Evensong: Love Chronicles

 

Love Chronicles is the second studio album of Scottish folk artist Al Stewart, released in September 1969.

Love Chronicles was notable for the 18-minute title track, an anguished autobiographical tale of sexual encounters that was the first mainstream record release ever to include the word "fucking". It was voted "Folk Album of the Year" by the UK music magazine Melody Maker and features Jimmy Page and Richard Thompson (listed as Marvyn Prestwick) on guitar. Richard was there with three other members of Fairport Convention: bassist Ashley Hutchings, guitarist Simon Nicol (listed as "Simon Breckenridge") and  drummer Martin Lamble (as Martyn Francis) You'll have to wait until 16 minutes and 37 seconds in for that ground-breaking "fucking" - but it is a journey worth taking.

 16:37 "And where I thought that just plucking the fruits of the bed was enough, it grew to be less like fucking and more like making love."

Evensong: A little bit of Monica in the Night

 No, mr verge, not that Monica. These ladies are all considerably more worldly wise than that star-struck girl, so hugely flattered that Mr President ruined her best dress that she kept it as a mee-men-toe. And an insurance policy. She was an Intern, of course, not a professional SPAD, which meant that she donated her services to the President free of charge. Unlike Matt Hancock's bit of SPAD, whose professional fees came out of the public purse. That means my taxes. And yours.

Ladies and gentlemen, lets hear it for the great Lou Bega and his incredibly stylish video:

 

Sunday Ishmael 27/06/21

 

As mr mike indicated on the last thread - what the fuck? Are these people mad? Which century do these Gilbert and Sullivan Sea Lords and Lord High Admirals think they are living in? These Algernon Cunningham-Backhouse Go Lightley Jockstraps - have they realised that Team GB no longer rules the waves with our fleet of 79 commissioned ships, which include one icebreaker, the historic warship Victory - flagship of the First Sea Lord, with 243 years' service under its belt, two transport docks, four survey vessels, thirteen mine sweepers, twenty-six patrol vessels, eleven submarines, thirteen frigates, six guided missile destroyers and  two aircraft carriers, now with a part-complement of eighteen F-35B jet aircraft. Whereas Russia appears to possess a fleet of 365 commissioned vessels, none of which has 243 years' service, and which includes sixteen scary-sounding nuclear attack submarines and two ships that sound as if they have commuted from Star Wars - Battle Cruisers
 

No, not those - more like this

 

So why did Boris prod the bear? Fuck knows. He said:

"I think it was wholly appropriate to use international waters. This is part of sovereign Ukrainian territory, it was entirely right that we should vindicate the law and pursue freedom of navigation in the way that we did, take the shortest route between two points, and that’s what we did.’

Apparently Dominic Raab (Foreign Secretary) and Ben Wallace(Defence Secretary)  were quarrelling about the wisdom of HMS Defender taking the Black Sea route  and handed the decision over to Boris.  We know what happened. Mr Putin’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov warned against ‘provocative steps’ and vowed that Russia will bomb any ships who ‘violate the state borders of the Russian Federation’. Russia summoned the UK’s ambassador in Moscow for a formal telling off last night as relations between the two nations continued to deteriorate after the air and sea skirmish in the Black Sea.

None of that explains why Boris decided to provoke the bear. What do the Battleship Papers say? Fifty soggy papers were found by a member of the public behind a bus stop in Kent early on Tuesday morning. They were classified, from the Ministry of Defence and discussed Russia's potential reaction to sending  Defender through the Black Sea passage. This has, of course, laid Britain open to international mockery. Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson asked the British Government "why do we need Russian hackers if there are British bus-stops?"

Maybe Carrie told Boris to do it.

Well, that didn't turn out well. On the Andrew Marr show today, Jeremy Hunt's view of the Hancock Great Disgrace was that there had been some of the worst failures of the State under the Hancock regime, but, at least you can say of him that he made himself constantly available. Yes. Hmmm. 

The term "Special Advisor" now, of course has a special meaning - a tradition started by William Hague, and brought to climax by Hancock.

Another "Special Advisor" is Salma Shah, 

who held that role to Sajid Javid, our new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Javid has held most of the big jobs of State. Salma told Andrew Marr today that: "we'll see a different complexion in the Cabinet now."

Do we detect the hand of another "Special Advisor" in this appointment? Mrs Boris Johnson once served in that capacity to Sajid, who was kind enough to grace her 30th birthday party. 

Andrew Marr has been off sick with Covid. He thinks he caught it at the G7 - not surprised, it wasn't all socially distanced there, either, and there were lots of foreigners - it is kind of the nature of the G7 that they will let foreigners in, and no talk of quarantining. Marr was a bit cross because he was double-jabbed and thought that gave him god-like status. Thickly made-up with ManTanFantastic to disguise the Covid pallor, Marr thundered at his guest, Sir Peter Horby, chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), "128 thousand people dead of Covid in this country. I was double vaccinated and I still caught it. What's going on?"

Sir Peter, uncowed, reminded Marr that he was neither in hospital nor dead, so the vaccinations had provided immunity from the worst consequences. 

Shame that Matty Hancock didn't have access to mr ishmael's  reflections on the consequences of marital infidelity back in 2013.

  UNCLE SAM'S NEWS            

IF YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT YOU'LL BELIEVE ANYTHING.

I am resigning because I lied to my wife.

  PISS-UGLY GENERAL  QUITS AS MATTER OF HONOUR.

AYE, RIGHT.    

 It is bruited about, by our information masters, that this be-ribboned arsehole, being the repository of all sorts of secrets - secret torture,  secret murder, secret bribery, secret  extortion, secret kidnapping, secret illegal invasions, secret drug rackets, secret money-laundering, more secret torture, all, in fact  of Uncle Sam's  secret, democratic, freedom-loving tools - resigned as director of the torturing CIA spooks because he'd been unfaithful to his wife.

Funny, isn't it, that someone much further up the chain of command, right at the top, in fact, didn't.

PRESIDENT SPUNKY BILL, 

FUTURE FIRST GENTLEMAN.

 Mah fellow motherfuckers. All Ah done was to have this liddle bitch, less'nhalf my age,  stick mah cee-gar up her snatch, and mebbe Ah shot mah presidential see-men load over her clothes.   Ain't as though Ah lied to mah wife, President Hillary Trousers, and certainly wasn't no need for me to resign. See y'all back in the White House, come 2016.

all sing: ....our house, is a very, very, very, fine house
--------------------------------------------------------------

TROUGHING NEWS

 Former NewLabour minister for larceny.

What can one say about McShane that one hasn't already said ?

Only that - even among stiff, six-hundred-strong competition - his exposure as a thief is an absolute delight and Please God, even though I don't believe in You and even though I don't believe in it, please, please, please send this cunt to prison.

   BBC NEWS

Horizon, Arena, Omnibus, Panorama; the BBC loves its neo-classical pomposity, the maxim above Bush House - Nation shall speak peace unto nation - is equally grandiose, vainglorious, too, when one considers that a more appropriate motto would be Let me entertain you. Nation shall speak shite unto nation, more like.

It is a watchword of these commentaries, here,  that there IS no business like show business, that the rampant, unstoppable epidemic of largely talentless broadcast exhibitionism which has poisoned post-war society is both the herald and the instrument of Ruin. On the tube, Pink Floyd's sixteen channels of shit on m'TeeVee to chose from have metamorphosed into a non-stop, multi-portal, planetary cesspit, it's surface creeping up around our necks, it's barrel-scrapings, its turds of wisdom lapping around our chins; cruelty tevee, shopping teevee, cooking teevee, house teevee, gambling teevee,  the more of it there is, the worse it gets.

And yet, its practitioners seem to merit more and more kudos - the post of Director General of the BBC  being the secular equivalent to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Everyone, even Pope Nazi and his worldwide brotherhood of noncing monsignors,  is bandwagoning the Jimmy Saville........ As  though the Vatican itself was not the spiritual and corporeal home of The Beast, sacramentalising the  rancid, priestly prick, the dirty, filthy fucking bastards, as though the Unholy Father, by dint of removing a preposterous knighthood from his deceased NoncingBrother James, can align himself and his legions of  degenerate employees with the meek and mild, the  Godly.

I am a wholly unremarkable man, not for me the rewards of obedience, the glittering prizes, the gilded career, not even the many years of selfless public service beloved of the mealy-mouthed town hall apparatchik up to his arse in corruption, no, I am not even as respectable as that. I am vested with no great acuity, no special insights, no razor sharp wit, no-one would ever say of me that I did not suffer fools gladly or any of that other claptrap of the obituarist, the hagiographers and journalistic cocksucker, for who knows how to recognise a fool, to distinguish him from a politician, a judge, a clergy person or some other fucking buffoon.

I am not of the same bright, jewelled fabric as legislators and jurists, academics or senior bureaucrats; I am neither police officer nor social worker, I am not  a hospital manager nor the heir  as we call the useless ponce, to the throne, I am not among the charmed  circle which now wails in chorus  that Jimmy Saville fooled it; odd, then,  given my lustreless mediocrity, that he never fooled me, not for a second. Surely I should be plucked from bitter anonymity and be made Director General of absolutely everything.

 All of my adult life I have looked upon this man with revulsion, loathing and incredulity, amazed at his pre-eminence in the national  life, his consorting with the most powerful.  I only ever had to see Saville and the words Nonce, Bully and Beast would flash before my eyes in angry, lurid colours. Why the fuck is it, one might justly enquire, that the brightest in the land, the most advantaged, the most highly paid, the most capable were all, as they protest, now, blind to foul Beasting, right before their very eyes, there, on the fucking television? How dare they now propose to enquire and to report and to - altogether now, you all know this one - learn valuable lessons, make sure it can never happen again, draw a line in the sand and move forward.  Full and far-reaching cover-up. Cunts.

I wonder what kind of self-subterfuge went on here. Why on Earth would parents let their children watch Saville, when you could almost smell his rottenness through the bloody screen? I wouldn't let our children watch the coarse and vicious  EastEnders, never mind Jimmy fucking Saville, ogling, as he did, teenage girls, dollybirds, didn't he call them; even in front of the camera he was at it.

Something happens, I think, with celebrity, theTeeVee takes some half-wit, one trick pony, like Sir Wogan and after a wee while, because his agents  and his producers insist that he is a national treasure, he becomes one. And for fifty years, it seems, he peddles his stage Paddy horseshit to millions who think they are being given a treat. Somehow, we have been persuaded that the useless prat Paxman is a ferocious, tenacious interviewer,  that none can evade his invigilation, even though they do it every night.  Why is it, if BBC interviewers Humphries and Paxman et al are so good  that - despite the proven universal venality of MediaMinster - only once in my lifetime has a BBC political interviewee stormed off the set in mid-question. Older readers will remember Whisky Maggie's pretend defence seckatry, useless John Nott,  ripping his 'mic off when the late Robin Day fired a round of fucks into him.  Why is it that Paxman's failure to  nail Michael Howard's balls to the chair is hailed as a triumph and not the miserable failure it was.  Why is it, en passant but in an associated point, that during this round of MediaMinster cruelty, this round of punishment of the naughty electorate - how dare they question our expenses? - how is it that, should a public voice be raised in anger on any of the lame BBC forums - Any Planted Questions, Approved Question Time - it is immediately silenced by the uppercrust goons running these fucking awful shows ?

If BBC political interviewers were any damn good there'd be John Nott incidents all the time.  But of course MediaMinster all send their brats to the same school, dine in the same restaurants, holiday in the same resorts, best of chums, just invent a  bit of onscreen confrontation for the sake of the hoi poloi.  

Sometimes there is a pretence that some presenter or other has some specialist knowledge,  that Monty Don does do his own garden, for instance;  never runs out of compost, although, one man toiling away there in his cardy, he uses tons of it, tons.  I make compost in my walled acre and I can never make enough of it, never; have to buy as much from Lidl as I make, at least as much, and I don't have to make teevee shows and write books and columns and save heroin addicts from destruction, like Earnest Monty does. No, it's bollocks,  of course; Monty has a team of gardeners doing the work, he's a presenter, leans on his shovel and sighs worthily about how good life can be, if only we do like him,  magic gardening with invisible labourers, scriptwriters, producers and the best horticulturalists that your licence fee can buy.  Let me entertain you.

And Saville knew nothing and cared less about music,  he was a bouncer, loitering in nineteen-fifties nightclubs and Locarnos, 

musclebound and stupid, thick and nasty, an Anglo version of Sean Connery.  And then, thanks to who knows whom, as with Thicko Sir Sean, Thicko Saville  got  lucky. 

Enforced on us by that great liberal, Tony Benn, lamely imitating, or trying to imitate the pirate radio stations of the 'sixties,  Radio One was, of course, always a ship of fools, cheesy clowns, gobby name-checking morons, braying, posturing egomaniacs, as musical, in the main, as constipation.  Where the pirates had spunk and spirit, Radio One fell flat and never got up. Remember, ye ancients?  Tony fucking Blackburn, Jimmy fucking Young, Ed fucking Stewpot Stewart, Bob Holness and Kenny Everett, geniuses, one and all.  Bunch of cunts.  Few, if any of them, gave a fuck about music; John Peel, maybe, before he turned into a silly old fart celebrating punk and in so doing missing the point entirely, it wasn't for him; Dave Cash, Johnny Walker, were OK but the rest of them had all the sincerity  and ability of one of those grinning imbeciles selling gen-yew-ine Craponite jewellery on one of the downmarket shopping channels. Downmarket shopping channels, yeah, I know, that's saying something, hairsplitting to the Nth degree, they're all downmarket.  But even by the standards of his peers, people like the nauseating Simon Bates and Dave Lee Gob,  Saville was awful, unspeakably bad.  How and why on Earth was his first contract ever renewed?

 

 

If you started with Little Richard and went to, I dunno, say, for argument's sake, the evisceration of rock'n'roll by the corpse-chilly precision of Pink Floyd or by the rapid descent into joyless bombast of Dire Straits or the phony, consumerist hysteria of the Archbishop of Sweat, Bruce Springsteen, you might mirror the encroaching, inevitable grossness and the putrefaction, the stupidity and the selfishness of we, the Boomers, bleating now, anew, not that we wanna dance but that we shouldn't have to pay for our care, in our twelve-bar old age.

WHAT CAN A POOR BOY DO?

By Boomers I mean those mid-century born, around nineteen fifty, the Teds were our older brothers, pre-warbabies, Blitzkids, evacuees, quick to violence, to storming, motor-cycle chain, broken-bottle GBH; dressed in drape coats and drainpipe trousers, coiffed and sideburned, ungainly, insectoid, in crepe-soled brothel creepers, all sicklied o'er with pimples and blackheads and brilliantined dandruff and bad breath and BO, the Teds, Rockabilly hooligan vigilantes of style, were the fag-end of something else, spivs, maybe, and were washed away by what we call rock 'n' roll, their time swift and sharp, like the fleeting caress on the cheek of a cut-throat razor; from Teddy Boys, truculent, rebellious if bizarre nouveau Edwardian punk-thugs, the market moved into the more orchestrated and exploitable zone of the post-war economic miracle, the teenager, born in the early fifties, spending his or her parents' monies in the early sixties and their own ever since; many of them remain, paunchy, grey haired, arthritic, defiantly teenage, in their sixties. Many of them, rock and rollers still, malleable, gullible, still market fodder, voted, laughably, for their own lay preacher of rock, after all, he played his own, Prime Minister's Edition Fender Stratocaster, they voted for Tony Blair. This is the story of how the machine eats-up everything. This is the nightmare of Rock 'n' Roll, I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life. This is the way the world ends, not with a Doo-Wop but with an I SimplySayPeepulOvBritain, Clearly, On Balance and In a Very Real Sense. This, friends, is the Ruination Blues.

Well, itsa one for the money,
Two for the money,
Three for the money
Now Go, cat, go
But don't you
Step on my Blue Suede Shoes.

----------------------------------------------------------
CLOSE YOUR EYES AND I'LL KISS YOU

How the Beatles destroyed Rock 'n' Roll.

 Like many, they were overawed, the fab mopsters, by the Minessotan Dwarf, punchdrunk on his own imagery of collision, his own fricasee of easy chordings and hammerings-on, Dylan did more, suggested more, accomplished more with a guitar, a mouthharp and a formidable, burglar's intelligence than these four did with their Gretsches  and Rickenbackers, the Hohner Violin Bass, their harmonies and that dumb fuck, up the back, the luckiest Scouser in history, banging on the drums, shaking his head.

McCartney almost once said that they kept Ringo on because he was so stupid, came up with odd wordplays, Howyadoin Ringo? resulted in the simian growling, Oh, I feel like I've had a hard day's night; the creativity of enforced, cloistered co-habitation resulting, in the nursery rhyme number one worldwide hit.

The Beatles historical perspective was terse and limited to the USA of maybe the forties and fifties; McCartney derived a bigband sensitivity for arrangement and harmony from his dad, Jimmy, but mainly the Beatles, in Hamburg, covered US R 'n'B and the great, the maestro singer-songwriter,  Chuck Berry.

Dylan tapped into all sorts of shit.  An American  Russian Jew he had listened to everything, country, rockabilly, swing, jazz, country blues, urban blues,  bigband and that amorphous mass,  folk-airs from Scotland and Ireland, ballads from  England, spooky nigger hollers from Mississippi, Everly Brothers' Kentucky harmonies. louche, funky, shake-your-moneymaker twelve-bars from Chicago, Howlings and Lightnings and SonnyBoys; Hank Williams poorboy lovesongs,  hobo talking blues and railroad songs from the Depression, Rebel and Yankee tunes, Steven Foster......Lennon and McCartney, by comparison, were popular music illiterates.

But never mind that, they could do harmonies .......We've heard a lot here, recently, about the harmonies of the Copper Family, unaccompanied English rural songs, in which the voices embellish themselves, each other, with nary a squeezebox or fiddle to be seen, just the voices weaving in and out, around and around, reeling, almost, and a-rocking. Well, the Beatles' very first hit, Love Me Do, was remarkable for its harmonies as well as for the almost Elizabethan useage, not  Love Me or Do Love Me but Love Me Do;  almost off-key.

 

 

mr ishmael's essays today are:

HAVE I GOT SOME OLD NEWS FOR YOU   drafted  11th April 2013

THE SUNDAY SERIAL, C'mon Everybody    drafted  11/3/2010

Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

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

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.  

Link for the paperback:

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Or...

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 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

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At checkout, try WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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.  

With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89

 

Y'know that Hancock? says the toilet, chattily, I used to have 'im in the cab, here

She's a winner! Doesn't that just take the biscuit?

Evensong: Priests

 

 Priests

The simple life of heroes, the twisted lives of saints, 

They just confuse the sunny calendar with their red and golden paints.

 

Judy Collins album "Wildflowers" (1967) has some marvelous tracks - Sisters of Mercy, Both Sides Now, Hey,  That's No Way to Say Goodbye - but this simple, eerie little song with  its unadorned orchestration and Collins' voice in its clear, youthful purity, is surely something rare and wonderful. 

The Sunday Ishmael 20/06/2021

The former Mr Tiny Speaker, alleged bully, serial house flipper, expenses supremo, and, like Boris, keen on interior design, (the tax payer stumped up £20,659 for the redecoration of the Speaker's apartment in the Palace of Westminster on his instruction) has finally and eventually, at the age of 58, discovered his passion for equality, social justice and internationalism. In an interview with the Observer, he stated that he has reached the conclusion that the present government needs to be replaced. Is Boris bothered? John Berkowitz added that his political views have evolved over time. I'll say. The son of a taxi driver, and educated at the comprehensive school, Finchley Manorhill, in London, you'd have thought his spiritual home was the Labour Party, but he proved himself to be more Conservative than the young Bullingtonians  when he went up to the University of Essex, where he was described by one of his professors, Anthony King, as "very right-wing, pretty stroppy and.... an outstanding student". He was a member of the Conservative Monday Club, standing as a candidate for the club's National Executive in 1981 with a manifesto calling for a programme of "assisted repatriation" of immigrants and became secretary of its immigration and repatriation committee. He has subsequently denounced himself as bone headed for holding these views and repudiated his participation in the club as utter madness. The former Mr Tiny Speaker, who claims to be five foot six inches tall and likes his wife to wear high heels, will surely be an adornment to the Labour Party. Turning his coat has nothing to do with being pissed off about being denied a peerage by Boris Johnson's lot. John says he was subject to antisemitic abuse from the Tories. There's none of that in the Labour Party, of course.

mr ishmael had a special place in his heart for mr Tiny  Speaker. Here he is, in 2010: London

Well, of course, jolly good chap, what,  ho-ho-ho, greatest city in the world, 'specially with me mayoring it, perfectly proper for people to, ah, um, protest, mustn't let it amount to anything, though, that's the trick, otherwise where would we be, people protesting, I mean, Gosh, where would it end ?  London's police? Yes, marvelous job, dedicated, professional thugs, want somebody fitted-up, shot or beaten to death, 'sno better body of men for the job;  Gosh, and women, too, mustn't forget the ladies,what? Did I mention I can speak Greek?  In Greek, you know, properly. Just the thing you need in a prime minister;  not, of course, not that I ever want to do anything other than mayorise this fabulous city and anyway David and wotsisname, yes, Prick, no Nick, yes David and Nick, they're doing such a wonderful job;  riots on the street, wonderful, not that it's their fault, not really.

I  just want to say whatever it it is that my right honourable friend the prime minister would say, yes, I have it here, We'll have the sweet and sour pork with some of that egg fried rice  which you people do so cleverly, and can you put it on the slate......No...no...I'm sorry Mr Tiny Speaker... wrong piece of paper...Right...I have  it here.... how can the right honourable lady argue with our plans when she isn't even a man ....????

Tory cheers.  Get yer tits out!!!  No, keep 'em in !!!!  Slag!!!

Foreign Seckatry:  Steady on Nick, glass houses and so on, and can you just mention that some of those young men students,  the very fit ones, kicking in the windows,  and sweating,  are quite, uh, comely, and they might want to consider sleeping with me, I mean working with me, in the Foreign Office. It's not that I'm gay, heavens, hasn't my wife had miscarriages to prove it, it's just that when I'm travelling I get lonely and it's nice to have a man half my age in bed with me, perfectly innocent, many honourable members do it.

As a plane load of 
premiership gang rapists flew home from Mandelaberg, leader of the LibDems and Tories, Mr CallHimDave, blamed their failure to recently rape any gullible teenagers on the previous administration.

I blame thirteen years of Labour misrule for me not being able to say that England's World Cup victory reflected the new spirit of national co-operation which my coalition embodies and thus their outstanding performance is all down to me. But they fucked it.  I mean, those black teenagers out in Africa, they're begging for it, you'd think the lads could have spit-roasted a few of them, for the country. But look, homoerotocism, of the sort we see every Saturday,  is all well and good, millions of gay men cheering-on their idols is one thing, let's face it, there can be no finer expression of male love than two men, or indeed, I understand, more than two, fucking each other via a young, impressionable, drunken teenaged girl, you know, gangrape, it really is in the finest traditions of sportsmanship  - and you know, it does have its roots in oik factory culture, back in the good old days we used to let them work six days but have Wednesday afternoon off, that's why some of the teams are called something-Wednesday  it was the only time they could play and that's what we must get back to, a proper understanding of the nature of leisure, we, with heavy responsibilities,  must have it to recharge our batteries but poor bastards, oiks, well, they should work all the time, 'swhat they're for isn't it? But we mustn't lose sight of the real issue, the thing which made us great and I'm talking here about pain, pain, yes and humiliation, we in the Liberal Party do it to the people and they love it so much that they start begging for it. Like now. Did I say Liberal Party? I meant, of course, Mr Tiny Speaker, to say Conservative Party, although, in truth, Mr Tiny Speaker, there's not much difference between us, nor Labour, come to that.  The people, you see, they are the common enemy, the enemy  within.

But the England supporters are truly an advanced case of masochism en masse, which is just as well, really, one way and another, said Mr CallHimDave, one of a succession of unelected prime ministers, below, in negotiations with a colleague.

 Privy councillors; the Devil, as ever, is in the detail.

Welfare to work, that's what these fans need, never mind lengthy holidays in the Sun while the rest of us are knocking our guts out attacking the poor and the sick and the disabled.  If you think it's easy dreaming up new, petty ways in which to humiliate sick people and old people then you have no idea of how hard it is forging a govament of national hatred. But somebody's gotta do it.  Thank God we have lots of Bullingdon Boys in the govament.  And a few gimps.

As for taxation well, this just proves my point.  The footballers have been paying far too much of their incomes in taxation and it has probably sapped their will to rape, I mean win.  If we 're not jolly careful they'll all be going and working abroad. No taxation for rich people,  that's the thing. And we would go further, Mr Tiny Speaker. The best thing for our high earners is not to tax them at all and for every million pounds a week they earn we should bung them another half-mill from public funds, we'll easily afford it from all the disability payments we're cutting.  I must pay some people to come up with some facts to prove this is right, an independent body which does exactly as I say, like these chaps at the office of budget wotsit. And Ms Frank Field is probably the right sort of slag to do it. What, he's already on the payroll? Well that's alright then, give him a rise. Reward the rich and punish the poor, that's the thing. Did I mention I went to Eton? And that's why I'm so fucking stupid.
  ..............................................................................

Enough Mr Tiny Speaker, BoJo the Ho Ho and CallMeDave - they are all monsters from the past. Ed.

What's that you say? They haven't gone away?

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

Gorgeous, pouting Andy Burnham, 

King of the North, according to the Andrew Marr show, is miffed with Gnasher Sturgeon, who has  declared that all non-essential travel to Manchester by her subjects will be banned from Monday. This is to "minimise the risk of allowing more virus to come back here to Scotland. I'd ask you to think carefully about whether your journey is really necessary," because we've all seen Queer As Folk and we know what dirty bastards they are in Manchester.

The movements of the Tartan Army, as previously documented in these pages, present absolutely no risk whatsoever, although Gnasher did tell them off for singing nasty, but funny,  songs about the English. 

Well, I've been hanging out with some chums who have formed the view that the Tartan Army was allowed to invade England, not because of fears of civil war should the police or armed forces attempt to prevent them, but because those in charge of us, Who Know Best, know fine well that there is no global pandemic, that it has all been bigged  up in order to inspire fear in the population for the purposes of  consolidating their own wealth, power and privilege and persuading us to take the vaccine, for purposes which were not specified, but we can be assured that said purposes are dark. Too late for me. I'm double-jagged, as we say in Scotland, to differentiate us from England, whose inhabitants are double-jabbed.

Here's a concluding essay from mr ishmael:

MUSIC IS SO MUCH LESS THAN WHAT YOU ARE, BERNSTEIN 7th November 2015

 

My late big  brother, Joseph,  used to try to teach me stuff. 

He continued way past the time that he could but while he still could, when we were children, he did so very well. My late father, Joseph,  was a skilled man, a time-served motor engineer but like most of us he was a poor teacher, sermonising was his cup of tea, he preached an edgy and entirely worthy scepticism in cadences which I hear to this day, cautionary but resigned; he would quote huge chunks of poetry, Grey's Elegy, especially, assuming an understanding on my part, at ten, which was entirely unrealistic, never stopping to check my comprehension,  he roared away, theatrically; I mean, what ten-year old would understand, simply  upon hearing:
 

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

brother Joe, however, until whatever it was which went wrong went wrong, could teach and inspire.  Latterly, he would browbeat and hector with the dreadful  righteousness of the habitually drunken Presbyterian, as much at odds with himself as with his fellows.

Before he was overtaken by himself, though, Joey was a dazzler. We were watching a Western on the black-and-white telly one day, long ago and far away; it was that ghastly John Wayne in Stagecoach. The Duke, as he later modestly called himself, was in the role which probably made his Hollywood name. As the Ringo Kid, Wayne, atop a stagecoach travelling through Monument Valley, exchanges shots with a pursuing band of savage injuns; mile after mile the stagecoach thunders along, the Duke's Winchester deterring  the blood-crazed, raping redskins, their blood-curdling war cries underscoring their  lust for  the white women aboard the coach; only the marksmanship and outlaw courage of the Ringo Kid, mile after bumpy mile, can save the women from a fate worse than death.

Good job they're so stupid, the Apaches, said Joe.

Whaddayamean?

Well, all they gotta do is shoot one of the horses.............

So why don't they?

Because then there would be no chase.......no film.

If there ever were marauding Apaches, chasing after a stagecoach defended by a big fairy in a big fairy shirt balancing on its roof then those blokes, from the time of the Conquistadores' introduction of the horse to the Americas, would have grown skilled in killing other beasts from horseback; gun-shooting or arrowing one horse from a team would have been child's play, but then, as Joe said, there would've been no film.

It was my introduction to what we call the Suspension of Disbelief, the fact that you must mentally eat shit, bite into it and swallow it down,  you must ignore your common sense for fiction to work its work upon you; and by fiction I mean theatre, film, television and what we still insist upon calling journalism. As mr mike noted, during his recent visit to Sheffield, even what we call the news is theatrical, not just a bit theatrical, entirely so, playing us, as in Hamlet's impatient words to Guildenstern:

 Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! 
You would play upon me. 
You would seem to know my stops. 
You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.
 You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.

Something has happened to me, or to my circumstances, recently, whereby most of  the sources for these commentaries are become entirely worthless, not worth viewing, hearing  or reading about, much less transposing into their deserved bitter caricature.  It is as though I am relentlessly beaten about the head and shoulders with  Tom Lehrer's  dictum  that a world which could award the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger was a world far beyond having the piss taken.

I am unaccustomedly away from home  from early Monday until late Thursday and during those days I am by turns citizen-suspect at the airport, passenger on the 'plane and in the taxi; patient in the hyperbaric treatment centre; passenger in another taxi and then, worst of all, guest in a hotel run by charity-biddies - salaried ones - and cancer patients from Orkney and Shetland, furiously anxious and generationally tribal.  I fucking hate that place. I fucking hate Shetland and Shetlanders and I fucking hate the fact that so many of them smoke cigarettes, laughing naughtily as they have a last gasp before being driven at your expense to their radio- or chemo-therapy.  Quite brings out my inner Simon Heffer, it does, stupid fucking bastards.  I know addiction is hard,  I know that having cancer is a prime location for the resignation which inhabits the line, When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose; I know we should properly hang a few multi-national tobacco barons and their stooges, people like Ken I Never Heard Of Dolphin Square Clarke, PC, QC, MP and we would if only they didn't all give  so much money to MediaMinster; and I know that we should tax tobacco beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy and seriously punish illicit traffickers.  But never mind the pushers,  users have responsibilities, even in addiction. I look at these people going to have treatment for the poison in their systems while greedily inhaling as much poison as they can, from what they call their only pleasure in life and when I see them huddled together around a dining table eating their sausages and tatties, hissing loudly about Incomers to the Isles I want to kill them, shove their mouths onto an exhaust pipe, tape their heads to a rear bumper and stand on the throttle.

mr ishmael's essays today are:

London                                                                                       drafted  11/11/2010 

SkyMadeUpNewsandSport, S&M England, The World Cup    drafted 28/6/2010

Music is so much less than what you are, Bernstein                  drafted  7/11/2015

Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

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

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.  

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back : 

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 WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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.  

With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89

 

A Nightingale Didn't sing in Leicester Square

 Scotland has been busy celebrating their nil nil victory, ably egged on by a triumphalist BBC Radio Scotland.

Even I, a person on whom the finer, even grosser, detail of the beautiful game is entirely lost, watched quite a chunk of the match between my two countries, before boredom drove me to Gardener's World. Now, there's a soporific show for a Friday evening - live, or on iPlayer, it never disappoints - Monty mooing over the latest eco-sustainable gardening fad - No Plastic! No Peat! Don't cut your grass! and his team of presenters, all of whom viscerally hate Monty in the way that the crew of the United Star Ship Enterprise hate, loathe and detest Captain Jim Kirk; guaranteed to have one dropping off for a pleasant snooze before it is time to climb the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire.

I digress. Scottish fans had fun. So abysmal is their football performance that a draw is to them an astounding, unbelievable, utterly delightful victory. After roundly insulting their hosts in song and trashing Leicester Square, they've cleared off hame to Glasgae.

It's an instinct - make as much mess as possible to show your superiority. Harris does the same by peeing on the urine of other male dogs, as he patrols the mean streets of Kirkwall.

On Friday, Wee Sturgeon  told the Tartan Army to "follow the rules in London" to avoid spreading the covid virus. She told them to be Ambassadors for Scotland and respect their London hosts. She said: "I would abhor and condemn unreservedly any anti-English chants. Racism, xenophobia, anything like that is not to be tolerated."

Well, they paid you not a blind bit of notice - so what's your next move? Build a wall round fucken Glasgow? Or - here's a thought - stop whipping up anti-English sentiment. 

 

Evensong: Yes, Sir, I can Boogie

 

Scotland didn't lose!!!!

Nor did England!!!!

That's just about the best of all possible outcomes, seeing as how London was invaded by the largest scoatish army ever, like ever. Of course, the real winner will be the Delta Variant, which has Glasgow by the throat, and lungs - and the Tartan Army musters from Glasgow.

You can't help but be a little bit pleased for them, cos they don't win football matches, and not to lose is, like, a gigantic victory.

 

Yeay! Scotland didn't lose!!!

Evensong: Bottle of red, bottle of white....

 Scenes From  an Italian Restaurant

 

Maybe not the best sound - it is a live recording - but, oh the fun they had and doesn't it just take you back.  Great music for a summer's evening and I'll meet you anytime you want in our Italian restaurant. That saxophone is amazing. But Billy Joel could make a piano do anything he wants - that's why they called him The Piano Man.

The Sunday Ishmael: 13/06/21

 

Whether a German-controlled EU will be better or worse is open to debate: you could argue it will be more coherent, even if it lacks democratic legitimacy. But there can surely no longer be any debate about whether German domination is happening.     Matthew Lynn in the Spectator 7/6/21

 

Friday

Spiced melon, gazpacho, coconut, high note herbs

Turbot roasted on the bone (caught off the Cornish coast by a fisherman from Newquay) with Cornish new potatoes and wild garlic pesto with local garden greens

 Cheeses - Cornish cheese, Gouda, Cornish yarg, helford blue

English strawberry pavlova

clotted cream fudge, clotted cream ice cream cone, chocolate Earl Grey truffles

Saturday

Sparkling scallops, Curgurrell crab claws, Portscatho mackerel

seared and smokey moorland sirloin, Newlyn lobster and scorched leeks with  layered Cornish potato chips, StJust purple sprouting broccoli and salt baked beetroot

Beach Hut Sundae

 

Around firepits on the beach: Baked Brie, hot buttered rum and toasted marshmallows

 

These people eat too much. Boris really shouldn't have had them over - it's like giving a dinner party to people you are obliged to have round: they eat your food and drink your Cornish beer and hedgerow fizz, then proceed to piss on the furniture. That Macron, he can't tell his arse from a hole in the ground: "Nothing is negotiable. Everything is applicable" - that is just rude. We'll see how he gets on with Germany in charge this time round. And how very dare he suggest that Northern Ireland is not part of the same country as the United Kingdom. The Foreign Secretary, our Dom, was moved to extremely undiplomatic language this morning:  "I think it is offensive... what we want is a bit of respect from the other side, a bit of flexibility, a bit of goodwill"

 

Look, they may not be everybody's cup of Earl Grey, they may be a bit looney-tunes, they may be a bit Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but they are our looney-tunes, and we're proud to have the six counties as part of our glorious nation, so we are. mr ishmael, a son of Belfast, touched on its specialness - not often, because they are downright scary. He told me that his mother would alert the family to the Orange parades with the cry of "The men! The men are coming!" as they processed with sashes, bowler hats, instruments and intimidation through Catholic residential streets.

Do you remember Irisgate?  Peter Robinson, a founder member of the Democratic Unionist Party, together with the downright terrifying Ian Paisley, was the First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2008 until 2016. In 2010, his wife, Iris, a serving MP and Member of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly for the DUP for Strangford, had an affair with  19 year old Kirk McCambley and procured £50,000 in loans for the boy so he could start his own restaurant. She failed to declare her monetary interest in the restaurant, despite serving on the council which leased the premises to her teenage lover.
The Official Assembly Commissioner's Investigation and Report completely cleared Robinson of any wrongdoing.

 

THE SWISH FAMILY ROBINSON POSE OUTSIDE ONE OF THEIR MANY VULGAR HOMES.

It turns out that Pete and the babyfucker, Iris,  still embody the brutal ethos of orange presbyterianism after all; the same sort of attitudes which sparked the Troubles in 1967 and led, eventually to the virtual apotheosis of Mr Kneecaps McGuinness, Mr Gerry Adams of the Noncing Adams Family, the ghastly Paisley horrorshow and themselves.

This writer is of these people and knows too well their tight-lipped, rictus smile, judgemental, tut-tutting hypocrisy, their sense of historic entitlement,  their Masonic carve-ups and vendettas, their bent cops and judges, their apartheid wrapped in a Union Jack.

Robinson and his clan, in my lifetime, argued that one person one vote  had no place in Northern Ireland;  that businessmen, like themselves, should continue to have a vote in every constituency in which they had premises - democracy minus zero, no limits.

They argued that a special, armed, sectarian police force, the B Specials, composed of their most loutish cousins and nephews and uncles, should exist to control the Catholics by means of beatings and shootings and framings-up in the courts.

The Orangemen, flushed still, from their (Dutch) victory in a minor military skirmish nearly three hundred years previous, insisted on their right to annually terrorise their Catholic neighbours by marching, pissed-up and belligerent, through their neighbourhoods, insisted on the legitimacy of their control of housing, policing and employment - which worked to the advantage only of themselves and to the active disadvantage of the Catholics. A shower of fucking bastards, supported by a Westminster Tory shower of fucking bastards and a vicious  Orange hoodlum regiment in Glasgow; it was a civil rights movement as legitimate as that in the United States which was hijacked by the Provisional IRA  and which led to a bloodbath so gross that the current Northern Ireland Police Service has just announced the abandonment of  investigations into three thousand deaths in that benighted province.

I'm not a violent man, never have been, never had to be, I was always, from about eleven, over six feet tall.  I've had the odd incident, was charged, once, with attempted murder but that was just Old Bill, doing what he does, lying his arse off;  it was self-defence and the judge threw it out, laughing.  I hit this guy - who was attacking me with a deadly weapon - as hard as I could, just the once, broke his face in bits - teeth, jaw, cheekbone.  'Salways made me think twice about that stuff,  And the other thing is that the older I've become the more I realise how utterly miraculous is Life, Creation, how our self-repairing systems are hard-wired, clever beyond belief and how a punch in the gob is potentially an act of heinous vandalism.

That's not to say that some people don't deserve to have their beings vandalised;  we can all think of six-hundred and fifty of them, immediately - thieves, ponces, slags, war criminals, Earth criminals, blackmailers, extortionists and child molesters;  there's a giant-sized A&E department's worth just sitting there, lying and bragging and guffawing on the green benches.

But some people, the nerve of some people, they really need singling-out for special treatment, for cruel and unusual punishment.  If I was ever alone in a room with this guy, I would gouge his eyes out, cut his tongue out,  smash every bone in his body and bury him alive:

 Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has been challenged by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to make a statement to the Dail on the disappearance of Belfast mother-of-ten Jean McConville.

Mr Kenny told Mr Adams that for “one reason or another”  his name was always associated with “elements of that”.

“There’s a challenge for you now,” Mr Kenny said. “Say it on the record.”
Fianna Fail Micheal Martin leader also told the Dail: "Nobody except Deputy Adams believes he wasn't in the IRA."
Before her death, IRA bomber Dolours Price publicly alleged that Mr Adams ordered Ms McConville's kidnapping and killing.
Mr Adams has consistently rejected the accusations.
It comes just days after recordings of secret interviews with the late IRA bomber Dolours Price were handed over to police in Northern Ireland investigating the disappearance of Ms McConville.
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers travelled to the US to collect the tapes from the US Justice Department, after they had been secured by subpoena from Boston College.
The Taoiseach has urged anyone with information about those abducted, murdered and secretly buried during the Troubles to help end the decades-long suffering of their families.
Relatives of the victims, known as the Disappeared, met Mr Kenny and presented him with a copy of a recently published book setting out some of their stories.
Afterwards, in a statement, Mr Kenny said he expressed his sympathy to the families and supported their ongoing fight to have the remains of their loved ones located and returned for burial.
"I am glad to have the opportunity this evening to meet with and to hear the stories of those families whose loved ones were taken, killed and then hidden from them in such a callous and tragic way," he said.
"Information from the public is absolutely essential to help to bring an end to their pain."
Mr Kenny called on anyone with information about any of the cases to contact the Victims' Remains Commission in strict confidence.
"I also call on anyone who knows anyone else who may have relevant information to use their influence to encourage them to make it available to the commission," he said.

"This is a matter of common human decency. These families have suffered enough and somebody out there can help to bring an end to that suffering."

The Taoiseach also said in the statement that he met the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) and was updated on their work."

By Fiach Kelly – 09 July 2013

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

mr ishmael's essays today were:

 

NO SURRENDER. THE THIEVING RED HAND OF ULSTER  drafted 31/03/2010 

 

WOTSONTELLY drafted 9/11/2013

 

Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

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

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.  

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back : 

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 WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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.  

With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89