Vonga Dot Com.

OK I’m still trying to understand this European pickle. The radio has just said that Germany can borrow at 2% but because of Portugal’s deficit they will need to fork out 17% on what they’ll need to borrow. That’s because ‘the market’ sees a Portuguese government bond as risky, i.e. they may have to take a haircut, or god forbid a back, sack and crack, so they add an extra 15% to cover the 6:1 chance of losing their money. So like Wonga dot com at 2,500% APR they will lend you money and bleed you dry all at the same time. Wonga know they won’t get all the money back because they’ll make you penniless in twenty minutes so make you pay back the amount you borrowed in the first five. Now 17% per annum is virtually impossible for a country to pay off even when their economy is pulsating like Katie Price’s boobies so as we’re currently all running at a level of ‘bob-a-job’ week it’s not going to happen. So the current German ‘rescue’ packages are tantamount to requiring you send off your flat screen TV, car and dishwasher to the local auction house before the bailiffs arrive. The Germans though are strangely deluded. They originally fought for the euro because Italy, Spain et al kept using the old underhand trick of devaluing their currency causing German exports to become too expensive, so they hit on the idea of a common currency so they couldn’t. Now though because zay are nict buying enough Volkswagens, Germany wants them to be more competitive so they can pay the interest on the largely German loans. I’m beginning to wonder if in fact the euro is just a new name for the Deutsche Mark. But if, when we see the sky filled with flapping pigs, they do become competitive; but that’s not going to happen. So just like those stupid enough to get a loan from Wonga dot com the rest of Europe will hence forth spend 90% of their working week supporting the Wonga. And all in the name of ‘being helpful.’ So is Angela Merkel like Florence Nightingale, or the knitting granny in the Wonga adds. 

A Merciful Escape.

Back in 1967 with a degree and job as a physicist I decided on a change of direction: not a damascene realisation of my true calling, I just thought my social life needed a lift. Back then uni was free and you got a grant that covered everything apart from beer and Italian restaurants. Hardly believable isn’t it. I applied to do probation officering and got an interview. My neighbouring candidate informed me he was doing ‘bib studs’ which confused me at first then made me wonder if maths and physics might not be the entrance qualifications they were looking for. My interviewer was only a small step from a hardened criminal himself. His technique was as a knife thrower, his intention to see where circumstance might draw blood. Suddenly science seemed a green and pleasant land. I can only imagine bib studs boy went home crying with deep, psyche threatening lacerations but I didn’t fare much better. My damage though was more self inflicted. On the topic of retribution I ventured the opinion that the stocks and hanging cages were a good idea, only, I have to say, because I’d recently seen a film with them in. Being twenty years BT, before Thatcher, and still fondly cherishing the welfare state this must have come over as a teensy bit harsh, even for this virtuous arm of the Cray family. I may have supported it with a cost/benefit analysis and aspects of human cognition only now being appreciated by advances in neuroscience. But the harsh truth is I am a sissy and he knew it. Then miraculously he turned into a nice bloke. Dam it was all an act! But what was I supposed to do, have a stand up row? Anyway as luck would have it I failed and did industrial design instead thus saving myself from pittance pay, over work, stress and ultimate redundancy. Only a few years ago I volunteered to do work with delinquent kids and was again rejected. At least that time my flies were undone which doesn’t bode well when working with children.

Fingers on pens.

Many months ago I commented on how Daughtermouse held her pen. I read in the Guardian today that undergraduates are finding it difficult writing exam essays because they find it so tiring. The accompanying photo shows the same mangled abomination of fingers and thumb, which is apparently causing fatigue and even calluses on fingers. There’s something symptomatic about youngsters being capable typists, a skill no one has ever taught them, yet unable to hold a pen properly, which presumably some one has tried to teach them somewhere along the line. The result is profoundly inelegant. Elegance is a word that has become subtly corrupted in recent decades. It’s now connected with the outdated puritanical style of a dowager duchess rather than ‘a refined quality of gracefulness’ and ‘ingenious simplicity.’ There is something Murdockian about their awkward clutching of a pen that owes more to the paranoid strangling of a recalcitrant chicken than a flowing pas de deux of man and implement. Murdockian because all he know is the plundering use of his surroundings, his fingers on the jugular of all he surveys. This gross manipulation is reflected in this pen holding. It allows no artistry. I only hope it isn’t carried through to what is written into clunky ham-fisted prose that simply fulfil the word count. It’s not that it’s 2,000 words long, it’s that every word counts, just like each individual stitch in an elegant tapestry. 

I Got a da Shrug.

I have several old pictures of me. At sixteen with four friends in suits after exams and me stripped to the waist with shirt flying in the breeze. At twenty-two in a chair with guitar looking all moody like Brian Ferry. At twenty-seven sitting on a toilet seat being shaved by the head of department at art school. This is not a history I remember. Others, an eager to please six year old in primary school, graduate with parents, family holidays etc, I do. It seems I have a history I admit to and another secret one I have but don’t recognise. I wonder if it’s the same with Fred West the serial killer, “Yes that’s me and my mum, and this one’s when I got my GCSEs, and… I don’t remember this one of me decapitating a cat in a vice.” I mean if I had realised I was a not bad looking brooding eccentric stoner I really could have been Brian Ferry, or failing that the Big Lebowski. And now thanks to V even Lori, who I don’t know from Eve and lives in America, knows me better than I know myself. I guess that’s why I hate people who say, ‘I’m not going to change, this is just the way I am.’ No it’s not, it’s just the way you think you are, just your habitualised persona. I hate them because I’m just the same except I want to be Brian Ferry. Actually no I don’t want to be Brian Ferry but I do want to explore other me’s, attempt to play other roles a little. Maybe if I take up Italian, not the language, just the gestures.

E-mail ooops.

So I open my portal to the world and get the following e-mail-

“Hi Lori, ……seeing Stiffmouse the other night prompted me. I love the way he calls you Lon. A, alias!!!

Anyway, he's retired now and has been for a few years. He's such a lovely, gentle, hippie stoner really. His wife is a therapist which I guess is a good thing. Together they are hilarious, a bit like Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Parents. Hope all is well. Give me a ring when you can. Love, V.”
Well to be honest it could have been worse. It’s strange finding oneself captured in an overheard conversation or miss-sent e-mail. We so often tailor our conversational responses to some fictitious mutual satisfaction. In fact ordinary conversation is often rendered futile because of it. “I like fish, do you like fish? Isn’t it nice we both like fish.” That sort of thing. Yes it avoids WW3, WW4, WW5 etc but it does tend to replace conflict with cold war espionage. But not in this case. It probably is a good thing I’m married to a therapist being a hippy stoner, which I’m not but obviously appear to be. Some people are Born to be Wild and I was born to be vague. I get another mail.
“Hi Stiffmouse I thought I was forwarding to Lori and I actually replied to you! I hope you don't mind me calling you a hippie stoner…..I am mortally embarrassed at having done this. I've not done it before which is amazing for me…. Love, V.”  
So there you have it, both of us revealed so well in so few words. Now who can I misdirect an e-mail to? Ah yes, “Hi Lori, just met Bernard, what a twat!”

An Even Tempered Life.

In a recent Ted Talk a mathematician chappy suggested our enjoyment of music depended on repartition and pattern, and to prove it created a non repeating pattern-less piece supposedly devoid of enjoyment. It didn’t prove his point, it was a little disjointed but most people according to the comments found pattern in it. He did though inadvertently make the reverse point, that our cognition is finely tuned to find and enjoy pattern even when mathematically it’s not there. He also overlooked the fact that all the notes in an even-tempered scale are strictly related by the ratio of 2 to the power n over 12 where n is the number of the note in the scale. Even the word recognition suggests we perceive by a process of finding some pre-existing cognitive pattern in what is presented. If we can’t it becomes noise or information of no value, an infinitely blurred picture. It then becomes intriguing that our cognition hovers between a reliance on structure and a disinterest in pattern-less noise and how we relate to the intermediate spectrum between the two. In one direction we are driven to find structure in apparent noise so that it ceases to be noise, and in the other we succumb to the comfort and eventual imprisonment of habitual patterns. It’s thus rare that we de-construct structure back into noise so that new structures can be found. De-construct a street full of parked cars and they become a mass of expensive mechanical litter, cholesterol choking the arteries of movement, the cherished stagnation of our love of movement. Things aren’t as they seem, they just seem to be.  

The Artist is amazing.

The Artist is amazing. Never has so much been achieved by cost saving. It lingers like a monochrome curry stain on a white shirt. The dog is amazing. I don’t think it was played by Merrill Streeeep but it had all the hallmarks of her best performances, bark, sit and run about on demand, and makeup these days is, well amazing. But she’s not credited. After half an hour of being plunged back into its near century old technology I had acclimatised to it and its demands to observe the less to gain the more. In contrast our more recent wonders of speech, colour, CGI and 3D are like the aeroplane spoon docking into a babies mouth. And prescient amongst its many themes is men’s inability to speak. Choked by pride, hubris and fear we have been reduced to verbalising mechanical success and platitudes of technology. In some subtle sense we have become mute, reduced by the dictates of growth and economy. It’s not that we lack the vocals but that we stall at a logjam of conviction on our path to uncertainty. Which brings me to another of this weekend’s findings. How to take a cat for a walk? With a dog it’s easy, just put him on a lead and he’ll go, either as a placid heeler or your opponent in a tractor pulling competition. A cat though will balk at the mere hint of a lead. We tried to take our cat to the vets on a long string once. On passing next doors shrubbery she disappeared, knitting herself in so thoroughly it quickly took on the appearance of a loosely woven jumper with a random pattern of bushes on it. But there is a way. Wear a pair of shoes with long frayed laces left untied. Where one wants the surety of a lead the other will only follow the flapping ends of frayed uncertainty. It takes, as they say, all sorts. 

Gold Men, in Sacks!

Today David Cameron and Milly B will speech about excessive bankers pay. Now I ran my own company for many years and the aim was to extract as much profit as possible paying as little to the gov as possible. That’s what the company was for. So Goldmeninsacks paying £9 billion in salaries and bonuses and RBS paying £7 million to its chief executive isn’t a surprise. The significant difference is that I owned the company and they don’t. Delving further back my chief argument as a teenager was that “everyone else had 50p pocket money, an electric guitar, a motorbike, and stayed out late” etc. It doesn’t take a genius to realise this actually meant “someone told me a boy he knew had a friend who he thought had a bike, a guitar, a car” and this under the influence of teenage optimism meant I had an equal right to them too. These two memories make it obvious that bonuses will flame up like a forest fire from a cigarette end given the merest chance. So where Goldmeninsacks paid a meagre dividend and RBS shareholders, us, have lost money the execs have “just taken pay that someone somewhere sometime got, as reported in the News of the World.” So today DC and Milly B will, like weakling parents, bleat on our behalf that this isn’t nice. So what? As this extraction of capital is so obviously easy and unbounded I would have thought under some rule of corporate governance or common law there must be some limitation to it. Corporate governance for example requires that all stakeholders be taken into account. These include shareholders, debt holders and employees, so the disproportionate extraction of capital by a few to the detriment of the majority of stakeholders must surely be illegal, or at least governed by some ruling. Otherwise we might find our corporate captains ‘accidentally falling’ into lifeboats and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. 

Moved by Moving.

Sometimes when I make my way back upstairs from a nighttime morsel or relief it’s pitch black. I notice I can negotiate the winding stairs surprisingly easily. I seem to rely on a muscular memory as well as my thinking brain. My conscious brain orchestrates the general intention but the accuracy of my making the steps and handholds seems to come from body memory. I regularly remember guitar tunes in the same way. My brain can’t remember them but my fingers do. When dancing in strange shapes my body informs me of emotions connected with them. These instances remind me of the systemic nature of my functioning, that I am an integrated whole not a brainy automaton. There seems a frequently overlooked hinterland of connectivity between brain, muscle, emotions and will. I’ve just noticed an upcoming lecture where I trained, on domestic violence, how otherwise ‘nice’ people can become violent within domestic intimacy. Violence is muscle guided by emotion against the suggestions from brain and will. We may call it animalistic but it’s not, it’s uniquely humanistic. It made me wonder if this hinterland of connectivity is lost in such cases leading to a sort of systemic imbalance. If so it’s unlikely talking therapies will be much good. The brain and will may gain a little power but on the dark stairway to another event the systemic memory will react as before. How then can therapy strengthen this hinterland of connectivity in the light of our systemic nature? I remember one time in a practice session I got out of the ‘talking’ chair and how just walking around the room made the experience more affecting. So should it be in the form of some whole body experience, Psychodrama, dance, clowning or enacting the movements of perpetrator and victim?  Maybe talking is good but moving is better.

Who’s a Slut?

Have I invented the next popular party game? No, we’ve just been cleaning Daughtermouse’s room that she vacated to go to college last September. Her peremptory clean was just bagging up cloths and a laptop whilst mesmerised by her ever present mobile. Mothermouse began yesterday arranging the major objects and I follower up hovering today. MM delving under the bed found her birth certificate over which we had had a somewhat testy correspondence with the Student Loans Company re them not returning it. She then pulled out a small black suitcase. She wondered, as we would all do, what she might find, photographs, schoolbooks, snorkels from the last holiday? On opening it she found it empty apart from a cat, our Britney, who looked up with her casual, “And you are?” Then it was my turn with the final hoovering. People of a delicate disposition should look away now. DM obviously won’t bend down for anything less than a 50p piece. I collected £1.22 in small change, which on the way home had me clutching my trousers to keep them up. Two spoons and a fork liberally smeared with the six-month old remains of a chocolate trifle, numerous dog ends and countless plastic tubes that roll-your-own filters come in. The rest was an assortment of old tissues, wrappers, hair bands, nail varnish and one or two bits of jewellery. Either she has an eyesight condition where the floor is rendered invisible or she won’t bend down for anything less valuable than a River Island top. But then again it amazes me how quickly a newly purchased ‘oh you look lovely in it’ garment joins the carpet of litter. In fact it’s quite likely she won’t ever notice if there’s an elephant in the room because it would be covered in a pile of Top Shop cast offs. The downstairs toilet/shower room was equally grim until at the fifth time of asking she did actually clean it. Perhaps that’s it, perhaps we’re being to hard on sluts. Perhaps they just have trouble bending down. 

Demonocracy.

I usually think of psychopaths as people one doesn’t want to meet in an alley on a dark night but apparently I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m far more likely to find psychopaths in the well-lit offices of government, advertising, finance and the media according to a Saturday morning Radio 4 psychologist. I rushed to Wikipedia and sure enough the traits of this condition are glaringly obvious in these professions when you begin to look. It seems that where some are driven to the bottom of society by it others are elevated to the top. “Consummate liars…. a willingness to say anything to anyone without concern for accuracy or truth….see other people as objects for their personal gratification….possess a general lack of empathy….dominant and confident with great charm and an ability to manipulate others…. have ambitious goals in life….excessive need for excitement and stimulation….seek quick satisfaction and thrills….have extremely inflated self-esteem….notorious for their hair-trigger tempers…. have a total lack of remorse for the abuses they commit.” Think Pears Morgan, Clinton, Blair and Murdock etc. The more I read these traits the more I realised our public school system is a perfect training ground for socially acceptable psychopaths. Elitism, rugby, fagging, debating and jolly property-smashing japes couldn’t be a better designed education for our psychopathic elite. With their strangle hold on high places the results become obvious: Erratic poor governance and a tendency to percolate the individualistic and lack of empathy traits of their condition throughout our society. Luckily though the day to day grass roots of it, far away from the disruptive influence of psychopaths, is alive and well, with the vast majority honest, hard working and a pleasure to be with. 

Say Wuff for the Dog.

Last night Freddie Flintoff talked about depression in sport. Apparently on average one player in every cricket team is struggling with depression. It seems that those super fit, super successful sportsmen, and possibly women, paid to do what we can only dream of are particularly prone to feelings of deep inadequacy. After watching Brene Brown’s Ted Talk on vulnerability I begin to wonder. We all have internal dialogue, note dia-logue. Though it may appear a monologue with my internal voice chirping away I am also the listener to it. It’s an unequal conversation of two halves. The voice half is smart-arsed expectation and the silent half something akin to a besotted puppy licking ‘like me’ to anyone who shows the slightest interest. This I guess is my internalised dog and master. I remember drawing with my wrong hand a picture of this dog when I was low once, a shaggy dishevelled cowering mutt as I remember, but a useful exercise. It seems to me depression is when the dog gives up after a torrent of abusive expectation from the talking voice. It lays barely breathing, shivering in dread. It can’t go on but it must, moment to agonising moment. Yet strangely my pity goes to the voice. The dog is alive but the voice is a lifeless manufacture, a headless chicken, a Pinocchio automaton that can only mouth what expectation tells it to. This pompous pug faced balloon must be burst; the dog must speak its piece. The master must be trained first to get the natural, excellent best from his dog. My master, I’m glad to say, is now encouraging, he gives me bones, tickles my tummy and takes me to shows, and even when I poop in the show ring he just says, “well everyone’s got to go sometime.” I do my best for him and he does his best for me. It’s worked out well in the end.

Blob-head in Blue.

OK how do we get Big Brother into politics? How do we get the lisping pansy, the curly haired post and polyurethane varnished blob-head into the Big Brother House? It’s going to take a massive effort folks but we can do it. They are our public servants so we have a right to know how they really are in our real world of wall-to-wall CCTV. I mean are we really interested in their policies and manifestos when they bear no relation to what they end up doing? No. Are we interested in their ‘middle class equivalent of Blind Date’ televised debates? No, we want and have a right to know how they are as real people relating to real people. Put Margaret Thatcher in with a selection of norms for three weeks and she’d have trouble getting a job as a teaching assistant; no dis to teaching assistants, they’re just not intending to run the country. And they would learn a thing or two about being a single parent, an unemployed Skins resident, a pointless, indebted undergraduate and a pompous middleclass Marxist. But how can we make it happen? Could this idea go viral and lead to the mother and father of all e-petitions? If the audience of Big Brother, say 10 million, all voted for it it would be hard to ignore. Might I suggest, “We the undersigned believe our democracy is being undermined by professional politicians, public disinterest and a wide spread lack of respect for the process of government. In an effort to rekindle a healthy public involvement in the political process, widen the experience of politicians and allow the voting public to make informed electoral decisions leading politicians of all parties must spend a period of two weeks in the Big Brother house to be broadcast nationally in the year preceding a general election. They should share the house with at least double their number of the general public selected at random.” So come on blob-head, lets see the colour of your underwear.

RIP Tommy.

There was something viscerally appealing about Tommy Cooper. He embodied, for me at least, my two basic questions, ‘who am I?’ and ‘where am I?’ and an answer, ‘It’s OK.’ At first sight they’re questions I know the answer to or at least I know an answer to, but they’re always still there on the tip of my tongue like the hovering name of a forgotten friend. At least that’s what he portrayed. I’m intrigued that the merest imagination of him, his ‘not like that, like that’, raises a smile from some deep pool, like lifting the sword of our Arthurian legend; the success, the only success of personhood. He was “To be or not to be”, our Hamlet tipping between courage and disaster with a little laugh and continuing. And there with him in the midst of his outrageous fortune we see all that we can ask of ourselves, to continue with a little laugh, to be. Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler wrote the lines, “It’s amazing. In the wink of an eye you finally see the light. It’s amazing when the moment arrives you know you’ll be alright.” The sword that will protect you always is clear of the rock to become newly owned. This is knowledge that can only be known in retrospect and, it must be said, can be forgotten too. So thank you Tommy, it is given to few to be able to die in public. So lets all remember, “Ashes to ashes, for richer for poorer, may the force be with you, because you're worth it.” RIP.

Who's Bad?

As this blog is for the more discerning reader who won’t have watched it I’ll Streeeepify the inaugural meeting of last night’s new Celebrity Big Brother series and the F Listers’ first taste of champagne since their dreadful lawn mover accident went viral on You Tube in 1997.  Mr Starzan Stripes kicked off but, being old and confused, soon got lost in the toilet. A perky Eastenders young lady, born in episode 3 to Dot and Jim and presumably now resting in prison or a canal, joined, followed by two blond Hugh Hefner play twins and a similarly shaped page three girl. Mr Stripes and the play twins like most Americans faced with our quaint English reality appear brainless so far but it’s early days. A Welsh gay rugby player; where do they find these people, a young fey nob and a TOWIE resident. And then the recent failure par excellaunce of  X Factor, Frankie Cocozza, the McDonalds easy eat patty in the Big Brother bun. Frankie is trying to write himself into our consciousness as the ‘bad boy’ of pop. He began tastefully enough by shagging the majority of his holiday camp female staff members whilst his mate tattooed their names on his bottom, a feat that in my imagination is damn nigh impossible, so kudos to the guy. His inability to sing, his bad whipped diesel hair, his bad behaviour have in fact been so bad he’s single-handedly managed to reset the definition of bad, so expertly reversed by Michael Jackson, back to bad. Yes Frankie, you have to be good to be bad. Anyway it’s nice to have the word back so thanks for that. Then the peck over after program where an underdressed fairy god mother with a microphone wand conducting a pompous panel of self promoting pratts and an audience of norms, so pleased to have been selected they whoop with delight over someone saying ‘the’, assess the meat. We now have an immediate use for our newly reclaimed word. In fact bad doesn’t even cover it. In fact by the end I’m beginning to feel I am that person trying to tattoo girls’ names on Frankie’s bouncing bottom. Who’s bad?

BH I’d betr DS.

It seems Merrell Streeep has set the tone for 2012: Belligerence. Yep bile.co.uk will be my new home. So OK when do teenagers’ sensory organs kick in? I mean when does their sensory outputs begin to affect the teenager as a whole, as in bodily action. They’ve like got a set top box but the cable’s missing to the TV. They can turn a bedroom into a bombsite and moan they can’t find anything. They lob their mobile phone around like a bar of soap, which I grant you is a similar shape, but considerably less expensive. Not a day goes by without the familiar clatter of an iPhone hitting the deck. Does Sony-Eriksson realise they need to drop test their products by slinging them from the top deck of a bus onto the concrete in front of another one?  Sensory awareness of household necessities like washing up, vacuuming, cooking, clearing and cleaning just dribble out of their open unconnected socket, elbowed into obscurity by a five year old Sheffield Wednesday goal or the latest Hollyoaks sit-trage. In fact life can be plotted as a series of, “Bloody hell I’d better do something” moments where the oil tanker of unconcern hits the rocks of impending oily sea birds disaster. It begins when shitting your nappy turns from a pleasure to un-pleasure and becomes. “Woow quick, where’s mi potty!” The next, assuming the parent provides every necessity FOC, is GCSE’s. Whilst it’s quaintly touching that teenagers have such faith in educational osmosis there comes a time, usually days before the exam, where mere presence proves insufficient and they realise effort is involved. The next of course is their degree. Here their own personal state sponsored mortgage provides for their advancing needs of beer, drugs and clubs etc until such point that another ‘BH I’d betr DS’ moment kicks in. Somewhere along the line there’s one or more sexual encounters that also provide a similar moment. Next the long process of romantic solidification throws up moving in, engagement, marriage and kids, and it’s back to, “Woow quick, where’s the potty!” And then of course there’s death where it changes slightly to, “Bloody hell I could have done something.”

It’s how we are.

 So a bat and a ball cost $1.10 and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Well 50% of Harvard students said 10cents. It sounds right but the proper way is to say if X equals the ball cost then X + (100+X) = 110cents. Thus 2X = 110 – 100 = 10, therefore the ball costs 10/2 = 5cents. Apparently we’re plagued with many falsehoods like this simple example. Students were asked to read a list of words, Florida, golf, retirement, pension, and when asked to walk along a corridor walked slower, like they were ‘old.’ When their computer screensaver was set to floating dollar signs they became more selfish and insular. Presumably if it was set to clips from hit musicals they’d become more friendly with Dorothy. We are apparently led by the nose or ‘primed’ by numerous influences we barely notice. No doubt Merrell Streeep’s father was a keen collector of Nazi memorabilia, but I digress. Linx ads for example don’t focus on its pleasing aroma or its capacity to seal up your sweat glands, they know young lads want a shag, dream about having a shag and imagine shagging 24/7 so they show the open epithelial duct of shagarama heaven, collaterally pimping for the whole female race, whether they like it or not. Shop windows are only there to pre-moisten your buying juices before you enter. Honestly if you could avoid shop windows, TV ads, glossy magazines etc etc etc you’d find yourself wanting for nothing: well apart from sex, warmth and food. And when the guy who won the Nobel Prize for this research was asked, “So what can we do about it?” replied, “Well nothing much, it’s just how we are.” 

Just Another Day.

After the gales woke me up all night they blew over our recycle bin dumping bottles and converting our empty cans into far-flung wind chimes all over the neighbourhood. It was a pleasant sound so I left them to it. Plan for the day was to insulate our airing cupboard which required the purchase of an 8’x4’ sheet of Celotex insulation board. Considering the 60mph winds I decided, seeing as even the short journey from shop to car might lead to me showing up on some air traffic controller’s radar, it would be better left to another day. I had lunch. What the hell I’m retired, that’s a busy morning for me. Sod it this isn’t going anywhere, I’ll slag off Merrill Streeep. She’s nut squashingly crap at acting. You can see the stage directions running through her mind, “OK Merl baby, three paces forward, move head right, smile, look unsure, raise hand. Cut. No no no, a smile is where you show your teeth, no not like that, like when you’re pleased, remember  being pleased? Oh, OK well it’s like when you trod on that baby and its head popped off, yeh, and you smiled yeh? Like that.” Anyway we just watched Mama Mia because Man U was losing 3:0 to Newcastle. That film is toasted exploding gonads crap! So what if they had a ball making it, I enjoy a good defecation but I don’t film it and put it on in cinemas with surround sound! Wasn’t she in ‘The Hours’? Honestly NEVER go to see that film unless you’re considering suicide and looking for a reason. I know she could play Ilse Koch – The Nazi SS Bitch of Buchenwald who made lampshades and handbags from prisoner skin and really did squash prisoners’ nuts. Anyway Merrell has given me great pleasure over the years like a piñata, a hanging effigy you beat with a stick till it bursts and sweets come out. It’s not all bad.

The RC Party.

Well Christians, what can I say? A party of RCs’; onomatopoeic or the closest I’ll ever get to a Republican Convention? First of all let me say we love our Greco-English neighbours, they could be Gerald Durrell’s inspiration for ‘My Family and Other Animals’, a wonderful combination of love and space to be their unique selves. A veritable Harrods cheese board of characters, a cornucopia of fruitcakes. They do though invite the local Catholic un-dead to their parties. Like being Tardis-ed into a Republican Convention I am struck dumb, unable to expend even the slightest percentage of lung function in conversation. I genuinely can’t explain it. It’s as if my life flashes in front of me full of the pitfalls I’ve been perpetually struggling to avoid. Niceness. The wonderful farcical contradiction is that Jesus was not a believer. He may have been a profit, a teller of God, a beautiful human being but he wasn’t a believer; he made it up as he went along. Every day it was like ‘wow this life is amazing!’ not ‘Yes I grew zuccinis’ in the states and you know if you leave them too long they grow this big!’ or ‘that colour would look lovely in our lounge.’ Jesus didn’t do that. You can strike me down dead this minute if Jesus, like me and Mothermouse, wouldn’t have been up in the smoking room with the kids within fifteen minutes of arriving. “Who are those loonies downstairs?” “They’re gathering together in your name.” “What!! You’re kidding me. I’ll go down and throw over their table of tasty nibbles.” “No, stay and tell us, how is heaven these days?” “Full, don’t even think about it.” No, Jesus was as meek and mild as Brian Sewell. He wasn’t into tasteful terracotta décor, he brought the dead back to life, which incidentally isn’t even allowed in Star Trek to this day. He was tempted and, unlike Maradona, came back a better player. He was crucified and, unlike most savaged celebs, didn’t resort to a stint in the Big Brother house. He rose majestically from the dead like Take That. He was mega. OK I’m being holier than thou but at least I’m enjoying it.

NYE WMC 2011/2.

So New Year’s Eve at our local Working Men’s Club. I feel fraudulent in that my membership is hours away from being two years out of date, I’m retired and before that I got paid for enjoying myself which doesn’t really constitute work. This is born out by the first round of Bingo. To everyone else is appears to be a pleasant, engaging pastime but to me it was, well work, and unprofitable work at that. So we installed at our table at 7.30 and by 8.30 when the band came on we were already talking about the need for pacing. The band, ‘Jack of Hearts’ is led by Jackmouse who is in turn led by Jackmouse’s ego in the form of a permanent wide brimmed black hat, which gives him the appearance of a guitarist suspended from the claws of a hovering crow. Now music-musician-audience is a delicate triangle especially in a WMC. One wouldn’t for example play a selection of the Third Reich’s Greatest Hits at a bar mitzvah. Likewise one shouldn’t hire a blues band to play a once a year NYE gig, especially one who’s trumpet player thought little of playing in a different key to everyone else and a mix engineer who couldn’t hear the low frequency feedback reminiscent of a passing tube train inches below our feet. I’m torn: I know the months of hard work, practice and the odd fight required to put a band and a set together but that counts for little with an audience that don’t. An audience only wants what they have fondly imagined to be fulfilled, and Dock of the Bay wasn’t it on NYE at the WMC. Thirty minutes of mild unrest and back to Bingo and its variants, Dingo, Pingo and Jingo. Margretmouse proudly whipped out her dibber and it was eyes down to watch your stake disappear. Fag breaks become more frequent as I avoid both the bingo and the band. Half way down the left wall is the Fat Controller/bingo caller behind a tinsel dais. As he proclaims the miracle of counting to the crowded hall a young girl on a spot lit stairway hitches up her knickers in a matter of fact way whilst kids of all ages entertain themselves as their parents drink with one hand and lose with the other. The Fat Controller, like many of the men, is 13 stone from the back and 16 stone from the front. He is chair of the committee, President of the proceedings. The doorman, tasked to keep non-members out is by this time pissed as Canute and letting anyone in for 50p. I talk to a chap at the fag station who has come back ‘up north’ because people are unfriendly ‘down south.’ After ten minutes I know why. I go back inside. The band is playing, the subway train is still passing and the trumpet player is still blasting out eastern semitones to a Jimi Hendrix cover. The evening is also ‘bring your own food’, which proves a god send for passing the time. Margaretmouse, as is her wont, has brought cheese, ham, pastrami and roast pork rolls, bottles of gherkins and funeral onions, at lest that’s what my parents called them, tortillas, bread sticks and, well we never did get to the bottom of her bag. By now it’s twenty to twelve, I’m sober but coughing like a drain. The Fat Controller has had enough of the band and orders Jackmouse to sling his hook. And he’d changed his shirt for the second half, shame. His evening has not gone as he had fondly imagined. The FC, in an effort to raise the mood to a midnight climax, then put on a sounds of the sixties medley featuring The Supremes. We joined hands, sang Old Langsyne and went home. An enjoyable evening, but not as we’d fondly imagined it.