What could possibly go wrong? Here I am, at home, following the guidance. He won't make me cry this time.
You are in the toilet, Matt.
Yes, it's my safe place. Painted in Farrow and Ball's Womb Red, with
my carefully-curated collection of normal-person objects and pictures.
And my red boxes. Most importantly, it has a nice, strong bolt. He can't
get at me in here.
It's the toilet, Matt.
No-one will notice, because I'm wearing my nice blue suit just the colour of my eyes.
But you are sitting on the toilet, Matt.
That's because it is kind of cosy in here. Oh, oh, is it my turn now?
Health Secretary, I put it to you that the majority of people can't stay at home because, as the TUC have estimated, the average worker will lose £690 per week.
Well, Andrew, we have got, look, some of the most generous support schemes in the EntireWorld. And most people qualify for full payment of their salaries.
No, Health Secretary, 7 out of 10 people don't.
Well, Andrew, those one third can have financial support in our financiallyveryGenerousSchemes.
A word about your testing scheme, Health Secretary - are these the same lateral flow tests that didn't work in Liverpool?
Andrew, the same lateral flow tests that worked effectively in Liverpool, Yes.
In Liverpool, 60% of positive tests were missed.
No
Yes
No
Health Secretary, I have just read you your own scientists saying the exact opposite of what you have just said.
And
having wiped the floor with the Health Secretary, who is following the
guidance to stay on the toilet, I will turn now to Sir Keir Starmer
I don't care what the question is, Andrew, the answer is that it's a thin deal.
No, no. no, it is a thin deal.
Look, I want this to succeed and it is a thin deal. It is thin. But it is better than nothing.
It is not what was promised. It is a thin treaty.
..................................................
Contest Prize Part Two: Mr Bungalow Bill has requested something about the Bracing Isles.
The
trick is to get the windscreen wipers going and headlights on before
driving across the Barriers.
 |
wave breaking on the windscreen
|
When there's a severe weather warning, the police drive down to St Mary's Village and physically close the Barriers. If you are stuck on the wrong side, you just have to make other plans or sit in your car until the Barriers are re-opened. This is why property prices on the linked south islands are considerably lower than on Orkney Mainland. The police don't always get there in time and intrepid motorists, wanting to go to work or get home, venture across, risking massive damage. Those waves are heavy, man. And carry great rocks which are dumped on your car roof or smash your windscreen. When a wave drops on you, you can't see anything other than a world of noisy water. You are unlikely to drive off the Barrier and into the sea because there are low barriers on either side of the roadway, but you can be pushed into it. Here is one of the Barriers on a calm day:
to the right of the barrier you can see the rusting remains of the Block ships that were the defence to the entrance to Scapa Flow. Scapa Flow is one of the largest sheltered harbours in the world and home to the Grand Fleet from 1914 - handy for engaging with the German Fleet based in the Baltic. There are four islands on the eastern side of Scapa Flow: South Ronaldsay, Burray, Lamb Holm and Glimps Holm.The narrow passages between the islands were blocked by sinking old ships. At the start of WWII further blockships were sunk and submarine nets were deployed, but were inadequate in the face of intelligence gathered by German spies masquerading as holiday-making ministers staying locally. The ministers took out a boat daily, together with rods and keep nets. Whilst ostensibly and ostentatiously fishing, they surreptitiously depth-sounded the entrance to the Flow. This information was added to hundreds and hundreds of aerial photographs taken by low-flying German planes, which overlapped to form a complete, massive picture of the Flow and the surrounding land. The definition of these aerial photos was so precise and detailed that it showed Orkney farm-wives hanging out their washing.
On 14 October 1939, the German U-Boat, U-47, under Gunther Prien, made its way past the blockships at high tide and torpedoed the 23 year old HMS Royal Oak lying at anchor in Scapa Flow. The ship had been notorious in 1928 when her senior officers were court-martialled, following the "Royal Oak Mutiny" - which started when Rear-Admiral Bernard Collard and two senior officers, Captain Kenneth Dewar and Commander Henry Daniel, disagreed over the band at the ship's wardroom dance and became a bitter feud. Dewar and Daniel accused Collard of "vindictive fault-finding" and openly humiliating and insulting them before their crew; in return, Collard countercharged them with failing to follow orders and treating him "worse than a midshipman". Commander-in-Chief Admiral Sir Roger Keyes removed all three from their posts and sent them back to England, on the eve of a major naval exercise, which he was obliged to postpone, causing rumours to fly around the fleet that the Royal Oak had experienced a mutiny. The story was picked up by the press worldwide, reaching such proportions as to involve the King, who summoned First Lord of the Admiralty William Bridgeman for an explanation.For their letters of complaint, Dewar and Daniel were controversially charged with writing "subversive documents". Both were court-martialled, found guilty and severely reprimanded, leading Daniel to resign from the Navy. Collard was criticised for the excesses of his conduct by the press and in Parliament, and on being denounced by Bridgeman as "unfitted to hold further high command", was forcibly retired from service. One consequence of the embarassing, widely publicised and lampooned affair was an undertaking from the Admiralty to review the means by which naval officers might bring complaints against the conduct of their superiors. The first Grievance Policy.
The Royal Oak was at anchor in the Flow when she was torpedoed. Of her complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed that night or died later of their wounds. The shock resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.
The wreck of Royal Oak, a designated war grave, lies almost upside down in 100 feet of water with her hull 16 feet beneath the surface. In an annual ceremony, Royal Navy divers place a White Ensign underwater at her stern. Unauthorised divers are prohibited from approaching the wreck under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.
Within a month of the sinking of the Royal Oak, Winston Churchill visited Orkney and ordered that work begin on the construction of four permanent barriers. 
To form the bases over 250,000 tons of broken rock were dropped from overhead cableways into waters up to 59 feet deep. The bases were then covered with 66,000 concrete blocks in five-tonne and ten-tonne sizes. The five-ton blocks were laid on the core, and the ten-tonne blocks were arranged on the sides in a random pattern to act as wave-breaks. Material was quarried on Orkney, and concrete blocks were cast on an industrial scale on the islands before being brought to the cableways by a network of railways.
1300 Italian prisoners of war worked on the construction.The prisoners were divided between three camps, 700 in two camps on Burray and 600 at Camp 60 on Lamb Holm. These men also constructed The Italian Chapel. As the use of POW labour for War Effort works is prohibited under the Geneva Convention, the works were justified as ‘improvements to communications’ to the southern Orkney Islands.The work began in May 1940 and was completed by September 1944. The Churchill Barriers were formally opened by the first Lord of the Admiralty on 12th May 1945, four days after the end of World War II in Europe.
There's a nice little fictionalised account of the construction of the Churchill Causeways by Philip Paris, called The Italian Chapel.
Talk about bracing - here's mr ishmael writing on the 24th December 2016.
Storm
Barbara is battering us, a bit, presently; I think it's still Barbara,
although it might be some other bastard; I guess it's just the ongoing
commodification of everything, this baby-talking of Life itself; I
preferred that Beaufort Scale stuff - Force 10, Gale Force, Storm
Force, Hurricane Force and so on
but giving storms names probably makes the fuckwit newsreaders feel
more important. We have weathered worse and don't usually complain but
where once I might have charged out and tried to minimise ongoing
property damage, now I just let it rip. This is just an old shed, down
the side of the house, collapsing outside my window:
it is used for storing
rakes and flower pots and I'd rather let it just blow into the fields
than try to go and lash it down. I'll use the timber for something, even
for firewood and I'll build a brick one, next time, breeze blocks,
anyway. I say I but I mean some person masquerading as a builder, the
world is full of them, even here, in Arcadia; a rusty Transit and a
miniature cement mixer doth a builder make, those and the shameless
cheek of the Devil.
We
are past the darkest times, now, and the good Earth tilts lightwards;
the daffodils are already peeping through; last time I counted there
were about 5,000 of them, brightening and measuring my days, there are a
few hundred tulips, I suppose, never counted them, and they don't seem
to spread as rampantly as the daffs and even though they come later
their more exotic colourings - blues and purples and pinks and blacks -
define and emphasise the warming Spring.
I
love that piece from A Shropshire Lad, about the cherry blossom, and
find myself more and more watchful of the seasons, their punctuation of
my time.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A. E. Housman
THE BOOK PAGE, MUSTN'T RUSH THE GORSE 27/4/10
Somebody pressed a book on me, a new hardback. You'll like this, ishmael, it's right up your street. It was by Dan Brown, the Da Vinci millionaire and franchisee and Jesus, it was desperate stuff.
I had to read it, the donor was a fellow expat and you can't really say Thanks, most kind but Fuck off, this is shit, I know it's shit before I open it, I'd rather read a bus ticket. They are fragile, these expat relationships and slights have consequences. The dinner parties, for instance, lost souls, huddled together against sourfaced Presbyteria and yokel incompetence would stop happening and one might decide, as do some, to take up goats and the accordion and start speaking in tongues, pompous and judgemental, about Quality of life and about vehicular air-conditioning being nothing short of grandchild betrayal; some join the amateur dramatics societies and take up furtive wife-swapping and stagey exhibitionism. Better not risk the delicate status quo, better to read two hundred pages of occult-nouvelle tripe and keep on good terms with acquaintances, pressed by shared migrant despair, to each other's dining tables. Read the damn thing. Just look on it like a weekend spent wrapped in a cardy, at Mrs Dale's queer diary, reading his exclusive, gossipy burblings or at Col von Fawkes's, learning about how great capitalism is, how not taxing the rich is good, actually, for the poor, no, really, it is; about how wonderful, strong and vibrant is the Irish economy and how Codger McCain is going to romp the US election; there is no shortage, even in the massive, rambling cyberlibrary, of ill-informed shit to read, nor of contentedly ill-informed readers. Dan Brown can't be worse than that.
But bus tickets, I knew a guy one time, said that very thing, almost. Said that he couldn't even contemplate doing a sitdown toilet unless he had something to read. Anything would do, anything was better than nothing, even said he'd managed some good number twos by reading, in the cruel absence of anything else, his rent book and on one occasion a 'bus ticket which he'd found, rummaging in his round-the-ankles trouser pocket, as he sat fruitlessly on the loo, despairingly, slammed shut constipated, not by diet or intestinal mischief but by the absence of words on paper, the 'bus ticket was his laxatif instantane his thundering, flatulent deliverance, although he preferred the Sun.
I don't think it's a fetish, bordering on LiberalCopraDemocratism, just a ritual but then, as BB King says, one man's ritual is another man's fetish, just ask FatherMcNonceULike, down at the Pope Nazi Church of The Holy Infant Sodomisers. No, reading in the loo, it's sort of basic yooman rights with me, you know, without something to read I might never poo again, have to cut me open and fit a stoma bag, colostomised for want of something to read. I just wouldn't go in there without there being a sufficient supply of reading material - Viz magazine, with a magnifying glass to read the speech balloons, some political biography, some head stuff, Zen or Tao or Ching and sometimes some fiction, although less and less. I remember battering my way almost through The Magus by John Fowles, one of those serious, irritable, beardy English novelistbastards with a deep, brown voice and one of his characters saying Why on Earth would I read fiction, it's all made up, maybe half a page per hundred containing some insight I hadn't already seen-into myself, the rest of it drivel, words to that effect, anyway, and even though the character saying them was made-up and in a novel, they stayed with me, a sort of a contradiction, a Medium is the Message moment; fiction, therefore, is not the first thing I would reach for, my head is full of my own, mad what-if and if-only and maybe-someday fiction, what do I want with somebody else's; in fact, most of the time, I think How Dare There Be Writers ? I mean people who, that's all they do, is write books, poems, plays, you know, made-up stuff, and call it a job, work; Jeanette Winterface, Martin Teeth. I mentioned, before, that when I worked in a library, I met, lunched with a few writers, shifty, idle bastards, they were, good for fuck all. They need a good smack in the mouth and a few days digging holes in the road. It's alright people writing stuff down, I love it, levels my head and eases my mind but, you know, just think of any professional writer you've ever heard on Radio Four or BBC2 and they'll be intolerable arseholes.
I saw that AS Byatt once, not sure what it was, may have been Lord Bragg's drooling, groupie, teeth-and-hair South Bank Show.
Byatt was talking about her modus operandi, her creative process, she has a hubby-gofer called Peter, and he's an absolute treasure, rather like a little woman or little man, who does for her, drives her about the place, a housekeeper/chauffeur/confidante/whipping boy, she simply couldn't do what she does without him, ghastly. She and Peter were up in Yorkshire, reee-surching some load of pretentious, dreary old shite, some hokum set, where else, but in academe, which she was dreaming up for her readers and they'd done whatever it was they went to do, her local colour ree-surch, and were on the way back to Hampstead or the South of France, when she realised that in some descriptive paragraph she'd Rushed the Gorse, hadn't quite got it down right, the Gorse - gorse, for overseas readers, is a tough, prickly shrub with yellow flowers which grows wildly in abundance, particularly in the North of the UK, it's like locoweed, only you can't smoke it - simply mustn't Rush the Gorse, crucial to the telling of the tale, it was and so she made Peter, the absolute treasure, take her back so's she could sit and Be With the Gorse. Shouting at the radio, I was; hopefully is a fucking adverb, ya mad, frigid old trout.
Byatt says this of her creativity:
" I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously – but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people. " ( trans: I am the fucking breadwinner.)
Driving back to Yorkshire, to do the Gorse-describing quality control, I woulda fucking killed her. And if I ever see her on the side of a Highlands road, Being With The Gorse, I will.
These people see their lives in chapters, italicising the everyday. It's all pretence, artifice, conceit and its not as though a) there isn't already plenty to read and b) plenty of other shit that needs doing far more urgently than book writing. Or poems. Especially poems. That Roger McGough, what's he like, primly, pompously poetry-pleasing, behind his Radio Four microphone, when, once, he was a popstar, of sorts, drinking a drink, a drink to Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink. Silly old Prat.
In the '60s US prison film, Cool Hand Luke, the redneck captain of the guard, having battered Luke, Paul Newman, to the ground, says jocularly, What We Have Here Is A Failure to Communicate
and I always feel like Luke, down on the floor, bruised, when I hear writers twittering tyrannically on about their fucking writing, like they were jailers, insead of layabouts, and we had to understand exactly, exactly what they meant, before we could be free, had to delight in their metaphors, gasp at their narrative twists. If you need to go on about it for years afterwards, then you obviously didn't write it properly in the first place. Rather have toothache, me, than read Ian McEwan and hearing him talk about how he Does It, the writing, well........
My young friend, stanislav, the Polish plumber, has written extensively of the crippling snobbery which surrounds the act of communicating by writing on the Internet, of the Apostrophe Jihadists, who, spitefully and stupidly, like Mr PTB's cruel and vicious dons, stomping the vitality from their students, would dismiss an enthusiastically expressed, original thought, merely because its thinker was improperly or not at all schooled in punctuation. There was a blogger, currently absent and much missed, Dennis, the cruel, bell-ringing pedant, who, a precise and elegant writer, himself, could not tolerate what he saw as the deliberate, lazy shortcomings of lesser writers, misplacing or misunderstanding a colon, claiming, somewhat dictatorially, that poor grammar invalidated everything wherein it appeared, that it was incomprehensible unless grammatically flawless; utter bollocks, of course.
In the case of Dan Brown, though, I just had to read it in order to stay on good terms with my fellow expat. Scotland is the best part of England but you need to keep close to other English - those not gone goat-native - for its magic to work continuously and so I put it on the shelf in the loo, next to Viz and Lao Tzu's The Art of War and Zen in the Art of Archery, between Imelda Blair's Big Book About Myself and Barack Obama's Big Book About Himself - Obama can write beautifully, if self-obsessedly; Imelda does complaining, just as you'd expect, her life is a complaint. And Dan Brown? He says of himself:
"I do something very intentional and specific in these books. And that is to blend fact and fiction in a very modern and efficient style, to tell a story. There are some people who understand what I do, and they sort of get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time, and there are other people who should probably just read somebody else."
.................................................................
Mr ishmael's essays today are:
Storm
Barbara 24th December 2016.
The Book Page: mustn't rush the Gorse 27th April 2010
The Health Secretary and the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition contributed their own words and toilet. Honest, Not Invent.
...............................................
Honest, Not Invent is an anthology of essays by stanislav and mr ishmael. It is available from lulu.com and is listed by both Blackwells and the Book Depository. Lulu assures me that it is shortly to be available through Amazon.
To buy a copy: please
register an account with Lulu first. This will save you a couple of
quid, as going straight into the links 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 one of the links (to either
paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu
Bookstore search box. If you follow a 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.
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.Link for Hard Back :
Link for Paper Back :
There's a 15% discount for a couple of days: with the voucher code = 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.
