The Sunday Ishmael 20/12/2020

 

Since Boris has cancelled Christmas, (thank God, fasting, for a decisive leader) here's a  particularly Chrismassy and Ishmaelian Sunday Ishmael. But first let me share an Orcadian recipe with you - considering the high sugar content of this delicacy, it is amazing that Orkney's life expectancy is the longest in Scotland - on 2017 figures, an Orcadian baby boy could expect to live until he was 80.3 years old, whereas a Glasgow City baby boy could only hope to reach 73.4 years, and that's if he's able to keep away from the substances that stimulate, sooth and delight. On Tuesday, the National Records of Scotland revealed there had been 1,264 drug-related deaths registered in Scotland in 2019, an increase of 6% from 1,187 in 2018 - death rate more than 3.5 times that of the UK as a whole. Every 7 hours a Scot dies of illegal drug use, which fact made Nicola so cross that she had discussions on Friday with Drug Minister Joe FitzPatrick, because, natch, it was all his fault, in consequence of which he agreed to quit. 

Nicola graciously said that no-one should doubt Joe's hard work, dedication and sincerity, but it was simply not good enough and it is now former equalities secretary, 

Angela Constance's turn to be Drug Minister and fall flat on her face in consequence of her entire inability to do anything about the Weegie and Dundonian fondness for getting aff their heeds.

Dundonian sentence: 'Watna but pink lint on yir peess?'

English translation: 'Do you want a piece of cold meat on your sandwich?'

(This famous Dundee phrase is heard when the adult female asks the adult male about his lunch requirements. The lunch is usually prepared in the home and taken to the male's place of work by means of a 'Peess Poke'. When he has a place of work.)

But I digress.The following recipe might well meet the requirements of a Weegie stricken by the munchies, but it is Orcadian in origin and has nothing to do with drugs, despite the misleading name:

TABLET TIFFIN 

No, wrong tablet

Christmas is never complete without a sweet treat. Traybakes just fill the gap between Christmas Dinner and Christmas Tea. Here's an iconic essential, easy to make with delicious results.

Ingredients:

• 100g of crushed Orkney shortbread
  
• 300g good quality dark chocolate
• 125g Orkney Butter
• 3 tablespoons of golden syrup*(boiled up sugar with water)
• 70g chopped Orkney Tablet* (boiled up sugar)
• 70g chopped Orkney Fudge* (boiled up sugar and evaporated milk)
• Handful of marshmallows* (boiled up sugar with gelatine)

Method:

1. Line a 20cm x 20cm baking tin with cling film
2. Melt the chocolate, Orkney Butter and golden syrup in a pan. While ingredients are melting, put the Orkney Shortbread Fingers into a zip seal freezer bag and bash with a rolling pin.
3. Once the mixture in the pan has melted, transfer 125g to a bowl and set aside. Add the shortbread fingers, Orkney Fudge, Orkney Tablet and marshmallows to the mixture.
4. Transfer the mixture to the baking tin and spread evenly. Transfer the remaining 125g of chocolate mix to the tin and spread evenly over the top.
5. Transfer the mixture to the fridge and allow 2 hours to set.
6. Once set, carefully remove the tiffin from the tin and cut into squares.

Editor's note - probably best at this point  to throw it in the bin. Safer that way.

 

CHURCH NEWS - Ishmael Smith 11/4/2013

THERE ARE MANY HARD COCKS AHEAD, I MEAN CHOICES.

 His unholiness, Archbishop JR, oilman and cleric,

 now Archbishop of Canterbury.

Founded for no other spiritual reason than to facilitate the lust of syphilitic monster, Henry the Eighth, the C of E, in its dying days, now - aptly -  represents frocked, unbridled licentiousness, militant, impertinent Sapphism  and doesn't even try to do God, just buggery and whatever is its Sapphic equivalent. Don't tell me, I don't want to know.

 I have personal reasons for asserting - insisting - that all clergypersons are  beasts, unrecognised nonces, either by deed or by omission, by collusion, denial and obfuscation.  If you think about it even for a minute or two - the costumes, the ritual, the incense, the falsetto chanting, the pseudo-solemnity, the intrusive power over the vulnerable - Vicaring, like showbusiness proper,  is just the sort of gig sought by the flashy, showy predator;  rubber-stamping for God the souls of the young, the bereaved, the hospital patient, the homeless and the hungry. Zoning-in, like a heat-seeking missile on Grief's inevitability, your whoreson vicar/chaplain/priest/padre can sniff out your sorrow and stick his cock in it. Pack up your sorrows, he'll simper, and give them all to me. But he'll minister, especially,  bless, to  the young.  Suffer the little children to come unto me. 

 Choirmasters and vicars, how many thousands of the fuckers were exposed by the old News of the World,  week after week, year after year?  And yet still, as though we were mediaeval serfs, bishop-nonces and archbishop-nonces hiss and glide and simper among us, sitting even in our legislature, the cheeky cunts, presiding benignly over centuries of oppression, of blessing the beast. Fuck 'em, up against the wall with them.  Take our  money and property back from them, give it to the poor. We should hang up Justin by his nuts, just for his cheek.

Pope Nazi's  - as was - rancid brethren are, of course, way out ahead in wickedly  cynical, institutionalised  noncing bestiality  and whilst I do not believe  that homosexuality and noncing are the same thing, I do feel that the Anglican church's loving embrace of all things evolutionarily and scripturally aberrant must make it a hotbed of unnatural carnality, the sort of environment which sees paedophilia as part of God's rich tapestry, for Him to chastise or forgive and for the rest of us to meekly accept.

This new gabshite, the old Etonian evangelical,

Swing swing together,

With your bodies between your knees. 

JR and his  first lady sing the Eton rowing song for the meeja.

We are all in this together.        

will be entertaining but his - or anyone's - capacity to reconcile the louche, sybaritic,  amoral, white, western Anglicanism with the diehard, punitive, reactionary, black  African  Church of England/Christ the Cannibal is so limited as to be irrelevant. It will matter fuck all to Justin, of course; he will have reached the second-highest position in the God-serving career ladder - woe unto ye, who see contradiction in such Godless, hierarchical horseshit - and that, for a gobby alpha male, is the main thing,  the poor ye have with ye always, innit.

Perhaps we will now  see the full fruits of Etonian expertise,  the unelected prime minister presiding over the break-up of the United Kingdom, for his own electoral advantage and Archbishop JR presiding over the long overdue break-up of this worldwide Godless heathenbastard child-molesting homosexual freakshow. The mess is over, go in peace.

............................................................

Some seven years into the continuing mess, the
Learning Lessons Review, commissioned by the Church of England and commencing in October 2019 into its handling of the allegations of abuse committed by the late John Smyth Q.C., chum of Archbishop Welby, is continuing, but completion is now expected sometime in 2021. The Church explains this massive overrun of its anticipated nine months'  timescale in terms of the huge amount of evidence it has taken and the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions on the review’s day to day workings.

Led by Keith Makin, the review has focussed on: "victims and survivors who have bravely provided invaluable and full accounts of the abuse. In addition, the reviewers have continued to receive contact from individuals and organisations wishing to submit accounts and written materials of vital interest. This has been wider than could have been anticipated when the review began."

Then there's Rev Jonathan Fletcher, 77, who was already banned from preaching at his church in Wimbledon, south west London, following a string of allegations he 'spiritually abused' vulnerable adults. Subsequently, further details emerged of the disgraced former vicar's alleged behaviours, which included bullying, intimidation, sexually inappropriate comments, questions about masturbation, naked saunas and nude oily massages. One chap said he was beaten with  'six of the best with a gym shoe on a bare backside'.

Mr Fletcher denied he humiliated people or made derogatory comments about their appearance, and said he never gave ice baths, but 'very rarely' gave a 'cold bath'.

He said 'anything that happened was totally consensual and non-sexual' and 'the punishments were a) consensual, and b) mutual'.

He said he was 'deeply, deeply sorry for anybody that I have hurt or harmed in any way', adding: 'If I knew the individuals that I had harmed I would seek their forgiveness and ask to apologise.'

 Speaking on the Andrew  Marr show today, the Good Archbishop advised elderly people not to go to Church this Christmas. Too right, Justin. It's a dangerous place.

And in our round-up of Church news in 2020, let's not forget  the extraordinary career of Canon Andrew White, one of those interferering meddlers in the Middle East, who has fallen foul of the Charity Commissioners. In October it was revealed that in July Canon Andrew White was banned from being involved in the senior management of any UK charity. His nick-name, like something from Pure Hell at St Trinian's , 

 is the Vicar of Baghdad following his time serving in Iraq.  He has been prevented by the Charity Commission from working as a trustee or any senior role for a period of twelve years. We are indebted for this information to  the release of the findings of an inquiry looking into mismanagement at his current charity Jerusalem Merit, which provides poverty relief across the Middle East.He was previously criticised by the Charity Commission over wrongdoing at his former organisation the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (FRRME).The Commission says the ban relates to that previous investigation.

The most recent inquiry into Jerusalem Merit has highlighted a conflict of interest and financial concerns at the charity. The conflict of interest relates to a payment made to an organisation called Ace White Gold Ltd, which is owned by Andrew White, for what the Commission described as PAYE services.

In regards to financial concerns, the Commission says that it has seen no evidence that funds raised for the charity by Andrew White through his own book sales have been given to the charity. It also highlights the movement of money overseas, payments to serving trustees and charity money being kept in personal bank accounts. He says that through his work he has become unaccustomed to a normal civilian life, and has said that he would find life in London 'boring'.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, will take a three-month sabbatical next year for “reflection, prayer, and spiritual renewal”, Lambeth Palace has said.

 COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON 

TUESDAY, 24 DECEMBER 2013

It is the very Devil, Christmas, all the hypocrisies rolled into one, the rich man in his castle, the poor man sleeping on the street; the mistreated, mateless mother, her soul trashed by her kids’ consumerist expectations; the poor, the sick, the lonely, those estranged by familial strife, the bereaved, all mercilessly dragooned into believing that the footfall in the shopping malls, the scorching cyber avenues and the simpering, noncing monsignors are actually something to do with them, something, for fuck’s sake, to celebrate. For many it will be a misery and for even more it will a disappointing delusion.

I saw a woman on the box, yesterday - I nearly said the News, silly me. Some Godless, heathenbastard moron, gobbing away at her self-scripted nonsense about how not getting home by rail was not an option, as though her life, and its momentary intersection with mine, was a Bruce Willis film, in which she would star for me, triumphantly; her arrival at her family’s MincePie House was not subject to things like the weather, or to what we call Acts of God, fuck me, no; silly cunt. Just another one of those conceited Ruinettes, her brain turned to mush by Infotainment Inc; God knows, they’re everywhere, dribbling platitudes which they can hardly pronounce. Dunno why she irritated me so much, maybe because, in the same bulletin, two people had been washed away to their Merry Christmas deaths by angry, swollen rivers; maybe because as I write this I’m looking at the sky again, at the sea boiling and frothing over a road it has just washed away. I’d love to grab that stupid bitch by the throat and say, There y’are, go and walk through that lot and tell me that Failure’s not an option. It’s ninety miles an hour forecast here but that can mean gusts of a hundred and thirty, blew me over, yesterday, flat on my arse, Harris barking his head off, tangling his lead in my fallen legs.

And that, of course, the mighty weather, is what it has always been about, the mid-winter feasting and firing and fucking. It really tells, up here in the North; from now on the days will get longer, perceptibly, there’ll be gales and storms and hightides but there’ll be light, in which to cope with them. After a decade or so here at the End of the World that is what we and I guess all our neighbours, all the islanders, are actually celebrating, the triumph over, the survival of Darkness. Down South, even a Godless heathenbastard such as I would find church or cathedral at midnight and sing lustily with good courage. The Christians, of course, would humour me and say That, Ishmael, Hallelujah, is what the Christ child’s message is, the triumph of Light over Darkness. That and Religions Incorporated.

 Went to a Christmas concert, up here, in the Presbyterian Badlands and Jesus, it was fucking awful;  two parts of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, flanking his Concerto for two violins. Sitting, freezing, cramped in our arsebone-mashing ten-pound seats, Mrs Ishmael and I felt like strangers in a strange land, none of the other hundreds of concertgoers could, apparently, distinguish between sharp and flat, had ever before heard music played in unison,  in time or in harmony and could relish only this type of dismal discord, a proper concert, one imagined, would have sent them screaming from the event, their ears bleeding, howling for their Lord to smite the tuneful unGodly.

There were three trumpets in the chamber orchestra and each was playing a quarter tone sharp or flat of the other two and a half a note behind or ahead of the other two and every time the trumpets came in mrs and I would glance at each other with a look bespeaking sharpened bamboo stakes being jammed up our rectums,  the rest of the audience, however, gazed Heavenwards, rocking gently, beatifically,  as though hearing the first dawn chorus in the Garden of Eden. Had there been a proper musician in the orchestra  or the choir he would have equipped himself with a  silenced pistol and without fuss shot the trumpeters dead. Triple trumpetercide, however, alone,  would not have healed this dreadful,  sonic wound;  the strings staggered about like seasick drunks aboard the MV Doom in a Force ten gale, sliding first one way and then another, staggering together for a note or two and then lurching off on their separate, heaving  ways.  The conductress waved madly  with her baton, oblivious to the miscarriage  she was orchestrating, she was, after all, doing this for some charity in Malawi, or Botswana, where, however grim their existence, the recipients wouldn't ever have to listen  to this shit.

I had seen the same outfit do the Messiah and Carmina Burana and some modern, John Rutter uberwork and they were fine but  either they insufficiently rehearsed the Bach or they had recruited some spectacularly incompetent people to their ranks.  I always think that Amateur Dramatics is just a very public form of wifeswapping, randy old biddies and ageing nonces, made-up and play-acting;  that playactors are pathetic and revolting exhibitionists is well known  to anyone who has ever spent time with Ac-tors,  they really do say Darling, you were wonderful,  they really do think that they go to very dangerous places, right out there.  No wonder that the Lord Chamberlain used to keep such a close eye on their licentiousness and depravity, Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, being the soundest advice that Noel Coward ever languidly declaimed.  Thanks to my recent concert experience I must now look askance at amateur musicians, too. Whatever they are there for - on that showing, at least, it is fuck all to do with music.

I raised this experience with the guy in the music shop.  You're dead right, Ishmael, sometimes I go to these things, you know, bands, folk, jazz, blues or classical and when I read the review in the fucking 'paper I think Was this cunt at the same gig as me?

There is, here,  in the Wilderness,  a suspension of critical analysis which was probably understandable in the nineteenth century when almost any assemblage of songsters and fiddlers provided an Event, at least, at which people could wear a clean collar and travel by horse and cart from their windswept and desolate  farms into  a world of candlelight and temporary make believe, a world wherein people without reproduced music and moving pictures might be transported to the glittering capitals of Europe, but which, in the Age of YouTube, is unforgiveable. You can watch Rostropovitch playing Bach's Cello concerto, von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic or Bob Dylan at the Newport Festival;  you can watch Ali Farka Touree in Mali, Ukelele Jake in Central Park, Jacqueline du Pre at the Festival Hall,  the Beatles on the roof in Saville Row, Pink Floyd at Pompei and the Grateful Dead all over the shop;  you could start watching good stuff on YouTube tonight and  die before you exhausted its  treasures; the amateur performance, needs, therefore, to at least meet some basic requirements. Doesn't need to be virtuoso, but it needs to be in tune and largely in time, especially for the charity bandits' tenner a head.
 

We quit the concert in the interval, muttering to ourselves, Fuck this shit, sat in the car for a few minutes and found, watching the doors delightedly, that a few more people had  endured enough pain for one night and were legging it.

It's the Quality of Life Zombies, responsible for all this rubbish. Mr jgm2 will know of them,  the Anglos who have moved North, and, since they have chosen to do this then everything here must be of Outstanding Quality. Even if it's shit, as much of it is,  SmirkingWeeFiona teenagers assaulting perfectly good violins and producing noises normally heard only by sadistic sex murderers as their victims shriek for mercy or death, while fifty-something Gillians and Dianas and Roberts applaud them furiously. Quality of Life Zombies,  they are the truly accursed of the North;  they will have made up most of the choir, most of the orchestra and most of the audience from whom collectively, we fled, the other night. It is a colonisation of sorts,  these QOL Zombies, many of them strident, senior-ish public sector yahoos, occupying, en masse,  the public performance space with talents so niggardly, so inconsequential,  as to,  in the South, see them catcalled and pelted with fruit; it is a maladroit imperialism, theirs.

Fuck 'em, anyway, on the heels of that travesty we are off, in a few hours, to Birmingham's shiny Symphony Hall and the CBSO's New Year Concert, reminding ourselves that it can't be this way everywhere.

December 2011

GOD GAVE ROCK'N'ROLL TO YOU. HANDEL: MESSIAH - Last two choruses -  Worthy is the Lamb & Amen.
 

ONCE UPON A TIME IN DUBLIN. 21/12/2014

 

Filmed in Dublin, this is Harry Christophers and his early music gang, loosely known as The Sixteen, the scene of the first performance of Messiah in 1742.

Blessing and honour, glory and power be unto Him.

The entire perfomance, near perfect, in my opinion, is on the cyber ouija-board and - if you like this sort of thing- a rewarding use of a couple of Christmas hours.

Even though the daffodils are long risen and the gladioli come again, out of turn, it is still winter. It has been dark here and Christmas, impudently colonising ancient mid-winter rejoicing, is nevertheless welcome, as is, no matter how often I hear it, Handel's joyous Messiah. Once upon a time at the Albert Hall I stood in a huge choir and mumbled my way through the Messiah; it was a proper orchestra and soloists but the choir - hundreds and hundreds and hundreds - had been assembled from NHS staff groups, and friends, who had been rehearsed all over the country, week after week, by amateur choirmasters. I had only previously known Hallelujah and Redeemer but after that performance I came to know it all very well indeed. My favourite version used to be by Neville Marriner and the choir of St Martin in the Fields but youtube led me to this one, which seems just a bit superior in every respect - interpretation, technique, artistry and especially in the recording; also, of course, you can watch it.

I have no authority in these matters but I guess that Christophers' baroque ubiquity and his looks my irritate purists but he has yet to disappoint my prosaic expectation.

 
Herewith wishing us all a good health, such love as we may find and such peace as we are permitted.

I don’t begrudge them their services and I love their carols and to anyone here who is a believer I wish you a happy and a holy time, in Heaven the bells are ringing. For the rest, as mrs narcolept says, wherever you are I hope you withstand the weather, each other, the crassness of it all, and emerge safely on the other side.

Be glad, for the song has no ending.

 

 

mr ishmael's essays today are:

CHURCH NEWS - Ishmael Smith                  11/4/2013 

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON            TUESDAY, 24 DECEMBER 2013

Went to a Christmas concert                            December 2011

ONCE UPON A TIME IN DUBLIN.                21/12/2014

If you would like to read more from stanislav and mr ishmael, the anthology of their essays is available from lulu.com.   and it is now listed by both Blackwells and the Book Depository. 

 

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please register an account with Lulu first.  This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the links provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer.  Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  If you follow a link, a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed.  If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box (found at the bottom left by scrolling down) has been checked.  You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.

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There's a 15% discount for a couple of days: with the voucher code = TREAT15 in the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up. 

 

cotillons