I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH FAME, I MEAN DEATH.

 DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI
trans:
LET ME......ENTERTAIN YOU.

 It's a bit like Live Aid, all this, don't you think,  
only with uniforms? The rich putting on a show for the poor.  To show how much they care.

What, no uniforms, even as Mr President  they don't give you a wardrobe full of uniforms?
Well, I can get my people to run you up a few, if you like. 
No, fuck no, one doesn't have to have served or anything, Colonel in Chief, Admiral of the Fleet, whatever you like,  medals, too; ribbons, sashes; jolly good, stand at ease, Sambo.

No use coming the old soldier with me, 
I'm your next King, you know.
No, Mater gave me my medals, no blood and shit for me.
I'm your next King, you know.

Still, all comrades together, eh, all die for each other, only not me, because I'm your next King. You know, King and Country, what you're happy to die for?

Pushing it a bit, isn't it, the idea that anyone in their right mind'd die for this worthless, idle, pampered  piece of shit?

Royalism aside, though, it seems that every  telly historian who can mix and mangle a metaphor has had a gig this year. 
 All it needs is for Sir Tony Robinson and the TimeTeam GraveRobbers to take a JCB to the Menin Gate and the nation will be gorged, replete with ersatz martial  history. 

We have had our eyes opened-up  to every conceivable point of view regarding WW1; celebrity professor, Neil Ferguson, 

has said that it was grade one arseholery, short-sightedness and stupidity  on the part of European statespersons, especially the beardy, inbred  Ruritanians, ancestors of Good Queen Brenda the Immortal;  Field Marshal Professor Sir Max Hitler Hastings, VC, liberator of the Falklands 

 has avowed, contrarily, that his great somebody-or-other died  on the Western Front and so it was all a jolly good show, spiffing, we'd all a been jolly well fucked without it; Radio Four has had its share, professors Maggie McMillan and Christopher Clark and the insufferable Peter Hennessy  


have delivered media-professorial insights into, well, into whatever arcane, especial aspect of WW1 they and their agents have colonised;  even Housewives' Choice hunk, Jeremy Vine,


God, I'm so moved I could eat my own shit.

 has mixed-in a bit of, you know,  warhistory, 'swotitsallabout this year, 'swot all the top jocks're playing, along with the hits of yesteryear and of course the traffic news, where you are,   but only little bite-sized bits  of  warstuff, because Radio Two listeners have a short attention span, being so old, yet so young at heart, so wise, yet so fucking stupid,  their dotage fuelled by dreams of playlists goneby.   Bit of Ypres, bit of the Carpenters,  even Status Quo;  that's the stuff to  give the troops.

There was even some snooty old trollop at the Chelsea Flower Show, angling for business, hungry for recognition,  enunciating to Mad Monty Don all the ways in which her Chelsea Garden, her tarted-up bits of grass and flowers movingly evoked the spirit of her great, great something or other who fell at the Somme; you'd think she spent her every weekend volunteering to maintain the Commonwealth  war cemetries of the Western Front.

 If I'd been there I'da  run a hedge-trimmer down her face.  I don't know, maybe - probably -  I have some distant connection to a  white stone cross atop a bag of bones  in Flanders but even if I don't,  we have mrs ishmael's grandfather's death medal hanging behind glass in the hall with later medals awarded to her father, for hosing-down and mucking-out Auschwitz. Most people are connected, quietly, one way or another to Slaughter, although few are lavishly paid for rehearsing their own distant genealogy, building a memorial garden for the Chelsea flower Show, make you puke, really, the New Britons. Anything for a few quid, sell anything, steal anything;  Larceny in  Virtue's  clothes; Thatcher's legacy. And Blair's. And Brown's. And that other prick.  The bloke in the underpants.

With Monty, though, he's pure, unadulterated showbusiness; be it gardens about  poverty, disability, heroin addiction or, as now, the annihilation of a generation, Monty has an earnest  horticultural apercu with which to lighten our collective, human load - At the end of the day, viewers, for me, it's what gardening's all about and what better way to commemorate all those dead blokes than for you all to buy my books and watch my shows, whether you're a pacifist - as I obviously am, look, I even have a dog - or whether you're another sort of person - and that really is a matter of personal choice- gardening, through feast or famine, high or low, war and peace, is what it's really all about. Everyman, down his garden with his dog, a camera crew, a producer, a scriptwrier, a make-up girl, a director and a team of sturdy workers to do the actual digging, y'know, the gardening part, rather than, though I say it myself, doing the most important part, the presenting; well, what could be more diligent and painstaking and honest and virtuous and quintessentially British than that?


Join me next time  on Gardeners World for some more well-rehearsed, spontaneous, specious and insincere homilies and you, too, could live a life like Monty -  humble, sincere, worthy, essentially carbon-neutral, compostible and completely cuntish.

Jeremy Paxman, 
 
Jerry being sombre at a war memorial, take 3.
That's lovely, darling, but let's do it one more time.

a distinguished member  of the Queen's Own Ringo Starr Regiment of Luckiest Men Alive, has brought his leaden, million-pounds-a-year sneer to the proceedings. 

Good for fuck allness personified, Paxman, can't even anchor the tamest, blandest news show in the world.  I watched that mythologised interview with Michael Howard and my dog, Harris, would've wrung a better answer from the worthless, rotten, oily bastard; 

Two Oxbridge Tory bullies putting on a bit of a show.
BAFTAs all 'round.

 Twelve times Paxman asked Howard, the PrisonWorks man,   if he'd done such and such to his underling, prisons' commandant, Derek Lewis, and twelve times he wriggled away, smirking;  Paxman's Cambridge education, you see, and a lifetime poncing at the PBC,  that's what makes him the nation's premier, forensic interlocutor. He has obviously spent his life  sucking on the collective BBC knob, for his skills, his personality are non-existent;   Robin Day would've nailed Howard, Ludovic Kennedy, even the repulsive David Frost would have obtained an answer;  Paxman, instead, is celebrated, weirdly, for his failure, as though he and not Howard was the victor,  the BBC claims that Paxman's interview - and not Howard's own oleagenous worthlessness - stalled his political career, it would say that, wouldn't it? I have watched most of Newsnight and I can't actually remember even one triumph of political interviewing and the only significant investigative reporting - into Sir Jimmy Savile - was shelved.  Just  a chat show, really, for Jerry and his chums, for Kirsty and her shrieking, arty slappers.  

  Even on University Challenge the only spanner in Paxman's presenters' toolbox is his impatient, schoolboy sneer;  the show's  original presenter,  Bamber Gascoigne, at least had some  personal charm and a genuine,  patient, easy erudition,  the show was fun, competitive and informative; under Paxman's browbeating stewardship it is brutish and dull; such a pair of hands, everything they touch turns to shit, shit for us, gold for him. And of course, being a veteran investigative journalist at the Beeb, Paxman, like all the other hotshot journos,  would have known nothing of his own organisation's instititionalised paedophilia, its extortion scams run by Yentob and Thomas and the rest; makes the Borgias look almost Presbyterian, does the BBC. 

 In a proper country, one a little less compulsorily inclusive and tolerant, the BBC would by now have been burnt to the ground. Anyway, Paxman on WW1, I gave him a miss, not even a starter for ten.  I am one of those who, somehow, does not see Paxman's indispensibility;  he's like that little fat fucker, Hislop, an Establishment stooge, one of them, pretending to be one of us; while they pretend to joust Truthwards,  they all have their cocks up each others arses;  a daisychain  of conceit and entitlement.




Dan, son-of-Peter, cousin of Jon Snow has had a good war year, too. 

Dan, who made his first tellyhistory programmes 
in tandem with his dad, Peter Snow

Well, viewers, no harm in giving the boy a leg-up;
 it is,  after all, what the BBC was set up to do,
 provide jobs for the well-connected.

now makes programmes more or less without holding Daddy's hand.  He has passions, Dan.  For boats.  For war. For history. For WW1. For Rome.  For anything he makes a programme about;  whatever it is, he's passionate about it, Dan.   Amazing how one can have such passions and remain such a clunking dunderhead;   makes Andy Murray look vivacious and well-adjusted, does Peter's boy, Dan.

He's seen here, above,  with the prerequisite dead relation;  we're talking moving, here,  humbling, awesome, all that shit.

They've all been at it. The Great War Feast has been going all year long and now it's hushed-tones D-Dayitis that's broken out, warporn, wall-to-wall landing craft, Mulberry harbours and grateful French peasants.

I was moved to write this - whatever it is and wherever it goes - by a simple line of gratitude to the class of June Sixth, over on mrs woar's blog, The Raft Journal;  Thank You, was all it said.

 Now, my Citroen rocket car has two little vibrators, one on the left and one on the right of the driver's seat squab;  if you doze off and  cross a white line on the offside  without indicating, it stabs you arythmically in the right buttock;  if you do it on the nearside it happens to the left buttock, it is, for a gentle, conventional soul such as I, quite disturbing and instantly effective.  Every now and again Citroen are years ahead of everyone else - the Traction Avant, the 2CV, the glorious DS 21 and recently the C4 VTS,  these are automobile magic. The sleepy-arse prod, though is probably uniquely French;  my new Volvo V40 is excessiveley, bewilderingly and infuriatingly high-tech but it doesn't have the sleepy-arse prod.  Life, herself, however, sometimes gives me her  sleepy-arse prod and  mrs woar's simple, dignified post prompted my most recent discomfort, it was a twinge at first but grew into that breathless, ball- and bowel-twisting sciatica which makes you so sick you wanna die.

 I was all set to just agree with that  Thank You; Fuck, yes, we all owe them all this whatever it is, this, this fact that we're not all speaking Herman now,  and then I started to feel suckered; who, exactly,  am I being grateful to and why; are my strings being  fretted, as if  by MediaMinster's own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are my stops known, my depths? Am I being given breath that I might discourse music most eloquent? And all as easy as lying?

Well, this warfeasting, it's outgrown the simple remembrances made by those who fought, those bereaved and those who just survived the Blitz and the deprivation; most of those are now dead or nearly dead, so what is it, exactly, which we who were not then born are remembering? What is it upon which we feast?  Is it Private Ryan?  Is it some Colonel Blimp propaganda balderdash from Pathe News;  is it a thousand war movies and  a hundred newsreel-filmed annual  gatherings of hypocrite politicians and freeloading Ruritanians, togged-up in fake medals,  whoring themselves at the Cenotaph? Few of us are remembering anything, we may well simply be swirling around in a maelstrom of counterfeit emotions driven by watching The Battle of Britain or The Longest Day,  we may feel loftily detached or mordantly cynical as a result of   reading the Great War poets;  we might have come over all Farage, all John Bull, all Winston Churchill, all crying God, for Harry, England and Saint George but whether it is  by  the BBC, Pathe News,  Pinewood Studios or William Shakespeare, himself,  we are not - even in this, this sanctimonious, scripted memorialising - we are not remembering, we are being played, instruments in a comic opera of audience participation, a pious, Knees-up Mother Brown community singalong. No business like showbusiness.

It is a drab, clodhopping melody they wring from us,  of trite, meaningless, enforced national  mourning, mourning safely and painlessly  for the long-dead, it's not proper mourning but it's the best sort, the sort that doesn't hurt, doesn't require denial, sacrifice or temporary withdrawal; it's sort-of garage-flower mourning, PoundLand mourning, cheap and cheerful;  we have grown adept at it, it has become a national default setting, if something bad has happened get yerself down the garage, quick,  that'll sort it. Bring closeya.

We need to be our own poison-taster, lest we choke on all these tawdry blooms;  they are overwhelming, jerking tears whilst  stiffening upper lips.  I fall for it often but this time,  like an asteroid just being nudged out of its collision path, I drifted away from the targeted we-will-remember-themism, just a degree at first and then, gathering speed, I hit escape velocity;  I escaped, that's what I did,  while everybody knelt to pray. I wish there was something, some national act of quite what I am unsure, but something more aligned with never-again atonement, than with schmaltzy, meaningless mourning; more Fuck, no, never again, than with Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?

The  awful thing is that some, much  of what is said about D-Day on the idiotbox  and in the filthsheets,  is true - youth, bravery, blood and guts;  scale, logistics, invention; fascism, tyranny,  resistance and sacrifice. A scant moment's thought about these events should render redundant and entirely superfluous the mewlings and pukings of showbiz arseholes like Paxman & Co.  Are we all now entirely bereft of imagination, must everything be spelled-out for us, directed, edited and voiced over? I know that young people are stupid, waving worthless degrees and  talking gibberish but both of the European wars were hugely significant,  the one for its incessant industrialised slaughter of the troops, the other for its globality, for twenty million Russian dead, for the gassed and incinerated  Jews, Gipsies and Queers and for the atom fucking bomb;  why don't people know this without it being told to them, Jackanory-style, by dingleberries like Hastings and Snow, Paxman and Vine?

But it is wise  to draw the line at the assumption,  the declaration of ubiquitous  - and thus devalued -  heroism;  there is nothing heroic about obedience.  We are not here comparing like with like, comparing us with  them and what-iffing.  No question that a lot of those boys were bold and daring and phlegmatic in the face of horror.  Even allowing for the hyperbole of the obituarist, the  preening of the grandiose, puffed-up regimental CO and the vagaries of some possibly hugely heroic actions being invisible,  overlooked or unknown, there can be but little doubt that wartime circumstances combine and collide to prompt acts of crazed, incredible, inspiring, self-negating bravery. But mostly they were just doing what they were told.  

Wouldn't happen now,  couldn't happen now, everybody'd want counselling, medication, therapy, com-pen-say-shun;  their wives'd be wetting themselves all over Breakfast TeeVee; their screeching, peroxide single mothers'd be unstoppable.  Christ, if Operation Overlord's  shit-yourself fear and nightmare-horrors had been called by their modern name of post-traumatic stress disorder  the biggest armada in history would have turned 'round before it was out of sight of land.  Nah, can't go Sarge, gotta condition, me, a disorder; fuck Rommel and his 'Lantic Wall, fuck the Frogs; nah, fuck all that, need to go 'ome an' 'ave a lie down;  anyone invented 'Elp For 'Eroes yet?

   The ordering of society was much more stringent in 1944, people did what they did not that I might live in indolence, they did what they did because that's what they were  told to fucking do.  Get in this landing craft, son, and then, when you get out, just go and charge them machine guns, you'll be alright, just remember yer training son. Right, Sarn't Major.  'Sfor King and Country, lad.  

That naivety, is that brave, or is that stupid?  Depends how you look at it.  But you cannot compare that attitude with today's widespread, idle, empty-headed narcissism, they are not both on a continuum of nobility, we cannot stretch back our greedy, pampered hands and shake theirs. Nor can you say that they did it for us, because I'll bet you  a million quid to five Woodbine that if they could see us, Facebooking, Tweeting and X-Factoring, they wouldn't piss on us.  Yet somehow we are force-fed the idea that all these young men, as they writhed, dying in agony, all muttered to themselves, well, I mighta popped me clogs, me legs are over there, me arm 'anging up there, on that wire, but at  least I can die knowing that millions of morons will consent, in the future,  to being shat upon by some cunt  called  Clegg; 


somehow, knowin' that,  it makes my dyin' at eighteen all worthwhile,  keep the 'ome fires burning, eh, night-night, dear old Blighty. 

Isn't it enough to make you weep, weep  tears of rage, that filth like Nick Clegg suborn even the  Glorious Dead to their own vanity?

 No, they didn't die that I might live they did it  it because, by means fair  and foul, they were compelled to do it.   Great men, men to whom  statues are raised, had fucked-up, just like they always do and for remedy there came a six-year bloodletting. And in recognition of this sleight of jingoistic hand, we place the remains in neat graves and entrust their surviving comrades' needs not to the Exchequer which sent them there but instead to the meagre comforts and reassurances of begging bowl charities. Tony and Imelda Blair will want for nothing, ever; athough they are completely corrupt millionaires we pension, secure and pamper them from our taxes; veterans, even today, maimed to the glory of Blair, - remember how he said No prime minister has ever been so well-served by his troops?  - are in eternal want, of money, of limbs, of love; thrown not into  the infinitely comforting arms  of ministerial pension but into the worn, crabbed fingers of collecting-tin charity.  That Blair's warriors depend, for their ease,  upon Help For Heroes and not upon a properly funded military welfare system is a fucking disgrace. Never mind trekking across the Antarctic with Prince Pisshead, some of these publicity-hungry limbless squaddies should storm the MoD, take what's theirs.

On June 6th 1944, though,  it was kill or be killed, better them than us. Unlike the recent BlairWars4Money, D-Day had to be done, had to be done in all its awful  magnificence;  amphibian tanks and their crews, dipping and sinking, on launch, to the bottom of the sea;  teenagers never placing  a foot ashore before being smashed, shocked and ripped by hot machine gun fire, dismembered and eviscerated by  mortars; crippled, legless and armless by anti-personnel mines.  Fuck me, Jesus, it must have been awful, jumping out of aircraft; strapped into plywood, deathtrap gliders;  every desperate, terrified minute potentially your last, slip-sliding around in the guts of others;  your tiny, treasured life, conscripted from you, uniformed and brainwashed and  utterly expendable en route to  the  triumph of governments and their statesmen, mostly safe at home, pampered with cognac, cigars, fortified with whores, whilst you shit yourself and call for your mother.  I think it is mr richard, here,  who is the sternest on the professional soldier and I generally agree with him but conscripts are a different kettle of fish, we were talking a while back about conchies and I think maybe making the decision not to fight requires more courage than  doing as you're bid by HMG, the Daily Express and the Home Service.  It's all so frightfully fucking mediaeval,  the idea of killing and dying for King and Country;  anybody's King, anybody's Country.

And, true to nationalism's cynical form, what better recognition of all this could there be, this Hell on Earth,  seventy years on, than the praise of the unGodly, the sloppy, wordy salutes from this cowardly, villainous shower. 



MediaMinster threw everything at it. How better to memorialise  the trench-footed, blinded, gassed, eviscerated, atomised Fallen of the Western Front than in the sombre, grating  tones of Huw Welshman or Joanna Gosling or even Jayne Tits, the grinning bint who does the weather, beaming at us that she's now going to show us just what that weather was really like, on June the wotsaname  and how Supreme Commander Wotsisname had a really tough call to make with his weathermen, because - do you know what - they didn't have sattelite weather back then. Full steam ahead it was, at the BBC, for Juno Beach.

But if we quell, in our heads, the jingo-gibberings of Huw Welshman and the rest and if we just take a peek at them individually, les poseurs gallantes, we can see the true colour of their cowardice and knavery. 

I say, you do know that if you live in a council house,
 one with a spare room, you'll have to hop it, don't you?
Only don't try dossing-down around any govament buildings
because we've put spikes down.
To deter your sort.

Disability benefits? 
No, we're putting a stop to all that nonsense. 
It's not what you fought for is it,  to be mollycoddled, no, work's the thing;  Jerry, your old, valiant adversary, here,  and I'm sure my opposite number and very good friend, Mrs Frau Lardarse, have a word for it - Arbeit Macht Frei, well three words, actually,  and after all this time I feel that we should let bygones be bygones and adopt this motto for our country, too, Arbeit Macht Frei, it sort of sums up what Mr Duncan Smith is trying so bravely to achieve, slave labour.

Pardon, whadidyasay? Who'm I?
I'm your elected prime minister. Well, not exactly elected.  What?  A coup?  A junta?  No, certainly not. We put our mandates before the people and we are acting exactly according to what was not in them.

Cameron is busily ripping-up the social justice compact forged immediately after the very war which  he now hymns; the NHS is being sold-off, the sick and disabled are gleefully, vengefully demonised, the unemployed - the price worth paying - are shat upon,  the old, the young, the vulnerable of every hue are hectored, corralled and bullied by imported companies of social security benefits entitlement assessment carpet-baggers, hardfaced spivs, paid on results,  nearly half of their decisions are reversed on appeal yet they still enjoy the full confidence of the wheezing, grimy, vengeful buffoon, Ian Smith;  a million or more depend upon food banks, scandals wrack the hospitals, the care homes, the schools and of course, axiomatically, the rich get richer while the poor get fucked. Prices rise, wages fall yet we are deemed to be in growth.  Cameron's cronies, Coulson, Brooks, Murdoch,  have a common criminality which would shame Goebbels, he surrounds himself with criminals, appoints them to cabinet and entrusts them with the reins of government communication, spivs and crooks, degenerates and hustlers lecture us on our shortcomings;  seventy years on, filth like David Cameron piss on those who perished that he and his rotten tribe might prosper.  To whom do I offer my thanks for this betrayal?  

And then there's SonnyBoy Obama, strutting about in Normandy, fresh from another military shame-fest, back at home. His military veterans, too,  treated like shit.

 My fellow motherfuckers. 

 I am your commander in chief. 

 

I make the decisions. To put people. Good people. In harm's way. Our people. My fellow motherfuckers. To whom we  owe. An immense debt of gratitude. I am responsible. I am responsible. And I alone. 

 

And that is why, my fellow motherfuckers, when things go wrong. In our treatment. Of those good folks. Those veterans. All of whom have served our country so well. Some other cunt.

 

  Has to resign.

 Some other cunt.  Than me.

  I have today, therefore. Reluctantly accepted. The resignation of Seckatry for Veterans, General Whoosists.
General Whoosits has my complete confidence. And the nation's.  And the nation's veterans. Owe him. A huge debt. Of gratitude. And that is why. I had to sack him.

Some sonofafuckinbitch hadda be sacked.
 And it wasn't gonna be me.

Wall Street's houseboy, Obama, global torturemeister, coward, omnisnoop, fascist warmonger and stuttering megalomaniac;  what's he doing, at Omaha Beach, dusting himself with Valour's glitter?

And this shrunken, cock-waving, gabshite  imbecile.

Hollande.

Actually more socialite than  socialiste, he was going to rein-back Austerity's dark German squadrons, going to borrow to spend, invest in French workers. Enough of all this merde capitaliste et globale.   First thing he did was  queue jump over Cameron, in order  to stand next to Obama and  his urgent need  to bomb the working class, the poor and the hungry  of Syria.

Now, he's a figure of fun, mocked  not only for kowtowing to Mme Bosche and her poor-bashing but also for his dalliances with women young enough to be his children.  These, Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel, these are the people who preach to us of valour and self-sacrifice.
  Aye, right. 
 It's a long way to Tipperary.

I have  a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death	5
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.	10
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows 'twere better to be deep	15
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death	20
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Allan Seeger 1888-1916

And nor did he.

THE LAST POST.

Elsewhere, in MediaMinster, those who say nothing badly attract readers and comments in their thousands;  here, it has become  like a war grave, tended by a loyal few, comments on average not reaching double figures.  There is a Sufi saying: I wrote you a hundred letters and received not one reply;  this, of course, is  a message in itself.
I have stayed too long at the fair, blogging a dead horse.

To those, formerly and currently, who have forged, beaten, shaped, embellished and polished these commentaries with me I touch my heart and say  as-salamu alaykum.

SHOWBUSINESS FOR UGLY PEOPLE, MILIBAND TREADS THE BOARDS.

This book will change your life,  is  a fiction much over-used by the ghastlies of the publishing world but now and again one does change your life.  I abandoned fiction, more or less, years ago; mr verge, among others, recommends things now and again and I read them and enjoy them but he is un homme des lettres transgressif and I am not, I am a furniture polisher yet I can make up my own stories and I rebel at the proposition that somebody with nothing to polish, nothing  better to do, can, through his own edited and finessed, stylised  imaginings, lead me to an invaluable  truth or an insight, as though I was a dog at Crufts, led this way and that, prodded, tricked and finally given a treat, a treat which disappears in a moment.  I hate them, in the main, novelists and would cheerfully set them to rebuilding Yorkshire's dry stone walls, let them do one good deed before they die.

Feeling that my rejection of StoryTime was a little eccentric, though - mrs ishmael is e-voracious as well as a proper, bookshop-library bibliophile - the last time I was in hospital I tried, out of deference to the occasional mr the dyers garden, to read Homer, I tried and I tried - straight, drugged, pre-op, post-op;  did me fucking head in, the Illiad just seemed to be endless lists of shit, names of warriors, warriors' families,  warriors' dominions, names of gods, lists of feast menus.  I knew the stories from school of course but it all seemed like shopping lists of rubbish, interspersed with bestial incest and bloody combat, and so now it's back on one of the posh shelves, the Illiad, unopened for another decade, probably for ever, generating and embracing classical dust, along with the many-volumed history of English literature,  I have shitloads of that stuff, dictionarioes of everything.  I suppose it did change my life in a way, the Illiad, my envy of the classical scholar remains but I no longer wish to do anything about it. Plato can stay where he is.

Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of MotorCycle Maintainance,  an Enquiry into Values, however, did change my life, changed the way I think about things, anyway, is that the same thing?  I don't think it seasons these commentaries, I am at home here, native and to the manor born and actually, a passing  truth to tell, a Dane, myself, genetically;  a Dane, a Frog, a Rosbif, a Scot, like many people now exercising themselves over their particular, precious, historically incidental nation state,  like Mr Salmond and Mr Farage, each revving-up their slightly dodgy back-to-the-futuremobiles.  Elsewhere, though, even though I don't get out that much, I find myself less sanguine,  less confident in my language, endlessly self-correcting. I comment now and again on mrs woar's blog and contrasted with her understated lucidity and authority my comments rebuke me even as I write them and I amend and qualify and expand them as I go along;  this is Persig, the biker-philosopher, chiding me about hypotheses and evidence and  Quality.

In his book, an autobiographical post mortem, neither fact nor fiction yet both,  Persig scattered many of Reason's  jewels; I am sure I could recall and display them from here to Eternity but the one which has come to mind relates to a period, before he suffered state-ordered personality annihilation, when he taught English at Montana State College.  Write me an essay about the USA,  five hundred words, he instructed his students and one girl, after failing to hand anything in, said she was flummoxed;  OK, make it about this town, Bozeman; nothing doing; OK, make it about the college; again she could produce nothing;  OK, make it about a room, a lecture hall;  same again;  eventually  he said, forget about the United States, forget about the college, write me an essay about a brick, one brick.  Thus directed, she couldn't stop writing, she handed in a five- thousand word brick essay, her writer's block was overcome; once she looked at things a brick at a time she saw that every supposed fact had an infinity of hypotheses which she could explore and narrate;  just in a split second, just by the way she looked at something, she had invoked a bombardment of information;  it doesn't matter if it's a brick in the wall or a grain of sand,  they are vast; the more you look, the more you see. I have since found that looking at things moreso can be wearying but once you start there's no direction home, life gets microscopic. I think these days we call that sort of meta-analysis Deconstruction; one of the ghastlies, Kirsty Wark, Mariella Frostrup, Mark Kermode, PotatoFace Lawson, one of them will have a word for it, this super-specifity. See?  See what I mean? Super specifity?  Once somebody has had the thought and done the work, a critic will come along and devise a label, telling us what whatever it is is  really all about, for  aren't they, after all, the ghastlies, aren't they great writers, themselves?

At the very first televised word of Ed Miliband's speech at Thurrock, yesterday,  I,   just like Persig's student, experienced  a  massive, multi-coloured  firework display in my  mind.   In a BigBang instant the history and background  of the unequal battles between the rich and the poor, of the struggles which distilled, briefly, into the  labour movement reprised themselves.  It was an all-at-once, 360 degree view of it all, of  the the short and simple annals of the poor,  the clearances, the enclosures, the lock-outs,  the hungry, famished and frozen;  the malnourished illness, the marches, the mining disasters,  the slums,  the unions, the banners, the galas, the working men's clubs, the credit unions, the Provident Society, the Co-Op;  the endless, uneven struggle between capital and labour,  between the haves and the have-nots, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate;  evictions, whippings, floggings, hangings, the stocks and transportation;  health and safety, the shops and factories acts, holiday pay, sick leave, affordable council housing - all now under attack  from head-up-their-arse-rednecks, their prejudices puppeteered by belligerent billionaire larcenous press pornobarons, filth like Murdoch -  the right to vote, the old-age pension, the national health service, the minimum wage, all these things, now - despite our being one of the wealthiest nations in history- unaffordable, privatiseable, cuttable, all dowithoutable  and, as remedy to this theft, this vandalism, this trickle-up, class warfare, as remedy, this man proposes himself.

THE HURDY GURDY MAN.

hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, 

hurdy gurdy gurdy, he sang.

In an instant,  yesterday, maybe blinded by the light,  maybe by an  enhanced  recognition triggered by chronic pain, this welter of  affection and respect  for  centuries of struggle collided with the startling realisation, the full bucket-of-shit-in-the-face realisation, that this man presents himself as the Keeper of Decency's flame. And in an instant I left the room, fled the image and the voice. It was one of those, we all have them, one of those OH, FOR FUCKS SAKE, NO moments.

I was genuinely upset, it wasn't my inbred cynicism about these people, it was the opposite, I was hurt, naively; I was hurt for countless generations of struggle;  I was hurt by the fact that while Goodness hides behind its gates, people like this force their way front and centre.  I could've cried. 

 It's not that I was ever a member of the Labour party, or any party, or any union, it's just that my instincts draw me always to what used to be called the Left.  I am a bit old to have an Animal Farm moment and have, anyway, known for  as long as I have known anything, that politicians and political parties  are vermin, all of them; now and again, though, as in my Thurrock moment, yesterday, something reinforces anew the shocking truth.

I was so shocked by my sudden forbidding realisation that I just dashed into another room without turning off the telly and I could hear that he still droned on,  that  whining, adolescent, adenoidal voice, a voice which invites its own strangulation; doesn't matter what he's  saying, he could be reciting the Sermon in the Mount, his are the cadences of discomfort, he is a pain in the neck.  The correct would say it is unfair, he obviously  can't help the way he speaks, but  he can, we all can. Even Whisky Maggie Thatcher, strident and shrill as a shrew on speed, managed to take some simple voice coaching, never harmonised her own discordant demons, nothing would, this side of the grave but at least she recognised the ugliness of her timbre;  but even if Miliband cultivated the oratorical fluency of Laurence Olivier  what he said would still be intolerable.

I heard the odd phrase and quickly got the message. Mr Miliband had come among the ordinary people, whose ills he could diagnose and cure. His repeated use of this fucking miserly phrase, ordinary people,  indicated that while he might be with them, he was certainly not of them.  To be fair to him he never actually said that he, too, was ordinary for how could he, ordinary people cannot divine their own situation,  that's why they're ordinary, but he could, he could tell ordinary people how they were wrong about things, like, in voting for Mr UKIP, he understood why they did that, it was understandable, because they just didn't understand things very well. Because of being ordinary.  But not to worry, he was there to explain their ordinariness to them, explain its shortcomings. He was ordinary but in an extraordinary way. And as everybody knows, extra just means more, so, in fact, he was more ordinary than ordinary people.  His years at Oxbridge and in the States and in MediaMinster made him more ordinary than ordinary people who have to go to work, doing things. But his downbeat, teacherly, preacherly syntax, his calm and patient identification of ordinary people's lack of understanding, failures of judgement, need for gentle patient correction didn't quite camouflage the bivouac of concet from which he sallied forth, at times like these.

Listen, he might have said, I am ordinary and my friends are ordinary.  Take me and my brother, it was entirely ordinary how a pair of worthless tossers like us became foreign seckatry and energy seckatry;  it was dead ordinary, it was just that our leader, Mr Gordon Snot, was less scared of us than he was of other ordinary people in the govament.  And while I'm here, let me just make clear that when we all spoke collegiately about the end of boom and bust you must all have misunderstood us, what we really meant was end of boom and permanent bust.  What was the real policy was that we would just borrow money into existence.  You don't have to actually have anything, you just borrow it into existence and then give it to the bankers who will lend it to you,  the ordinary people;  the money doesn't exist but your debt to them does.  And then, just to oil the wheels of commerce, our friends in the banks can lend this borrowed into existence money to people who cannot repay it, award themselves bonuses on the strength of what we call subprime loans and on top of that we can give them knighthoods, in exchange for our own directorships in the banks, after we retire from serving you, the ordinary people.  Ordinary people like you might wonder what happens when the loans aren't repaid.  That's simple,  they are sold on again to some other bankers who obviously give themselves bonuses, too and then, eventually, although that is someway down the line, eventually,  when  not even a filthy money-laundering gangster will touch these loans Mr Snot pays them all off with your money.  What could be more ordinary than that?  And that's why we are the party of ordinary people.

I even have ordinary people in my shadow cabinet.  An ordinary hard-working family like Mr and Mrs Balls, for instance, followed a quite ordinary career trajectory, from Oxford to MediaMinster and then into a safe ordinary Labour seat and then into Mr Snot's ordinary circle of blackmailing ministers. Like any ordinary couple they claim for, and flip, a second home,  they claim for food - everybody has to eat, don't they -  they claim for anything they can, even though their joint salary is huge  Like I say, we know how hard it can be, being ordinary ourselves, but not exactly.

Miliband's blatantly offensive hypocrisies, piled up, would reach the sky, in this he is no different from many, from most in his grimy trade.  But even in the short period since Mr Snot was thrown out that trade has become  more image-conscious, more yoof-ful;  Cameron and Clegg, empty, shallow clowns, thieves and arseholes, recognise this change and represent it, empty heads, shiny faces in shiny suits.  Miliband's nauseating Day Of The Ordinary Man may have been his attempt at rebranding for the New People. Even in that feeble endeavour, he failed.

 As for me, Miliband did change my life, no struggle worth the name could ever be associated with him and  nothing for me  will ever be the same again, in electing him its leader, the Labour party deleted itself, and this action cannot be undone.

 It was just a moment, loaded with horror, like waking up in a coffin; it was, I hope, this unsuspecting encounter with Ed Miliband, the closest I shall come to premature burial.

MORE HITLER LESSONS WITH HIS MAJESTY

HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE CHARLES 

VON GOODFORFUCKALL VON RURITANIA.

Yes, well, the bounder's well and truly in the bunker, all his troops dead or dying, all hope gone and still the wretched man won't call it a day. 

Rather like that chappie, Hitler,  the one one's uncle was so find of.

 

 NICK CLEGG, DANNY ALEXANDER, THAT CUNT OF A BLOKE, FARRON  AND OTHER NEO-COALITIONISTS DISCUSS THEIR DESPERATE PLIGHT.

WE FIGHT ON, WE FIGHT TO WIN. CITY DIRECTORSHIPS, PENSIONS AND POSITIONS IN THE EUROREICH. THE PEOPLE MUST DIE FOR ME.

Meanwhile,  the First Regiment, Clegg's Own BDSM Copraphiliacs, 

marches away to imprisonment

 

LIBDEMS IN DISARRAY.

Another military man, Field Marshal Lord Paddy Pantsdown, had this to say

 Now just listen....I am an extremely silly idea....I am devoted to me....I am brave....I am determined....I am the best prime minister we never had. Yet.

The Deputy Prime Minister, relaxing,
 away from the hurly-burly of politics

SHIP OF FOOLS. THE THINGS THEY SAY.

He died doing what he loved. 

 Cold, frightened, choking, desperate and terrified.  Drowning.

 Right. Lovely.

I'd rather someone had kicked his stupid arse and he was still alive.

THE SUNDAY EARTHQUAKE

UN GRAND TREMBLEMENT DE TERRE.

Not so much an earthquake, 
more a modest geoligical twitch.

 A third of those so entitled  voted in what we must call the UKIP  local elections Earthquake. Roughly, generously speaking, a third of that third voted for Mr Nigel Fruitcake's NutKippers. A third of a third is a ninth, almost one in ten.  These elections, however, were not for entire councils, just for, in most cases, a third of the council seats;  a third of a ninth, therefore, earthquaked its way into psephological history;  a third of a ninth is a twenty-seventh; of those eligible to vote, therefore, in local  elections,  less than five in a hundred, less than half-a-person in ten, rocked the Richter Scale. Never mind, on such thin fare does the commentariat dine.

It is true, of course,  that such numerical realism applies equally to the electoral brigandage, the democratic deficit  of other parties - a minority share of a minority's total  vote can enthrone a minority on the Great Latrine of State,  with a working majority,  there to enrich itself for life whilst shitting in our faces;  there is nothing new in Farage's counterfeit ebullience, nothing new in MediaMinster's hyperbolic exaggerations, locally, Mr Fruitcake's  mandate is  microscopic, but don't ruin a good story with the truth.

Messrs Cameron and Clegg and their masters in MediaMinster, insist that they were elected, insist that -  perhaps via some undiscovered form of mass, national telepathy, some effort of purposeful mass consciousness -  those who bothered to vote last time exactly calculated how each of them should vote in order to precisely elect a coalition of nutters, criminals and incompetents.  

I am not making this up, just recall for yourselves how many times Cameron has said Getting on with the job of prime minister which I was elected to do.  He wasn't.  Nobody voted for a coalition, it wasn't on the ballot paper;  it was a usurpation of such watered-down democracy as previously existed, a coup, in other words.  The poltroon, Clegg, is more grandiose even than CallHimDave, martyring himself on the altar of his obedience to the public clamour for his Deputy Premiership, as though he was dragged, kicking and screaming into his limousine.  We are told daily that we gave this job - of  cruel robbery, not of but by the banks,  to the Coalition, to get on with.  These, you recall, are people like David Laws and Chris Huhne and Maria Miller, people like Liam Fox and Peter Cruddas, filth.

 There is a vivid example of this misleading and spurious terminolgy here, in Scotland, the best part of England.  Devolution brought into being a Scottish Executive, a local parliament with restricted powers.  Upon winning an election, Alec Salmond's Tribesmen changed the name of the executive to the Scottish Government thus, logically, at a stroke, abolishing their own raison d'etre;  if they are a national government, from what are they seeking independence?  It is bollocks, of course,  there is no Scottish Government, there is merely a linguistic nonsense, reality corrupted to no other purpose than the satisfaction of Salmond's mountainous ego.  This is what they do, they say what they want and in short order the press jackals go along with it;  Elected Coalition, Scottish Goverment, take your pick, horseshit, all of it.

No, this, like Mr Snot's, is not an elected government but a cabal of cheeky opportunists, no rational person could judge Nick Clegg or David Cameron capable of any responsible task whatsoever, nothing;  even such skills as one routinely picks up through living and working are denied these two, because through privilege and nepotism they have done neither, they are good for fuck all.

What, therefore, should we make of  the equally bogus skills of Nigel Farage, as he proclaims his  tiny, flaccid  earthquake?  Well,  he is quite fluent in Man-In-The-Pub;  as a very well paid and pensioned MEP he has no need to work and receives huge  expenses, these have given him ample opportunity to prop up the bar, between visiting branches of his harem;  the very least he could do, by way of gratitude, would be to learn the Why-Oh-Why language of the half-pissed, bar room bore.  That's about it, I think; he speaks Man-In-The-Pub and he has been speaking it at a time when, thanks largely to the blogosphere, many are finally wiping MediaMinster's shit from their faces - the place, the time, the script  have been handed to him by others.  Aside from that he is overdressed, overpaid and over-confident, one of them, in other words, pretending to be one of us.  And half a person in ten loves him, probably the half that has the arse in it,  the arse they talk out of.

WORDCRIME. 
THE THEFT OF THE NIGGER WORD

Never knew what racism meant, me.  Don't know how old the word is. Certainly it was not part of my parents' regular vocabulary. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish certainly prompted my mother's tears but I doubt that my parents saw this as racism, just as the blind hatreds of pig-ignorant, tripe-eating  Brummie trash. I didn't then and I still don't see those - still present -  attitudes as amenable to good anti-discriminatory practice, to anti-racist awareness programmes. Imposed Multi-culturalism may have caused these attitudes to take cover, find camouflage but as we see, they are alive and well, succoured by filth like Jack Tortuer and Roy Hatterjee,  their actions fertilised UKIP's flourishing, uneasy rhetoric.

 Maybe it's a creation, racism, maybe it was brought into common use by  my g-g-g-generation, not my generation in total but by the gobby ones,  the I-Know-Besters  of my generation, the pushy, censorious, accusatory ones;  quick, under the guise of rights'n'freedoms, to shackle and enslave, as quick to chain and punish, the Word-Criminologists, in their own righteous way, as the Georgia plantation owner, the Glasgow slave freighter.

(These fuckers are everywhere, incidentally;  there is no area of our lives unplagued by a pestilence of gobby, pushy, dictatorial fuckwits.  I was listenting to Gardeners' World, on PBC4, and - even there - there was a braying, pushy nitwit of a woman - I met loads of her, in the '70s, they called themselves the New Diggers, then, librarians and teachers, steeped in inexpressible grievance, with not enough proper work to do, trying to take over the allotments, turn them into  a Movement, instead of a hobby. I'm telling you, you are not safe from these people, they never go away and whatever it is you're doing they will want to reclaim it for their own higher purposes, gabshites; some of them become councillors.  Anyway, this skriking bint, probably with a masters degree in preciousness studies, wanted there to be, demanded that there be Free-Veg, community gardens all over the land, where the worthy, pseudo middle-class can plant kohl-rabi, aubergines and artichokes for any poor pleb  to come along and  pull up to take home and eat with their pizzas and doner kebabs. Stupid bitch.)

I just checked and the first recorded use of the word racist  was in 1902 by what we would now be obliged to call a right racist bastard, this guy, Richard Henry Pratt,

who felt that native American Indians would be fine human beings if only they had the Indian knocked out of them. Pratt felt that it was racism to denigrate people because of their race when their racial defects could be educated out of them.

In my young adulthood, however, the term racist became applied by clever people to those whom they considered stupider than they  and in  relation specifically to inherited societal attitudes towards specifically black people and specifically - since they were, at that time, the majority of black people - towards those who were by  then - having been called coons, niggers, jungle bunnies, wogs, darkies and blackies - called West Indians but are now called, equally racistly - or separatistly -  in my view, Afro-Caribbeans; who would want to be so denominated? My equivalent race-label would be Viking-Norman-English-Scots-Ulster-British, but there is no stopping  the linguistically gaudy anti-racists  conjuring ever newer nomenclatures,  descriptive titles  of Otherness, with fancier, more geographically and historically  precise name-clusters. Pure, shameless  cuntishness.

I am speaking here of the UK but the same paradigm shift occurred in the US where acceptable terminology moved swiftly
 from nigger to coloured folk, to black to people of colour to African-American;  still a racial differential, just differently differential;  separatism, Otherism.  They just love segregating people, those anti-racists, stupid fucking bastards, as though a geographical precision made name-calling respectable.  Oh, you are of Afro-Caribbean descent and I respect your cultural heritage; this is WordCrime-speak for Hi, nigger. Po-faced, sanctimonious hypocrite bastards. Accidents of technology and geography notwithstanding, there is only one race, isn't there? The human race.

I use the word nigger here, not mischieveously or carelessly, I quite deiberately put it in the mouths of those who, examined  by their own definitions are racist, people like the Clintons, who  fried a retarded Arkansas niggerboy to celebrate Spunky Bill's first inauguration and who subsequently presided over a massive increase in the black prison population, not only imprisonment but cruel, mediaeval, maximum security lockdown torture prison and who, like GlobaCorp's Uncle Tomming houseboys, the Obamas, were and are happy to bomb and kill people of colour all over the world, anywhere; show Obama an uppity nigger and he'll shoot him with techno-horror nightmare weapons,  burn him, drone him or bang him up and torture him in some secret illegal prison, all the time saying ain't it great for black folks, now they got us in the White House;  this is why I publish stuff like this:

Me, Barack and our girls, liddle wosstheirnames, ain't no way we ever gonna be hauled off into the bush and sold to slavers, fuck no.  

 

That shit's for niggers.

Whilst Blair was impertinently introducing Holocaust Day - as though we mortals needed reminding about such serious matters, as though it was the duty of our betters, like him, him, the the biggest whore ever in Downing Street, to police our morality, Fuck, I ask you - George Dubya and Tony Blair bombed and torched and tortured their way across four countries but would probably never say the nigger word in public,  just in private, all the time. Michelle's husband, 

Now, you jes be a good nigger,
 an' gwine back to yer mastah, ya hear me?
Yessir, mr president.

rejoicing in his counterfeit status as the first black president, as well as trampling on blacks at home, has Bush'n'Blaired six countries, beggared his own country in the interest of his masters, spied on all of us, the cheeky cunt, and sought to promote further lucrative and illegal conflict anywhere he can, in Syria, Ukraine and - God help us all - even in the Orient, the man is a criminal monster; America's exceptionalism, its lawlessness, its hatreds and its estrangement from  Decency exponentialise themselves with every minute that Obama is in office.   But, hey,  the main thing is we don't use the n-word, cos that's you know, just the most offensive thing.

I am ranting about this because elderly playboy, Andy Neil,

formerly Murdoch's fellator-in-chief cum greatest living newsman - Christ, Guido Fawkes-Staines is a greater newsman than Neil, although equally down on his knees before Rupert -
 had some insufferable luvvie cunt on his dreadful show the other night,


 a black American, Clark Peters, who was sighing and swooning, stagily and repulsively clutching his bosom and Oh-the-pain-of-it-alling at the very idea of the n-word, whilst, of course, plugging his upcoming appearance on the terribly, terribly highbrow kiddy programme, Midsomer Murders.   The main thing, according to Darling Clarke,was not that Uncle Sam was furiously, crazily, savagely anti-wog, was not that  black children all over the world, even today, cannot get a drink of fucking water, no, the main challenge facing civilised people today was the eradication of a word.  I would cheerfully burn this cunt on the fiery cross.


Stooging their poxy arses off, Alan Cuckold and Micky Portillo empathised like crazy, Oh, the n-word, we would never, never, never say that, we might bomb niggers and ayrabs and ragheads by the fucking million but we would never say that dreadful word. We're not racists, it's just that black and brown people need killing and enslaving so very badly. Not obedient,  Labour-voting coons or rich, Tory voting Asians,  not Trevor Phillips, or David Lammie or our new shadow business chap, ChumbaWumba, I believe his name is, no, no, one could easily sit down and have a free dinner and a few free brandies with chaps like these, chaps who know their place.


Quite, yes, one actually could. Actually, as a matter of historical fact and to burnish my ongoing media profile I, myself, am actually half-Spanish, half-Scottish, half-American and half-nigger, Whoops, I didn't mean that, it just slipped out, rather like Mr Clarkson, I, like he, was thinking nigger, although I would obviously never, ever say it.

 
Michael, what you're saying is that it's OK to hate people, as, for instance, I hate poor people - did I ever tell you I went to unversity and  got a first class combined honours degree in MurdochFellating and Thatcher Cunnilinguilaling? - you hate trade unionists, Michael and Alan, a trade unionist of sorts,himself ....


that copper, by the way, the one who was knobbing your missus, was he in the Police Federation, no, only joking, it's just that they are in the news....

 
No, no, 'salright, Andrew, 'sall water under the pension fund, and we had 'im sacked, anyway, and as for unions, well,  I hate them now, meself,  just used mine  to get into parliament and become Chancellor of the wotsaname, yeah, I know, crazy....me......chancellor of the wotsaname..


 .......so as long as we don't use the n-word, which I never would, either, it's OK to hate people, unfairly discriminate against them, mistreat them through the criminal justice system and blow their countries of origin to fragments.....

Quite, Andrew, that's right. Like in Iraq, D'you know Iraq was the very cradle of civilisation - I know this because I'm half-Iraqi, myself - and we blew it to fucking smithereens. And here's me earning a crust blethering on about St Pancras station, rather like I was, Pevsner, was that his name, chappie who was an expert on English buildings? I mean, to be fair, I only pretend to be a historian, when it comes to history I'm like a whore at a hockey match, leave all that ree-surch stuff to the production team.  But no, whatever,  I would never say the word nigger, certainly not.

So there it is, Racism Incorporated; by their own definition they  can be as racist as they  like, up to and including holocaustal violence, just as long as you never, never, never say nigger. WordCrime.

And here we are, now, in this glorious Farage  weekend, in an orgy of  WeAren'tRacists-ism. So all-encompassingly, so earnestly anti-racist are those now damning Mr Fruitcake that they have invented racism where there is no race to be -ist about;  what race, pray, is Romanian, or German?   As far as I know, there's a handful of races, Asian, Caucasian, Negroid, Oriental, something like that, maybe some sub-divisions of those but Romanian isn't one of them, Romanian is a nationality. These stupid bastards don't mean racism, they mean Otherism but they dare not open that can of worms for fear that their own careers as professional Otherists would be revealed and so they stick with racism and homophobia as their default insults, even though linguistically and rationally they are meaningless. 

Oh, we may be rotten, thieving, warmongering, child-molesting, shit-eating, hypocritical degenerates, we may be a poxed-up whore rabble of money-grubbing, brutal, wickedness but at least we're not racists, like Mr Fruitcake is, even though he isn't. Being studiedly and phonily  non-racist, of course, as a badge of honour, is akin to saying that since he was a vegetarian Hitler wasn't all bad; probably never said nigger, even once. Send all zese fucking yids to ze gaschamber und experimentation wards but on no account must you call ze fucking subhuman bastards nigger, or it vill be ze Russian front for you, liebchen. And whilst we are talking of Nazi Otherism, we should remember that Mr Ian Duncan Smith and his colleagues, on all sides, forget about incoming Labour opposition, Schmidt and Co, who require that we buy and bequest them at least one luxurious home and the profits therefrom, also demand that poor, weak, defenceless disabled people be evicted from their homes in order to satisfy some braindead DailyMail redneck fuckpig horde.  IDS, of course, would never say nigger.

Being lectured about racism, from Radio Four, by Angela Eagle,

 one of NewLabour's HorseLesbians of the Iraq Apocalypse is one of Life's more surreal moments.  Mr Fruitcake, for all his arseisms has not yet launched Armageddon on millions of working class Iraqis.  But you would think he had.

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. THE FILTH-O-GRAPH ON THE UKIP ELECTION,

 You want me to talk democracy for you, big boy?

"Can I just conclude with a request: however you feel about all this, please vote. And, if possible, take your children to the polling station with you so that they can see how it is done, and how important you believe it to be to participate in this system for which so many people have given, or been prepared to risk, their lives."

Thus the Filth-O-Graph's shilling-a-line philosopher-battleaxe, Janet Daly, condescendingly chivvies her readers into believing that no matter what, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as though she stood in a shieldwall going back to Runnymede or Agincourt  or the Normandy beaches, as though the shithole of MediaMinster was just experiencing a littte temporary difficulty, easily corrected by a thoughtful electorate, doing as it was bid.  It is your duty to vote for one of those we allow on the ballot paper.

Janet, of course, works for the secretive, anti-democratic filthsters, the Barclay Twins, who  don't believe in voting, regularly tyrannise their neighbours in the Channel Islands and would do the same here if possible and seek so to do via the mewlings and pukings of this rancid old woman.

Others, mainly NutKippers, are calling for a large turnout in order to honour the memory of Trooper Lee Rigby and his various wives when, in fact, the arrest of Tony Blair, rather than the election of even more  greedy, worthless shitheads to Brussels, would more usefully serve that memory.  Britain has been given over to nignogs, they urge,  nignogs killed poor Lee, vote, therefore, for the only truly anti-nignog party.  A vote for Nigel is a votye for Lee. We are not racist, we just hate nignogs of all colours and none, Paki nignogs, Frog nignogs, German nignogs and specially Romanian  gippo nignogs.

I said to mrs ishmael this morning that although I was not discouraging  her,  I would not be going through this voting charade.  Even before her eyebrows raised I said And don't gimme any of that people died so's you could vote shit.  It doesn't wash any more, parliamentary democracy, political parties;  they are all shit, any one of them, all of them, how many times must I say, they all have more in common with each other than with us;  this is a farce, doesn't matter who they are, Jock tribesmen, Welsh fucking nutters,  LibLabCon, those insufferable green bastards and now this limping, dimwit, Zimmerframed, sclerotic,  angry horde of dispossessed Thatcherite, National Frontsters, starching-up their brown shirts and Union Jacks,  they'll all be a long time dead before Nigel Fruitcake forms a government and even if they weren't, governents, all governments are just enforcers for global oligarchy.  Nigel Fruitcake and Nick Clegg, what's the difference, both will reinforce the gun-bristling, armour-plated barricade between the filthy rich and the rest of us, voting for one or the other is joining in the spastic shuffle of the village idiot, tormenting himself with the vague, shadowy notion that tomorrow, maybe, someone will be kind to him.  

They won't.

ADVERTISING NEWS. MAN DITCHES BRIDE.

This is the tragic news that some fuckhead who makes adverts for banks has dumped his bride-to-be.

A trio of financial experts shares its wisdom with the public.

I am just not ready to commit, said Mr Rory Prat;  I need to spend all of my time concentrating on my advertising career.  That's why I came into golf in the first place.

 

  Mr McPrat's colleague, Mr Lewis TaxExile, said he fully understood McPratt's greed and wouldn't run him off the road, even though he could, easily.  No, it was Britain and British fans who made me and that's why it would be seriously mad for me to live there and pay taxes.  Santander?  No, they really are a great bank, actually give people money, well, me, anyway.  And that's what counts.

No, it's cool, and I'm fine with it, said jilted fiancee, Ms Jabberwocky,  I mean, it was just getting past a joke.  He even had it tattooed on his number seven iron, knowhaddamean?  Yeah, on his cock, Bank with Santander.  In tiny letters, obviously, right? Yeah, that sickly orangey-red.  I mean, what girl wants that on her wedding night,  there's getting fucked  by the banks, I know, but that was too much.  Yeah, Lewis has it too, Jensen, all of them.

NEWS REVIEW.

FOUR MEN IN A BOAT. OR OUT OF IT.

Could this be Flight MH 370-something? 
 Or is it the missing British yacht?

 Good evening, look you and this is Huw Welshman with the six o' clock news from the PBC.  And in a dramatic day, no honestly, dramatic, in a dramatic day of twists and turns and wotsanames the search for some people is back on, thanks, in large part to you, the viewer, to the unelected prime minister, Mr Cameron, to Mr Murdoch's arselicker-in-chief, Mr Jeremy Hunt and to interest flagging in the doings of Mr Nigel Fruitcake and his  NutKipper Party.

And it's over now to our Northern correspondent, ishmael smith, ishmael what's your take on this?

Take on what?

On the search for the four missing yachtsmen.

Oh, them. 'Slike polo, isn't it?

Isn't what?

Yachting, it's like polo.  It's for layabouts, it's for people with too much money, or access to other people with too much money.  It's for people with nothing better to do.  Fuck 'em.  I don't care about them, let 'em fucking drown,  they don't give a fuck about me. why've I gotta be wound-up, all over again, about some buncha pricks who can't even sail a boat properly. What, I'm supposed to piss myself because some cunt's mummy loves him, or his sister? And anyway, the North Atlantic's no place for a fucking yacht, not unless you gotta a ten-thousand ton ship tied on the back, that you can jump into. I went across it in a six thousand ton tramp steamer and it was like a fucking rowing boat.  Ya ever see those waves, Huw, close-up?  They're like fucking cathedrals crashing down on top of you, you never seen anything so big, so fuck-off powerful. Davy Jones's locker, me 'earties, that's the place for them; full fathom five, my father lies, and his bones they are of coral made...

You what...??

It's Shakespeare, Huw, the Tempest, I think.

Shakespeare???  What's Shakespeare gotta do with it, look you.   This a real life human drama, here, with these four blokes.  And their families.

Ah,  their families.

And what's that supposed to mean, eh, Ah, their families.  Something wrong with families, is there, boyo?

Not something.

What, then?

Everything. 
 Everything's wrong with families,  the cradle of racism, the family;  the crucible of insanity, mothers'n'fathers;  they fuck you up, your mum and dad.  Never mind, Huw, you wouldn't understand , you're only a filthcaster. And your chosen filth subject is Are these blokes dead or not? Well I don't know but Oscar Testosterone is in the loonybin for a month, before they let him off the charge of trollopkilling, so there's no trial,  and nobody gives a fuck, now, about the Malayan airline, so I suppose this is a good bit of filth to have happened along.  That bloke won't be able to believe his luck.

What bloke?

That bloke, professor of upturned yachtology studies, the geezer from Southampton University,  

 

needle-in-a-haystacking, that bloke.  I betya he thought he'd had his fifteen minutes of fame and now, less than a month later, here he is again, talking shite, currents and wind speed, like he knew something when the only reason he's there is because they need a titled talking head.  Richard Branson, he was on, too, hissing and stuttering about his various founderings and crashes.

Sir Richard Call-Me-Sir-Richard Branson, 
unusually staying afloat for a few minutes.

and some of his many rescue scenarios

Well be that as it may, ishmael, is there any sign of a liferaft up there, on your shore?

On my shore?  No, just  the seals.

But I suppose there could be, I suppose it might eventually drift up there,  they're great blokes, these sailors, everybody says so.

You mean their families say so. Not only my son but my best friend, too, was it?

Well, their families and two hundred thousand twitterers.

Yeah, exactly, two hundred thousand Twitterers. Is that how things now happen, through Twitter, is that how the US Coastguard is to manage itself?  Fuck me, Jesus, Huw, fuck me Jesus;  good thing we didn't have Twitter at the time of D-Day.

Well that was ishmael smith for us there on the Atlantic shore giving us the latest on this breaking story of the four wotsanames, missing presumed alive by their families and dead by the US Coatsguard and I'm joined now here in the studio by that well-known ventriloquism act, Drs Gerry McCann and Cilla.  Gerry, what do you and your dummy make of all this.

Well, clearly, Huw, and lessbeclear about this, clearly, we are doctors and we are  the victims here but putting that aside, Cilla and I are clearly prepared to fly down there, in the First Class(Grieving) cabin, to the Caribbean with some of our highly professional drinking companions, liars of the greatest integrity,  and trample all over the crime scene, refuse to answer any questions and blame the local police for kidnapping the yacht and sinking it.  What do you think, Cilla?

Gottle-a-geer, gottle-a-geer.

There's a good little scouse git, I mean girl. And I'd just like to mention, while I'm here, Huw, that Cilla and I are, as all right-thinking people believe, entirely innocent of neglecting liddle wotsername in any way at all and viewers can still send us just three pounds a week to keep us out of jail, I mean to help us in our search for wotsername, whatever it is.  Like those missing yachtsmen, she is out there somewhere.  Isn't that right, Cilla?

Gottle-a-geer, gottle-a-geer.

SUN ARISE. 
BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

 These daily images, of eighty-year olds going into court distress me a bit.  In a way it's OK, you know, for richer for poorer, for better for worse but in another way it's a bit creepy, punitive, the walk of shame they call it on Cruelty TeeVee, it's a bit like putting people in the stocks.  There ought to be a discreet, private entrance to the courts, at least until people are convicted, especially old, old married people.

mr vincent was saying here that Rolf Harris being a beast was particularly shocking.  I know what he meant even though it doesn't shock me.  Some aspects of childhood, ephemera, really, for no readily discernible reason, remain more vivid than others, as though they happened yesterday and I remember - I cannot remember where or with whom - seeing, on a new-fangled teevee set, in 1957, a children's programme called Mick and Montmorency,  a big guy and a little guy, Charlie Drake was the little guy, I don't know the other player but there was a regular guest star, an eccentrically comic turn, he did things like draw an octopus on his hand, dangle the hand in a bowl of water, wriggle the fingers and talk like an octopus.  


The octopus impersonator was Rolf Harris and at the age of six or seven I found him distinctly creepy, if that was entertainment it was a talent I didn't want to have.

I subsequently found the rest of his skillset equally creepy - the double-tracked voicings of Sun Arise, his first pop hit;  the wobble board and the didgeridoo,  the painting,  the version of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, bad enough by that gang of noncing plagiarists, infinitely worse by this stage Aussie, beardy, kids entertainer.  And then there was the showbiz-veterinary shit, Animal Hospital, wasn't it?  Always gimme the heeby-jeebies, did Rolf, always.

I am not shocked, therefore, to hear that he abused his counterfeit, showbiz stature in the ways that those people do.  To digress, momentarily, from Rolfing, I have, in passing,  read, over the years that the Beatles' performing tours were, in their own words, like Fellini's Satyricon; that the Rolling Stones' tours were worse, darker, more humiliating for female fans than were the Beatles' high-jinx and that the afore-mentioned Led Zeppelin behaved in ways that the Romans would've found depraved beyond belief.  
There weas also a blatantly beastly so-called Supergroup, Blind Filth, containing at least two heroin adicts, and they displayed a frightful paedo sensitivity, but then they were brilliant musicians, like Rolf Harris.


BLIND FAITH: 
WINWOOD, GRECH, BAKER AND CLAPTON

AND THEIR EPONYMOUS ALBUM COVER

She was eleven, old enough, eh?

I wonder if Time will ever stand still long enough to see if these demi-Gods, too, might have visited their starry greatness on the under-aged, might face charges; if McCartney or Jagger or Plant and members of their entoureages might, instead of being feted and soireed and honoured by pimp presidents and criminal prime ministers, find themselves in the dock.

FAB MOPSTERS WITH LEADING DJ.

GOLDEN GOD WITH
WHOLE LOTTA  YOUNG LOVE

Harris, anyway, as far as I know, has all but admitted at least one set of serious sexual offences  and faces many other, lesser ones.

  I say lesser because they are lesser in the eyes of the law, they attract lesser penalties but if you ask anyone who has been molested by a clergyperson they will tell you that the word lesser has no place in the conversation and some of those who allege assault and molestation by Harris claim that their lives were irreparably damaged, devastatingly derailed as much by the fact of the offence as by its gravity,  the beast's gross and - to the victim - truly, fundamentally, 


 That Queen Brenda, what's she like?
She gives these to any old slag.

shattering violation of trust is, in my view, deserving of as severe a penalty as are those offences of penetration, perversion and aberration which we deem more serious. The breaking of trust between the powerful and the weak can only breed delinquence in the victim.

But I am uneasy at seeing an old lady, perhaps herself image-manipulated by showbiz handlers, tottering daily into court, before the filthsters' assembled cameras.  She has few blossom times remaining to her, few, if any and her final days should not be such as these.  If Harris, himself, will not spare her this grim ritual, then he has grown creepier now than my seven-year old self could ever imagine.