Wednesday 23 December 2015

THE PEOPLE WHO WALKED IN DARKNESS HAVE NOT SEEN A GREAT LIGHT.

 It would be wrong to say that I missed Benn junior's recent peroration on the virtue of vice, the honour of homicide or whatever contortion he performed for the delight of his tumescent colleagues during their communal lusting for mass murder of Syrians, Isilites, wogs, anybody, really, just, with a heavy heart,  kill the fuckers, 'swhy we came into politics;
 
 I didn't miss it, for nothing on Earth would have enticed me into Benn's orbit, I would rather kiss Michael Howard's oily, rancid arse than observe a Benn plying the family's Godless trade.  And  Hilary, either as treacherous caricature of his Papa or in his own weaselly, wordy way, malformed and reptilian,  is a sight to repel those craving decency.


I do not despise the Benns for their socialism for they have none,   are not remotely collectivist, much less Christian,  neither would share a farthing with the poor but only sell them books, preach at them, smugly, of Heaven, just around the corner from the next by-election;  just another family of grubby, gobby parasites, with whom we are  long overblest and by whom we are overruled, divided, robbed and shat upon.  Not even the fatuous estimation of great oratory would bend my ears  and eyes  to Hypocrisy's Hilary Benn, gobbing-off about war.  There are, in any event, no orators still in MediaMinster, thay are gone, now, along with Art and Reason and Nationhood, and were proof required of these absences, then the idea of Hilary Benn as orator should be sufficiently positive.

 

God fucking help me, I have heard enough such self-absorbed  tedium from his old man, I deserved a break from Bennism, God's own reproof to those who seek worthiness in narcissistic filth, gazing adoringly at its own fecal image. 


Since his death, I have come to despise Benn the Father, for his diarising, indeed, I  begin to think  that the furtive telling of tales to oneself  should become punishable with ostracism by one's fellows.  I mean, if you were down the pub, or in a NewPeople's wine bar or pavement cafe or wherever the fuck these poor shackled bastards  congregate to bray and hiss  and photograph themselves, but say it was the pub, and you're sat there with some of the lads and one of them is not drinking but instead is scribbling-down, under the table, what everybody else is saying and then he's going to go home, 

 
 The smuggest, smirkingest old gossip who ever lived.

have a nice cup of tea and then speak your  joint evening into a tape-recorder, complete with distortion and excision and waspish invention, and then, and then this is the good part, then get some old biddy to type it all up, because, y'know, he's too important to do wimmin's work, and let's face it, typing always was wimmin's work, and so, in solidarity with wimmin everywhere, he's not going to encroach on their employment, and then give it to some fag, wife-beating  publisher, so's he can sell your night down the pub to other people, well, somebody like that, some ratty little scribbler, he'd deserve to find himself lying in the pub car park, wondering how he'd got there. 

Instead of the masturbatory gesture, shaken in incidents of roadrage, with the noun being mouthed, a better world would see a scribbling hand-gesture, accompanied by a silent "Diarist!

I had a chimney sweep here, yesterday, a nice lad, black as the Ace of  Spades with his work and with a huge, white smile, like a stage nigger would have had, back before racism and its effortless criminalisation of word and thought.  It is a woefully misregarded trade, chimney-sweeping and I can listen to a good sweep for hours, a good brickie, come to that.  My previous one has left the isles, he was an amateur luvvie, Ivan, happiest in the chorus line of Pirates of Penzance, and lived in a maelstrom of counterfeit romances with interesting but younger women, not nonce-younger, just in their twenties and thirties,  while he was pushing fifty and to whom he would play  sooty Svengali. All of these liaisons resulted in financial troubles and fierce invigilation by the taxman;  Ivan, thus hamstrung,  has now gone Sooth taking  his knowledge of household thermo-dynamics with him;  what he didn't know about thirty-feet high Georgian chimneys, like mine, wasn't worth knowing;  their construction, their  properties, their dimensions and angles, their flammability, their  proper pots and cowls.  He'd swept in great Edinburgh Georgian homes, unblocked and recommissioned fireplaces once redundant, now an arriviste's dream, and more importantly, a great selling feature, now that the home is become commodity, ever-engorging aspiration and vassal to junky chancellor, George.

Since Ivan's been gone, we haven't bothered with having the Rayburn  stove-chimney swept and it has kind of fallen out of use; our not eating meat has lessened its utility, too,  but it does heat an unused part of the first floor, burns the waste, especially the wood offcuts which I still seem to generate and it looks and smells nice, elemental, I throw the wood ash, which is always disappointingly slight, in the compost, so that, in itself, makes me worthy, doesn't it, according, anyway, to the Gospel of Monty Don,
which saith, never ye an opportunity miss  to stress thine own virtuous, ethical and most earnest worthiness, to the planet and its teeming programme schedulers. 

Yes, more of a ministry's how I see my tenure at Gardeners World, 'sall about responsibility, caring,  very deeply I might say, for the  garden that is our planet, wearing carefully selected pre-worn clothes and talking like a cunt.

 It is probably even a great selling feature, here,  too, my Rayburn,  although it is, what, sixty, seventy, eighty  years old, a plain white Rayburn Royale, the kind which features in every TeeVee period drama from All Creatures Great and Small to Foyle's War.  A proper arriviste would have a shiny, new, red or green one, an Aga,  with shiny, steel lids; with shiny, copper pipes and a shimmering, shiny  halogen-lit tiled surround, which never saw soot or vapour or  grease but sat smokeless and shiny, gleaming and humming, like a domestic nuclear reactor, the fabled kitchen hub,  centrepiece to the shiny consumer lives of busy professionals, as if  antidote to their empty, greedy minds, their garlicky breath, their vile children  and the little filthy brown stains on their underwear.
 Better, in my consumer opinion, have a forest of bidets,  at a few hundred pounds apiece, one in every toilet in the house, than a glistening, ten-grand Aga, for thus, doth the Empire of Health and Hygiene flourish and prosper. I live in hopes of a true, true, true nanny-state,  one  which is anathema to our own mr mongoose, one  urging us to wash our soiled arses as well as we do our hands.
Instead, via winsome, tongue-tied infants, Andrex embeds us in the one true faith, that of surreptitious , rueful shit-smearing, and calleth it Clean. 
Can't be any doo-doo on my  botty, Mum;
I've smeared it all around with Andrex bogroll.
The sweep, though.  Yesterday, I sat in the kitchen with him, while he worked, something I rarely do, normally departing with an I'll be through here if you need me. We had got talking, though, and I was doing a few wee chores on the kitchen table, anyway, sorting toolbox bits'n'pieces, so it wasn't as though I was just sat there, watching him.
He used a rotary brush, not a traditional bristly brush, a six-stranded  flail, really, which he shoved up and down the chimney, fixed, at the end of the flexible, connected rods, to a powered screwdriver, which would have spun the flail at many thousands or revolutions per minute.  I guess that the strands were tough enough to dislodge soot deposits but flexible enough not to harm the stonework, seemed to be, anyway.
It was a productive encounter, the job's a good un,  he'll get paid promptly, we each learned something from the other and a little bridge was built  over Alienation's fiercely cold and rising waters.

He told me, though, a bit shyly, of a recent encounter with another non-Orcadian.  I have mentioned previously that I simply do not know where the house keys are,  that we go away for weeks at a time,  leaving the place unlocked,  that the car keys are always in the unlocked car.  It is not that people on this side of the Pentland Firth are especially virtuous,  just that there is so very little career opportunity for the burglar or the car thief;  even hundreds of metres from my nearest neighbour, I can still be overlooked, and am, neighbours know better my comings and goings than I do myself, and a hue and cry would ensue should an unknown vehicle appear parked  in my grounds and if it escaped then said vehicle can only leave the islands by registered ferry, requiring personal identification and there is simply no tradition of fencing stolen property locally,  through pubs or carboot sales;  honesty, therefore, at least as far as property goes,  is justifiably assumed, just not by another of my chimneysweep's customers.

We had been talking about customer relationships, how very important they were to the small business, moreso than in GlobaTheftCorporation, where, if you're lucky, a recorded voice is ethically deployed to tell you to fuck off, otherwise you are played the Four Seasons, the lively one, anyway, Spring.  He had said several times how sorry he was to have delayed his visit and although it actually made little difference to me he was berating himself  for paying so much attention to customers who shouted at him, demanding, dictating Acceptability or rather, its Un-ness, and so little to those, like myself, who didn't. I told him that once, just once, a customer, well not a customer, an window-shopper, come inside,  had so enraged me, so stretched my patience that I clipped him sharply around the ear and ejected him from my premises,  that he called the cops, and that a witness, whom I had not known was present, on an upper floor, advised them that he, or indeed they, would have ejected this horrid little bastard through a closed door or a plate glass window, so vexatious and improper had he been. The cops duly vouchsafed this sentiment to the complainant and he left, rubbing his ear and muttering. I said that mr sweep should by no means strike his gobby clients but that inviting the particularly obnoxious client to  Go And Fuck Yourself, served a very useful purpose, a sort of a mental hygiene steam-valve, releasing the pressure of a thousand slights.

The miscreant, in this particular chimney-sweeping case, had loudly complained, when told that the sweep could only attend during his own working hours and had very begrudgingly left his key, under a stone. As mr sweep was completing the task he noticed an iPad, strategically placed, partially hidden, in a place where it could only have been placed in order to give surveillance of the task and the worker.  I guess that this behaviour is near-enough legal but shockingly bad form. Worse, it is an extension, by the citizen, himself,  of the state-sponsored belief not in the citizen but in the citizen-suspect; people  cleverly setting electronic security measures against their own neighbours.  Must give Mickey Fallon a hard-on, that.

And you're sure it fires through wheelchairs?
 Yes, you can't trust anybody, that's why we have to kill them.
Wogs, benefit cheats, disabled  people, they're not, you know, not really, not disabled at all. 
The radio was on the other day and had happened to land upon Radio Four's Greatest Hits. Extra, is it?  It was the simpering shrink, Anthony Clare, interviewing Tony Benn about his wondrous self, in the studio psychiatrist's chair.  Clare was on a hiding to nothing for Benn had a lifetime behind him of blethering narcissistically to his own ends, and no showbiz headshrinker like Clare was going to unearth anything truthful about him, even though his monumental vanity and worthlessness were to be heard in his every conceited phrase.

In the few minutes that I heard of the show, I was struck by Benn senior's sense of Alwaysness, time after time he said assuredly: Y'know, as I always say, as my mother always said, as my father always said, as I always said to the children, when they were growing up,  d'you know what I mean?  Alwaysness, yes, that would be at the very core of my own, wotachamaycall it, my own national treasure celebrityness, d'you now what I mean? It was, in passing,  strangely unsettling,  incongruous, to hear Benn's patient, avuncular articulation of Knoworramean? -   it was as redundant, as lazy and irrelevant an interrogative as the truncated version more commonly repeated by those less privileged  than Benn, himself. However cosily bracketed,  his absurd belief in  the permanence of his trite phoney dogma, it was as though once something had been said  by he or his,  it became immutable, irreversible, righteously, scripturally certain, the moreso with its repetition; in the Benn circle they do not speak but axiomise. And have a jolly nice cup of tea.  Now, I drink many varieties of tea but would not try to weave its consumption into morality or ethics, Benn, though,  the national treasure, abstemious and temperate, never failed so to do, sucking, simultaneously at his tobacco addiction   None of his hoary maxims could be questioned for if he believed them who could doubt? In his wider quotational  repertoire, Benn always sought, in advance, authentication by his fellow-greats, starting his dreadful, practised  replies with, D'you know, I'm with my fellow socialist,  Jesus,   on this one or D'you know, I can't put it better than Confucius, my fellow-philosopher or Well, it's like my fellow-author, George Bernard Shaw always said............

I drifted-off, into a nightmare reverie of Benn, swigging his hourly pint of milky Ty-Phoo,  dictating his wretched diaries, for the  next morning's Mrs Mopp to  transcribe, of him sitting between  Two Thousand  Years of Wit and Wisdom  and   piles of dictionaries of quotations and biography, searching them for  verification of his own phony do-gooderness. 


 And then by darker visions of his mammoth fallatiotron with Willy Hague, the two MediaMinster whores, together touring the nation's sold-out small theatres, people flocking to their surprisingly friendly and witty banter, as though they were a   medicine show, for the feeble-minded, the deranged;  a travelling Dave Channel.  If you don't know about the Dave Channel, keep it that way. It is not diabetes will kill me, it is my imagination.  Firebrand lefty, Christian socialist, national treasure touring with nonce-apologist, prettyboy-loving, slaphead, teenage mutant, sixteen pints a night grotesque, redneck carpetbagger. The mutant's last resort; from Ken Dodd to Michael Jackson, Whisky Maggie to Gnasher Sturgeon; there is no business like showbusiness, fearful horror given life, it is all around us.

But mainly it's the Alwaysness of Benn, and indeed of so many in his filthy trade, which is so annoying;  they possess a certainty quite alien to me, as though they really led the life unexamined, never proof-read, much less edited themselves, but merely spouted unhesitant  rubbish and drivel, as to the Oxbridge manor born.

mrs ishmael, with my coercion, used to keep a Commonplace Book, more jotter than diary but a kind of continuum, a record of vaguely notable stuff. I, on the other hand, could never write a diary for, like the assasins' fretful target, my mind never sleeps twice in the same place.  If I have slept, I awaken each morning a new person, yesterday's man fortified or diluted by each and everything I have experienced between sleeps, but never the same man;  never a fit person to chronicle the myriad happenstances of my life,  be they the predisposed or the chance.  Even a work diary was beyond me,  I only ever did stuff - completed things -  that were scheduled weeks or days  ahead, not months,  and so I resisted the writing-down  of them, if it was important I remembered, unfailingly,  to do it. As to a personal diary, being randomly and largely self-educated, I have never really been able to figure-out what has happened in the past eighteen hours, I don't have a framework, a field of reference, by which to succinctly precis what has just happened to me;  only after some time, often a long time do I understand what happened, the idea of  summarising it, at the time, for publication or as an aide memoire seems to me utterly foolhardy, a denial of growth and change, a preposterous, contrary vanity.

It could be argued that these commentaries, here,  are diaristic and in some senses - their continuity, for instance; their repetitions - they are inevitably so, they are also, unusually for me, written in the first person,  a stylising which I have  avoided all my life.  On the other hand,  although they are not scrupulously anonymised they do not appear under my given name and they are, somewhat luxuriously, not commercial.  That these are not diary entries is clear enough in that often the greater and wiser volume of text appears in the commentaries of others, which, in turn,  shape my own future thinking;  a co-operative, in short, not a diary, a group effort, shaped by stakeholders, past and present.

I do not suggest, here, that there are no certainties, for there are things in Heaven and Earth, which I used only to think I knew, but which now I believe;  I merely say that the synchronous, arbitrary and selective annotation of one's lived experience, as favoured by political filthsters, and its presentation as remotely true, accurate or reliable is at best a foolishness, a pretence.   Tony Benn, famous, like Lord Mike Biscuits, 
I say, when the show's over, I generally like a few bourbons or custard creams, be a good chap;  I killed Whisky Maggie, y'know.



for his flouncing, and, like a watered-down, tabloid Samuel Pepys,  for his diaries, 

was, even by the meagre standards of his peers, a vain, self-adoring fool;  that Benn, an effete, self-obsessed,  wealthy careerist and an empty-headed soundbiter was able - and encouraged - to colonise and  then torch the landscape of the Left, so that his very name became, to MediaMinster,  a useful  byword for  profligate evil -   was an irreparable, national catastrophe. 

 That his ghastly spawn, and grandspawn, moreover, now shit on us from the same exalted latrine of state, must delight the cheapskate vulgarian himself, sipping fiery  tea, down there, with his master, Satan. 

To divert ourselves from  medieval-scale  national larceny and from global mayhem with the mewlings and pukings  of a hereditary simpering nobody such as  Hilary Benn is, to put it mildly, regrettable.  
We, who know better, should not differentiate between  one specimen of  vermin and another on the grounds of their speechifying skills; firstly, they don't have any to speak of and secondly they need no encouragement whatsoever from us, much less our critical appreciation of their filthy lies. We should not suspect our neighbour so that he becomes our enemy; instead we should scrutinise,  eject and punish our tormentors.  I remember, just six or seven years ago, being entranced by Obama's speechifying, and look how he turned out.  I never believed a word of it but especially after George Dubya Chimp, the fact that he could, then, with his aides, frame something approaching a sentence was refreshing;  Hilary Benn, tossing himself off in the commons,  vying for Corbyn's job, well, he wasn't even goping to be in Obama's league.

Some of them, though, Benn's worknmates, we  pay them two or sometimes three sets of wages, expenses and pensions.


Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's  just a wee bit rich, blaming me for Donald Trump, all I did was invite him into Scotland, give him tax breaks, override the community he was despoiling, fall for his lies and appoint him my personal ambassador.  I think you'll find that, as with the oilprice, Andrew, and the referendum which, I also think you'll find, we actually won, that I was entirely correct as well as resolutely honest and proper, acting entirely in the interests of the Scottish sovereign people.
  That'll be twenty-five hundred of your English pounds, please, yes in Scottish pounds.


Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's a wee bit rich, blaming me for  yon Forth Road Bridge fiasco, fallin' doon, like it is, and causing chaos all over Scotland. Aye, the transport minister have all bin loonies. An' aye, it is right, we have bin in govament for eight years, but I think ye'll find, Andrew, that that disnae mean we can be held responsible for anything that goes wrong. Jeez, mon, if that wis the case we'd be fair fucked, what wi' the polis an' the skules an the NHS, all ganging' doon the drain, not tae mention the oil price falling, an' everyone in Aberdeen gangin' aboot wi' their arses in their hands, mebbe havin'  tae sell one a their three RangeRovers, an' all as a result, I might say, o' David Cameron fixing the oilprice, quite  agin the spirit o' the vow that he made to the sovereign Scoattish people at the referendum, which, I think ye'll find, Andrew, that we won.


 What they do need, North and South, across the Irish channel

Property magnate, cuckold and gabshite, Peter Robinson, self-suspended First Minister of the Six Counties, pouting in one of his twelve hundred neckties, like a Mafia Wiseguy, so he is.

Well, I must say, so I must, Andrew, that that's a wee bit rich, so it is, youse saying that I crashed the Stormont Assembly, just to divert attention from the wholly and entirely and utterly conemptible lie that I'm no better than a thief, when,  in fact, as youse well know,   I am nothing but a thief.  All of my political life, so it is, as you well know, has been devoted to serving this fractured community of ours, and the fact that I have had the good fortune to become a multi-millionaire on property dealings, and that my dear, official wife, Mrs Grannygate, has had the good fortune to pay for the sexual favours of a young man through govament grants which she arranged while an elected representative of the People of Northern Ireland, well, all of that is pure hearsay, so it is. And so it is a bit rich, Andrew, for people like yourselves  to go casting aspersions on the good name of a decent, loyal Orangeman, doing his best, so he is, to serve his people to the very best of their gullibility.

 and what I wish them all, 


in a seasonal spirit, 



is a happy hanging-up by the neck from Westminster Bridge. Or the Forth Road Bridge. Or the one over the Lagan. As long as  we wish them anything else we will adoringly eat their shit, high days, holy days, Christmas Day.
 Party parliamentary democracy, 
the arse which never closes.

28 comments:

SG said...

What brought about the broadside against Mr Benn, Mr I (with which, incidentally, I entirely agree)? Have I missed something? What a dreadful fate it would be, to be banged up in solitary confinement with nothing but his diaries to read. How long  would it be before one searched for something to suspend oneself from the bars of the cell window with or stripped the bed in pursuit of something to slash one's wrists with? Beloved of the PBC, he almost makes the Prince of Wales look 'normal'. No - give me the sleazy irreverance of Alan Clark, despite his strange infatuation with Mrs Thatcher,  or Chris Mullen's dry wit anyday... 

Mike said...

I see the Germans are now permitting a re-release of Mein Kampf. Perhaps things are finally moving, as Mrs WoaR suggested in the earlier thread.

Benn's diaries certainly wont move a nation to war, maybe their bowels?

call me ishmael said...

I thought it was you, actually, mr sg; I thought you had, at the time of it, grudgingly admired Hilary's speech to the Filthy. One way and another, the moment passed, until, last week, I heard Tony, on the programme I mention here. I was just really catching-up, reminding ourselves that the unGodly speak in many tongues and that we should not be deceived. The chimney sweep experience is real as pain, the citizen-suspect equally real. I have read the diaries you mention and others and my stricture on the matter is unwavering. If I valued Mullins for anything it would be for his work on behalf of the Birmingham Six, not his diaries and I am afraid I share Jane Clark's opinion of her late husband, that he was a shit, though I would not be so forgiving as she, copraphilia is bad news, IMHO. as we say. Kissing it, hugging it, sleeping with it, shit is not nice, that's why we call it shit, I think. Some people in MediaMinster, I do believe, eat it, God help us all. Bad shit, I never understood that one, it's all bad, isn't it? That's why we flush down the fucking toilet as soon as we can. And flush it into the ocean, where our luxury Christmas lobsters can eat it, before we eat them. SDrrtves us right, if you ask me, for cheerily boiling them alive.

By no means would I precipitate a Christmas suicide but I did read, in, I believe. an Ian Fleming book, that one can commit suicide by pinching, hard enough, and wrenching, at one's jugular. I hope none of us ever have occasion to put this remedy to the test but just in case you are ever in the torment which you imagine, it is worth knowing of.

call me ishmael said...

Morning, mr mike, they are growing quite martial, aren't they, the Hermanns, joining-in with wars that they haven't started, publishing Adolfs remedy for the impure? To everything there is a season. Be the Japs, next, polishing-up the Samurai blade, just to give the headchoppers a taste of their own medicine. And to please Uncle Sam. Militarisation, GlobaCorps ambulance-chaser.

Mike said...

Morning Mr I: its warm Christmas Eve here right now - best wishes to you and Mrs I and all fellow travelers.

I too appreciate a craft well done - be it a sweep, cabinet maker, whatever. Last week the memsahib booked a mobile knife sharpener to do our Wusthofs for Christmas. He arrived on a motorbike, and somehow connected his sharpener wheel to his rear wheel. An hour later he had finished, and I have to say he did a marvelous job - so much so I have already nearly severed my thumb cutting watermelon for Mr Pug. He was a Pommie as well - howzat?

call me ishmael said...

I worked with knives and the big bad is allowing them to grow dull in the first place because you get used to applying just a little extra pressure, in compensation, then, when they are re-sharpened, that extra pressure creates a task discord, an imbalance and you need to re-adjust. Mind you, if you nearly sever a finger, that doesn't take too long. hard to cut yourself accidentally, with a good, sharp knife, a blunt one and you';e fucked and fingerless in New South Wales. Now, there's a book title for mr verge, fucked and fingerless in NSW. Have a happy Down Under Christmas, yourselves.

Mike said...

You are spot on with your diagnosis, re knives. Now we have found Dave (unfortunate name) the mobile knife man, I won't let my blade dull again.

call me ishmael said...

CallMeSharp, eh?

yardarm said...

I saw Benn`s speech live on the PBC 24hr thing and while noticing he missed every point going all I could really hear from his gob was " I want Corbyn`s Job.....I want Corbyn`s job ". And as you say Bennataollah Senior was not short of worldy ambition.

You told me about Robinson`s twelve hundred strong necktie collection back down the road, a fact which should alone damn him in the eyes of his electorate. Did he think one day Marty Kneecaps will imprison him in Colditz and he can lash them all together into a rope and shin down the mountain ?

As for MacMugabe the fact that he , thwarted in his ambition of becoming First Skirtsman was back down to Westminster like a rat up a drainpipe should inform his voters of where his true allegiance lies: in his gut and wallet, not to them. But it won`t.

Some reckon the arse falling out of the oil price, scuppering MacMobutu`s fantasy economy will keep him from winning another referendum. You shouldn`t throw out that Norwegian phrasebook yet, Mr Ishmael. After all, your part of the world wasn't politically part of Scotland until the late fifteenth century and if Fat Alec can play around with the nation state then so can we all.

Anonymous said...

I bought a house with a chimney and I wish I still had it. My next house will definitely have one, even if I have to clumsily insert a woodburner and flue.

The traditional sweep came, moving like a black cat but leaving no marks. He turned to me and sai "You'll want to go out and see the brush".
I replied no, it was quite alright, I completely trusted his expertise, which I did. He looked at me with stone blue pebble eyes and said:
"YOU'LL BE WANTING TO GO OUT AND SEE THE BRUSH".

I went out and duly observed the brush bobbing once, twice, three times out of the pot. I think it might be magic or religion or philosophy, but he was explicit: the chimney is not swept until the lady has seen the brush and comes back and confirms it.

Ancient fertility rite, maybe? At any rate, I was a mother within five years, so that proves it.

Mrs Raft, enjoying soggy Yorkshire and off to the Christmas market.

SG said...

I think I likened it to Goebbels' 'Total War' speech, Mr I. I suppose that is admiration of a sort...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRvafKSJ1ls

Anonymous said...

Good morning Mr Ishmael,splendid, simply splendid stuff,'to serve his people to the very best of their gullibility. Priceless.
I wish you and yours a happy Christmas and prosperous healthy New Year.
Micky

call me ishmael said...

No hurt intended, mr sg, no rebuke; lotsa people were heaping greatness on Benn, and perhaps. by the standards of his workmates, it was notable; the subject of these castigations, in any event, is generally their author.

call me ishmael said...

I can't always do it but I think it's a question of open-tuning the mind to the key of whomever it is and sometimes fretting a perfect chord. I was hearing Robinson's voice in my head and he actually said that to me, made me laugh too, mr micky. A dark truth arrived at, just by freeform imagination.
Thanks and the same to you

call me ishmael said...

It is a rite, mrs woar, they all tender an invitation to see the brush. Don't, as did I, purchase a home with sixteen chimneypotsful of grief.

Do go and see Archbishop John, in the Minster, tonight, if you can, although, having vowed not to change his underpants before the overthrow of Bob Mugabe, he might, by now, be smelling a bit unholy.

Thank you and bon voyage.

call me ishmael said...

I didn't see it, still haven't, mr yardarm, the speech, but I am sure it was as you said, how could it be other? I suppose I should, however, partly qualify what I said for Jake Mogg turns an elegant satirical phrase although to no purpose other than to delight in the sound of himself. I can think of no-one else to whom I would listen, for pleasure. And I never did see the oratory in what Billy Hague had to say, with his ubiquitous and inappropriate long ays and his dreadful uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-ing, he is a gobby, braying buffoon, and yet people paid good money to have him joke at their Masonic dos.

Ulster politics is a mystery to me, maybe mr richard could offer us a vignette, but there's a couple of things: I was there seven years ago and gangs of hard men gathered, still, on corners and in shop doorways, I saw them on the Falls and on the Shankill. They looked like they'd break your legs, soon as look at you. The hatreds are painted lavishly on the walls, for all to see and remember as they go about their business, indeed many of them are on the Belfast tourist trail, murals to the Shankill Butchers, to Prince William of Orange as well as to Celtic Football Club, the balaclaved Provos, the Armalite and to the hunger strikers, may God rest their poor, valiant souls and send a fiery pox up the arse of Gery Nonce and Marty Kneecaps. The cops are armed; the gangster-politicians, too. The multi-faith school is the exception. My own view is that it would have been cheaper, by every measure, to have resettled the Unionists in Lowland Scotland, where we came from. As it is, this sectarianism will just either erupt again in widespread violence or poison any attempred coalition administration as has happened, just now.

Robinson is vile, bent, nasty and on the make. but if I was of his tribe I would rather have him opposing Sinn Fein than have some worthy liberal, Stormont is a formalised street-fight, between crooked, grasping ruffians, Like Robinson, like Paisley, before him. If you ever take a look at its proceedings on the parliament channel you will see them conducted with the utmost gravity, people on all sides know that if they say the wrong thing, they may be killed. There is some staged abuse, of course, but in the main, everyone is walking on explosive eggshells.

Orkney would not be allowed a secession referendum, not unless it could be rigged. I am not kidding about this, the Tribesmen are all crooked, rotten to the core, the only good vote is one they can fix.

Caratacus said...

With old man Benn it was always the utter certainty with which he spoke that I found most off-putting; never a scintilla of doubt that what he was saying was anything other than the most logical and truthful standpoint. If he has bequeathed nothing else to young Hilary, it is this fascinating messianic self-certainty. All very useful when starting from a point which is indefensible, I suppose ... but it does tend to make one look like a self-satisfied knob to those of us with more than half an eye open for posturing politicians who will try to convince us that turds are honey cakes.

May your feasting at the table of plenty during our Winter Solstice be long and laden with good humour :-) I shall be raising a glass of the Macallan tonight in grateful thanks for your continued penmanship ... it really does make a difference. Thank you.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, that's well put, king caratacus, always a dodgy bastard, Benn, although broadly in sympathy with some, at least, of his views, mine were held for the common good, his for his own. If you would know his vanity just google "images, tony benn, " there is scarce a picture, in sixty years which is not posed.

Thank you for your good wishes. These days it is hard to turn around without giving offence to one sector of Grievance or another, nevertheless, and although not a believer, I wish that more would attend the celebration of the idea, at least, of self-sacrifice that others may benefit and the encouragement of even an embarrassed moment of universal friendship, of a collective, wishing and hoping together for more of the better things, fewer of the worse, and realising, if they have not yet, that the Kingdom of Heaven, however they fancy it, will not be approached via the brash sloganising of Tony, Hilary Benn or any of their co-accused. Happy Christmas, therefore, your majesty, and Yule and solstice; here , in the North, visibly the planet turns to Spring, and all will be renewed. I may have a Macallan, myself.

Anonymous said...

I reckon you deserve one, Mr Ish. Cheers,

verge.//

call me ishmael said...

Cheers, yourself, mr verge, and thank you, too.

SG said...

None inflicted Mr I! You do us all great courtesy by responding to each and everyone of our 'two-penneths'. Also you may be right about the Ulster Scot return to the Lowlands 'plan'. However, Mr Clark, whom we were discussing above, 'shit' or not, had an alternative proposal:

"The only solution is to kill 600 people in one night. Let the UN and Bill Clinton and everyone else make a scene - and it is over for 20 years."

I have a strange feeling that he may have been right in this.

Happy Christmas!




Anonymous said...

Happy Christmas Mr Ishmael, and a happy new year to you and yours. Thanks for the blog too.

Vincent

call me ishmael said...

And thanks to you, mr vbincent, for your attendance, good to see you back, the blog is not mine; as I have said, I merely bring the table for others to lay. Happy Christmas.

call me ishmael said...

There was always merit in that idea, mr sg, mr mongoose and I have discussed it over the years, why didn't the Paras and the RUC just kill all the big players, on all sides, once and for all and then threaten any upstarts with the same? It woukld have been sorted, once and for all. Paddy isn't like Ahmed, he wants to live, blow his thicj head off and his mates'll soon get the message. This is not to deny Republican nationalism its petulant urge, merely to say that thou shalt not kill in its pursuit.

ther is a Christmas card, further up the roaD, but Happy Christmas, anyway, encore.

Mike said...

Mr I: I believe there was such a plan to wipe out the IRA in a night of the long knives. There weren't that many, and all known. It was vetoed by the yanks.

call me ishmael said...

Gosh, mr mike, the power of fathead Boston's Feniansh. I suppose we should be grateful tor the Twin Towers Mystery, or they'd still be at it, the Yanks, killing us on our own streets, like they do everyone else.

Anonymous said...

A merry Christmas to you and yours, Mr I, and thank you and all, as ever, for bloggering my head free of the cognitive dissonances of our times.

All the very best for the new year.

R.T.G.

call me ishmael said...

It is indeed hard, mr rtg, to approach it, time after time, and not feel overwhelmed, futile, powerless; the worst thing, I suppose, is seeing how easily people are diverted from the crimes committed against them, by some worthless, psychopathic football manager, by tarts and nitwits dancing about or by some morons baking fucking buns, how the rich just laugh at us.
Thank you for your kind thoughts, and please accept mine, in return.

Long before the dreadful rock opera or the concept album, Mr Mike Heron wrote A Very Cellular Song, an eclectic, cascading hymn to Creation, its segments embracing jug-band, Bahamanian funerary music, East Indian incantation and Celtic mysticism, as wikipedia says, or, as I describe it, riffs, reels and ragas. As the song reaches its end it includes:

Black hair, brown hair, feather and scale
Seed and stamen and all unnamed lives that live
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Feel the energy projection of my cells
Wishes you well.

I guess that, despite all the words, that is what we are doing here.