Other Writing – Page 2 – Writer-insighter

Social research and the Old Firm

Long long ago when the world was young or at least I was, when Latin teachers had actually fought in the Spanish Civil War (unlike Eric Blair, mine tragically wasn’t shot by a Fascist sniper) and university lecturers still awarded marks for Marx, I read Sociology at the University of Bath. I didn’t read much of it, to be honest. Like Ben in Not Your Heart Away I had a head full of ideals and romance, not for anyone in particular, just for the thingness of things. The brightness. The future. The shining plain.

Lenin. We used to go in the same pub. Not at the same time, admittedly.

I didn’t enjoy Sociology. I thought it wasted my time and its own. I didn’t see the point of it. I disliked the earnest mature student middle-class magistrate mums who thought they were contributing to ‘the revolution’ they desired, oblivious to the fact they’d almost certainly have been first against the wall if their revolution went the same way it did in Russia, thanks to a bunch of sociopathic paranoiacs. The biggest joke of all looking back was that not a single one of them realised they were in the middle of the biggest, sickest revolution this country ever went through, back in the early 1980s. But anyway, he typed, wiping the spittle from the laptop screen. Moving on.

I always liked finding things out. I didn’t like the way if an identifiable real incident was referred to that was instantly called ‘anecdotal,’ which was supposed to mean unrepresentative. It wasn’t even tested, just a knee-jerk response, as valid as “Marx for marks” or “greed is good.” Like the selective view of soviet communism, it seemed to be the collective truth that it was the principle that counted, not the facts. If something really happened then it just didn’t. Facts were irrelevant. Reactionary. Not to be trusted.

Things that make you go hmmm

It was a view that coloured my view of the validity of lots of research. Working in commercial research for two decades made me realise that there are plenty of charlatans around and the very biggest ones are too stupid to even realise that they are. You can spot them easily though; they’re the ones with the presentations full of buzz-words, usually ones they don’t actually know what they mean going forward. As Gregory Peck said in Twelve Angry Men, let’s run that up the flagpole and see who salutes it. Or we can throw it out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up.

Either way, when I see things like this, earnest, useful, trying to be helpful, couched in this pseudo-scientific jargon that is supposed to primarily impress the researcher’s PhD board, it still irritates. I was reading as one does the Association Between Old Firm Fitba – sorry, Football Matches and Reported Domestic Violence.

You can see a problem just from the title. The Old Firm is Rangers v Celtic, Prods v Papes. Quite how two different brands of imaginary friends make you punch your partner in the face (because God wanted it that way?) is a mystery to me but then the Lord moves in a mysterious way. Much like the fans after a bottle of Bucky.

The real issue, the real problem with this research is ‘reported’, because generally, it isn’t. Women make excuses for the people who attack them. They’re embarrassed about staying with them. They’re encouraged to believe it’s their fault. The more it happens the more it happens, because for the woman it becomes a cycle of feeling more and more useless and deserving of being attacked while for men it becomes a self-justifying loop of look-whit-ye-made-me-dae.

That was inappropriate. I am sometimes. It’s certainly not an issue confined to Strathclyde.

But it’s also not an issue that benefits from ‘explanations’ like this. Whatever else I am, I am not stupid. And I have not the first clue what this “Association” (geddit??) graphic is telling me or even what it is supposed to tell me. A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. But some researchers seem to believe a picture like this proves academic rigour, that the less intelligible a report is, the magically ‘better’ it must be until everyone sings the chorus to The King Is In The Altogether. The emperor is always naked, whatever people flatteringly say.

If you can’t see what it is from this picture, it isn’t saying anything worth saying. It is, as they might say in Strathclyde, a self-righteous havering pile of sh*te.

Here’s what it said:

It was found that the median number of reported domestic incidents was significantly greater in the Old Firm condition, compared with the Old Firm comparator and both Scotland International conditions.

That means more people punch their partner in the face when Celtic are playing Rangers, more than when any other match is on. So why not say it? Bit they havnae finished:

Moreover, there was no statistical difference between the Scotland International and Scotland International comparator conditions. Additional comparisons indicated a statistically significant difference between Old Firm and Scotland International comparator conditions, but none between Scotland International and Old Firm comparator conditions.

Moreover, that is simply repeating the first sentence, unless you want to know that when Celtic play Rangers there’s a difference in the amount of partner-face-punching compared to when Scotland International matches are on, but we’re not told which way, better (less) or worse (more). Sorry, that’s me introducing my disgusting, frivolous anecdotal subjectivity into science. Again.

We are told there is evidence of a link between sporting events and increased levels of domestic violence in wider society (Brimicombe & Café, 2012). Palmer (2011) discusses the role of the “holy trinity” (seeWenner, 1998) of sports, alcohol, and hegemonic masculinity in the context of domestic violence but this minces words.

barmy army — Other hegemonic masculinity. Of a sort.

How about this? Sport, specifically football, attracts morons who like a fight, especially when they’re drunk. There are no mass fights at rugby matches, or tennis or chess tournaments or even cricket matches, despite the temptation to lump the bathetic Barmy Army. When Celtic are playing Rangers, drunk morons who think their God likes this kind of behaviour like to smack their wives and girlfriends about, more than at other times.

This is not “engaging in hegemonic masculinity.” This is called being a violent, domineering, retarded inadequate. There are other, much shorter words that I know for a fact are often used in Strathclyde. But of course, a proper social researcher could come up with a more academic nomenclature.

I didn’t do well in Sociology. Somehow I just couldn’t see the point of it at all.

Customer Satisfaction

Over three weeks ago I ordered broadband from BT. More fool me. Twenty-six years ago BT was privatised, changing it from a publicly-owned monopoly. We were promised this was going to bring more competition. Better service. Trickle-down. If you see Sid, tell him.

All of it was one big con. Twenty-six years later BT is still to all intents and purposes a private monopoly. If you don’t believe that, try getting a line to your house installed by anyone else. If you live somewhere Virgin operates you might be lucky. If you live anywhere else it’s BT or nothing. But surely, the service is better?

Here’s what happened this week. When BT eventually turned up on Friday they couldn’t find out where the junction for the phone line was. Maybe it was on top of a pole. Maybe it was in a box up to two miles away. “The system’ eventually tracked it down to a box somewhere outside Such-And-Such house. Where was that then, the BT man asked?

Here’s the neat little BT logic-loop.

The only way he was able to find the BT junction box was for me to go on the web on my iPhone (O2) to get a map image of where the address was. Luckily the address was the same as a house for sale on Rightmove, so I could even give him a picture of the address he was looking for. Which was just as well because BT couldn’t or wouldn’t help him with this at all. Still, they were only going on as they started – they didn’t tell him how to find my house after I’d given them detailed instructions even down to where to park.

It’s Good To Talk

After two hours on Friday the BT man announced he’d connected it. Great! Er, no, not really. There’s something wrong with the line. Not here. Somewhere. Can’t do anything about it today. Have to log it on Monday. They’ll probably do something about it Wednesday-ish.

But no. Today at about three o’clock I got a text. The phone line is connected. It wasn’t. half an hour later I got another text. Broadband is connected. Make sure you use it, and be aware that of course (of course!) it might be slow or just stop at any time in the next three days. Oh and if it’s like really slow, do make sure you complain up to three months later, but obviously after the cancellation period.

So a pack of lies so far. I called them on the phone. It’s good to talk, Bob Hoskins used to say. Except BT don’t like talking. First they charge you to talk to them on an 0800 number. Because they can. Then a woman with a Scottish voice (which in this house hasn’t always been a mark of harmony and accord but that’s another story) asks you what you want. For example. You might say ‘I haven’t got a phone after you said I had.” And if you do say that she’s very sorry but that isn’t what she’s going to rpely to.

Will you be wanting a phone?

Aye, that’s right enough, hen.

“Well which number are yi calling aboot, ye havering English och sorry, ah fair fergot fer a mumment?”

I don’t know the number. The text said I should dial XXXX (redacted) to get the number, but the line disnae work seh ah cannet.

Och weeel, if ye don’t have a number you’ll no be having a BT connection, so talk tae yer ain provider. See you.

Three times. Then I thought maybe I could fool her. A slim chance, trying to fool a Scottish girl but worth a try. I was desperate now anyway. Maybe if I say I want a phone, that’ll dae ut right enough. Sorry. That might be the answer to this conundrum.

People Who Speak English

I get through. To a call centre. English people. Thousands of them in a tin hut, by the sound of it. “Thank-you for calling BT, the UK’s favourite broadband provider.”

Well it isn’t with me.

I can’t hear you. Is it your phone?

No, I wanted half a hundredweight of Saxon potatoes. Of course it’s my phone.

I can’t hear you. Is it your phone?

No, it’s your call centre.

Explain the problem.

Five calls. Two texts. BT don’t answer texts. Mind you, to be fair they weren’t answering calls either. They have a novel new way of dealing with complaints now. If they don’t like them they just put the phone down. Twice. Would I like to spend two more minutes on my phone bill to explain exactly how satisfied with BT I am? No, actually, thanks awfully for asking. But I do recognise a rigged customer satisfaction survey when I see one. And a third-world service basking in the cosy glow of its protected monopoly, happy in the knowledge it can do as it likes because for all the lying nonsense we were fed when a pubic company was sold off cheap to make money for the government’s chums in banks at the taxpayer’s expense, there actually isn’t any competition at all. If you see Sid, tell him.

And in a little postscript, the next day I phoned again. I got an Indian man on the end of the phone and winced, waiting for his half-English excuses. He fixed the whole problem of no phone connection courteously and politely, in fifteen minutes, most of which was me running up and down stairs. As I’d just swum a kilometre I had already got my quota of exercise for the day. That’ll make up for my birthday tomorrow then. If it works like that.

Joseph Knecht’s Posthumous Lament

No permanence is ours; we are a wave

That flows to fit whatever form it finds:

Through day or night, cathedral or the cave

We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mould after mould we fill and never rest.

We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.

We move, we are the everlasting guest.

No field nor plough is ours, we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown.

He plays; we are the clay to his desire.

Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan,

He kneeds, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!

We long forever for the right to stay.

But all that ever stays with us is fear,

And we shall never rest upon our way.

By Hermann Hesse, from Magister Ludi

I read this a long time ago, in a desert far away. I was about Ben’s age in Not Your Heart Away. A girl sat on an abandoned tractor one night with the wind blowing her hair while I read the poem aloud from the book she carried. Those sentences tell you probably all you need to know about who we were, then. The feeling’s stayed with me ever since, inside me head. Not that one, the one that took us out to the abandoned tractor to talk, as people used to say (‘let’s go somewhere we can talk…’) but the book thing, the stage-prop, the lever, the excuse, the poem, that’s stayed with me.

Walking with blue

Rudolf Hess. Nutter. Do not confuse the two.

I’ve spent the day going through old notebooks, trying to write songs, remembering old dreams. And then I found this. It should not have become my song, the song of my life or if it had to not then, when I was nineteen. There might be a time for this in people’s lives, maybe particularly if they’re German. If you’ve lost a world war or two. If you’ve got one too many duelling scars from Heidelberg. If you’re a short dark painter who can’t paint very well and live in a bedsit with people like Christopher Isherwood flitting about. But not when you’re a teenage British kid into Magazine and Kate Bush, wearing black cords and red Kickers, just off to university. What was wrong with me? What, you know, was it?

I, like, didn’t know who I was. Well, big news. I still don’t. A bit more, a bit more than then perhaps. But as the other bladerunner said at the end of the film, the one who wasn’t Harrison Ford, the one who hadn’t fallen in love with a mechanical blow-up doll, the one who’d found out they were programmed to fall to bits in a couple of years because it was all too much for them, then again, who does?

I’ve never felt I had a home, more than for about an hour or two. People have tried to make me feel that, truly tried, but it didn’t stick. Or maybe I didn’t stick. It’s not a big noble born under a wandering star thing, just this no permanence is mine thing. I’d like it to be. I don’t think it’s going to happen now.

Years ago there was a film. Bob Hoskins, the Singing Detective, the uber-geezer in The Long Good Friday, the friendly bloke from the BT ads who told us it was good to talk fell into a cartoon as a 1940s gum-shoe, a private eye trying to find-out Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Prime suspect was Jessica Rabbit, a smouldering torch singer with a figure to die for and Bob thought Roger probably had. She was trouble. You could see that a mile away. A voice that would smoke tarmac when she said: “I’m not really bad. I’m just … drawn that way.” That was me.

"I'm not bad. I'm just....drawn that way." — “I’m not bad. I’m just….drawn that way.”

Not Jessica Rabbit, you understand. I’ve never poured myself into a ball gown. Poured people out of them, but that’s a different thing altogether. (“That’s a different thing.” Thank-you.)

But that thing, the longing forever for the right to stay. I know that feeling. It has nothing to do with mortgages or arrears or where you live or passports or visas. People like us now, we do so many different things. You can call it a portfolio career if it helps. I’ve cooked crepes, shot things, explained things, found things, made things, written things and yes, I crave a form that binds, a certainty, a constancy. And at the same time I avoid it as if it was contagion incarnate, as if it burned my eyes.

I should never have found this poem. I should never have found this poem again. But it didn’t change my life. It just articulated some of it.

Food, fashion and fetishism

Infantilising foods

Heston Blumenthal seems to have taken over the Waitrose magazine for reasons that were never made clear, as Hunter Thompson used to say. Presenting himself as the wacky scientist chef with the James Bond villain name, the man whose restaurant mysteriously wasn’t closed down when he poisoned scores of people with oysters that were way past being a bit iffy feels it’s his duty to tell us all about the food Waitrose can sell us.

As recipes go they’re admirably simple. Sometimes they’re so simple you could get the impression you might have had when you were about seven years old, that putting toast on a plate was making breakfast or that opening a tin of baked beans was making dinner. Most of them are tweely ‘Heston’s’; as in Heston’s ultimate cheeseburger.

Never mind that it sounds exactly like those people you shared with at uni who used a chinagraph pencil to mark the level on their milk bottles and biroed their initials on sausages. But life turned out ok. I topped up the milk bottle with water. I passed it myself.

Cheese slices

To make the cheese slices, mix the cheese, Worcestershire sauce, English mustard, cornflour, yeast and Marmite. Place in the fridge for 2 hours.

Sorry? To make cheese I put cheese in the fridge? And why isn’t there anything about slicing it? How do I do that without instructions, exactly? Is this supposed to be a recipe or what? And breathe. And look at another recipe.

Salmon dip

(Please note, Heston’s waaaaaay too funky to use a capital at the start of each word. If you’ll pardon the expression. Funky means ‘smelling of sex.’ I always think unencumbered it’s a bit like marzipan, (me and the writer of The English Patient too if you remember the scene at the Christmas party. In the film, obviously) but not something I’d want to be aware of in a commercial kitchen where my dinner is being prepared by several people I haven’t even met.

Funky fishy stuff

By combining two forms of salmon – chargrilled and tea-smoked – you get a variety of texture.

From the wild rushing rivers of Alaska to the reaches of the Clyde and the Tay, the fjords of Norway and the Arctic tundra, salmon fishers the world over quest for the wily tea-smoked salmon. There are two forms of brown trout, which are much more interesting. The normal ones, that eat insects and larvae and grow to no more than about a foot long for a really big one. Then there are the weird, strange ones, the were-trout, the ferox that lives up to its name, brown trout that have gone cannibal and grown ten times heavier than they might have expected to when they hatched. Weirder still, absolutely no-one knows why they do that, if and when they do. There are also two forms of salmon, almost as Heston says, but he doesn’t seem to want to talk about them at all. There are wild salmon, traditionally in the UK bright pink and eaten from tins. And there are farmed salmon, which get subsidies to provide a handful of jobs in Scotland, where they have to be force-fed chemicals to stop them dying from infections caused by sea-lice eating them alive while their droppings poison the sea-bed under and downstream of their cages. Because they can’t swim far they’ve got no muscle tone so their flesh doesn’t have much texture and because they don’t get much exercise their flesh also has to be dyed to make it the colour people expect of their smoked salmon. Still, if you want this ersatz copy of the good life at £2.99 for 200g then the 27-odd industrial chemicals involved in getting it onto your plate probably doesn’t matter. Certainly Heston can’t be bothered to mention it.

But then, texture, like production and provenance seems to be something else that’s all a bit desperately un-hip and boring. The people Heston’s aiming Pork shoulder sliders at seem to think so, anyway.

Sliders are so-called because they slide down easy.

Let’s ignore the hyphen which seems to imply that they’re not called that at all. Let’s ignore the chummy anti-elitist illiteracy of using easy instead of easily. Heston, you absolute dude. Instead, let’s think about the virtues of food you don’t even have to chew. Yum.

Of course, if you don’t chew your teeth will fall out sooner than they might otherwise and equally of course, you’ll eat far more of this stuff because without chewing you by-pass the bio-feedback loop created over millions of years to tell you you’re full. Oh and you won’t produce saliva the way you’re supposed to, so you won’t digest it properly, you won’t feel great and you’ll get fat.

But so what? Who, frankly, cares? Obviously not Heston. Because food isn’t an integral part of your life that really matters and without it you’ll die and with the wrong foods you’ll die in considerable discomfort. Debatably worse, you’ll look as if you have as well.

Gin

Gin with grapefruit and ginger beer. This drink is packed full of aromatics. Yes. It’s called gin. That’s what gin is.

Spit-roasting

Spit-roasted pineapple – no, I’m not even going to go there.

But I’m a square. Food is fun. Food is wacky. Food is a zillion photos of a bald bloke fiddling with his glasses and a Bunsen burner. Food is 529 people projectile vomiting and involuntarily re-decorating their bathrooms when luckily there’s no breach of food hygiene regulations. It’s nothing to do with where it came from or how it got to your plate or what it’s going to do to you. None of that matters at all.

And finally

And on page 13, Heart disease might be scary.*

Who knew? Depressingly, I didn’t even make that up. Food as fetishism I can cope with; at least fetishism takes things seriously. Food as faddish infantilism mocks the animals that provided it and the people who eat it.

* p13 Waitrose magazine 1^st August.

Adder berries

When I was a boy I lived in the countryside, but I didn’t really know anything much about it. It had changed. We were surrounded by fields but we didn’t know what happened there. My friend Andrew lived the other end of a footpath past a field, Star’s Field, named after the horse I just about remember there, but one day Star went and shortly after that the field went as well. There’s a little row of shop for the estate there now. Adder berries grew at one end of the path. That’s what we called them. Everyone did. Adders do eat they, we were told. They’re poisonous.

“They’re poisonous’ was applied to everything that didn’t come from a shop. It wasn’t meant to be ironic, notwithstanding that a lot of the food in shops isn’t great for you at all. If you want to argue about that, have a look at the incidence of obesity and Type Two diabetes, two things that’ll mess you up big style if you overdo the Sunny Delight and instant meals.

Poison

“They’re poisonous” was applied to all mushrooms in every field as soon as older people who knew that all funghi are edible but some only once had the kind of jobs that meant they couldn’t be with children in the fields to tell them that St George’s mushrooms, the huge puffballs, should be cooked instead of kicked and that while just the look of the Avenging Angel will suck you in almost mesmerically, shining so pure and white it’s almost luminous, so will you be within a few days if you eat it.

It’s Good For You

So the thing is done. Whatever industrial chemical (farmed salmon has up to 27 of them) is in the food, not including our old friends aspartame or cancer-promoting saccharine (look it up if you don’t believe me, I’m tired of saying the same thing over and again), so long as it’s got a plastic wrap on it it’s Good For You. If it hasn’t it’s Bad. Just like adder berries. I’ve never eaten one. I’m not actually going to try. At least until I find out what they really are and what they do. Just the way no-one bothers to when they read the list of ingredients in processed foods. They’re fine, even when the makers put a label on them saying they’ll mess you up. Processed food is Cheap. Convenient. Hygienic. Good For You. And that’s official. Even when something is so toxic it’s banned until Donald Rumsfeld pulls some strings to get it made ok.

Bad is Good. Black is White. Knowns are Unknowns, or at least, Unmentionds.

Wrong-footed

I heard there was a lunch at a club I belong to, but I wasn’t sure when or exactly where. I asked a friend who’s a member. She said she’d email me, at two email addresses she had for me, but I didn’t get either one. I emailed the founder of the club. Sure! Great to see you! It’s at this address, five miles away, noon Sunday.

My friend said she’d see me at the thing there in the afternoon. Did it go on after lunch? Did lunch sort of evolve into whatever was after lunch? Did I have time to cycle there so I could drink, or should I go and get petrol for something I had to do first thing tomorrow morning and the little yellow petrol pump has been lit up on the dashboard on and off for the past two days? And what to wear, anyway? It was an Arts Club lunch, so what do you wear that says “artistic’ that doesn’t say ‘old queen”?

I’ve nothing against old queens per se, except a firm belief that anyone’s sexuality is absolutely no business of anyone else whatsoever. I’ve always believed there was a lot to be said for the policy the US Army had towards gay personnel: don’t ask, don’t tell, not because it’ll frighten the horses but because it’s none of my damn business or anybody else’s who chooses to put what where with another consenting adult. But I still didn’t want to look like an old queen, so the ironic cravat was out. They don’t do ironic very well in rural Suffolk, even at the seaside.

Settled on an ironed check shirt instead, summer-weight trousers, suede Oxfords, light blue check Burlington socks (yes I know. It’s an ’80s thing. What about it?), silver Liberty cufflinks. Rejected the cotton jacket. Rejected the rather nice and now somehow improbably vintage Italian silk tie that was a hunting trophy from the ‘80s. (No sweetheart, when you give someone else someone else’s handmade tie you don’t get it back just because they remember where they left it. Call me unreasonable. And do your own explaining). Is it going to rain? Don’t know. Is there time to get petrol? There’s not going to be time not to, with a 6 am start to get raw milk to market tomorrow. It’s what used to be called a mixed and varied life, these days.

I was driving down the road when I realised I didn’t actually want to go to lunch. I don’t eat slaughterhouse meat and I’m not even going to start on about farmed salmon because I have other stuff to do this afternoon. And I was looking forward to the rocket, cous-cous, tomato-stewed beans, cos and lentils with sourdough and the humous I’d made two days ago and needed eating up in the comfort of my own garden while the weather holds, with the chickens and some wine and a book. Except someone came round unexpectedly last night and in the course of the two hours of the half hour she could stay for we somehow drank the bottle of wine that was the only one I had in the house. Chateau-bottled red, since you ask. Co-op. £5.99. Not as grand as it sounded, is it? Really, really very nice though, but maybe that was the company it was drunk in.

Got to the lunch predictably too late so didn’t go in. Saw that the afternoon thing was an outdoor jazz picnic (Nice!) with people trooping down to the sea carrying deck-chairs and picnic rugs. It was one of the only times I didn’t even have a sheet of plastic in the boot of the car let along anything more comfortable to sit on. So home after snagging a bottle of Duoro. Slight bridling at £8.99 until I reasoned that was two and a half pints of something much less nice in the pub. And while obviously the pub is there for more than just drinking we don’t want to attract too much attention, do we, two days in a row? So home, thinking about changing into stuff I can sit on grass in. The weather looks as if it’s thinking about changing too, hence lunch with myself. It’s half-past one. Pub’s still open. And what to do?

Clouded hills

I cycled nine miles to a friend’s farm the other evening to be there for a meeting at seven. We were going to discuss the business plan I’m writing for her, changing her experimental pastoral herd to one that can sustain a modest living for more than just the cows.

It was a sunny, late June evening and the back-from work rush-hour was starting in Butley. There must have been four cars altogether, two behind me and two coming towards me, one of them waiting to turn into the side-road on my left.

It was a little red car, about 15 years old by the P-plate. The woman driving it was a bit tanned, wearing shades with her hair in a top-knot. All the car windows were down and there was music blasting out. I didn’t recognise it at first. You don’t normally hear anything in Butley. When the Butley Oyster was open there used to be old photos on the wall, memories of a time when things ever happened in this tiny, usually silent village. The pub used to be confused with the Butley Oysterage at Orford, four miles away, famous for its food and when people from London phoned to try to book a table, the landlady, who never, ever served food, thought it was terribly clever and amusing to pretend she’d never heard of the Oysterage and that she had no idea what anyone was talking about. We simply roared. Odd that the pub is shut now. But like most of Suffolk, despite what the more moronic inhabitants like to pretend, it hasn’t always been like this at all.

The photos on the wall of the pub proved it. All of them in black and white, faded with time. One of them showed a crashed Heinkel in a field, a wrecked German bomber surrounded by British policemen, civilians and a man in un buttoned RAF tunic, holding a machine-gun from the aircraft at waist-level, pretending to be Jimmy Cagney over 70 years ago. The other photo I always noticed was from the same period, when Suffolk expected to be the front line and over-run. Especially this part of Suffolk. This whole area was off-limits to civilians for most of the war. Whole villages were simply confiscated and everyone told to leave for the duration. Iken was one, where thousands of Allied troops charged up the beaches of the Alde in practice for Normandy. Shingle Street, just a few miles away, was another and to this day, no-one really knows what happened there, nor whether or not there really was a German landing that resulted in hundreds of burned bodies being washed up along the shoreline. The photo showed the local Home Guard unit, the men too old or too young or too infirm for active service, kitted out in their uncomfortable-looking serge uniforms and re-cycled WW1 Lee-Enfield rifles, leftovers from the War to end all Wars.

There are lots of sad things about old photos, not least the fact that in any photo seventy years old, its likely that even the youngest people are actuarially likely to be dead. But there was always another sadness about this photo of the halt and the lame. The Home Guard were by definition the men who couldn’t join the regular Army. The sad thing was the number of them in the photo, more old and young, more men unfit for active service than live in the whole village today.

Suffolk more than many rural places has changed. The communities are fragmented. If you’re young you have to move away because there are no jobs. If you’re old you almost certainly didn’t make your money in the area and want to preserve the picture postcard fantasy that ‘it’s always been like this,’ without inconvenient children playing or teenagers snogging each others faces off in the bus shelter, thank-you very much. Without any motorways and a farcical, un-commutable railway service that means the 97 mile journey to London takes around two and a half hours, once the farms mechanised there simply wasn’t anything for anyone to do. The farms weren’t the bulwark of society people like to pretend. They got rid of the horses and got rid of the men who worked on farms. That got rid of the whole point of most of these villages. The people drifted away, apart from the ones too old to do anything except hang on in the twilight of rural zombie world until the end.

We will not sleep

The music was still hammering out of the little red car when I recognised what it was the girl with the top-knot and the shades was listening to somewhat unbelievably: Jerusalem. William Blake wrote the lyrics, one of the weirdest artists and poets who ever lived in the middle of London. I used to walk past where his house had been most days, just round the corner from where Karl Marx lived in a two-room flat writing so passionately about the exploitation of the proletariat that he got his maid pregnant. The song became the anthem of the Labour Party long before Blair re-branded it Tory-Lite (‘I’m Bombin ’ It’™). But it used to mean something, Blake’s Albion, the Labour-landslide 1945 generation’s self-reward for its blood sacrifice twice in what was so obviously not then an average lifetime.

Blake must always have sat uncomfortably with the buttoned-up church folk. Like Dickens, he only once saw a ghost and then one no-one else saw or had ever heard of. He and his wife once sunbathed naked at a time when most decent people didn’t even take their clothes off to wash once a week. And the paintings, the poems about tigers, the rays of sun, the tablets of stone, the amazement and the wonder that radiates from everything this strange man painted and wrote, the power of the imagery and the dark undertow beneath dull little rhymes about diseased roses and flying worms. All of this, belting out of an old Nissan in a country lane one Friday teatime.

Heston Services

If you shop at Waitrose (and dear reader, it is a truth universally acknowledge that one does not admit to shopping anywhere else) you’ll have seen Waitrose Weekend, the free newspaper-style magazine with cooking tips and as they would never say in public, so much more.

This week along with the butterflied lamb with fig glaze (What? No, if you’ve got something to say then just say it. I’m waiting….) there’s a feature on how utterly crap, damaging to reality, truth and a genuine business culture The Apprentice actually is along with a thing about Aggers and cricket. So far so excellent. Cricket, and in particular Radio 4’s surreal commentaries on it where the on-air appreciation of cakes baked by deranged listeners and sent to the men in their 80s broadcasting as they chortle over a cup of tea at world-class schoolboy humour (“the batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willy”) is far and away the best athletic sport, chiefly because sloggers like Botham aside it doesn’t look very athletic. Sitting in a deckchair it all looks so gentle any spectator can think ‘I could do that. If I could be bothered to stand up. Maybe I’ll have another cup of tea first.’ I once tried to introduce a Scottish woman to the serene loveliness of an English village cricket match. It was the first time I’d really appreciated how much Lewis Carrol had put into the game.

‘Why’s that stupit man with all the hats wearing a dress?’

The umpire had decided to wear the hat of everyone who had decided their hat was too hot or got in the way and handed it to him. He’d also decided to wear shorts, a deplorable practice in cricket but let’s face it, they weren’t playing at the Oval. He’d then worn his white warehouse coat, as umpire and the hem of the coat was longer than his shorts. Not a dress. But it did look as if the local transsexual had branched out with a multiple hat fetish, to be fair. The next comment was much more damning.

‘If they put their back intae ut this could be over in haffanoor.’

I tried to explain that running when you hit the ball, well, that was really for professionals on TV, and that running was antithetical to cricket, where the cucumber sandwiches and the gossip around the pavillion, where the tea-urn is probably more important than the urn the Ashes are kept in, is all much more important than the crass vulgarity of actually winning the game. Cricket is – well cricket is for sitting on a deckchair in the sun and languid clapping, reflecting on the inanities of sports that involve strenuous effort like cheering. The Zen contemplation of the red, white and green. If the Rastafari flag is gold for the sun, red for the blood of the martyrs and green for the green fields of Ethiopia (notwithstanding that Hailie Selassie, the Lion of Judah, spent a fair bit of time in a nice early-Victorian stone villa in Bath) then cricket’s iconography symbolises the red of the ball that hit you in the side of the head on a playing field when you were fourteen and looking at Teresa Powell playing volleyball instead of fielding properly, (if you kept your eyes open Bennett this wouldn’t have happened. You’re letting your team down. There’s nothing wrong with you…), white for the colour the knee pads used to be, the only pad you could find that had buckles on all of its straps and green for the grass stains you hoped you might get on your whites when volleyball was over in a summer long ago. The smell of long-dead bowlers and boyhood and loss and the wheel of life anthem for doomed youth that gently haunts every cobweb in every village Pav. I tried to translate this into Scottish but I think it lost something along the way.

No. What irritated me about Waitrose Weekend (and let’s face it, so far so lovely) was Heston Blumenthal. To be fair, either of those two words irritates me intensely, let alone both together. Heston Blumenthal is a self-consciously ‘wacky’ (no, there really isn’t an N in the word, officially) celebrity chef who looks like a dick and plays with food. You won’t hear anything about provenance or terroir or grass feeding or ethical standards in Heston’s cooking. Or the food poisoning that sent literally hundreds of his customers to the bathroom all night that the local Environmental Health Officers in Bray felt shouldn’t close his restaurant but one hundredth of which would have shut a burger van for good. All you ever hear about “Heston’s” food is exactly that – how he’s put his own unique stamp on it. Because that’s obviously the most important thing.

“In his Heston from Waitrose Salted Caramel Popcorn Ice Cream the chef manages to contain everything that’s great about the movies.’ Does he? Does he really? He combines the burning, corrosive madness of the English Patient with the whimsical fun of banditry in Butch Cassidy and the seen-it-all Bogart and the beautiful-and-dead appeal of James Dean and the institutionalised crushing brutality of The Hill in a bag of popcorn? Not bad going, Heston. Maybe next time you could add a soupcon of Bad Wives from the Vivid studio. That might lend a little ‘ow you say, piquancy.

“In a television advert for Waitrose… the chef is shown being inspired by popcorn-like meteors on a trip to the cinema.” I think Waitrose will find they’ve actually paid for an advert for the chef, not for themselves at all, notwithstanding that after The Triffids a lot of people look at meteors with a distinct unease. But that could just be the popcorn, of course. Exactly what a popcorn-like meteor is, or how it inspires anyone is quickly brushed aside.

“The chef, who is famous for molecular gastronomy” (like every other chef on the planet, but let’s put that aside too, along with food poisoning, which is obviously now officially in the Rude To Mention It category) ‘reveals…he had this idea. Why not take my love of ice-cream and my childhood love of cinema and just stick them all together?”

No Heston. Just stop right there. The real question is why do that, not why not? Let’s ignore the fact that corn is one of the very worst things you can eat, in terms not just of the economics of its production but also what it does to you. Corn syrup, anyone? With a side order of Type Two diabetes? Coming right up.

It’s the sheer mind-warping inanity, the look-at-me-look-at-me playing with food I object to. Why not take my love of Biggles books and rice and um, eat it on an airplane? Oh wait, that’s been done. Ok, here’s one. Why not take my love of Gerry Anderson’s puppets and sandwiches and er, make a balsa wood sandwich with a string filling? Yeah baby! Behave! Now we’re cooking with gas. Molecularly. Like no-one else does.

Next week Heston shows us a protein shake any man can make in five minutes with an old copy of Penthouse. As Waitrose Weekend hopefully doesn’t say.

WTF

I was hunting the job ads, like you do, when I saw this:

Paid Role For Creative Writer

Seeking up and coming creative writer to become a part of the film project.

We have a very exciting script and are in current talks with a Funding Firm in London with keen interest.

The creative writer should be able to come on board and help furnish the script to the macro excellence we are looking for. The ideal candidate should be expected to write in the cutting edgy genre.

The Treatment and character development have already been completed, so what we require is
someone to help flesh the script out. The project is still in the planning stage.

What are you waiting for? Send your CV and a sample script (no more than 5 pages) to the email below.

The Creative Writer will be working alongside the original creative writer and director of the film.

THIS IS A PAID ROLE

Where to start?

Up and coming? Well, I can give it a go, but let’s look at the property first. You haven’t got a screenplay, you’ve got a synopsis and the characters. In other words, all you’ve got is some ideas for people you saw in the street and what you think they might do if they were trapped in a New York lift with a chemical weapon and a string vest. Nobody’s bought an option on the film or you’d have funding. So far, so what? That’s why you want a writer. Then you might have a screenplay.

Macro excellence

What worries me is what language it’s supposed to be written in. I don’t know if I can write macro excellence. Because I don’t know what it means. Nobody walks down the street saying things like that because even the bloke selling the Big Issue would laugh at them. “Come back to my place, baby. I think I can promise you some….( drop voice an octave and do not rush this bit) ....macro excellence.” Can you see it? You’d be the only person that could that night.

Cutting edgy genre

You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat's ugly. — You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat’s ugly.

But it’s the next bit that really worries me. Can I write in the cutting edgy genre? Cutting edge used to mean really like now. And really like now then is like Filofaxes, ties that look like a piano keyboard and Su Pollard; you can sort of get it and its harmless enough but you wouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe cutting edgy is different though, like an arch Noel Coward looking for another dime bag, Sherlock Holmes when the Duke of Dumfries says no way dude, you still owe me for all the Charlie for Vicky’s Jubilee bash.

Come on. All they want is someone to ‘flesh the script out,’ or change it from an overall plot with some characters to an actual story where you know who says what and how they get to the place where they say it. That’s not hard, is it? So what’s the problem? Well, there’s a few of them. It’s in West London for a start, 150 miles from me which is a long commute especially when you have a tendency to forget your packed lunch. It means working with the original creative, who obviously isn’t that creative or he’d have written the thing already instead of just extended notes. And there’s no money, so it’s being run on someone’s trust fund.

The shrill repetition of ‘this is a paid-for job’ bothers me too. Instead of what, an unpaid job? That’s not a job. It’s either voluntary work, like helping out at the Red Cross jumble sale, or it’s internship, the kind of socially acceptable totally illegal because it breaches minimum-wage legislation slavery for people with rich mummies and daddies that you can eat between deals. That’s what this is. Keep the poor poor. They’ve got the creative writer who isn’t creative and the film director without a film but Pops will fix it. It’s Tim and Jonty’s Gep Yah, isn’t it?

So like WTF, I don’t think I do these kinds of abbreviations. Maybe I’m just too cutting edgy.

The curse of big words

I officially heard it all today. Read it, anyway. It’s finally happened. I knew it would one day. After this – I’m not sure there is an ‘after this.’ I read the most stupid, conceited, 15 year-old know-it-all gee-mom-thanks-for-the-psychology-textbook-guess-I’m-a-psychiatrist-now thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some. And that, as we used to say, ain’t no lie.

Desperado

It’s Saturday morning. I just got some tea and sourdough toast, some not-very-nice figs (I didn’t get them because they were’t very nice, they just weren’t) and a bowl of rhubarb stewed with ginger and went back to bed to write, because I didn’t want to start the cleaning and clearing and all the stuff I have to do today quite yet. The Eagles were playing on the radio. The Eagles have been out riding fences for so long now that you can’t really tell which of their songs is which until you stop and listen carefully. You just know they can play, they wrote their own stuff, didn’t use a rythym machine, the lyrics mean something and one of these days you’ll stop and listen and find out what they are.

After a few seconds of listening I looked up one of those lyrics-with-meanings websites. I should have known better. You get those days when it seems as if the whole interweb is written by a teenager living with their parents in Ohio, my shorthand for someone whose worldview is incredibly circumscribed but officially knows everything there is to know about everything, on account of he’s not paying the bills and shucks, all them cornfields cain’t be wrong.

Lying Eyes

City girls just seem to find out early
How to open doors with just a smile
A rich old man
And she won’t have to worry
She’ll dress up all in lace and go in style
Late at night a big old house gets lonely
I guess ev’ry form of refuge has its price
And it breaks her heart to think her love is
Only given to a man with hands as cold as ice

Luckily, thanks to websites like this we can share Traynor or Chuck’s insights on what the Eagles really meant with all the collective wisdom Moose Droppings, OH can muster. She’s got Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you see? She could benefit from some counselling, quite a lot of it. It’s people like her Mental Health Awareness Day was set-up for. She’s ‘phony,’ a word I haven’t really heard since Holden Caulfield got drafted to Veet Naym.

She gets the wanted attention that she so misses in her NEW relationship. This new person is so wonderful and all the feelings she remembers having in her “old” relationship are coming back. However what her narcissistic personality fails to understand is that these feelings (as nice as they are) will be temporary. Relationships grow and as beautiful as the guy thinks she is, telling her how wonderful and great she is everyday gets tiresome. Again, it’s all about her and he will realize this in time or just become a doormat.

So now you know. Obviously Traynor hasn’t got to the chapter about projection yet. That’ll be a good day. He’ll probably be listening to Take It To The Limit.