Me, Father Christmas?

Back in 1962 with three A’s at A Level I went to college. It never crossed my mind that when my parents were eighteen they had no such opportunity. In fact by eighteen they were both experienced mill workers. Somehow by eighteen one has grown into the current circumstance as one’s launch pad for the years to come. This hadn’t really struck me till quite recently. My own three sons had all turned twenty three in 2008 and had followed my own progression, a degree and a job earning decent money: My step kids are younger. Now a few nights ago I played at an open mic gig in a student pub full of eighteen, possibly, to twenty year olds. They were all delightful apart from one who, on seeing me said, “Oh look it’s Father Christmas.” I smiled and drew my stomach in. That aside I sensed a seed change in this post 2008 generation. Born into this different world they seem to be integrally aware of it. Where I may think they’re not going to ‘have it so good’ they are in the midst of enjoying it for what it is. They’re not yearning for their first clapped out banger with bald tyres, that turns left if you touch the brakes, they walk and cycle. They’re not looking for a career ladder, they’re making the best of a minimum wage job serving my Father Christmas generation. Their future as I see it is austerity but as they see it, it’s just the future. In Lancashire there’s a saying, “Clogs to clogs in three generations.” It’s as if my generation, the middle one, took the advantages given them by their parent’s clog generation, squandered it on ourselves and presented our own children with a brand new pair of clogs; shameful but understandable. But the kids in the pub were happily making the best of it and in a sense I envy their different set of challenges. I don’t envy their television upbringing and its irrelevance to reality but they’ll grow out of it. But I’m grateful they’re somehow less ageist than my generation, more accepting of us Father Christmases than I ever was.

Chelsea's Great Spirit.

Chelsea beat Barcelona last night against all the odds. Down one goal and to ten men against the recognised ‘best team in the world’ they won. They showed great spirit and belief. I’m also half way through ‘Senna’, the film, and he too had the same spirit and belief. And finally I’ve just watched Queen’s set at Live Aid, where again they stole the show by spirit. Now I’m used to ‘Great Spirit’, I speak to it on the rare occasions I’m in a sweat as the non anthropomorphised form of god. In that context it is ‘out there’ but it seems, for all their human foibles, Chelsea, Senna and Freddy Mercury see it as ‘in here.’ That’s quite a difference. Out there spirit is comforting, somehow manageable and mysterious, but in here, well in me, it’s quite a different matter. It’s frightening, awe inspiring, intimidating. How, I ask myself, can I afford to let that wild animal loose? How can I dare to unleash such energy when it might destroy me, make me a laughing stock? I haven’t. I probably couldn’t even beat Drodba at darts. My spirit sees it as a shame, but says, ‘hey if that’s what you want to do.’ And when I rail at it to show me its ways it just says, ‘trust me,’ oh and, ‘practice, you can’t do anything without practice.’ Practice creates skill which makes belief, and belief allows flight. Ayrton Senna had that belief. On the weekend of his death another driver was killed on the Saturday and Ayrton was torn in many directions. On the Sunday morning he looked to his bible for help. He opened it and read, ‘and god will give you his greatest gift, to see him.’ His accident was a freak. A part of the suspension hit him in the head. Two inches either way and he would have walked back to the pits. After his death the whole nation of Brazil mourned their greatest spirit. So what is great spirit?

European Trombone.

As European debt is looking unsustainable here's a re-post. 
Imagine you see a trombone in a shop window priced £100. It could be a trombone or a strimmer I don’t mind, I’m just not restricting it to musical instruments, or for that matter garden equipment. Lets just say it’s a trombone. But you don’t have £100 so you borrow it off me. As it happens I’m also strapped for cash and lending you the money has zeroed my account so I borrow £100 to tide me over. My good friend lends me the hundred but finds he needs it to pay the builder for his house extension. Being a nice builder he relents and loans him the £100 in loo of what my friend owes him. The builder then finds he’s £100 short of paying for the materials for his next job. You can see where I’m going with this. Anyway there’s no problem because if all else fails you could sell the trombone, pay me back, I’d pay my friend, he’d pay the builder and the builder would pay for the materials thus saving the builders merchant from bankruptcy. BUT what if the trombone was run over by an articulated lorry on the A47 near Newark? You couldn’t pay me, I couldn’t pay etc etc etc. There’s not just the £100 debt you owe me. I owe £100, my friend owes £100, the builder owes £100 and so on. The builders merchant’s declared bankrupt because the trombone of someone he’s never met was squashed on the A47. So how much debt is in the system, a hundred pounds or six hundred? Now if a falling domino produces 1 joule of energy say then a row of a hundred will produce overall 100 joules but the last will fall with 1 joule, the same as the first. That’s very different from say a hundred story building obviously being a hundred times taller than a single story. If one took this additive approach with a million dominoes one would expect the cumulative effect to give rise to a medium sized tsunami but they don’t. They just go topple topple topple. So when we’re X billion pounds in debt is it really X billion or a £100 debt passed on Y million times? In other words, “Which careless bastard allowed his trombone to get run over on the A47 and got us into this mess?”

RIP Bert.

Bert Weedon died today at the age of 91. Bert, though you may not know the name, changed the world about on a par with Einstein. Back in the fifties he wrote a book, a teach yourself guitar book, called ‘Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day.’ Then as now a fourteen year old boy will not continue his efforts for longer than a day if he isn’t a hero by the end of it, so Bert’s book was the answer to many prayers. Even if like me you only read the first dozen pages, it held out that irresistible promise. And by some miracle of education we actually were all ‘coming round the mountain’ by the end of it. And the ‘we’ includes many illustrious names, the Beatles, Stones, The Who, Queen, a whole generation of strummers that went on to change the world, thanks to Bert. Personally I’m in my nineteen thousand, seven hundred and tenth day and still loving it and learning. So Bert wasn’t actually giving us the whole story back then but I’m glad he didn’t. There’s still something magical about that promise. Why mainstream education hasn’t taken it up I don’t know. Imagine “Maths in a day.” If by the end of that magical day you could add two and two and were convinced you’d cracked the back of it you might turn up the following day to sort of finish off the loose ends. I think that’s what I’ve been doing these past fifty years. But they don’t do that in schools, they’re too busy saying ‘well that’s just day one of a five year endurance course’, and to any eleven year old, even girls, that’s one down and one thousand eight hundred and twenty four to go. Where Bert gave us three chords and said the world is yours the other guitar books said place your first finger here, your second here, read these notes, up stroke down stroke etc. Who cares! all we wanted to do was play. And we did. And out of that play came ‘ She loves You’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’,  ‘Tommy’, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Hey Jude’, a thousand examples of the amazing creativity of a generation that changed the world. And that in no small part is down to Bert. Even down to the Mott the Hoople song I’m currently learning, “All the young dudes carry the news, bugaboo dudes carry the news.” And they do, and they will if we let them. RIP Bert.

Buddhism Continued.

Whilst on this Buddhist streak perhaps you’re aware that there have been over thirty Buddhist monks and perhaps nuns self immolating recently. In reaction to the brutalising Chinese occupation of their country they have poured petrol over themselves and lit it. They have wound barbed wire round themselves to stop their Chinese guards from putting it out. Sitting there reading this I imagine you have feelings similar to my writing of it. That transmission seems to me as concrete as the unseen VHF waves that bring me my evenings TV viewing. Those feelings, though dimmed a little by distance, are still virulent, visceral. The currency of my receiver is I think the domain of karma. The Dalai Lama is sadly accepting that these actions of supreme self sacrifice are failing. When I tumble my feelings of all this through my fingers I’m hurt by the Chinese treatment but also by this sacrifice, there’s no difference in the colour of it; it’s just the same hurt. My friend wrote me to say Buddhist teaching says, “the ability to perceive mind of other directly and know what is essentially needed...... humility as a big as an ocean.....I love you Stiffmouse :))” I know ;) but that’s not the point. There’s something about the monks sacrifice that is somehow similar to their Chinese guards sacrifice. Wow, I didn’t see that coming. The Chinese guards are also sacrificing themselves? ‘Yep,’ I’m hearing, ‘now do you get it?’ This is followed by the usual inner conversation, Yes but they’re wilfully brutalising these poor people, they’re causing it, it’s their fault, they’re hateful. I sigh. ‘And what then is essentially needed?’ Oh so I must love them, the bastards. ‘No!’ Oh come on, give me a break, it must be one or the other, what do you want me to do? ‘See their sacrifice.’ What bloody sacrifice? They’re in charge, they’re wilfully doing it! ‘So now do you see their sacrifice?’ Wilfulness? ‘Yes, just as the monks are being wilful. I mean granted they have been goaded into being wilful when they’re trying so hard not to be.’ So you’re saying wilfulness is sacrifice? ‘Often.’ Oh bloody hell stop it! ‘OK you have energy, you are an energetic being right. That energy has direction and in a sense that’s good wilfulness, but you begin to believe you’re separate, that your mind is separate from the mind of all things. That is bad wilfulness.’ Well fine but I’m going to make a cup of tea if that’s OK. ‘That’s fine.’ ‘So?’ Oh sorry you’re still there. ‘Yes. So how are you going to know the difference between good and bad wilfulness?’ Oh so it’s an exam now is it. ‘There, that’s a wonderful example of how you flick your mind to deflect it from the mind of all things. It has a million tricks like that.’ But I don’t understand this mind of all things stuff, explain. ‘Good, that’s good wilfulness. If you can turn to all things and say I don’t understand, explain, that’s good. If for example someone is making you feel bad that’s working on the assumption you’re separate, one thing is ‘making’ the other thing feel bad, but if you say I don’t understand why I’m feeling bad, explain, that’s the mind of all things talking to itself.’ And the Buddhist monks? ‘They have forgotten that in setting fire to themselves they are also setting fire to their Chinese guards.’ But who’s to say you’re not just some smug bastard? ‘Good point.’

False Buddha Syndrome.

I’m the first reported case in the UK. Well the world actually seeing as I’ve just made it up, but I’ve a feeling it may be the next pandemic, so be warned. It hinges as you might expect around wisdom. The early stage symptoms are a slight smugness producing a meaningful but flaccid smile of understanding. A good thrashing will cure this in no time. If left untreated though the patient begins to suffer the delusions of knowing. He may begin to nod and impart his awareness of humanity’s foibles, especially the bit of humanity that includes his partner. This incubation period is difficult to treat. Whatever one does will be feed into his or her complex awareness of foibles and be added to his or her understanding. The sufferer will also subtly modify their foible dictionary with regard to themselves by changing the sign and value of judgments. This becomes an unconscious process impervious to argument. The patient is now at the point of developing full blown False Buddha Syndrome. Here in what’s called the ‘Buddha phase’ mutation begins. The patient’s dictionary of foibles being complete he, well me, takes on the mantle of mastery. He, well I, ceases to pontificate and hears and understands all with the wonderful knowing that all hurt is self inflicted by the ego, that if you are pissed off with him, well me, it’s you and a description of your ego problem is featured on page 472, paragraph 7. The medicine at this late stage has to be self administered and is so bitter it requires a kriptonite spoon as all normal materials melt. The prescription reads, “NEVER think you’re wiser than you are! and as you, i.e. me, haven’t a clue how wise you actually are, best to start at the lowest level you could possibly be.” On very rare occasions Buddha himself has been known to appear to patients and say, “You fucking twat!”

Sexual Brain Surgury.

A friend of mine recently posted an advertising video for shamanic sexuality workshops which I remember doing some ten years ago. The video explains that we all, particularly youngsters, would benefit from freeing ourselves from the guilt and shame surrounding sex and that shameless and guiltless we could go on to experiencing fabulous sex and in the process heal ourselves and the earth. Laudable aims even if the video laid them on thicker than Barbara Cartland’s makeup. Now I was a teenager once, in fact I remember comparing genitals with the girl across the road when I was five. I fell in love with the landlady’s daughter at twelve and I was the first to have a girlfriend at fourteen. After that I have to admit there was a bit of a drought, but I don’t remember being troubled by guilt and shame. OK like most kids I was shy and frustrated like when I didn’t get to fondle Maggie Weller’s tits or reach nirvana up Rhoda’s leg or other stuff I’m not prepared to admit to here but guilt and shame? Not really. Sure I experienced the limitations of what was socially acceptable but that’s nothing to do with me personally. So I do the sexuality workshop. Inside the confine of the workshop what was socially acceptable was admittedly more relaxed but still governed by its own social acceptabilities, and I was introduced to the concept that I should try to overcome my feelings of guilt and shame about sex. Well thanks for the idea implant, not. Then there’s saving the earth by shagging. Now I’m the first to admit I’m not that good at it but being surrounded by people who can apparently do orgasmic brain surgery in the bedroom was a bit of a downer. In fact I began to feel the shame and guilt they were talking about. I was failing my partner, failing our healing and failing the earth. I set too to learn the techniques of these miracles. If I stroke that like this, breath like this and be sexy like that I could… but all I got was a headache from trying to remember it all. Slowly sex stopped being the most natural intuitive intimate and fun thing two people can do and became an intellectual mountain I was failing to climb. And finally I was coupled with a woman I’d barely said hello to to practice what I’d learnt. To be honest I’d rather we’d had a coffee and a chat. And these amazing people who have amazing sex? They kind of make me glad I’m not amazing. Dam, that must mean I should feel guilt and shame. 

Donkey Dick Anyone?

Every so often I look to see what sights blog readers have come from. A year back it was penisenlargement.com, no explanation needed there, last month it was stop-a-cheater.com and today, cigarpass.com. Stop-a-cheater.com is about catching slinky wild cats. Not safaris in Africa; they attempt to catch errant husbands from their mobile phone information in America, i.e. “How come your iPhone was in down town Cincinnati 600 miles from your annual ‘Dog Food and Treats Conference’ in New York when you rang me to say it was boring as hell and you couldn’t wait to get home, you bastard!?” To be honest I don’t have a clue where Cincinnati is so the mileage might be wrong. It’s easily done when you consider England is only the size of a Los Angeles suburb. Cigarpass.com appears to advocate the passing of slobbery tipped cigars between friends, possibly a social mixing device as foreplay before car keys. But my imagination is getting ahead of me. So an interesting and somewhat surprising selection of the world’s internet players. Anyway hi everybody how’s it going? I hear they’re doing donkey transplants in Bulgaria. Sorry, but that’s not a bad idea, I mean so long as the donkey’s had a vasectomy. So what other human enhancements might be gleaned from animal body parts surgery? This is surely an untapped industry of the future. I leave it to your imagination. My favourite though is a baboon’s bottom for those porn stars eager to push the limits for their art. 

Alight Gove?

Teaching’s just too easy to mock. Michael Gove our Education Minister, obviously named by the family’s forelocking tradesman, has a Play Dough face that will surely be remoulded before all this is over by somebody’s fisted forearm. Teachers are up in forearms, they haven’t been given guns yet, over his latest initiatives to bring the lazy, overpaid, good for nothing skivers into line. For some strange reason our liberal free market democracy turns to quaint communist ideology when it comes to education. A Trabant for every boy and girl manufactured by massed ranks of disaffected, spied on, boiler suited automatons marching four abreast to turn levers. This seems particularly perverse for our most human of endeavours. Whilst the rest of us pump our youth full of pop, enrage them with rap and turn their brains to sap with soaps teachers are expected to single-handedly drag the resulting disaffected ragtag into a sufficient state of maturity to receive real-life-relevant knowledge. And whilst spannering on this ramshackled production line they are overseen by legions of foremen from parents, their dogs, Ofsted, Gove, league tables, and now accountants and ‘vent your anonymous spleen’ websites. It can’t be easy not punching the Play Dough. And all this for less money! So the students are racked between Hollyoaks et al where “nobody ever bothers to learn anything” and unfathomable “effort is necessary” maturity, and teachers between a momentary lack of post graduation imagination and a pension. If it’s a marriage it’s not made in heaven. But Gove has one trick that might unravel this unseemly mess. If he reduces the pension so it’s not worth waiting for ……….

All in a Generation.

I must have been cinematically arrogant as a teenager, I avoided such fripperies as ‘The Sound of music’, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and only yesterday watched ‘Mary Poppins’ for the first time. I’m thus a generation late coming to these cinematic gems and can compare my emotional response side by side with the current crop of CGI blockbusters. Oh dear, what has become of us? In one short generation Julie Andrews has been replaced by Angelina Jolie. It’s like the West has become some sick aging banker that’s ditched his worldly strong hearted loving wife for a puffy lipped trollop in hot pants. While his unconscious wrestles with his financio/physical demise his conscious mind dreams about abstract diversions of youthful heroism against computerised cardboard cutouts. How quickly we’ve aged from these are a few of my favourite things to the end of the world is nigh, from a spoonful of sugar to a dollop of depressing debt ridden death. We’rrh dooomed, probably by alliteration. Strangely enough alliteration may be more pertinent than I imagined when I self deprecated just then. Like Doctor Zeus we are perhaps caught in the childish desire of wanting more of the pleasant same in our mouth, like another McDonalds. What happened to ‘I have confidence in confidence alone, because, you see, I have confidence in me’? (Sound of Music in case you’re wondering) But Maria is no longer in the building, well not on a hilltop waving her arms about underneath a helicopter. No, she’s at home, an overweight couch potato wondering if lip surgery might attract a rich aging banker. Don’t go there Maria there’s no future in it. Oh I forgot Maria did attract a rich banker, a Baron even, but by being wonderful, not strapping a pair of tomatoes on her face. So first off tidy your room, come on spit spot. 

My Favourite Thing.

I am tasked to be security over the monthly women’s sweat, an American Indian practice, because ‘for all my relations’, i.e. Mothermouse is taking a fire keeper exam and needs a full crew. I take up position overlooking the surrounding fields, which I later find is slap bang in the middle of the ladies last minute pee area, and consider my role. Being security is not being the welcoming committee so I focus fibre-ly on the fields and ignore the assembling ladies. The doggie side of my nature finds this incredibly difficult but I settle in to two or so hours of the same. The light drifts lower, the night lights in the grass that define the path begin to glow brighter and the fire to heat the rocks cackles its flecks of light throughout the stand of trees round the sweat. It’s a little chilly but a beautiful still evening with absolutely nothing to be secure from. It might appear I am wasting my time doing a job that need not be done, sitting in a field on my own looking at the dim outlines of roofs and trees, but I settle down to enjoy it. On a later security walk through the kitchen garden and into the gloom of the top field I’m startled to find three Hari Crishna’s on a bench doing the same, presumably for the purposes of some enlightenment. Now a few days ago someone posted on Facebook a dog’s and cat’s diary. The cat’s was written as though the cat felt unjustly imprisoned by its humans, which as any cat owner will testify, is quite opposite to the truth. A cat will come and go whenever it likes and only puts up with its pet humans for reasons of food, comfortable sleeping situations and warmth. The dog’s diary on the other hand read, “9am- breakfast, my favourite thing. 9.30am- a car ride, my favourite thing. 10.00am- a walk in the park, my favourite thing. 11.00am- got rubbed and petted, my favourite thing, >>>> 5pm- dinner, my favourite thing” and so on. Now I’ve bounced off various forms of spiritual enlightenment over the years and I have to say for me the dog’s got it right. I could sit at the feet of gurus, follow umpteen different paths and practices, suffer difficult ceremonies, believe in gods and spirits and I would have failed them all if I couldn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Tea and toast, my favourite thing. Do washing up, my favourite thing. Run kids to school, my favourite thing. Go to work, my favourite thing, >>>> bedtime, my favourite thing.” Oh and pointlessly sitting on my own in a field in the dark, my favourite thing.

Is it me?

So last night, the first Thursday in the month, it was another gathering of the shamanistas. We all have fibres coming from our tummies that whip around like tree branches in a tornado untroubled by the time and physical encumbrance of the rest of us. My best guess is they’re the direction of our unconscious attention, and that being down there underneath our conscious radar are a conduit for our chi. We can lose and gain, give and take energy, heal and spoil in this underworld economy. But though it’s occurring 24/7 whether we like it or not and we couldn’t function without it, it’s as susceptible as snow on a hot tin roof to melting away under scrutiny. Davemouse suggests we try a French handshake. As with kissing and all things French it’s more intimate than our English hand wrestle. He takes my hand in demonstration and we attempt to glean some inner appreciation of each other. I as usual fail to glean anything more than an aching shoulder but Davemouse being more expert at this sort of thing gleans I deserve a beaming smile. My ensuing confusion is whether my innermost presence is absolutely lovely or whether it’s so poverty stricken it needs an exceptionally large dose of encouragement. As Davemouse conducts these meeting on the basis of plumbing the depths and boundaries of our ignorance rather than fast tracking us towards nirvana and beyond I venture a personal conundrum. I begin, “I’ve been wondering about you know if you sort of squeeze around your second shacra you get a sort of burst of sexual emotional energy up through your body, what’s that about?” Davemouse looks at me blankly. I look around the room. More blank faces. “Like this”, I demonstrate. Of course nothing is apparent apart from a burst of sexual emotional energy up through my body. Nope, nothing. We gloss over the fact I am a sexually and emotionally repressed pervert and move on.

Clegg’s Visage.

Rick Clegg, yes I know it’s Nick but Rick suits him better, anyway Rick’s face could have gone to a comprehensive. He has that slight look as if he might be listening, possibly from having his packed lunch stolen by one of the bigger boys. Rick’s coalescence is necessary as the voice of, “We Libbylibby Demdems really don’t want to do it but, well the school Bullindon made me.” This allows the school Bullindon to say, “It must be right because even Cleggy in Y7 says so.” So today’s news: We’ll scrute your mail, tax your tweets and have private courts, and convert Britain into one big Guantanamo Bay holiday camp; you’ll love the sunny weather by the sea. But in the face of universal condemnation Cleggy is pushed forward and offers the voice of Y7 reason. ‘The coalescence will not push this legislation through parliament; we’ll have a proper debate about it first.’ Oh thanks Rick but isn’t that the whole idea of parliament? Remember playground rules and such, and the school’s zero bullying policy. ‘Well yes but well to be honest it’ll only be a formality. You see he’s still got my lunch box and, well he said he’d give it back if….’ And Ken Clarke’s visage, a punch bag if ever I saw one. No more visages.

The Visage of David.

David Cameron’s smooth features on the other hand are often depicted as flattened by a tight fitting condom into a permanently flustered, verging on red, humph; an ever present explosion contained in a smugbag, his complexion still redolent of an over zealous nanny scrubbing along to, “If it doesn’t hurt it’s not clean,” and, “A little bit of damage makes the medicine go down….” But he too has the natural botoxed look of hereditary privilege. It defeats me why the English public vote Conservative knowing their allegiances are to those that count their fortunes in noughts not numbers and trickle down debt to the rest of us. Perhaps it’s their clear masterful vision of what we must suffer to attain our bright new future together. Lately it’s reminded me of cleaning out my shed. Out went all the things I no longer use, NHS, rusty spanners, local services, old bike wheels, and pensions etc to make more room for a bigger motorcycle. But if one looks more closely at those with clear masterful vision one perceives the singular performance of a one trick pony. Their confidence in their one way is merely the result of being unable to conceive of any other. “Well we’ve been doing this for generations and look where it’s got us old boy. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it yah.” But if you happen to be the rust on a spanner or the spokes of an old wheel watch out, it’s skippy time. In fact fuck it, I’ll knock the whole shed down and build a garage for my new Lamborghini. 

The Visage of George.

Christening my new keyboard with all the letters on for a change. Now everyone can have the occasional unflattering picture taken of them, a moment after their fingers were caught in a car door or in the midst of eating something disgusting, but George Osborne somehow has a face that is permanently unflattering. It’s not disfigurement or genetic ugliness; it’s in the way he wears it, in how his life experience has grown it into being. I mean that’s not necessarily bad, the vast majority of us, whatever our circumstance or age, have reasonably pleasing features that, tastefully captured in a good light, can look attractive in a way that George’s three pink slabs seamed together with the usual features never will. It’s not an expression it’s something writ large in the very fabric of his visage. He’s a walking talking platitude, a bromide cliché. His face is of a parasite written in skin because in all his forty odd years he has sucked off his surroundings, picked ticks from rhinos, fed like a tapeworm off his hosts. His only consideration is whether his host has the capacity to feed him and if not he simply moves on, and on. It’s not opportunity that’s bad, we’ve all had certain privileges, a good education, good food, good friends, family and problems to overcome, but the parasite has a fundamental disconnect between privilege, opportunity and struggle. In fact as we understand the word he has not had these privileges at all; he has simply been fed without effort. All the difficulties that it has been our privilege to be formed by are absent. He has not been pushed around in his mum’s Tesco trolley, not jostled in state primary school, not struggled with a drum kit in his mate’s garage, waited in a dole queue or counted his change in a Late Shopper. It’s all these privileges of struggle that make a face attractive that shape its interest. No, George has a certain poverty moulded into the clay of the one place he can’t cover up.