitting in my chair reading, and waiting for my wife to return home. I was expecting the usual slamming of the front door, the exaggerated sigh, the unmistakeable odour of victimhood and the air of frustrated anger that usually came my way at this time of the evening. I was prepared to respond as I habitually did: with a mixture of the nod and the quiet acquiescence of the freshly made cup of tea.

So when the door slammed, I thought nothing of it; but when something vivid and white flashed past me and flung itself down on the sofa opposite I looked up in surprise. A white shirt? Her?

There was a youth sitting opposite me, stereotypically tousle-haired, his white shirt open at the collar and two vivid sideburns that looked like a sharper version of seventies powercut-and-inflation facial hair.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked, unable to get up but feeling stuck between the arms of my chair.

"Oh shut up, grandad," he replied, before looking around him and saying "I've always wanted to say that."

"What the bloody hell are you-"

"Oh for crying out loud, shut up and listen. Why on earth are you sitting here, on a beautiful evening like this, reading Harry Potter again? Why the bloody hell aren't you actually doing something?"

I was at a loss. I was reading Harry Potter, that much was true, but I hadn't really looked outside for hours. And what business was it of this interloper's?

"Jesus man, look at the state of you. Fat, bald, and - I don't believe it - are you still wearing that shirt?"

"There's nothing wrong with my shirt." It was my favourite shirt. I had had it for years. In fact, I sat my finals exams in it. I remembered the constant sense of panic and the persistent feeling that I had simply failed: not just in my degree, but in something deeper, in everything.

"Yes there is, it looks dreadful. It looks about twenty years old."

"Twenty one actually." I could not understand why I wasn't calling the police, but I also could not understand why I was allowing myself to be drawn into a battle of wits with someone much more agile and intelligent than me. Probably.

He laughed and he began to fiddle with his long hair. He looked around for a moment, seeming to take in the room.

"Not much in here is there? Where are the pictures? The family? The home-ness of home?"

"We went for the minimalist look."

"Oh yes. Where is your wife?"

"I'm not sure. She went out hours ago. Shopping probably."

"Well, if she did, she went with the guy from No.27."

"What?"

"Come on. Don't tell me you didn't know: the lifts to work, the silences, the confidence - she's sleeping with the tall, slim man from No 27 who still has all his own hair." I cannot say that I was really shocked: I saw now that I had been thinking this for months, but hadn't wanted to admit it. But I was curious as to how this youth knew, and why he cared. But he had moved on.

"Do you remember your first kiss?" I did. It was kept, safely, in the corner of my life, surrounded by glorious skies, a permanent force field of anxiety, and the background of exams. I had been sixteen, and she had been beautiful and the most intelligent girl in the school. The enforced wait had made the first contact so special and so full of...of...me, me and her, that it had simply stayed here all that time. "And what happened then?" Not much, was the honest answer. Come our GCSE results, two months later, I had done poorly, she had excelled, and in a fit of the spiteful childishness I later made my speciality, ignored her and the relationship was over. He looked sympathetically at me. "They say your first love is the most special, the one you keep returning to."

"I don't think so. I don't feel any shade of love, and it's too long ago now for regrets. I feel....shame, I suppose. Shame and beauty. Funny combination, that."

The youth looked thoughtful for a moment. "So this is what it all comes to, then," he said. "Reading children's books in an empty room, with an empty heart, and not even enough hair to tweak like you always used to do; no calling, no ambition, no faith."

"I suppose so."

"It's a bit of a waste of time, really. I might as well just-" he leaned into his pocket to pull out what looked like a small bottle of tablets.

"What does it have to do with you?" was my bizarrely inappropriate question, since by now I knew perfectly well what it had to do with him.

"Well, why should i work, and strive, and do as I am told all the time, if you're just going to sit here....rotting away?"

I had a sudden thought. I stood up, feeling stronger than I had done for ages. "Look, I've got an idea." His right eyebrow raised itself. "That's it. Don't sacrifice her. Look after her. You're right for each other - you can change things. You can, you can make it different. Make it all different. Just by that first love affair. Change everything."

He laughed and shook his head. "No, old man. I'm not doing anything different. I haven't done anything wrong. It's you who needs to change. You who needs to undo the evil you've caused. I'm just a kid. Why should I try to undo your cocked up life?"

"Because you're the one with the power, the energy. You can do it."

The youth stood up slowly, sighing. "I was afraid of this," he said. "You really are finished, aren't you. You've absolutely nothing to give anymore. Something has gone very, badly wrong and your entire life is being scrunched up and thrown in the bin."

With that, he ran his hands through his luxuriant hair and slowly walked out of the room.

Tin Drummer is Minor League Genius, Major League Twat*

2009-03-14T23:23:00.004Z

Well here are the scores at 12 March 2009:

Maths A Level Module Pure Core 1: 3% - 97%: TD

Maths A Level Module Statistics 1: 14% - 86%: TD

Well I guess I have outwitted the maths A Level papers by massive margins and I am currently (by 1.5%) on course for an A* in the full A Level.

To my mind this is *extremely* cool and I am well chuffed.

If this makes me an extremist then so be it.

*One has to make any genuine boast appear ironic, doesn't one, or one will seem to be, er, unseemly. After all, this is Britain. Britain.

Leftism is Criminal

2009-03-14T23:07:00.004Z

Despite reading Atlas Shrugged three times, I'd managed to miss the money shot, but luckily DK picks up on it for me:

The only power any government has says Dr Ferris is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.

And you know, the willingness of the left to resort to lawfare, to codes of practice that employees can neither amend nor negotiate, to principles of equality and diversity that magically entail restrictions of freedom of speech and thought, to antidemocratically enforcing their worldview through state-funded charities and NGOs and QUANGOs; their desire to have dissent criminalised, or as we see in California, their willingess physically to intimidate opponents when lawfare fails(and to publish their names in newspapers - the left are _very_ keen that others are held accountable to them for their differing opinions), and as we see in the "respectable" intellectual press, their willingness to deny the crimes of leftism (and you don't have to be an extremist to deny the Holodomor or the import of the gulags, or the forty five year slavery of Eastern Europe, or the thirty million victims of Mao - who, disgustingly, appears in the game Civilisation: Revolution for the XBox - or the Soviet Union's pivotal role in starting WWII, not that you'd think it) justifies this very long sentence.

And rightly so.

For there are worse things in life than a long sentence.

Such an evil, power grabbing weltanshaung that attempts to work from an ideology of victimhood. Which restricts your freedoms because of made up complaints from groups in the pay of the authorities. Which just fucking goes on and on passing laws that are designed, in each and every case, to make an individual's life a little bit harder.

Stay Calm

2009-02-27T20:49:00.003Z

A wise admonishment from the man who coined the phrase "the Righteous" to describe those who call themselves liberals, and who demand control over thought, language and action: read it, think and act appropriately here.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw thinks that this government has done more for civil liberties than any other (and presumably did not read Kerry McCarthy MP saying that she is very suspicious of this whole "liberty thing" or somesuch idiot words - which can also, I'm sorry to say, be sometimes read at Harry's Place).

For all that self-styled liberals think that individual liberties are just so,like mid C20, and that progressive politics just, you know, demands a certain sacrifice for the good of socierty; for all that they hate people who don't agree: there is a battle being fought, and we, the lovers of individual liberty, are losing. We are losing in the streets, in the homes, and in the workplace, where left-wing politics are being encoded into contracts, and supported by government lackeys and fake charities (see any recent case of a non-atheist being suspended/fired/disciplined for daring to live by their non-atheism, as is their right). Individual liberty is, it seems,a lost cause. As Leg Iron points out: they want a "fucking riot" in order to cut off democracy at the root: and their subordinates in the police, ACPO and LGA are already preparing the ground. They want us to riot and this time there will be no Scarman Report: just the savage repression they have been waiting for.

Don't do it.

WRITE letters to The Daily Telegraph;

SEND emails to the BBC cricket live-text;

MUTTER in the bus-queue;

BE IRONIC when you praise the Labour Party at work;

SLAP the steering wheel when the Today Programme is on;

LAUGH SARDONICALLY when atheists tell you how stupid religion is and how civilised atheism is and by the way disabled people or unwanted babies should not exist because that is better than you know, being a pain in anyone's arse;

SAY when you are asked about your sexuality when you buy a house, that it is "normal" (and CHEER when you are then taken to the cells);

RESPOND when your employer tells you that you CANNOT opt out of a GOVERNMENT MANDATED SURVEY of your private life, but do it in a bit of a bad mood;

SNIFF A BIT when someone tells you that Mrs Thatcher was evil;

UM AND ERR when someone tells you that de-industrialisation happened SOLELY between 1979 and 1997.

FAIL TO LOOK CHEERFUL when Gordon Brown comes on the TV.

LOOK A BIT SHIFTY when someone tells you that we all need to either die, or live in caves, to save the planet. But say nothing. Or you'll be a Nazi*.

SNORT when some public sector snout in the trough DEMANDS your money for their pension ON PAIN OF A PRISON SENTENCE**, while you know perfectly well you'll get fuck all when you retire. But, again, say nothing.

I think that should do it.

COMRADES: Buy THE DAILY TELEGRAPH now! And we will go forward in revolution.

* This is a REALLY BAD THING and it means that your views are seriously at variance with a socialist's. As a general rule, if you think people are a good thing, you're not ashamed of your existence, you don't think the world is about to end, you move from A to B sometimes (but, crucially, in doing so,ARE NOT spreading the word about imminent destruction of everything), you don't agree that hatred consists of merely disagreeing with someone, you want as many people as possible to say whatever they want whenever they want -

well -

then, you are a Nazi.

So be careful.

Stay Calm.

** Yes, yes ok I am a public sector snout in the trough. But at least I'm not a hypocrite. Much.

I Am The Master, And You Will Obey Me

2009-02-20T22:31:00.002Z

I have grown a rather cool goatee, it even frightens my dad, and bus drivers just sort of let me on, and BMW drivers overtake me with a bit more decorum than they used to, librarians don't fine me, barmen don't hesitate to serve me, blokes in hoodies don't actually eyeball me and I can cross the road _without even looking_...

so I have spent the entire evening looking at, eyeballing the mirror...

but sadly it has had no effect, and the mirror still does not obey me.

Searching for a Strong Leader

2009-02-17T21:57:00.004Z

There's a strange and frightening fantasy gaining currency in the West.

In fact, it has been doing it these twenty years of economic expansion: we have called it "management skills" or "leadership skills" and our companies (many of them now shown to be crooks, or swindlers, or simply twats) have wanted only those with "leadership skills". They have, consistently, wanted people whose desire it is to control the thoughts, work and output of others.

To build profit, of course.

Now, I have no problem with profit. Profit is good. Profit works.

But we know now that these "leaders" were scamming us all while they hired and fired, while they wrote big thick books on how to be team players (there's no I in team), while they set up the human resources departments full of discipliners, counsellors, facilitators and time and motion tossers.

We also know that many of these people were simply given a job with which to indulge their passion for fucking up the lives of others; for holding them to made-up government standards; for refusing to see the evidence of their own eyes - for, you see, the evidence of one's own eyes is as nothing compared to a government tick list of targets.

In Alastair MacIntyre's book, "After Virtue", the philosopher sets out how managerialism strikes: firstly some guy who knows his job invents a tick list to make it easier. Then someone else takes over and uses the tick list a bit more than the first guy. Then someone realises that the tick list is comprehensive and makes the next guy learn the tick list first. Then has the tick list become the first and key part of the job, and it drives the people who come in, over and above the knowledge of their area. Expertise is then driven by knowledge of the list, and people are brought in to maintain the list.

I have no idea if this holds.

But my experience of people suggests it isn't far off the mark.

I think there are a lot of people - a lot - for whom being in charge, and control, is desperately important. I think these people pretend they do it for "the good of the company" or to pay the bills, but in fact there are lots of ways to pay the bills. There is however only one way to control people, and that is to control people.

So they do it. And they hide behind codes of conduct, contracts, best practice, inspections, assessments, reviews: at the end of it all they want to tell other people what to do and they do it.

So here we are in a serious recession and there are bloggers and columnists calling for strong leadership.

We have had twenty years of embedding exactly this concept into the professions. Everyone in the professional castes now believes in the virtues of strong leadership (many management teams have switched from the word "management" to the word "leadership"); no-one really knows the way out of this recession, but we all seem to be clamouring for someone who does.

In the last global fiscal depression management theory had made its first major strides, based in part on the shovelling-human-beings-into-the-bin strategies of WWI. People had become targets and target-fulfillers.

This is stage two. People have been target-oriented now for longer than they recall. They have been, knowingly and willingly, not even cogs, but teeth on the cogs.

Now we are desperate for the Leader. We all look to leaders, we all ache to be a leader, so it makes sense that we are mad keen for the Leader to take us out of all this.

(In the meantime we will fire and destroy whoever is below us, to preserve our productivity and our action-oriented status, and we will pretend it is for the company - a sort of working towards the Fuhrer technique, where evil is driven as much from below as from above).

The Leader. Who Are They? Where Are They?

Please Save Us, Leader. We Look To You. We Love You.

Well, here is TTD's message to The Leader, whoever she may be:

Fuck off.

Fuck off and die.

Believe you me, it is for the best.

Fuck leaders: satirise, expose, humiliate them wherever they occur. Destroy, fire, suspend them wherever you can. It is leaders who will take us down. Take away their pretensions, their jargon, strip them of their powers, force them to admit what it is they really want: hold leaders to account, before and above their followers, and subject them to the same torture their followers suffer. Fire them on a whim, cut their hours, cut their shifts, send them down the job centre. Don't let them whine about their hours, about their stresses and strains, about their heartbreaking responsbilities - they wanted it, they loved it when times were good and they were out of the limelight. Let them do it, let them go down. Fuck them.

Only people, real people with good ideas motivated by love of their ideas, will help us. Let us build a world where ideas, concepts, work is valued above the people who organise, manage and sift those things. Where thinking is good, in and of itself, not where it needs to tick x number of the right boxes.

People who wish to control will fuck everything.

Yet again.

Fuck the Leaders.

No Longer Knowing What is Truth

2009-02-17T21:37:00.002Z

Pontius Pilate, in one Gospel account, famously accosted Jesus with the question, "Truth? What is that?" or "What is Truth?"

Oddly enough, the gospel in question doesn't record the answer.

In a vivid instant, the New Testament captures our own anxieties, two thousand years later. What IS truth? But note how the question is framed - not "what is the truth?" but more like "I do not understand what you mean by this word 'truth'. Please explain."

Although, how you translate John 18:38 makes a big difference here.

Still - the essence of Pilate's question is clearly not "what is the substance of this allegation?" but "what the **** are you ****ing talking about?"

Pilate - a twat for our own age.

And what was he talking about? Jesus' claim to be "witness to the truth" (John 18:37). Tellingly, from whatever perspective you take it, Jesus does not respond to Pilate's piss-take. Verbally, at least.

So. What is truth?

Who knows. Maybe - the revealed truths of mathematics, which underpin the sciences. Yes, perhaps mathematics is truth. 2+2 = 4 generally obtains, except in Nineteen Eighty Four (but then my little book shows that the structure of the novel proves that 2 + 2 = 4 after all).

And for us? For us young apes? What is truth for us? The cultural certainties of an authoritarian age?

When we lie, so much and so often and so skilfully? When we make livings out of lies? When we pretend to ourselves unto death that we did not know the truth?

Who knows.

Truth? What is that?

Good Luck to Matt

2009-02-16T23:03:00.001Z

With the new blog

but, assuming I could remember how many "a"s it has, in the wake of atheists routinely denouncing their opponents as "mad", and given that they seem to support any bullying authority over any individual who doesn't share their worldview, I think I will give the debate a miss.

If Matt can get Alex back to work then that would be worth joining, of course.

How Do You Martians Say "I Love You"?

2009-02-16T21:48:00.002Z

Crikey O Reilly this is hard work.

Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.

Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.

Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).

Trying to make serious contact with women?

*ahem*

Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).

For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.

They do it to us too.

When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.

And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.

No.

In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.

We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.

Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.

We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.

We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.

And in the end we die.

We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.

No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.

I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.

It does exist. It's not a game.

We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.

Gone.

We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.

How true

2009-02-16T09:50:00.004Z

Indeed.

This story on the other hand, has to be a total fabrication, utterly without foundation.

It is ridiculous to suggest that we are governed by anything other than upright, honest, well-intentioned persons.

I mean, this is Britain.

Britain.

England in Not Out Shock

2009-02-15T17:19:00.002Z

Well, England are STILL BATTING after over ONE FULL SESSION in today's test match.

I'm just flabbergasted, utterly, utterly shocked.

Not So Dreadful Valentine's Day

2009-02-15T00:23:00.002Z

In fact, here are the latest figures from the TD exit poll:

No of girlfriends: 0

No of Valentine's Cards: 2

Relationships suddenly in the offing: 2

Excellent effort, that.

Thoughtcrimes Published

2009-02-14T16:36:00.003Z

At last I finished my little project: to revise and extend my thoughts on Nineteen Eighty Four and publish it on lulu. Well it's done. It's not long, only 17500 words and it's fairly accessible by my standards (ie I think some of it makes sense). It only costs £2.00 also. That's a fat 11p profit for me on each copy I think.

I slipped in some b&w photos of the drummer heimat too. But I was a bit vague about proofing or reviewing it.

Going Out With My Girl

2009-02-14T13:12:00.003Z

Well, it's Valentine's Day today so tonight I shall be seeing Stella, my lovely girlfriend. She is rather cold at times, but gives me a warm glow - I don't know how she does it, but she gets inside me. She doesn't mean it always but she plays with my mind - you know, makes me feel things about myself that aren't true. Boy do I love being with her - she gives me such ideas. I hold her, cradle her, and we communicate so much through lips - lips are the source of our relationship. Lips and tongue, of course.

Stella likes to be taken, repeatedly. She lets me have her four or five times a night. I struggle to keep up, to be honest and at the end of it I always feel dizzy, dozy, and sometimes a little sad - as if I've spent myself on this love that actually always makes me feel bad the next day.

Well, we're meeting up tonight - in our usual place: the bar. And I will be searching for love in her golden depths. As I do most nights. We might do dinner, but I think she loses her charm if food is involved - just a few bags of crisps - that'll do. And I'll take her home. With her stuck inside my head, to my utter, delighted, bafflement.

You Who Know All The Arn-sers

2009-02-12T21:40:00.004Z

Well, goodbye Mrs S:

You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -

You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.

Goodbye Mrs S.

You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.

Goodbye Mrs S.

You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.

You really did have all the answers, for a while.

If life is subtraction, you are the difference.

And the difference is?

A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.

Goodbye Mrs S.

These Are The Things I Could Do Without (Part N)

2009-02-12T21:17:00.003Z

1. Deception
2. Hate
3. Self-delusion
4. Self-pity
5. Persecution complex
6. Martyrdom complex
7. Thinking that a fucking middle ranking management job is harder than being the fucking prime minister.
8. Love of stress.
9. Love of power.
10. Ambition.
11. Busy-ness.
12. Love of, and belief in, authority.
13. Doing What The Government Tells You.
14. Not having the originality, intelligence or courage to do your own thing.
15. Manipulation.
16. Lies.
17. Shallowness, where feelings are related only to self.
18. Inadequate use of language, where your deceptions are leaked through your own utter incapability with language.
19. Lack of concern.
20. Exclusion.
21. Ridiculous projection.
22. Pathetic fallacy.
23. Thinking That People You Don't Know Don't Deserve To Lose Their Jobs, While People You Sacked Did.
24. Management/Worker.
25. Lying: specifically, about your non-existent love of literature and religion.
26. Saying And Doing Whatever You Like, Whenever You Like, But Being Mortally Offended When Someone Else Does The Same.
27. Teasing.
28. Bullying.
29. Emotional Manipulation Of The Crudest Kind.
30. Hypocrisy.
31. Denying the people who love you space in your life.
32. Lying: specifically, about things you never went to, because they did not exist, and sounding so hard done by when lying about those things.
33. Pretending you want a family.
34. Refusing to make a shred of effort for someone you "love".
35. Making up rubbish about "soulmates", then ditching it when you've got work to do.
36. Thinking that when your dog dies, so does your soulmate.
37. Slagging off your "soulmate" for retreating into the hole you've kicked them into.
38. Telling someone you're not slamming the phone down on them, then doing it.
39. Crying and shouting insults over the phone.
40. Slagging someone off, then walking out on them when they open their mouth.
41. Ignoring the one you "love"'s birthday. Again.
42. Telling them you'd rather be listening to shit rock somewhere in the arse of England than being with them on New Year's Eve.
43. Sleeping with someone else.
44. Probably.
45. Because you lie, and lie, and lie again.
46. Being fucking horrible and then never mentioning it again.
47. Refusing to touch, only talk: then refusing to talk, only touch.
48. Cutting down talk whenever and wherever you like.
49. Taking obvious love, and its action, and its proof, and ignoring and forgetting it whenever you feel a bit hard done by due to something completely different.
50. Being embittered, ugly, full of regret, and with the kind of blotchy and bloated face that knows it has only limited years in which to spread its hate-filled bile and its barely concealed self-hate, not to mention its certainty of its own inadequacy; though its knob is a good size, its potency is not, and its entire character is a pile of stinking fucking dog crap.

No 50 is clearly a remark by TTD directed at himself.

For the avoidance of doubt.

TD Rants about Education

2009-02-08T12:36:00.003Z

Over at t'other place. Not quite sure it makes sense, but then I was a bit pissed when I wrote it. I think the main thrust - a bizarre emphasis on a wholly unnatural and often inappropriate concept of understanding in mathematics teaching - holds, mind.

Disguises Wore Thin, With Less And Less Skin

2009-02-07T21:22:00.002Z

How,exactly, do you earn change: do you earn growth, and development, and decline, and death?

You earn it by survival. Before that, it is a tragedy, or an excuse for someone to say you oughtn't to live anyway. After that, the same. When you are weakest, beginning or end, there are plenty of people who want you to die, and who want to make smoke out of your body. In the meantime, while you are strong, it would be a tragedy (in the _truest_ sense, of course), a waste, shocking, terrible, how awful for his lovely girlfriend, etc. But when you are bad, or wrong, and survived birht by the merest thread, and you shit your pants, and you cannot think, and no-one knows what happens inside your head; then, you should die, because you offend them, their notion of dignity, their notion of life; then you must die. No, don't look at me, don't survive, don't take my taxes: die, die, die.

Compassionate people do so love death.

After all, it's cruel to disabled people to suffer them to live, isn't it?

Cricket Is Back!

2009-02-07T20:08:00.002Z

I cannot think of a better New Dawn for cricket than for West Indies to fuck England by an innings (their first victory v England since Edgbaston 2000, also by an innings). To listen to Tony Cozier and Sir Vivian Richards purring on TMS was just plain beautiful. England deserved to go down like they did. Bad cricket. WI played fantastic cricket. It was a delight to hear their fast bowlers steaming in and their spinner just gradually tormenting England out. And I am as narrow minded a nationalist as you could wish to avoid.

West Indies are back. Cricket is back.

England - Britain- the UK- call it what you will - is fucked. Royally. And truly.

Bring it on.

If we could have lost to anyone,anyone, I would have wanted it to be WI: cricket has been so weak without them, their passion, their skill, their love of the game, untainted (until now) by the pursuit of $$$; WI play cricket - have done since Ramadin and Valentine - to fuck their opponents and today they did.

Here's to WI fucking so many more teams.

Fuck 'em guys, in the spirit of Sir Vivian Richards, Joel Garner, the late Malcolm Marshall, in the spirit of Brian Lara, in the spirt of the great Gloucestershire and WI servant Courtney Walsh, and all those great players who played through the seemingly endless decline.

The decline has ended: England's has begun. And it is wholly deserved.

And if anyone thinks I am being a patronising colonialist, well they can fuck right off because 4-0 would bring cricket to attention in a real way. And we all need WI. And we need England, full of lunches, assumptions and other people's money to wake up and fuck off.

Cricket is my favourite sport.

Love it.

The Baby P Case

2009-02-07T11:38:00.003Z

Amid all the hysteria and tabloid outrage, let us not forget the real victim of this story. There is absolutely no reason why highly paid executives should take responsibility, nor should they be shy of slating opposition politicians, using the language of the government; nor should they regret anything they have done. They are absolutely right to use the state media to point out - correctly - that they have suffered, perhaps more than anyone else.

Please, let us stop victimising those in charge.

Journey in the Dark

2009-02-06T22:33:00.002Z

An exercise in acting...

...which didn't lapse once...

Good heavens, these guys (and gals) were good. I mean really good. Is there a reason why bands like Delta 5 didn't make it big? Was it to preserve their genius? Was it to keep their special gift special? Was it because everyone in the world is a cunt?

Or is it because we men absolutely fucking hate any suggestion of female infidelity (which is not in fact suggested by this track, quite the opposite, but which *is* hinted by the music)? Yeah, damn straight it is. Girls like these were the object of crap songs, not the makers of piercing, modernistic love stories.

Fuck knows, but you know, I'd take Delta 5 over any mass production fucker any day - Elton John (hair transplanted) - fuck right off. Those girls were good. Really, fucking good.

Can you imagine Girls Aloud reinterpreting this? Fuck me, it would be all about how sex wasn't *quite* as good as the singer had hoped. About how his cock wasn't quite as hard as it should have been, and how he refused to fuck her in the back room (her "tutu" not quite to his liking, one imagines).

...one knows nothing, one knows the truth...

and someone *always* knows the truth

Human relationships obtain, despite the media saturation of genital contact, the actual relationships still exist, they are still real. Despite the non-contact of cock and cunt, humans still relate. Love still exists, humans co-exist, they seek each other, in the dark and they don't seek cock, cunt or arse. They seek each other. They seek truth - namely, the other. The other is -1, the self is 1. Together they are 0. It doesn't matter, and it is the supreme human calculation. Together we make 0. We make nothing. We slide into non-existence together.

That's the point.

...four days together....

....it gives another backdrop....

We have spent a decade building backdrops to relationships: glamorous, clean, shaven, plastic, unreal decor of a square room; light, always light, lots of light.

We are the backdrop to our own lives.

Our lives and pornography have merged, in a not-very-felicitous-concert: no difference between the two now: the achievement of sexuality is all we cling to. The achievement of body - ours or the other's - and of touch, the most brutal touch (devoid of time) - even people born at the time of Cuba are stoking their bodies with plastic and oil to make someone else want to possess them and nothing else.

In this late-capitalist world, possession is nine tenths of the law; debt the other tenth.

Grown ups really think that others will love them, for wanting their body for a moment. They really believe that slaking desire will give them life. They really think that in forty years, someone will be there, still addicted to their body, still giving everything for that word, fuck. Fuck, it will be the conversation of the dying in thirty years' time, the last word on our lips - but he wanted to fuck me, I wanted to fuck her, we wanted to fuck. We fucked. And still, while we lie, cadaverous, our bodies eating themselves, still we will say it, and still it will give us that thrill.

No end of fucking. Not now. Not ever.

End of love. Always, under the duvet, always, end of love is there. In the cry, in the thought. It is the stolen object that induces panic in the dream; it is the fence underneath the snow; it is the person who stares at you, inexpressive, silent.

No end of fucking.

Ever.

New Life (depeche mode)

2009-02-06T22:22:00.002Z

...sounds just like my old Speccy.

From 3.14 onwards. Crumbs. It's just as if the pop groups of the 80s looked at the technology of the time and thought, "Well, I guess this is how communication is going to be".

As if they, being clever and nervous, living under the bomb, and being the only generation whose every family member, including themselves (born around the time of Cuba) would have grown up going back two generations under threat of total war and/or utter annihilation, looked at speech and thought and saw it being reduced to binary expression and simple synthesised sounds.

What a ridiculous idea, eh?

Day Off!

2009-02-06T07:28:00.004Z

Isn't it odd how history repeats itself. I'm sure it was two years ago more or less today that we last had a bout of terrible weather. So today my school is closed (the one that does sometimes close, not the other one - you do know I have two jobs?): leaving a tough decision - what to do?

Hmm. I know. I'll just stay here, looking out the window. After all, with global warming, this is going to become more and more rare.

A Meditation on Snogging

2009-02-05T15:54:00.001Z

Mmm, that was nice.

OMG! Snow!

2009-02-05T15:44:00.002Z

This is just so like - wow! I'm like, what? well duuh, there's all this white crap on the ground? And you want me to, like, go to school? Hello? WTF? Do you want me to mess my hair up or something? WTF is this stuff anyway? This is like, so random? One time, I saw something like it on Sex and the City, and I was like, what? But it's like, I can't see anything, and there's all kinds of dudes going like really slow on the roads, all like old dudes driving like no miles an hour, and being really booring. I'm like, WTF? Get a move on grandad? So my mum's like yeah, the 4x4 is cool, and we're like flashing and beeping this dude in a Fiesta, cos he's just like going OMG, OMG, gotta go really slow. But he wasn't cool, cos he like looked at us when we overtook him and told us to "fuck off".

OMG!

Something in the Silence

2009-02-01T13:04:00.002Z

I was thinking about yesterday's post and the need to have something going on in the background - Doctor Who music again at the moment - and why silence is difficult to endure.

Always I've worked to the sound of something - music I vaguely like, Radio 5, whatever. It can't really be drama or classical because that stops me thinking about what I'm doing.

But silence - I find it distracting. I find it slightly sinister: as if the air becomes pregnant with something. Like there is someone trying to say something to you. I always feel uncomfortable with silence. Houses, rooms, don't lend themselves to silence. They should be bustling with life and love. If I am working on something, like some writing, or some maths, I find the silence brings me too close into what I am doing. It makes me get too far away from the anchorage I seem to need. Too far away from ordinary society.

Silence opens up too much space for thought.

Why I Listen To Doctor Who Incidental Music

2009-01-31T09:19:00.002Z

I don't mean Dudley Simpson's orchestral stuff here, nor Murray Gold's modern version, but the synth outpourings of Roger Limb et al in the 80s.

Well, it's like this. A lot of Doctor Who music is well written, vaguely atmospheric and reminds me of being a kid. It is also, unsurprisingly, almost devoid of serious emotional content. Adric's theme, the end of Earthshock - it's alright, but it's no Love Will Tear Us Apart. For me, this is good. It means I can listen to tunes without being battered by the contents of my own mind. Goodness knows why we like to see our pain reflected in our music - what on earth is this for? Is it to express the pain, through tapping and dancing or whatever, or is it to deepen it, and enable us to spend hours in brutal melancholy?

Listening to these synth themes obviates this problem. In fact the best of them are not even the 80s guys but the sheer brilliance of Delia Derbyshire, who seemed to have a feel for electronic sound like no-one else. the 80s stuff is much more conventional, it doesn't really push boundaries like hers does, but it does use synths and samples to tell the story in sound, which I find appealing. Peter Howell's music for The Five Doctors for example is the story, as much as the teleplay or the camerawork is.

The appeal is also nostalgic. I was given a record of Doctor Who music by a friend when I was 10, and I taped it; then later I bought it on CD; now I have it on iTunes (and am listening to it now in fact) - the form has shifted, like my own in these twenty two years, but the tunes still carry the information of those early days, when I could see Leckhampton Hill from my classroom and you could still have a teacher throw a board rubber at your head. In fact, when I listen to this, I am listening to the story of my own life, as I see it, as much as I am to the stories behind the music.

And it is music: sounds, phasing, rhythm, themes - it's just not three minute statements of the bleedin' obvious.

But there's little point overstating the theory or the nostalgia. I listen to it because I like it, because I can get on and do other stuff as well, and because I don't have to listen to some kid spewing out my own romantic problems in the process.

Now there might be another question here - why not just silence?

But that's another story altogether.

Crushed

2009-01-29T09:05:00.000Z

...receives a very unTTD post...

This Is my N - Leafed Clover

2009-01-28T21:53:00.003Z

mathematics...tears before bedtime...vivid dreams in bright primary colours...laughing with my pupils in a conspiracy of friendliness devoid of power relations...reading about the past...having my poetry analysed and criticised..listening to Doctor Who music...examinations...not reading the newspapers...walking a riverbank and watching the evening sky in between the branches...arm in arm with a friend...cutting the booze...new car...reading the most beautiful poetry ever written by ten year olds...ignoring the criteria...growing up together with language...getting lost in Reading...loathing and despising that ghastly mixture of nineteenth century gothic and late twentieth century neo-classical pastiche...talking a book with a stranger...learning from someone whose name you'll never know...solving a problem after giving up on it...being passed over for promotion...being left alone, right alone...finding you are the same as someone else...realising humanity is difference, not similarity...casting off the shackles of ideology...hacking away the people who think your private world is their domain...watching a film of demons and seeing them out of the corner of your eye.

InEquality

2009-01-28T21:35:00.003Z

Root x, x to the half, the number or the value that is multiplied by itself to make x, you take it and you put it over two, then you spring up the two to make half x to the half, then you differentiate and you stick the half in front of the x and slap down the half index so that it is x to the minus half. Alternatively you could wallop one over root x, then you fiddle, or rather you divide, so then you get a sort of quotient which is x to the minus half, and the neat thing about that is that you can easily, as it were, reverse the operation because it leaves no remainder and no doubt: you just reverse what you did to obtain the fraction.

A conveniently ingested portion of excreted material.

Indeed, a fraction is not a statement: it is an action - when you look at a fraction (one number sliced by another) you look at a process. That process can do its stuff and have its stuff undone by its inverse.

I have proofs of all this shit at the other place....

Hole in the Heart

2009-01-28T21:29:00.003Z

...and love falls through it, onto the street, where you see it gleam for a moment but take it for sweet wrapping; you think you see something dipping out of your line of sight but you return to real life (work and desire and ambition and hate)as soon as the thought strikes you, as you should, as only life can continue through - and the feeling is gone, sunk, like everyone else's feelings, into the running sore of the gutter.

And it is over.

John Scott Martin - Exterminated

2009-01-25T12:45:00.002Z

I know it's a bit crass, but he did appear in over 100 episodes of Doctor Who, almost always as a Dalek (I think he was also an extra in The Daemons, at least), and he has died aged 83. He was a real stalwart of old Who, and probably did more than anyone else apart from Peter Hawkins to bring the Daleks alive as characters: although the voices weren't his, the movements were and it was often in the sudden, jerky movements of a Dalek that you glimpsed the irrationality underneath the robot-like exterior - it gave you a hint of the mass of hate inside.

I wonder how many people he exterminated over those 100 odd episodes?

Thanks, John.

The Art of Noise

2009-01-23T20:32:00.003Z

Silence, as they say, is a non-reactive rare earth metal. In which case, noise is a precious though abundant element.

The problem is: where do you go for noise? How do you achieve it?

Well, I suggest that an average primary classroom is a good place to start: in there is all human noise - the hum of work, the mutter of conspiracy, the febrile buzz of unconscious flirtation (and that's just the teacher and assistant), the groans of pain, the sneers of hate.

It's all there, and in any good classroom they mix and mould all together, giving an outsider the impression of some kind of productivity. Whereas, what really exists is a sort of subdued revolution, consisting of all the adult, sub-adult and immature minds in that room, dancing together in felcitious concert.

Look for noise in the scribbling of pencils, in the sharpening of the same, in the bloated silence of the rubber, in the pregnancy of the staring into space, in the glare of the teacher, in the misread glance of enthusiasm from educator to pupil: at every stage the noise.

Even to the warlike roars, chants and screams of the playground. This is where we act all politics, from the tribal disputes to the sophisticated attempts to bring protagonists together (usually without genuine success, thus guaranteeing yet another League of Nations fiasco).

Into the frustrated scraping of chairs and all too rapid scuffling of coats at the end of the day. Noise, meaningful noise, what it means to be a community.

A surviving, thriving community.

New Year, Etc....

2009-01-22T16:00:00.002Z

I wonder if the thing is not so much to renew yourself, through resolutions, or by some arbitrary action to appear to be changing - but to recognise yourself anew. By which I mean, see what it was that had been holding you back, and see what you were before that happened.

Very few of us can look back at ourselves with honesty. For one thing, we genuinely forget what we were like. Through the difficult patch, we come, as through all kinds of memory, to see ourselves as perfect before. This "memory cheats" thing must be some kind of survival device.

You are what you are: you will probably not succeed in changing that significantly, unless something happens to you - shocks you, in some way. But how do you know that what you think you are is what you are? In the muddle, the wave of relationships, the power games they need, the way that they grow around you like your most comfortable clothes, in all this, it is hardly a surprise that you look in the mirror and you don't quite see yourself, but instead see yourself looking a certain way (good or bad) "in that". Your perception is coloured by something that is not, in fact, you.

So what are you, then? How do you recover or recognise what it is that you are and what you can do with it?

I think this is where New Year's Resolutions come in, and the psychology of hope- especially the kind of vicarious hope that we have seen lately. But these are more likely to represent what we want to be, not what we are.

To be honest, I have no idea. I look for the answer in words, in alcohol, in staring at the mirror, even in -yuk- work (which is usually the way of blocking self off altogether): but no answers are forthcoming.

Is it possible, after all, that it is very difficult to know how to recognise yourself? Or is it me?

Confession

2009-01-16T23:04:00.001Z

I've just spent the evening on...FACEBOOK.

Fuck me, I'd rather admit to spending it wanking over porn.

but I wasn't, so I can't.

Never Let Me Down (again)

2009-01-16T21:53:00.002Z

From up here I can see the gutters, the filthy gutters, the ones I am supposed to be looking up from at the stars. But no: I can see the fag ends, the leaf-mulch, the filth of the Thames, the blood of the rodents and the accumulated dirt of the valley floor.

The stars are behind me; though I can't see them I see their faint reflections in the dirt. They are diminished in the passage of light, even in the beauty of soil.

From here I travel through empty boughs and over the hardly moving meadow grass: the wild barley stays brittle in the stillness. There it is, dark, monochrome, given a sort of sub-illumination, unnoticed.

No-one cares about the stars, but the boughs hold tall over the valley, full and broad. They stand, despite the fall of time. They simply hold.

Give me the dirt, the essence of life and the rain, over a fascist, body-worshipping, death-cult sun-regime - any time.

Give me the lush, sinking soil on any day of my life. Let me look, fly, fall, sink and then merge in the full body of the ground.

Then I see the stars.

They are nothing. Literally nothing.

Here, life bleeds into soil and back again. Ideas crawl into the air and are picked up, mainly by people who don't want them.

Matt Smith

2009-01-03T18:06:00.002Z

He's got the face for it...that's for sure. I was worried a young actor might just be cast for eye candy but his face has got real possibilities!

Good luck, Matt, I am insanely jealous.

Live Blogging the New Who Announcement

2009-01-03T17:34:00.003Z

...come on, get on with it....RTD going on and on at the moment...zzzzz....hurry up....

Ah...a flashback sequence....oh I still love Peter Davison as Who...

David Tennant reckons it's the youngest Doctor...hmm...who's that then? Not David Morrissey then! Sadly.

hmmm...running down the Doctors now...zzzz...

OMG this means the new Doctor is going to be younger than me! Holy moley that's how you know you're getting older.

You know I really like Jon Pertwee's Doctor these days. I think he is a brilliant Doctor. I didn't like him as a kid but these days I do like the more sort of aggressive character of the 3rd Doctor. The Doctor as a fully paid up member of the establishment...

OMG the new Doctor is 26!!! Oh no I am getting old now....

Oh....I don't recognise his face....Matt Smith.

Who the hell is he?

Living In The Ice Age

2008-12-29T23:02:00.004Z

Well what the hell is there to this number - 2008?

I'll tell you. Nothing at all. There is nothing to this number at all:-

no blossoming oak, no muddy field full of young leaves, no rippling water sipped by lambs, no tumbling beech, no lime hanging in the breeze, no river scudding on in the long wind, no mallard skipping the current, no robin copping an eyeful on the nearest bare branch.

There is nothing here you'd care to see: no hands slipping out of touch, no missed glances, no desires shaping into the clouds, no love unspoken in stones, no sighs given by thrown twigs or rocks, no resentments that a stranger hasn't supped in his breath as he walks past.

What is there to your year?

There is nothing.

Nothing at all.

Explanation

2008-12-27T21:54:00.004Z

If you didn't get my previous post.

One of those things that haunts the memory.

But if you are too young...this is it:

Or you might know it like this:

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.

Life goes on.

So they say.

Clipper Maid of the Seas

2008-12-27T21:37:00.002Z

Fucking hell.

It is my greatest fear.

And it did actually happen: to 249 people. So many of them found to be scratching the seats or holding hands or holding crucifixes.

I remember the newsflash. Michael Burke: the helpline number: the Christmas tree in the corner of the room.

This is why I hate horror films: they are the worst of what humans actually do to each other - they are not fantasy.

Ghost by Robert Harris

2008-12-27T19:53:00.002Z

The Shorter Version:

I have a real sneaking admiration for Blair, despite everything, but I really, really hate his wife; and I don't think much of the Ham Shanks either.

End of.

Liberty Still Alive

2008-12-04T11:12:00.003Z

A good story from Europe at last, for all those who believe that simply being arrested should not make you a suspect in all future crimes.

Needless to say, however, just as the government refused to add the amendment voted through by the Lords last month to the counter-terrorism bill, they are disappointed that individuals should remain free from suspicion and that citizens should not have their personal details routinely sifted through by police whenever a crime happens anywhere. They don't really intend to change the law.

Well...what can you say? Are you surprised?

Liberty Prorogued

2008-12-03T19:28:00.002Z

Oh well, no revolution. A mildly interesting speech by the speaker, calling to order interventions on his own interventions - for the maths devotees among us, an interesting example of recursion - but other than that, the same old same old: questions, no answers, the governing party and the independent police in curious lockstep.

The idea, among the intellectuals, that the police have the right to uninterrupted action, whereas the democratic representatives of the people don't (if they belong to the opposition, crucially).

And the PM? Presumably, the strongest, most passionate democrat in the land?

He does not give a fuck. Instead he wants more powers for the state to demand things from innocent civilians.

Do not rely on the most intelligent: in times like these, their genius is put to the service of evil, which makes tenth rate minds like mine sit back and say, time after time, when liberty after liberty is killed, and even the right to oppose finally attacked, say "oh, well, I guess...if _they_ say it's reasonable, then it must be: after all, they write independent reports/are the police service of the people/are the local authorities/are the independent authority....". Genius and reason can, and are, used by evil.

That's when the only response is silent rebellion, to live as you wish to live.

And that's when they decide to come for you too: because they realise that when visible rebellion has gone, they need to seek the other sources of rebellion.

I'd give it 25 years.

Then, if I were you, I'd learn Newspeak.

By 2050, at the latest.

Hmmm.

2008-11-29T10:53:00.003Z

As I see it, the story goes like this. The arrest of Damien Green is fine because he possibly broke the law. You don't want MPs above the law now do you? Whatever Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Tony Blair and others did in the 90s, or indeed, whatever Gordon Brown did last weekend, with the PBR, is completely irrelevant.

In short, leaks to or by Labour are part of the democratic process. Leaks by or to the Tories need the full force of the law brought down upon them.

Some sections of the left are not covering themselves with glory over this - it is interesting that the defenders of Green have been people like Tony Benn: ie the looney left. The modern, reasonable left thinks that arresting Conservatives for something Labour does all the time is perfectly alright.

Opposition Still Legal

2008-11-28T21:18:00.002Z

...for the moment.

The NuLab defences:

1) You didn't care about Ponting;

2) If Robin Cook had of been arrested in the 90s, and if you right wingers had of been blogging then, you wouldn't of made a fuss then;

3) The Tories are cunts, so it's ok.

That basically sums up the Left-Stalinist-Centre defences when aksed whether arresting an MP with 9 counter- terrorism officers, holding him for 7 hours and ransacking any property to do with him, on suspicion of er, having helped to leak info in the public interest, you know, like NuLab did all the fucking time in the 90s, with the Supergun and Matrix Churchill stuff among fucking shedloads of others, and have done whenever they liked since then, was appropriate.

New Labour must be destroyed.

We must destroy them.

This is how.

You write sarky and sweary blog posts until May 2010, then you mark any of the boxes on the ballot paper that are not "Labour".

Of course, there will be an election then, and it will not be postponed because of unprecendented national emergency.

Oh - wait, hang on, I am receiving a NuLab transmission from 05/10:

"All these Tory toffs complaining about the election being postponed had nothing to say in 1940, when an election was cancelled due to a wholly fabricated 'national emergency', enabling the Tories to rule for x years [subs: fill in correct number]. They are just hypocrites, who cannot see that the reasons for not having an election have been approved by the independent Electoral Commission. And the Queen. This is a time when we need to pull together, not indulge our differences. And it is no time for whistleblowers...."

I guess I've sort of tuned out.

Normally, fucking the cunts is a good, pleasurable thing.

This time it will be difficult.

NuLab cunts are moist, but tight.

Fuck them. Fucking fuck the fucking fuckers.

Bragadoccio

2008-11-28T20:57:00.003Z

Well (shines cuff with little finger in a sort of half-formed light fist, circa 1949 and then 1989, to indicate self-satisfaction): far be it from me to boast, but each and every time I have been to France I have found their prophylactics inadequate....

I guess I'm unusual.

Heh.

Still - it would be a dull old world if everyone was the same, eh? Heh. Tchoh. I guess it takes all sorts, eh? Cah. What must it be like to - . Heh, but I guess we'd better not - hey! Life's good, isn't it?

I mean, possession of a piece of anatomy of uncontrolled size, is clearly an indication of personality and worth! Obviously! And if that piece of anatomy happens to be the same one used to make babies...well! Who am I to...? Well yes I know that no-one cares about the size of my liver (until it bursts), or my brain (nowt in it anyway), or my lungs - the least said about my spleen the better - hah! - though now you come to mention it, I've been feeling a bit of a bump here recently - have a feel -ow! - do you think - no, I guess I'm being silly. Where was I? Oh yes - the size of my knob is unutterably important. What do you mean, what if a woman has a - well yes I'm straight, what did you think I was? - what if she has, you know, a long...you know...yes, what does that have to do with anything? No of course I haven't thought of it! Does anyone? Well anyway, no I haven't. Is that a problem? Oh, right. Is she? Does she? What, every time? No, I mean, if you're big enough does she feel that - every time? Blimey! Is that really - I mean, are you supposed to feel that when you - you know, if your woman - oh. Oh dear. Am I supposed to feel that? Really? Oh.

Oh.

Well.

Then I guess these prophylactics are ok then. About the right size sort of. After all.

Hey ho.

Anyway, I've heard about this cream. You rub it on, and then, after eight months, maybe, you -

Oh My God, It's Started

2008-11-27T21:53:00.002Z

If I remember rightly, that's what the terrorists say in Superman II when their hydrogen bomb goes shooting down the Eiffel Tower (before it's eventually shoved into space to bust Terence Stamp out of his eternal prison).

Well, something has started tonight. Something the government has been doing for years has apparently caused it, but - what do you know - an opposition MP has been arrested and held by the police.

Made in Britain.

Easton on Teenagers

2008-11-27T17:12:00.002Z

Or rather, Easton on all those awful people who don't like teenagers hanging around telling people to fuck off and shouting with barely repressed rage:

Perhaps the Home Office might like to do a youth survey asking how worried people are about the anti-social problem of adults treating teenagers like vermin.

That's the best he can do - no analysis, no evidence, no attempt to empathise with people, no criticism of youth at all - just a sneer at the adults.

Modern liberal insouciance, with no attempt at impartiality at all - what we expect from the publicly funded broadcaster, of course.

But the problem is this. The behaviour he does not even address is not recorded in crime figures. It doesn't get written down. It just gets listened to and put up with every day of the year by thousands of people. It has happened to me, out here in the bloody back of beyond, several times recently: teenagers who refuse to move, who barge you, who shout at you, swear at you, jump into you - they just don't care and you don't really dare respond.

Behaviour that Easton and his tired, clapped out, in denial ideology just will never recognise. It's a rigorous appeal to the ethics of victimhood against the assumed foamings of middle England (or whatever the "bourgeoisie" are labelled from Islington these days). It's based on the two key words of "perception" and "prejudice" (which are essentials of Easton's argument, in meaning if not actually mentioned).

Key NuLab buzzwords both, applied to the streets, to prevent an immature subset of society recognising the rights of everyone else to live in peace. More than that - worshipping the immaturity and elevating it above the real struggles of life that the swearing and aggression is directed against.

Party Defeated by Mule?

2008-11-13T11:57:00.003Z

I've been thinking this week about re-arranging posts into a short book (an idea I stole from DK). But most of my output is nonsense: drunken, sweary and self-pitying, it says little of permanent interest.

I did think, however, that I could make something of my posts on the subject of the book.

So I've been re-reading them, and particularly one in which I suggest that a Mule would be the only person who might defeat Ingsoc. A Mule whose mental powers were capable of affecting others directly - not just through torture or fear.

The problem would be that such a character would be obvious from early on in their life. The Thought Police would surely see this child who has an effect on the children around him and either harness him, or destroy him, before he is old enough to act against the Party.

He might act a little like the central character in the fascinating Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which would certainly cause him to be hauled in by thinkpol.

But if he didn't, protected by parents or proles; if he grew to maturity keeping his powers secret, and if he were eventually hauled in for something like facecrime - it would be interesting to see his encounters with the Inner Party....

Armistice

2008-11-11T11:11:00.000Z

Well done, Harry.

Keep it going, man. Long as you can, mate.

I'll be thinking of you.

Quelle Surprise

2008-11-11T08:19:00.000Z

Kerry McCarthy, MP, as quoted by LPUK:

I don’t think ‘freedom’ is sacrosanct

This much is obvious. Indeed, the open scepticism shown by this government and its fellow-travellers to the whole notion of freedom (note the scare quotes above) should be a constant source of worry to all of us, until the day when we finally have them removed from office.

After Room 101

2008-11-10T21:33:00.004Z

Winston, purified, is supposedly filled with "ourselves" - meaning the desires and wishes of the Inner Party. He drinks, he gets up late, he hangs out in Chestnut Tree Cafe, he has a sinecure. He meets Julia and their meeting is awkward, punctuated by a lack of emotion, and precisely the inner hardness and separation that O Brien wanted and that Winston sought to escape from before the moment he first wrote in his diary.

In fact it is not quite the same, for Winston is now no longer aware of that isolation. He drinks heavily and he plays chess, and he worries about the news. His anxious thoughts are gone, but whether O Brien's confident statement that never again would Winston be capable of "ordinary human feeling" is correct is debateable. Take the drinking. Is Winston trying to hide something from himself - disgust? anxiety? Julia? Is he completely capable of those thoughts but merely repressing them - not quite what the Party wanted.

O Brien highlighted "fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement." He mentioned love of Big Brother and loyalty to the Party - but "everything else we shall destroy - everything."

From the final lines of the book, which contrast with an earlier segment, before he was arrested, Winston, in the bliss of the news of military triumph, imagines the "longed for bullet entering his brain" - he delights in this vision, this fantasy of his own death, "his soul white as snow".

With his tears of love for BB and his joy at the news, together with his conquest of the "false memory" that comes to him there of a happy moment of his childhood, Winston has been hollowed out. O Brien has his wish, and Winston, finally belongs to the Party.

And so he wants to die: because the Party want him to die, because they have engineered him to desire death at the point of his "perfection" - which is now, the very end. It is a reaction to his self-discoveries here: there is no self. Only the internalised Party.

Incidentally, the final point of the novel is made: the love of the Party is death. The theme of the novel has been "thoughtcrime is death" - as a totalitarian warning; but now we learn that it is this evil and hollow Party that is death. It is a re-statement of the vital values of civilisation and freedom. As readers we knew this already, as Winston used to know - but it is made with the self-sacrifice of the hero, who gives up, finally, any hero status he had, even in the physical act of survival (which was intended by the Party of course) - and is scooped out.

There is nothing left to do except fulfil the dream, which, we must imagine, would take place at any point of the Party's choosing following this moment.