The Sunday Ishmael 8/5/2022

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

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

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

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

Lisa needs to get a bigger suit and a haircut, 

Growler really, really needs to buy some longer skirts, 

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

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

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

Rock-God archaeologist staring moodily into the past.

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

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

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

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

Or pop on a beanie hat.

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

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

 WOTSONTELLY - Noisy Wimmin, THAT'S WHAT.

 

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

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

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

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

 Take that, Davina.

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

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

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

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

Anne Lister of Shibden Hall

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

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

 

Lulu Link for Vent Stack:

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

So far, so good.