That is the way it is in the mountains

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The best way to find out if you can trust anybody is to trust them.

All you have to do is write a true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

The first draft of anything is shit.

This isn’t my stuff, you know.

These are Hemingway quotes. And maybe like a lot of people, he’s been one of those writers you sort of know for so long that you can’t decide if he’s any good or not.

Fiesta

I read Fiesta when I was about twenty-four, only a bit younger than the character with the mysterious wound would probably have been, if it was set in the 1920s and he’d got shot wherever he’d got shot (Vimy Ridge, if you’ll pardon the expression?) in the Great War. Just to clarify, it was alternatively titled The Sun Also Rises, about a man who keeps coming across some English posh totty in Paris. Except he can’t seem to actually do that. And she isn’t sure she wants him to either, but she’s also not really sure she doesn’t and they sort of go on holiday with their friends except she’s not really with him you know, you do know that, I mean we had this talk, didn’t we? We said. And all the usual blah that anyone in their early twenties who drinks too much in a city can relate to. I loved that book.

At school I’d found a copy of something Hemingway did about a fish and an old man, and got through something he wrote about the Italian campaign in WWI, parts of which I recycled for O Level History which as nobody else even knew there was any fighting in Italy in WWI except probably Gino Petrillo and he was in a different class made me seem particularly knowledgeable.

I liked that whisky and guns and typewriters things, the more so because I was hugely into Hunter Thompson to the extent that I tracked him to his lair in Woody Creek. Depressingly, that’s actually true, but this isn’t the time for my Hunter Thompson and me party piece. Later.

I didn’t like the fact that like Richard Brautigan who lived in the same place, like Thompson who also once lived up on the California coast, all three of them shot themselves to death coincidentally or by design. In Thompson’s case, I’d suspect by design.

But that huge big gun big life thing, I didn’t really get off on that a lot. Nor did someone I used to know. She had to write about Hemingway at university and what with drinking and shagging and all the other things to do she couldn’t quite bring herself to read about a fat old man who hated himself, or anything he’d written. The day of the exam she skimmed through the covers of a few Hemingway titles and read no more than about twenty pages, at random. And blagged it. She’d got the gist of the plot and did much the same as I did in History O Level – stuck stuff in that was tangential and vaguely relevant. Whenever she got stuck she’d introduce a “Hemingway quote.”

The inverted commas are because she made it up. She couldn’t remember any real Hemingway quotes so she made up a bullshit, sparse, macho one instead. “That is the way it is in the mountains.” Sometimes with a comma, but more often not.

You bleed, writing about a bank manager taking a long time catching a fish on holiday. You write the truest thing you know about someone cadging doughnuts in a MidWest coffeeshop. OK. That’s probably why she got hugely good marks for her paper and something of a reputation of a Hemingway scholar for the rest of the term.

That is the way it is, in the mountains.

Guns, bombs and toilet bowls

A teacher in America was shot by her own gun when she went to the loo, according to the BBC. But the BBC isn’t what it used to be when Val and John and Bill & Ben ruled the airwaves. Right at the end of the tabloid story the BBC says basically, everything you just read was bullshit. We made it up. Yes, there was a teacher. Yes, she had a gun and went to the loo, or as she was American, the bayathrum. Yes, the gun went off when she didn’t mean it to. But it didn’t shoot her. It shot the toilet bowl. That’s what put her in hospital.

If that sounds unlikely, believe. And I know, because I was that soldier. Well, if not that soldier, certainly another toilet bowl victim.

And Scalextrix

It didn't have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad. — It didn’t have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad.

It was all a long time ago. I was living in London and had a job I hated and I’d been to some business exhibition down in Earls Court or somewhere. They were interchangeable. The only reason anyone went was because they had to and in those days they were full of free drinks. Maybe they still are.

Apart from alcohol one of the stalls had a Scalextrix track. If you don’t know it, it was plastic track with metal strips in that carried 12 volt current that worked electric racing cars, until they usually spun across the room on the corners because you’d been going too fast down the straight. Eeeh, we had proper toys in them days. Every male child was obliged by law to own a set, even though nobody really knew whether you pronounced the first X or not. The deal on the stall was simple. Win the race, win a bottle of champagne. With the cunning of the truly drunk I remembered the tortoise and the hare. Thinking that you’d lose more time retrieving the car and putting it back on the track if it spun off I just drove it sedately around the track. Which worked. Free champagne. Result. All I needed was someone negotiable to drink it with and there was one of those at home so I put the bottle in the big inside pocket of my covert coat and got the Tube.

Back then Finsbury Park overground had loos. It didn’t for a while after this episode, when the IRA blew it up. That stuff happened then, too. A friend walked past Liberty’s a few minutes before the windows blew out. I was close enough to hear the bang and see the smoke from somewhere in Fulham that was blown up. I thought the IRA blew up the loos anyway.

Pretty much like the Finsbury Park station Gents.

I was a bit tired. I was so tired I had to lean my head on the cool, welcoming wall tiles while I used the loo and without boasting or anything, they were quite a way away. I closed my eyes, because I was really, no I mean really tired. And the tiles were cool on my forehead even though I had to bend a bit to get my head on the wall and I wasn’t needing to find a bathroom really quite quickly anymore and I had free champagne and everything was really quite ok when the whole bathroom exploded.

There was a huge bang and I heard stuff pinging and ricochet off the walls just like on Saving Private Ryan and things hit me in the leg and my feet were wet with blood. Except when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see any blood and so far as I could make out the walls of the bathroom were still intact and there wasn’t any smoke and it wasn’t making any sense. Then I saw the champagne bottle in the stub of porcelain sticking out of the floor and suddenly it did. I didn’t mean for the bottle to fall out of my pocket and blow up the toilet bowl, but life is full of unintended things. Or it was then, anyway, but the bottle was intact so I went home and drank it.

Again according to the BBC another American professor shot himself in the foot when he was fiddling with his gun in his pocket while he was supposed to be talking to people. I had to flail desperately at my own trousers once when a Susy Lamplugh rape alarm went off in my pocket and I couldn’t turn it off while I was on the phone.

It was the ’80s. That’s what happened in offices. I’d been to a Lamplugh Trust event the night before and got one of the aerosol-powered alarms mainly because it was free but also because I liked stuff like that (wanna see my baton, baby?) and because I was a bit bored I was fiddling with the alarm in my pocket while I was talking to someone on the phone when it went off. Luckily it didn’t shoot a hole in my foot or explode a toilet bowl. That all came later. We all drank too much and had unprotected sex and bought flats we couldn’t afford with money we didn’t have for the price of a deposit on one now. It was brilliant. We had a BBC we could believe in, too. Mostly.

Selling England

There used to be a song called Selling England By The Pound. I think, although obviously I’m too young to know, that inter alia it was about devaluation, the scheme Harold Wilson came up with in the 1960s, artificially lowering the foreign exchange value of sterling to make exports cheaper in the countries they were supposed to be exported to. Since the great days of selling cheap Birmingham crap to natives in Africa, British overseas trade had depended on being cheap, the cheaper the better.

I don’t know whether it was because it was difficult to get investment money for new equipment, or the fact that if you mechanise first you’re stuck with the oldest machinery while everyone else is buying the newer stuff, a sense that if it’s not bust don’t fix it or as a country we’ve never, in my experience, valued real skills.

Sure, we had a couple of films about the man who invented the Spitfire. Anyone remember his name? Or his colostomy bag? The man who invented radar then? Or the hovercraft? Henry Hudson, the railway king? Any general other then Butcher Haig, or RAF officer other than Bomber Harris, or any naval officer after Nelson, really? Dyson. We know him. He moved his factory from Betjeman’s Malmesbury to China. Because it was cheaper, obviously.

Riding the rails

I knew a girl once whose great grandfather was a railway engineer. He designed steam engines, some of his in their time quite literally the fastest things on earth. I had another friend whose grandfather had driven the same engines. They never met. The first one, with her double-barrelled name and her genuine Hon. title put me right when I talked about the nobility of doing real jobs, of being covered in coal dust and sweat, understanding and cajoling these pulsing machines.

“No, he despised people like that,” she told me. Designing these things was a huge mental challenge. Rarely hard work. Just don’t ask him to bother about the grimy proles who had to work the things.

And then we had a war that got millions of grimy proles so fed-up with being asked to die for something they weren’t a part of that they voted Churchill, the nation’s saviour, into oblivion. Then we had Peter Sellers playing the archetypal trades unionist Fred Kite,

Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn't he? Geddit? — Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn’t he? Geddit?

or we were told we did, and then a Prime Minister the swooning papers called SuperMac, as if we ever really needed reminding who was in charge when things were real. The Americans had JFK. We got the landed-gentry First World War officer with his massive shooting estate and TV sketch moustache, then the equally fatuous double act, Wilson and Benn.

So far as Benn was concerned it was never really the end of the peer show; he renounced the title to get into the Commons, but obviously kept the money that went with it. Equally obviously, his son is in Parliament now. As for Wilson, the man who famously sported a pipe when there were cameras about and a cigar when they weren’t, the man who was either so stupid or such a brazen liar that he couldn’t see anything wrong with going on TV one week to announce that devaluation would not affect “the pound in your pocket” and then the very next week, just before Simon Dee, going back on the telly to say actually, thinking about it, it would.

Unlike Simon Dee Harold Wilson wasn’t accompanied by a white E-type Jaguar and a mini-skirted dolly bird; he’d obviously had very, very bad PR advice about that. It would probably have been easier for people to hear the real message if it went along the lines of “I’ve pissed it all up the wall on fast cars and easy chicks, yes, me, personally,” instead of the truth: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.”

Is it relevant now? It’s nearly all sold, after all. Just a few bits of the NHS left and the rail network, but that’s so crap that the taxpayer has to pay for that so that modern rail barons aren’t burdened with any of the bad bits of privatisation, like social investment, or common responsibility. But the same song still sings out: The health service is safe with us. We must defend our interests, whatever they are, however often they change. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the House of Saud. Immigrants are bad. People on benefits crashed the economy. It was Labour’s fault.

As before the real message stays the same: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.” And while people don’t vote it doesn’t really matter which one of those is true.

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.”

Black horse, white horse and a Sunbeam Rapier.

I went to the FolkEast festival last weekend, not least because it was walking distance from my house. I haven’t been to a festival for years, and more fool me. One of the first acts I saw there was Lisa Knapp, who had a four piece band behind her and she was sublime. I went and bought her CD from the information tent as soon as her set was over.

13LisaKnapp1 — Lisa Knapp. What’s not to like?

If you haven’t heard her, she sounds like this. And looks like this. She’s got a powerful voice, a little bit Kate Bush, a little bit Bjork, but newer, more now somehow and much as it pains me to say it, I think she’s actually better than Kate. If the entire music thing hadn’t gone fractal I’d have said she’d be bigger than Kate Bush in a year or two, but I’m not sure that’s how things work these days.

What I particularly like about her stuff is the way she explores a dark side of music, or life, or folk tales. Years ago I read about a man who went to get the papers one morning and found, rather to his surprise, a woman in what he presumed to be a shroud, dancing a few inches above the pavement in a perfectly ordinary street of terraced houses. She was still there when he came back from the shop, avoiding her side of the road, so he didn’t go that way again. And you hear these stories and think why? Why would anyone make that up? What would they do that for, exactly, if they didn’t want to get sectioned?

So when I heard Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse I was surprised by the power of her voice but also by the darkness she was flirting with, so much so that she turns a conversation/analogy between Life and Death, darkness and light into a lullaby. You can see it here. I watched it half an hour ago and I’ve still got chills running up my back because of something someone once told me.

I bought a car once from a friend’s girlfriend’s grandfather. It was an old car but he hadn’t exactly run this Mk V Sunbeam Rapier into the ground. He was out driving one night, with his wife, when just like an old joke, someone ran past him. Which was odd but fine in and of itself, expect he was doing about 60 mph and the man ran straight past the car in the same direction. Then it got odder, because the man flipped around and started running backwards, staring into the car as he ran a couple of feet in front of the bonnet. The old man braked, as well you might, but not in time or at least what he thought was time, because the man ran through the car. He could see him as he came through the dashboard, through the gap between the seats and out of the back of the car. The old man drove to the next town and found a police station to tell them what happened. They said it had happened before, there.

And again, why would you make that up? What would possess anyone to make that up and go to the police to tell them about it? I have no idea, whether it’s true, why anyone would make it up or any of it. But Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse in her video took me right back there to the day I heard that story and reminded me how I felt, driving that car at night. Nothing happened. How could it?

Customer Service

It’s BT. Obviously

“Thank-you for holding. We are very busy at the moment and your call will be answered as soon as possible.”

I don’t have a choice. I have to hold. I don’t need thanks for it. It’s pointless. I have no option. I can’t phone anyone else about this. And after waiting 24 hours for a call back to explain what I have to do to fix your fault, thanks don’t come into it.

It’s BT. I have no broadband. It’s been patchy but I’ve been told well, you live in Suffolk, what do you expect? Same as mobile phones. Let’s face it; it’s all retirees, the kind of people who make their own wooden folding chairs to go to the Snape Poetry Prom. Do you think they give a shit about no broadband? Only once a year, when the Saga car insurance comes due.

I am clearly not very busy, because I am expected to sympathise with the other, better people who are. You can tell they’re better. They’re busy. They’ve not sitting around complaining about things, shirking. They’re getting on, busily, with their tidy hair and their clean white shirts. Not like the slackers and shirkers and Moaning Minnies who frankly are just a drain on things with all their negative attitudes, as customer service may as well be called now.

So far it’s taken one entire day for my call to be answered. When I ask why this is, or what BT intend to do about it, I’m simply put in another queue, the one for people who ask difficult and therefore stupid questions. Like, why did I have to wait a day for a callback? Why when I re-structured my day to be at the house (essential according to BT) between 5pm and 6pm, notified to me by three separate texts and not really that convenient, especially considering I phoned at 20:00 the day before) was there, how shall we say, no phone call at all?

Why, given it’s obviously possible to answer my call at once if you had enough staff and gave a shit, wasn’t it answered for over half an hour? Why, BT, don’t you know how English works? Why when you were privatised in what, 1986 or something, and people have been born, had children and died in that time, when privatising your useless service was supposed to increase competition, as every parliamentarian will swear on a stack of Bibles, is it next to impossible to get any broadband connection that doesn’t use your useless service? Why?

Here’s what happened.

Dear BT, I realise you don’t give a shit about it because last time I mentioned it you put me on hold until my mobile battery ran out, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Yesterday I had to do something online. Quite an important thing, because I’d said I would so I had to. But no Internet. I phoned BT to see if there was anything wrong with the line. Everyone here knows you get slower Internet when it rains but BT say you don’t so that’s that and you’re a liar, but this wasn’t slow, it was not happening. BT, or the irritating Scottish voice BT thinks calms people down who wouldn’t have needed calming down if BT’s shit monopoly service wasn’t so utterly shit, told me there was nothing wrong with the line. Oddly, for a Scottish voice, it didn’t say ‘pal,’ when it told me there wisnae anything wrang, but if youse keep on there med well be.

So I got in the car and drove half an hour to go and buy a new modem. The old one was at least eight years old and I measured that by moving houses, so it might have been older. There’s nothing in a modem I can see how it could break, exactly, but maybe it just gets bored, or there’s a flesh tone counter or something. So anyway. New modem. It probably wasn’t BT’s fault that when I left Staples and got into the car and turned the key it just went click so I had to read Angela’s Ashes (really, hasn’t this all been done a bit, you know, before? Really? Sure and Catholicly begorrah it’s the drink and the rain to be sure and the past is another country and besoides, the pig was dead?) for two hours while Ipswich’s finest sashayed out to get chips and come back again until the AA turned up to sell me a new car battery, one of those things guv, that’s how it goes.

Get home. Install new modem. Still nothing. Phone BT. It’s not the line. It’s the exchange. We’ll call you. Tomorrow, when it would suit you. You can stay in all day or we can call you in the evening, let’s say five o’clock. So let’s say that indeed. Cycle to Aldeburgh. Buy a book and cheese and bread and tomatoes and lie on the beach in the sun for three hours, dozing and reading and then interrupt what has been a fairly lovely Saturday so far to get back for BT. But it’s hot and I’m thirsty so maybe as I’m literally cycling past the door anyway time to drop into a friend’s pub where there’s been perhaps the teensiest misunderstanding this morning but that’s nothing to do with BT to have a pint of wheat beer, but my army friend is there with his mother, so three pints down before I’m told it makes my other friend, the not army one who runs the place, feel ‘a bit weird’ if I’m there as a customer so would I mind not being, call you later, let’s go out after the lunch service tomorrow. Get home.

Nothing on the mobile. Nothing on the landline. Phone BT. Same message. Hang on for forty minutes until I eventually get through to someone. Who asks all of the questions I’ve dutifully tapped into the set of menus I needed to go through to get to talk to her, then can’t answer the question I want answering, when BT are going to sort this out and why after 28 years is their service still so utterly shit and there isn’t any competition? I’d settle for just the answer to the first one, to be honest, but of course, she doesn’t know. It’s not her job to know. I don’t know what her job is, but it isn’t to help customers. Because she can’t. It’s not her fault. She’s got no way of helping the customers. That’s why it can’t be any part of her job specification. What her job seems to be is winding up customers who are stupid enough to pay BT to phone BT to complain about BT so that they pay BT more to stay on the line having more things to complain about BT to BT about.

BT’s service, to use a technical term, is a pile of shit. And because this is a free market and nothing to do with the government, and because it’s such a free market that every single broadband provider in the UK has to use BT’s lines unless they live in Hull, tough. See above.

Dear Ebay

Please, if you’re going to email me in English, please learn to speak it in a way that doesn’t patronise me and tell lies at the same time. Thank-you.

No, this simply is not true. I made EBay aware of at least six fake ‘dovo’ razors. They were all still there for sale.

I also do not understand how you/Ebay can pretend my listing was removed “for my own safety.” What danger was I in, exactly?

My lack of understanding is this: Why is it ok to list fake razors? Why won’t EBay ever do anything about removing and banning sellers who repeatedly list fake razors?

I am sick and tired of Ebay’s sanctimonious and hypocritical attitude. Look at this listing

Click to view larger image and other views

Have one to sell? Sell it yourself

Cut Throat Razor Damascus Steel Jeffery Straight Grooming Vintage west Todd dovo

It is totally fake. The same way it was fake yesterday, the same way it was fake when I first reported it. Ebay refuses to do anything about it. The word dovo is listed clearly.

Dovo is a registered company in Germany. Every single one of their blades has the word DOVO stamped on it. This does not. This means it has nothing to do with the DOVO factory. This listing is fake. This seller sells fakes. Every one of his razors that says ‘dovo‘ in the ad is an ad for a fake. And I have told you this, by email, repeatedly.

WHY WON’T EBAY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?

I don’t expect a real answer because Ebay can do no wrong in its own eyes. I have been scammed out of money by fake buyers and Ebay’s attitude is simply a) I have to sort it out myself (b) tough.

Get these fake razors off eBay. Get the fake seller off Ebay for good, as he never sells anything else. Until then, please do not lecture me about my safety.

Best regards and my eternal hatred,

Me.

And I’m not even going to bother mentioning the fake ‘damascus’ steel which a pound to a penny is just rubbish metal etched with acid, not fine metal folded, hammered, folded and hammered hundreds of times so the edge when it’s sharpened is a sharks’ mouth of tiny ridges of steel. For #29. Sure it is, eBay. Sure it is.

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.

That place

I used to drive around a lot, just for fun. There wasn’t much else to do where I grew up; everywhere was somewhere else. As I got older I kept on driving for fun, or if not fun then more often to be somewhere I wasn’t.

I bought a house in the Cotswolds one winter, a place I’d driven through when I was eighteen and not that far from where I was born, but we left there when I was two. The real town I bought the old posting barn, four hundred years old, where footsteps often carried on from the old pub next door straight through where the wall was, six feet thick, and walked through the barn, and still the house I was happy walking around at three in the morning, can’t sleep, leaving the lights off to see the sleeping town was in Not Your Heart Away, the place where Ben and Claire, Peter and Liz stopped after the car crash they’d just escaped having.

But none of that ever happened. Things like it did, but that didn’t, because they were imaginary people. Almost. Just like that place.

That Place

That place we saw once

Driving that bright January day;

I can’t remember the name of the town

Just bigger than a village

I don’t often drive that way now.

But somewhere on a hill,

Stark trees against the sharp blue sky

Up on the ridge, a red phone box

Against the snowy hedge,

The morning almost silent

Now the car’s calmed down.

Our eyes nearly back to normal

Once the motorway’s long behind us.

Cold with the window open.

Definitely not a day you want

To come out without a coat.

That feeling in your throat this time of year

Making you wonder if it’s the weather

Or whether you’re getting a cold

And how long it’s been since you were here before.

The shop’s become someone’s house now

And other new houses built on fields

To let you know you’re getting older,

But still alive. Still alive

As a cat walks across the frosty road

This crisp morning and you’d swear

You caught the Boxing Day fox-hunting

Smell of cigars as you turned the corner

That wasn’t quite where you remembered it was.

Wrong turn; And you drive the length

Of this Cotswold street.

A man on his phone, smiling, carrying the newspaper

Back towards his home or someone else’s.

Safe and warm for now.

If you’d lived here it would have been different.

All of it. And you know that’s true.

How different it would all have been

If I’d never known you.

Psychosis

For a day job I work for a mental health hospital. Today I read one of the descriptions of the services the hospital offers and wondered about the way the fear and stigma of mental illness has affected treatment, to the extent that it’s not the done thing to even talk about it. We can and do happily discuss mental health but it’s not really on to talk about mental illness. It’s frightening. It’s a total loss of control.

Out on the primal veldt if you break your leg the lions might get you sooner, but at least you can make a plan. Light a fire, sharpen a stick, do something to put it off. And maybe, maybe you’ll get through. But when your mind isn’t very well you’re the most vulnerable you can possibly be and still be alive. Your plan is going to be about as good as the lions’s and they’ve got much bigger teeth than you.

Watch a cat with another cat that just came back from the vet and acts woozy from the anaesthetic. That would be my fear of what would happen, that frightened people would lash out, as frightened people do. Unless you’re lucky. Unless you can get help.

The service description got me thinking of how sanitised the language of therapy has become. Maybe it’s a good thing. I honestly don’t know. In one way it helps by reminding people, maybe unintentionally, the thinness of the tightrope we all walk. I see people who’ve missed their footing every day. It’s a terrifyingly long way down.

Psychosis

Treatment for psychotic symptoms, including hearing voices and seeing things others do not, feeling paranoid or mistrustful, believing in an ability to read other people’s minds, feeling confused, irritable and depressed, not thinking clearly, feeling that bad things may happen to self or others, believing in one’s special powers or fame are classic symptoms of a psychotic episode.

The factsheet told me the symptoms are common

And extensively varied including hearing voices,

Or seeing things that other people don’t see and hear.

And it’s true. I hear voices that other people don’t.

Other people don’t share my memories

And I hear your voice still telling me it’ll be ok.

Feeling paranoid or mistrustful.

I used to think paranoid meant thinking

Everyone was out to get you

But in the end, one person’s quite enough

Especially when they don’t want to get you at all

But the opposite. They want to un-get you.

For good. And mistrust.

Where would I be without a healthy dose of that?

Signed up to share my bank account with a Nigerian prince

Who suddenly needs to get the money belonging to his uncle

Who sadly died in a plane crash out of the country.

If I’d only share my details half of it can be mine.

And I can tick another box now. I could read his mind

This prince with a distinctly un-royal address.

But maybe things are different there.

Where nobody is confused or irritable or depressed

Where everyone thinks clearly all the time,

Where the words psychosis and mental health

Or service user are hardly ever used,

Unlike American Express or bank account details.

It’s my attitude, isn’t it?

It’s all in my head, as if I could think anywhere else

And shift this feeling that bad things might happen to me

And they will without any question at all

Because nobody gets out of this alive.

Do I believe in my special powers? It depends.

Right now only my special power to survive

Unlike the tens of billions who went before me

Dying and being born, a flash and dust

Under an eternal flame

So yes. Hands up. Me sir! Me sir! Sir! Sir!

That’s my special fame.

This is not the thing I wanted to write about mental health treatment. It just came out that way. As some people seem to have problems, oops, sorry, I meant issues reading this and thinking ‘Is he?’ You know, is he like that?’ the answer is no. Not diagnosed, anyway.