It’s odd when you hear a piece of music and, although you have never heard it before, you seem to know it, it seems to be far more familiar than is at all possible. To put it another way, if you were able to compose and perform music in the the same idiom, this would be it. If I can go out on a limb and risk some of the more cynical among you who might happen to be reading this thinking me as the pretentious pillock you always suspected I was, I would say that the music ‘speaks to me’. It’s uncannily as though it were my music.
I have had that sensation several times over the past years, and it happened again a while ago with a piano sonata by Scarlatti (Domenico - there seems to be a whole tribe of them, his dad, his granddad, his brother, two uncles, a chap down the road, old Guiseppe who used to run the bar and compose in his spare time, loads of them, but the one I am referring to his Domenico). The piece is K466 in F minor. I was idly listening to Radio 3 one Saturday morning (and having just written that, I’m beginning to wonder whether one really can ‘idly’ listen to the radio, but there you go) and it was played by some Japanese pianist or other. And it was as though I had known the piece all my life. I ‘understood’ it immediately. It was as though I had composed it. It seemed to describe me and what I felt.
Then there is the music of David Fuiczynski. Same story. I first heard his playing when I bought my first (or second, I can’t remember) MP3 player and with it came a voucher for 20 free downloads. I opted for some jazz guitar and Mr Fiuczynski was one of those playing. And it has to be said that the piece he played was utterly atypical of the the work I later came to know. But on the strength of that one track, I looked him up and, on spec, bought an album called Amandala and exactly the same thing happened: if I were a good guitarists that was exactly the kind of music I would like to create. (As far as I am concerned, Fiuczynski’s music is indefinable - not jazz, not rock, simply itself.)
Most recently it has happened with a composer called Kenneth Leighton. I really can’t remember where I was or how I came to hear it, but I heard a piece by him on Radio 3 and I was hooked. So far I have bought his second and third symphonies.
Similarly, but not quite, is a piece by jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans called Young And Foolish. There is something about it which goes right deep inside me and then towards the end seems to touch a part of me which I feel no one had ever seen for the simple reason that I have tried not to let anyone see it. Sounds like a load of wank, I know, but what the hell.
Here are four pieces, one by each of the above. First up is the piano sonata K466 in F minor by Scarlatti. If it doesn’t sound too daft, I should like this piece played at my funeral.
Then there is a piece by David Fiuczynski. Given his varied output, all I can do is simply choose one of the many pieces by him I have on iTunes, and one of the main reasons I choose this is rather banal: it’s not too long and a good-quality Quick Time movie of it would not be too big to upload.
Here is the fifth movement of the Symphony No 2 by Kenneth Leighton. There is just something about this music I - ahem - adore. Sorry, for that, but that’s how I feel. And it shouldn’t be Sarah Cox, but Sarah Fox. I didn’t realise until a few seconds ago while listening to the piece once it was here on the blog and it’s too bloody late to do anything about it. Well, actually, it’s not too late - I could go back to the original iMovie movie, correct it, re-save the Quick Time movie, upload it again and get it all square but, dear reader, I at this point I really can’t be fucking arsed (and if there are any virgins reading this, make that bloody arsed. Can’t upset people, can I?) So an apology to Sarah Fox will have to do, though I doubt she will ever find her way here. But if you do, Sarah, sorry.
Finally, here is the piece by jazz pianist Bill Evans called Young And Foolish. UPDATE - Feb17, 2013: No it’s not, it’s called Peace Piece. Sorry about that. My mistake. It is also posted on You Tube and some punter called Geoff Rowe put me right. Oh well, lose some, lose some. It is quite simply beautiful, though not exactly in the way you might originally think. I would also like this piece played at my funeral. When I hear it, I feel someone is looking into my soul, especially the discordant bits towards the end. Thing is, that’s me and everyone else who was once young and foolish. More wank, I’m afraid, but there you go.
I trust you like some, perhaps even all of them. If you are interested in other videos, you can find them here.Oh, and as I have gone out on a limb in this entry and laid myself wide open to ridicule in some of my descriptions, I might as well add that apart from the Scarlatti sonata and the Bill Evans track a third piece I should like played at my funeral is Mozart’s Symphony no 41, and if time is a little short and the undertakers are getting restless to get me down under sooner rather than later so they can bugger off and get home before dark, I should at least like that symphony’s last movement played.
Saturday, 27 October 2012
Thursday, 25 October 2012
In which, for no very good reason I can make out, I go to bed without supper...
Well, an interesting 24 hours which at the point of writing - 8.45pm - is soon to culminate with me going to bed with no supper. Not that I have done anything wrong, it’s just that I am married to a rather odd woman who insists on doing things her way however daft, not to say utterly and bafflingly incomprehensible, her way might be.
Finished my Wednesday shift at 6pm as usual last night, but instead of taking myself off down the M3, then the A303 as usual, with my usual stop-off in South Petherton in Somerset or Sticklepath on the edge of Darmoor for a pint or two of cider and a cigar, I headed out to a little village a few miles north of High Wycombe to visit the widow of an old friend of my father’s.
When my stepmother had her stroke five-and-a-half years ago, Susan, by then already widowed for a few years, took on my stepmther’s two dogs, two springer spaniels called Daisy and Puffin. Daisy was already a grande dame and died not long afterwards, but Puffin was in her prime and proved to be excellent company for Susan. Sadly, Puffin had to be put down a month or two ago because of bad health (I think it was cancer) and when I heard, I rang Susan and gathered (although she never said a word) that she was feeling very bereft and lonely.
So I decided to visit her and take her out for a meal, a deed made far, far easier and extremely pleasant to boot in that Susan is very good company and, although by now over 80, still very girlish and young in the way that some folk miraculously remain young in spirit and thus give the impression of being far younger than they really are. Susan lives in a cottage which was once two semi-detached cottages, and walking into the house is like stepping back into the Fifties, with books and papers and a variety of pictures and paintings everywhere. Before she retired she taught art and is still active.
Rather than drive home after supper, I slept at Susan’s and took off down here to Cornwall in the morning, dropping in on my mother’s grave at the cemetery at Lower Assendon near where we once lived on the way home. At the end of last week, I took a picture of my two children, then printed it out at work and got Ron (at work about whom I could write several thousand words) to laminate it. I left this with a pot plant at my mother’s grave. I have not been there for several years, but I think I am the only one of my family to visit it. Perhaps my sister does when she is here in Britain, but I know neither of my two brothers do. In fact, I would be surprised if they knew where it is. I left the picture of my two children because between us all, my mother, were she still alive would have six grandchildren but died before any of them was born. And she was the kind of woman who would just loved to have been a grandmother and spoilt her grandchildren rotten (as is, of course, exactly as it should be).
After that I headed off west through Reading, but taking the A34 south to Newbury to join the A303 (such details making essential reading for all the nerds who do me the honour of reading the crap I write), took a wrong turning and found myself heading south for Southampton, although far. This is where I made a mistake: rather than retrace my tracks and rejoin the A303 I ‘got clever’ (a perpetual flaw of mine, and despite long ago realising the certain dangers of ‘getting clever’, I still fall for it.)
In this case I decided that, courtesy of my satnav, I would just keep ‘heading west’ and ignore its instructions. The upshot was that I criss-crossed most of west Hampshire and east wiltshire, getting nowhere closer to Cornwall than had I been exploring the Gobi desert. That
meant that a journey which should have taken me just over four hours took seven, although one of those hours was taken up with stopping off at the Taw River Inn in Sticklepath for a pint of cider (at just £1.90 - fuckwits in London and especially the Scarsdale Tavern take note) and a couple of bags of cheese and onion crisps. Oh, and to oogle Shona, who is not in the slightest bit pretty and a tad dumpy to boot, but who I could give one just like that. Furthermore, I get a slight impression she wouldn’t mind being given one). Then it was on homewards.
Here my daughter has buggered off to some school function, my son went off to football and my wife announced she ‘wasn’t hungry’. And nothing had been prepared. But I am hungry. I drove off up to The Old Inn, but that has been taken over from the two woofters who used to run it (and used to have a reasonably decent pub food restaurant) by someone who likes to attract the punter with ‘all you can eat and then some’ offers, which is not really my kind of thing (although he gains a brownie point or two for having reinstated the pool table which the woofters had got rid of to make way for more restaurant tables). I came back home and toyed with the idea of an Indian in Wadebridge, then a visit to the Blisland Inn (in Blisland - now there’s a surprise), but finally can’t get enthused about much. I finally decided to settle in, finish off the bag of Kettles salt ’n cracked pepper crisps (how is ‘cracked pepper’ different to ‘pepper’ I wonder?) feel sorry for myself that I shall be going to bed hungry. But don’t worry, we Scorpios have long memories and my wife really hasn’t heard the last of this.
Enjoy your supper.
Finished my Wednesday shift at 6pm as usual last night, but instead of taking myself off down the M3, then the A303 as usual, with my usual stop-off in South Petherton in Somerset or Sticklepath on the edge of Darmoor for a pint or two of cider and a cigar, I headed out to a little village a few miles north of High Wycombe to visit the widow of an old friend of my father’s.
When my stepmother had her stroke five-and-a-half years ago, Susan, by then already widowed for a few years, took on my stepmther’s two dogs, two springer spaniels called Daisy and Puffin. Daisy was already a grande dame and died not long afterwards, but Puffin was in her prime and proved to be excellent company for Susan. Sadly, Puffin had to be put down a month or two ago because of bad health (I think it was cancer) and when I heard, I rang Susan and gathered (although she never said a word) that she was feeling very bereft and lonely.
So I decided to visit her and take her out for a meal, a deed made far, far easier and extremely pleasant to boot in that Susan is very good company and, although by now over 80, still very girlish and young in the way that some folk miraculously remain young in spirit and thus give the impression of being far younger than they really are. Susan lives in a cottage which was once two semi-detached cottages, and walking into the house is like stepping back into the Fifties, with books and papers and a variety of pictures and paintings everywhere. Before she retired she taught art and is still active.
Rather than drive home after supper, I slept at Susan’s and took off down here to Cornwall in the morning, dropping in on my mother’s grave at the cemetery at Lower Assendon near where we once lived on the way home. At the end of last week, I took a picture of my two children, then printed it out at work and got Ron (at work about whom I could write several thousand words) to laminate it. I left this with a pot plant at my mother’s grave. I have not been there for several years, but I think I am the only one of my family to visit it. Perhaps my sister does when she is here in Britain, but I know neither of my two brothers do. In fact, I would be surprised if they knew where it is. I left the picture of my two children because between us all, my mother, were she still alive would have six grandchildren but died before any of them was born. And she was the kind of woman who would just loved to have been a grandmother and spoilt her grandchildren rotten (as is, of course, exactly as it should be).
After that I headed off west through Reading, but taking the A34 south to Newbury to join the A303 (such details making essential reading for all the nerds who do me the honour of reading the crap I write), took a wrong turning and found myself heading south for Southampton, although far. This is where I made a mistake: rather than retrace my tracks and rejoin the A303 I ‘got clever’ (a perpetual flaw of mine, and despite long ago realising the certain dangers of ‘getting clever’, I still fall for it.)
In this case I decided that, courtesy of my satnav, I would just keep ‘heading west’ and ignore its instructions. The upshot was that I criss-crossed most of west Hampshire and east wiltshire, getting nowhere closer to Cornwall than had I been exploring the Gobi desert. That
Here my daughter has buggered off to some school function, my son went off to football and my wife announced she ‘wasn’t hungry’. And nothing had been prepared. But I am hungry. I drove off up to The Old Inn, but that has been taken over from the two woofters who used to run it (and used to have a reasonably decent pub food restaurant) by someone who likes to attract the punter with ‘all you can eat and then some’ offers, which is not really my kind of thing (although he gains a brownie point or two for having reinstated the pool table which the woofters had got rid of to make way for more restaurant tables). I came back home and toyed with the idea of an Indian in Wadebridge, then a visit to the Blisland Inn (in Blisland - now there’s a surprise), but finally can’t get enthused about much. I finally decided to settle in, finish off the bag of Kettles salt ’n cracked pepper crisps (how is ‘cracked pepper’ different to ‘pepper’ I wonder?) feel sorry for myself that I shall be going to bed hungry. But don’t worry, we Scorpios have long memories and my wife really hasn’t heard the last of this.
Enjoy your supper.
Saturday, 20 October 2012
A great day for fascists: the golden dawn has arrived. It’s not such a great day for the rest of us. Nobel Peace Prize anyone?
Most of my knowledge is of the scavenged variety. It consists of tidbits and scraps gathered here and there which can then be stitched together into an apparently coherent whole. Carefully trotted out and dipped into conversation as almost an aside, this knowledge can then give the impression of being but the tip of an iceberg, that had I but world enough and time others might well be treated to a marvellous exposition of some more arcane aspect of what is being discussed, but that I am far too well-mannered to ‘show off’ and quite possibly risk showing up some in the company who might not be as well-read, well-informed and as wise as I apparently seem to be. It takes a little, though not a great deal of, skill to achieve the effect and, as always, the admirable principle is ‘less is more’.
In the 140-odd words I have written so far, I have already attempted (and, I bloody well hope, achieved) persuading some of you - though most certainly not all - that I am rather well-read and you might well have marvelled at my skill in weaving into the fabric of this piece, a paraphrase of a well-known poem. It is, of course, all complete bullshit. Despite having taken an English literature course at Dundee University, I was comprehensively failed by the English department for hardly turning in any work and what I did turn in being immature cack. Oh, and I read very, very few of the set texts.
Incidentally, you might be familiar with another ploy used by some to intimidate others. It consists of some twat or other declaring something along the lines of: ‘As Mallarmé put it so well ...’ followed by a minute or two of something in French, delivered in the sure knowledge that you don’t ‘have’ any French of any kind and that even if you did, you would not be familiar with the piece quoted. The intention is the not-so-subtle ‘you’re an ill-educated oik, whereas I’m not, and I think it is best to make sure we both know it sooner rather than later in a relationship which, believe me, will be as brief as it is unimportant’. A related ploy is to
announce something like ‘you’ll be familiar, of course, with Weaver’s delightful demolition of the Nicene creed as being complete epistemological nonsense’, knowing full well that you are not familiar with anything of the kind and that the only ‘Weaver’ you have heard of was the sidekick in Gunsmoke and the main man in McCloud. Or how about ‘don’t you think when it comes to Japanese hikrati tokumoru, Bullock gets it just right?’ Bollocks gets it just right would be more to the point.
The above should set the scene nicely for what comes next: I came across it a few days ago, and it seems rather apt for our times. I shall now look it up on the net to make sure that my belief that it is indeed by Mark Twain (that’s what the chap said who used it in the piece I read). A minute later: Yes it was. He is said to have remarked: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
I have recently done many things, but two of them are to watch every episode so far of Boardwalk Empire, and to dig out reports of the rise of (Χρυσή Αυγή or, for those who don’t ‘have’ Greek, Chrysi Avgi). (‘Mum, he’s doing it again!’ ‘Just ignore him, dear, he only wants attention, and if you ignore him he’ll go away. Just ignore him.’)
Boardwalk Empire is relevant because it portrays the lives of a list of Prohibition Era gangsters in Atlantic City, New York, Chicago and Philidelphia and the speakeasy culture which evolved because of prohibition. The Twenties were also known as the Jazz Age and were a time of expansion, growing credit and exuberant business of all kinds and which ended rather suddenly with the Wall St. crash in October 1929. The Depression followed the crash and the misery it caused help the fascists in Germany and Spain (and far earlier in Italy) gain popular support.
I am not, of course - I’m not daft - declaring that the Noughties (as the first decade of the 21st century is known to some) is a repeat of the Twenties, but they do seem to rhyme and I would be on firmer ground to claim that there are a great deal of similarities: the wilful business exuberance, the delusion that the stock bull market was here to stay (one of the bigger idiots produced by ‘New’ Labour promised there would be ‘no return to boom and bust’. Yeah, right), everyone living the life of Riley (mainly because the Chinese were selling the goods they produced at or even below cost in order to ‘grow’ their economy) and generally the conviction that the good times were here to stay. They weren’t, of course, as many said and we all - in our heart of hearts - knew. We are now paying the price.
I have been banging on about what a dog’s dinner the whole euro project is and always has been and, to be honest, it would bore me too much yet again to bang on some more. Like many others I follow the news and the ‘latest developments’, and in if one takes those developments individually, they can seem to make sense. But if, metaphorically, you go up the hill and survey the European economic landscape from a better perspective, it would be hard to argue that it is all complete madness. In both Greece and Spain, one in four people of working age is out of a job. In Spain the Spanish Red Cross has appealed to ‘the better off’ to donate food to ‘those who aren’t so well off’. In Greece, hospitals are opening only two or three days a week and many pharmacies have run out of drugs. There are daily demonstrations outside the Spanish parliament. In several weeks, Catalonia will hold a referendum on whether to declare independence. And in Greece, Golden Dawn, a gang - it would simply be dishonest to describe them as a ‘political party’ - is gaining ever more support. Several years ago, they were regarded by the Greeks as the nutters they are and
could only manage to win 0.4pc of the vote. At the most recent general election they gained 12pc. And estimated 60pc of the police in Greece are members of Golden Dawn. They have started a public campaign of ridding Greece of immigrants - they declare they want to ‘get the stench out of Greece’. By ‘stench’ they mean the immigrants. They are well organised. They have a network of ‘help bureaux’ where people can get food and other assistance. They are getting their support where all fascists parties get their support: among the dispossessed and those who have lost hope among the poor and lower middle classes.
The point must be made again that none of this would be possible without the misery the euro crisis has created in Greece. Certainly, what Angela Merkel insists upon as part of her plans to ‘save the euro’ makes a certain sense in context: why should a country like Greece which lived beyond its means for so many years be bailed out without itself helping to sort out the problem by cutting back on public spending? But that misses the point entirely: and
the point is that we should be here in the first place. And worst of all is that there is no longer an equitable solution. None whatsoever. We are too far down the road for that. Golden Dawn is up and running, and the fascist genie is out of the lamp.
We all - all of us ‘baby boomers’ who have lived through the 67 years of peace which - oh, the irony! - have earned the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize - imagine that it will all ‘come right in the end’, that now is not the time to become a Cassandra, ‘they’ will sort it out. Oh really? Yes, it will ‘all come right in the end’ rather as the fuckup that was Nazi Germany ‘all came right in the end’ 23 years later by the mid-1950s. Me, I’m 63 next birthday and won’t see the worst of it. It is my 16-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son whose lives and well-being I fear for.
In the 140-odd words I have written so far, I have already attempted (and, I bloody well hope, achieved) persuading some of you - though most certainly not all - that I am rather well-read and you might well have marvelled at my skill in weaving into the fabric of this piece, a paraphrase of a well-known poem. It is, of course, all complete bullshit. Despite having taken an English literature course at Dundee University, I was comprehensively failed by the English department for hardly turning in any work and what I did turn in being immature cack. Oh, and I read very, very few of the set texts.
Incidentally, you might be familiar with another ploy used by some to intimidate others. It consists of some twat or other declaring something along the lines of: ‘As Mallarmé put it so well ...’ followed by a minute or two of something in French, delivered in the sure knowledge that you don’t ‘have’ any French of any kind and that even if you did, you would not be familiar with the piece quoted. The intention is the not-so-subtle ‘you’re an ill-educated oik, whereas I’m not, and I think it is best to make sure we both know it sooner rather than later in a relationship which, believe me, will be as brief as it is unimportant’. A related ploy is to
The above should set the scene nicely for what comes next: I came across it a few days ago, and it seems rather apt for our times. I shall now look it up on the net to make sure that my belief that it is indeed by Mark Twain (that’s what the chap said who used it in the piece I read). A minute later: Yes it was. He is said to have remarked: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
I have recently done many things, but two of them are to watch every episode so far of Boardwalk Empire, and to dig out reports of the rise of (Χρυσή Αυγή or, for those who don’t ‘have’ Greek, Chrysi Avgi). (‘Mum, he’s doing it again!’ ‘Just ignore him, dear, he only wants attention, and if you ignore him he’ll go away. Just ignore him.’)
Boardwalk Empire is relevant because it portrays the lives of a list of Prohibition Era gangsters in Atlantic City, New York, Chicago and Philidelphia and the speakeasy culture which evolved because of prohibition. The Twenties were also known as the Jazz Age and were a time of expansion, growing credit and exuberant business of all kinds and which ended rather suddenly with the Wall St. crash in October 1929. The Depression followed the crash and the misery it caused help the fascists in Germany and Spain (and far earlier in Italy) gain popular support.
I am not, of course - I’m not daft - declaring that the Noughties (as the first decade of the 21st century is known to some) is a repeat of the Twenties, but they do seem to rhyme and I would be on firmer ground to claim that there are a great deal of similarities: the wilful business exuberance, the delusion that the stock bull market was here to stay (one of the bigger idiots produced by ‘New’ Labour promised there would be ‘no return to boom and bust’. Yeah, right), everyone living the life of Riley (mainly because the Chinese were selling the goods they produced at or even below cost in order to ‘grow’ their economy) and generally the conviction that the good times were here to stay. They weren’t, of course, as many said and we all - in our heart of hearts - knew. We are now paying the price.
I have been banging on about what a dog’s dinner the whole euro project is and always has been and, to be honest, it would bore me too much yet again to bang on some more. Like many others I follow the news and the ‘latest developments’, and in if one takes those developments individually, they can seem to make sense. But if, metaphorically, you go up the hill and survey the European economic landscape from a better perspective, it would be hard to argue that it is all complete madness. In both Greece and Spain, one in four people of working age is out of a job. In Spain the Spanish Red Cross has appealed to ‘the better off’ to donate food to ‘those who aren’t so well off’. In Greece, hospitals are opening only two or three days a week and many pharmacies have run out of drugs. There are daily demonstrations outside the Spanish parliament. In several weeks, Catalonia will hold a referendum on whether to declare independence. And in Greece, Golden Dawn, a gang - it would simply be dishonest to describe them as a ‘political party’ - is gaining ever more support. Several years ago, they were regarded by the Greeks as the nutters they are and
The point must be made again that none of this would be possible without the misery the euro crisis has created in Greece. Certainly, what Angela Merkel insists upon as part of her plans to ‘save the euro’ makes a certain sense in context: why should a country like Greece which lived beyond its means for so many years be bailed out without itself helping to sort out the problem by cutting back on public spending? But that misses the point entirely: and
We all - all of us ‘baby boomers’ who have lived through the 67 years of peace which - oh, the irony! - have earned the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize - imagine that it will all ‘come right in the end’, that now is not the time to become a Cassandra, ‘they’ will sort it out. Oh really? Yes, it will ‘all come right in the end’ rather as the fuckup that was Nazi Germany ‘all came right in the end’ 23 years later by the mid-1950s. Me, I’m 63 next birthday and won’t see the worst of it. It is my 16-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son whose lives and well-being I fear for.
Monday, 15 October 2012
Worst news of the week: the Stones aren’t just not yet dead, they are going to play some more gigs. Can it get worse? No, not really – I’m not a fan of twats like Jagger
Quite possibly the worst news of the day is that The Rolling Stones are due to play a series of gigs in London and the U.S. The usual crap PR spiel tactics were used to make the news ‘exciting’: I was in the gym which was tuned to London’s XFM station when the presenter told us that he had some news to tell us about the Stones, but couldn’t do so yet – just stay tuned and he would reveal all by noon. The purpose of his schtick is, of course, to keep the listener tuned into XFM rather than any of the other London stations, but this ‘we’ve got some fabulous news to tell you about the Stones’ is so old hat, you can even get arrested for using it in some of the trendier parts of London.
The only fabulous news I want to hear is that Jagger – especially bloody Jagger, that multi-millionaire man-of-the-people pseudo Cockney art collecting twat whose one ambition for these past 20 years was to ‘get a knighthood’ - Richard and Wood have were all burnt alive in a car crash. Not Charlie Watts though, because he is rather more down-to-earth. Actually, Richards isn’t too bad, either, except that I have yet to see him interviewed where he makes even a modicum of sense. The guy seems so drug-addled that that when he is asked a question, he goes off-topic within about five seconds, starts some telling some incoherent, rambling anecdote but never finishes it because he ends up cackling like some village idiot when he recalls what made him laugh in the first place. And keep Ronnie Wood out of the car crash, too. He was in a band called Truth with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart which produced a cracking album. So, let’s recap: the only one of the Stones I should like burnt to cinders in the most brutal way is that arch-twat ‘Sir’ Mick Jagger.
When I was a kid, about 134 years ago, the usual pop marketing was to set up bands against each other: you liked one and not the other. Then it was The Beatles v The Stones. More recently is was Oasis v Blur. It’s all horribly phoney, I know, but kids always fall for it, and I fell for it. I was in The Beatles camp, although I also liked the Stones music. The Stones were also marketed as ‘bad boys’, another schtick which also goes down well. The equivalent for females is marketing someone as a ‘slut’, someone some girls can identify themselves with. The ‘bad boys’ image was, we now know, wholly bogus, but that wasn’t the point. The tabloids played along, of course, because that’s the name of the game. As for the music, The Stones weren’t half bad in the early days, but as far as I am concerned their last decent record was several centuries ago – Exile On Main Street. After that there were a couple of singles but like all bands – or rather like almost all bands – they went off the ball in a big, big way.
While writing the above, I have been asking myself why I am so obviously so, so pissed off with them and the ‘exciting’ news of new gigs. I think I know: they are a tragic embarrassment. The truth is that whitey rock and pop stars age very badly – bloody ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney dyes his sodding hair, for God’s sake – but they still soldier on in the delusion that they can still cut it with the young ones. The point is they can’t. Rock, pop, call it what you will was dealt a death blow when it began to be regarded as ‘art’. But it’s not fucking ‘art’: it’s fucking rock, funk, soul, R&B, pop, lover’s rock, grunge. What it isn’t is ‘art’.
The other night I was listening to Radio 4’s poncey 7.15pm arts show Front Row and they had bloody Muse on, waffling on about themselves and their new album and their ‘inspiration’ and the relevance of lyrics. Muse: three delightfully nice middle-class chaps from Teignmouth in Devon you wouldn’t at all be upset to see your daughter marrying. Along those lines one of the
guys in Blur is developed into a cheesemaker. For fuck’s sake, a bloody cheesemaker. I have also been a slow developer and didn’t mature properly until I was well into my 80s, and I do remember being horribly disappointed to hear that one Vince Furnier - the really, really evil one in Alice Cooper - was a highly regarded golfer. Oh, Lord, I cried for days and I hadn’t even heard their music, just one or two singles.
Don’t get me wrong: rock stars, pop stars, call them what you will, can do what they bloody hell they like – but don’t tell us about it. Collect Meissen porcelain, set up a string of garden centres (Jethro Tull’s mainman Ian Anderson has a string of fish farms), join the bloody Women’s Institute, do what the fuck you like – but DON’T let us know. We DON’T want to know. Even at 86 I don’t want to know.
As for the Stones, every pic of the band taken I the past 30 years embarrasses me; these guys are pushing 70 for God’s sake and look it. With the possible exception of Charlie Watts I can honestly say I’ve seen healthier corpses. (For the record I’ve only seen on corpse, but let’s not allow a detail like that to spoil a tirade.) Look at the pic I’ve dug out: can you really take that gang of pensioners seriously as ‘the best rock n’ roll band in the world’. If the answer’s yes, you are officially banned from reading this blog.
The only fabulous news I want to hear is that Jagger – especially bloody Jagger, that multi-millionaire man-of-the-people pseudo Cockney art collecting twat whose one ambition for these past 20 years was to ‘get a knighthood’ - Richard and Wood have were all burnt alive in a car crash. Not Charlie Watts though, because he is rather more down-to-earth. Actually, Richards isn’t too bad, either, except that I have yet to see him interviewed where he makes even a modicum of sense. The guy seems so drug-addled that that when he is asked a question, he goes off-topic within about five seconds, starts some telling some incoherent, rambling anecdote but never finishes it because he ends up cackling like some village idiot when he recalls what made him laugh in the first place. And keep Ronnie Wood out of the car crash, too. He was in a band called Truth with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart which produced a cracking album. So, let’s recap: the only one of the Stones I should like burnt to cinders in the most brutal way is that arch-twat ‘Sir’ Mick Jagger.
When I was a kid, about 134 years ago, the usual pop marketing was to set up bands against each other: you liked one and not the other. Then it was The Beatles v The Stones. More recently is was Oasis v Blur. It’s all horribly phoney, I know, but kids always fall for it, and I fell for it. I was in The Beatles camp, although I also liked the Stones music. The Stones were also marketed as ‘bad boys’, another schtick which also goes down well. The equivalent for females is marketing someone as a ‘slut’, someone some girls can identify themselves with. The ‘bad boys’ image was, we now know, wholly bogus, but that wasn’t the point. The tabloids played along, of course, because that’s the name of the game. As for the music, The Stones weren’t half bad in the early days, but as far as I am concerned their last decent record was several centuries ago – Exile On Main Street. After that there were a couple of singles but like all bands – or rather like almost all bands – they went off the ball in a big, big way.
While writing the above, I have been asking myself why I am so obviously so, so pissed off with them and the ‘exciting’ news of new gigs. I think I know: they are a tragic embarrassment. The truth is that whitey rock and pop stars age very badly – bloody ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney dyes his sodding hair, for God’s sake – but they still soldier on in the delusion that they can still cut it with the young ones. The point is they can’t. Rock, pop, call it what you will was dealt a death blow when it began to be regarded as ‘art’. But it’s not fucking ‘art’: it’s fucking rock, funk, soul, R&B, pop, lover’s rock, grunge. What it isn’t is ‘art’.
The other night I was listening to Radio 4’s poncey 7.15pm arts show Front Row and they had bloody Muse on, waffling on about themselves and their new album and their ‘inspiration’ and the relevance of lyrics. Muse: three delightfully nice middle-class chaps from Teignmouth in Devon you wouldn’t at all be upset to see your daughter marrying. Along those lines one of the
Don’t get me wrong: rock stars, pop stars, call them what you will, can do what they bloody hell they like – but don’t tell us about it. Collect Meissen porcelain, set up a string of garden centres (Jethro Tull’s mainman Ian Anderson has a string of fish farms), join the bloody Women’s Institute, do what the fuck you like – but DON’T let us know. We DON’T want to know. Even at 86 I don’t want to know.
As for the Stones, every pic of the band taken I the past 30 years embarrasses me; these guys are pushing 70 for God’s sake and look it. With the possible exception of Charlie Watts I can honestly say I’ve seen healthier corpses. (For the record I’ve only seen on corpse, but let’s not allow a detail like that to spoil a tirade.) Look at the pic I’ve dug out: can you really take that gang of pensioners seriously as ‘the best rock n’ roll band in the world’. If the answer’s yes, you are officially banned from reading this blog.
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
In which I introduce a grateful world to my two new enthusiasms: Pink and Boardwalk Empire
Well, it’s all happening: Syria is shooting at Turkey, Turkey is shooting back at Syria, Angela Merkel is in Athens, apparently expressing her solidarity with all those she is reducing to pauperism but actually merely showing that when it comes to tact, the Germans aren’t always on the button, one in four Spaniards who want to work can’t, just months after being elected King of France (although the French don’t actually call it King), Francois Hollande is now less popular than a turd on a living room carpet, and surveys in America report that the voters don’t like Obama or Romney. Yes, it’s all happening, but I have something far more important to report: I have two new enthusiasms.
. . .
The first is the music and songs of a lady called Pink, who might be known to some of you, but perhaps not to all of you. When I mentioned it the other day, I colleague said he was astounded, quite possibly because I am 63 next birthday, or quite possibly there is some other reason. I don’t know. What I do know is that among her peers (although I should add the I haven’t actually heard very much by her peers) I think she stands out rather well.
Discovering her and her music was purely by chance and if it hadn’t been that I heard a particular song, liked it and then heard it was by some singer called Pink, I doubt very much I would have followed it up. But the song, Family Portrait, rather touched me. These days, the only time I hear new music, rather new pop music, is when I am in the gym at work. I
was familiar with her hit Get This Party Started which, although a great pop song, is not, at the end of the day anything more than just a great pop song. And Family Portrait, too, could be seen as just another pop song. But what struck me when I heard it for the first time and what strikes me every time I hear it again, is that Pink sings it from the heart. In it’s way it is as far removed from all the crappy Britney Spears pop mush as a Bach cantata (although superficially it has more in common the Britney Spears than a Bach cantata. That much I’ll admit).
It is a sad song in which Pink simply pleads with her parents not to split up and can’t the family try to get back to what they once were. And that is it. But not much upsets me more than unhappy children, and even though Pink was an adult by the time she recorded that song, part of her still hurts and it comes across in the song. After that I bought one album, then another, then another, and I like her music. For one thing she has a great pop sensibility, but more than that she has a strong voice and can sing. Finally, she has a sense of humour. All in all, 63 next birthday or not, Pink’s my gal.
I might add here that I have also recently bought Dylan’s latest album Tempest. That is great, too. I don’t know how he does it - and the chances are that he doesn’t either - but Dylan does it more or less every time. To this day that opening chord of Like A Rolling Stone sends a shiver down my spine. (And if, by the way, you like it as much as I do, check out Johnny Winter’s version. He makes it a different song, but in its way it is just as good.)
. . .
My second enthusiasm is Boardwalk Empire, the story of Nucky Thompson who I read somewhere is described as a gangster and a politician who can’t decide whether he is more the gangster or the politician. The series is made by HBO and many, many, many of the great
talents who produced The Sopranos are involved in making it. Quite a few film makers have said that the bless the day when television started to allow them to make such series and allowed them to take their time telling a story, letting characters develop. They say that isn’t really possible in the conventional film of between 90 and 120 minutes. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out. Some people say it is ‘boring’ because it is ‘too slow’ and that ‘nothing happens’. Well, if that’s the case they should stick to their Britney Spears collection of albums and leave more room for the rest of us to enjoy it.
. . .
I am always take a look at the stats for this blog every day. It’s a form of vanity, I know, but it is also an interesting insight into what people like to read and what they are interested in. And bugger me if this particular entry doesn’t regularly beat all other entries into a cocked hat. The odd thing is I really don’t know why. Someone care to tell me?
. . .
The first is the music and songs of a lady called Pink, who might be known to some of you, but perhaps not to all of you. When I mentioned it the other day, I colleague said he was astounded, quite possibly because I am 63 next birthday, or quite possibly there is some other reason. I don’t know. What I do know is that among her peers (although I should add the I haven’t actually heard very much by her peers) I think she stands out rather well.
Discovering her and her music was purely by chance and if it hadn’t been that I heard a particular song, liked it and then heard it was by some singer called Pink, I doubt very much I would have followed it up. But the song, Family Portrait, rather touched me. These days, the only time I hear new music, rather new pop music, is when I am in the gym at work. I
It is a sad song in which Pink simply pleads with her parents not to split up and can’t the family try to get back to what they once were. And that is it. But not much upsets me more than unhappy children, and even though Pink was an adult by the time she recorded that song, part of her still hurts and it comes across in the song. After that I bought one album, then another, then another, and I like her music. For one thing she has a great pop sensibility, but more than that she has a strong voice and can sing. Finally, she has a sense of humour. All in all, 63 next birthday or not, Pink’s my gal.
I might add here that I have also recently bought Dylan’s latest album Tempest. That is great, too. I don’t know how he does it - and the chances are that he doesn’t either - but Dylan does it more or less every time. To this day that opening chord of Like A Rolling Stone sends a shiver down my spine. (And if, by the way, you like it as much as I do, check out Johnny Winter’s version. He makes it a different song, but in its way it is just as good.)
. . .
My second enthusiasm is Boardwalk Empire, the story of Nucky Thompson who I read somewhere is described as a gangster and a politician who can’t decide whether he is more the gangster or the politician. The series is made by HBO and many, many, many of the great
. . .
I am always take a look at the stats for this blog every day. It’s a form of vanity, I know, but it is also an interesting insight into what people like to read and what they are interested in. And bugger me if this particular entry doesn’t regularly beat all other entries into a cocked hat. The odd thing is I really don’t know why. Someone care to tell me?
Sunday, 30 September 2012
Oh, the fun to be had in wallowing in filth and vomit. Or why the West is disappearing up its own arse, perhaps mainly because we have had it so good for rather too long
Having said that, what too many of us here in the West see as ‘Muslim’ is often nothing of the kind: we would be wrong to regard the fundamentalist and intolerant Wahabi Islam as more or less what all of Islam stands for, rather as it would be exceptionally silly to think of the far-out whacky elements of fundamentalist ‘Christians’ as representative of all Christians. But I
So I offer you these images, although they are not, in fact, the subject of this entry. What I should like to highlight is how increasingly many in the West, mainly those who regard themselves as being ‘progressive’ and ‘forward-thinking’ are apt to tie themselves into knots trying to excuse the inexcusable. These images are not new and have been knocking around for several years (and are all, incidentally the copyright of the photographer who took them, Maciej Dakowicz). Many were published in 2011 by the Daily Mail (which has its own axes to grind) and, I think, were previously published by the Mail a year or two earlier. But that isn’t the point, either.
I believe these photographs are being exhibited in Cardiff, and a review of that exhibition was published in The Observer this morning. And it is the frighteningly woolly think betrayed by that review (by a chap called Sean O’Hagan) to which I should like to draw attention. You can read his review here, but just one excerpt might serve as an indication that the way the ‘progressive’ left is disappearing up its own arse could well be, in microcosm, how the West is slowly, but surely, losing the plot. O’Hagan writes:
Because of the subject matter of these photographs – the ways in which young people choose to enjoy themselves to excess on a Saturday night – you could say that Cardiff After Dark [the exhibition being reviewed] is a visual essay about Britain's binge-drinking culture. If you were you so inclined, you could even view it as a snapshot of what has gone wrong with Britain since deference and good manners gave way to lack of respect and vulgarity . . . On closer observation, though, Dakowicz's work evades this kind of reductive appraisal. The photographs in this book are loud, the behaviour they show often vulgar. The more you look, though, the more you glimpse a certain collective doggedness in this wild pursuit of pleasure and abandonment, a doggedness that suggests much deeper discontent.
So there you have it: black becomes white, wrong becomes right. The young folk, all the worse for wear, are not, as they might at first seem to be, merely total chavs who think that getting rat-arsed all night, then spewing up, not giving a flying fuck for anyone else and wallowing in the filth of a late-night cityscape are unacceptable, but – according to O’Hagan – something far more noble: they are demonstrating a certain collective doggedness in this wild pursuit of pleasure and abandonment. Not only that but in the same sentence the blame for any bad behaviour is shifted to everyone else in that their doggedness suggests much deeper discontent.
The implication is plain: they are not to blame for behaving like pigs, we – society – is. Certainly, many of them might find themselves in boring jobs and certainly many of them would like to be paid far more, though it has to be said that a great many other folk the world
Is it that they are being denied an education and being made to work very long hours for a pittance from a very early age? No, it’s not that either. Britain has very strict laws on child employment and a free education is available to every British child until the age of 16 at the
So just take a look at the pictures of these ‘discontented’ chavs and ask yourself who, exactly, is to blame for the way they chose to wallow in their own vomit, detritus and filth: them or us? And then ask yourself whether those who would prefer to argue that black is white and that
. . .
It is not the sign of a great mind to quote a line from a soap opera by way of passing on a wisdom. We might all be agreed on that even if the soap opera in question, The Sopranos is not usually regarded as a soap but as something more upmarket, the rule of thumb is soap scripts tend to deal in clichés and seemingly try to avoid any originality as much and as often as possible. (A case in point might be one of my favourite bêtes noir, The Archers, of which, as chance has it, I usually hear a few minutes on a Wednesday night as I drive home from London to Cornwall and a Sunday morning as I drive to work in London: the script is at best abysmal and so choc-a-bloc with clichés – ‘well, as they say, time will tell’ – that it surely deserves some kind of award.)
But great minds or not (and I’m slowly and sadly realising as I approach my dotage that my mind was, is and never will be great), I shall pass on the observation of one character who featured in The Sopranos. She was Svetlana, a one-legged Russian woman who was a friend and confidante of one of Tony Soprano’s former bit on the side and is later hired to keep house and look after Uncle Junior Soprano when he is under house arrest and starts showing signs of dementia.
One day while at Uncle Junior’s house, Tony has sex with Svetlana (or possibly Svetlana has sex with Tony – she is very much her own woman) and afterwards when Tony starts bemoaning his life, she tells him (and here I must paraphrase) that the trouble with Americans is that the are always seeking perfection in everything and are thus necessarily disappointed and unhappy. Russians, she tells him, on the other hand always expect things to be pretty shitty and are quite often pleasantly surprised and as a rule thus a lot happier.
This rather relates to the pictures in the entry above and by contention that we are in the West are now in our declining years. Our problem, to put it bluntly, is that life is generally far too easy for us. Few of us are in want. On the contrary, if we want something, from a two-week holiday abroad twice a year to a new car, a widescreen TV set or any other number of luxury goods, we can – make that could – get them immediately. What with insurance, social and unemployment benefits, state pensions (fabulously good for some in Europe) and infrastructure which makes life very easy indeed, we should have little to grumble about (and let me concede here and now that there are many, though a minority, who don’t share in the good life, but I am talking about the majority of us). But are we grateful? Do we value and cherish our advantages? I would suggest increasingly not: the general rule is that the more we have the less we value it. And the less we have the more we value it. It is a curious fact of life that the poor who have little for themselves are apt to be more charitable and fellow-minded than their more prosperous cousins. It gets worse: the more we have, the more we expect and the more unpleasant we get when we don’t get it.
I have no idea whether you reading this agree with these observations, but I might, in this instance, be forgiven for passing on a piece of wisdom from a soap opera. Pip, pip!
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Another civil war in Spain? Too much Spanish Burgundy or has he finally lost his marbles? It could never happen! No, of course, not, and nor could the massacre at Srebrenica
The obvious question is just how long can it all go one, and by ‘it’ I mean, of course, what might well now be regarded as the ‘phoney war’ in the euro crisis. Superficially, it might all seem to have gone quite, with good ole’ Mario Draghi trying desperately to calm nerves by insisting he and his train set will do everything to make sure the good folk of the island of Sodor will continue to get a rail service second to none - no, look, I’m getting confused: Draghi runs the European Central Bank, not Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.
It’s all so confusing what with everyone being so brave and insisting the euro is here to stay, you mark their words, and this is all just a glitch, a rite of passage through which the currency will pass from adolescence to adulthood. In years to come they, the bankers and politicians and commentators, will crack open a find bottle of brandy and swap anecdotes and memories, and reflect on the high drama when - well, if the truth be told it did, at times, seem touch and go for the dear little euro (such a sweet little currency, who’d have thought it was capable of potentially bringing such grief when all it was intended to do was to be the cement the great European Union and bring peace and goodwill to all good men and true).
But, of course, I’m rambling (as I am apt to do), a mood brought on by some troubling news. There was a demonstration in Madrid today outside Spain’s parliament by the Occupy Congress movement who feel that the government returned by a large majority at the end of last year hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of solving this crisis or any future crisis. But it wasn’t the demo which rather alarmed me - demos come and go and are largely forgotten within days. What I thought more notable was that the Spanish province of Calalonia (do they call the provinces?) is getting mightily fed up and its government has called a snap election with a view to gaining more independence, both political and financial from Madrid. This is not very good news. You can read about the latest developments here and here.
Ordinarily, such a move could well be pooh-poohed as just so much sabre-rattling, signifying nothing, but these are surely not ordinary times. Is it really conceivable that a part of Spain could declare independence? Isn’t that the kind of thing which happens only in history books and which we debate many years after the event?
More than 20 years ago, the American historian Francis Fukuyama published an essay called The End Of History (and later developed his thesis in a similarly entitled book) in which he argued - if I have got it right - that the world had more or less evolved politically as far as it would ever evolve and the our liberal democratic form of government (in the West, at least) was more or less the end stage of that development. What he had so say was a little more subtle, but the general idea was that ‘lads, this is it’. I remember at the time thinking what a crock of shit the idea was, but at the time I didn’t really know what he was suggesting.
Now I know a little more, I can see the point he is making, and although I no longer think it is total bollocks, I do feel he is being a tad optimistic. My point is, though, that the West generally, which has, despite one or two local wars, most notably in the Balkans in the Nineties, enjoyed a sustained period of peace and prosperity, is finding it increasingly difficult to imagine (and accept) that things will not always be like that. Were I here and now to suggest that, for example, there is a distinct possibility of another civil war in Spain, the consensus would be ‘the chap’s off his head/doesn’t know what he’s talking about/has he been drinking?
Truthfully, I know very little about domestic Spanish politics and affairs, but merely suggest the possibility of a second civil war in Spain as the kind of utterly unexpected development we find it almost impossible to get our heads around. And because we find such things impossible to grasp and thus give credence to, they are deemed to be utterly implausible. Brussels and the rest of the EU wouldn’t allow it, you could say. Or you could argue that Western Europe has become far too civilised to countenance any such action on its soil. All I will say to that is: never count your chickens.
The total disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc was, for almost all of us, a pretty unexpected development, but it happened and it happened pretty damn quickly. We are accustomed to hear of massacres and wholesale slaughter in, say, the Congo or Uganda, or Afghanistan and other points east, but we never expected any such wholesale massacre in Europe. Then several thousands Bosnians were massacred in Srebenica. And, most tellingly, they were massacred while Dutch ‘peacekeepers’ more or less looked on and did nothing because any prevention of that massacre ‘wasn’t in its remit’. That would have seemed impossible just days before it happened. And the total inaction of the Dutch to do anything to stop it would have seemed even more unbelievable.
So when this loudmouth points out that things aren’t looking too healthy in Spain and could even perhaps lead to the kind of violence we haven’t seen in Western Europe for 70 years, jeer at me by all means. But at least be a little more prepared to expect the utterly unexpected.
It’s all so confusing what with everyone being so brave and insisting the euro is here to stay, you mark their words, and this is all just a glitch, a rite of passage through which the currency will pass from adolescence to adulthood. In years to come they, the bankers and politicians and commentators, will crack open a find bottle of brandy and swap anecdotes and memories, and reflect on the high drama when - well, if the truth be told it did, at times, seem touch and go for the dear little euro (such a sweet little currency, who’d have thought it was capable of potentially bringing such grief when all it was intended to do was to be the cement the great European Union and bring peace and goodwill to all good men and true).
But, of course, I’m rambling (as I am apt to do), a mood brought on by some troubling news. There was a demonstration in Madrid today outside Spain’s parliament by the Occupy Congress movement who feel that the government returned by a large majority at the end of last year hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of solving this crisis or any future crisis. But it wasn’t the demo which rather alarmed me - demos come and go and are largely forgotten within days. What I thought more notable was that the Spanish province of Calalonia (do they call the provinces?) is getting mightily fed up and its government has called a snap election with a view to gaining more independence, both political and financial from Madrid. This is not very good news. You can read about the latest developments here and here.
Ordinarily, such a move could well be pooh-poohed as just so much sabre-rattling, signifying nothing, but these are surely not ordinary times. Is it really conceivable that a part of Spain could declare independence? Isn’t that the kind of thing which happens only in history books and which we debate many years after the event?
More than 20 years ago, the American historian Francis Fukuyama published an essay called The End Of History (and later developed his thesis in a similarly entitled book) in which he argued - if I have got it right - that the world had more or less evolved politically as far as it would ever evolve and the our liberal democratic form of government (in the West, at least) was more or less the end stage of that development. What he had so say was a little more subtle, but the general idea was that ‘lads, this is it’. I remember at the time thinking what a crock of shit the idea was, but at the time I didn’t really know what he was suggesting.
Now I know a little more, I can see the point he is making, and although I no longer think it is total bollocks, I do feel he is being a tad optimistic. My point is, though, that the West generally, which has, despite one or two local wars, most notably in the Balkans in the Nineties, enjoyed a sustained period of peace and prosperity, is finding it increasingly difficult to imagine (and accept) that things will not always be like that. Were I here and now to suggest that, for example, there is a distinct possibility of another civil war in Spain, the consensus would be ‘the chap’s off his head/doesn’t know what he’s talking about/has he been drinking?
Truthfully, I know very little about domestic Spanish politics and affairs, but merely suggest the possibility of a second civil war in Spain as the kind of utterly unexpected development we find it almost impossible to get our heads around. And because we find such things impossible to grasp and thus give credence to, they are deemed to be utterly implausible. Brussels and the rest of the EU wouldn’t allow it, you could say. Or you could argue that Western Europe has become far too civilised to countenance any such action on its soil. All I will say to that is: never count your chickens.
The total disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc was, for almost all of us, a pretty unexpected development, but it happened and it happened pretty damn quickly. We are accustomed to hear of massacres and wholesale slaughter in, say, the Congo or Uganda, or Afghanistan and other points east, but we never expected any such wholesale massacre in Europe. Then several thousands Bosnians were massacred in Srebenica. And, most tellingly, they were massacred while Dutch ‘peacekeepers’ more or less looked on and did nothing because any prevention of that massacre ‘wasn’t in its remit’. That would have seemed impossible just days before it happened. And the total inaction of the Dutch to do anything to stop it would have seemed even more unbelievable.
So when this loudmouth points out that things aren’t looking too healthy in Spain and could even perhaps lead to the kind of violence we haven’t seen in Western Europe for 70 years, jeer at me by all means. But at least be a little more prepared to expect the utterly unexpected.
Friday, 21 September 2012
Hypocrisy comes in many forms - try the variety favoured by (some) Muslims
Forget, if you can, that Peaches Geldoff has recently taken her son Astala and dog Parpy for a stroll and that Kourteny Kardashian has already managed to get back to a ‘fighting fit’ slim figure just ten weeks after giving birth to baby Penelope. Forget even - yes, I know it’s difficult, but, please, just try, even if for just a few minutes - that Kelly Osbourne thinks that Lady Gaga is pregnant, not just getting fat on too many pizzas and that Kim Kardashian has charmed her way into the hearts of police on promotional tour in Australia. (What is she promoting? Kim Karadashian, of course. Silly me). Today, in its customary lighthearted mood, this blog intends to turn its attention to a rather more mundane mattter, that is the Muslim ‘outrage’ the world over.
And what has upset them? Why an extremely badly made film in California which was subsequently overdubbed to insult the prophet Mohammed. In fact, so outraged were Muslims in Libya that they felt it necessary to murder the U.S. ambassador to express their outrage, and since then outraged Muslims have been demonstrating, sometimes violently in other predominantly Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon and Malayasia. Talk about a sense of proportion - it seems these lads don’t give a fig for the latest Lady Gaga, Peaches Geldoff and Kardashian family gossip.
A mob is a mob is a mob anywhere in the world, whether in Cairo, Benghazi, Woking, Galashiels, Peoria or Buenos Aires, and in an odd kind of way a mob seems to become more than just the sum of its parts. So when ‘a mob’ is responsible for the death of one or more people as it expresses its outrage, no one in that mob feels him or herself (though it has to be said it is invariably himself) specifi - ‘the mob’ is to be blamed for the death, not individuals.
Furthermore, mobs can easily be manipulated, a fact which no end of unscrupulous men and women have known for centuries and successfully made use of. We know that once whatever idiot it was who made the film which insulted the Prophet Mohammed had - very badly - overdubbed it to include the insults (apparently the film started life as some kind of D movie about the desert), the film was channelled into Muslim countries - one report I heard was that a fundamentalist Christian group was involved which enlisted the help of Egyptian Coptic Christian. Whoever did that knew exactly what the consequences would be and knew also that unscrupulous Muslim rabble-rousers would gleefully seize upon the film to futher their own agend.
It has been recorded that the outrage of many Muslims was based on the ‘fact’ that apparently ‘U.S. state television’ had broadcast the film. That the U.S. doesn’t have, and has never had, a ‘state television’ is quite irrelevant: the mob believed it to be true, and so it became ’a truth’ and so the mob went on its self-righteous rampage. Yet ironically, however stupid ‘the mob’ is, in a sense it is blameless: it has no mind and its violence is literally mindless. But far, far more disturbing is the attitude of Muslims who should and quite possibly do know better.
Last Monday, four of them were interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. They were all, three men and a woman, British Asian professionals - they insisted that the programme should highlight that they were professionals: one was an engineer, one a businessman (or woman) and two were doctors. They were articulate and - I assume - intelligent, but they were certainly educated people. Most significant was that they were all members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which likes to describe itself as ‘the Liberation party’ and which organised a demonstration last Sunday outside the US embassy in London. These four, who had all taken part in the demo and who, one imagines, listen to radio and TV news, would most certainly have been aware of the untruths being put about in order to fuel the mobs’ outrage: it is inconceivable that - as intelligent, educated and professional people - they sincerely believed that the US government had indeed brazenly broadcast the insulting film on ‘state TV’. Yet they chose to ignore what they must have known to be untrue and took part in the demo and later agreed to be interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight to justify their actions and the actions of violent mobs in many parts of the Muslim world. You have to ask yourself: why?
Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website has published an open letter to non-Muslims about the film and the ‘insult to the Prophet Mohammed’ (you can read it here) and it has the gall to castigate Western ‘hypocrisy’. The first paragraph of this open letter reads:
'It is a centuries-old Islamic tradition to engage in debate, tolerate criticism and hear the critiques of others. But insults against Islam, such as those in the recent film and cartoons, are unacceptable provocations that cross a red line that no Muslim or decent human being would ever accept. As such we condemn them in the strongest possible terms, as we do any such insults against Islam and the symbols of our religion; especially those against the greatest man ever, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.’
The open letter goes on:
We do not condone the recent violence that has broken out in response, but the blood-stained track record of Western foreign policy and hypocrisy regarding free speech means that all right to take the moral high ground has been forfeited when arguing that violence is an unacceptable response to this provocation, or when arguing that freedom of speech is sacred.
Does Hizb up-Tahrir and its four intelligent, educated and professional members who agreed to be interviewed on Radio 4 really believe that outright murder and innocent deaths are justifiable in defence of imagined insults against the Prophet Mohammed? Well, apparently they do.
I also wonder what Hizb up-Tahrir would have to say about the hypocrisy of its fellow Muslims who are quite happy to hand out awful insults to other faiths and their followers. Because or all the noble talk about not tolerating insults to Islam, many Muslims are far from shy about grossly insulting not only Jews and Christians, but their fellow Muslims. Here is a list (which I have taken from the New York Times website and which appeared here in one of its columns) of exceedingly gross insults made by Muslims (follow links for original source):
ON CHRISTIANS: Hasan Rahimpur Azghadi of the Iranian Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution: Christianity is “a reeking corpse, on which you have to constantly pour eau de cologne and perfume, and wash it in order to keep it clean.” — July 20, 2007.
Sheik Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi: It is permissible to spill the blood of the Iraqi Christians — and a duty to wage jihad against them. — April 14, 2011.
Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, a Saudi professor of Islamic law, calls for “positive hatred” of Christians. Al-Majd TV (Saudi Arabia), — Dec. 16, 2005.
ON SHIITES: The Egyptian Cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub: “Muslim Brotherhood Presidential Candidate Mohamed Morsi told me that the Shiites are more dangerous to Islam than the Jews.” — June 13, 2012.
The Egyptian Cleric Mazen al-Sirsawi: “If Allah had not created the Shiites as human beings, they would have been donkeys.” — Aug. 7, 2011.
The Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan video series: “The Shiite is a Nasl [Race/Offspring] of Jews.” http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6208.htm — March 21, 2012.
ON JEWS: Article on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website praises jihad against America and the Jews: “The Descendants of Apes and Pigs.” — Sept. 7, 2012.
The Pakistani cleric Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai: “When the Jews are wiped out, the world would be purified and the sun of peace would rise on the entire world.” — Aug. 1, 2012.
Dr. Ismail Ali Muhammad, a senior Al-Azhar scholar: The Jews, “a source of evil and harm in all human societies.” — Feb. 14, 2012.
ON SUFIS: A shrine venerating a Sufi Muslim saint in Libya has been partly destroyed, the latest in a series of attacks blamed on ultraconservative Salafi Islamists. — Aug. 26, 2012.
It does seem to me that for many of the more fanatical Muslims there is one rule for them and another for everyone else. There is very little quite as unpleasant as the stench of hypocrisy. (All the above references were published in a piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. You can read it here.)
. . .
I keep a keen eye on the so-called ‘stats’ provided by Google which tell me not only how many people have chanced up - or even knowingly returned to - this blog in any given day, week, month or year, but also where they live, what browser they use, what computer operating system they use, whether they are using a computer, tablet, iPad or smartphone when visiting and, crucially, whether they loathe hypocrisy as much as I do. The stats also tell me which sites are used to ‘refer’ the searcher to this blog and what are the most visited blog entries.
By far the most popular is one which features one Tony Blair, one Christine Keeler and one Mandy Rice-Davies. It includes a cartoon of Blair and a photo each of Christine and Mandy (my familiarity is gratuitous in that I don’t know either of the two ladies and am highly unlikely to meet either at any time soon.) But it did occur to me that to drum up more visits, I should include in each post a pic of both of them. So that is exactly what I intend to do.
(Incidentally, this second part of this entry has bugger all to do with Muslim, Muslim outrage, the Prophet or anything of that kind. The principle I am working on is that you can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.)
and
And what has upset them? Why an extremely badly made film in California which was subsequently overdubbed to insult the prophet Mohammed. In fact, so outraged were Muslims in Libya that they felt it necessary to murder the U.S. ambassador to express their outrage, and since then outraged Muslims have been demonstrating, sometimes violently in other predominantly Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon and Malayasia. Talk about a sense of proportion - it seems these lads don’t give a fig for the latest Lady Gaga, Peaches Geldoff and Kardashian family gossip.
A mob is a mob is a mob anywhere in the world, whether in Cairo, Benghazi, Woking, Galashiels, Peoria or Buenos Aires, and in an odd kind of way a mob seems to become more than just the sum of its parts. So when ‘a mob’ is responsible for the death of one or more people as it expresses its outrage, no one in that mob feels him or herself (though it has to be said it is invariably himself) specifi - ‘the mob’ is to be blamed for the death, not individuals.
Furthermore, mobs can easily be manipulated, a fact which no end of unscrupulous men and women have known for centuries and successfully made use of. We know that once whatever idiot it was who made the film which insulted the Prophet Mohammed had - very badly - overdubbed it to include the insults (apparently the film started life as some kind of D movie about the desert), the film was channelled into Muslim countries - one report I heard was that a fundamentalist Christian group was involved which enlisted the help of Egyptian Coptic Christian. Whoever did that knew exactly what the consequences would be and knew also that unscrupulous Muslim rabble-rousers would gleefully seize upon the film to futher their own agend.
It has been recorded that the outrage of many Muslims was based on the ‘fact’ that apparently ‘U.S. state television’ had broadcast the film. That the U.S. doesn’t have, and has never had, a ‘state television’ is quite irrelevant: the mob believed it to be true, and so it became ’a truth’ and so the mob went on its self-righteous rampage. Yet ironically, however stupid ‘the mob’ is, in a sense it is blameless: it has no mind and its violence is literally mindless. But far, far more disturbing is the attitude of Muslims who should and quite possibly do know better.
Last Monday, four of them were interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. They were all, three men and a woman, British Asian professionals - they insisted that the programme should highlight that they were professionals: one was an engineer, one a businessman (or woman) and two were doctors. They were articulate and - I assume - intelligent, but they were certainly educated people. Most significant was that they were all members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which likes to describe itself as ‘the Liberation party’ and which organised a demonstration last Sunday outside the US embassy in London. These four, who had all taken part in the demo and who, one imagines, listen to radio and TV news, would most certainly have been aware of the untruths being put about in order to fuel the mobs’ outrage: it is inconceivable that - as intelligent, educated and professional people - they sincerely believed that the US government had indeed brazenly broadcast the insulting film on ‘state TV’. Yet they chose to ignore what they must have known to be untrue and took part in the demo and later agreed to be interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight to justify their actions and the actions of violent mobs in many parts of the Muslim world. You have to ask yourself: why?
Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website has published an open letter to non-Muslims about the film and the ‘insult to the Prophet Mohammed’ (you can read it here) and it has the gall to castigate Western ‘hypocrisy’. The first paragraph of this open letter reads:
'It is a centuries-old Islamic tradition to engage in debate, tolerate criticism and hear the critiques of others. But insults against Islam, such as those in the recent film and cartoons, are unacceptable provocations that cross a red line that no Muslim or decent human being would ever accept. As such we condemn them in the strongest possible terms, as we do any such insults against Islam and the symbols of our religion; especially those against the greatest man ever, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.’
The open letter goes on:
We do not condone the recent violence that has broken out in response, but the blood-stained track record of Western foreign policy and hypocrisy regarding free speech means that all right to take the moral high ground has been forfeited when arguing that violence is an unacceptable response to this provocation, or when arguing that freedom of speech is sacred.
Does Hizb up-Tahrir and its four intelligent, educated and professional members who agreed to be interviewed on Radio 4 really believe that outright murder and innocent deaths are justifiable in defence of imagined insults against the Prophet Mohammed? Well, apparently they do.
I also wonder what Hizb up-Tahrir would have to say about the hypocrisy of its fellow Muslims who are quite happy to hand out awful insults to other faiths and their followers. Because or all the noble talk about not tolerating insults to Islam, many Muslims are far from shy about grossly insulting not only Jews and Christians, but their fellow Muslims. Here is a list (which I have taken from the New York Times website and which appeared here in one of its columns) of exceedingly gross insults made by Muslims (follow links for original source):
ON CHRISTIANS: Hasan Rahimpur Azghadi of the Iranian Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution: Christianity is “a reeking corpse, on which you have to constantly pour eau de cologne and perfume, and wash it in order to keep it clean.” — July 20, 2007.
Sheik Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi: It is permissible to spill the blood of the Iraqi Christians — and a duty to wage jihad against them. — April 14, 2011.
Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, a Saudi professor of Islamic law, calls for “positive hatred” of Christians. Al-Majd TV (Saudi Arabia), — Dec. 16, 2005.
ON SHIITES: The Egyptian Cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub: “Muslim Brotherhood Presidential Candidate Mohamed Morsi told me that the Shiites are more dangerous to Islam than the Jews.” — June 13, 2012.
The Egyptian Cleric Mazen al-Sirsawi: “If Allah had not created the Shiites as human beings, they would have been donkeys.” — Aug. 7, 2011.
The Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan video series: “The Shiite is a Nasl [Race/Offspring] of Jews.” http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6208.htm — March 21, 2012.
ON JEWS: Article on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website praises jihad against America and the Jews: “The Descendants of Apes and Pigs.” — Sept. 7, 2012.
The Pakistani cleric Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai: “When the Jews are wiped out, the world would be purified and the sun of peace would rise on the entire world.” — Aug. 1, 2012.
Dr. Ismail Ali Muhammad, a senior Al-Azhar scholar: The Jews, “a source of evil and harm in all human societies.” — Feb. 14, 2012.
ON SUFIS: A shrine venerating a Sufi Muslim saint in Libya has been partly destroyed, the latest in a series of attacks blamed on ultraconservative Salafi Islamists. — Aug. 26, 2012.
It does seem to me that for many of the more fanatical Muslims there is one rule for them and another for everyone else. There is very little quite as unpleasant as the stench of hypocrisy. (All the above references were published in a piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. You can read it here.)
. . .
I keep a keen eye on the so-called ‘stats’ provided by Google which tell me not only how many people have chanced up - or even knowingly returned to - this blog in any given day, week, month or year, but also where they live, what browser they use, what computer operating system they use, whether they are using a computer, tablet, iPad or smartphone when visiting and, crucially, whether they loathe hypocrisy as much as I do. The stats also tell me which sites are used to ‘refer’ the searcher to this blog and what are the most visited blog entries.
By far the most popular is one which features one Tony Blair, one Christine Keeler and one Mandy Rice-Davies. It includes a cartoon of Blair and a photo each of Christine and Mandy (my familiarity is gratuitous in that I don’t know either of the two ladies and am highly unlikely to meet either at any time soon.) But it did occur to me that to drum up more visits, I should include in each post a pic of both of them. So that is exactly what I intend to do.
(Incidentally, this second part of this entry has bugger all to do with Muslim, Muslim outrage, the Prophet or anything of that kind. The principle I am working on is that you can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.)
Thursday, 20 September 2012
Welcome to the new look, as unexpected for you as it was for me — but needs must and I’m making the best of a bad job. Then there’s Disney’s take on a Cathar castle
First things first: You might think ‘oh, what a nice chap, he’s redesigned his blog to make us feel more welcome, more valued, to show us that our ease and comfort is his dearest wish’, but you’d be bloody wrong. It’s all down to my terrible habit of dicking around, and in this instance I noticed that Google are touting some new all-singing, all-dancing ‘dynamic’ template and decided to investigate.
Well, I did investigate, decided I didn’t like it and have spent the best part of an hour trying to get my blog back to what it was. This is the result. Given that I couldn’t totally recreate it, I’ve given it a few tweeks to try and improve things but basically I’m a tad pissed off with Google and a tad more pissed off with myself for again dicking around when a lifetime of coming a cropper dicking around should have taught me to leave well alone.
. . .
Today (yesterday - Ed), the last day of our two weeks, it was off to Carcassonne to visit what at first sight seems a rather spectacular ‘Cathar’ castle. I say seems because although it is truly magnificent to see as you cross the bridge at Carcassonne heading south, then wind your way up through the town up to the visitors’ car park, you get a closer view and bugger me if it doesn’t vaguely and rather disconcertingly remind you of Disneyland.
This was, in fact, our second visit to Carcassonne. The first time it was getting a little late after we had wandered through the narrow alleyways surrounding the castle and we decided to come again. This we did today and went straight to the castle. Quite soon it became quite obvious what had gone wrong and why you expect Mickey Mouse himself suddenly to loom large over the turrets and give you a cheery wave. For although the Romans had built a fort here (and one or two of their towers are still standing) and although some dude called Count Raimond Bernard Trencavel expanded it because he was top dog in the area and needed a court (that was in the 11th century, several centuries before this part of France came under the control of the French throne and even longer before it was actually a part of the French kingdom, and although when he finally got his mitts on the castle the French king had it substantially expanded, what is standing today is, in fact and in my view, a rather failed attempt at renovation by a chap called Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century.
He initially called in to renovate the nearby St Nazaire cathedral, but then decided to have a go at the castle itself. The trouble was that many parts of it had largely fallen into ruin (as castles do) and what was left was a hotch-potch of different styles from different ages. But Viollet-le-Duc was not to be thwarted. He spent a great deal of time trying to work out what had been what and eventually decided to rebuild most of the castle on what it might have looked like in the 16th century. The trouble for us is that when Walt Disney decided to design castles to feature in his various cartoons, he looked to the same age, which explains the rather baffling resemblance Carcassonne castle has to something dreamed up in Hollywood.
It doesn’t help that the alleyways of the ‘village’ within the outside curtain walls (I hope I’ve got the jargon right and if I haven’t, I’m sure some smartarse will email in with a comment setting me straight) are wall-to-wall tat emporiums, ice-cream parlours, overpriced restaurants, twee memoribilia shops and bars, all designed with the same Disney dedication to taste and crammed with tourists.
Two days ago, we went to see the Chateau de Termes, which was something else entirely. This is now wholly in ruins, but must have been truly spectacular in its heyday. It was also held my the Trencavel family, and when the then Pope took against the Cathars who were more or less declaring UDI from Rome (the usual story: they reckoned the Roman Church was corrupt - Lord, what a cheek! - and wanted to live purer lives), the Trencavels protected them and they thrived for a while.
Finally, the word went out that anyone who put down the heresy and its protectors could keep the land won from the protectors, which was an offer far too good for a certain Simon de Montfort to refuse (he is the grandfather of our Simon de Montfort). He besieged that castle and it finally surrendered after many months. Here are two pictures: one is as the ruins look today, and below it is an impression of what it would have looked at when it was still intact.
. . .
That was written yesterday, and this is today, written at my kitchen table at home. To emulate The Economist, ‘so the worst is over. What lessons have we learnt?’ Well, we have learned that despite the British middle-class infatuation with all things French (‘Lord, we could learn a thing or two from them about how to live. And their women - so elegant!), they have just as many chavs as we do; McDonald’s are devastating their country at an alarming rate just as in Britain; yes, on the whole their women are a tad more elegant, mainly because they just try a little harder and have an innate sense of something which apparently eludes British women (except the very rich, but they tend to shop in Paris anyway), and on the whole the French drive more like lunatics than we do, and their womenfolk are especially bad. Can everyone really be in so late over there? I rather doubt it.
But I’m back, can’t say I had two glorious weeks off, for one reason and another, but I did have two weeks off work with a change of scenery, so whose complaining. As I got up at 6.45am to get to Toulouse airport (that’s 5.45am in pounds, shillings and pence) I am bushed so I shall wish you all a bonne nuit (French for good night) and climb the wooden hill.
Well, I did investigate, decided I didn’t like it and have spent the best part of an hour trying to get my blog back to what it was. This is the result. Given that I couldn’t totally recreate it, I’ve given it a few tweeks to try and improve things but basically I’m a tad pissed off with Google and a tad more pissed off with myself for again dicking around when a lifetime of coming a cropper dicking around should have taught me to leave well alone.
. . .
Today (yesterday - Ed), the last day of our two weeks, it was off to Carcassonne to visit what at first sight seems a rather spectacular ‘Cathar’ castle. I say seems because although it is truly magnificent to see as you cross the bridge at Carcassonne heading south, then wind your way up through the town up to the visitors’ car park, you get a closer view and bugger me if it doesn’t vaguely and rather disconcertingly remind you of Disneyland.
This was, in fact, our second visit to Carcassonne. The first time it was getting a little late after we had wandered through the narrow alleyways surrounding the castle and we decided to come again. This we did today and went straight to the castle. Quite soon it became quite obvious what had gone wrong and why you expect Mickey Mouse himself suddenly to loom large over the turrets and give you a cheery wave. For although the Romans had built a fort here (and one or two of their towers are still standing) and although some dude called Count Raimond Bernard Trencavel expanded it because he was top dog in the area and needed a court (that was in the 11th century, several centuries before this part of France came under the control of the French throne and even longer before it was actually a part of the French kingdom, and although when he finally got his mitts on the castle the French king had it substantially expanded, what is standing today is, in fact and in my view, a rather failed attempt at renovation by a chap called Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century.
He initially called in to renovate the nearby St Nazaire cathedral, but then decided to have a go at the castle itself. The trouble was that many parts of it had largely fallen into ruin (as castles do) and what was left was a hotch-potch of different styles from different ages. But Viollet-le-Duc was not to be thwarted. He spent a great deal of time trying to work out what had been what and eventually decided to rebuild most of the castle on what it might have looked like in the 16th century. The trouble for us is that when Walt Disney decided to design castles to feature in his various cartoons, he looked to the same age, which explains the rather baffling resemblance Carcassonne castle has to something dreamed up in Hollywood.
It doesn’t help that the alleyways of the ‘village’ within the outside curtain walls (I hope I’ve got the jargon right and if I haven’t, I’m sure some smartarse will email in with a comment setting me straight) are wall-to-wall tat emporiums, ice-cream parlours, overpriced restaurants, twee memoribilia shops and bars, all designed with the same Disney dedication to taste and crammed with tourists.
Two days ago, we went to see the Chateau de Termes, which was something else entirely. This is now wholly in ruins, but must have been truly spectacular in its heyday. It was also held my the Trencavel family, and when the then Pope took against the Cathars who were more or less declaring UDI from Rome (the usual story: they reckoned the Roman Church was corrupt - Lord, what a cheek! - and wanted to live purer lives), the Trencavels protected them and they thrived for a while.
Finally, the word went out that anyone who put down the heresy and its protectors could keep the land won from the protectors, which was an offer far too good for a certain Simon de Montfort to refuse (he is the grandfather of our Simon de Montfort). He besieged that castle and it finally surrendered after many months. Here are two pictures: one is as the ruins look today, and below it is an impression of what it would have looked at when it was still intact.
. . .
That was written yesterday, and this is today, written at my kitchen table at home. To emulate The Economist, ‘so the worst is over. What lessons have we learnt?’ Well, we have learned that despite the British middle-class infatuation with all things French (‘Lord, we could learn a thing or two from them about how to live. And their women - so elegant!), they have just as many chavs as we do; McDonald’s are devastating their country at an alarming rate just as in Britain; yes, on the whole their women are a tad more elegant, mainly because they just try a little harder and have an innate sense of something which apparently eludes British women (except the very rich, but they tend to shop in Paris anyway), and on the whole the French drive more like lunatics than we do, and their womenfolk are especially bad. Can everyone really be in so late over there? I rather doubt it.
But I’m back, can’t say I had two glorious weeks off, for one reason and another, but I did have two weeks off work with a change of scenery, so whose complaining. As I got up at 6.45am to get to Toulouse airport (that’s 5.45am in pounds, shillings and pence) I am bushed so I shall wish you all a bonne nuit (French for good night) and climb the wooden hill.
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
It’s over far too soon, but at least I can get outraged by greedy opticians, who don’t just want my money, but, apparently, my blood. And a crucial decision must be made: do I move with the times and apply super-duper whizz-bang 3D dynamic styles to this ’ere blog?
Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc (last day but one)
My brother and I visited the nearby Canal Midi lock at Homps the other day, and then drove on to adjacent Olonzac for a beer. (Mark has developed a thing about canal locks and likes to watch them in operation. Or if he hasn’t newly developed it, he has revealed a side to himself with which I was unfamiliar. I don’t mind watching one or two being opened and closed, but after that it all rather loses the element of surprise.) And was the place crawling with Brits? Does the Pope shit in the forest? There were more Brits knocking around (it would be unfair to single them out as the local paunch-carriers as you do get to see one or two fat Frenchmen and women) than on any given day in High St Kensington. Unfortunately, I don’t speak French (‘have French’ I think they say if they are trying to impress each other), so I keep my mouth well and truly shut when out and about locally, and get Mark to do all the talking as he speaks French (‘has French’)
When packing for my trip to Bordeaux in July, I found I had somehow mislaid my spare spectacles for use in just such an emergency, but was lackadaisical in getting a replacement pair and went, the week before leaving for France for this holiday I went to my optician’s to get them to make up a spare set, they refused to do so point-blank on the grounds that it had been more than two years since my last sight-check and that it was ‘illegal’ to provide a set without a new sight-check. As far as that is concerned, that is so much bollocks and I even downloaded and read the relevant paragraph in their professional body’s ‘code of conduct’, but I have to say what they say is as clear as mud and one could equally interpret the body’s guidance as legally binding as mere guidance.
But all that is irrelevant in the optician’s refused to order me another pair using the more than two-year-old prescription. The upshot was that I don’t have spare spectacle with me, but because of the possibility of just such and emergency as has now happened, I dug out three old lenses left over from when I had previously lost a lens or it was damaged and - glory be! – one was an exact match. I then rang my optician’s in Bodmin to order a new pair. ‘No problem,’ they said, ‘that will be £130 for the replacement lens.’ My jaw must have dropped audibly because the very helpful chap at the other end of the phone added: ‘It’s £260 for the pair’ (thus demonstrating that in matters mathematical he is most certainly no slouch).
Well, the truth is out: brother Mark, who had his
early upbringing and education until the age of 13 in France, has uttered the
words I would never have thought I would hear from him: ‘I can’t wait to get
back to Britain.’ For one thing the house we are staying, dating back at least
450 years and which us undoubtedly pokey, is built all wrong and he keeps
banging his head everywhere and finds it difficult to negotiate the steps, of which
there are far too many anyway. Furthermore, ‘France is too big’, this after he
looked up the Cathar Chateau de Mauriac and found it was at least a two-hour
drive away but is still in the same department!
Me? Granted the house is rather pokey in that it is
undoubtedly very cosy in the winter and a haven of cool in the very hot summer
months – cool as in temperature, not as in New York artsy-fartsy attitude – and
granted that ideally I should have liked a terrace or a courtyard to go and sit
in, for me our departure on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, has come around
far, far too soon.
One thing I have learnt these past few weeks is that
I both like being on my own and like having company. In the past, I have gone
on holiday on my own and enjoyed my own company, although I am one of those
kinds who, when enjoying something, seems to enjoy it more if I can share the
experience (and no – stop sniggering at the back – I am not talking about sex).
That goes for food, music, visits to galleries, films and a lot more. On the
other hand, there is a certain joy in solitude once you have overcome the
novelty of relying on yourself for company, and I do suspect many reading this
will be familiar with the occasional quiet desire to be alone. But to do so
here might well have come across as unfriendly, so I didn’t do it.
There are indeed rather a great deal of tourists
hereabouts, and not just in Caunes-Minervois. Now, I know that I am on thin ice
complaining about tourists, especially British tourists, when I am one myself,
but when I go abroad, I do like to be with the people of the country I am
visiting. Many other Brits, indeed, I suspect most other Brits don’t. They get
a little uneasy. What has been very disconcerting is to visit the local
Intermarche, Carrefour, Auchon or Spar and find a substantial section of one of
the food aisles devoted to Marmite, Bovril, Gale’s honey, golden syrup and
various other abominations (or at least I shall deem them abominations for the duration
of my stay here) without which your average Brit really cannot face life. This
in a supermarket where even the cheapest pates are 1,000 better than the slop
sold in British supermarkets and in a country where in a race of cooks it would
have completed the course where the Brit contender was still pulling on his
running shoes. (NB Note the topical allusion there, running? Not too out of
day, given that the Olympic Games finished less than a month ago. Neat, eh?)
. . . My brother and I visited the nearby Canal Midi lock at Homps the other day, and then drove on to adjacent Olonzac for a beer. (Mark has developed a thing about canal locks and likes to watch them in operation. Or if he hasn’t newly developed it, he has revealed a side to himself with which I was unfamiliar. I don’t mind watching one or two being opened and closed, but after that it all rather loses the element of surprise.) And was the place crawling with Brits? Does the Pope shit in the forest? There were more Brits knocking around (it would be unfair to single them out as the local paunch-carriers as you do get to see one or two fat Frenchmen and women) than on any given day in High St Kensington. Unfortunately, I don’t speak French (‘have French’ I think they say if they are trying to impress each other), so I keep my mouth well and truly shut when out and about locally, and get Mark to do all the talking as he speaks French (‘has French’)
. . .
I was somehow careless when taking out my contact
lenses and putting them in their little barrel cannister last night and dropped
one before shutting its relevant compartment. I am usually super careful as I
have lost them in that way in the past, but it nevertheless happened, although
I didn’t find out until this morning when I went to put them in again.When packing for my trip to Bordeaux in July, I found I had somehow mislaid my spare spectacles for use in just such an emergency, but was lackadaisical in getting a replacement pair and went, the week before leaving for France for this holiday I went to my optician’s to get them to make up a spare set, they refused to do so point-blank on the grounds that it had been more than two years since my last sight-check and that it was ‘illegal’ to provide a set without a new sight-check. As far as that is concerned, that is so much bollocks and I even downloaded and read the relevant paragraph in their professional body’s ‘code of conduct’, but I have to say what they say is as clear as mud and one could equally interpret the body’s guidance as legally binding as mere guidance.
But all that is irrelevant in the optician’s refused to order me another pair using the more than two-year-old prescription. The upshot was that I don’t have spare spectacle with me, but because of the possibility of just such and emergency as has now happened, I dug out three old lenses left over from when I had previously lost a lens or it was damaged and - glory be! – one was an exact match. I then rang my optician’s in Bodmin to order a new pair. ‘No problem,’ they said, ‘that will be £130 for the replacement lens.’ My jaw must have dropped audibly because the very helpful chap at the other end of the phone added: ‘It’s £260 for the pair’ (thus demonstrating that in matters mathematical he is most certainly no slouch).
I protested that the last pair I had bought – and I
stressed ‘pair’ – had only cost me £120. ‘Ah,’ said the very helpful chap at other
end of the phone, ‘that was because you were then still in our customer care
scheme. But your membership has since lapsed (and to be fair they did bombard
me with junk mail at the time warning me to renew it). ‘But I can renew your annual membership for
£45 and then the replacement lens will only cost £75.’
So renew I did. But it
all left a very bad taste in my mouth, and the most definite suspicion that
someone is taking the ‘valued customer’ for a very long ride. Given the
original developmental costs involved when coming up with the ‘latest
technology in gas permeable hard lenses’ was underway and given that the cost
has to be reflected in the price a little, and given the production costs
involved for each lens even though physically each lens is just a then circular
piece of bloody plastic about 5mm in diameter, we, the punters, can’t, of
course, expect to get our contact lenses for next to nothing. If we were, it
would surely undermine the very notion of modern capitalism and bring our
Western democracies, for whom it is an essential building block crashing to the
ground, though no doubt one or two entrerprising businessmen would find ways of
making a welcome bob or two out of the ensuing chaos. But here’s the thing (©Siobhan
in Twenty Twelve): whatever I pay for my lenses, those developmental and production costs will be
identical in either case.
So when, not in the ‘customer care scheme’ I am to be
charged £130 for the replacement lens, but only £75 as part of it, someone
somewhere is making a fuck of a profit and taking the piss in spades. And given
that the development and production costs will surely and most certainly be no
more than a fifth of the £75 – around £15, although even that figure is surely
far higher than the real cost – ‘a fuck of a profit’ is certainly a crude but
quite exact description of what is going on.
I feel several letters coming on:
one to Boots, one each to the Telegraph and the Mail, and to the ruling council
of this breed of bloodsuckers and one to the Minister for Health. Oh yes! Never
underestimate the outrage and letter-writing ability of an Englishman when he
feels he is being made to pay through the nose! Oh no! I know, of course, that
my various letters will achieve absolutely nothing at all, but that isn’t the
point is it? It’s something along the lines of ‘not playing the game to win but
just to play the game’ (which might explain why when we win the football and
rugby world cups, the element of fluke should never be discounted.) Now I think
I should move to Tunbridge Wells, (a joke no doubt completely wasted on 99pc of
people reading this, but in my present mood of seething outrage all I can say
is: what the hell!
. . .
Thanks to those clever dicks at Google, I am faced with a dilemma: they have come up with exceptionally, almost obscenely, snazzy new and dynamic - their word, not mine - blog layouts which will allow the reader to decide exactly how they want to view a blog. I’m not too sure any of them really add to a blog, and if a blog is crap, it will still be crap, although in now and modern new clothes.
On the other hand, I tell myself, if I don’t move with the times I am very much in danger of becoming an old buffer for whom any innovation is at best suspicious and at worst the work of the Devil. So I shall investigate further and see what it what. I know, I’ll set up a committee to look into the matter, which should kick any decision either way into the long grass for a while.
LATER: Well, I tried it out and fucked it up. I have tried to revert to what I had before but because Google’s fuckwits can out fuckwit any other fuckwit on the planet - and that would be me - I can’t quite get it back to what it was. Oh well, maybe it was time for a change anyway. I’ll see what I can do overt he next few days. Love and kisses ...
LATER: Well, I tried it out and fucked it up. I have tried to revert to what I had before but because Google’s fuckwits can out fuckwit any other fuckwit on the planet - and that would be me - I can’t quite get it back to what it was. Oh well, maybe it was time for a change anyway. I’ll see what I can do overt he next few days. Love and kisses ...
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