The Sunday Ishmael 27/03/2022 That's me, back from my hols

 

Sunset at Sea, taken from the M.V. Hjaltland 26/3/2022

Just back from a 1,144 mile road trip. Plus two ferry crossings on the MV Hjaltand, each of 6 or 7 hours' duration. The Hjaltland is fairly disgusting, as mr ishmael has previously documented, Shetlanders in the bar and huge animal transporters on the car deck, taking the poor beasts from Orkney to mainland Scottish abattoirs to be slaughtered. The stench and cries of the pitiable imprisoned cows of a morning when one retrieves one's car, picking a way around the giant transports, chains, cars and wheel blocks, would drive second thoughts into the most hardened carnivore. Just another aspect of the death industry to be tidied away from the sight of folk who prefer their meat to be neatly packaged in little trays, with cellophane around them and a sort of sanitary towel under them to soak up the blood. And from Marks and Spencer or Waitrose. 

The Hjaltland has an on-board cinema - well, not really - it is a big telly with a DVD player - so after fishnchips and two tiny little bottles of indescribably horrid white wine, I watched the only offering. New, it wasn't. Not a wots on at t'pictures experience. More a this is so old you have to get it on DVD. So you may have already seen  it. 152 minutes long. That's two hours and a half an hour and then another two minutes. Which, considering I had to kill 6 hours of chugging across the North Sea, was ok. If I'd seen it at home, I'd have been looking for something else to do. Like the washing up. But that would have been a mistake. Maybe my reaction was conditioned by having wrangled the mighty Mercedes Benz over 325 miles that day, so I'd just lived my own race-movie, maybe the drone of the ferry's engines and the swell of the sea provided additional dimensions of sensory experience to the film, but when Christian Bale rammed his footie down to the floorboards, my footie was down, too, my hands gripped the steering wheel, my face was split in the rictus grin of high speed laughing in the face of death, as old Christian with his skull of a tanned, sweating face, gunned his race car into impossible feats of overtaking, scraping wheels as rivals tried to force him off track, ducking as bits of burning car flew past, and in a gentlemanly, team-player concession to the wishes of the Ford executive, slowed down so that all three Ford cars could cross the finish line of Le Mans '66 together. Having rubbished all those Ferrari bastards. That Le Mans race was cruel. Twenty-four hours solid, interrupted by pit stops for new parts, tyres and fuel, the pit crews working with furious, balletic skill, drivers spelling each other with inadequate breaks, cars overturning at preposterous speed, bursting into flame, killing drivers. Henry Ford wanted a race car because Enzo Ferrari goaded him with the line: “You’re not Henry Ford. You’re Henry Ford II.” And wouldn't sell him Ferrari - the winners of Le Mans for three years. Ford was looking like an old ladies' car in the Sixties: “James Bond does not drive a Ford,” the advertising executive explains, to which Henry Ford II, the company’s chief executive, retorts: “Because he’s a degenerate.” 

Those are about the best lines in the film and there's an awful lot of reaction shots, bromance crap, executive schenagling, widowandorphanning and Matt fucking Damon - but the race track sequences, shot low so race cars explode into hot metal and flames around your ears are pretty damn superb and Christian Bale's  Ken Miles

 

is like Guy Martin on speed. You wouldn't want either of them driving you to the supermarket.

So Joe Biden had a "who will rid me of this turbulent priest" moment this week. Really not a good idea. What with Tank Girl Truss and Joseph Robinette, its no wonder that Putin is suspicious of the West.

For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power

After the best part of a fortnight in England's green and pleasant land, it was back home to smart, successful Scotland, so clever that 1 in 11 Scots are currently suffering from Covid, and 2000 Scots are hospitalised in consequence of Covid - not in hospital with something else and then either catch it or are found to already have it, but because they have a nasty case of Covid. Hospitals are cancelling non-urgent interventions, operations and treatments.

But still the only thing that the media want us to think about is Biden's War:

Ishmaelian epigram: A CRIMEAN NOTEBOOK 30/3/2014
"In the 21st century you simply cannot invade other countries on some made-up pretext." John Facelift, US Secretary of State

  and how we can do our bit to support sanctions by not complaining when our living standards drop and  gas, electricity and fuel prices go up, because it is all in a good cause. Honestly, old Russian ladies fighting over bags of sugar in supermarkets and Russian women (am I still allowed to call them that?) not able to find tampons and sanitary towels in the shops, will not cause Putin one moment, one iota of a moment's concern. He's like that.

'sokay, though, because Britain can take the pain. And the millionaire running our economy will help us out with 5p a litre off fuel. 

 

Here's a relevant little rant by mr ishmael:

 

LOOK AFTER THE PENNIES

They really do think we are stupid, they really do think that a penny on or off the price of a pint is a matter of national concern,  that horny-handed churls everywhere will be beside themselves with rage or glee, should the price of a pint alter.  Perhaps this astonishing misapprehension arises from the fact that they don't buy their own booze, fuck, no;  they don't buy anything unless it can be charged to us;  we buy their food, their clothes, their houses, we pay for their holidays, business pays for other holidays or bribes, which is what they are,  and we pay for serious fact-finding trips abroad, to the Caribbean, to China, Australia, Paris, Rome and Stockholm,  to wherever the whores and the boys and the shopping are good; as a matter of  fact,  there is nowhere in the world from which a parliamentarian cannot gather useful information of great value to his or her constituents.  Free everything, it is vital, if an MP is to stay in touch with life lived by the electors, that he doesn't have to pay for anything and it is this concept which informs his judgement on the crucial importance of the penny on the pint.

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

Mothering Sunday. 

Here's some daffs. 

A better present might be to stop killing every mother's son. And making widows before their time. Here's mr ishmael again:

 

 

 THE SUNDAY SERMON: 

Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. 19/ 6/ 2010

 

The Dead, what are they like, eh, a pain in the arse, if you ask me.  For some reason, probably ominous, there has been, in my corner of reality, a - what, what would you call a group of them, a Coven of, a Funeral of, a Weariness of - yes, A Weariness of Widows and its presence has ignited  a flaming whirlwind of  resentful defiance and resentment at tippytoeing around the only-to-be-guessed-at whims and foibles of an entity which doesn't exist, Ah, but it's what HE would have wanted;  mustn't, for fucks sake,  say something, ANYTHING with which HE would take offence; if HE still was, that is. Who do these fucking dead bastards think they are ?

The young widow of a young husband.  By all accounts, even hers, he was an utter wanker - lazy, critical and incompetent, she working and he staying at home on his arse, getting pissed or stoned or both and ridiculing her career choices; greedy, tight-fisted and stupid, he had bullied and humiliated her for a decade; like manys a layabout he had practiced the artistry of being a pretend Artist, Treat me not as you would others, for I am  Artist;  he didn't play or write or paint anything, he was the Artist of our Times, he took  fucking pictures.   Just ordinary pictures - seascapes, landscapes, skyscapes;  hard to take a bad picture of that stuff, here, at the End of the World.  But being an undiscovered Photographer - even in a culture where babies play with cameraphones and everyone is a photographer, and where everyone is a movie-maker -  being an Undiscovered Photographer was, he thought, like being apprenticed to Athena, Goddess of Art; Don't speak to me of unpaid bills, unmade beds and unseen hurts, Stop making with those negative waves, Moriar-ity.

Anyway, one morning he woke-up dead, or she woke up and he was. He had a whole lifetime left, nearly, in which to spray his bitter piss all over her and there he was, stretched out, not. And ever since it's been, Oh, I'm gonna do so-and-so, because it's what HE would have wanted me to do.  And a  gaggle of comforting, tentative relatives nodding, 'swhat he would have wanted, The Flying Mourners, just a phone call away, or they just turn up, out of empathy.

  Now, that's all very well, but it hadn't ought to be compulsory on the whole population.  Didya hear so-and-so's dead? No? Oh fuck me, that's terrible, you don't happen to have a hairshirt I could borrow, do you, only 'sprobably what he would have wanted, no, never, never met him;  the whole fucking world going about worrying about what  some fucking memory might think of things. The bastard's dead, doesn't matter what he would have wanted. Well, not to me it doesn't.

I think, what I think, is that widows should go in proper fucking mourning, away from the gaze of the grief-fetishists, indoors, mainly, out of sight  and out of mind until their griefs and guilts are purged by time and necessity and lust.  The purpose of the funeral is to let those who wish to express their respects and regrets and remembrances do so publicly and forthrightly; after the funeral, the grief, once, briefly, collectively owned reverts entirely to the bereaved, it is theirs and theirs alone, obviously.

 And they should be in black, widows, if they do go out among the unbereaved; widows in black, with veils, know where you are, then;  can avoid them.Mourning is something they can only do on their own, that's the point of it, you can't share it out, among others, on the other side of the screen,  so why do they keep trying to?

I forget this one's name, early forties, hubby was a captain, killed in the Stan and he was just the best this that and the other and I dunno what I'm gonna do when this happens and that happens and he's not there. No? Well what'll probably happen is that you'll be doing it with a new husband, innit? C'mon, stop messing about.

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

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

 

Lulu Link for Vent Stack:

https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Lulu Link for Honest, Not Invent

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

Link for Paper Back : 

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

At checkout, try PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which  takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.