The Sunday Ishmael 15/05/2022

I don't know  why they bother with the appalling pop songs and the sparkly outfits. Each entry might as well be a reading of the local telephone directory set to a hand bell chorus for all the difference it  makes to the voting. Did I tell you about the time I watched Eurovision with Olga, the sturdy blonde Estonian whose hobby was dressing in medieval armour and swashbuckling with chums of a similar propensity whilst photographing themselves? Well, Olga, who was staying with us at the time, insisted on watching Eurovision. Mr ishmael went and sat in the conservatory whilst Olga carefully explained to me the alliances and likely voting patterns of the various nations, particularly the Eastern European ones. So, the fact that we haven't won Eurovision since God was a boy has nothing to do with our dire taste in music, but the fact that the Europeans  never liked us. Null pointes. Now that we have come second - does this mean that we are liked because we have supported plucky little Ukraine or because we have started the crumbling apart of Europe? Ukraine won, by the way. Quelle surprise!

Scotland, the Racist Part of England

 

Sheku Bayou died on the 3rd May 2015, in Kirkcaldy.  Two police officers responded to 999 calls that a man was seen, drunk or high and carrying a knife. It's the usual high drama, sirens, shouting, vehicles skidding to a halt. The man no longer has a knife and is walking away but the police do not let this deter them from their public duty. Two more officers arrive, batons and pepper spray are wielded, Sheku is knocked to the ground, more officers arrive - nine in total. A witness sees six officers kneeling and lying across Sheku, 31 years old and the father of two children. His feet and hands are bound as he lies dying on the pavement. He is pronounced dead in hospital ninety minutes later. He had sustained 23 separate injuries.

Sheku with his sons

Kirkcaldy, population approx 60,000, is in Fife, on Scotland's east coast. The 2011 census shows that 97% of Kirkcaldy's residents were white and 1% were black.
Later that day, Sheku's sister, Kadi, was visited by police to inform her of her brother's death.She said: "At first they told me he'd been found on the ground. Then they said they were looking for two men. Eventually, after talking to their boss, they told me there had been a forceful arrest, and he'd died on the way to hospital. We just couldn't get a straight answer out of them."

No police officers have been charged. Kadi  has led a relentless campaign which has finally, seven years after Sheku's death, resulted in a public inquiry, chaired by Lord Bracadale.

Bracadale, in his working clothes.

Bracadale's remit is to examine the circumstances leading up to the incident, the following management process and investigation into the death and the role that Sheku's ethnicity played in his death.

Interviewed by Martin Geissler this morning, Kadi  stated that she considers Scotland to be racist and that she does not feel safe. The police kill your brother, then lie about it and cover it up - of course you won't feel safe. Best keep those Kirkcaldy police away from Kirkwall's harbour-front pubs of a Saturday night - all the blokes are staggering-pished. No, wait - they are all white, so they'll be fine. 

 

Aamer Anwar is representing the family.  “Over the years, it has become clear to the family that the police, the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner, and the Crown Office has operated an unholy trinity of dishonesty, racism and incompetence, betraying the word justice,” he told a press conference.
 

Sounds about right. Thing is, the institutions of a country reflect the attitudes and prejudices of that country. Statista Research Department reported that there were just under 1.8 thousand racist crime offences recorded by the police in Scotland in the 2020/21 reporting year. And that doesn't include the crimes they commit themselves. Or the crimes that aren't reported.
Smart, Successful, Racist Scotland, population 5,466,000. Is Scotland racist? Hell, yes. They don't like the English, either.

mr ishmael harboured no illusions about the police, as you know. Here's a little piece from the drafts:

 

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. THE FILTH-O-GRAPH, 31-1-2011

 Police used CS spray on protesters at an anti-tax avoidance demo today after an activist was arrested while pushing leaflets into an outlet of Boots. Officers detained a woman on suspicion of causing criminal damage during a sit-in demonstration at the store in Oxford Street, central London.  Demonstrators said she simply bent the rubber seal between the doors of the premises as she attempted to force leaflets through.  As officers arrested her, a confrontation took place during which a member of the police deployed CS spray against a small group.  Three people were taken to hospital for treatment following the incident, London Ambulance Service said.  Scotland Yard confirmed that CS spray had been used to disperse protesters during the arrest, which took place shortly after 2.30pm.  After the incident, nearby shop Ben's Cookies handed out milk for those affected to douse their eyes with.  Activists from campaign group Uncut added that staff from Boots - the focus of the demo - gave them free eye wash.

Well, sir, I was proceeding in an orderly fashion down Oxford Street with a patrol of heavily armoured  friendly neighborhood beat officers when, acting upon intelligence, we noticed some young people - and we know how dangerous young people are to the govament, don't we, sir - we noticed some young people pushing paper leaflets under the door of Messrs Boots the Chemists, sir. Quickly perceiving that these were paper leaflets and that these people were protesters, legally protesting about the taxation arrangements of some very respectable business gents I had no alternative but to order my men to gas them and if necessary set about them with items of security apparatus. Yes, sir, big sticks, and boots and fists. Some of them we arrested for causing criminal damage with the paper leaflets and removed them to the police station for further beatings, I mean interrogation. One and the same thing, sir? Oh, I don't think so, sir, not now that we have the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which stipulates quite clearly that when we are beating people or crushing their testicles the cameras  must be clearly switched off. I mean, sir, we can't have people going around protesting about things, can we now, sir? So I think, sir, what with the upsurge in so-called protest,  we might all come to call CS gas  Democracy's truest friend, the rubber bullets, too.

Egypt, sir? yes I believe it s what they do in Egypt but we are a long way from Egypt here. Move along now, please, or I shall have to call in the army.

 

On the Sophie Show today, Jeremy Cunt (Charterhouse and Magdalen College, Oxford) impressed with his determination  to avoid all Sophe's questions and to single-mindedly promote his book, with the catchy title: Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS.

Jeremy  was Health Secretary from 2012-2018, during which time he made a right cock-up of the NHS. In February 2016 he was polled as the most disliked frontline British politician.

Sophe: Are you in the running for the Prime Minister's job, Mr. Cunt?

Jeremy: I would not rule out a return to Front-Bench Politics, but I'm here to talk about my book. In which I say none of that was my fault. “It was not about rogue staff or a rogue hospital. It was about a rogue system. A rogue system that I, as health secretary, sat at the top of.”

 

Jeremy is the current chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee - certainly not one of the great offices of state - and a pro-European. Arse-licker in chief to Call Me Dave Cameron according to mr ishmael. Cunt's book seeks to explain how and why he was not able to turn the NHS into an efficient, transparent, affordable health care system. It was everyone else's fault, of course. I particularly liked this quotation: “Too often managers who had failed were recycled to jobs in a different part of the country, where they continued to make the same mistakes. ” That probably explains the phenomenon of Ministers of State fucking up one job after another, as they flit about, hither and yon, in each Cabinet re-shuffle.

 

Obituary Corner: 

Dennis WATERMAN  (24 February 1948 – 8 May 2022)

Dennis Waterman died of lung cancer in Spain on the 8th May 2022. He had been married four times:

• Penny Dixon (1967–1976)
• Patricia Maynard (1977–1987),
• Rula Lenska (1987–1998)
• Pam Flint (November 2011–2022

Waterman's marriage to Rula Lenska ended because of his violent behaviour towards her. In March 2012, he commented: "It's not difficult for a woman to make a man hit her. She certainly wasn't a beaten wife, she was hit and that's different."

PUSSY WATCH. WITH UNCLE GEORGE AND HIS  WONDERHAT OF ETERNAL YOUTH. ishmael smith 5/03/2016

From the Filth-O-Graph clickbait section

Rula Lenska flipped car with grandson, three, in back after shot of vodka with builders. Actress banned for 16 months after admitting drink-driving when she hit parked car after downing spirit with Polish builders to celebrate new fence.

(that's right, to celebrate a new fence; she'd be drunk for months should a new carpet arrive)

Rula Lenska!

My Pussy-Mummy! 
 

My Comrade! 

My Co-Star!

 One of my many co-stars on the long march to Celebrity.

And Freedom, of course.

 I salute your indefatigability! 

I salute your revolutionary pisshead-granny drunken driving  with a kid in the back heroism. 

 And we do, too. 
And Granny Rula is the real victim here. I mean let's face it, who hasn't,  at one time or another, got pissed and taken an unsecured infant  for a drunken spin and turned the car over. It's actually the sign of an excellent grandparent. And maybe the Metropolitan Police should be tasked with investigating the Wimbledon Magistrates Court, sounds like they've developed some very Portuguese practices down there.

Goddamn you, 
Wimbledon Magistrates Court!

 I love you, my flame-haired Polish princess! 

Goddamn you Dennis Waterman! 

Cor, take it easy, George, me ole china,

weren't me driving pissed, I carn't even see over the bleedin' steerin'wheel, can I, that's why me an' my guvnor, Jack Reagan, always 'ad drivers, in the Sweeney, like, for the chases. An' any road, she ain't achelly me trouble'n'strife no more. So you 'ave 'er, if you fink yer man enough. I know I fuckin' weren't. Mad Polack dipso.

You can't sing! You can't act. You are a worthless. unmusical hatless, beardless dwarf! 

Goddamn  you, Dennis Waterman!

I'll sue you, that's what I'll do. 

I'll sue your worthless dwarf arse.

Everybody knows I am the most artistic ex-parliamentarian, the heir to John Lennon, the revolutionary thinkers' Bob Dylan.

(sings, in guttural, hostile Glaswegian)

.........Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

(the phrase: I'm not the only one, is registered as being the intellectual property of Mr George the Hat. Although he very probably is.

The only one.) 

But you, you are just shit, Dennis Waterman.

You were unfit to be married to my fiery Polish Princess and co-star.

 I would marry her myself, 

if I wasn't already several times married.

And Goddamn you, Coronation Street.

 'Ey-up, chuck, howsabout we neck a few more large vodkas, load't gran'kids in't back't motor, like, and go fer a spin, down't smoke, like, round Wimbledon?

You people at Coronation Street, you're all women-hating homosexualists. It was you lot, Goddamn you, who led my Rula into the ways of the Infidel.  I, I, Imam George Mohamed el Hat, I  have never taken a drop of alcohol in my entire blameless life. 

And Goddamn you, David Cameron, I call on you, from here, from the true People's Parliament, here, in Studio Sputnik of the Democratic Russia Today TeeVee Network, 

 

I call on you to end these show trials, to close these kangaroo courts, and without delay, Goddamn you, to appoint me to sit as Allah's Stipendiary Magistrate with two or three of my eminent Muslim brethren.  We'll show you what true justice means.

  

And tell me, brother, are there enough stones lying around the streets of London for us to administer proper justice to the filthy adulterous whore bitches?

Fucked if I know, pal. 

I only travel by helicopter. 

London Transport's all clogged-up with nig-nogs.

ishmael smith 5/03/2016

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The third anthology of essays by ishmael smith, thinker, writer,  contrarian and originator of this blog, is approaching completion.

Editor mr verge's selection ranges from 2009-2019 and has an auto-biographical theme. We hear about young ishmael running away to sea: "I remember standing on her (the SS Ramore Head) plunging and soaring stern a thousand miles from anywhere, thinking, terrified and awestruck as I was - Fuck me, this is good." And the drinking years: Red, Red Wine. And the other substances years: The Carpet Horrors. And the time he worked in the library: "Some of the nicest people I have ever met worked in public libraries; when I worked in one of them, for a while, I felt that I became nicer.....I felt then and I feel now that going to the library makes everybody a bit nicer." And who but Ishmael pauses to question the ethics of the Orkney Stoat Eradication Plan: "No mate, yer fucked, its Zyklon B for you. It's the birds, they need Lebensraum. Wossat? No, mate, you don't need it just as much as they do......."

 

We are at the proof-reading stage - the blue cover as above will probably not be the final choice - after all, the blog dog usually graces the covers of the Ishmael canon.

Editor mr. verge has done his usual brilliant job of tidying, juxtaposing, contextualising and formatting the text. I'm very impressed, actually.

If you still haven't bought your copies of Honest Not Invent or Vent Stack, Amazon will help you out.

Evensong: Yoiking and other Northern-ness

 "The yoik is a unique form of cultural expression for the Sami people in the North of Sweden. The songs are not merely descriptive, but yearn to capture the subject in its living sense. It is not about something, it is that something. It does not begin and it does not end. Like the wind."

 

  Yoik of the Wind

As far as I can make out, the yoik is an evocative  melodic noise, without words. The performer here is Sofia, who describes her music as  "dancing somewhere between the mystic of the northern light and the warmth of the comforting fire. I am inspired by the vastness of the land, the people and the meetings between these elements."

 

And here is Erland Cooper's Simmer Dim:

  It's a bit noisy, a lot urgent - but the image compilation is amazing. Best viewed on full screen.

Erland Cooper is a  composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist originally from Stromness, Orkney. His work combines field recordings with classical orchestration and contemporary electronic elements.  He is credited with  the concept of psychogeography, connecting identity, memory, and place through music, words and cinematography.
He is known for burying the only existing copy of the master magnetic tape of his first classical album in Scotland, deleting all digital files and creating a treasure hunt of clues to aid the search for it. The tape has yet to be found.

The Simmer Dim is the twilight of the Northern Isles around midsummer. It doesn't get properly dark - just dim, from around midnight, until the full light starts up again a couple hours later.

The Sunday Ishmael 8/5/2022

So - the local elections - the politicians got in again. The Conservatives took a beating. Labour failed to convince the upNortherners. Do Not Take Eddie for Granted Davey is smiling his sly smile. Is Boris Bovvered? Hell, no. Not until his chaotic party manages to produce a credible alternative to satisfy the racist misogynists. And what happens in the local elections is just a reflection of the dissatisfaction, anger, nay fury of the electorate mid term and has nothing to do with whether anyone will take a punt on Labour again. Or the Dog Shooters. In the proper elections. That's what Dominic Raab said this morning on the Sophie Show. Or something like that. He's not worried, anyway. And he's not going to slag off Sir Keir for being a curry eater and beer drinker, just because Tories eat cheese and drink wine. Nope, Dom is focusing on The Eckonomy, stupid, the Cost of Living and Real People's Real Worries. Whatever they are.

As for Stormont, we need mr mongoose to give us a summary. Broad brushstrokes - Sin Fein (that's the pretend respectable political arm of the murderous IRA, with a cosy and reassuring female presence) is now the majority party in the devolved administration of Northern Ireland  and they will take up the business of governing, thus undercutting the DUP's (Democratic Unionist Party - the murderous Protestant lot) strike action in protest about the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was a fudge arrived at to prevent a border being imposed between Eire and Northern Ireland, in order to facilitate Britain exiting from Europe. Eire being a foreign country and a member state of Europe, the DUP see the Protocol as an insidious creepy way to unify Eire and Northern Ireland and bring the whole island into Europe. They are probably right. Basically, I don't care as long as nobody starts blowing stuff up again, torturing and killing people.

Poor old Sophie had a dreadful crew on her show this morning. The very, very worst was Steve Coogan, publicising his appalling Partridge creation. The next very worst was Do Not Take Eddie for Granted Davey, who was pretty damn pleased with himself as the electorate seems to have forgiven his party's murderous past. Then we had Lisa Nandy, Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Labour MP for Wigan  since 2010, doing a boring and repetitive apologia for Sir Beer and Curry, chortling about looking forward to getting into Gove's office and sorting out his little messes and not, absolutely not, being drawn on which Northern female might become Party Leader once Sir Beer and Curry has been hung, drawn and evicted. 

Why do Labour Totties refuse to look like serious, grown up politicians? 

Lisa needs to get a bigger suit and a haircut, 

Growler really, really needs to buy some longer skirts, 

and as for Gloria de Piero, in her slapper red dress, who read out some news headlines for Sophe, whilst flashing her Deep, Dark Growler of Doom at the camera operative, 

one can only be grateful that she is no longer in the House to distract our Boris. No, she is now a presenter on GBNews. I tried to watch GBN, but was immediately confronted and appalled by the transformation of Neil Oliver. Now there's a man who really needs a script, flattering camera angles and multiple takes to make any kind of sense.

Remember him? Described by mr ishmael as "The grinning, hairy, Jock hobgoblin, Neil Oliver, whining his way around the Coast or through mediaeval Scotland, like a Kosher Billy Connolly."

Rock-God archaeologist staring moodily into the past.

 He has now, for some unfathomable reason, been given his own show on GBN, where he mumbles his way through interviews and opinion pieces, displaying his Old Testament beard and scarf. He seems to have developed a scarf fetish.

Or has something gone horribly wrong with his neck? Has he grown a few additional chins, dewlaps, or turkey neck? 

Given the aging demographic of the nation, maybe it is time to re-introduce the ruff

 or wimple. Wrap up all the extra neck and tie it in a knot on top of one's head, then drape something over that. 

Or pop on a beanie hat.

Whilst South on my hols, taking advantage of the English habit of afternoon tea which does not involve haggis, black pudding and chips followed by homebakes I spotted on the menu: frangipane tart with seasonal berries.

Intriguing, I thought. Seasonal berries. In March. In Yorkshire. What horticultural miracle could this be? So I asked the waitress what were the seasonal berries? She thought for a moment, then pronounced triumphantly: Rhubarb. 

 WOTSONTELLY - Noisy Wimmin, THAT'S WHAT.

 

Did you see Davina McCall's Myth, Menopause, Mind, Magic,Sex, Me on a bicycle with a great big placard?

 You missed it? What a shame. You'll be able to catch up with it on the i-thing or it will be repeated for the next few hundred years. You may remember Davina for her sterling work as a Garnier Brand Ambassador - that is she advertises box dyes for home use:

Looks like she is now promoting Big Pharma's medicalisation of the Menopause. There's big money to be made from convincing women that they are suffering from a deficiency disease that causes brain fog, night sweats, hot flushes, anxiety, loss of libido and, ultimately, Alzheimer's. And that Big Pharma has the solution in the form of oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone, clinically packaged, expensive and addictive. Still won't make you young, fertile and desirable, though, however many patches you slap on. And the damn artificial hormones are polluting the environment as they seep into the water table through menopausal women's pee. We have previously mentioned here the hermaphrodite fish swimming around sewage outlet pipes. And the strange phenomenon of young men going bald.

Yes, like all women who are lucky enough to survive long enough to get there, I had a menopause of my own to manage. Here are my recommendations: supplement with Agnus Castus during the peri-menopause. Then switch to black cohosh or red clover with a vitamin supplement. And read Germaine Greer's The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause  Greer describes the myths about menopause: "Frightening females is fun", she wrote in 2002. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She added that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable".

 Take that, Davina.

She's got a great face, though, Davina, one of those hard, bony, intellectual, androgynous faces. Like Suranne Jones. Who is ont 'telly again in series two of Gentleman Jack. Compulsory viewing for me of course - my weekly blue remembered hills fix.  Just a reminder, from mr ishmael, of how much he loathed it. It hasn't changed - 

 A TENDENCY TO CORRUPT AND DEPRAVE (3/6/2019)

mrs ishmael played in Shibden Hall as a child, living just across the road from it in Halifax.  We must, therefore, here in the manse, endure each weekly broadcast of  Gentleman Jack. 
I say we but when it's on I go and sit in the garden conservatory and watch the sea; even so, I  can hear the thwacks and thumps and screams as one savage beating after another is administered to some poor peasant or tenant, followed by the slurps and sighs and moans of lesbian sex between the participants. 

Based very loosely on the massive, encoded diary of Ann Lister, which we have on the shelves*, here,  the show portrays the bravery of an 1830's polymath manlady stepping-in to run the Yorkshire family estate and doing it just like Annie Oakley, better'n  any Goddamned male sonofabitch.
 Interspersed with an irritatingly jaunty and risque SteeleyeSpanesque folkrock soundtrack,  Lister's and her protagonists' scripts are laughably, impossibly cogent, concise and eloquent; the costumes, make-up and props outrageously anachronistic and the outdoor settings so romantically bucolic that they might've been painted by John Constable. No business like showbusiness. 
Introduced by a breathless, pouting BBC announcer, Gentleman Jack is sadism and titillation, extravagantly produced, overacted and overblown;
if that's what you like  just google lesbian porn and you'll find something altogether more agreeable. 

Anne Lister of Shibden Hall

*Anne Lister's  journals contain more than four million words, around a sixth of them in a code based on the Greek alphabet, which she called “crypthand.”  After her death in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia in 1840, Ann Walker, having arranged for Lister’s body to be embalmed and returned to the north of England for burial,  concealed the 26 diary volumes behind a panel in the walls of Shibden Hall. They stayed there until the late nineteenth century, when one of the inheritors of the hall, with an antiquarian friend, began to publish extracts from the uncoded sections and to decode the crypthand passages. Their discovery that   the journals contained what they called “an intimate account of homosexual practices between Miss Lister and her many ‘friends’”  horrified the two men, and they replaced the books in their hiding place. The hall became a public museum in 1934, and Lister’s papers, including a key to the code, became public property.

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Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased  from Amazon or from Lulu. 

 

Lulu Link for Vent Stack:

https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Lulu Link for Honest, Not Invent

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html

Link for Paper Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html

At checkout, try PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or 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.

So far, so good.

 

 

The Ginger Growler - or Outrageous Slur Revisited

 

Ginger marmalade

Mr Northern Speaker assured us that when he had uncovered the originator of the appalling, misogynist allegation against Growler Rayner there would be Consequences.
He was Egged on by Growler, who stated in the Tweetosphere that she was a victim of “sexism and misogyny”.

“I stand accused of a ‘ploy’ to ‘distract’ the helpless PM – by being a woman, having legs and wearing clothes,” Rayner said. She accused Johnson’s allies of “resorting to spreading desperate, perverted smears in their doomed attempts to save his skin”. “He and his cheerleaders clearly have a big problem with women in public life. They should be ashamed of themselves. I won’t be letting their vile lies deter me. Their attempts to harass and intimidate me will fail.” 

Now that you have uncovered the originator of the  outrageous slur that Ginger Rayner displayed her Ginger Growler in a vain attempt to distract the happily married Prime Minister, what Consequences will you visit upon the Right Honorable Deputy Leader, Mr Northern Speaker?

Talk about Black Ops.

 

Note - not being conversant with northern factory slang, I had to consult the Urban Dictionary for the definition of growler.