Like A Train Passing In The Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that I'm bitter or anything..

Sexcrime

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


Or, at the very worst, goodsex?


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

The Friendless Desert

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

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

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

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



"The Pharos Project!"





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

And I am a capitalist.

Imagine that.

Another Day, Another NuLab Ideologue Speaks

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

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

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

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

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

What would it have to gain?

Next You'll Be Telling Me It's 1990

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

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


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

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

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

Er....

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

So things do change after all.


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

A Seventeen Point Six Percent Swing

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

Anyway.

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


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


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

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


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



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

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

Football, Bloody Hell

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

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

The Echoes of Your Footsteps on the Stairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the people who desire change desire power.

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

When you have had enough of thoughtcrime, that is.




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

Love in a Void

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

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

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

Crimespeak: A Times Editorial

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


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



Editorial writed by Magnus Linklater.


with thanks to Inner Party Observer.

Poor Nyssa

Oh well at least she had some nice music.

Good Question

Is there a proper answer?

For The Love of Big Brother

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

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

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

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

Coool.

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

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

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


Fucking magic.

You've Just Joined the Human Race

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

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


Oh well.

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

Life without booze? Fuck me.

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

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


*Are yuz caalin me a fuckin vorgin?**

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

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

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

I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own

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

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

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

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

Fever breathe your love on me.

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

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

The Movement of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Girls They Love to See You Shoot

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

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


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


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

Exercise kills.

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

TTD: An Apology

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

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

Which is this. I am a tub of lard.

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

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

On Pseudonymity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there.

Carving Chunks Out of Your Psyche

I've just realised it.

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


1978.

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


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

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

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

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


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


And the picture?

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

In Loving Memory of a Name

...forgotten, not lost....


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

Frightening Television

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

Can anyone help me with this?

I'm So Macho

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

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

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

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

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

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


Oh well.

Nineteen Eighty Four is Bullshit

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

so Orwell was completely wrong! Again!


What a wanker.

It's 1995 Again...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Bollocks

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

er...

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

Blimey

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

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

This Is My...Four Leafed Clover

Aha! I found the way to carry on nicking post titles off of Tears for Fears!


Well anyway, I was going to call it "Change pt 94" because I _didn't_ change cricket club and that was a terrible idea because I had 10 seven year olds running around in the mud loving the mess more than the batting. I was far more tempted by, er, other entertainments. What I mean is this. I had been at another teacher's house last night (we'll call him Mr C) and I drank all his beers. I mean all of them, except the ones he drank, and his partner. She knocked back a couple too. I decided to buy Mr C a load more and so I stored them in the staffroom but then I was gasping, utterly desperate for a drink at 4.30 so I...left them alone.

You see...stories don't need progression or endings. Though they do need problems. Without problems they are blogs. Or diaries.

You also need the confessional element. Even the most amazing political blogs are rarely without the personal element. In fact, these are sometimes informed more by the author's loathings and generalisations of his opponents than by his actual views. It is merely a miracle when he finds a Department of Bullshit graph to support his argument on bottom habits or whatever. I mean "merely" in its original sense of "solely" of course. A blog without an author whose ego is the size of six pints of Stella made into a wobbly tower is no blog at all. It is a history book, and a poor one at that. It is also tiresomely obvious when he presents the latest "report" or statement or just lie from whichever party he hates the least to support views he has held since he was 8 and so he can say "Ah, but the research shows..."

God how I loathe that clause.

And I capitalise "god" because it is the start of the sentence. Otherwise I'd join all the radicals who can't be arsed. "god", hey wow this like fucking magic. What about "mr (or even mrs) smith" - wooooow, how cool is that. Get in.

Bloody hell how I hate the way everyone wants to rule the world (c - you know who). Why does everyone want to be in charge? Want their views to be enforced at the point of a prison cell? Why do they want everyone who doesn't agree to be officially labelled "cunt"? Why are we such damned intolerant fuckwits? And the worst of it it's our brightest and best who are the most fanatical, who cleave to ideologies with the most desperation, seeking out all and any references to support them and using Google like a pistol to demolish anyone who disagrees? Why is it down to tenth rate minds like mine to say "actually I don't know...there might be something to be said...well...maybe...erm...er..."? And hence prevent the bitterness of revolution and the spread of the gibbet, which seems to be onrushing at the same speed as firsts from crap universities in marxist subjects?

And before anyone emails me with bucket loads of quotes from this very blog showing my own intolerance...where did I except myself, apart from the bit about the tenth rate minds? All I mean is that, yes, I am a cunt, but that in real life,when I really think, and really want to be sensible, I think like the quotation above.

So does writing make fanatics of us all. The diffusion of printed material and all that.

So too does alcohol make bastards and lackwits of us all. So I did turn out to be violent after a few jars after all. And there was me thinking I just got emotional and cried.

Never mind.

Loss of YouTube Virginity

Well I've joined the c21 with a mobile broadband connection and I've already used up a good proportion of my download limit looking up stuff I thought I'd never see again on Youtube. Here's a selection

1) Heysel as it happened.
2) The death of JFK as told by news bulletins
3) XTC performing senses working overtime
4) Announcement of Princess Diana's death
5) 1999 Champions League final
6) the cancellation of the Late Late Breakfast Show (oddly enough I had this announcement on Betamax for years as it came after an episode of Doctor Who)
7) News reports of the Miner's Strike
8) Threads (!)
9) 1981 European Cup Final
10) 1984 "
11) Joy Division and Love Will Tear Us Apart


This is amazing but 3g a month is no way enough!

All Credit to the Lads

Incredibly, unbelievably, Carshalton Athletic have escaped relegation on the final day of the season. With one round of matches to go they were 2nd from bottom of the Ryman Premier Division and with 4 going down it was looking pretty dicey. Amazingly though they have finished 5th from bottom on 50 points and escape relegation by (to my delirious calculations) a +4 goal difference on the team below them.

Carshalton is the Drummer ancestral seat. Whereas I may be exiled elsewhere, the Robins are the drummer's natural team.

The Joy of Blogging

Some time ago I would read the debates over at In Search of High Places, occasionally dip my oar in the deep waters, and generally marvel and the intelligence and humanity of Matt and Alex, two young bloggers from whom I have learned vast amounts (though I've forgotten most of it now). I still visit there often though I don't really comment much as I feel I have little to contribute.

There is a magnificent instance of blogging over at Deogolwulf's place: he has written an amazing critique of AC Grayling and the man himself has responded in the comments. I really hope it becomes an ongoing debate but I don't know if it will. Deogolwulf often posts brilliant stuff, but this is a real tour de force, and the prospect of Grayling himself debating Deogolwulf in the comments box is exciting.

So it's not all vitriol and alcohol, you know.

In Which TD Goes a Bit Soft in the Head

My previous post was, as you can easily imagine, written while heavily refreshed. Reading it, I see a lot I'd like to have changed and a lot I probably should not have put: but its message is essentially sound and it is this.

Brace yourselves for a post devoid of hatred or self pity. Yes, it's true.

I was at mass this morning, as usual, with a slight hangover, as is also usual, and some lingering regrets about blogging while tipsy. Then I realised that the idea of my post, and of many previous ones over the last few days or even weeks was simply to try and recognise the fact that, for want of a better turn of phrase, my heart is opening up and is reaching out to people as it has hardly ever done before: that I care about so many people, that I want them to be happy and safe and well, that they are in my thoughts, that thinking of them is wonderful: in short, that I love them. Perhaps not many. I don't know that many people. A few, then: far more than before.

This is quite difficult for an old raging soak like me to understand. It doesn't, after all, depend on what they think of or feel for me, it is wholly independent of requital or interest, devoid of expectation and is nothing to do with any kind of possession, just of a joy in another's existence.

It's also a difficult sensation to understand. Years of introspection and closing off, of hiding myself away, these have left me unprotected for such genuine feelings.

I should not really be writing this post any more than the previous ones: but it is true, and sober, and explains some of what has gone before it in the sense that it has been germinating here without my really understanding it until now.

You strip away the layers of protection and disguise, the masks you have built and you find that, after all, there might be something there, that really does exist and is positive.

Some Beautiful Women

..do actually like the drummer and admit the pre-eminence of alcohol in their liking. This is no bad thing. Alcohol is a truth serum. It works especially well after a week's disappointing, indeed piss-poor, work. It works even better faced with decades old hatreds and loves. All women are beautiful by virtue of not being men, some women are even more beautiful by virtue of being known to TTD. Some, especially unlucky women, are exceptionally weird by virtue of being specifically close to TTD at a given moment in time (ie are somewhere near).

For example: people I hated are dead. People I loved are dead. I visit the grave of someone I hated three times a year: that's because he died aged 19. People I loved are selfish old cunts and they leave nothing and nowhere to go. I wish they would just go and fuck off out of memory. And, doubtless, they will: and by then, so will go my life, my memory and my self. I visit someone else's grave: "Woody something[can't remember]Pecker" out of the nation's chess magazine, who died aged 28, and who I played so much snooker with and drank with and kept score with at cricket matches. We got so pissed and we played so much cider-fuelled snooker at the Oxford Union. We are old, we die, we decay and the hair falls out of our booze-headed follicles. And he told me he had cancer and I--I--forgot, I mis-remembered, I mis-took, I mis-spoke.

I forgot.


I forgot.


I forgot he was dying.


He died.



I will die.


I think his resting place is too cold and too dark.

I don't think he will mind. His father might, as he is there with him. They might appreciate the shade but then again they will be chilly and will need to wrap up.




So does family decay and die.



Fucking bastards: why are living beings such utter cunts?? Why do they go and die when you want to go & love them the most? Why do they fuck off out of your life and survive when you want them to survive with you against the floods so much you'd rather die?


*In My Mind's Eye*


There are women who love me and who I sort of love in different ways. Here goes a recent chat:

The conversation in question went something like this. Let a be the woman and let t be TD. Let x be the moment that TD realised that a did not want to sleep with him. Let z be the moment she realised her utter distaste for him.

a: I like you quite a lot, I find you bright and thoughtful.
t: Oh you're too kind. I mean, really. Actually I'm a wanker.
a: That's just the alcohol talking.
t: Well, you'd like to think so. Actually it's completely true.
a: Oh I'm sure it isn't.
t: It is.

x

a: How do you live with yourself?
t: With Stella, with sleep and with Tears for Fears.
a: you're joking.
t: No.
a: So you're telling me you're an alcoholic conservative with suicidal tendencies?
t: Apart from the suicidal tendencies, yes.

z

a: I have to....go and have a shit now.
t: Aha, shit! One of the joys of living! have you ever thought-
[TD gets his remaining light punched out]


Actually the above conversation is invented and is a lie, by all accounts and on all measures of truth. I do become animated upon talk of egestion but that is entirely satiric, and is intended to demonstrate my linking lavatorial desires with sexual ones, and hence to prove the ultimate futility and disgusting-ness of the human body. Many people do not understand this, which is why I have few friends, but with any luck the message will start to get through soon (heh heh).

So they go....

So I go....

So goes time and hair and heartbeats and blood pressure.


*Oi! John! Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps!*


**








** My dear first love,who I don't even know if she is still alive, she would tell me she loved my eccentricities and my weirdnesses, but above all she loved my hair...she loved my hair...my hair....

On the Sobering Effects of Alcohol

I don't even like calling beer "alcohol" because it's mainly water but anyway...long term readers of this blog will know that I frequently post when greatly refreshed and that is because it is easier and fun. Being a narcissist I don't really mind if it annoys or inconveniences anyone else. To my mind I think I have only deleted one post that I wrote under the influence - something about religion I think. Oh no, I tell a lie. I think I also outed myself once. That was more of a stealth edit though.

A trawl through some of these old posts reveal the same points being made over and over again (so what's new - it's a blog after all!) as well as a number of loathings and hatreds. This is normal and healthy. One of our modern pathologies is not anger itself but the desperate attempts to delegitimise it, to cure it, to squeeze it out of the personality. Our interest in suppression of this very natural emotion is interesting - I wonder what it's for?

Intriguingly for me there are also hints & guesses that I clearly keep leaving lying around on the pages of this blog. I ought to go through and delete them all, but I haven't the dishonesty. There are things (not evil things or owt like that - just normal stuff) which I just cannot bring myself to face or admit, even to myself, and the blog helps me to valve them out slowly without even knowing it. A diary would not offer me the same protection: I would be a lot more open. Writing a blog is therefore an exercise in social skills for me, as well as in self-absorption, which is maybe not so positive.

That point might seem counter intuitive, given all we hear about the eeeevil rightwing blogosphere - but it's true, for me at least.

This post, for the sake of clarity, was written with absolute sobriety moments before it was published.

Final Body Image Update

For the avoidance of any doubt, the other chap who resembles me physically and more importantly emotionally (and intellectually) is this fellow:

Self Portrait (Body Image Update II)

He is so cool, isn't he? And just cop the size of his brekkers. For me that's just not enough food. And his utterly innocent delight in food remains, despite his humbling at the hands of the giant. The morality of this book is superior and more nuanced than that of many grown up publications, including almost all newspapers. Maybe not The Daily Sport. You see: he realises that it's wrong to eat so much, but he still loves food because eating is a wonderful and beautiful experience, and that in itself is not wrong, indeed it is a pleasure of living which should be extended to all, by natural right. He doesn't really talk of poverty or famine but I like to think that is implicit in his recognition of the immorality of gluttony.

Anyway, for those of you who've been wondering, the resemblance is remarkable, except my skin is more pinkish. I have only a little more hair than he does. My legs are about the same size. I guess my smile isn't as broad as his.

Spot the References

At the risk of outing myself (small, I am sure, as few people are actually interested in the contents of this blog, but then again I don't really mind as I am a narcissist anyway), here are a few quotes from my favourite film (well, "film" is stretching it a bit):

"I need at least an extra six PSUs...I'm using traffic wardens already."
"Yeah but when...yeah but where?"

--

"There's something going on, I tell you."
"There'll be something going on tonight when I've had a few pints."

--

"We don't want the whole street blowing up while you're away."

---

and many other classic lines. I mention it only because I read in today's Times about a US ship firing warning shots in the Persian Gulf, and I was immediately transported sideways and back to that wholly fictional 1983 where the world ended on Thursday May 26th, bringing a swift closure to the Great & Super Powers.

And all that was left was vomiting into water butts; turning over to die in the inner refuge; collecting water drops in a collander; watching people have their arms sawn off; swapping tabs for whisky; hoarding an old book of birds for ten years to remind yourself of what you had loved.



"Skeletons and skulls. Of different creatures."

Body Image Update

See the post or two below. Bodies are odd things, most human bodies, of whatever sex, being of comic misshapenness, my own foremost among these. I have praised female bodies in one of today's posts, and the praise is entirely genuine. I do, however, think that pornography as we conceive it proves the lie of my adoration and conviction. The truth is we adore only certain bodies, and some bodies identify powerful desires, giving us the need for touch and warmth, while others don't (ie mine). whether this is societal or genetic or cultural I have, literally, no idea. Pornography really struggles to provide comedy or irony, though it tries: hence I think it means something, really tries to be modern rather than post-modern, and latches onto very real perceptions and dreams. Possibly it is the techonological working out of Freudian dreams and even subconscious fantasies ( big tits? milf?). I do think there's a distinction to be made between pornography and fashion. The two, at times, seem to be working in opposing directions. Whatever the truth of it, I think there is a lot more to come (ho ho) from pornography, both as a leisure activity and as a major source of release, as well as an increasingly powerful driver of body image. I speak here only of heterosexual pornography, which seems to have few problems with bald, ugly or overweight male performers, provided they have the requisite equipment. Or stamina. Or whatever. It needs someone rather more specialised than myself properly to conjecture whether or not pornography sets trends or works from them. What, exactly, is the extent of its influence? Judging from the number of playboy pencil cases, diaries, and other accessories I have seen in school (owned, with a crushing degree of inevitability, by girls) it's reasonably extensive.

Anyhow, I wanted to mention that there are only two working bits of my body left. 1) My brain. In fact this is not working, and only seems to be because it is keeping my heart beating. It has not really worked since 1998, when it was in pretty sharp condition. 2) My arse. In fact this doesn't work well either, but I find more satisfaction in its movements and ideas.

One might also argue that my spleen is working. I couldn't possibly comment. Also my liver is probably doing a good job. I daren't ask it, however...

Woman In Chains

So the nicking from Tears for Fears continues....

This is more of a thought than a post, really, which comes from a convesation I had yesterday with a very beautiful woman, who thinks she needs to lose weight. She does not. Her daughter, she says, suffers from real self-image problems for the same reason. Why does this happen in our "civilisation"? Why do young (and not so young) women seem to have such problems so often? I have yet to meet a heterosexual man who does not adore the curves and softnesses of a woman's mysterious, delightful body. I have curves myself of course, but then again they _shouldn't_ be there. I understand that sometimes these issues are caused by health concerns. Fair enough. That's the root of mine, as well as the fact that breasts are attractive on women and not on men. But otherwise - straight men love female bodies that move and undulate, that press against clothing, that can enfold them.

I guess I understand some of the myriad reasons for the problems that women have (including, probably, a male dominated world of media and pornography), but I ask, in all naivety and innocence: what is there not to love in a beautiful, curvy woman?

Labels

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I have been going back and adding labels to loads of my posts. I've sort of been working backwards so it currently covers about 100 of the most recent.

What _is_ interesting is that in PtI of my existence (which ended around june of last year) I was, if anything, even more drunken and rhetorically violent than I am now, whereas I thought my alcoholic incontinence and middle aged rage were a new phenomenon.

Narcissism

The excellent David Thompson has this post about the pathology of self-criticism. He means it geopolitically, of course (the kind of drivel-question to which every answer is "it's the West's fault" - the ideological equivalent of the Friday night "Are you looking at my bird" to which every possible answer is wrong, and results in a beating).

Of interest to me is the way in which modesty, or fragile self confidence, call it what you will, slips easily into a kind of self-regarding masochism. You start off, reasonably, by refusing to arrogate too much praise to yourself: there are, after all, many factors including luck in your success. Then you begin to wonder whether or not what you have done is successful or not and once you are absorbed in this train of thought all sorts of possibilities open up: how does one really assess any given criteria, how can one be certain that a seemingly obvious criterion (ie publishing a poem) actually involves success; and so on. It is a short and fatal step from there to an utterly disproportionate but enfolding and comforting sense that, as nothing you have done can be counted as good, you cannot possibly survive or undertake any kind of challenge. Hence you must sit at home and, er, blog. Or something.

A side effect, much desired, of this kind of self-criticism is that well meaning persons continually try to reassure one. This is now slimy and nasty: not the persons, but the masochistic individual, who becomes accustomed to hearing people say nice things and wants more of it, but in order to do that needs to keep, simultaneously, doing things well and believing that they are doing them badly. The regression into early childhood becomes complete at the point at which the individual realises what he likes most is having nice women put their arms round him.

In other words, it is all too easy, especially in a society which values and esteems victimhood, to make oneself a victim - of oneself. To be, in a sense, the tortured individual whose own blindness to his success is in fact a symptom of the most ghastly self-love - a kind of psychological masturbation.

It is extremely difficult to break out of this: its corrosive effects soon begin to affect relationships and then really begin to affect work, and then you are left with little to show for years of self-regard but a permanent sense of worthlessness that is, in reality, a fault of too much self rather than too little.

This post, of course, in a recursive way, being a symptom in itself.

A criminal record?

For a bin lid that doesn't quite shut? How, exactly, is that proportionate? How, exactly, does having a permanent CRB problem reflect the scale of his offence? Why are we letting the people who claim to be our servants revel in ever increased punishments: while we teachers are told by experts that children do not learn through punishment, the theory is being pursued with genuine enthusiasm when it comes to adults by those who claim to be working for us. The extremity of this treatment, and the blank faced assumption of moral superiority by the enforcers of draconian punishments fills me with horror. And I really would be proud of being called a purple faced Daily Mail reader by those who should know better - the Guardian readers don't seem to give a monkey's about the harsher treatment of citizens by its so-called "public services". Yes, the scare quotes are completely necessary.

Assuming that the BBC website and Radio 5 reports are correct, I don't think I am alone in finding this kind of case frightening: minor infractions being treated in a way that means you can never escape them; spying; the deliberate conflation of a minor misdemeanour with putative global tragedies; the cynical application of power in the name of service. It is, surely, taking us places we don't want to go.

But obviously enough people do want to go there, because they're taking us. And I'm not sure we're going to have any choice in whether to join the ride or not.

_Please_ someone find me a link or some evidence to show that I am overreacting and this man does not have a criminal record for leaving his bin open.

Ruddy Hell

...I would like to swear but just don't see the reason, at the moment: I've just had my tea, and I am full to the brim with red wine and Stella. So, understandably, I feel pretty cheered right now. Except the government....grrrr...bastads...gggrrrr...

I love people, some people, love them more than they will ever know: in some cases, if they did know, they'd never speak to me again: and in others, they'd be mildly disappointed: and in others, they'd say "ok, well, so? And-?" Love is a really strange thing, especially after booze, when it becomes easier and weirder than when you are sober.

Uninspired

hmm, total lack of ideas today. Odd, isn't it. I can think of almost literally nothing worth posting. I suppose I could liveblog my lack of inspiration but it wouldn't make for very interesting reading. On the other hand, here's TD's NuLab inspired guide to being in government.

1) Slip an unpopular policy change in under the radar, while you give important policy speeches about more (possibly) popular stuff.

2) Sit back and watch the firestorm erupt.

3) Slag off people who don't like your new, not-exactly-publicised policy.

4) Point out that only people who don't matter will suffer.

5) Read opinion polls (although I wouldn't bother checking the BBC for them).

6) Rush out a "leaked" statement denying that you're thinking of reversing the policy, so that people automatically assume you are.

7) Wait for the storm to die down a bit.

8) Continue with your original crap policy.

Fiddling With the Order of Things

I've taken jmb's advice and bumped my post on Alec Douglas-Home from 3rd April to today, I could have put it under Thursday, which would have been right&proper, but I didn't. Thanks, jmb.

UPDATE: Actually I did. Oh well I can't be bothered to change it again.

Where Does The End Of Me Become The Start Of You?

Somewhere at the end of my sentence, is the answer. Then, you take what I've said and you mulch it through your prejudices, be they right or left, then you add your assumptions of what I am and you conclude the brief encounter with an idea of what you think I have said, and worse, what you think I think. All of this is rather nastily mashed in social mores and the end result is that you almost certainly think that I'm a cunt. I don't mind that, per se, it is probably true, I just "feel" that it's a touch unfair. And some people's feelings count for a good deal more than many others, so depending on your ethnic or sexual characteristics, this could well be enough to earn me a "cunt" certificate from the government itself. For example, if you scream and shout and say "cunt" but you happen to be a leftist, then you're not so bad, you were just provoked; if I do it, then I am full of rage and anger and I need therapy or a prison sentence, or worse. Or I'm defending my privileges, despite owning nothing at all, or whatever, but by looking at the colour of my skin you nonetheless know what I've been through or not, so you are qualified to comment by the presence of the Guardian under your flabby arm. And if I complain then I am yet another privileged white fucker against equality, or whatever justification for discrimination you've come up with this week after too long spent in the saloon bar of one of London's rather more fashionable establishments. And the comment threads at Harry's Place will go on and on about how easy I've had it and how I've never sat on an Equality Committee in my life, and how, after all, "cunt" is fair enough comment on me.

Where you begin is where my voice ends, and where I begin is where I turn what you say into whatever I want it to be: where I see memories of myself when you speak, and where I think of what you've made me think of myself when you've spoken of your life, even though it's taken me months to make you open up such that I now know something, a very small something, of the real you, and I've immediately reinterpreted it in the light of my bizarre assumptions about life and ethics.


Where you begin is where I've thought for a long time my words end, in gentle and soft landings somewhere in your outer consciousness; that's where I think I end but whether you see me there or not, is, frankly, up to you - and I guess that the answer is that I am a shell on the seashore, glinting in the occasional sunlight, but for the most part occluded by polluted waters or industrial skies.

And it all comes back to the end of the sentence: the suggestion of irony, the lifting lilt, the downbeat self-mockery, the absence of an actual full stop. I suggest by my insecurity that you might like to know more about me, and that I would like to know more about you: but you have other things to do, and your phone is ringing in your pocket, and the tea will be getting cold in an hour or so, so I am faded to black, which is where I should be.

The end of the sentence is no more interesting than the beginning, or the endless dullness of the middle with all its subordinate clauses and hesitations. The end of the sentence goes nowhere and says nothing.

You Hear Laughter Cracking Through the Walls

Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees(look it up on YouTube) is one of those genuinely unsettling songs, a piece of art that makes me shiver, only very slightly, but enough to prmopt me to think of the recesses of the imagination. I also think it captures neatly an imaginative or rhetorical violence in music that had been going for some years but which had lacked a register to become anything more than loud and aggressive. Here, the implied violence is given the cloaking of Grimm's Fairy Tales or of a hundred traditional stories about fairy circles and spirits. Its negative spirituality and bursting irrationality is invasive and caught me when I first heard it as a somewhat isolated teenager in 1989 (I still have my tape recording of it made off the tv from the BBC programme "Boxpops" which used to do tracks and news from previous years on a any given subject). I don't know whether you can read it as Freudian or not, I guess you probably could. I read it as a cultural symbol: out of the depths of recession and near-economic despair, of real street violence and alienation, comes this primal elaboration of fear and uncontrol. It's a metaphor, in word, rhythm and structure: this song is reaching into human experience for a very specific cultural problem.

But anything which goes in that direction can have unexpected and haunting effects. Even this vocabulary makes my point harder to communicate: "haunting", "primal", "fear" - you could add "ghostly" and "piercing" to that list. What it's all saying is that humanity fears determinism as contradicting its most basic day-to-day assumptions; and that it fears annihilation, being made unphysical or unplaced. You could make this mean death only, or you could, a la Paul Tillich and existentialism, say that it means any radical form of challenging (of the kind that was certainly underway in 1981) which dislocates and threatens to undermine you.

Whether we exist in any meaningful sense or not, we have fears of the shadowy and the ungrasped or ungraspable: I think it's straightforward to see that it all refers to the fear of otherness, which, by its very definition, means we will not be as we are. That is hard to imagine, and it means we, as we are, will be negated. We always strive against negation, create order and physicality, but we know we are going to be negated and that in steps along the way things will happen to negate what we are and what we understand on many occasions. Those things might produce something better and finer, more worthwhile, but the process is terrifying. Hence we write songs that try to show something of the nothingness that surrounds us and we shiver for a bit, or it won't leave our heads for a while: we watch horror films and are unsettled: we tell ghost stories and are thoughtful: we emphasise our bodiedness by fucking everything in sight and inventing ethics to justify our desperation.

High Speed Vass Gets Things Done

Private Eye's nickname for Sir Alec Douglas-Home was "Baillie Vass" owing to an early photographic mix up in a local newspaper(I think - it might just have been a lookalike*). It was savage to him from the beginning of his brief premiership (63-64) and blamed Macmillan for selecting him as a two fingers to the other candidates for the leadership after Mac's doctors told him to quit. In those days the Conservative Party took "soundings" - suggestions, informal votes, expressions of support - from senior members and the leader made his recommendation to HM The Queen. Ted Heath was the first Tory leader to be voted to the leadership. The Eye said of the Home selection: "...The Party wanted Butler. The People as a Whole Wanted Butler. Why Wasn't Butler Chosen?" and gives Mac a speech bubble replying: "Because I hate bloody Butler's guts". The Eye were particularly vicious towards Home, mainly on the basis of his lack of legitimacy as a leader (they sent Willie Rushton as a rival candidate when he had to fight for a Commons seat) but also because they felt that urgent action was needed to save Britain from a long drawn out decay, as well as from the odour of corruption and taint that had become such a marked aspect of the Macmillan premiership. There was also a sense that as a noble he was out of touch with both the people and political reality. The long needed action was eventually promised by Wilson, who won the 1964 election by 4 seats ( and thus provided a kind of retrospective justification for Macmillan's decision - it was much narrow than had been expected during '63). This close election frustrated Wilson's desire to forge a new Britain out of the heats of the technological revolution (though the Eye would also lampoon Anthony Wedgewood Benn and his enthusiasm for technology during this government). So Britain was not revolutionised: the Tories were less unelectable after Heath, Grammar School & no peerage, was more of a man of the people than either Mac or Home or Eden, even if his manner and lack of an apparent family did him few favours. The long period in office and the scandal and the failure really to kick-start the economy did not stop the Tories from unexpectedly winning in 1970.

Baillie Vass did more for the Conservatives by not doing much than Mac or Butler would probably have done (Mac was ok, it turned out). Wilson promised far more than he could deliver and so his government is remembered more for its social legislation than its extremely dodgy economic record and failure to address the increasing problem of union militancy (In Place of Strife got absolutely nowhere, facing too much opposition from within Labour) - hence it gets a much easier ride from modern commentators than it perhaps deserves. What did Vass do for the country? Not much, he didn't set out to - he set out to hold the political fort against Labour's fierce Commons operator Wilson and against the increasingly cynical public view of the Tories. Did he put party before country? Probably - show me a politician who doesn't and I'll show you a failed candidate. But he also struck a small blow against corruption and against the creed of "action" - the belief that it will all be fine if we sweep through and turn everything upside down; or that if we have a "vision", just a vision, that will somehow turn into competence or become inspiring to others. He struck, or rather, tapped out, a blow for reality, in its dullness.

He kind of succeeded. Quite an epitaph for any of us, I'm sure.

*Douglas-Home's wikipedia entry gives the story.

High Speed Vass Gets Things Done (Ages Ago)

I've just published a post about Alec Douglas-Home but because it's been in draft for weeks it's been published under April 3rd, so no-one can see it. Bloody Blogger!
Oh well, if you're interested it's somewhere on the previous page.

Children's Books

...are excellent, at the moment. Their morality is striking and confident, their approach to the big issues intriguing and daring, and their lack of easy cop outs unexpected.

I'm not talking about _all_ children's books, of course; it just seems on my recent reading that they are prepared to say and imply things that a lot of adult fiction doesn't want to: it's sort of hidden itself in political certainty, drink, sex, and light comedy. Novels which tackle big subjects often seem to have their author's prejudices barely disguised at all (ie the numerous books I've read where the priest turns out to be evil/loses his faith/dies horribly). By contrast, children's books such as Catcall by Linda Newbery approach family structures (say) with depth and insight and an acknowledgement that the modern cliches we use to make ourselves feel better about what are self-centred choices ("it would be much harder on the kids if we didn't split up...") don't carry the explanatory power we think they do. In this book the agonies of two young boys are examined in depth and without the simplicity of worldview that I would now expect from a lot of adult books (ie the children are just fine).

One thing I will say: the grammar and sentence structure of many modern children's books is much simpler than the grammar of even, say, Enid Blyton books. It is really telling that very bright children often have trouble reading classic children's novels ("When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" for example): they find the sentences very hard to follow. They don't deal well with multiple subclauses and trains of thought or description that cascade through independent clauses - semi colons, especially. The lengthy, thoughtful or continuous sentence that was a staple of literature is hard for modern children to understand. Is that a flaw of teaching, or a movement of language? I think it goes a little further. Although children's books are excellent, the "young adult" fiction sub-genre is a little bit more inconsistent: too many authors seem to view "shopping&fucking" as a synonym for "adult" - leaving genuine explorations of the depth that intelligent teenagers might be expected to understand somewhat squeezed. It's also here that I think political certainties undermine otherwise well written stories (on occasion - such as The H-Bomb Girl, discussed last week).

Writing generally and impressionistically like this is problematic and I've added almost no examples to support my case - but hey, it's what I do.

These Are The Things I Could Do Without

1) The government
2) Any other government
3) Sobriety
4) Work
5) Death
6) Dr Evan Harris MP
7) Fanaticism
8) Change
9) Stability
10) Consistency
11) Logic
12) Finity
13) The EU
14) Star Trek
15) Glasgow Rangers FC
16) Yorkshire CCC
17) Cricket Australia
18) Tattoos over the arse
19) Terrorism
20) Manky Feet

Welcome to Someone Else's Life

sorry for the recent string of Tears for Fears misappropriations. They just keep springing to mind.

Also apologies for the stream of personal-related posts. The making of resolutions is often just a temporary method of holding back floods of other things. so it is.

Anyhow, odd morning. Mass, as usual. Late on, a well-known local woman keels over, ever so gently, ever so slowly, supported by friends. Some people to go her aid, by now she is laid out over 4 or 5 seats while the blessings and hymns go on as usual. My normal job is the second collection so I hold out the bowl, just inside the door, because it is raining. Right before my eyes is someone I would swear was dead: no movement, no colour, no nothing. The same expressionless face I have seen only once before. Terror beginning to grip me, and winding its cloak around the remaining congregation (most of it). The priest gives the sacrament of the sick and slowly, imperceptibly at first, parishioners join in his prayers until by the end of the Lord's Prayer a group of people are standing around praying. An ambulance arrives, and she opens her eyes and sits up. She talks. I had felt about to give way and collapse myself, partly out of fear, out of shame, out of sheer dislocation - in trying to do normal things while this is going on.

I don't know how things are with her now - I can just hope, and pray.

Has She Gone Away?

Well, the answer is "yes". I am trying to write, and think, in the style of Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox" but this is really, really, hard. It requires, firstly, an infinite adaption of an adult mind, and a remarkable ability to think like an innocent, but intelligent, and moreover, fictional, character. A fictional character. Someone who winks in and out of existence when the pages are opened and closed. But someone you'd want to exist. Tom is one of life's, and fiction's, really darn good guys. The odd thing is: he doesn't exist: but having read, studied, and taught the book over and over I find this really hard to believe. So, is it more important that you're brilliant and not real, or that you're flawed and somehow exist, against all chance and change and desire? Aha- well, you fall for the ontological argument, of a kind, in assuming your existence predicates some kind of betterness than non-existence. The "X" (why not call you Bob?), the "Bob" of someone else's imagining is always and everywhere better, deeper, more original, than the "Bob" that you actually are, because it is more perfect and more coherent. You're a collaboration of ideas and organs, and things-always-tempted-to-switch-off and so your being here could be said to affirm St Anselm, but then again it doesn't because the versions of you in your mind or someone else's are always so much better: more evil, more intelligent, sexier, more good, whatever. You reach your perfections as someone else's fantasy.

What happens if you are no-one's fantasy? If you just have to blog your way through the greyness of streets and life? The answer is nothing. Nothing happens. You just are, and, worse, you just have to _be_. For example, I am currently nursing my copy of "Viz: The Turtle's Head" through its final stages of collapse. This comic book has sustained me over 12 years of fart and poo jokes, and also some jokes about wanking. Now it is succumbing to entropy and I will lose 12 years of comfort and assurance: the bastard world is in fact full of incoherence and ridiculousness (as I've pointed out in previous posts, taking the human body seriously is stupid - but somehow there are legions of people po-facedly talking about sex, while refusing to acknowledge poo). You are, with Viz, with drink, with news, with blogging, with whatever, even work: and you leave a trail of some kind, you make a brief indentation, like your fat arse on a sofa, then it's all over and you're gone and no-one gives a toss.

Still, never mind, "Bob". Why not just piss off down the pub and leave everything else, which is just management bollock-speak, to sort itself out? After all, no-one will remember, after things have changed, after things have moved on and gone forward: after you've fucked off, which is what everyone's really waiting for.

"You were a photograph" - of the worst, unsuspecting, short-necked, fat-gutted kind. With a head of hair that would rather be down the drain than on your head.

So it goes.

I never did catch Betsy Byars' style.

Clarification

1) the character in the previous post, Mr C Smith, is a creation of my fevered imagination and bears no resemblance to anything. It is this kind of bizarre randomness that makes my blog so unlikely to gain a regular readership but then who cares, it's my blog!

2) The book I was waxing lyrical about yesterday, "The H Bomb Girl", is very good up to the end, although it falls into a bit of kneejerk leftism: do you have to put party affiliation on any manuscript to get published these days?

3) Boozeblogging is back, as you will have noticed. Meh. I'm sober this morning, by the way.

The Not-So-Nameless One

In a previous post (see Dec 07) I named a Mr C Smith as the one responsible for leading me into my, ultimately, ill-fated, alcohol experiments. These tests, it is now known, are responsible for all manner of psychological and physiological problems. Mr C Smith, whose name is known to be a pseudonym, is a singularly unscrupulous individual whose appearances in my life are associated, with a depressing degree of inevitability, with drunkenness and instability. He has, I am sorry to say, appeared again and has led me into a spiral of criminal (or at least outside government advice) behaviour. Today, for example, I _drove my car_ (heedless of the savage effect on the planet this would have) and then later I had _loads of booze_ (heedless of the disastrous effect on my blogging this would have). Mr C Smith is a shadow-figure, a metaphor: he is a vague character who lives in the sidelines and who prevents any serious activity from actually occurring. Instead he just snipes away at real endeavour and entices one into substitute activities (ie drinking, or listening to Tears for Fears, or both). He thinks that he can lure innocent humans to a timely end (all ends are timely to him, and he isn't even death) through asking them "Is it worth it? Is it really worth it?" and, do you know, eleven times out of ten, it isn't. He told me one late stormy night, while the December winds were pounding at the double glazing, that I should just jack it all in and go to Uttoxeter. Uttoxeter! I don't even know where that is, or what I would do if I got there. Nothing, I guess. Or not very much. Or maybe I was supposed to rent a room in a ghastly B&B and then walk the streets until I literally topped myself out of boredom. Probably that was it: Mr C Smith is a funny old guy, with a bizarre sense of humour: he wants you to laugh but doesn't really give a toss who you are or if he's met you. He often comes to me during a dull day at work, or rather, I go to him, as he's far too cool to approach me. He says encouraging things but you know he wants you to die, I think. Or maybe he doesn't; perhaps I've misjudged the stupid old bugger and he just wants you to do something, I mean really _do_ something, that'd give you validity for just a second at least.

I don't even know what the C stands for.

John Smith and the Common Men

".is the stage name of the honourable Aubrey Waite..."


is how I believe the line goes......

Fucking Bastard Writers

Some cunts are really good at what they do, leaving twats like me marooned in the shit-strewn seas of mediocrity. One of these is Stephen Baxter, who has written "The H-Bomb Girl", a novel for teenagers, which, by a staggeringly unfortunate co-incidence, is the novel I've been trying to write for over ten years. What a fuckwit. So: is it any good, well yes of course it is fucking amazing, I mean it references SuperMac, Civil Defence, Jack Kennedy's speeches and John Smith and the Common Men* so of course it is ace. Alas it _does_ conflate 1960s civil defence stuff with Protect and Survive, and some pages round about p150 look as if they were copied out of Threads, but overall it is the fucking buggering bastard novel I've been trying to write for so damn long. What a cunt. Never mind. Nowt I can do about that, except recommend it to all 11+ people I've ever met, which I am about to do, with the proviso that some bits are nicked out of "Casualties" (see drummer posts passim) and hence look as if Mac's govt was doing Wislon's, Ted's, Sunny Jim's, and Thatch's dirty work for them, which it wasn't. Supermac may have been a twat and a cuckold but he did not want the world to end: he'd spent enough time lying in the mud at the Somme for that. Supermac went to his grave with nightmares about Cuba, which I guess this novel is writing about. But I won't hear any criticism of Mac over Cuba - so any cunt who thinks Supermac fucked it up can just come over here and see if he's hard enough. And he _did not_ piss off down the A4 to Turnstile, nor did any other fucker, nor would it have been any bastard good, because the Russians knew exactly where it was (not that I'm suggesting Baxter claims this, I haven't finished the book yet). "Casualties" (not to be confused with "Casualty") is the final work of art of western civilisation, the last statement, the big two fingers: "Casualty" is just a piss-poor tv show. What a fabulous piece of art (is "Casualties"): more challenging than a cow in a tank, more controversial than paintings made of menstrual fluids, more damn scary than...er anything else. "Casualties" is what we end up with, or used to end up, or,perhaps, should of ended up with. And don't accuse me of hate, I'm an artist, I'm just thinking. Er.. anyway, You don't want to go around writing stuff out of Threads like that, in case it comes true. Also the narrator -nearly- quotes the kid with the earring out of Threads: "they've started fighting, mum... the Americans and the Russians...it's just been on the news."

Well I guess Baxter is a bright guy and knows what he's doing and he probably doesn't reckon Supermac was going to do any of that shit he says he does, but just in case...step outside, mate, if you don't mind....

I wonder if this world is a parallel world gone wrong: as if it was supposed to end in 1984 and we cocked it all up: so everything seems a bit crap now. Sort of, a bit millennial, a bit further than it should be. Shock horror headline: Conservative thinks world "a bit more" than can cope with! Hmmm, seems likely to me. "Casualties" is so perfect, so clean, so well written that it surely _supposed_ to be the last document of our culture. Anything else is just bullshit. And that includes installation videos of people vomiting. Or cows, for that matter.


*STEPHEN BAXTER HAS NICKED THIS OFF OF AN UNEARTHLY CHILD- THE FIRST EPISODE OF WHO - AND HENCE HE IS UNBELIEVABLY CLEVER AND COOL, THE FUCKER. GAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! AND THE CAPITALS ARE WHOLLY NECESSARY.


ps I wonder if this author "Stephen Baxter" is in fact Bullet Baxter out of early 80s Grange Hill. If so, it would explain a lot....

Not The End of Bel

Thank Goodness.

Sorry. Couldn't resist it. Am very glad to see her again tho'.