It would be wrong to say that I missed Benn junior's recent peroration on the virtue of vice, the honour of homicide or whatever contortion he performed for the delight of his tumescent colleagues during their communal lusting for mass murder of Syrians, Isilites, wogs, anybody, really, just, with a heavy heart, kill the fuckers, 'swhy we came into politics;
I didn't miss it, for nothing on Earth would have enticed me into Benn's orbit, I would rather kiss Michael Howard's oily, rancid arse than observe a Benn plying the family's Godless trade. And Hilary, either as treacherous caricature of his Papa or in his own weaselly, wordy way, malformed and reptilian, is a sight to repel those craving decency.
I do not despise the Benns for their socialism for they have none, are not remotely collectivist, much less Christian, neither would share a farthing with the poor but only sell them books, preach at them, smugly, of Heaven, just around the corner from the next by-election; just another family of grubby, gobby parasites, with whom we are long overblest and by whom we are overruled, divided, robbed and shat upon. Not even the fatuous estimation of great oratory would bend my ears and eyes to Hypocrisy's Hilary Benn, gobbing-off about war. There are, in any event, no orators still in MediaMinster, thay are gone, now, along with Art and Reason and Nationhood, and were proof required of these absences, then the idea of Hilary Benn as orator should be sufficiently positive.
God fucking help me, I have heard enough such self-absorbed tedium from his old man, I deserved a break from Bennism, God's own reproof to those who seek worthiness in narcissistic filth, gazing adoringly at its own fecal image.
Since his death, I have come to despise Benn the Father, for his diarising, indeed, I begin to think that the furtive telling of tales to oneself should become punishable with ostracism by one's fellows. I mean, if you were down the pub, or in a NewPeople's wine bar or pavement cafe or wherever the fuck these poor shackled bastards congregate to bray and hiss and photograph themselves, but say it was the pub, and you're sat there with some of the lads and one of them is not drinking but instead is scribbling-down, under the table, what everybody else is saying and then he's going to go home,
The smuggest, smirkingest old gossip who ever lived.
have a nice cup of tea and then speak your joint evening into a tape-recorder, complete with distortion and excision and waspish invention, and then, and then this is the good part, then get some old biddy to type it all up, because, y'know, he's too important to do wimmin's work, and let's face it, typing always was wimmin's work, and so, in solidarity with wimmin everywhere, he's not going to encroach on their employment, and then give it to some fag, wife-beating publisher, so's he can sell your night down the pub to other people, well, somebody like that, some ratty little scribbler, he'd deserve to find himself lying in the pub car park, wondering how he'd got there.
Instead of the masturbatory gesture, shaken in incidents of roadrage, with the noun being mouthed, a better world would see a scribbling hand-gesture, accompanied by a silent "Diarist!
I had a chimney sweep here, yesterday, a nice lad, black as the Ace of Spades with his work and with a huge, white smile, like a stage nigger would have had, back before racism and its effortless criminalisation of word and thought. It is a woefully misregarded trade, chimney-sweeping and I can listen to a good sweep for hours, a good brickie, come to that. My previous one has left the isles, he was an amateur luvvie, Ivan, happiest in the chorus line of Pirates of Penzance, and lived in a maelstrom of counterfeit romances with interesting but younger women, not nonce-younger, just in their twenties and thirties, while he was pushing fifty and to whom he would play sooty Svengali. All of these liaisons resulted in financial troubles and fierce invigilation by the taxman; Ivan, thus hamstrung, has now gone Sooth taking his knowledge of household thermo-dynamics with him; what he didn't know about thirty-feet high Georgian chimneys, like mine, wasn't worth knowing; their construction, their properties, their dimensions and angles, their flammability, their proper pots and cowls. He'd swept in great Edinburgh Georgian homes, unblocked and recommissioned fireplaces once redundant, now an arriviste's dream, and more importantly, a great selling feature, now that the home is become commodity, ever-engorging aspiration and vassal to junky chancellor, George.
Since Ivan's been gone, we haven't bothered with having the Rayburn stove-chimney swept and it has kind of fallen out of use; our not eating meat has lessened its utility, too, but it does heat an unused part of the first floor, burns the waste, especially the wood offcuts which I still seem to generate and it looks and smells nice, elemental, I throw the wood ash, which is always disappointingly slight, in the compost, so that, in itself, makes me worthy, doesn't it, according, anyway, to the Gospel of Monty Don,
which saith, never ye an opportunity miss to stress thine own virtuous, ethical and most earnest worthiness, to the planet and its teeming programme schedulers.
Yes, more of a ministry's how I see my tenure at Gardeners World, 'sall about responsibility, caring, very deeply I might say, for the garden that is our planet, wearing carefully selected pre-worn clothes and talking like a cunt.
It is probably even a great selling feature, here, too, my Rayburn, although it is, what, sixty, seventy, eighty years old, a plain white Rayburn Royale, the kind which features in every TeeVee period drama from All Creatures Great and Small to Foyle's War. A proper arriviste would have a shiny, new, red or green one, an Aga, with shiny, steel lids; with shiny, copper pipes and a shimmering, shiny halogen-lit tiled surround, which never saw soot or vapour or grease but sat smokeless and shiny, gleaming and humming, like a domestic nuclear reactor, the fabled kitchen hub, centrepiece to the shiny consumer lives of busy professionals, as if antidote to their empty, greedy minds, their garlicky breath, their vile children and the little filthy brown stains on their underwear.
Better, in my consumer opinion, have a forest of bidets, at a few hundred pounds apiece, one in every toilet in the house, than a glistening, ten-grand Aga, for thus, doth the Empire of Health and Hygiene flourish and prosper. I live in hopes of a true, true, true nanny-state, one which is anathema to our own mr mongoose, one urging us to wash our soiled arses as well as we do our hands.
Instead, via winsome, tongue-tied infants, Andrex embeds us in the one true faith, that of surreptitious , rueful shit-smearing, and calleth it Clean.
Can't be any doo-doo on my botty, Mum;
I've smeared it all around with Andrex bogroll.
The sweep, though. Yesterday, I sat in the kitchen with him, while he worked, something I rarely do, normally departing with an I'll be through here if you need me. We had got talking, though, and I was doing a few wee chores on the kitchen table, anyway, sorting toolbox bits'n'pieces, so it wasn't as though I was just sat there, watching him.
He used a rotary brush, not a traditional bristly brush, a six-stranded flail, really, which he shoved up and down the chimney, fixed, at the end of the flexible, connected rods, to a powered screwdriver, which would have spun the flail at many thousands or revolutions per minute. I guess that the strands were tough enough to dislodge soot deposits but flexible enough not to harm the stonework, seemed to be, anyway.
It was a productive encounter, the job's a good un, he'll get paid promptly, we each learned something from the other and a little bridge was built over Alienation's fiercely cold and rising waters.
He told me, though, a bit shyly, of a recent encounter with another non-Orcadian. I have mentioned previously that I simply do not know where the house keys are, that we go away for weeks at a time, leaving the place unlocked, that the car keys are always in the unlocked car. It is not that people on this side of the Pentland Firth are especially virtuous, just that there is so very little career opportunity for the burglar or the car thief; even hundreds of metres from my nearest neighbour, I can still be overlooked, and am, neighbours know better my comings and goings than I do myself, and a hue and cry would ensue should an unknown vehicle appear parked in my grounds and if it escaped then said vehicle can only leave the islands by registered ferry, requiring personal identification and there is simply no tradition of fencing stolen property locally, through pubs or carboot sales; honesty, therefore, at least as far as property goes, is justifiably assumed, just not by another of my chimneysweep's customers.
We had been talking about customer relationships, how very important they were to the small business, moreso than in GlobaTheftCorporation, where, if you're lucky, a recorded voice is ethically deployed to tell you to fuck off, otherwise you are played the Four Seasons, the lively one, anyway, Spring. He had said several times how sorry he was to have delayed his visit and although it actually made little difference to me he was berating himself for paying so much attention to customers who shouted at him, demanding, dictating Acceptability or rather, its Un-ness, and so little to those, like myself, who didn't. I told him that once, just once, a customer, well not a customer, an window-shopper, come inside, had so enraged me, so stretched my patience that I clipped him sharply around the ear and ejected him from my premises, that he called the cops, and that a witness, whom I had not known was present, on an upper floor, advised them that he, or indeed they, would have ejected this horrid little bastard through a closed door or a plate glass window, so vexatious and improper had he been. The cops duly vouchsafed this sentiment to the complainant and he left, rubbing his ear and muttering. I said that mr sweep should by no means strike his gobby clients but that inviting the particularly obnoxious client to Go And Fuck Yourself, served a very useful purpose, a sort of a mental hygiene steam-valve, releasing the pressure of a thousand slights.
The miscreant, in this particular chimney-sweeping case, had loudly complained, when told that the sweep could only attend during his own working hours and had very begrudgingly left his key, under a stone. As mr sweep was completing the task he noticed an iPad, strategically placed, partially hidden, in a place where it could only have been placed in order to give surveillance of the task and the worker. I guess that this behaviour is near-enough legal but shockingly bad form. Worse, it is an extension, by the citizen, himself, of the state-sponsored belief not in the citizen but in the citizen-suspect; people cleverly setting electronic security measures against their own neighbours. Must give Mickey Fallon a hard-on, that.
And you're sure it fires through wheelchairs?
Yes, you can't trust anybody, that's why we have to kill them.
Wogs, benefit cheats, disabled people, they're not, you know, not really, not disabled at all.
The radio was on the other day and had happened to land upon Radio Four's Greatest Hits. Extra, is it? It was the simpering shrink, Anthony Clare, interviewing Tony Benn about his wondrous self, in the studio psychiatrist's chair. Clare was on a hiding to nothing for Benn had a lifetime behind him of blethering narcissistically to his own ends, and no showbiz headshrinker like Clare was going to unearth anything truthful about him, even though his monumental vanity and worthlessness were to be heard in his every conceited phrase.
In the few minutes that I heard of the show, I was struck by Benn senior's sense of Alwaysness, time after time he said assuredly: Y'know, as I always say, as my mother always said, as my father always said, as I always said to the children, when they were growing up, d'you know what I mean? Alwaysness, yes, that would be at the very core of my own, wotachamaycall it, my own national treasure celebrityness, d'you now what I mean? It was, in passing, strangely unsettling, incongruous, to hear Benn's patient, avuncular articulation of Knoworramean? - it was as redundant, as lazy and irrelevant an interrogative as the truncated version more commonly repeated by those less privileged than Benn, himself. However cosily bracketed, his absurd belief in the permanence of his trite phoney dogma, it was as though once something had been said by he or his, it became immutable, irreversible, righteously, scripturally certain, the moreso with its repetition; in the Benn circle they do not speak but axiomise. And have a jolly nice cup of tea. Now, I drink many varieties of tea but would not try to weave its consumption into morality or ethics, Benn, though, the national treasure, abstemious and temperate, never failed so to do, sucking, simultaneously at his tobacco addiction None of his hoary maxims could be questioned for if he believed them who could doubt? In his wider quotational repertoire, Benn always sought, in advance, authentication by his fellow-greats, starting his dreadful, practised replies with, D'you know, I'm with my fellow socialist, Jesus, on this one or D'you know, I can't put it better than Confucius, my fellow-philosopher or Well, it's like my fellow-author, George Bernard Shaw always said............
I drifted-off, into a nightmare reverie of Benn, swigging his hourly pint of milky Ty-Phoo, dictating his wretched diaries, for the next morning's Mrs Mopp to transcribe, of him sitting between Two Thousand Years of Wit and Wisdom and piles of dictionaries of quotations and biography, searching them for verification of his own phony do-gooderness.
And then by darker visions of his mammoth fallatiotron with Willy Hague, the two MediaMinster whores, together touring the nation's sold-out small theatres, people flocking to their surprisingly friendly and witty banter, as though they were a medicine show, for the feeble-minded, the deranged; a travelling Dave Channel. If you don't know about the Dave Channel, keep it that way. It is not diabetes will kill me, it is my imagination. Firebrand lefty, Christian socialist, national treasure touring with nonce-apologist, prettyboy-loving, slaphead, teenage mutant, sixteen pints a night grotesque, redneck carpetbagger. The mutant's last resort; from Ken Dodd to Michael Jackson, Whisky Maggie to Gnasher Sturgeon; there is no business like showbusiness, fearful horror given life, it is all around us.
But mainly it's the Alwaysness of Benn, and indeed of so many in his filthy trade, which is so annoying; they possess a certainty quite alien to me, as though they really led the life unexamined, never proof-read, much less edited themselves, but merely spouted unhesitant rubbish and drivel, as to the Oxbridge manor born.
mrs ishmael, with my coercion, used to keep a Commonplace Book, more jotter than diary but a kind of continuum, a record of vaguely notable stuff. I, on the other hand, could never write a diary for, like the assasins' fretful target, my mind never sleeps twice in the same place. If I have slept, I awaken each morning a new person, yesterday's man fortified or diluted by each and everything I have experienced between sleeps, but never the same man; never a fit person to chronicle the myriad happenstances of my life, be they the predisposed or the chance. Even a work diary was beyond me, I only ever did stuff - completed things - that were scheduled weeks or days ahead, not months, and so I resisted the writing-down of them, if it was important I remembered, unfailingly, to do it. As to a personal diary, being randomly and largely self-educated, I have never really been able to figure-out what has happened in the past eighteen hours, I don't have a framework, a field of reference, by which to succinctly precis what has just happened to me; only after some time, often a long time do I understand what happened, the idea of summarising it, at the time, for publication or as an aide memoire seems to me utterly foolhardy, a denial of growth and change, a preposterous, contrary vanity.
It could be argued that these commentaries, here, are diaristic and in some senses - their continuity, for instance; their repetitions - they are inevitably so, they are also, unusually for me, written in the first person, a stylising which I have avoided all my life. On the other hand, although they are not scrupulously anonymised they do not appear under my given name and they are, somewhat luxuriously, not commercial. That these are not diary entries is clear enough in that often the greater and wiser volume of text appears in the commentaries of others, which, in turn, shape my own future thinking; a co-operative, in short, not a diary, a group effort, shaped by stakeholders, past and present.
I do not suggest, here, that there are no certainties, for there are things in Heaven and Earth, which I used only to think I knew, but which now I believe; I merely say that the synchronous, arbitrary and selective annotation of one's lived experience, as favoured by political filthsters, and its presentation as remotely true, accurate or reliable is at best a foolishness, a pretence. Tony Benn, famous, like Lord Mike Biscuits,
I say, when the show's over, I generally like a few bourbons or custard creams, be a good chap; I killed Whisky Maggie, y'know.
for his flouncing, and, like a watered-down, tabloid Samuel Pepys, for his diaries,
was, even by the meagre standards of his peers, a vain, self-adoring fool; that Benn, an effete, self-obsessed, wealthy careerist and an empty-headed soundbiter was able - and encouraged - to colonise and then torch the landscape of the Left, so that his very name became, to MediaMinster, a useful byword for profligate evil - was an irreparable, national catastrophe.
That his ghastly spawn, and grandspawn, moreover, now shit on us from the same exalted latrine of state, must delight the cheapskate vulgarian himself, sipping fiery tea, down there, with his master, Satan.
To divert ourselves from medieval-scale national larceny and from global mayhem with the mewlings and pukings of a hereditary simpering nobody such as Hilary Benn is, to put it mildly, regrettable.
We, who know better, should not differentiate between one specimen of vermin and another on the grounds of their speechifying skills; firstly, they don't have any to speak of and secondly they need no encouragement whatsoever from us, much less our critical appreciation of their filthy lies. We should not suspect our neighbour so that he becomes our enemy; instead we should scrutinise, eject and punish our tormentors. I remember, just six or seven years ago, being entranced by Obama's speechifying, and look how he turned out. I never believed a word of it but especially after George Dubya Chimp, the fact that he could, then, with his aides, frame something approaching a sentence was refreshing; Hilary Benn, tossing himself off in the commons, vying for Corbyn's job, well, he wasn't even goping to be in Obama's league.
Some of them, though, Benn's worknmates, we pay them two or sometimes three sets of wages, expenses and pensions.
Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's just a wee bit rich, blaming me for Donald Trump, all I did was invite him into Scotland, give him tax breaks, override the community he was despoiling, fall for his lies and appoint him my personal ambassador. I think you'll find that, as with the oilprice, Andrew, and the referendum which, I also think you'll find, we actually won, that I was entirely correct as well as resolutely honest and proper, acting entirely in the interests of the Scottish sovereign people.
That'll be twenty-five hundred of your English pounds, please, yes in Scottish pounds.
Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's a wee bit rich, blaming me for yon Forth Road Bridge fiasco, fallin' doon, like it is, and causing chaos all over Scotland. Aye, the transport minister have all bin loonies. An' aye, it is right, we have bin in govament for eight years, but I think ye'll find, Andrew, that that disnae mean we can be held responsible for anything that goes wrong. Jeez, mon, if that wis the case we'd be fair fucked, what wi' the polis an' the skules an the NHS, all ganging' doon the drain, not tae mention the oil price falling, an' everyone in Aberdeen gangin' aboot wi' their arses in their hands, mebbe havin' tae sell one a their three RangeRovers, an' all as a result, I might say, o' David Cameron fixing the oilprice, quite agin the spirit o' the vow that he made to the sovereign Scoattish people at the referendum, which, I think ye'll find, Andrew, that we won.
What they do need, North and South, across the Irish channel
Property magnate, cuckold and gabshite, Peter Robinson, self-suspended First Minister of the Six Counties, pouting in one of his twelve hundred neckties, like a Mafia Wiseguy, so he is.
Well, I must say, so I must, Andrew, that that's a wee bit rich, so it is, youse saying that I crashed the Stormont Assembly, just to divert attention from the wholly and entirely and utterly conemptible lie that I'm no better than a thief, when, in fact, as youse well know, I am nothing but a thief. All of my political life, so it is, as you well know, has been devoted to serving this fractured community of ours, and the fact that I have had the good fortune to become a multi-millionaire on property dealings, and that my dear, official wife, Mrs Grannygate, has had the good fortune to pay for the sexual favours of a young man through govament grants which she arranged while an elected representative of the People of Northern Ireland, well, all of that is pure hearsay, so it is. And so it is a bit rich, Andrew, for people like yourselves to go casting aspersions on the good name of a decent, loyal Orangeman, doing his best, so he is, to serve his people to the very best of their gullibility.
and what I wish them all,
in a seasonal spirit,
is a happy hanging-up by the neck from Westminster Bridge. Or the Forth Road Bridge. Or the one over the Lagan. As long as we wish them anything else we will adoringly eat their shit, high days, holy days, Christmas Day.
Party parliamentary democracy,
the arse which never closes.
