Wednesday 28 November 2012

A quiet drink or two

A [Home Office] spokesman added: "Those who enjoy a quiet drink or two have nothing to fear from our proposals."

BBC news (see here)

A Nazi spokesman added: "Gentiles have nothing to fear from our proposed 'final solution'"

Attrib.

What about three drinks? Or what if, while slightly inebriated, you raise your voice in defense of your opinion that the Home Office has exceeded its democratic mandate? God help you if you get shit-faced and take a piss against the walls of the Palace of Westminster.

According to Nick Triggle, Health Correspondent for the BBC, "ministers are proposing a minimum price of 45p a unit [say £4.20 for a bottle of plonk] for the sale of alcohol in England and Wales as part of a drive to tackle problem drinking...The Home Office said the consultation was targeted at 'harmful drinkers and irresponsible shops'...Research carried out by Sheffield University for the government shows a 45p minimum would reduce the consumption of alcohol by 4.3%, leading to 2,000 fewer deaths and 66,000 hospital admissions after 10 years...The number of crimes would drop by 24,000 a year as well, researchers suggested."

There are precious few reasons to remain in Blighty; the only reason I'm still here is inertia. The BBC is no longer a candidate reason. Having fingered the wrong man, in its pursuit of witches (aka paedophiles), it has become incapable of speaking its mind.

It is regularly claimed that I live in a free country, where I am encouraged to do anything I please that isn't specifically prohibited under law. Even were this absurd claim true, which it is not, there are so few enjoyable activities that are still legally sanctioned that I might as well report to Stalin.

If I take my seventy-something-year-old Mum to the pub for lunch, she has to skulk off to the car park whenever she wants a fag. If I am curious about the experience of being high on any drug other than alcohol or nicotine, I had better be careful that the pigs aren't watching. I suppose that I should gratefully acknowledge my freedom to teach infants that they are damned unless they 'agree' to be baptised before they die, but strangely enough that's a right I've never been keen to invoke.

We must take a stand. We must state clearly that we do not care how our government thinks we should behave. We must smoke in pubs (sigh, I shall have to take up smoking, which I hate); drink to excess; abuse illegal drugs; have sex with 15-year old girls and boys, with their consent; treat members of barbaric, palaeolithic cults with contempt; hunt foxes if it pleases us to do so; and force our loathsome politicians back into the shadows where they will once again feel at home.


Tuesday 27 November 2012

Life. Part IV. A New Hope.

Just discovered I've been divorced for three months. No-one had thought to tell me. This is almost funny; in fact, I expect that years hence I'll laugh when I recall the moment my ex-wife broke the news that we hadn't been married for some time. In the moment, however, it felt like a slap in the face, not a punchline. Way-hay, I'm a bachelor again. If I weren't so fat that I can barely see my own dick in a mirror, an (occasionally) functioning alcoholic and in possession of a negative libido (I have been whiling away the evenings watching 'Dexter', an American TV series about a serial killer and I relate strongly to the eponymous anti-hero, who has found the perfect girlfriend in a woman traumatised by a previous abusive relationship into an extreme aversion to sex), I am sure that this situation would open up vistas invisible to the species Bridget Jones referred to as 'smug marrieds'. As it is, I can't think of this as anything other than Very Bad News. Perhaps the worst I have ever received.

Love is the most bitter of the many poisoned chalices that an uncaring universe has bequeathed to us, her most self-important creation. Or is that just me? When I reflect back on my life, it is blindingly obvious in the brilliant laser beam of hindsight, that love has caused me far more pain than hate, anger, guilt, shame and remorse combined. The fierce love I bore for my father caused us both anguish that ended, with his death, only for him. The less complicated love I bear for my mother causes us both great distress still, because neither of us knows how to express it. I loved my first wife so intensely that I was unable to enjoy life away from her and, when my love for her burned out suddenly and unexpectedly, the result was a year of abject misery for her and me. Unrequited love, which followed, hurts more than any physical pain short of torture but perhaps it leaves fewer scars than requited love gone bad. And then came true love - ah, true love - how exquisitely crafted it is to cause the maximum level of suffering that a normal human being can bear without breaking.

When I survey my friends and acquaintances, I can't help but notice that my experience of love is not unique. In fact, it seems to be almost universal. Everyone I know seems either to be enduring a miserable relationship, or not enduring it, causing misery of a different sort. A few gay friends seem to have avoided this love-trap but probably I just can't read their relationships accurately. The unconditional love that almost every parent bears for his children causes, of course, more agony than any of the other loves one is required to endure in an average life, and I can't help but wonder whether childless relationships - gay or straight - are not happier. Every misery that my father inflicted upon me must have felt twice as awful to him. When my young son told me that there were only two things he is 'sad of'; when mummy forgot to bring his pirate costume to school one day and the fact that I don't live with him any more, I sincerely wished I'd never been born.

I'd like to say that I'm done with love. That I'll stomp on the treacherous little turd's head the next time it shows itself. But the truth is I am hopelessly, forever, in love with many people and I will go to my grave lamenting all the pain those loves - requited or not - have wrought. 

Saturday 24 November 2012

Old friends

I was driving my schoolfriend Chris to Chippenham station this afternoon. Mis-guideldly, I suggested to my kids that they sing to Chris a song I'd taught them as infants, beginning 'God is a cheeky monkey...' Louie, one of Pieter's friends, was also in the car and he responded with 'Our God is a great big God (see here). Chris, sandwiched in the back seat betweeen Pieter and Louie, extemporised and suggested the alternative lyrics, Our God is a great big God, and he spends a lot of time on the bog.'

This suggestion was well received and resulted in much discussion of whether God is too fat to fit down the chimney at Christmas. We wondered, collectively, whether, if God farted continuously for the whole month of November, he might be slim enough by December 25th. In the end, we decided it'd be safer to rely on FC to deliver presents and let God take care of the hymns.

I wondered whether God the Father might have been a tragic mis-translation of God the Farter and his accomplices The Bum and the Wholly Shit but the kids had no opinion on this subject. Goodness, it's hard work undoing the damage we pay other people to do unto our kids.

The land of the blind

WHAT’S THAT!
One shiny wet nose! 

Two big furry ears! 
Two big googly eyes! 
IT’S A BEAR!

Michael Rosen & Helen Oxenbury

The captain is a one-armed dwarf
He's throwing dice along the wharf
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king
So take this ring... 

Tom Waits

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and, in a car with two occupants, the former zoology student is instantly promoted to resident expert on all matters ursine, when a bear appears unexpectedly on the road less traveled ahead.

'Holy crap!' says Spike, 'It's a bear!' Which is as succinct a description of our situation as you'd expect from a former student of English Literature. Moving with the grace of a ballet dancer and at the speed of a striking cobra, Spike hits the power window button (on his side, not mine).

'Um, will it charge the car, or anything?' he asks. I know less about bear biology than I do about foraminifera, say, but I have discovered in life that it's not what you know that counts, it's the conviction with which you express your opinion.

'No.' I said, authoritatively. 'It's just curious. We're probably the first human beings its ever seen.'

'What do they eat?' Asks Spike, evidently less impressed by my fund of bear-lore than I am. 'Um, vegetables, I think, and worms probably. Humans too, but rarely.'

The bear seems to be curious. It swiftly retreats from the road into the forest but I can see it examining us, peering out from behind tree trunks, evidently frightened, but not enough to vanish.

This is a magical moment. Neither Spike nor I had seen a wild bear previously in our 80+ combined years of globe-trotting and neither of us expects to see another. There are only a few thousand bears left on Hokkaido, or perhaps only a few hundred (see here for an impeccably researched article on the subject), and the more I think about it, the luckier I feel for having encountered one. Our bear is a beautiful animal, with dark brown fur and a honey-coloured collar and face.

It's a particularly bad time to be a bear in Hokkaido, though perhaps there has never been a really good one. To stray into a town, where the dustbins overflow with bear food in the way that Israel allegedly did with milk and honey, is tantamount to suicide. The news-starved providers of content for Japanese domestic TV dispatch reporters to cover the bear hunt and its inevitable death, at the hands of police marksmen. Terrified civilians are interviewed: 'How is this possible? I mean, I have a baby. The bear might have eaten her. Why isn't the government doing something?'

Spike suggested, and perhaps on this occasion he is even right, that the reaction of most Japanese citizens to our encounter would have been horror or revulsion or a demand for a detachment of paratroopers to be sent immediately to kill the beast. Spike and I spent most of our time together in Japan seeking out roads that no sane native of those islands would voluntarily travel. On the occasions when our attempt to drive such roads wasn't thwarted by an impassable steel-and-concrete barrier, we encountered virtually no other traffic. It is a bizarre experience, traveling in one of the most populous nations on earth, to find oneself completely alone, barely a dozen miles from the nearest 7-11. If you had a puncture out there, you'd either starve to death or walk out.

When we were students together, Spike introduced me to Tom Waits. I quoted the line at the head of this post in an essay on optimal foraging theory, written in my final exams, and I've been looking for an excuse ever since to deploy it again.

Tuesday 20 November 2012

As good today as it's always been

Driving through Bradford-on-Avon today, I passed an enormous truck, heading in the opposite direction. 'Hovis', said the words on the side facing me, 'As good today as it's always been.' The advertising genius who came up with this slogan is destined to go far. The claim is impossible to challenge. Competitors or consumers who say that Hovis makes tasteless, chewy, steamed dough can hardly complain, unless they are prepared to admit that Hovis, once-upon-a-time, made bread. Fans (are there any over the age of ten?) can congratulate themsleves on their judgement and a small percentage of the mindless majority might possibly be persuaded to defect from Allinson.

The only reason I am writing about this is that I have a good Hovis story, told to me by a bloke who was, at the time, very senior in Rank Hovis McDougall. One evening, after a few glasses of wine, he told me that RHM had participated voluntarily in serious discussions with the government of the day about reducing the amount of salt that British people consume in their ordinary diet. It turns out that, for most people, bread contributes more salt in absolute terms than any other dietary component. According to my source, RHM offered to reduce the amount of salt it used in bread manufacture by a certain, quite large, percentage and the government negotiator went away very happy.

What Hovis did then was very clever. The 'master bakers' - I swear that is what they are called - were instructed to reduce the amount of salt per loaf in all the 'own label' bread they produced on behalf of supermarket chains (how could the customers complain?) and increase, by a smaller amount, the salt per loaf in Hovis. Salt is what makes bread taste good. Result? Government ecstatic and consumers defect in droves from own-label bread and start buying Hovis, which now tastes better and generates much higher margins for RHM. The subversive/anarchist in me warms to any tale of authority being shown the finger in this way and I have had a soft spot for RHM (but not Hovis) ever since.

Monday 12 November 2012

Cretin of the year

It's been a while. I've been in Japan, collecting seeds and getting drunk in the unlikeliest of places. Even when I am most engaged with the outside world, news reaches my ear at the speed of a homing pigeon. Buying newspapers or turning on the telly would keep me connected but why, honestly, should I bother? I bought a copy of the Sunday Times last weekend, only because I'd decided to stop for lunch in a pub on the way home from visiting a friend in Somerset and wanted something to read.

Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have earned, I discovered, our sincere thanks for making it so fucking miserable to be a UK taxpayer that all the well-paid people in the country have moved to New York, which has overtaken London as the financial capital of the world. This will cost the Treasury about £30 billion in foregone tax revenues, an excellent bargain considering that the tax system is now so much fairer. Incidentally, I discovered recently that Nick Clegg was an exact contemporary of mine at Cambridge University, which makes me feel less bad about my underachieving life.

Barack Obama has won a second term as President of the USA (what, you hadn't heard), defeating by a terrifyingly narrow margin a Mormon named Mitt Romney, a man whom, thanks to the intervention of the Antichrist, no-one will remember three or four years from now. Mormons believe that Jesus visited the USA after his resurrection and revealed to Joseph Smith His true teachings. Perhaps it's just me, but isn't the only relevant difference between Romney and Ahmaninedjad of Iran that, whereas the latter would like to have a nuclear bomb but can't because he's not a Jew, the former would have had several thousand, had it not been for African-Americans, 93% of whom voted for Obama. If this is not an argument in favour of naked prejudice, I'd like to see a better one.

The Church of England has a new Archbishop of Canterbury, news that was announced on page three of the Sunday Times in a short column next to a large picture of Paula Broadwell, who'd been screwing David Petraeus, (former) head of the CIA, until his wife found out. The journos at the ST can't have much fun but poor Justin Welby is an easy target. Apparently the new Archbish announced 'during a visit to a food parcel initiative in Sunderland' that 'it's a very strange feeling when you find yourself having odds quoted on you at a bookies. Generally speaking, I am not a horse. I think that's a really important point to get across.' According to the ST, he also intends to reduce the gulf between rich and poor, while at the same time reconnecting with the wealthy. 'He is conscious that having a lot of money makes it easier to rely on material things...It's his opinion that it can be harder to be spiritual if you're rich', according to a spokesman. That's a really profound insight, when you think about it.

The BBC is in trouble, having mistaken Lord McAlpine for a paedophile of the same name. Easily done, when you reflect that most heterosexual Scottish men secretly fancy girls just slightly younger than the appropriate age. As do most heterosexual men in every other country on earth. The traditional media are naturally obsessed with their own imminent demise, which is why Welby, the City of London and even the square-jawed fantasist from Salt Lake City were on page three.

Nadine Dorries, who is apparently a Tory MP, has appeared on a TV programme called 'I'm a Celebrity, Get me out of Here...' This is the most interesting thing she has ever done. Acording to the ST, 'the Prime Minister was informed by his aides while having breakfast in Abu Dhabi'. Thank goodness for the civil service. Hats off chaps.

Catherine Robbe-Grillet has revealed that she had sex with her late husband and that occasionally they used whips to enhance their mutual sexual pleasure. Fuck, I'd never have thought of that.

Sunnis and Shiites are apparently taking opposite sides in the conflicts in Iran, Iraq and Syria. I don't like to boast but I think I could have predicted that. Both sides agree that the Prophet Mohamed flew to Mecca first class on Etihad Airlines but they differ on whether his complimentary socks were blue or red. This is a really worthwhile reason for going to war and I just don't understand the imbeciles who disagree.

It will be some time before I buy another newspaper.