This Be The Verse - PHILIP LARKIN
In Scotland, best part of England, some ground-breaking legislation came into force yesterday, that may limit the ability of your mam and dad to fuck you up; or, at least, beat you up. The Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Act now allows the prosecution of parents for the offence of assault if they physically punish or discipline their child. Until yesterday, parents may have been able to use the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ depending on the circumstances. That defence has now been removed. Illegal physical punishment includes hitting, smacking, spanking and slapping. Hitting the kids with weapons is not on, either. The tawse used to be a popular weapon in Scotland in the war against children, especially in schools. It consists of a strip of leather, with one end split into a number of tails. The thickness of the leather and the number of tails is variable.
*My fellow motherfuckers,
As I approach the end of my contract with GlobaCrime I have some thoughts to share with y'all.
First, I have honoured my commitment, made eight years ago, to serve the interests of rich, white folks. Not just here, at home, but everywhere. That's why they let me stand. And I am happy that no banker has gone to jail on my watch, no arms manufacturer has suffered a dime's loss, and, most important, I am proud that President Trousers and her husband, my great friend, President Spunky Bill, have, on my specific instructions, been cleared of any wrongdoing whatsoever, now or at any time in the future.
Sure, I said I'd shut-down Gitmo, but that don't matter. They only got niggers held there, and even if they's all so-called innocent we can see, today, here in Dallas, what niggers're capable of. Thassright, fightin' back. Just goes to show, best thing is to keep the critters locked-up, and no-one can accuse me of not doing my duty in that respect. Shit, motherfuckers, when I came, bringing hope to niggers everywhere, we only had but a handful of the goddam sonsafuckinbitches in jail. Now as I leave office they's in greater numbers than ever before. A nation truly divided on racial lines. I'm sure y'all agree with me that that's the kinda America we all wanna see.
Now, some folks's been askin' why I inserted myself in the Limey referendum. Well, 'slike I said, I was elected by rich folks an' that's what they told me to do. The people who run America.
When I came to Orkney I couldn't find any inch-and-a-half ovals or inch-and-a-quarter panel pins, the ironmongers and builders' merchants only had big ugly bastard nails, the sort you use for building, or crucifixion - three, four and six inches long with big flat heads. I have never had any use for such fixings and I couldn't ever knock them in, not even when I was fit and healthy, I'd rather drill a pilot hole and use a powered screwdriver to sink a big screw, no frontiersman, me; I have heaps of kindling but none of it is split with an axe, on a tree stump; the need for kindling is one of the reasons I have table- and radial arm- and chain-saws. And electricity. Have you seen the price of kindling, in Tesco, it's like a luxury, lifestyle item. I suppose, to some people, that's exactly what it is; that burny, woody kind of stuff, darling? Yes, I'll pick some up at the supermarket.
who was a raging, mummysboy narcissist, Harris flatly refuses to have a picture taken.
Every time I try to capture his likeness what emerges is a horrid digital composition of some scrawny, baleful, red-eyed monster, all fangs and halitosis. He will never smile, never sit still, always runs out of shot, under something or behind something. As well as enduring Harris's intransigent modesty, I broke my favourite digicam ages ago, a Panasonic Lumix, I had used it for years, simply and easily and I might have caught Harris with it, unawares; the replacement, a Samsung something, more costly and complicated, needs more setting-up than one of those big tripod things they used in the Westerns, to photograph the upright corpses; can't just pick it up and take a picture; automatically, no matter what I do, it re-adjusts itself to take long, cloudy exposures and everything looks like shit, processing, it says, in the five- or ten-second gap between me pressing the button and some blurred apparition emerging on the screen, which turns out to be Harris's back legs. I have followed all the instructions in the on-line manual, translated from Oriental by some half-pissed, illiterate Australian, by the looks of it and I have been a hair's breadth from putting it on the table and smashing it to pieces with a big hammer. Sometimes wanton destruction is good for one's mental hygiene; that's what I think
The ouija-pad takes great photos but I'll be fucked if I can get them from there into Blogger. Things just get more complicated, updating they call it, the NewPeople, but it's just shit. One day a few years ago I thought to myself, fuck all this writing to the newspapers - I have a mountain of Scottish, English and foreign 'papers and journals all with my rantings in them. I should think they're only a short step from the compost heap. I hope to burn every trace of myself,* just before I die; who wouldn't? My own form of raging narcissism, I suppose, none of it matters, beyond the moment. I started doing that letters to the editor correspondence because I was fed-up doing crosswords, of a morning; it's the same sort of thing, you just have to get in to the minds of the letters editors, as if he'd set a crossword, and it was good to think that Jumpin' Jack McConnell or John Cock-Waving Prescott might at least get a whiff of how reviled they were by real people, out here, on the otherside of Celebrity's lens, beyond her charmed circle.......
There is an i-app, Bloggsy, which is supposed to enable Blogger blogging from the ouija pad but I simply cannot understand a word of it. I could get someone to help me with it, some lonely, corpulent IT person, running a little business, maybe with his son, who's obviously more'n his son, he's his best friend, but they would be the sort of people who would probably ring the police if they read Call Me Ishmael. He's a fucking terrorist, this bloke, what he says, you should arrest him, officer, hanging's too good for people who think like that. I could, I suppose, set up another blog, about gardening or something, and there learn the Bloggsy ropes, take it into IslandComputersRus and say, Can you help me with this Bloggsy shit, there's not a word on this blog, yet, just some pictures of lupins, I just wanna know how to do it. But if I did that it would only confuse me further. Even so, just thinking about it, I convinced myself that I should start a blog called Orkney Islands Council Is Shit, because it is. And with a name like that it'd get a million hits - all the tourists, all the Quality of Lifers, dying to move up here, into a wee cottage, with a wee goat and a wee rusty LandRover; every time they googled Orkney Islands, to plan their new life, living the dream, my blog'd come up, Orkney Islands Council Is Shit
But I'd be in the same bind, trying to get help with it. Everbody here hates the council but many - maybe most - work for it and before I knew it I'd be getting Wickermanned.
Jobs dated the saintly Joan Baez, briefly - for younger readers who never heard of her, Ms Baez fucked Bob Dylan for a while,
but not as badly as he fucked her - until one day iJobs said to her, Babe, there's a really beautiful French dress in this little boutique, out on the coast, in Santa Methedrine, you wanna go see it?
Oh, Wow, said Joan, do you really mean it?
When they got there, Joanie tried-on the dress, gave a little twirl, maybe sang a few bars of screeching soprano and NutJobs nodded approvingly; that liddlenumber, it looks just so cool on you, you know what, Babe, you know what, you really should buy it. I think anyone who even came within a few metres of Steve Jobs hated his fucking guts, apart from the blushing newly-wed, Steven Fag and he doesn't count. Oh, and all the NewPeople.
Don't want my photos kept in the sky; it's bollocks, all that. An old biscuit tin, that'll do me. I'd be happier taking wet photos, having them developed and scanning them in, I can do that, understand how that works. I had an engineer here recently, quoting for something and he was raving about how his i-phone spoke to his i-pad, didn't seem to have made him any smarter, any more of an engineer, useless fat fuck, wouldn't trust him to change a plug. NewPeople, what are they like; I read of the CPS chief in the Gary Glitter trial, pontificating that "The bravery of the victims and other witnesses in this case cannot be understated ." She meant overstated or shouldn't be understated but never mind, she's only the head of the London CPS, probably has lightning thumbs, for texting and twittering, retrieving shit from the Cloud, fucking imbecile. If senior lawyers and politicians fail to understand the comparators, similes and metaphors which they deploy, if they know not adjective from adverb, noun from verb, singular from plural, then they have nothing to say to someone like me - one whose education was incomplete - who does.
Anyway, they co-operated, today, Harris and the camera and I have some shots which approximate his appearance.
He has settled-in really well and been with us now for over a year. Real men'd say that dogblokes shouldn't sit on the furniture, much less sleep at the bottom of the bed, shouldn't eat salad sandwiches and raspberries, shouldn't have clothes to wear, should just be treated like fucking dogs and there is something in that, although I swear that some men only have dogs so's they can grab their shotguns and kill them when they get the 'flu or a limp; kindest thing, put him out of his misery, sweedart; no, I don't mind doing it; I'll shoot him twice, three times, better safe than sorry; yeah, in the head, more merciful that way; maybe I'll just blast away at him, until he's just shreds, and then hose him into the lawn, get some use from him, like compost, he wooda wanted that. These men, they're like the psychobully piano tuners, everybody's met one.
I never made it, though, to real manhood and I never had a dog so's I could master him, we have had all our dogblokes so's we could care for them and, through them, ourselves, and maybe others. I know, it sounds pompous and self-serving but it is true, a coincidence of wants, dogbloke wanting to be loved and us wanting to love a dogbloke. All five of ours were in need of care, in need of homes and people, none of them were commissioned, bred, to meet a specific consumer need, not by us, anyway.
Not being that real man, however, a man who insists that dog knows his place, resisting the idea of owning another creature, this is not without cost.
For a year or more, he has been travelling on my lap, mrs ishmael mostly doing the driving. It's OK if he squeezes himself between me and the door and goes to sleep but most of the time he sits, four paws on my lap, with the front paws, hard and sharp, digging into my thighs; often he's wet, from a walk, which means I am, too. Yesterday mrs ishmael bought him a travelling crate, a lightweight thing, which he demolished in thirty seconds, gleefully bounding over the centre console, on to my lap, happy as a pig in shit.
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Novemberby Thomas Hood No sun--no moon! |
21 comments:
Well, it looks like they have finally struck down The Donald - like King Kong in the old black and white movie. I'm no Trump fan, but this election stinks to high heaven. Its the old cliche - be careful what you wish for - because if the (self-proclaimed) best democracy on the planet is reduced to this, then the US is finished - it is anyway, but this just brings the end point forward.
The pictures of Harris are very cute (is Harris a male or female? Buster definitely looks male). My Mr Pug is an alpha-male happy to take on big dogs, particularly dogs with pointy faces, and joggers and cyclists. He puts the fear of God into delivery men approaching the front door with his bark - they think its a massive rottweiler on the other side of the door.
He's not going quietly, though, mr mike. It's all a bit of a shame - America has reverted to its status quo ante, and no doubt the rift in history caused by the Donald will quickly heal over as though he'd never happened.
Harris is a boy - keen on defending his territory like your mr Pug, but not so feisty out and about, and he's never bitten a person or another dog - unlike little Buster, who was a holy terror with a cunning way of nipping around the back of people and biting them in the ankle.
I think that that is the worry, mrs i. the government has weathered the storm and is back in charge. It was a four year long election nullification followed by a coup d'etat based on cheating and lying. You don't have to have any love for the Orange Himself to know that something wicked just happened in plain sight.
Now it's back to showbusiness. Who would like to bet on the date of the first GI fatality in a foreign theatre?
Too big, too wealthy, too much to lose, too much inertia ever to turn it around - I suppose it is rather wonderful that Trump was ever elected in the first place and allowed to serve his term.
Never mind a bit of a worry, mr mongoose my dear - it's bloody scary.
Its in the balance at the moment, Mrs I. In the West people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their Govts, big tech, big pharma etc. Brexit, "populism" in Europe and the "deplorables" in the US. In France, for example, Lady Macron (a Rothschild banker) appeared from nowhere with 24% of the vote and was anointed president. My friend in France who is quite conservative is spitting blood. The whole Eu is a shambles right now. The UK is a shambles. I can't see the Yanks meekly accepting this coup, when over 70 million voted for Trump. The US courts have to tread a very fine line now between partisanship and the actual rule of law, or the whole thing will erupt. I don't even discount a war to distract attention, which would literally be the end for the UK, Europe and the US.
Hope you're wrong, fear you're right - there's a horrible plausibility about your scenario, mr mike.
There is an old thought that everything is bright and wonderful the day you hang the despots, and from that day onwards it all turns to rat-shit until you hang them again. Alas, the second time, the hangees are your offspring or theirs or their children's. The French Revolution managed to horseshoe that all into a long weekend but most of the rest of us take lifetimes. The UK seems to manage it about every two hundred years - and we are due.
The US is a map of straight lines. So that entire nation is still a victory carve-up. Not a word or a shred of honour can be found on the map of the USA. And so therefore it must fall again. Just look at any of the red/blue county maps. The WASPs in the NE and the Techies in the far W hold the rest of the country by the throat only because the West bit is the social media ammo that shores up the fading MSM of the East.
The only hope they have is that The dreadful Trump has cemented their constitution - actually a noble and decent document - against the lunacy of the age. If Georgia does the old two-step witht he senate re-runs, all bets are off.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Los Angeles-based Michael McCaffrey says:
"Angelinos will still have to step over hordes of homeless people and used needles and human excrement as they navigate this sick, venal, miserable third world shithole trying, and usually failing, to scratch out a living and to make ends meet. Biden’s rapturously received electoral victory is a vacant win for nothing but a stylistic change.... Biden is, like the Orange Man liberals love to loathe, a shameless corporatist who will bend over backwards to fill the coffers of the fat cats in board rooms and on Wall Street, all while screwing over poor, working and middle-class people."
Sleepy Joe is one foot in his hell-lit grave. He has been a parasite all his sorry life. That he suffered family loss, and seemingly behaved honourably, is to his credit but it is no more than I hope any of we here would do, might have done even, but we would have not said a word about it. The more I see and hear the more I just hate the fucking lot of them.
The important thing is to use our experience. Our generation and the one or two before have been preised away from the priestly teat of afterlife hope. We must now prise our children away from their electronic teats. The likes and the smileys, the acceptance. The opposite being the electronic gulag, the cancellation. Think for yourselves you buggers! Quickly FFS.
That sparked a connection for me, mr mongoose, my dear - the political class are the new priestly class. Equally parasitical on the vast majority of the people who do things, make things, think things, teach things, write things, design things, even do play-acting, this new priesthood that creates nothing but chaos, legislation and war, does not offer a decent life after death, cos we can't believe that crap anyore. Instead, it offers jam tomorrow as long as we do as we are told. Of course, as Lewis Carroll's White Queen told Alice: 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.'
And because we are never in tomorrow, there's no jam.
Scary stuff that those that supported Trump are now “listed”.
What if you supported him but didn’t agree with some policies? Or did not support him but agreed with some policies?
There seems to be no middle ground anymore.
“If you ain’t with us you’re agin us” I believe the great GW Bush declared.
Don't forget the MSM being parasitical on all and sundry.
Seems nothing has changed much since Lewis Carroll's day.
Very pleasing assemblage this, Mrs I, thanks. We must retreat into our modest locales if we are to survive as proper humans. Do the smaller things well and preserve our loathings cannily. Arts and crafts and Mr Mongoose's science, to be set against the One World Barbarians.
Let's make ourselves hard to track.
Good Heavens, mr doug shoulders - I hadn't picked up on that, so I googled it and, like, wow, as the new people would say. The "Trump Accountability Project" lists enemies in many categories - including judges and donors. Apparently, the list of administration officials alone contains 1202 people. One shudders for America - it was always the case, though, that History is written by the victors. Best not to be on the losing side. Either maintain a low profile in a type of William Morris utopia, as mr bb exhorts, or be prepared to switch sides like Henry IV of France, who initially kept to his Protestant faith and therefore had to fight against the Catholic League, which refused his legitimacy as monarch bec ause he was a Protestant. After four years of stalemate, Henry IV converted to Catholicism, famously saying "Paris is well worth a mass." Suppose it depends on your taste. Bloody dreadful place.
D'you suppose Tony Blair converted in order to obtain absolution for his war crimes?
And now we have a coronavirus vaccine apparently "90% effective". Hmmm. Well. I'll not be taking it. And I bet the fucker come with an electronic track-and-bullshit app. You see if it doesn't.
Quite right, mr bb. And the waterwheel generator project is revived too if we really are going to go silly buggers about gas and power.
Mr mongoose: you will suddenly find you can't renew your passport, or driving licence, or whatever, if your name isn't on the vaccine computer list. Its already been mooted down here. The problem is that the western vaccines work by modifying your cells - essentially you become GMO'd, unlike the Russian and Chinese vaccines which are more traditional (Russia developed the successful Ebola vaccine, and their Covid vaccine is a derivative of that). For obvious reasons, you will not be offered that choice. I'm old enough to remember queuing up for a polio vaccine as a kid; only years later I was able to spell thalidomide.
We are told that it has been widely tested. What they have been unable to do, of course, is test it longitudinally. You can imagine a John Wyndham scenario in which 90% of the population are injected with a vaccine that is 90% effective and then five years down the road, 100% of those who received the vaccine go blind, or develop cognitive difficulties, or their children are born limbless, whilst of the 10% refuseniks, those who survived their encounter with Covid are wholly occupied in caring for the stricken majority of the population. Or the triffids/Midwich Cuckoos/slugs from Mars move in to take over this green and juicy planet. I know, I know, too much science fiction at an impressionable age.
It's already here mr Mike. Ticketmaster, the online booking folks for gig tickets, are telling the new people that they must have proof of vaccination if they want access to any future 'performances' by the likes of Stormzy, that well known poet, lyricist and race-baiter.FFS, the new people are the least likely to suffer or indeed contract the 'rona. Is there no end to this fucking madness?
Be careful mr mongoose, generating your own power? You'll be growin your own food an wantin a gun next. You'll be on ze list havin such thoughts.
While it was still legal to leave the house, mr mike, I took mrs m out to our local frog eatery. (The silver thingy! Who would have guessed it?) Anyway, the madamoiselle at the door smiled and pointed at the QR code for the gov's track-and-trace. I raised my phone, swiped through to the barcode reader and snapped it. The young lady said something unintelligible in French but it was inquisitive and had "tout" in it. I smiled manically behind my mask so that some of it spread above the nose line and off we trotted. The kid knew. As it seems we have to, we played the charade. Two hours later, as fat as ticks, we emerged. The gov was none the wiser. The kids are all doing the same at their various places of youthful wickedness.
Although it is interesting, this new mechanism of protection is a tad on the innovative side to be releasing into the wild so thoroughly and so untested - as mrs i says - at length. I have thus far managed to stay away from doctor bastards apart from mechanical mishaps of the bllod-stained vriety. I shall be staying away a while longer. I shall though re-read my Wyndhams, mrs i, to be prepared for the End Times.
Donald is not going quietly. We should see some sport early next week.
Mr mongoose: earlier this week I ventured out for a haircut after several months, as my hippie days are behind me. I must say I was a little bervous after all the attempts to frighten us. No masks in sight. I had my usual short-back-n-side (number 2) and all
s well with the world. We have been a few days now with no new cases in Australia, no deaths for a while, and only 81 recovering cases. But as I say the nervousness in me was palpable - shows the power of propaganda.
The terrible human truth, mr mike, is that ten thousand people die every week in the UK. In the winter it is 11k or sometimes 12 and in the summer it is 8 or 9. In this last Spring, we lost an extra 50,000 people above the normal annual curve - and over about ten weeks. 5,000 extra per week on average (it looked Normal-ish to me, a bit skewed); a 50% increase. 50% is horrible. 100% of your old mum is more horrible. But it isn't the Black Death. It isn't worth the tyranny and the destruction of livelihoods - possibly soon to include my own, at which I am throwing my savings (such as they are).
That said, exponentials are scary bastards. it will though never be possible to prove that what was said to be encessary was in fact unnecessary. Rule Number 1: the next time somebody says "Build back better", punch them in the gob.
I have had two haircuts this year. My head now looks like an elderly badger's backside.
“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
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