It’s certainly brought out the cliches. I was going to type that I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, but one thing I have seen before is government incompetence, dogma and a total refusal to accept that anything it does could ever be wrong. That part is just like the 1980s again. You turn if you want to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve been meaning to read everything I have in the pile but it mostly hasn’t happened. I still haven’t read Wolf Among Wolves<\/em> and I love Hans Fallada. Ditto A Boy In Winter<\/em>, Austerlitz<\/em>, even Arthur Miller’s Timebends<\/em> isn’t getting read. Instead I tried to catch-up on my everyone’s-supposed-to-have-read-Conrad list, given that at least he wrote short books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a spare of films about the Vietnam War, from the Deerhunter through Apocalypse through FMJ, teaching mine and Jeremy Clarkson’s generation an entire vocabulary of gooks and slopes, M16s, medevac, fragging officers and the Thousand Yard Stare. Man, the chopper used to fly right over my house. Not in Vietnam but in Finsbury Park, coming down from somewhere north to shoot Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket<\/em> in Docklands. Back then we – a collection of girls called things like Laura and Nicky and Caroline, DPG spooks, thick rich boys and ditto moguls (Nay, rarely, not Indian princes, girls who do photo shoots, ya? Because of the way they speak, ya?!?!<\/em>) called it Full Dinner Jacket at the White Horse in Parson’s Green. What larks! <\/p>\n\n\n\n But only because if you can remember the 1980s you weren’t drunk most of the time. I found it oddly appropriate that when a film-maker wanted to shoot in a tense, devastated third-world hell hole the obvious location was London. But it was a different place back then. The horror. The horror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conrad, to point out the bleeding obvious, wrote Heart of Darkness<\/em>. To be honest, guv, I found the telling a story by telling a story about someone telling a story a bit laboured, quotes and all. But I can’t find a publisher and Conrad did, so what do I know?<\/p>\n\n\n\nApocalypse Now was the problem.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/writer-insighter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/960px-White_Horse_Fulham_23.jpg\")