THE THINGS THEY SAY. RUSSELL LUVVIE ON THE BURDENS OF GREATNESS.

Bullyboy prima donna playactor, Russell Crowe, has spoken out in defence of his fellow lout, Mr Jeremy Fuckhead. Listen, he told the PBC, I know all about long days, and if Jeremy's been out there all day, giving it everything and all he wants in return is some hot food at the end of it, well you can understand him feelin' like he did. Right, darling Russ, just a bit of hot food. And a million pounds a year, plus.

Russ went on to say that maybe Jerry Fuckhead's victim had a bit of a point, maybe there were two sides to the story -even though there aren't - but Top Gear, after all, IS Jeremy Fuckhead. And that's what counts. There we are, the view from luvvieland, superior beings, abusing and assaulting their  inferiors. Such hard work, darling, tyranny; the little people simply don't understand.

Crowe, thus far, has managed to buy his way out of bullying behaviours which would see most of us behind bars. They call it Hell-raising, don't they, the showbiz equivalent of the Bullingdon Boys. Clarkson, though, is sufficiently fucked-up and self-destructive to kill someone;  his recent drunken tirade at one of those fuck-awful charity shows portrayed a man some distance from reality - the PBC, he ranted,  by having the nerve to investigate his disgusting behaviour was ruining a great show. The truth, though, is that since his nigger remark Clarkson has been doing his best to get himself sacked. And who could  blame him, who in their right mind would want to be in a ridiculous, never-ending pantomime with televisual rubbish like May and Hammond, widely adored by Neanderthals, a poster-boy for sclerotic, red-faced masturbators; drooling like a teenager over some scrawny Hollywood baggage;  a fifty-five year old, cast as Dennis the Menace

If the PBC does find the nerve to sack him it will  be one of its rare examples of public service and will also be doing Clarkson, himself, a great favour; he wouldn't like jail, which is where he was heading.

It remains to be seen whether or not the police will investigate this matter, they may, of course, like darling Russell, take the view that it's OK. for great men to kick the servants up and down the hall.

EVENSONG, COME ON, GIMME SOME OF THAT NOVOCAINE. SETTING THE BLUEGRASS ON FIRE. Dave Rawlings & Gillian Welch - Sweet Tooth

He says he can't, on his own, play worth a damn and it is true he is no Richard Thompson; even so, I wish I could think the way David Rawlings plays, in perfect dissonance; notes which played by another would jangle, ring so true, so pretty on his old Epiphone. This is an homage to John Hurt's Candy Man, maybe a meditation on addiction and for those with a liking for the bluegrass and the jugband, a lot of fun. Much of what they do, these two, is sombre, elegiacal, that Presbyterian Ulster-Scot via Appalachia stuff, which so coloured Brother, Where Art Thou? - Death and More Death, and Mourning, Sorrow and Guilt and more Death, sitting by graves, singing to their occupants; this, laughing in the face of Life and Death, is different, pure good-time, foot-stomping, couldn't-give-a-fuck Americana.

WOTSONTELLY. A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MIND.

It is an effete, comfortable form of anarchy, here, where I live.

 As in Ishmaelia, there are just  understandings; no rules, no community terms and conditions; I just assume that people who have found their way here will, whatever else they do, conduct themselves properly, and they do. It is Quentin Crisp's axiom, the one about the grace of good manners versus the tyranny of etiquette, which guides me on.

There is  a pair  of apartments on the top floor which are used, decreasingly, as holiday lets.  They were there when we came  and are very useful for accommodating - and distancing - visiting friends and family enemies; they are let only occasionally to people who have been coming every year, in whose  lives they have become a fixture which I do not care to disturb;  people have repaired their marriages here, educated their children in the elements and in the Stone Age and in the flora and fauna; some, alone now, bereaved, come with sisters or grandchildren, pilgrims to a place of happier days, vanished now but memorialised and fleetingly revived  by place;  they can visit until everything is no longer.

Even there, in the apartments,  a semi-public space, there are no chiding little laminated books of rules about rubbish and lights and baths and heaters;  if people can drive five hundred miles, traverse Inverness, Sutherland and the Badlands of Caithness it is safe enough, I think, to let them get on with things as adults;  unless they are eight Chinese students, in which case they should be beaten and killed and buried in the garden, well, seven of them, anyway.

And so it is that we are untramelled, also, household-wise;  mrs ishmael does what she does and I do what I do, each to our abilities - hers greater than mine - and our needs to be doing, some of it drudgery, some of it projects of imagination and tricky execution and it all happens without negotiation or contract.  

It is the same with diversion and distraction. In the mornings she will listen to the local, PBC Radio Abo, it is unimaginably hateful to me - cod accents, stagey linguistic anachronism and  that hissing,  Presbyterian bigotry and racism,  the moral compassing of the amoral Gordon Snot, that sort of snooty, son of the Manse preachiness -  and the English on that show  are even worse, they all sound like David and Ruth Archer, relentless, sinister bullies, determinedly earnest and sanctimonious, people Living the Quality of Life Dream, living in a hovel, with a rusty Land-Rover, vile children and a couple of sickly goats which they should be banned from keeping.  They all go back South, these people, lacking the inner resources required for island life, vulnerable beyond the fortifications of the M25 and the M42. The Radio Orkney news is generally along the lines of There's a big puddle on the road to Stromness; sheep  are fetching X poonds at the mart; for the fourteenth year in succession, Mrs Annie Scragg has won the neeps'n'tatties pie-making competition at the Mucksville Women's Guild; fairmers have expressed concern aboot the geese annoying the coos and eatin' the seed and the weather is set to be sunny, windy, wintry, fine, warm, very cold with sleet  and snow, calm with gale force winds.

I have felt and seen hypodermic needles injecting anaesthetic into my eyeballs and so I know of what I speak when I say I would rather stick pins in my eyes than listen to Radio Orkney

 The evening show is worse;  they have music on it, local music. I saw it once, in a community hall, that Jimmy Shand Polka music;  I thought, not for the first time, that I had wandered into a horror film; there was a skeletal old woman, must've been eighty, thumbing away, deftly,  at a huge Fender Precision bass guitar, a wee fat man wrestling with one of those fucking awful Hohner piano-keyed accordions, not a concertina, a big, shiny fuck-off thing, the only appropriate setting for which is in an Austrian Nazi oom-pah band - quite how that is traditional to the Northern Isles I'm buggered if I know - and there was a weedy teenager, snapping a Polka beat from a tiny wee snare drum.  It is a matter of taste, of course but I  enjoy many, many types of music, from all over the world and have even heard some amazing world  music right here and yet I couldn't find a space in my mind for this stuff. I couldn't move, I felt as though I had been turned to lead.

She doesn't listen to that show, the evening one, mrs ishmael but the morning one, the horse and cart technology of PBC local radio stations,  is part of her daily routine which occurs in her bathroom, her sewing room, sometimes in the laundry but away, at any rate, from me;  it is usually a background to her tasks and just as long as me and Harris don't have to hear it there is no disagreement.

It is the same with breakfast TeeVee, Harris and I don't watch it, never have but mrs ishmael has it on with her breakfast, in the kitchen. They could be broadcasting the Second Coming but I turn nothing on until mid-day, at the earliest. I think it indecent, mass shit media before lunch, and deleterious to the mental health.

I remember when it started, TV AM, a vanity project for some of the vilest, vainest, greediest, most disloyal  people in showbusiness, 

Hello, good morning and goodbye.

 David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Robert Kee, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford, even Esther Rantzen was slated to ship with this ghastly crew, dropping-out only because she was pregnant. it was to be home to star presenters who were also the stations directors, owners and managers, a beacon of televisual brilliance.  Some of them were quickly replaced, for a time by the dreadful Jonathan Spanker Aitken, and it was only when all of these  arsepeople had left or been removed that TV AM and Good Morning Britain started to make any money at all. The BBC, originally behind whatever the curve is, actually stole a march on TV AM, settling quite quickly into that hideous and worthless sofa show which remains an excresence on the face of every TeeVee morning.  I have never watched it, anyway, and the fact that mrs ishmael does is just something I don't think about.

This morning, however, as Harris and I were meditating on the coming day, 
 
mrs ishmael burst into the room and without permission or preamble turned-on the telly. It's the eclipse programme, they're having an eclipse, she said, dashing back to her toast.  Within seconds I was struggling to make the accursed remote control work and yelling at the TeeVee, as was she, in the kitchen.  Did you hear what they said? we both enquired, as we collided in the hall. They said It is a huge battle between two cosmic giants.  Stupid fucking bastards. Yeah, I know, that's what they said. I can't listen to that shit. No, nor can I, but it's always like that, that's why I don't watch it, doesn't need to be a fucking eclipse for Breakfast TeeVee to be shit.  

She went off to work then, anyway, and before I could smack and punch the remote control into operation I heard some professor of astronomy from the University of his Garden Shed, I heard him say,  there on the telly, in front of everybody, Do you know what, we simply cannot underestimate enough how important these events were to ancient peoples.  I don't care how many degrees and doctorates this bloke has, this is the statement of a fucking imbecile and there was a time when someone like Huw Welshman would have tactfully corrected it, A slip of the tongue, there, children, look you, isn't it, from Professor Gob, he of course meant to say overestimate, not underestimate, slip of the tongue, could happen to anyone, isn't it. But we don't want you going back to school confused about over- and underestimated.  That time, when the BBC cared about qualities and values more precious than ratings, is no more.

Funny how the most pompous of TeeVee's ambassadors turned out to be nothing more than  greedy vulgarians - Jon Sox, Michael Grade, Belbin Bagg, Michael Parkinson and David Frost. 

 And nation shall speak shite unto nation, that is their contribution, 
their motto, their epitaph 
and their requiem mass.

FOR, LO, THE WINTER IS PAST.

 

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; 

 

 

the time of singing has come, 

and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;

 

Song of Solomon 2, vs 11 & 12

 King James Bible.

 

EVENSONG. THE PHATT BOLLARDS. I GIVE ALL MY MONEY TO MILLIONAIRES AND I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

L, AS THE NEW PEOPLE SAY, OL

THE PRIME MINISTER'S FRIEND. retrieved by mrs woman on a raft

Seeking a new role in presenting his friend, the prime minister's, immigration policy, Mr Jeremy Fuckhead today announced the view from New Cotswoldia, the Gloucestershire home of organised crime.

NO NIGGERS, NO SLOPES, NO IRISH CUNTS.

Yes, my children adore him, said the unelected prime minister, Mr David Fuckhead. My wife adores him and I adore him. And never mind investigations, the BBC shouild just reinstate him. If they know what's good for them.

It wasn't Eton but Jeremy Fuckhead went to a perfectly acceptable public school  and is, therefore, quite clearly entitled to do, what's that phrase, yes, thank you, mr jgm2, exactly what he fucking wants.  Yes, and fuck everybody else. I mean, where would we be if we tried to live in a coherent and just society?

 And look,  lessbeclear, calling one of the lower orders an Irish cunt and punching him in the face is just the sort of thing which made this country great. All the children of Irish immigrants here will agree that it never did them any harm. Well, alright then, their mothers may have come home in tears but let's be honest, who cares about that? And quite frankly, lessbeclear,   the niggers and the Irish have had quite enough special treatment, on the backs of intelligent and hard-working white people; the sooner we see more talented people like Mr Fuckhead telling it like it is, the better. 

Andrew Mitchell? 

Never heard of him

DOWN TO BRASS TAX, A COMMENT OVERFLOW.

I do try to respond to those gracious enough to join these commentaries, often I agree with what is said, often I do not; in either case, however, I am grateful for the discourse, the fellowship and the provocation.

I did try to respond to the later comments on the last thread, yesterday but cramming them into the accursed Blogger window, on the accursed i-thing, I lost them. The bulk of the thread initiated, I think, by ms lilith and echoed by mr jgm2,concerned private education, moved to the enquiries into historical paedophilia, sidetracking into mr richard's, non-statist perception of the NHS, in Ulster. Those repsosnes are  amalgamated from memory, here, below, for those who are still interested.

The average  person  has fewer than two legs and  although many  would bridle at that information, it is clearly accurate and is a caution to us when we confuse average with normal. The average contribution, however, made by employed adults to the NHS, via their National Insurance deductions  is, by the simple use of long division,  easier to calculate and understand and amounts to  just short of £800 per year.  

Conventional cancer treatment costs £35,000 per year; dialysis costs £750 per week and a liver transplant £70,000; ante-natal appointments cost a couple a couple of hundred pounds whilst a normal delivery costs £2-3,000 and a caesarian section consideraby more;  a broken leg can cost £3,000 and the long-term, twenty-four hour home  care of disabled people can cost in excess of £100,000 per year, for decades; hip and knee replacements cost £6-10,00).  GP appointments are variously calculated but an average cost would be around £40 per visit;  many patients do not pay directly for prescriptions arising from such  appointments and these can be costly and repeated. Diabetes is presently manageable but incurable and incurs  life-long costs of medication, equipment, monitoring and often, even among patients with a well-controlled condition, the expensive treatment of complications.  It may be the case, sometimes, that obesity, drink and indolence trigger diabetes, although in some cases, my own, for instance, it occurs spontaneously in otherwise healthy patients  and/or, as in my case, where there is a genetic predisposition.

The wider costs of public health, include post-natal care, school nurses, PE and games, clean water, the dentist, clean air, a health and safety structure, a national veterinary system, a food inspectorate,  widespread vaccination programmes,  the safety of transport systems, vehicles and roads and the construction and policing of same;  the safety of buildings generally,  the integrity of sewage systems, of sports and leisure facilities and of the workplace - from which everyone alive benefits. It is clear, even to Reason's staunchest doubters, that our health and safety are contingent upon massive state investment in an encyclopaedic range of  structures, measures, facilities, regulations and personnel and that, therefore, the £800 per year contribution, nominally ascribed to  health care is preposterously inadequate, insufficient to pay for even our useage of the NHS, never mind all the other stuff which keeps us safe.

mr richard, in his last comment, on the previous thread, said, inter alia:

..... Round our way a four to eight hour wait in casualty is not unusual but a private medical policy, costing less than your N.I., gets you seen straight away. By the same doctor. ......richard on SID FARAGE TO SUCCEED CLARKSON IN TOP QUEER.

And so it may, this private medical policy, help jump a tiresome queue but it won't do anything else, certainly will not improve the health infrastructure, in fact  misuses, parasitically,  a resource - the trained doctor and probably premises and facilities - long ago paid for by the taxpayer and is adding-to rather than decreasng waiting times.

BigMed, in the form of the BMA and the medical colleges owns many or most in the legislature,  a gathering of criminals which, itself, like many doctors, insists on the right to neglect its prime task but  to use that position to facilitate the doing of  private work at public expense. Jack Straw, sitting in his office, pimping his arse,  is like your average, whoreson  private surgeon.

A minimum condition of ishmaelia joining a coalition government would be that those practicing private medicine be immediately stripped of citizenship, of all national rights and privileges and permanently deported to any of those  what we call  third world countries which would accept them, there to work, unpaid, for the rest of their days; their assets nationalised and their families set to work in care homes, on the minimum wage.

See what that does to waiting lists.


The insurance trade works only on the basis that the fortunate outnumber the unfortunate, identifiable and assessable risk is pooled, in good faith,  in the hope that those suffering misfortune can be compensated from just a portion of the monies derived from shared-risk premiums;  this is all well and good with buildings and vehicles and aircraft and vessels but it does not and cannot apply to people. And by definition, therefore, those sickly or weak or inheritors of illness  may not join in that sport;  what do we do with them, the untouchables, the uninsurables? Do we let them die, put them in concentration camps, experiment upon them?

And for most, the cost, anyway, of insuring against what we now consider normal, to-be-expected illnesses is prohibitive.  mr richard might find he'd get his sprained ankle treated an hour or so sooner by a moonlighting, greedybastard quack but he and his might well prove an uninsurable risk otherwise; maybe his parents' medical history, maybe his postcode, maybe, shortly, his genetic profile;  they simply won't insure you economically if they think you are going to be ill in a costly way;  why would they?  Only the state can provide comprehensive health care for its citizens, that state which, non-existent, according to mr richard, nevertheless intitiates and provides the national health, safety, care and wellbeing structures outlined above.  Gosh, even mr jgm2's children will have been publicly vaccinated, screened and nurtured, even  the little mongeese;  all of our children survive birth  and flourish thanks, not to BigSick but  to the NHS, that filthy, interfering  socialist device of enslavement, devised by traitors and tyrants..

Here is what I would do to improve the national health:  BigSmoke owns many or most in our legislature, so a condition of my support for a coalition government would be, at the very least,  the immediate execution  of all LungDeath  directors, investors and parliamentary spokespersons - especially Cool Ken Clarke -  the seizure of all their assets at home or abroad and the employment of all their surviving relatives in restoring the nation's dry stone walls and when that task is completed, set them to decent, arse-wiping work, on the minimum wage, in the care homes.  

We are very happy to bomb, burn and strafe anyone whom Barak Obama says is a terrrorist, some blackfellow, who may have killed no-one  at all, may just be going to his kid's wedding, kill the bastard, that's what we say, he might be a terrorist, so that's good enough for me, eh.  But BigSmoke drug peddlers, enslaving, addicting and killing millions all over the world, costing us an incalculable  fortune, well, we soiree them in Downing Street and put them in the house of lordcrooks.  Stand them on the fucking gallows, that's what they need, filthy bastards, let them stand there a minute and then kill them, before they kill millions more of us. Up against the wall, motherfuckerism is too good for them, hanging, that's the thing for war criminals. And if you don't think BigSmoke is at war with us then you're in the wrong place, my friend, you better leave.

See what that does for the national health. 
 See what happens to  cardio-vascular disease, after we kill its servants.  Oh,  I know,  'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go, people have the right to poison themselves, people will always find a way, civil liberties, can't stop it blah blah blah,  I pay for my cancer treatment through the tax on me fags. No you fucking don't, you stupid cunt.  No, people don't have a right to poison themselves, no more than  they had a right to own slaves, to bait bears with dogs, to subjugate women or send children down the fucking mines.

I am sure that many of mr richard's troublesome neighbours will be overweight, unhealthy and suffering personality disorders, as are most people forced to consume poison on a daily basis. 

We have kown since 1957 that refined sugar is a poison because it has been depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals. "What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins and minerals are present. Nature supplies these elements in each plant in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates. Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of 'toxic metabolite' such as pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing five carbon atoms. Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time, some of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the body and is the beginning of degenerative disease."   
Dangers of Refined Sugars, Global Healing Centre. And thousands upon thousands of others.

If someone tried to bring a product like refined sugar to the market, today, food and drug administrations and licensers all over the world would laugh at them. Youwannadowhat? Put six teaspoonsful of poison in every soft drink, every tin of beans, every hamburger meal?

BigSugar, though, historically owns the legislatura, a minimum condition, therefore,  for us joining a coalition  government would be the  immediate lengthy imprisonment of SweetDeath directors, investors and parliamentary spokespersons, the employment of their  relatives in restorative landscape  projects, hedgerow and tree-planting and maintainance, as well as the siezure of all assets and the immediate closure of all refineries, plants and storage facilities and an outright ban on the use of refined sugars in processed foods and drinks. 
See what that does to major organ disease, eh?

It is probably unfair of me, all this talk of criminalising criminals. All they're  trying to do, after all, is  what's best for their children, bless,  LuvEm2Bits, they do, DoAnyfin4Em, MySon'E'sMoreLikeM'BestFriend. 
Those people. 

They went home to their kids, every night, those people who threw babies and children over the heads of their crammed-in parents and  into the gas chambers. Probably played Schubert to them, later, their own children, wanted what was best for them.
Fuck that my kids uber alles shit.

Funny, how we, in the whaddayacallit, the West, the Free World, the Developed World, the Spied-Upon Democracies, how we grow more and more obsessed with the narcissistic worship of our own children, aspirational, that's the marketing term for this phenomenon, amogst the under-employed. 

Even little fat fascist, Reg, he does it.

LuvEm2BitsMe, MyOtherPeople'sKids.

No-one ever comes right-out and says My Children Good, Your Children Bad, instead, they use words like clever and gifted and talented and special, they do actually say that, all squirmy and angry, I-Just-Don't-See-Why-Notting, as though their lives depended upon their children receiving special treatment, My Sasha is a really talented child, requires a place with other similarly gifted children, they really do say that, fucking Nazi bastards, mothers, generally, but fathers too. Fuck 'em, let em all fuck off to some fantasy island, down Branson way, where their talents will just magically summons an entire infrastructure from the jungle, without the employment of any nasty ordinary people, where no-one will ever have to pay any tax, and things will just be given to them, because they're, y'know, special and clever.

In the meantime, against that glorious day, we have, for the children of the special ones,  the private schools. 
mr jgm2, just the other day, was raging about his children's education. Well, I'm sorry but I already paid for his children's education, and their health care, as well as for that of my own child.  I am sorry that while it was good enough for her, it is not good enough for them, life is full of unfairness - but then, on the other entitlement hand, I only had the one, you see, the one child, so maybe mr jgm2, having more than one, should, all things considered,  send me a refund, that's the sense of it, isn't it, this idea that we deserve what we say we deserve and collective be damned.  I deserve a refund from parents of multiple children. People with no children deserve a refund from me. I pay council tax for street lights, even though I live eight miles into the big dark, can I have a refund?  No, of course I can't. 
mr jgm2, by his own regular admission, has more, and therefore  wants more, albeit just  for he and his.  But he shouldn't take it from me and that is what he is doing with the private school tax scam, he couldn't send his kids to a tax-exempt riding school,  why should there be a favoured tax status for St Cakes?  

In  summary, then,  the NHS is brilliant but flawed;  the idea that it is funded from tiny NI contributions is risible but not as risible as the idea that, somehow,  it can continue to operate without all of us accepting significant personal tax rises, without paying respectable salaries to its workers and without challenging entrenched BigDeath corporate interests which run our JackStraw parliament. Aside from smashing BigDeathCorp we should also demand, as a condition of our joining a coalition of national unity, that the businesses of those not paying tax - such as Amazon -  be nationalised without compensation, their directors apprehended on international arrest warrants, tried and jailed for lengthy terms, their relatives put to arse-wiping, their personal fortunes absorbed by the NHS and any persons in government or HMRC who have facilitated the tax  evasion be jailed for similar terms, their salaries and pensions forfeited and their relatives set, also, to arse-wiping duties in nationalised care homes. 
See what that does for NHS funding crises, getting rich people to pay tax.

Private health care is both a drain on the NHS and an affront to Decency, there is no valid ethical or clinical  argument to be made for it, and the notion that its customers use it altruistically, in order to free-up NHS beds,  is contemptible, let them, too, fuck off to Fantasy private Island and fund their own health care system. See how long they survive that experiment, without labs and theatres and training funded by every other bastard.

The private education tax scam is intolerable and I am sick to fucking death of hearing some ponce headmaster ruminating that Well, actually he does, as with mr mike, for instance,  take some children from poorer backgrounds, the cheeky cunt, who does he think he's talking to, fools? The private education scam is a racket whereby the undistinguished spawn of rich arseholes garner for themselves not an education but a lifetime of connection to unearned wealth and power,  that would be just tolerable were these fucking spoiled idiots any good at power's exercise but they are not - see HM Governments 1900 - present.

As a minimun condition for joining a coalition of national unity we insist that all presently within the estates of  them should be ejected from so-called public schools, whipped around the  nearest town and set to arse-wiping duties, withour delay; their customers should be heavily fined; the properties and facilitities and grounds themselves, to be nationalised without compensation and  used as educational, recreational or recuperative establishments for those in need - disdvantaged children, wounded soldiers, the terminally ill. 

Finally, from the previous thread, ms lilith and I differed over the  ongoing pursuit of the dead Savile, me acknowledging that he could never be other than innocent, she saying that his untriable crimes, if any, were minor, normal-for-then, groping and touching. My final point on that issue was, I think, that the Savile enquiries were necessary - not only for his victims, whom,  ms lilith, I feel, disparaged unfairly and uncharacteristically, without knowing their evidence -  insofar as they might lead to  and corroborate evidence relating to the more serious, alleged Westminster Paedophile Murder Ring, might promote a climate in which a decent bobby or two or a decent lawyer would feel able to come forward.
PBC2 Newsnight reported that very development only last night.

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS.

mr sg and I were talking about Dr Tubby Ramirez, the telly historian, 

of how, like most of them,  she is so very much in the way and I recalled her first shows, in which  she managed  to thrust  her tits at us, repeatedly show us her spike heels and even introduce us to her kid,  Little Baby Tubby, all while she was lecturing us about Anglo-Saxon art. 

 

 I had visions of her cameraman, lying on a floor-level trolley, pulled along, following her up and down the aisle of Durham Cathedral, filming her shoes click-clacking, muttering, Swing that arse for me, tubby bitch; you know, like  they do in the pornography community. I half-expected talented angry gastronome, Jeremy Fuckhead, to burst  into the cathedral, like Becket's assassins, growling, Gimme somea that, I want somea that, Do you know who I am? I'm talent on legs, me. The prime minister's a mateamine, I'm a gourmet, gimme steak'n'chips, well done, with plenty of tomato ketchup. Otherwise I'll punch your fag face in.  Jeremy Fuckhead, drooling over Dr Tubby's legs'n'feet'n'heels'n'baby, Christ, there's a porno nightmare and no mistake, a star on a reasonably-priced historian.

 We don't see so much of her footwear - or her family -  and she is less SteamPunk, now that she's established and to be fair to her she is nowhere near as annoying as is Dr David Hiss, 

the man who insists that all the English Kings and Queens were gay. 

 

Of course they were, you know they were, 

 

just admit it, all you viewers,
 you're all gay, everybody's gay, 

 

You want to admit it. You know you do.
  Take me, look, I'm just a grammar school boy but look what I've achieved by being gay, 

I'm rich 

 

and I'm the prettiest historian on the telly. 

She falls way short, though, Dr Tubby, in her programmes,  of standards set by earlier, less showy presenters,.

We were also talkmg, recently, about that Clark chap, and the Civilisation series.  I didn't see that but I gather that his presentation was much less intrusive that that of Dr Tubby Ramirez and her gang of  tits-out, cock-waving celebrity historians. 

It is a shame that these shows all must be presenter-led, that they all have a version of Bruce Forsyth, gibbering all over them, shoving their vanity in our faces; so trashy, so unscholarly. The broadcasters, of course, would say that this is what we want, showbiz, that we cannot sustain an interest for an hour, unless some plump little doxy is flirting with us.

 Look, here's me, with  a really, really old book.

 And here's me, on the telly, with some other really, really old things. It's just so fascinating. That really, really long ago, people made these things. Because, you know, there wasn't any Tesco, where they could go and buy things.

And do you know what, if he was alive today, which, obviously he couldn't be, that old monk, the Veritable Bede, is it Veritable? Venomous, the Venomous Bede? Verifiable? The Verifiable Bede? Anyway, if he was alive, the Virtual Bede, see, I knew it all along, on the tip of my tongue , it was, the Virtual Bede, course it was; if the Virtual Bede was alive today, he'd be on the telly. I'd probly have him on one of my shows, achelly.

Jeremy Isaacs' The World At War is on again,

 

it is always on, somewhere, and rightly so, it is brilliantly good television history, expertly written, scored by Carl Davies, narrated, almost neutrally,  by Laurence Olivier, every one of twenty-six episodes freeze-framing at the end on some dire image of War's horror -  a stricken face, a shattered city, a captured column; rage, agony and humiliation - and not a presenter in sight, ever. How dare there be?

Discussing education, yesterday, there seemed to be a consensus that many teachers were simply not up to the job but if you were a pupil, studying history, who would you prefer, your teacher, droning-on, or Neil Oliver 

being helicoptered from one dramatic ruin  to another? How can a history graduate with a PGCE compete with the falsity and excitement of the wonderful world of history, created by television and presented by gobby hacks?

 

Anyway, tellyhistory is not all trash and I remembered this, below, from years ago. It might make a rainy afternoon read and if either of the shows are portalised, platformised or by any other means available to watch, well, there are worse things to do, If you like that sort of thing. The comments are good, too.

Friday, 29 May 2009

FROM THE MOUTHS OF THE BARDS TO THE PEN OF THE SCRIBE.

 

WOTSONTELLY. TREASURES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, MICHAEL WOOD ON BEOWULF.BBC FOUR.

There was a lovely juxtaposition on BBC Four last night; it should, so very English was it, have been broadcast on St George's Day, on every Saint George's Day for in a two-programme combination of the British Museum, on the Sutton Hoo helmet and the historian Michael Wood, on the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, the evening, almost inadvertently, nonchalantly celebrated the art and the craft of England, neither of them native here to the manor  born but now weathered-in, intrinsically English, celebrated wherever she is spoken, read or acted-out; there was no Elgar, no Henry the Eighth and praise God, neither the ghastly Simon Schama nor the obnoxious David Starkey, queened and preened throughout, their every line arch and rehearsed, comic book history. Michael Wood is of much greater refinement.

Most of them annihilate culture, the telly twitterati, the grammar school totalitarianistes nouveau, reducing it to just an ingredient in the endless sausagemeat of broadcasting – cogito ergo disseminare, I think, therefore I must be on the telly, arseholes,  all of human history and culture merely a vehicle for their smug, emphatic, talking heads.

The tale from the Museum recounted the disovery of the helmet, now gloriously reconstructed, taken from an East Anglian burial mound, part of an enormous treasure trove and donated, quite properly and in an understated, English fashion, to the nation by it's finder, Mrs Pretty. It revealed how, until the find, Anglo-Saxon man was assumed a mead-swigging brutish dullard scratching around in the pigshit and how the dicovery of such exquisite craft stood that assumption on its head. It was told with effortless scolarship by employees of the Museum and by film and stills from the 'thirties, when the treasure-laden burial ship of, it is presumed, King Raedwald, was discovered in its burial mound. The excavation took place against the commencement of the Nazi War and all, fabulously wrought gold and silver and gems, was, like much of our treasure, consigned to an Underground station for future restoration, once Mr Hitler had been sent packing by our trusty warriors.

Judged against scholars, restorers, custodians of Antiquity, Wark, the snarling harridan and Mark Potato on the BBC are irrelevant mouthy show-offs, trashy; Schama and Starkey crush enthusiasm and curiosity beneath a cavalcade of wordy, name-dropping, punning and put-downs; contrived, over-written, moribund, an hour watching either of these jumped-up irritants produces TV’s desired effect of making the viewer feel lesser, patronised, nobody-ised. The grinning, hairy, Jock hobgoblin, Neil Oliver, whining his way around the Coast or through mediaeval Scotland, like a Kosher Billy Connolly, makes one yearn for an Open University Closed.

Wood, though, blessed with boyish good looks, easy charm, a wondering enthusiasm and an unfaltering, seemingly spontaneous delivery had me up and running, or Googling anyway, reading poetry, planning a trip to Jarrow Monastery to walk in the steps of the Venerable Bede; to Malmesbury, where, Wood surmised, the pagan Anglo-Saxon oral tradition was enscribed and preserved - but, paradoxically, by latin, Christian clerks.

In a few magic moments filmed with a man expert in ancient swordsmithing, Wood teased out the craft, almost alchemy, the ritual, the myth behind the Warrior’s magical, dragon-slaying sword, created originally by extracting ore from meteorites sent by the Gods, the fabulously sophisticated artisan twisting and beating and twisting together again rods of red-hot iron to produce the killing strength required, the enchanted ripples of it's melding unique to each blade.

Wood’s programme was interspersed with a telling of the epic Beowulf in a repilicated Saxon Hall. Performed by Julian Glover to an audience of period-dressed, wassailing Saxonophiles this demonstration harked back to an information technology predating even writing. In the beginning was the word. 

In a few simple phrases Wood linked the whole of English literature, story-telling, from Chaucer to High Noon to the oral tradition of the Danes, the Angles, the Saxons; our every literary nuance, the astonishing global impact of English deeply rooted in the myths, not of John Bull but of the Germanic immigrant tribes; it was deftly, lovingly done, it’s purpose to educate, inform and enthral.

Glover's raucous and dramatic performance to an enthusiastic, participating crowd was intercut also by an elegant, spare photography, landscapes almost Oriental in their singularity conjured, somehow, the rush of Time itself in a single, static frame; quietly, seditiously demonstrated the endurance of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, against which we are all, Warrior or empty, discredited politicians, Jock Tribesman, Eton Bully or fearful National Fronter, but performing fleas.

The poem itself, compassionate in its way to both hero and monster, is taught to English undergrads after the Epic of Gilgamesh and before Gawain and the Green Knight and many an Ishmaelite pays it scant, barely requisite attention, yet in Wood's homage it seems pivotal to the Pagan-Christian duality which forged our national culture during what we call the Dark Ages but which, for an hour, Michael Wood made Bright.

See both programmes, if you can, on one of the BBC's many portals to distraction.

There, mr verge, as you were saying, no man is an island, no monster either.