Tuesday 9 February 2010

evensong, fotheringay, sandy denny, prompted by mrs woman on a raft, on ali campbell's blues.

a bloody monster, mary queen of scots, but an infant compared to Tony, Call-Me-Tony. She met her death bravely by all accounts, unlike Blair, who lives every moment in cowardice, every grinning, whore's moment bought and paid for by Uncle Sam.

10 comments:

Dick the Prick said...

Dear Mr Ish

Hope you & yours are well and keeping warm in this cold snap. Have poor internet connection at mo so youtube impossibelly. Have also dropped remote control so whatssontelly is now stuck on BBC2 - arrrgghh! Sports news? Really?

Looking forward to winter Olympics - they're all clearly proper nutters. Have been getting more vertigo as I clock on and the ski jumping that looked good as a kid now looks a bit scary.

It's 12 weeks to hopefully a general election that will change the team; to be sure, it's no great shakes but it is still shakes. All getting a bit dirty - people getting the bungs now, brown envelope city - 'soften them up' - namely tell them to shut the fuck up. Fair enough - everyone's got a price. Got 1 old timer who never gave a shit about cash laughing his tits off.

Vote blue, go red...err...that's not right,ed.

All the best

DtP

mongoose said...

Fuck 'em all, Mr DtP. "None of the above."

That vertigo thing. I now get vertigo looking at pictures on the wall, for Christ's sake. That one with the red indian steeplejacks way up in the sky of New York eating their lunch over the void. Ye Gods, man!

As for Saint Sandy - a lovely, simple song. Proper English folk music made by fine musicians. (Though I am at the moment still discovering more John Martyn.)

call me ishmael said...

All ok, thanks for asking, Mr DTP, as for the youtube it is as Mr mongoose says, a well-tempered lament for Mary Queen of Scots, after Mrs WOAR's customary erudition-noir.

A spoiled paper is the only honourable option.

I get vertigo putting my socks on, of a morning.

Saint Bob said...

Tut tut, Mr I. The cult of the celebrity? Never mind the hundreds of other drones who passed away at the same time, unmarked and unrecorded. Died for their beliefs. Believed they might eat.
The Paula Yates of her time. But hey, that's the price of fame.

call me ishmael said...

The Paula Yates of her time. But hey, that's the price of fame.

Yes, of course,- a bloody monster - the point was about the iconigraphy of - lets call it - Evil, how stooges and satraps can, even posthumously, make noble the most wicked - as we see, but also how, even within the darkest orders of wickedness, there are gradations, we just know that Tony Blair would not face Death, or anything, bravely.

The only celebrity around here is Buster, the blogdog, God bless the flatulent little scrap of Creation.

mrs narcolept said...

Loved that. A single voice with plucked strings gets me every time. And Buster, of course.

Why was MQS a bloody monster though, particularly, Mr Ishmael? She seems comparatively harmless to me compared with her two royal cousins burning and beheading because it was the right thing to do for the country.

call me ishmael said...

Bloody Mary. Not especially monstrous. No worse than others of her ilk and epoch, it's true, mrs n, but it took us centuries to overthrow bloody monarchy,like her, leaving us just with playboy parasitism.

My point was that apparently, despite her God-fearing cruelty, she made a good fist of dying on the block, something of which our own hollow men would be incapable.

But we don't know, of course, maybe it suited the historians to describe her end thus, in order to mollify her supporters, maybe she went shitting herself and screaming. As I most certainly would.

A moot point, all this, there are serious people who proclaim Richard Crookback hero, his crimes and his unwholesomeness all got up by Shakespeare, in order to do down the Plantagenets and curry favour with the Tudors, rather as Simon Schama and others lionise Spunky Bill Clinton. I think that for all our erudition and web scholarship, Mr Henry Ford was right, history is bunk, written, mostly, by the victors, or, God help us, the Chilcot enquiry.

mrs narcolept said...

I think Mary Tudor was worse, and she died in her bed. Though perhaps there wasn't much to choose between them: maybe MQS would have been just as bad if she had not been put a stop to. But yes, doom faced with dignity is always moving and no, I can't imagine any of This Lot doing it.

lilith said...

When Calfy was a little thing, perhaps 7 or 8 I came upon her sobbing in her bedroom. It turned out that she was weeping over an account of MQS's death. I think it was MQS's dignity combined with her little dog's distress that finished my girl off.

woman on a raft said...

Lovely song, thanks, I will try to take a trip over to the castle.

There are two Marys here.

Mary Tudor - Bloody Mary - was eldest daughter of Henry VIII and tried to reverse the Reformation, and it was for her enthusiastic re-processing of Protestants that she got the name. It didn't work out. The throne eventually went to Elizabeth I.

I haven't got the score-card to hand, but nobody really emerges with much credit. After all, Henry wasn't above the odd bonfire, Edward VI annoys me particularly for the amount of church defacement he did (and killing people, of course) and Elizabeth was gradually drawn back in to distinctly repressive measures, despite her famous desire to separate private belief from public behaviour.

Our Mary here, MQS, is the one who also had a legitimate claim on the throne of England. She was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, whereas Elizabeth was his grand-daughter.

Despite being called a pretender, by genealogy she had a darn good claim, it just gets complicated when looking at intervening legislation. You know what lawyers are like. Mary could have ratified the Treaty of Edinburgh which sought political prudence by recognizing Elizabeth's right ro rule England, but she refused to sign.

MQS came to the Scottish throne which was never going to be an easy job as she was Catholic and the country was going Presbyterian. She then mis-played the admittedly duff hand she had been dealt, and by age 24 was fleeing with little more than her petticoats to England. As wiki puts it:

After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne (of Scotland), Mary fled to England seeking protection from her first cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, whose kingdom she hoped to inherit.

"Hi cuz, I'm going to be the focus of plots against you, have a claim on your throne which many of your subjects feel is stronger than yours, I'm Catholic (although in private at the moment) and, btw, could you see your way clear to giving me a bunch of soldiers so that I can re-take my own throne and then raise an army and march south against you."

Elizabeth had her locked up for 19 years before Walsingham and Cecil finally resolved to have her done in legally. I don't (yet) know why they even bothered by then; the 43 year old was not well and might have checked-out without any need for unpleasantness. I'd have simply intercepted her messages and fed her a load of baloney about her forces arriving real soon now, money troubles etc.

MQS had her faults but as she barely got any ruling-time in, we only have the possibility that she was involved in the death of her husband in some way. What she can fairly be criticised for is failing to grasp quickly that she had lost her Scottish throne and wouldn't be getting the English one. As a result of failing to accept this, she spent 20 years subtly encouraging stupid young Catholic jihaddists to get themselves killed for no good reason.

Had she faced facts and become studiously apolitical, it would have taken about five years for Elizabeth to shunt her off to a quiet estate in, say, Shropshire (up the Wrekin for instance) where she could hunt, have a household, build pretty churches and play at being the fairy queen. She might even have been allowed to marry if that would have put her more out of the way of the throne.

She doesn't make it to bloody monster status, but was a 9.9 idiot.