MY BIG FAT GIPSY GENERAL ELECTION.

WELCOME, TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD

warning! 
readers may be distressed by some of the images in this report; one of them, anyway; 
 I know I am.

Christ Almighty, it's like fucking ZombieWorld around here, recently.

PinstripeMick Heseltine, on The Daily Hobgoblin, the other day, I swear he was fast asleep, most of the time, mad old git.

Fuck, have I nodded-off, again,  and missed the biscuits, be a good chap, Neil,  and fetch me a couple of garibaldis, they're my favourite, you can dunk them, without too much risk of them falling-off and making your tea all lumpy.  I hate that, don't you, when you're just coming to the end of your cup of tea and you feel lumps of soggy fucking biscuit on your upper lip, must be hell for chaps with a moustache, getting it coated with warm  digestive biscuit paste. And you can't just wipe it away, with an Irish  linen napkin, off the Sheraton sideboard, because parts of it are slop and relatively easily absorbed but other parts haven't quite dissolved and they rather abrade one's upper lip, or,  indeed, clog-up one's moustache, if one has one.  Either way, it's the very Devil of a biscuit management problem.  But you can rely on the Tories to deal with this sort of thing.  No, you just keep the digestives for eating your brie or camembert, off your Royal Worcester bone china plates, out of the Sheraton mahogany and  rosewood credenza and keep the garibaldis for dunking in your PG Tips, like a chimp. Only of course, one shouldn't park oneself on the Georgian mahogany extending dining table  and masturbate oneself all over the tea service, grinning like a Scottish tribesman.  Y'see, Andrew?  Takes a special kind of chap to be deputy prime minister.  Only not that arse, Clegg, obviously. Stroll on, 'drather be in coalition with Andy fucking Pandy.  Get more sense out of a papier mache Teddy fucking Bear than you would out of that cunt.

That'll do, won't it, time for my tablets and my nap.

That was Lord Mick Heseltine there,

joining us on the Daily Hobgoblin.

And if it seems like I've been interviewing him for the past fifty years, it's because I have.

But don't worry, I think when this lot's over I'll be hanging up the old ginger-and-white toupee,

and spending some time with friends. 

 

an old, and much unrespected, well-disliked  journalist,

 unencumbered by wig, make-up or patent Squeeze-U-in suit, tie'n'hankie, enjoying his Midnight Hour.

 Before that, before BiscuitsMick, it was Johnny Underpants, doing his soapbox drone in The Solihull Dementia Sufferers LunchClub. Oh yes.

Oh, yes; oh, yes; oh, yes.

Hear this, church-going spinsters, the very salt of England, bicycling home, on your Raleigh Back2Basics Ladies' cycles,  to a glass of warm beer and an interracial gangbang. 

These Milibands, they're right bastards. 

What, just one of them? Where's the other fucker gone, then? 

America?

Well I never.

I have been not unsignificantly inaware of that.

But even if there's only one of them, he'll cause more trouble than that bastard, Portillo.

Oh yes.

Remember, voters of Britain,

a vote for Milband is a vote for Portillo.

And you might let those Torybastards in.

And today, the Filth-O-Graph has that model of public service, 

Edwina Shagbag,  
all dolled-up for the Ugly Whores' Ball,

gobbing-off, not about doing the GreyManFuckShuffle, not about appointing the worst sex offender in history to run a fucking hospital but on how Tory activists, all seven of them, are going to dash about on their strong legs and jolly well get the slackers out to fuck, I mean vote. 

Edwina Currie, Jesus fucking wept. 

They have no shame, at the Filth-O-Graph, none at all, they'd join a shit-eating competition, and win, if they thought it would keep-out the not-very-red menace.  Christ, they'd eat buckets of it, lorryloads of it, rather than pay tax.

And for the LibDems, facing wipe-out, there's

mad old bastard, Field Marshal Pantsdown, of the Dogshooters Regiment,

 he's developed that senile Tourette's syndrome

  

 Bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards,

not my word - bastards, but I love saying it, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, sixty of the fucking bastards, not sixteen fucking Tory bastards but sixty Tory bastards, it's just great saying bastards, I don't think I'm ever gonna say anything else, I'm just gonna look into the distance, with my steely, soldier's eyes, and shout,

 Bastards! Bastards1 Bastards! 

I betcha I can say bastards more times'n any other bastarding bastard. 

 Dogs? Shoot the bastards. 'Salways been our policy.

 Vince Cable? Shoot the bastard! 

Voters? Shoot the bastards.  

Go on, Michael Crick , you try saying bastards, you'll fucking love it, go on, it gets easier, after me, one-two-three, Bastards! Bastards! Bastards! 

You're all bastards, all of you bastards, you're all bastarding bastards. Vote for me.

 I'll sort out the fucking bastards.

Sharp sticks, that's what we need, and loadsa garlic. 

 Beware the undead.

On the bright side, Neil, Heseltine and  Pantsdown will have been carted-off by the time of the next general election, unless it's in November;  Major'll be retired to the Channel Isles, watching cricket on skymadeupnewsandfilth and his doxy, Edwina, should be dead of the House of Commons Pox,

Praise God and may He send a plague of rotten eggs to rain on her funeral. And on theirs.

WOTSONTELLY, DANCING WITH TITIAN.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, PBC4.

We often complain about the intrusion on their subjects of TeeVee arts presenters and  it can be argued that any presence is an intrusion and although some, being truly kowledgeable - Mathew Collings, Waldemar Jabberwocky and Michael Wood spring to mind - are at least tolerable, others, such as Dr Tubby Ramirez, Queen David Starkey and Simon Russell Beale, 

Andrew Graham Dixon,
for fucks sake, 

are a noisy pollution, vandalising any subject upon which they chance.  
Neil Oliver, an able historian, presents not just history or archaeology but himself,  

as  hybrid rockstar-archaeologist;  

Dan Cruikshank appears as a conspiratorially eccentric uncle, 
while Dan Snow 

of the ghastly Snow Dynasty, 

has a muscle-bound, platitudinous  oafishness,  voiced from a face upon which you foot'd break  before you tired of kicking it.  

Dr Lucy Lisp, Keeper of the Royal Knocking Shops and media tart, is happiest 

 

posing for the nation  in  a  bath or laced-up in a Georgian corset, pouting and lisping her crass arty histories at us,  a pseudo-scholarly telly trollop, ghastly little stoat. 

Hi, big boy,
I'm Doctor Lucy,
buy me.

The arts show is now merely a branding exercise for its presenters.
No business like showbusiness.

The convention seems to be that simply showing us pictures or playing us music is insufficient, there must be a media star between us and the art; it is a device patronising, impertinent and ultimately philistine in its presumption. Last night, however, on PBC4 there came one of those events which justifies the license tax;  Frederick Wiseman's, the National Gallery,  had neither presenter nor voiceover, yet, for three-hours, was eye-wateringly entertaining, informative, educational and inspiring .

Cameras roamed through the Gallery among patrons, paintings and staff. In a boardroom meeting, Gallery Director, Nicholas Penny, 

faced-down a Siobahn Sharpe-type PR bint, who was urging him to get with the charity programme and allow the building to be used as a hoarding for something related to the London Marathon, it's4, like,  you know, charidee.  This, you stupid cunt, he seemed to respond, bless him, is the National Fucking Gallery.  Later, he appeared giving an impromptu lecture on Poussin to Gallery visitors and why he was the Director of the National Gallery became very clear.

Although the film revisited the boardroom to witness a discussion about the budget,  the bureaaucracy of the Gallery ended there and the film appeared to just wander around , stopping  at an interesting conversation or at a curious juxtaposition of paintings.  They don't just hang 'em, dissertations are written about  where, how and with what else pictures should be hung, and although these scholarly discussions were held on camera they weren't to camera, were as naturalistic and spontaneous as they could possibly be, given that a camera in the room changes and distorts everything.

Much of the film, as did the recent FilmFour Mr Turner, concentrated on light and lighting;  one scene involved a lighting technician, high-up on a self-propelling ladder, being directed by a curator on the floor, seeking optimum illumination of a triptych, suggesting this angle, that intensity, in the  end being forced - like all artists - to accept  compromise and abandonment, having to live with a level of shadow; another scene was a lengthy exposition of picture illumimation - then, in Old Master times, and now. Pictures were sometimes created or sketched-out, in situ - where they would be hung - and according to then-prevailing natural light; composition was servant to that light, as were varnishes, some concocted to illuminate and to enhance and enrich pigments deployed, the varnish was both part of the palette and a form of self-contained illumination, albeit that with time the varnish obscured what it once revealed. Old Masters, when painted,  were basically viewed in the relative darkness of candlelight, bathed a little in the reflected shine of wooden floorings and way above the natural eye-line, hung - as many were - over grandly high fireplaces.  

 Sections of the film were as much about seeing the painting - were we physically seeing what the artist intended - as about understanding or appreciating it.  Were we superimposing the Now on the Then? Rembrandt never painted for the electric light; any place, therefore, where  a modern curator hung a Rembrandt was, in purist's terms,  the wrong place.

This conflict, between technologically anachronistic hindsight  and the original work of art,  followed, even more critically, the conservator and his or her painstaking work

and again the question asked itself, What the fuck are we doing here, meddling with Time's ruinous handiwork, attempting  to restore something to a state which we can never know? All concerned were flagellating themselves like Mediavalists, for sins which they may not have committed, for their inability to time-travel, ask Velazquez, How, exactly, should this fucking thing look?

has someone already fucked it up, a hundred years ago?

 This To-Restore/Not-Restore conundrum had niggled so much that the Gallery's dictum  now states that any retouching done by this generation must be easily removed by the next,  the future must be able to readily see the past unmediated by the more recent past, even if that recent past had already been mediated by earlier restorers. It is the sort of dilemma from whose horns there is no escape.

And so it went on, questioning, well, I suppose the survivability of works of art, asking, Can we actually do this, Are we - as quantum physicists alter the observed  merely by observing it - in seeking to conserve art  actually destroying it? And the answer, of course, is yes. 

 I am the world's worst - or best - restorer;  the furniture fetishist loves patina, patina is dirt;  I love to clean the dirt off.

 

This chair was jet black when we met, with two centuries of soot and I wanted to see the crazy elm figuring and see the sunshine from half a millenium ago. So I cleaned it. I don't try to remove scuffs or scratches or natural imperfections, just dirt. A collector would rather have had it in the soot-blackened, greasy state.  My decision, though,  gives more pleasure to more people, is more egalitarian and promotes, I know, a much greater interest in wood, trees, tools, furniture making, social history and Creation. It's the way I tell 'em.  Cleaning up dirty old pictures, even if it's wrong, it's right.

Several scenes revolved around a conservator, Larry, explaining to a small Gallery audience the well-intentioned damage done by generations of his fellow, Road To Hell  craftspersons. His predecessors, of course, had no access to x-rays and blotches,  revealed once the old varnish had been removed from a Rembrandt,  had been tinkered with, touched-up,  by earlier generations. 

Larry's x-ray of the painting showed that the portrait, of a burgher on horseback,  had been painted over another, similar subject; Rembrandt had merely recycled the canvas and what  History's  experts had judged careless execution  by Rembrandt was actually the earlier painting leeching through;  hard to know, therefore, with any certainty, which bits are Rembrandt and which Rembrandt Improved.

 Yet for all his professional hauteur and expertise, Larry, like so many in the National Gallery is an amateur, doing what he  does from love and en-theus-iasm, filled with God

 I came across this, decades ago, in McLuhan's Understanding Media, typed it up


and it's always been around, somewhere, on a shelf, a mantelpiece.
Nothing that I do is Art but some of the things which I have done I have done as well as I can. And I think that for all their agonising, the Gallery
  
the guides,
 
the attendants,
 
the craftspersons and the experts do that, too.

Even though there were, predictably,  too many gobby, arty men in carefully knotted scarves and expensive spectacles they were  a minor irritation, outnumbered by ordinary people, from everywhere, just gazing at  the pictures, one of the greatest collections in the world. 

There were three hours of conversation, discussion, explanation, notably about Leonardo, Velasquez, Titian, 

Rembrandt and our own Mr Turner. 


Collings was filmed shooting his own excellent show,
Turner's Thames. Not as excellent as this one, though.

And there was music, too, and finally, dance.  A pianist played to a small Gallery audience,  the Scherzo from Beethovens Sonata opus 31, while, echoing the stacatto of the music, the camera whizzed  and rattled through unidentified paintings and fragments of paintings. At various points in the film there were brief discussions about an upcoming dance  to be performed before a pair of Titians, what was the floor made of, what would the light be like, until eventually it dawned on the performers' representative that it was the pictures that mattered,  the pictures, the dancers would just have to cope with it being the National Gallery and not Sadlers Wells.  Despite everything else revealed by and hinted-at in this extraordinary blessing of a film, it was all really just about the pictures, looking at the pictures.  I suppose the difference between this and all the other TeeVee arts shows is that this, like Mr Turner, was a film and  not a programme, was truly Art, for Art's Sake.

    

When at the end, came the dancers, they were incongruous; so much lively  athleticism among centuries-frozen, two-dimensional mythology but my head and my heart were soon stolen away.  I came but lately to early music and Byrd just does that thing to me, the thing to which mr bungalow bill testifies, guilt and fretful isolation; his icy descant blended so perfectly with the gilded, ancient oils and the muscular arabesques that I thought my heart must break.

EXECUTION BLUES.

Albert Pierrepoint was the last great British executioner.  He was so good at what he did that for the Nuremberg hangings he was commissioned into the British Army as a lieutenant-colonel and sent out to hang the Nazis - the ones that weren't any good to the Russians or the Yanks, anyway.

Uncle Sam's necktie artistes were so inept, with their cowboy nooses, that they were either strangling Hermann to death, with shit and eyballs everywhere, or ripping his fucking head off completely. The Limey hangman demonstrated to them the finer points of his trade, despatching the Hermanns neatly and swiftly, ripping-off not even one Kraut head

 Pierrepoint came from a family of hangmen, his Da' and his uncle had been the official executioners for both England &Wales and Ireland, when we still owned her and Albert assisted them both, learning, forgive me, the ropes and when he  inherited the official executioner post and the little case containing the notes and tables on hanging and the deadly little noose he  made a steady living travelling the British Isles, killing people.

He was very adroit, Albert.  He kind of boasted that he would enter the condemned cell as the clock began to strike eight and his client would be dead before the eighth peal of the bell. The condemned cell door would swing open, Morning, old chap, he'd say, grasping the prisoner's hand and quickly walking him to the trap-door in the adjacent cell, the Topping Shop, pinioning his arms as they walked; once on the trap-door Albert's assistant would strap the man's legs together whilst Albert pulled a hood over his head, the assistant would draw back the safety catch on the trap-door and Albert would step back pulling the lever as he went.  The poor bastard never knew what was happening and in most cases died instantly, Albert having carefully calculated the length of his drop by means of reference to  Home Office tables compiled over many decades and by means of his own hangman's eye.  Having, the previous evening,  surreptitiously viewed the man through the Judas hole  in the cell door, Albert would minutely adjust the home office recommendations depending upon the idiosyncracies of each victim's musculature, if he was five feet eight with a thick neck and shoulders  he would need a longer drop than a five feet eight man of slight build. In nearly all of Albert's executions the spinal cord was severed at exactly the right vertebrae to cause instantaneous death.  Just the same, they'd leave him or her hanging there for an hour whilst Albert, the prison Governor  and his guests all went and had a hearty breakfast;  hungry work, hanging. Even so, if, before Abolition, you had been sentenced to death I am sure you would have paid good money to have Albert doing the business for you.

Those horrid, snarling little brown bastards in Indonesia, the ones with too many teeth in their mouths, those ugly little monsters could do with an Albert Pierrepoint, to help them execute people humaneley, well, less inhumanely. Gotta be more economical, too,  one hangman, one fee, one breakast.  I don't know if each of the eight executionees had their own firing squad, all to themselves but if they did that's ninety-six of the little brown bastards  and  nearly a hundred bullets. I was going to say that these shootings have put me in touch with my inner Farage, made me hate every last little angry brown bastard in Indonesia  but I guess he'd applaud the Indonesians' death penalty as being a litle corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

 I don't know what it was, today, why this particular obscenity shook me so  but a huge, red rage overtook me.  If there was an Indonesian charge d'affaires' gaff here, I'd have set fire to it and happily  beaten the diplomats to death, calling them rotten little brown bastards as I did so, cursing their rotten little brown bastard parents and their rotten little brown bastard children. And don't start me about how the NHS would be fucked sideways to Christmas if it wasn't for Indonesian arse-wipers.  I don't care, I don't want to be nursed or tended by nasty, angry little brown bastards, beardy women and angry,  conceited men, fuck 'em.

I read a lot about Pierepoint when I was younger   and was struck not by his humanity, that would be ridiculous, but by his efficiency;  he did that dire duty as well as it could be done and that included sparing the condemned as much distress as was possible, given the circumstances, and sparing him a slow, painful and probably unimaginably humiliating death.  

With these  brown bastards, it is the savagery of the process as much as the cruelty of the fact - shooting someone for something he did a decade ago, when he was someone else -  some poor smallfry, dragging him, screaming,  to a post or a wall, taking aim, firing and then checking that a dozen rounds have done the trick, and all whilst government and lawnforcement cartels grow rich on the continued absurdity of the War on Drugs - the Indonesians are planning to shoot a British granny for handling  three or four kilos of smack, I wonder how many kilos young parent, Sir Elton John consumed, when he was playing-up, Elt; of course, a rich junkie, was soireed in Downing Street, Granny a poor mule, will be shot to pieces.

Little Big Man

President Nasty Little Brown Bastard.
 
 Hanging's too good for them, Indonesians. Another  Boxing Day Tsunami, that's what they need, 
the last one taught them nothing.

CLAUSE FOUR REVISITED.

Mr Thomas B Hall commented on the last post that he was content to support a tiny, electorally insignificant and hopeless but uncompromising political party. Dave Nellist was the last MediaMinster politician for whom I had any respect and on the couple of occasions on which we spoke he struck me as gracious and sincere. Too gracious for the cunt, Kinnock, who, enraged by Nellist's only taking from his MP's salary the same wage as a skilled worker in his Coventry constituency, had him deselected.

 I post this broadcast not to proselytise but just in case others missed it, which would not be surprising, although I will say that I wish Dave and his comrades well, they should be neither insignificant nor hopeless. 

 Tearful Tommy Sheridan destroyed the left in  Scotland, snorting it away with cocaine bought from  party members' subscriptions, and Gorgeous George Galloway has pimped it away in England; maybe, in providing a collectivist's counterpoint to Poundland's lurid, discordant singularity Dave Nellist may yet, though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, rattle the cages of the unGodly. 

DREAMS OF NO RETURN. A MADMAN DEPARTS.

Waddawewant? Anal rape.

Whendowewannit? In the next Cleggalition.

Clegg supporters at the launch of  his party's ShitBook, yesterday.

My fellow child molesters,

All Cyril did was assault some children; what's so bad about that? Dave Boy Steel, former Chief Shitman.

my fellow shit-eaters,

 

 ShitParty copraphiliac shadow home secretary, 

Mark Oaten.

 look, I've eaten so much teenage fecal matter

 it's made my hair fall out.

How so Liberal is that?

my fellow wealthy benefit cheats,

 

 So I only stole fifty grand because I was gay and I didn't want my parents to know. ShitParty Education minister and ShitBook author, Dave Laws. 

So yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow jailbirds,

 Yes, I deeply regret it, being found out. 

Former ShitParty energy minister, Chris Huhne, 

writing in the Guardian,

 on wife-bullying and perverting the course of justice.

And on claiming twenty grand of taxpayer pounds when his criminality forced him out of the Cabinet, as they call organised crime's HQ.

Yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow incompetents,

The building contractors' friend, 
Lord Boy Steel-Shitman, 

presided over the Holyrood parliament building costs rising from fifty million pounds,

 to five hundred million pounds, half a billion fucking pounds for a talking shop.
It was a foreign architect, said  adulterer, Steel, Liberally; 

what do you expect from foreigners? 
Yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow gropers, grabbers and bottom fingerers,

Mike Hairy Hancock, CBE,  ShitParty Portsmouth MP, 

where he molested every constituent he encountered.

 Now believed to be standing  as a Groping Independent.

my fellow dipsomaniacs,

Charlie Pisshead, deeply principled former Chief Shitman and TeeVee non-personality, courageously  admitted to incompetence and unsuitability  through alcohol addiction a full ninety seconds  before his former aide was to blow the whistle on him.

my fellow raving lunatics

Field Marshal Lord Paddy Rupert-Golightly-Jockstrap-Narcissus, PC; VC, Croix de Guerre, Congressional Medal of Honour;

Nobel laureate, Oscar winner;

former Commanding Officer, Queen's Own Shitmen Regiment;

war hero, visionary, historian, distinguished statesman, orator, writer, philosopher, economist,  theologist,

TeeVee personality, adulterer and steely-eyed delusional maniac.

Delirious, stark, staring, raving, dribbling, foot-stomping, door-punching, climbing the walls bonkers, is Paddy; raging, unhinged, preposterous, rabid, demented, frantic, Napoleonic, gibbering out of his mind, mad as a box of fucking frogs;  Paddy is the ShitParty Election Supremo; how can it lose?

and last but not least, sickening hypocrites.

Straight Simon Hughes, 
warty, pervy,  bisexual queerbasher; liar, ponce, pseudo-Christian, cynical polytheist and all-round creepily untrustworthy bastard;  the ShitParty's justice minister.

What I say to you, all my colleagues, in the parliamentary party. And those several dozens of members and activists up and down the country, in the nation's public conveniences. What I say to you. Is this. 

Has it been  easy for me, a lifelong Tory, to lead my party into coalition with other lifelong Tories. Yes, of course it has.

And the nation should give me credit for doing the easy thing.   Not the hard thing, it's easy to do the hard thing. Not everyone would have done it the easy way. Some would have stood on their principles. And let the Tories fall, within a few months. But not me.  

Did I desperately want to be Deputy Tory Prime Minister?  Of course I did. It's what I came into politics for. I'd rather have been Tory prime minister. But we all have to make sacrifices. And I am sure the voters will give me credit for it. Has it been easy to pretend  that I'm not a Tory? Yes, of course it has. The main thing is that I have been in govament. And that I have managed  to keep the Tory faith, whilst destroying the prospects of you Liberals ever being taken seriously again.

 

Did I ever doubt what we were doing to Britain, throwing sick people out of their homes because they had an extra broom cupboard, where they kept their wheelchairs or dialysis machines? No, of course not.

People will know that as Tories our manifesto is our solemn word to the British people that we can be relied upon to break our every pledge, piss on our every promise and betray our every principle, not that we have any. And this one offers people the stark choice of me being in Downing Street, shafting poor people

 or him

 or him

People ask me if this election is about one thing and one thing only.

 Of course it is.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.