Uncategorized – Page 17 – Writer-insighter

An old mystery

Items found clearing land. Nothing to do with me. At all. I mean, maroon? Please.

I used to travel a lot as part of my work in a succession of motoring embarassements from my proto-Yuppie red VW Golf , through Escorts and the one I thought summed up the company it was bought by most of all, the sleazy crappy exhaust falling off white XR3i I was given by a company that pretended to be oh-so-reputable before it organised Abu Ghraib. For once, the phrase Yuppie Scum was appropriate, attached to them.

The Golf. I loved that car. I nearly killed a French teenager in that, in Toulon when he rode his scooter into it but the fact that he was clearly going too fast and I think also, bluntly, he was a black kid and I wasn’t, I never heard anything more about it after he bounced off my windscreen. Someone who’s now an American horticulturalist lived in that car for a couple of days while she sorted out one of those things that are brilliantly funny stories a long time later at a dinner party and an impenetrable world of crap while you’re actually doing them. But that wasn’t the car’s fault.

I drove up to Cannock Chase one day in that Golf to do something in Birmingham I can’t remember now and didn’t care much about then. I liked those trips though. I’d get all the visits done by about four at the latest, then in those pre-satnav days, either go by map avoiding the motorways or just point the car in the direction of my house and make it up. I wanted to see the country I lived in.

I found totally forgotten Georgian market towns bypassed by the railway. Cities that had lost their people. Traffic jams in the middle of nowhere that once meant someone dead on a small motorcycle at the end of the queue, spires and trees and blue roads in the dusk.

And Cannock Chase. I stopped to get a local paper, another thing I did then to get an idea about different places. I wasn’t happy where I lived, long before I realised that follows you around until you deal with it and I kept thinking that like Horace Greeley, all I had to do was go West, or as I was brought up there, north, or maybe south, or east. Anywhere, really. Anywhere that looked nice and in order to see if it was I got the papers to see what happened there, whether places were the kind of place where the newspaper deals in armed sieges or lost dogs returned to their owners. It doesn’t always work, of course. A friend from uni – well, you know what I mean – ended up in Shewsbury thinking it was quiet and idyllic and found that as the only psychiatric social worker for twenty miles she more than once found herself hauled out of the pub by the police to go and help when someone had barricaded themselves in a Telford tower block with a 12-bore. They didn’t think it was funny when she asked if she could borrow one of their guns if they wanted her to go in there and get the person out.

There were two things I remember about the Cannock trip. One was getting the local paper and reading about a century old murder in the woods there, and the more disturbing news that someone had been found murdered with the same name there a century later. I’ve tried but I can’t remember what town it was, let alone what newspaper, or where their archives might be kept to follow that up. The other thing was urgently needing to find a bathroom and thinking I was going to be another murder suspect as a result.

I grew up in farming country. We have fields, and hedges and lanes and when you’re driving along and need to get rid of some well, obviously not beer, officer, orange juice perhaps, or tea, then you stop your car in a field gateway and go behind a hedge. It’s what you do. Well, it’s what we did, anyway and I still can’t personally see anything wrong with it so long as nobody can see you. This time I couldn’t find a real lane until suddenly I did, which was just as well as I could hardly walk by that time, English garages not generally having bathrooms, or certainly not then and not there anyway.

The lane became a gravel track but it was overlooked by a busy road up above it until it became a grass track shaded by trees. I got out there. It was a hot day with no-one around and just the distant noise of the busy road in the distance. As I was standing there I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Something moving, the same height as a person would be. I looked up quickly and saw it there and felt cold all over.

A white camisole set was hanging on a bush, complete, the wind raising the silk a little every now and then. Nobody there. Except there obviously had been. And I was only guessing they weren’t still there. I had a bad feeling about that place. For years I had episodes where I imagined I was sitting in a police interview room, having an endless conversation.

“So you say you never met this woman. Never even heard of her.” Distinctly un-Inspector Morse-like police officer stands up. “Except you did, son. You stabbed her about fifteen times, scraped some leaves over her then pissed on her body. Your DNA’s all over this poor tart you never met, according to you. So don’t keep messing me about ’cause I’m getting tired of it and me dinner’s on. Now, let’s go over this again.”

We are with ISIS in Syria.

This morning the Church of England has condemned the Prime Minister, David Cameron,’s ‘incoherent’ Middle East foreign policy. They didn’t say he was one of a small number of public school boys so far out of their depth that Boris Johnson looks like a global statesman in comparison but they didn’t really need to. These are desperate times. Don’t you know there’s a war on? There usually is, after all.

So what about ISIS? They’re a threat to our whole way of life, apparently, the same way everything that happens in the Middle East is supposed to be a threat to our way of life. They behead criminals, which is what about 45% of the UK wants to do anyway, so that’s obviously unacceptable. We’d kill people a nice way. Out of sight, for a start, so we don’t have to see what we paid someone to do for us. They’ve left thousands of people stuck on a mountain without water. We’ve sent them phone chargers though, so at least they can see what Jeremy Clarkson has to say about it on Twitter. When I was a boy American comics were full of cartoons about muscle-bound GIs stuck on a hill until the crates of chewing gum and ammunition floated down out of the sky to let them break out, take Berlin and get on back home to Marylou-Anne gahdammit. The comic writers didn’t forsee the ‘chutes opening and grateful Yazidi refugees taking time out of their hectic schedule of despairing and dying of typhoid to pick up some style tips from Wallpaper online.

So we should be doing everything we can to stop ISIS, shouldn’t we? Obviously. But we didn’t. We did the opposite. We protected them. This isn’t my opinion. This is what Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said. He’s a Republican, from a rootin’ tootin’ right-to-carry state, the kind of place where if you’re out driving of a night time and see a gopher at the side of the road it’s acceptable behaviour to stop your car, open the glove box, pull out your .38, get out and shoot it. It’s about the size of a long rabbit. It doesn’t even bite people, which in the circumstances seems foolish. I’ve met people from Kentucky who’ve done exactly this. Shot small gophers, not bite people you understand. They were normal, nice people who were fun to be around. Apart from the guns and death thing and back then I liked guns a lot.

But anyway, why were we with ISIS? Because they hated Al-Queada. We hated Al-Queada, which was presented to us as The Enemy, the same way the guys in the grey uniforms and different shaped hats were throughout the twentieth century, rather than the loose alliance of pissed-off foreign people who thought they’d been sold down the river by the West after they were paid to fight the Russians in Afghanistan then told thanks guys, see you but not if we see you first when the Russians went home. We armed the mujadheen in Afghanistan all through the 1980s and 90s. We gave them Stinger missiles to shoot down Russian helicopters. We gave them a bounty if they could bring-in a Russian SVD sniper rifle There are so many references to all of this on the web that I really haven’t got the time or the inclination to cite them. Do it yourself. That’s what Google’s for.

Or you could do what David Cameron does. Make your opinion on what the” facts” are or what to do on who makes the loudest noise in the media. And remember, the media lies. And lies. And lies. They’ve got chemical weapons. It doesn’t matter that we sold them to them. They’ve got weapons of mass destruction. Like the atom bombs that Israel has which it’s rude to mention, apart from the fact the baddies didn’t have WMDs at all. That was just made-up. They’ve got missiles which could strike our bases within 45 minutes. Everyone wanted to think that meant places like Purbright and Warminster, not Cyprus at the very outside, and they couldn’t meet that timeframe anyway, and that’s what things like Iron Dome anti-missile missiles are for in the first place and we won’t hear a word against that, will we? Most of all though, they’re trying to destroy our way of life.

What does that even mean? If it means that some Middle East countries might put a price on the oil we’ve built our entire economy on, which was stupid, that we don’t find convenient or acceptable then our wonderful free markets should be able to sort the problem out. Markets are efficient, after all. The most perfect of all economies. So why shouldn’t we pay four times more for what’s left of the oil? Because like any spoiled child, we don’t want to. And it’s not fair. What we should do is go round the housing estates where there aren’t any jobs and get the brightest kids there to put a uniform on, then nobody really has to care if they get killed or not. They’re Our Brave Boys, fighting for our way of life, or the right to fill every Tesco car park with second-hand Range-Rovers, which is pretty much the same thing.

We do not give a fuck what happens in these countries. We do not care if every woman there gets raped or stoned to death. If you think that’s outrageous then direct your outrage to the fact that the government we installed in Afghanistan demands that wives are obliged to fulfill their husband’s sexual desires. That’s the law. If they don’t – and let’s face it, the Kabul Anne Summers shop probably isn’t much to inspire anyone – they can be starved to death. Us. We did that. It was against the law before our favourite Afghan changed the law there. Do we care if Arab women get stoned to death? We certainly didn’t care when a Saudi princes was beheaded in a carpark for playing away. We made a documentary about it (Death Of a Princess) and then decided not to show it, in case it upset ‘our way of life.’ Not the way of life that doesn’t generally behead women for shagging someone they perhaps ought not to have done, but the way of life that likes Saudi oil.

So let’s do what we always do. Let’s have a war. It doesn’t matter what side we pick, or who or what we’re fighting for, or how many times we change sides. That never happens. You won’t see any mention of it in the media. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania and it’s Rude To Mention It anyway.

Vote for Rupert Murdoch, which in the UK should suit most people because you don’t even have to bother voting. Just remember when you don’t then you do. You vote for how things turn out. All of it. You wild non-voting rebel you.

And please, don’t go to the Remembrance service. Dying to support a pile of lies is a big enough insult to deal with, without people wrapping themselves in your shroud.

Walcot Nation

I lived in Bath a long time ago. In those days a lot of the buildings were black with 200 years of soot from coal fires but it was a bustling, busy place. It still is, but where once Walcot Street was full of combat jackets and patchouli oil, today it’s Range-Rover parking and shops selling bathroom taps for half a term’s student grant. There was a fabulous market there on Saturdays if you ever needed a cheap car radio, definitely not stolen, oh dear me no. You tested it by clipping a car battery to the cut power lead once the guy selling it had peeled back the insulation, and taping another lead to any speaker lying around the stall. Bath has changed. This poem is a little of how it was.

A WESTERN SUN

I hear that song, still feel the heat of a western sun

Those years ago but now – and it’s always now, in my head,

Always the time I first heard it aged seventeen

And my, those ten years just flew by, didn’t they?

That’s just when it was.

I can see the blurred flag flapping in slow motion

Snapping in the damp wind of my false memories

Of long haired men marching to the war we despised

But that was someone else’s war ten years before,

Something that was all in our minds

As we wandered up Walcot Street to the Hat & Feathers,

Leather jackets and silk scarves, the day of the festival

A sweat salt tang stayed on our lips

Our battle salve patchouli hazed our dreams

That blurred afternoon and back then we dared to dream

Not about BMWs and ISAs or chartered accountancy

Or a thrilling carer in actuarial statistics and dear God

If I’d only known that the loose connections, the loops

Of if-this-then-that in my head, the spurting synapses undammed

By dope and cursed by my teachers at a country school

Could have bought me half the grey stone town I grew up in

By now. Probably. But stop. But stop.

Never go down this road

Where half the streetlights aren’t working,

Lit only by the dipped beam of my memory

Coming from a car I haven’t had for twenty years

A faulty bulb flickering whenever I put the wipers on.

You know that if you take this track you’ll only get a hundred yards or so

Until a cold girl in a warm car, silhouetted against the trees

Lit like the backdrop of a play, so cold outside;

The girl in the sheepskin coat will say

‘What if there’s nothing there, the other side of the gate?’

The second it appears in the headlights.

Even then you felt her voice would hunt your dreams,

Sniffing you out while you sleep, wherever you hide at night.

But that flag, the flapping ripple of cloth,

And the hair blown across her forehead and somewhere

The taste of tears as well as the kiss still on her lips;

The army coats and the smell of goats when her bag got rained on;

The time she did, she really did tie red ribbons in her hair

And small golden bells. They looked golden anyway,

Borrowed from the mirror on her dresser,

Bought from a headshop one Saturday afternoon in Bath.

Can you believe those words, now?

This long since Princess Margaret and her happy dusted chums

Played with a restaurant and a farm to feed it, up on the Swindon road,

The way Peter Starstedt said it then, just for a laugh, ah ha ha.

Parsenn Sally. Later, in the eighties a waitress paused

When a customer pushed his napkin to the floor,

Measuring the length of her skirt as she stopped

Looked to the audience, fifty or so of us willing

To show the colour of our money,

Waiting to see the colour of her underwear,

A fiver on white, ten on black,

Wild bets on something awful like cerise

As she put a finger mocking to her lips, shook her head,

Bent her knees a little, just to tease, then flexed her leg,

Kicked the napkin under the nearest table

To a round of applause.

“Another bottle of fitou over here, if you would”

The appreciative click of credit cards on glass tables.

“And have one for you.”

Bath where Regency houses lured London workers with their siren song

Bath where water streamed down Royal Crescent walls,

The lead flashing long gone, during the war probably,

When patriotic householders bore the loss not just of sons

But irreplaceably the 1820s cast iron trellices, rococco awnings,

Gates and railings cropped and sawn and smelted to beat the Hun,

Our loss; as if cast iron Spitfires ever flew

Or steel swallows ever perched in Larkhall Mansions.

Scars from bomb splinters still pock the stonework near M&S,

The slashed birthmark of our time

Still there if you know where to look

Past the ghosts of open markets, joss-sticks and motorcycles

Cafes full of lean dogs and coke stoves,

Not a baby buggy in sight. All of this emblazoned on our tattered flag.

All of this our banner as we marched

Under the stained pennants of our duvets towards now.

Come the revolution in Walcot Street.

Come the glorious day.

We didn’t see the bathroom showrooms coming.

We thought it would turn out ok.

Late Flowering Lust

“With brandy-certain aim” described my own technique, once upon a time. It’s not nice. but Betjeman’s poems weren’t about nice. They were about real life, a vision of England much more real than many imagine, a summer’s meadow where the picnic usually has wasps.

So because I like you all so much, here, fantastically but true, is nearly a whole hour of Betjeman set not only to music but to film.

Things to note are my mother at 2:30 (not actually her, but it may as well have been) and the literal dance macabre late at the party.

As for the late-flowering lust stuff, obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment.

And btw, the teddy bear in Brideshead was Betjeman’s. He was nothing like Sebastian n any other respect, although perhaps he wished he was.

Me and Edith Sitwell

It was just a name I’d heard, the way you do. One of The Pancakes turned me on to her, as we used to say, when it didn’t mean that.

“You should hear her stuff on You Tube. It’s like the stuff you do.”

edith sitwell — “Apparently my stuff’s like Carl Bennett’s.”

Hmm. I’m not sure Still Falls The Rain is anything like the stuff I do, frankly. I can feel the pain in it. I can’t go along with the thing that says ‘my invisible friend says somehow all this is alright.’ Mrs Miniver I can handle. Mrs Masochist not so much.

I thought maybe she had something to do with the Mitfords and all the rest of those semi-mythical people the British idolise primarily because they’re rich, have dysfunctional families and usually have something wrong with them. It’s our national obsession, that and living in the kind of stone house that points to slavery or tobacco. Of course, if you want the really biggest, most absolutely Yah kind of house, sorry, hise, you have to kill lots of foreigners. Absolutely loads of them if you want something like Blenheim Palace. Apparently the Duke of Marlborough went off to war, his wife built the house (and yes, me too. I’d really, really like to have seen her with a hod full of bricks over her shoulder, or having a sausage sarnie while she read Ye Sunne, wiping the brown sauce off her hands on the leg of her jeans) and he shagged her in his riding boots when he got back. Although why she was wearing his riding boots instead of her own was never made clear.

But anyway, Edith Sitwell ticked all the boxes. Allegedly. A hundred and one years on and we seem to have a lot in common. “Sitwell published poetry, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was also praised.”

My step-sister lived around the corner from where Edith lived, admittedly at a different time, so another tenuous link there, I think you’d have to agree. Apart from the rich thing. I’ve never had the knack. Like all True Brits, nor did Edith Sitwell. She inherited it. Oldest child and only daughter of a baronet who was fantastically “an expert on genealogy and landscaping,” two of the most irrelevant things you could ever aspire to be an expert in. Her titled mother claimed descent from the Plantagenets, but rather more medieval money seemed to have come with her ladyship than attached itself to a friend of mine who grew up in Farnborough who equally claims descent from them.

Edith ticked the dysfunctional family box pretty well, being locked into a metal cage to straighten her spine, which she doubted was ever bent in the first place. She could probably knuckle-bump Eminem too, whose mother pretended he had something wrong with him other than just hating her, something any normal male teenager is supposed to do anyway. Unlike Eminem’s mum and rather to his disappointment, obviously, she ended up in a wheelchair with Marfan Syndrome and died of a brain haemorrhage

So me, Edith Sitwell and Eminem. We’ve got a lot in common. Maybe that’s why the comment I hear about my stuff is it’s good. You do know it’s insane, don’t you. But it’s good. And I can live with that. Unlike Poetry Voice.

28%

Dear Chinese people,

Thank-you. I mean, it’s really, really flattering that you like my stuff so much that 28.something percent of all the visits to my website are from China.

It’s truly humbling that my modest efforts to entertain people with posts about Germany and poetry and historically not shagging who I want to or not enough or not any more find their way all around the world to the high-rises of Canton and little thatched houses by a river all that way away.

It’s really nice that you take an interest. No, really it is.

But you aren’t, are you? You really aren’t into my Songs Without Music concept. You don’t really care about the Eidelweiss Pirates or Milorg or White Rose or bicycles (you’re getting rid of those) or any of my other obsessions I litter this site up with.

So WTF is it you actually WANT here? You never leave a comment. You certainly never buy my books. You don’t even charter a plane and come to my gigs, and there are certainly enough of you to make that an economic proposition.

You’re spying, aren’t you? You’re not even real people, just web bots trawling through every new post that goes on WordPress from anybody at all, looking to see if there’s something you can steal. It’s ok. My government wants to roll over and let you tickle its tummy in case you want to buy more stuff they’re giving away, so they won’t be doing anything about it.

So dear 28.7% of all the visitors to this site, please feel free. Immerse yourselves in dim memories and recreations and filterings and yearnings for people you never knew, people who don’t actually exist outside the prism of my creating them. Alternatively you could get off your collective farm arses and do something yourselves. But getting a web-bot to do your scamming is probably a bit easier, isn’t it?

Be lucky. Oh and stop killing the tigers. Eating them doesn’t give you a bigger cock after all.

Petta Fiesta

This weekend I’m doing something I don’t usually do: I’m going to a festival. Last time I went to a festival was to Stonehenge and it was rubbish. I was 18. I’d just done A Levels. I hitched there and met my mate Phil and listened to a band called Here & Now, who seemed to be the worst bits of Hawkwind and Gong joined together. There was another band we listened to as well, Alternative TV. It was sunny so we sat on the ground and wondered if you’d actually die if you ate anything being cooked there. We’d brought some cider so we drank that and fell sort of asleep for a bit. I woke up staring into a naked woman I’d never met before who wanted to trade an orange for cigarette papers. The snag was I didn’t have any cigarette papers.

We talked to people called things like Maggot who didn’t seem to have quite as many teeth as they ought to and whose conversational abilities appeared limited. We didn’t know or particularly care if that was a temporary thing or not.

We didn’t want to eat anything there, didn’t see where you could get a drink and when we did we didn’t like plastic beakers to drink out of (yeah, like ecological, man) and generally didn’t know what to do there so we went home.

We weren’t the world’s best festie goers. But we didn’t buy cheap tents then leave them there either, which seems to be the ‘alternative’ thing to do these days. Right on. One planet. Don’t spend it all at once.

But anyway. I’m going back to a festival, Petta Fiesta. I’m hoping its going to be different, because I’m on stage with Jan Pulsford, doing a set at 10:30 Saturday night. Just like last time I will be mostly sober, because I’m driving back afterwards. Contrary to my life plans my car doesn’t seem to be noticeably better than the one I wasn’t able to borrow to get to Stonehenge.

If you can’t get to Petta you can hear That Sound, something I might do as part of a set here on Soundcloud. Enjoy.

neither of us

Only once a year

Somehow it's not quite me. — Somehow it’s not quite me, is it?

It was a line from a John Otway song. Get ready for the festival, for the festival is only once a year. Raises your glasses in the air and fill the barrels full of beer.

I’ve always liked John Otway and there are more festivals around than there used to be. I know me festies. I went to Stonehenge once, man. It was utter rubbish. A naked woman I’d never met woke me up to ask if I would trade cigarette papers I had for oranges she had, but I didn’t actually want an orange at the time. I still wonder if she got what she was looking for, sometimes.

IMG_2177 - Version 4 — A spoken word fan. No, I was quite surprised too, actually.

My first ‘Welcome Back Tour’ date was at the Golden Key at Snape, here in Suffok, a place I’ve grown quite fond of since a gig there in mid-April which changed my life in totally unexpected ways. Some woman on her first post-baby holiday with her husband poured cocktails down me while he got more and more pissed off after my set until an even more so-stunning-there’s-no-way-she’s-interested-in-me woman deftly and literally shut the door on the cocktail buyer. Let’s just say some people really do appreciate spoken word.

So anyway, in what’s turning into being a bit of a year although thankfully not in the way last year did (oh hi, no, I didn’t mean you. You were quite a nice bit of it, mostly, so there’s no need to send someone round to my house again, like last time. Either of you.) odd stuff is happening. The oddest soonest thing is I’m doing some spoken word back up for Jan Pulsford, sharing her set at Petta Fiesta. I’ve stood on a stage in front 200 people who didn’t like what I was saying before, but that was wearing a suit, so this should be fine. It’s just I didn’t, back in January when I did my first ever set at The Anchor in Woodbridge, have it in my head that half a year from then I’d be asked by someone really famous and unarguably brilliant at what they do to do some of my stuff with them. It still comes as a surprise.

So I think I need a stage name. I’ve experimented with Alphonse D’Obermann but it doesn’t seem to stick. I like it but nobody gets the joke, if that’s what it is. I quite like Serious Voice, after I saw a poster for a band called Serious Face. Wonder if that would work? And how are they going to get the helicopter to take me to the gig and back down in the potato field opposite my house with those phone lines in the way?

Somehow I don’t think the organisers are going to quite stretch to a heli. But it’s still a festival. And I don’t have to pay. Come and see me if you’re around next weekend. It’ll be fun. Probably. Bring a mac though. You know, at our age and everything.

The point of the panga

Simon Kuper wrote in the FT today (April26th 2014) about inequality being the new apartheid and how unfondly he remembered the old one back in South Africa.

“I remember white South African liberals bemoaning apartheid while their black maid served supper. Most of them didn’t want to end apartheid. They just liked liberal talk.”

I grew up in times I used to think were different to now, but the older I get the more I don’t think they are at all. There were 1200 children at my school. Two were black. I don’t know if that’s changed and this wasn’t some elite fee-paying school, just the ordinary school in an ordinary West Country town. There just weren’t many black people there, it was as simple as that. There weren’t many opportunities for integration for that reason too. It wasn’t that we weren’t into multi-culturalism. We just didn’t have a multiplicity of cultures.

This is a panga. It's about as remarkable as a Swiss Army knife in South Africa. — This is a panga. It’s about as remarkable as a Swiss Army knife in South Africa.

But the kids whose parents had come down from London set out to cure all of that. Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part were taken as part-documentary, part training film. The unbelievable Um Bongo advert (Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo just in case your memory, hopefully, has blotted it out) was sung with gusto in the swimming pool changing rooms, that hot-bed of closet gayness where masculinity was supposed to be demonstrated by staring at and commenting on the size of other people’s cocks.

It was a different time. Maybe. People now beginning to think about retiring from Thatcher-fuelled careers in accountancy but also actuaries, doctors and builders alike all happily larded conversations with words Nigel Farage probably says to his bathroom mirror. A sentence that didn’t include the word coon or wog was a sentence wasted according to one graduate of the London School of Economics, to my certain knowledge.

But I also met someone at university whose family had managed to get themselves asked to leave South Africa for being too white liberal by the apartheid government. I was reminded about her when I read Simon Kuper.

She told me about the time when after standing up for the blicks to the extent the government didn’t like it, that Swapo or Zanu or someone decided to raid her parents’ house, waiting for her father to come home. Because they were opposed to discrimination they didn’t have a gun in the house. And also because they’d planned in advance he drove past; they left an innocent-looking postcard in the window next to the front door. If it was safe to come in you took the card down. If the card was up you didn’t go in the house. The card was up.

The raiders got bored and took themselves and their pangas away. Her father and the whole family lived to get out of South Africa another day.

I asked what had happened to the cook, the gardener and the pool boy.

“Oh, they wint thir.’

They were taken by Zanu or Swapo or whoever it was?

“Nah, they knew it was going to hippen. It’s wit they’re lak.”

Pity. I’d quite liked her before that.

Through a glass

Walking past an optician’s the other day (at least it looked like an optician’s shop) I saw one of those things that makes at least me go hmmm. Not in a good way.

Heston Blumenthal spectacles.

Poisoner. — Someone with memory challenges, if it’s about oysters.

If there’s any need at all to continue then I just will.

Nigella and Jamie Oliver cookware was bad enough. I could just about tolerate Jamie Oliver cookware because after all he was actually a trained chef who’d put the hours in and like Anthony Worral Thomson might be presumed to know what’s rubbish in a busy kitchen, rather than choosing something because the colour matched his nail varnish.

Gok Wan spectacles were stretching it, for me, not just because I detest the simpering silly fey queen act he has to put on for the camera on the orders of his director (Gok Wan says he’s a pint and a game of footie bloke who happens to be gay, so don’t blame me) but because I can’t see what a stylist has to do with spectacles.

Or actually, thinking about it and so long as he doesn’t get involved with the prescriptions and puffing air into your eyes while you look at a balloon, I can. I mean, presumably his job used to involve trawling through catalogues and buying hundreds of frames on sale-or-return before a gruelling morning with clients trying to find the has-to-be-that-one-

John Denver aviator frames never really caught on.

darling frame that would make someone look like they liked wearing glasses when nobody really does in case they look like the kid in the NHS specs on the special desk in Mrs Jones classroom, before John Boy Walton, John Denver and John Lennon made round lenses temporarily acceptable. And why the spooky unexplained mystery internet conspiracy Illuminati coincidence of them all being called John?

Ok. So Gok Wan. Nigella. No, sorry, I can’t stand Nigella. I’ve never liked cartoons apart from Tom and Jerry.

Much less of a ludicrous pastiche than Nigella. — Less of a ludicrous pastiche than Nigella.

But Heston Blumenthal is a cook. I’m not going to call him a chef in the same way I don’t call Nigella a chef. Because they both aren’t. Chefs are trained. Neither of those two ever did a day’s training. Epitomising the great Neo-Con Lie, Blumenthal says he taught himself, so he can take all the credit when it goes right, presumably.

Obviously it’s not his fault when it goes wrong. For example, when he poisoned over a hundred people who came to regret going to the Fat Duck at Bray, although interior decorators probably did very nicely out of that particular epidemic of food poisoning that the local Environmental Health Inspectors felt was just one of those things, in a way they signally never do if you have a restaurant and not a TV show as well. Try being called (Your Name Goes Here)’s Kitchen or the Balti Star and see how long you’re open if you give ten people food poisoning, let alone 240 customers spinning like toxic Catherine Wheels, but the kind nobody is going to say ‘oooooh’ about. Although a hose might still come in handy.

A cook. Heston Blumenthal is a cook. He shaves his head, presumably because he’s going bald or maybe he just read Skinhead under his desk in RE too often. He wears chefs whites, presumably he pops into the kitchen now and then. Big watches, because hey, it’s a guy thing. I’ve got one. I can’t quite see (ahahaha, geddit?) how that qualifies him to design spectacles.

Ok, he wears them. They make him look like a Thunderbirds puppet. I wear glasses too. I’m actually doing it now. Reckon we’ll see the Writer-Insighter range at Boots any time soon?