Uncategorized – Page 14 – Writer-insighter

Making It Up

Tweedledum or Tweedledee, or possibly both, once said to Alice that words meant anything he (or they) wanted them to mean, neither more nor less. As a descriptor for modern media it’s horribly accurate. Words that mean one thing one year mean the opposite the next. War is peace, as Orwell pointed out a long time ago.

Ever get the feeling you've been conned? — Ever get the feeling you’ve been conned?

All three might have been mildly amused by a man having a heart attack this week. Strictly, that wasn’t the nub of the story, although it seemed to be at first glance. After the driver had the heart attack the vehicle drove on and literally into Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Yesterday.

My father had a fatal heart attack and carried on after death much as he’d lived, being an expensive nuisance to other people causing a mess everyone else was expected to sort out and crashing into three cars. I don’t know whether this driver survived. But two things stood out immediately.

First, there was huge debate over whether the man should be called a taxi driver. It used to mean a black cab driver who had done the Knowledge and had a proper licence from the Hackney Carriage Office dahn the end of Chapel Market where Sammy Fox’s granny shopped, left then right then there guv, you won’t mind if I drop you here because I can’t get back otherwise what with the traffic and that, I was going down Kings Cross anyway but not this time of the afternoon living out in Essex south of the river nah, I’m not going that way this time of night. I had that Jeremy Clarkson in the back of my cab last week, very clever man. And all that STUFF.

No For Hire sign. No proper cab. So he was a mini-cab, like the dreaded Uber, which seems to be shorthand for the kind of no-insurance but gee-it’s got-a cute-app-plus-its-cheap which is shredding the black cab business, so long as you don’t mind nobody knowing where they’re going and legging it if there’s a traffic accident.

Rather more significant I thought was the fact that the picture showed so many lies we’ve all been told. Back in 2007 two men attempted to massacre people in the main concourse at Glasgow airport by driving a car into it and detonating gas bottles there. No, the big ones. The attack failed, not least because an airport baggage handler headbutted one of the attackers who was already on fire. After that we were told over and over again that airport security blah paramount importance- lessons-will -be -learned – best practice – watchful – security – terrorism – CCTV – vigilance and all the customary words that clearly mean nothing at all.

Because terrorism

Why do I say this? Why do I doubt that when I have to hold my trousers up at airports with my hands like someone on Death Row because my belt has to be interrogated because Terrorism, that this isn’t just a stupid charade that does less than nothing to stop terrorism? Becuase of the picture at the top.

If you go to Edinburgh airport you can get a car near the concourse. There are metal barriers stopping you repeating the attack at Glasgow. There are concrete bollards protecting the main doors, so you definitely can’t drive a car in there, whether you get head-butted or not. At Heathrow T5, obviously none of that matters. This taxi, mini-cab, VW microbus, call it what you like, stopped only because the driver’s foot came off the accelerator. As you can see clearly, it went straight through the puny designed-to-stop-people-only metal railings that were the front-line defence against a car being used to smash straight through the windows onto the concourse. As this vehicle nearly did.

Public response to this? Nothing? Security implications debated all over the media? No. Social media backlash? Well actually yes. I was told this was ‘nothing to do with terrorism’ and I was ‘stupid’ to mention it by someone on Facebook. So that seems to be official. Fifteen years of ‘security’ which has been nothing more than legalised theft of alcohol and perfume bottles over 150 ml at every airport where the G4S personnel don’t fancy doing their own Christmas shopping and the net result is that anybody with access to a car can still stage their own carbon copy of a terrorist attack mounted seven years ago. It isn’t just that it doesn’t matter. That matters in itself. What matters more to me is that nobody is even supposed to notice, or to mention it if they have.

The Furmity Tent

I don’t know when people started hating food. I had a fantastic dinner yesterday, a fairly ordinary spag bol sauce albeit using venison mince and – gasp!! – a veggie stock-cube along with Worcestershire sauce, with furmity. I liked it so much that I said so on Facebook.

One person said they didn’t ever want to see such a thing again. Another told me to fuck off. The first one I blocked, not least because I don’t want anyone posting Our Brave Boys knee-jerk seasonal adulation on their time-line anywhere near mine. The second I know as a farmer and I know what she meant. Which is ok. Mostly.

What isn’t is people thinking that anything doesn’t come out of a packet is suspect. There is a distinct meme running through what passes for contemporary life that the only good food comes from a factory. At the same time that the number of TV programmes about food increases, so does the number of ready-meals and cook-at-home pizzas sold. Tabloids scream that if people used all the spices Jamie Oliver does it would cost a whole week’s JSA. Which if you used all of all of the herbs in his kitchen it undoubtedly would, but nobody would ever need to go and buy them all in one go anyway. The fact that every packet of processed food, the kind that directly leads to coronary heart disease, Type II diabetes and ADHD has a list of ingredients far more disturbing than a pinch of oregano and half a nutmeg, grated, is irrelevant. Since when did nutmeg buy any advertising space?

What was really surprising was the horror about furmity. As you remember from school, when you had to read Thomas Hardy and snore through The Mayor of Casterbridge, or watch it on TV one Sunday afternoon to be polite to your girlfriend’s parents before they went out for the evening and you could maybe listen to that new Santana album again but shut up until they’ve gone or they’ll hear you, furmity was what got Michael Henchard into trouble. It also made a success of him for the next twenty years, which isn’t bad going for some raisins. Admittedly, I’m biased. A friend once lived in Thomas Hardy’s sister’s schoolhouse and his was our country in our twenties. We read every single book. Not so much because they were great books, I think, but because they were about our land. A half-mythical place. The place we were from. But anyway.

Separate the egg yolks, you say, Ezekiel? I suppose I could do meringues with the whites. 'Tis pity to waste they. — “Separate the egg yolks, you say, Ezekiel? I suppose I could do meringues with the whites. ‘Tis a mortal pity to waste they,” said Henchard.

My Furmity Recipe

Put some cracked wheat (bulgar) in a pan of water overnight. I have two measurements, “some” and “many.” This is “some.” Maybe two handfuls. 200g if you want to be picky about it. Don’t be.
Next day, drain the water off. Find some cinnamon in the back of the cupboard. And some raisins. Oh and there might be some allspice there as well.
Those walnuts you tried to pickle in port might be an idea too.
Or pine nuts.
Some of that ginger cordial because frankly I can’t see what else you’re going to do with it. Or why you bought it, to be honest.
Why DID you, anyway?
It’s like that knock-off Microplane grater you got in Paris, isn’t it? Except that at least you’re going to use that in (8).
Microplane half a nutmeg into the mixture.
Oh the mixture of all of it. What did you think you were going to do with it?
Add some almond milk. You could make it but it would be far more sensible to use some soya almond milk stuff.
Enough to cover it, obviously. Have you never cooked anything before?
Some of that ginger puree. About two-thirds of the nearest spoon in the drawer, which happens to be a soup spoon. Well, wash it then.
Add some brown sugar. Not the granulated stuff. You can’t do anything except apple sandwiches with that. About 50 grammes.
Two egg yolks. Separating them out using the two half shells looks really cheffy. I’m not convinced they actually add much to the experience though.
Heat it. Don’t let it boil. Just get it hot enough to burn your tongue on.
Eat it.

Henchard added rum to his and sold his wife, prompting two decades of abstinence in a nicely moral plot. The taste is amazing, layer on layer of complexity and warmth. The ginger isn’t part of any traditional recipe, or rather the Waitrose one I cribbed from, but I was trying to go for tastes that might be found in a country kitchen of Henchard’s time. Or if they might possibly not have had ginger root, at least they would have known about it.

It’s really easy to cook and like a lot of recipes that people say “I haven’t got time to do all that,” it actually takes about five minutes. Most of the ‘time’ is overnight while it’s soaking up water and you’re not doing anything to do with cooking then. I didn’t think I’d like that sweet-and-meat thing that seems to have been so popular in medieval cookery. It still is if you go to Moro or eat duck pancakes with plum sauce. But still quite hard to see why it should irritate people so much. Apart from the fact it’s not Pot Noodle.

Because I said so

This morning two things were reported which ought to scare you senseless.

The Defence Minister whose idea of defence includes blowing people up in foreign countries any time he feels like it said he’s fine with that. The RAF launched a drone, a big explodey model airplane and controlled it from Lincolnshire.

It killed two British people in Syria. According to the Prime Minister they’d been going to threaten our way of life. Again. Before he collected himself the Prime Minister said they’d been going to kill the Queen. So far as I remember in the tabloids they were going to do that the other weekend as well. Then he used the magic word:

“Such actions are required to prevent a terrorist attack.”

He didn’t once use the phrase extra-judicial murder, which was odd. The plaintiff “We have to work extremely hard” just sounded a bit pathetic tagged on the end.

It’s terrorism though, you see? The Attorney General said it was ok and if he wants to keep his very nicely paid job and pension then as every previous one, he’d better. So it’s ok to fly an airplane somewhere and blow people up. You don’t need a trial or any of that old nonsense. You can just go and kill them. It’s fine. Because terrorism.

The final solution

As Michael Fallon said, there was ‘no other way’ to deal with people accused of terrorism. After all, we’ve tried all that arresting people and putting them on trial and witnesses and burden of proof and all that he said but she said and ah-yes-but-m’lud and frankly, where does it get you? Maybe Rebeka Brooks can tell David Cameron some time.

Seconds later on BBC Radio 4’s one o’clock news today we were told a 28 year-old policeman had been arrested along with several others for conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice. That’s serious. You can go to jail for life.

THAW — Just because his lapels are like that doesn’t make it not scary.

For reasons which were never made clear, as Hunter Thompson used to say, the Birmingham policeman had made-up a story. Which sadly isn’t totally unknown among police officers as any cursory viewing of the Sweeney will tell the impartial observer. But this story was different.

This story was that terrorists had been going to kidnap a police officer. Except there weren’t any terrorists. It was all made-up.

Do you see a problem yet? Maybe you should. Because now you don’t need proof to go and kill people any more. Just someone’s say so. For example, a lying policeman’s word on it.

If you’re ok with this kind of drone strike it’s probably best if you don’t even look at people the wrong way in future. The party of conservatism is taking us a long, long way from Dixon of Dock Green. Mind how you go.

At the point of demand

I had a health scare last week. There was nothing wrong with me. But there had been once, ten years ago this year. And frankly, I was scared.

I was also in pain. Intermittently. This was the main problem. The thing I had had sent waves of pain through me. Not just like shutting your hand in a door, although that’s painful enough. I’m not a notably small person and I’m talking about the kind of pain that drops you to your knees mid-stride, vomiting. It wasn’t a stomach thing. I guessed that was just part of an extreme fight:flight reflex. We’ve all advanced such a long way, haven’t we? Apparently not when the chips are down. Or coming back up again as in this case.

The thing is, when five minutes later apart from doubting your own sanity there’s nothing much wrong with you at all, it’s quite hard to get a doctor to take you seriously. Or at least, the doctor’s surgery I went to, the one where I was told “if you can cycle 20 miles there’s nothing much wrong with you.”

Well, there was. That ‘advice’ very nearly killed me. The doctor was trying to avoid doing a blood test that would have cost about 80p. It has a reputation for providing false positives, which means that sometimes it will tell you that you have something when you don’t. The up side is that if the test says you don’t have the thing it’s testing for then you really, really don’t. And obviously, terms and conditions apply. Nothing is 100% accurate. Not even me.

It was DVT, or deep vein thrombosis back then. It happened when I was flying long-haul a lot and my blood clotted too much and blocked a vein. Which hurts if it’s a big vein, which it was. It isn’t the vein that’s painful but the things around it which hurt, I think. I don’t think there’s anything veins are made of that can feel anything much. I felt cold and slow and old and as if I was dying, which thanks to my doctor’s desire for an easy life and saving 80p, I was. It was no thanks to her that I didn’t. Instead I woke up one morning a decade ago with one leg nearly twice the size of the other and raspberry coloured, after three nights of terrifying dreams. Even my useless GP had to admit there was something wrong then, the way I’d been saying there was for three years. When I wasn’t dropped to my knees vomiting in pain.

Then a brilliant surgeon asked me if I’d like to be in his experiment, which having seen Marathon Man I wasn’t totally keen on. So he offered me a choice. Be part of my experiment. Or go on Warfarin anti-coagulant, so your blood flows more easily because it’s going to be made thinner. The snag being that it’s a cumulative drug, varying the dosage doesn’t work immediately and it’s easy to over or undershoot, so you’ll need a weekly blood-test. And after ten years you’ll probably haemorrhage spontaneously and that will be pretty much splashily that.

It wasn’t a difficult choice, really. I became the third person in the UK to have an iliac stent. If you remember Slinkies, think of one six inches long and just a few millimetres wide. Now think of it stuck inside your iliac vein. That’s the big one that gets the blood up out of your left leg, crosses over your spine and takes it to your lung. Which is why an iliac DVT is somewhat problematic.

If the blood clot breaks up and moves to your lung you’ll have a pulmonary embolism. Which can kill you. If it keeps moving it’ll go through your heart and probably block the artery on the way out, so your heart will literally explode as it keeps pumping blood into a blocked tube. Which can, obviously enough, kill you. Or it might keep going and lodge in your brain, when you’ll have a stroke and not be able to speak and have to learn how to eat again but with a spoon this time unless you’re already dead, which might be preferable. It wasn’t all that much fun, any of this. I think it was worth spending 80p on a blood test. My previous GP didn’t.

An hour of surgery under local anaesthetic. I watched the whole thing live on TV. That was stupid. Even the surgeon said so, afterwards. More nightmares, for two weeks. But in a thousand years when my grave is excavated on Time Team the only thing left will be the stent gleaming in the bottom of a pit. There is no way my iliac vein will be blocked there ever again unless I’m hit by a steamroller, in which case it will be an inconvenient day anyway.

Some people live with near-constant discomfort from stents, I was warned. My surgeon told me that might happen, or it might be only when I’m really tired. Which is what happened the day before yesterday but I didn’t know if it was that or the whole thing starting again.

So I went for a blood test at a new, different GP surgery. I don’t understand the talk about waiting lists. I phoned up and got an appointment ten minutes after the surgery was closed. The woman on Reception said it was ‘urgent.’ I drove over and gave a blood sample. Four and a bit hours later they called me on my mobile. Clear. I don’t have DVT.

I do need to sort my sleep out and I think a lot of that is simply bad sleeping habits. Like doing Facebook in bed, for example.

I’m lucky enough to live in a country where I can get health care like this. Most of my ancestors ended-up dead from DVT. OK, everyone ends-up dead sooner or later, but it’s not a quick or painless way to go. Luckier still, this kind of health-care is free. Still, after everything.

It doesn’t matter how rubbish you think politics is, or how much you want to pretend ‘they’re all the same’ or it doesn’t make any difference if you vote or not. Because it does. The National Health Service, free at the point of demand, is probably the greatest single achievement ever made in this country. It’s benefitted more people more fundamentally that anything else. And it came about precisely because politicians are not all the same. And because people didn’t try to justify their inaction with a self-fulfilling script about their own irrelevance.

Simple pleasures

imag1730 — If not Paris, we’ll always have, well, tea, old girl…

I always wanted one of these. Obviously that isn’t true. I wanted one since about oh, I don’t know. More than fifteen years. It’s a thing called a Kelly Kettle. You pull out the cork and pour water in. The bottom bit you put some old newspaper in, or pine cones, or driftwood, or anything you like, and light it. The flames go up the chimney in the middle because that’s all this is, really. A chimney, with the water held around it.

One part of the Saturday Financial Times is enough to boil about one and a half litres of water in less than five minutes, which is about the best use I can make of a Special Report on Khazakstan, however it’s spelled. I take the kettle to beach so I can sit and very Englishly drink fresh tea while I read a book in the sun. Is it a survivalist thing? Well, only if survivalists are quite well organised. Which I suppose they’d have to be or they wouldn’t. And only if they like tea, of course, so not Murican ones.

It’s not very glamorous. I used to have fantasies about taking one fly fishing, but given that yet again I haven’t done any this year as the nearest fly water is 200 miles away and I am definitely not fishing in a pond to torture fish by keeping on catching them and putting them back, it looks as if I probably won’t be doing any this year. But I can still drink tea.

It’s not the kind of behaviour you’d look for on a beach on the Riviera, except the Cornish one, but I’ve been to the real one before. But it fits where I live and part of me now. And I like this small part of me, quite a lot.

No power without a purpose

Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn't understand why he lost. — Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn’t understand why he lost.

Radio4 just told me that Gordon Brown is about to make a speech in London. There are several newsy things about this, not least that he hasn’t made a big speech for years. The other is that he’s going to say how awful Jeremy Corbyn is, presumably because Corbyn actually has some socialist principles while when Ed Milliband was accused of being a socialist by David Cameron he acted as if it actually was an insult and all but said ‘sorry.’

Given that Milliband spent most of the five years he was leader of Labour seemingly determined not to do anything that would in any way resemble contradicting the Tory Party’s policies then the title Leader of the Opposition was always misplaced. The full title was and is Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition; where it went wrong was that it was supposed to mean loyal to the Crown, not to the Prime Minister.

Yvette Cooper is another contender for the leadership of the Labour Party. She got her own little soundbite in the same piece on Radio4 too, explaining that Labour was out there listening to people and ‘trying to understand’ why they lost the General Election.

She also showed again why Labour lost the election and why they deserved to. Gordon Brown was probably the least charismatic figure any party could have chosen as a leader. It wasn’t just that his entire public persona as someone who was barely containing his inner fighty pub drunk wasn’t very attractive to the people who he wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t just that like Callaghan before him, he was supposed to be Prime Minister by inheriting the title and nobody outside the Labour Party thought this was credible. If they did, they hid the fact at election time. It wasn’t even that he got into probably the least edifying public competition with David Cameron ever, both of them doing all but digging-up the tiny corpse and screaming ‘my baby’s deader than your baby.’

How useless do you have to be exactly, to lose to him?

More, it was the fact that he was a workplace bully whose behaviour was tolerated and encouraged by a Party who claimed to oppose exactly that behaviour. It was the fact that in selling off gold at its lowest price for years he clearly believed his own nonsensical ‘no more boom and bust’ rhetoric. He did nothing to stop the slide towards privatising the NHS and nothing to stop the City of London rampaging out of control. His Freudian slip when he broadcast that he had ‘saved the world’ rather than bankers and their bonuses, primarily by giving money to banks without any stipulation they should do anything with it other than keep it and count it now and then spoke volumes about his belief in his importance in the scheme of things. And as the 2010 election showed, it was a belief few other people shared. Being unable to win an election against a collection of cartoon characters drawn from the Lord Snooty faction of the Beano illustrates that point better than anything I could write.

Gordon Brown was a joke. Like Bernard Manning, he appealed to some people but from here you can’t really see why. Milliband was too, but like Yvette Cooper, for a different reason. In trying to listen he shows he doesn’t have any principles or policies or passion. Aside from anything else he uses the wrong tools to listen, if that’s really what he wants to do.

Shortly after he became leader, Ed Milliband – or someone paid to pretend to be him – went on Twitter mourning the death of a ‘pollster’ (to use Ed’s own words) who had done sterling work for the Party. Except he hadn’t. He was dead, admittedly, but what his company had produced, recruited, interviewed and reported on were group discussions. Whatever else they’re for, groups are not a snapshot of what people are thinking. They’re done in a hurry and there aren’t enough people talked to that could give a representative idea of what other people think. If you’re interested, group discussions are a great way of generating ideas and discussing things to clarify your own thinking, but they aren’t in any way reliable for polling opinion. Because they aren’t opinion polls. Notwithstanding that a large body of UK market research thinks that two groups (ie about twelve people) can give the answer to anything, (a) they can’t and b) it might have been nice for the dead researcher to have what he did described correctly by the person who wanted to be seen to be paying tribute to him. Assuming he hadn’t described groups as polls himself, of course.

Because I worked in market research at the time I tried to talk to Ed on Twitter about it. He did what he always did in Parliament: stay silent. I thought then and now how pathetic that response was. I wasn’t abusive or rude in any way. I just said that polls are not group discussions and hence the deceased was not a pollster. I didn’t say that calling anyone a pollster is a fairly yucky faux-chuminess that isn’t the best epitaph anyone could wish for, especially as it was wrong anyway. But I might as well have done.

I tried to find the Tweet but it was years ago. I found another more recent one instead, from just before the election.

Ed probably thinks this is fighting talk. This is why he lost. Because like him, it doesn’t say anything that means anything. It’s a silly, irrelevant platitude that can mean anything you want it to mean. It doesn’t just suck up to the Tory line about ‘hard-working families.’ It says nothing about cutting child benefits at all. It says nothing about what if anything he intended to do to help families who aren’t working. It says nothing about creating an economy that creates jobs. Writing this – and let’s assume he did – Milliband could actually have CUT Child Benefit to families who weren’t working and stay true to his word. But first of course, he’d have to have some rubbish research done to see if a few people liked the idea.

Blair turned Labour into an Alice In Wonderland Party where words mean anything you want them to mean. But people outside Parliament don’t think like that. Most people mean what they say. They think about things and put together an idea of how they see the world and how they’d like it to be, then they do what they can to make it that way. What they don’t generally do is keep pestering everyone to find out what other people would like them to think. Because it’s creepy. About as creepy as gurning over a newspaper that despises you, pretending you’d even keep it in the bathroom in case the loo roll ran out.

When the truth is found

There used to be a band called Jefferson Airplane. Their break-through song, White Rabbit, was an acid-drenched soaring scream of wonder about leisure pharmaceuticals, drawing on Lewis Carrol’s Alice adventures. One of the most memorable exchanges in the book was between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Alice was puzzled about the way that according to Humpty and countless others, words could be made to mean anything you want them to mean. She found this odd and not the case; Humpty disagreed. I often wonder if it was just coincidence that on the very next track on a Jefferson album I have the very next track is “Somebody to Love.” It starts: ‘when the truth is found to be lies.’

MusicPlayOn – Let the music play on!

A fine dust

Longer ago than I want to think about I looked forward to everything Ian McEwan got published. I used my student grant to buy his books as soon as they went into paperback. The Cement Garden uncomfortably echoed living in a flat in Southampton while I was at university there, the hot empty cull-de-sac street and the smell of something that wouldn’t go away layered over the smell of life driving past on the dual-carriageway at the end of the road and the unhealthy relationship I was in at the time.

One of my favourite things he wrote I don’t think anyone has heard of now. Solid Geometry. It was about a man who inherits a notebook written by his great-great grandfather, who had disappeared; the reader learns how to do it. The one in the story you understand, not, oh, you know. Not, ok?

Reading it, there was a phrase which stuck in my head, about how energy can’t just disappear, as we know from Year Three Physics. It becomes something else, movement becomes heat in friction or kinetic energy from something small is absorbed by something bigger, but it’s still there. It doesn’t just go away. Except, we believe, when something dies. In the same way McEwan was speculating about the ‘fine dust blowing all over Cheapside’, the way we breath the atoms of everyone who ever lived, good, bad, or ugly, Saxon carters, Cumbrian tranters, Prince Rupert’s cavaliers and the sourest Puritans, all alike, around us all forever. This fine dust.

I absorbed quite a lot of it at the Sir John Soane museum last week in a visit I’d moronically put off for 20-odd years. And when I walked past the pop-up cafe nearby in Lincolns Inn Fields, at last free of the fear of spontaneous combustion that haunted me for years after having to read Bleak House at school, there they were, characters from a Lautrec painting, kitchen staff on their break, lounging in the shade of the trees in poses and light straight from the post-Impressionist handbook, or at least the one used by Pissarro or Bonnard. Here they are. I think they’re probably the best phone photo I’ve ever taken.

The waiting

It’s the longest day today and up here in Scotland where I am right now, holed-up on the run in a small hotel in Tomintoul, that means the days are very, very long.

Because it’s Scotland it’s raining and it’s cold. I had to buy a sweater yesterday. I’d packed a spare but when I put it on it looked as if dogs had slept on it. Then I remembered that’s exactly what had happened back in January. That was a nice time. A hopeful time, cold but the days getting longer, one by one till now.

Near Christmas you hear Peter Gabriel’s song about ring out Solstice bells. Nobody knows what it means. It’s just another word, the way words are supposed to mean anything anyone wants them to mean now. It’s another solstice today. I don’t hear any bells ringing at all.

The place I was passing had a sale on, so I got a really nice jumper for £20. But it’s not the same as the old one. That was Italian, from Peek & Klopenburg in Dam Square, and even though it was in a sale it was a bit more than £20. It paid for itself though; I bought it back in 2002. Or 2003. I can’t really remember. I was in Amsterdam quite a bit for a while, for reasons which need not be examined too closely but were legal if not perhaps entirely moral. It depends, I think. Possibly.

Anyway.

Anyway, after today we’ll all be able to say it once again, showing our true British pessimism. Altogether now at 7pm tomorrow night please, roll your eyes skyward and say ruefully:

“Aye, the nights are fair drawing in noo.”

Heavy relics

A joke. A pathetic one. There ought to be another control pot, labelled “Fakeness.” It should go all the way to 12.

I saw one of these in a shop window about ten years ago. I thought it was a joke then. I still do now, except this is a joke for people with two grand to spray up the wall.

Are the soles curling off of your blue suede shoes? Do your flabby arms chaffe when you windmill your guitar? Is your quiff, let’s face it, not quite as stiff as it used to be?
Ladies and elderly gentlemen, you need a Fender Relic.

Here are some words. I know all of them, just not in this order.

Fender USA Custom Shop 60’s HSS Strat guitar heavy relic Daphne Blue

As the ad says, 100% genuine and all original, but obviously it means 100% genuine fake. A ’60s guitar is what it says in one sentence, but a 2012 guitar not even 20 words on.

“Let’s talk about the finish first…” Oh do let’s, as they say in Enid Blyton books, which are more realistic than anything about this guitar or the company selling it now.

Relic® – There and back and still here today.The authentic worn-in wear of a guitar that has experienced many years of regular use in clubs and bars. Marks that tell a story, finish checking all over the body, and scars, dings and dents from bridge to headstock.

Can we have a look at that? Or doesn’t the Sale of Goods Act apply any more? It isn’t authentic because it’s fake. It isn’t worn in wear, because it’s fake. It hasn’t experienced many years of anything, because it’s three years old. It certainly hasn’t been played in clubs and bars regularly, if at all. The marks it has tell a story, certainly. A story of fake. It’s fake. Everything about it is fake. A fake story about a desperate company selling fake guitars to desperate fake posers. Jeez, I thought I was bad enough. Even I wouldn’t buy one of these. Not even women who’ve had screaming fits at me would accuse me of that.

This model that I have for sale here is a ‘Heavy Relic’ – a custom order Relic with just a little more ‘World Tour’ treatment !!

Many people think why would you buy a guitar that has been artificially aged ? The answer is very simple – the LOOK !.. and the feel. This guitar plays like new (because it is) rather than an old worn out Strat with a part-warped neck.

“How’s about that then,guys’n’gals?”

Why bother buying a Mexican Strat and a packet of sandpaper and still having change out of £400? I mean, that just wouldn’t be authentic, would it? It’s the look, after all. That’s got to cost £1600 on its own. Sandpaper isn’t cheap you know. Except actually, in real life, it is.

Relic®. When bullshit isn’t enough anymore.™

A learning experience

For the past four weeks I’ve been learning how to teach English as a foreign language in London, where despite UKIP’s opinion, it isn’t even vaguely. But London was foreign to me and I used to live there.

I lived there once for six months when I left university and it was crap. You could still smoke on the Tube in those days and people did. Entering a Tube carriage on a damp, dark November evening with your shoes soaked through to inhale 20 stranger’s Picadilly smoke was a budget version of Hell. A car I was trying to repair in the street fell of the jacks I had put it on and nearly fell on top of me. I helped save someone’s life when they walked straight off a station platform and fell onto the tracks one boiling afternoon when three trains had been cancelled trapping hundreds of us all trying to go home. It’s a lot further down to the tracks at a railway station than you think it is. Or rather it’s a much longer way back up, especially when you’ve got someone’s legs end and you’re trying to heave her back up to the platform while someone else you don’t know does the shoulders end, hopefully before the train gets there. Obviously as I’m writing this, we did. The other person was wearing a suit; I was wearing a leather jacket. He got thanked by the crowd. I got ignored.

I had a crappy flat off Westbourne Grove where one night a woman I’d never seen before knocked on the door and asked me to take her to hospital. She said she’d been in an accident. I’d just been to the launderette, so I was free. I called an ambulance because she was talking in a strange way. Within 20 minutes of meeting her I was seeing the X-Rays of her fillings and the size of her brain; they assumed I was something to do with her. I sort-of was a bit, after that. For a week or so, the way things went then.

I left, then I came back again, then twenty years ago I left for good. And I don’t recognise huge chunks of the London that was there then.