Yo Ho Ho etc.

I was going to write a much longer piece about Christmas. The theme would be The Irrational Yet Immutable Rituals And How They Make Christmas A Vibrant And Thoroughly Modern Festival. The title needed some work. And now I realise that I can't be bothered to finish any of it. There's presents to wrap, bells to ring etc. So instead, here's three aspects which to me epitomise the true spirit of the holiday.

1. Mashed Potatoes Nobody ever wants to eat the things. We've got turkey, sausages and stuffing on our plate (or in my case, a rather wonderful nutloaf). We've got sprouts and roast potatoes too, we've got figgy pudding to come and we've been gorging on chocolates all day. To a very full stomach, a white and largely tasteless lump doesn't really have much appeal. We take a tiny spoonful each and the vast majority gets thrown away. But if you leave out the mashed potatoes, everyone would complain. They are part of The Meal, they must be there. And I would complain as loud as anybody.

2. Santa Claus. Santa Claus is a god, let's make no mistake about that. He flies across the sky, he has supernatural powers, he enters our homes, he even has his own mantras. Most importantly, he makes moral judgements and rewards or punishes accordingly. Yet, though Bart Simpson said Christmas "celebrates the birth of Santa," he was generated by the festival not vice versa. He only became a central component after it was relatively mature. And after his one night of power he sinks back into the Arctic ice for another year. His jurisdiction is also limited to the very young. We are expected to believe in him absolutely for our first few years and then reject him as an essential part of maturing. And his sanctions only take the form of presents or the lack thereof; Black Peter and his club were given the boot a long time ago. Compartmentalised, materialistic, even partly designed by a fizzy drink corporation – if you ever wondered what sort of deity modern society would create, look no further than Santa Claus.

3. The Media Build-Up Some rituals shift over the years, others stay the same. A while ago the favourite was Santas Behaving Badly. Jolly men in red suits would have a few bevvies and start fights, or urinate in the street, or enter a stranger's house to take away rather more than a glass of sherry and a mince pie. Nowadays we hear a lot about councils in Tamworth or St Albans refusing to put up Christmas lights lest it offends the three Buddhist families in their ward. Nobody really cares, even the people in the affected towns. But they're always seized on by national papers on permanent PC Watch as symbols of our national decline. Other stories have an eternal appeal. Babies abandoned; old people abandoned; holidaymakers stranded in airports. "It shouldn't happen over Christmas" the writers wail, apparently believing that natural laws decree everyone should be happy and loved for one particular day a year. These tales always play well, tapping into the Victorian sentimentality which is still vital in shaping the festival. But they forget that the most striking image of Christmas is still one of absolute poverty: a stranded mother giving birth in a stable.

A Million To One, They Said

Greeted last week's news that there may be running water on Mars with a blend of excitement and frustration. Excitement because water is a basic prerequisite of life. And if some is still flowing on Mars' surface, rather than being locked up in permafrost around the poles, then living organisms could be existing around it. They won't be much, of course, just some rubbish form of algae. But life on another planet is still a major discovery; and life on Mars, because of H G Wells and David Bowie, especially evocative.

Frustration because nobody's actually sure about the water yet. They've just studied patterns of rock falls and concluded they were most likely caused by a stream which quickly evaporated. Then again, maybe they weren't. They could also have been made by rocks just, you know, falling. The only way to be certain, it seems to me, is to actually put somebody on the surface and ask them if anything's bubbling out of the ground. Instead NASA continues to rely on vague, blurry snapshots taken by unmanned probes. Logical deduction based on partial evidence is sometimes a necessary part of science. But there really is no substitute to actually being there. After all, in 1492 a Genoan set off westwards from Portugal with all existing knowledge telling him that he wouldn't hit land before India.

And the chances of the life on Mars being human seem remote right now. It hasn't gone well in recent decades, our great conquest of space. We got to the nearest possible destination and then just stopped. All recent shuttle voyages have been devoted to repairing the International Space Station. The ones which go ahead, that is, because the shuttles seem to be falling apart even quicker than the ISS itself. The ISS is a promising development, and a great name, but I'm not certain what actually happens there. Probably more pictures taken of distant galaxies from which scientists can make remarkably dubious deductions.

I know space travel costs a lot. And the American government needs their funds to meet their core aims: making billionaires even richer and knocking the Middle East to pieces. But mankind, we're always told, is supposed to be an explorer. Not just a peerer and a guesser. I'm also worried that if we ever do make contact with intelligent life from the stars, the prediction closest to the truth will be Douglas Adams'. Where we're irritably told by the aliens that their plans for demolishing Earth have been on public display at Alpha Centauri "only four light years away… If you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your lookout."

Tolerance, British Style

Tony Blair's latest contribution to the multi-culturalism debate could have been worst. The language was less than diplomatic – essentially "Respect our values of tolerance or piss off home, you dirty wogs." But there's nothing wrong with his central message, that Britain shouldn't welcome people who then go on to actively hate Britain.

What puzzled me is how he segued into the issue of wearing veils in public. There may be an automatic link between women covering their faces and men planting bombs on public transport. I've never seen it, though it seems obvious to Blair. Also a matter of "plain common sense" for him is that Kirklees Council was correct to fire a teaching assistant for refusing to remove her veil in the classroom. Being able to see somebody's face, he implied, is essential to the pedagogic process. Now it's been a long time since I was a pupil, but I don't recall the details of a teacher's face being very important. Unless they were especially unusual, of course, in which case you got to make fun of them. The correct posture in the classroom was to gaze apathetically at your desk. You tried not to look at the teacher at all. That only encouraged them to ask you questions and nobody wants that.

Women wearing veils should only be a concern when they are forced to do so against their wishes. Many aren't. And even when they are, these sweeping bans punish them rather than those bullying them. Being denied access to Jack Straw's constituency offices, which Blair also defended, is one thing and rather a blessing in disguise. But being fired for wearing an item of clothing central to your culture? It's not really British tolerance at its most impressive.

Time To Roll The Credits Please

We've all seen Hollywood blockbusters like this. They start well enough; taut atmosphere, sinister bad guys, menacing soundtrack. Then they just seem to lose it. Everyone's killing everyone and a plot to blow up a small municipal bookstore somehow becomes something threatening the whole galaxy. There's nothing to do but wait for the villain to die his third and final death so the credits can arrive.

So it is with the Alexander Litvinenko story. For a while it was possible to ignore the human tragedies or broader political implications and just enjoy it as a rollicking good yarn. The beginning was intriguing enough: a former KGB agent poisoned in London, most likely by the modern equivalent of the KGB. For days one astounding revelation followed another. They culminated in the news that Litvinenko had polonium-210 slipped into his sushi and the maginifcent Guardian headline 'The Radioactive Spy.' But once again, things have gotten out of hand. The so-called radiation 'trails' appear to have ended up covering most of Europe. Now Litvinenko's associate, Mario Scaramella, seems to have been poisoned too and you wonder where things are going to end. It's no longer possible to willingly suspend disbelief; or indeed the question "why didn't they just shoot him for Christ's sake?"

It began as a John le Carre and has turned into a James Bond. And anyone who's seen Casino Royale, or indeed any Bond film made in the last twenty five years, will know that's not a compliment. At this rate matters will culminate in Big Ben exploding while the hero (John Reid played by Sean Connery, possibly) rescues the woman in the nick of time. We needed a break from David Cameron, Pete Docherty's 47th drug bust and the Iraqi 'Not A Civil War, Not On Your Life' insurgency, but this is a bit much.

'Flatford Mill'

My parents had John Constable table mats when I was a child. Serious critics tend to excuse the great artists when they become consumer goods, saying it's a simple case of a glorious vision being perverted. My opinion is that the artists who get picked usually deserve it. Buy an Impressionist coaster set and you'll probably get Monet's water lilies, not Degas' vaudeville girls. Canalletto's Venetian picture postcards make good mouse mats, Caravaggio's dark melodramas don't. The people who produce these things knows that what sells in the home furnishing market is the idyllic and the bland. There are a lot of Constable table mats.

Flatford Mill has been chosen here but any number of Constable's works would have sufficed. He followed a template with minimum variety. In the foreground are generally one or two small figures. Few details can be made out on them. We learn little from even the most careful study. They are Rustics and their job is to look quaint. Constable put them to work on varying rural tasks which his aristocratic patrons liked to see doing so long as the labourer is not themselves. Here they are performing something mystifying involving boats. Elsewhere they might be fishing or driving a cart. The figures by Flatford Mill are young boys, which was a common Constable trick. Children look quaint almost by default. And they exude an innocence which seeps out over the whole painting and smothers any questions about the facts of rural life.

The figures, though, are shrivelled by their surroundings. This is a device sometimes to stunning effect. See Fragonard's Grand Cascade At Tivoli, for example, to see a demonstration of humanity's insignificance compared to nature, or Goya's Colossus for our helplessness in the face of disaster. But it doesn't quite work when the landscapes are as tedious as Constable's. What does he give us? Blue and green, green and blue. Green grass, blue sky, blue river, green leaves; the green of the trees even reflected in the blue water. There is a small brown patch in the foreground, some tiny red cottages in the distance and this is quite radical for Constable. He rarely admitted any breaks in his verdant utopias. No acknowledgement, for example, that sometimes leaves fall off trees, grasses parch and the sun occasionally sets.

And the eye searches for relief in the colour scheme because so little else is happening at Flatford Mill. Nobody is coming to intrude on the boys. No wind rustles the trees. No birds fly across the sky. All is neat and tidy, perfectly ordered by the artist. This is a flat and lifeless scene, removed from reality and stripped of any deeper meaning.

There's nothing wrong with creating from the imagination or even following a template. Lowrie, for one, basically painted the same picture his whole life and it was always several steps from sanity. But Lowrie was interesting because nobody had done anything quite like him before. Many had prior to Constable, even more have since. He either had the least fertile imagination possible or he let it be filled by others. The ruling classes, basically. His paintings are embodiments of the laziest clichés about England. The 'green and pleasant land,' that evocation of timeless plenty which is forever used to excuse all our failings. I can't look at Flatford Mill without remembering John Major quoting Orwell's grisly lines about spinsters cycling to village churches. Or The Day Today's spoof propaganda film: a jolly policeman smoking a bifta while a voice drones "This is England. And it's all right. Everything's all right…"

Everything isn't, of course. It certainly wasn't in 1817 when Flatford Mill was painting. A godless alliance of capitalists and aristocrats were stripping the last few rights from the rural poor. The happy, faceless peasants which Constable painted were being thrown off the land and into the workshops and proto-factories which comprised the first, worst stage of the Industrial Revolution. His scenes were outdated even when he painted them. But at best he ignored these changes, at worst he ignored the agents implementing them. As a result he gave us unnatural nature scenes and social commentaries with no social worth whatsoever. On to the dinner table with them all, where at least they can perform one useful function.

A Glorious Revolution?

Currently reading The Glorious Revolution, Edward Vallance's account of the events in 1688 which replaced James II with William and Mary on the British throne. Vallance is a revisionist to some extent, of course. Any historian who doesn't at least claim to be rewriting history won't find a publisher nowadays. He points out that the Glorious Revolution wasn't exactly a revolution. Though it had wide support in a Protestant England terrified of the Catholic, authoritarian James, it was basically a Dutch invasion which led to the crowning of a Dutch duke. (Mary was co-ruler only in name, partly on her own insistence). Most of the gentry went over to William's side when his armada landed. James was rather inconveniently left without an army and fled without a fight. But he would have probably lost anyway.

Nor, Vallance, states, was the 'Revolution' very Glorious. Outside of England it certainly wasn't bloodless. Rebellions against William in Ireland and Scotland culminated in the massacres of the Boyne and Glencoe. The Scottish resistance rumbled on for half a century until the final bloodshed at Culloden. No sooner was William comfy on the throne then he began a war with France which Britain could neither win nor afford. Vallance is also sceptical that 1688 marked, as is generally asserted, the birth of English liberty. William paid a little more attention to Parliament but only after packing it full of loyal Anglicans. Free speech was growing at the time, especially in the coffee house phenomenon, but in spite rather than because of government policy. The English Bill of Rights was certainly feeble compared to the American version. It was simply a reaffirmation of existing liberties, which were remarkably few. Unlike forty years earlier, there was no belief that the country could actually do without a monarch.

Vallance also gives a partial defence of James II. He wasn't trying to forcibly re-convert Britain to Catholicism, as was often claimed. His only legislation tried to reduce the civil but systematic discrimination against Catholics. His less laudable actions, from butchering the followers of a feeble uprising to rigging parliamentary elections, were fairly standard for the time. But his brusque personality and habit of increasing his standing army excited fears of absolutist rule, quite apart from his religion. I would have probably shared this paranoia. James was becoming increasingly authoritarian after only three years. Who knows what he would have been like if power had time to corrupt him properly?

Anyway, his true character is beside the point. Most people didn't want James. There was an energetic attempt to exclude him from the succession during the last years of his brother's reign. They stuck with him for a while, saw he was apparently as bad as they thought and simply replaced him. Britain still had to have a king, it seemed, but Britain would have the king it wanted. The notion of a divine right to rule died abruptly. And I think that the modern British attitude to its monarchy began to be created in its place. You can see a line, if not a direct one, leading from the Glorious Revolution to the events in Westminster this week. Where an overdressed woman announces the legislation to be introduced by 'her' government – yet is still only a hired orator for the elected rulers.

When A Shite Is Not A Shite

A linguistic dispute is currently raging in English football. On Wednesday referee Graham Poll denied Everton's claims for a penalty and then dismissed their striker James McFadden. McFadden, he alleges, called him a "fucking cheat." The striker has denied the charge. He was abusing the decision, not the referee himself. Furthermore, the phrase he used was "fucking shite."

It's an interesting defence given that McFadden was sent off for foul and abusive language. Effectively he's saying that his crime is twice as bad as originally thought. But of course he was actually punished for abusing the referee, not for cussing. The 'foul and abusive language' charge is only ever used tactically. If footballers were red carded each time they swore, every pitch would be cleared of players within five minutes of kick off.

So let this be a lesson to all you youngsters. When you swear at a referee, which you almost certainly will, speak loudly and clearly. Just in case, use a word that states you may still love the sinner while hating the sin. McFadden has demonstrated the dangers of "fucking shite." "Fucking shit" may be misinterpreted as "fucking tit," "fucking crap" as "fucking twat." I personally recommend "fucking bollocks." A little clumsy, perhaps, but guaranteed to ensure you stay on the pitch till the final whistle.

Guy Fawkes' Night

As a child, my favourite part of Guy Fawkes' Night was probably the gingerbread men. They had to be eaten in a particular way, naturally. You bit the arms and legs off first. Then you munched through the torso until all you had left was a decapitated head. This would be consumed with painstaking care, ideally the eyes left till the very last.

Nowadays my favourite part is explaining the festival to foreigners. "Fawkes," I say, "Was a Catholic who tried to blow up King James and his parliament. He was caught, and he and his accomplices were executed in an especially gruesome fashion. So now every year we make effigies of him, throw him on a bonfire and watch the fucker burn. Then we let off fireworks in celebration. And we let all the kiddies watch." If my audience doesn't look suitably horrified, I go on to tell them about the gingerbread men.

Every year there are protests about Guy Fawkes' Night. Especially in York, where Fawkes was born and raised. Local voices are always calling for him to be shown more respect, unabashed that our second most famous son was a rather dim wannabee mass murderer. (Our most famous, the Emperor Constantine, did actually manage to kill a lot of people though was considerably brighter.) I suppose these have some validity. In these religiously sensitive times, it's not good to be ceremonially burning a prominent Catholic. Though things have improved slightly; originally the effigies were of the Pope rather than Fawkes.

But the night isn't really about the thwarting of some remote, half-baked Catholic plot. That's just become the modern peg for an older urge; just as the birth of Jesus and the switch of calendars are to some extent for Christmas and New Year. Guy Fawkes' Night is about defying the season. The nights are encroaching, the chill is mounting. For one evening we like to build great beacons against the darkness. And against the creatures once thought to lurk there. It's probably no coincidence that Guy Fawkes' Night lies close to the older festival of Halloween. The ghosts who emerge are supposed to be vanquished by All Saints Day the following morning. Just in case any aren't, however, here's a barrage of bangers and rockets to scare them off.

Most countries have a night when they let off a barrel load of fireworks. The British may have chosen an especially perverse excuse for ours. But it's really no odder than the Americans or the French letting off their fireworks in the middle of summer, when they need them least of all.

Nine Films To Never See Even If You Live To A Thousand

Guys and Dolls
Let's be clear: all musicals are bad. Especially trying, though, are musicals based on stories which totally corrupt the whole damn point of the original. Liza Minelli turning Goodbye To Berlin into Cabaret sets the teeth on edge. But this one really wins the award. Damon Runyan's short stories are minor classics. He wrote of hustlers, gangsters and whores, their tawdry menace never quite dissipated by his humour and unique literary style. This can not, I repeat not, be represented by a man in spats swinging round a lamp post singing "Luck be a lady tonight."

Absolute Beginners
Whereas this has a whole-hearted awfulness which transcends the commonplace awfulness of the musical genre. It is a film you watch in fascination from beginning to end, wondering how anyone could possibly have created it, produced it, acted in it. I mean, did nobody realise? There is an earnest plot detailing the rise of the far right in England and that's interspersed with a seemingly infinite number of scenes where Lionel Blair gets kicked in the goolies. And those are the best bits. My mind has blotted out most of the rest.

Pretty Woman
On this, the first and last words belong to Bongwater: 'Richard Gere with his oh-so Zen films and their oh-so Zen messages like: Hey, it's fun to be a prostitute! I wish I could spread my legs across Hollywood Boulevard! Because that's all we want, isn't it girls? Sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping… But it's the feel-good movie of the year, it's the feel-good movie of the decade, it's the feel-good movie of the millennium!'

Charlie's Angels
Probably not the worst Hollywood blockbuster but the one which really snapped my patience with the whole bloody business. The stubborn refusal to even consider anything original. The smirk-smirk, 'we're so clever' (just not clever enough to do anything original) treatment given to modern updates. And above all, the damn slo-mo everywhere. I mean, why do they think action is more exciting if it happens in slow motion? It doesn't. It's just slower. If this film had proceeded at a normal pace, it would have been over in 40 minutes and I might have used that extra hour of my life productively.

Four Weddings And A Funeral
In the early 1990's the British film industry finally seemed to be going somewhere. Pictures like The Full Monty and Trainspotting showed very different visions but ones both true and unique to the county. And then came Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis came along, and the template clanged down again. The whole of Britain reduced to a cliché; and not even our cliché of ourselves but America. A land where every Englishman is foppish and posh and rich and white. I still don't know from where I found the willpower to watch this dreck to the end. And though I've never dared watch them, I've heard Notting Hill and Love Actually are even worst.

Battlefield Earth
You probably didn't see this, put off the bad reviews, but may have thought, "Well, I bet it isn't that bad." Well I say unto you: it is. If anything, it's worst. There's regular hilarious sights of Fat John Travolta in a monkey suit. There's a nonsensical plot from insane cult leader and Travolta's guru, L Ron Hubbard. And there's somebody screaming "NO-O-O-O-O-O!" pretty much every ten minutes. Even if nothing happens to make them scream "NO-O-O-O-O-O!" they still do it. Perhaps they just realised what sort of a film they were stuck in.

Barb Wire
Remember Pamela Anderson, that icon of the 1990's? The woman who, thanks to constant cosmetic surgery, became a creature of long blond hair and massive lips and massive breasts and not much else? All men were supposed to lust after her but really she was as sexless as a piece of plastic; which was what she largely was, after all. This was her attempt to launch a movie career. She plays an in-your-face bar owner in one of those post-apocalypse wasteland deals. That was the by-line at least. Actually, it's just Casablanca. Not at first, admittedly; the transformation only happens gradually. Half-way through you start thinking "Hang on, this is a mite familiar," and by the end it only lacks Dooley Wilson tinkling away on the piano. Even her porno film with Tommy Lee would probably be more appealing. And thus ended Pamela Anderson's movie career.

Havana
And the Casablanca rip-offs roll on. Maybe I shouldn't lump this in with Barb Wire. But while that felt like it lasted about three hours, Havana actually has the nerve to actually be almost three hours. And it feels longer. All for a plot which every living creature on the planet knows the end to anyway. Perhaps they needed the time to cover the full astonishing gamut of Robert Redford's facial expressions: the concerned frown, the comedy flinch and, er, the other concerned frown.

Sleepless In Seattle
If I were God… Ah, if I were God. If I were God and I saw this, I'd forget any promises made with rainbows. I'd wipe the whole human race out and not make any exceptions this time. I'd make a new dominant species based on – well, lizards, birds, cockroaches, anything. Just as long as they were physically incapable of ever producing synthetic sentimental bullshit like this.

The Stink Of Old Suez

History can be a great comfort sometimes. Ever think, for example, that we've reached at the absolute nadir of Western-Middle East relations? That the 2003 invasion of Iraq was an unparalleled mixture of cynicism and incompetence? Then just learn about the Suez Crisis forty years ago and you'll realise that things, unbelievably, have actually been worst.

I always knew Britain's botched invasion of Egypt, after Colonel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, was a mess. It put a definitive end to both the dwindling British Empire and the (never very high) reputation of the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. But before I watched BBC2's excellent documentary Suez: A Very British Crisis, I didn’t realise how ludicrous things got. The trouble for Eden was that he was itching to attack Egypt as soon as the Canal was occupied but had no actual excuse. No British citizens were massacred, no ships were stopped from entering the waterway. France, though, came up with a Cunning Plan. Israel was persuaded to launch a sudden attack on Egypt, something it was prone to do in those days. French and British troops would then intervene as peacekeepers to protect the Canal; incidentally reoccupying it in the process. Butter, even in the desert, wouldn't melt in their mouths.

Fortunately this scheme got the dexterous planning it deserved. Suez... was full of hilarious and scarcely believable little details. America getting so exasperated by the secrecy that it sent U2 spy planes over its staunchest ally, Israel. Nasser coolly surveying British jets bombing his capital while Eden bricks it before a BBC broadcast. French pilots scrambled and not actually given maps of their destination until they are in the cockpit, which is so dark they almost can't read them.

The purest farce, though, came when Britain, France and Israel met in the suburbs of Paris to finalise their scheme. Israel sent their Prime Minister, who hated Britannica and was soon calling her an "old whore." Britain was initially represented by Selywn Lloyd, a Foreign Minister who "often had trouble relating to foreigners." After some tough negotiations, the diplomats nipped out to a nightclub where they watched a performance of the can-can. Finally a treaty is drawn up and signed. Eden was horrified when he learns of this, written documents understandably not fitting in with his concept of secret plots. He sent some flunkies back to Paris to try and persuade the French to burn the papers. They were put in a stateroom and the door was locked for several hours, for no discernable reason.

Shimon Peres, a junior member of the Israeli delegate, chuckles mightily when relating all this to the BBC cameras. I don't blame him. To call it redolent of a Yes Prime Minister episode is too complimentary to the actors. It's pure PG Wodehouse. The only difference being that Anthony 'Bertie' Eden didn't have a Jeeves to rescue him.

Thankfully. It's frightening that people like this got into power but would be even more terrifying if they had succeeded. And, as I said, the episode is slightly comforting. Today's rulers may not have much understanding of their job or their electorate, but at least they have a vague grasp of reality.

'The Night Watch'

This probably isn't my favourite painting. But, outside the more demented fringes of surrealism, it has to be the one which gives me the most enjoyment. I can never look at it without raising a smile, partially patronising but mainly one of simple happiness. This is partly because of Paul Kidby's pastiche for the Terry Pratchett comic novel of the same name. But it's also because of what the original seems to show and what it really does reveal.

In a way, The Night Watch is one of Rembrandt's more constrained portraits. He was always a commercial artist dependent on patrons. In 1642 the Militia Company of Arquebusiers in Amsterdam commissioned him for a group portrait to hang on their headquarters' walls. An unflattering representation, one assumes, would have meant no cheque for Rembrandt. So he was not free to subject his models to the pitiless scrutiny he inflicted on his parents or, for that matter, himself. The Company is shown as a sturdy, impressive group of men striding out of the door and presumably to battle. Their Captain his instructing his lieutenant, the light playing over them to emphasise the red sash of one and the golden clothes of the other. The smartness of their attire would have been important to the Company. They were not just soldiers, they were declaring to the world – they were gentlemen too. In the background their troops prepare themselves; cleaning muskets, beating drums or just brandishing pikes. Even the ordering of the figures, a marvel of technical composition, had commercial considerations. Each man was given a prominence according to how much he had paid.

It was hard, though, to stop Rembrandt telling the truth. Some of his patrons were still painted with brutal objectivity; see the wizened merchant's wife Margaretha de Geer, for example. Two golden figures actually catch the eye in The Night Watch, and only one is a soldier. The other is the rather chubby young girl to the right of centre. It is generally thought that she, and the chicken which hangs from her belt, is a symbol of the company mascot. But she could just as easily be somebody's daughter who has wanders in. Regardless, her effect is to immediately undermine both the hierarchical structure and the militaristic statement of the group.

Look closer at the soldiers and these crumble further. Only the lieutenant is actually paying any attention to the captain. The rest are just getting on with their tasks as it suits them. One cleaning his rifle with a self-absorbed expression, one peering at his as if it has jammed, one raising the standard with a slow, ostentatious flourish. A few – the couple on the far right, for example – are simply gossiping. The lack of homogeneity becomes a problem too. There are one or two helmets on display, but the rank and file are almost as dandified as their officers. Some are youths, others white-bearded men. Rather than an army, this looks like a group of men playing at soldiers.

They were, of course. By the 1640's, 'militias' like the Company of Arquebusiers had lost all their original functions. Established to uphold the newly won Dutch independence, they soon became nothing but gentlemen's clubs. Pride and tradition kept them maintaining their training, their weapons and their military etiquette, but they were no more menacing than the Sealed Knot Society.

The Night Watch bears superficial resemblances to another masterpiece featuring a mass of pikes, Velasquez' The Surrender of Braga. Its meaning, though, is the exact opposite. Velasquez showed the Dutch and Spanish generals reaching an apparently amicable settlement. Yet the deportment of their respective troops shows that the former are really capitulating to the latter. What seems like peace is actually conquest. The Night Watch only came seventeen years after the events depicted but belongs to a far more optimistic era. Peace and prosperity had finally come to the Netherlands after their grim, protracted independence war. Rembrandt shows both erupting in what is supposed to be a statement of military might. This is what always makes me smile. That the men shown have reached a place comfortable enough to let them mess about a bit.

Some Vague Thoughts On The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments fall into two basic types: technical and general. The former, which also appear first, concern the nature of worship. None of that fiddly business to do with transubstantiation and rosaries, which caused so many people to kill one another later. Just a few basic ground rules. The second sort deal with how we should relate to one another rather than directly to our God.

The first commandment is, I confess, one that gives me some problem. Worship no other gods but me, said the Lord. I don't find it troubling directly. I've never felt any great urge to bow down to Buddha or Vishnu or the rest of the gang. And it's an understandable law, of course. God was speaking to what was basically a group of ragged asylum seekers lost in the middle of a desert. He would have wanted to remind then of the point of their exodus, why they had left their relatively comfortable old lives. From this perspective, it is essentially no different from a manager telling his players to be loyal to their team.

It is still rather draconian, however. And it's a commandment which has been used to justify crusades, holy wars, forced conversions; basically, a great deal of evil committed in the name of the Lord. It set Judaism and Christianity apart from other religions of the ancient world right from the start. Worshippers of Vesta, say, wouldn't deny the existence of Jupiter or Dionysus or deny the rights of others to worship them. But for the Jews and later the Christians, there was only one God and this commandment backed up the claim. Or they may have done, after it had been tweaked a little. I've got two Bibles; the King James version first produced in 1611 and the more modern Good News. The latter goes with a simple 'worship no god but me.' King James, though, has 'no god before me.' This seems a slight softening of the instruction; interestingly, done at a time when softening of anything wasn't exactly common. It hints at the practice more common in ancient times, when a certain god was given pre-eminence by particular groups but many others were also acknowledged. And that lets in the potential for ecumenicalism and tolerance in our times. I don't know precisely how the original Hebrew should be translated. But it seems likely that even a God emphatically laying down the law wouldn't expect His followers to cast out all their practices. Even if that meant allowing them to at least acknowledge other deities.

The second commandment, about not bowing down to graven images, seems a simple reinforcement of the first and so logical enough. In fact, though, the commandment doesn't simply prohibit bowing down. It also bans making 'any likeness of anything that is in heaven, or anything that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.' What we have here is basically a universal condemnation of all representative art.

The one always used to puzzle me. Mainly because the very places which told us to obey all God's rules are themselves defying one. The churches with their stained glass likenesses of things in heaven (the angels, for example), on earth (Adam and Eve, the creatures on Noah's ark) and even in the sea (the whale which gulped down Noah). You could say that the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock and his like are actually less blasphemous than all so-called 'religious art.' And I still can't find a solution to the paradox except for this one. The commandment is just ignored. It may have had a little influence, I suppose. Perhaps it is the reason why the God of the Bible, almost uniquely of all deities worshipped, is almost never pictured directly. It has become to describe Him mockingly as being a white-bearded man sat on the cloud. But this is the product of a very limited number of images; most famously Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco. Far more common is for God to be depicted through the proxy of his son. But Jesus, of course, is someone 'that is in heaven' himself, except for the short period when he was 'in the earth'. Judea-Christianity has simply bypassed half of the second commandment. In terms of both the success of the religion (for no faith can spread without strong images) and the enrichment of society in general, this was a very wise decision.

The commandment ends with a familiar carrot-and-stick message. Defiance will bring punishment upon you, your sons, your sons' sons and so on. Obedience will lead to great rewards. It's a little strange that God puts this here, rather than at the start or end of the whole list. Perhaps He anticipated that this instruction would be an especially tricky one to enforce, given humanity's perennial love of pictures. The wording, in one translation at least, is also interesting. Good News has Him simply calling Himself 'the Lord your God.' According to King James, though, He claims to be 'a jealous God.' If the latter is correct, it's rather a strange thing to confess to. Jealousy is a weakness. It is one of the deadly sins and actually condemned in the last commandment. Perhaps nothing more was intended than to reinforce the heinousness of bowing down to another deity. But I like to think that God could be admitting to a very human foible in the midst of one of the greatest moments of His power.

Of all the commandments actually acknowledged, the third which prohibits taking the Lord's name in vain has to be the most regularly violated. Nearly everyone does it, and does it at least once a day. And in an amazing variety of ways. The English language alone has been considerably expanded by blasphemies, from classics like 'zounds' (i.e. 'God's wounds') and 'bejesus' to modern favourites such as 'Jesus H Christ.' (Incidentally, what does the 'H' stand for? Holy? Hallowed? Henry? I think we need to know this.) Occasionally I try to prise out the exclamations which form such a regular part of my speech. I find, though, that this makes me swear rather more – "For Christ's sake" becomes "For fuck's sake," for example. And in one more indication of the inherent secularism of our society, this brings me rather more criticism than actual blasphemies. I suppose the solution is to stop cursing entirely. On the other hand, I'm only human. For fuck's sake.

The fourth commandment requires us to labour for six days and rest on the seventh, to mimic God's rapid creation of the world. This is really a combination of the 'technical' commandments and the more general ones. It's an excellent idea for many physical, mental and social ones. It has also fundamentally affected the structure of western societies From here came the concept of the weekend, the moral approval placed on (limited and carefully controlled) idleness and, ultimately, the modern leisure industry. And the instruction continues to have an influence, even on atheists. Sunday trading laws have been gradually chipped away by the greed of retailers and the timidity of governments. Saturday has joined Sunday as a day of rest for most of us. But Saturdays still tend to be when we do most of our household tasks; leaving Sunday devoted to pleasure. Unfortunately, our definition of enjoyment nowadays often requires others to work. Somebody has to play the football games, run the rollercoaster rides or staff the DIY stores. Our rest often isn't especially restful any more and can rarely be carried out alone.

We generally get told that we should spend our Sundays at church. However, this is simply a convention first created by expediency. Sundays used to be the only time people were released from their labour long enough to worship. Nothing in the actual commandment requires it, beyond the rather vague notion about keeping the day 'holy'. It could be argued that Sunday should be the one time people avoid church. Because their attendance requires the clergy to work, thus disobeying one of the commandments they are advocating.

Now we get on to the commandments dealing more with how people treat one another; as essential to a proper religion as the mechanics of worship. Honouring your father and mother used to be emphasised especially, and no wonder. It was always a handy reinforcement of traditional patriarchal authority. However, to honour (or even, to use Good News' interpretation, 'respect') doesn't necessarily mean 'automatically obey.' I've always seen it as saying we should try to both love and like our parents. So we should, even in this era of looser familial relations. Except, possibly, for those unlucky enough to have been mistreated by theirs. The end of the commandment hints at one reason why. There is a promise that if you obey you will long enjoy 'the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.' I don't think this is just God using the carrot again. He is reminding us exactly what our parent gave us. Life, and so, at the start, everything. So respect, as DJ's used to say, is due.

'Thou shalt not kill,' according to King James, comes next. Anti-abortionists are very fond of this one. It is the only piece of text in the whole of the Bible which justifies their creed. I think, however, that we need to be careful how freely we define it. Push it in other directions and it becomes a commandment supporting pacifism or vegetarianism. And neither of these are supported elsewhere. Some of the disciples, for example, were fishermen, which requires killing on a rather regular basis. And the God of the Old Testament was always telling his followers to smite their enemies, even when He wasn't doing the smiting Himself. The narrower translation in Good News, 'Do not commit murder,' seems truer in this instance. Which doesn’t seem enough for many people, including me, but there you are.

The next two commandments instruct us not to steal or commit adultery. God hasn't supplied footnotes in either instance. Frankly, they don't need any. Just say no, kids.

The final pair are perhaps the subtlest ones. Both recognise that harm can be done to others not simply through the direct means of assault or theft but through simple speech as well. Particularly number nine: 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.' The precise wording makes it seems a very limited instruction, simply prohibiting committing perjury in a court. I think, though, that this can be legitimately extended further. Do not slander somebody, or libel them, or spread rumours or lies about them. Don't say a word about them, basically, which you don't believe to be true. And this could include false compliments and flattery, which themselves can be damaging. If you stick to this notion of falseness, however, not all methods of harm are excluded. You can probably insult somebody, providing you genuinely believe in the insult. This is a commandment against gossip rather than bad manners, one which exhorts honesty. Which makes it an excellent rule to follow.

At school, we were told that the final commandment was said to be against coverting thy neighbour's ass. I suspect this was done to give bored children a cheap laugh. (And how it worked.) In fact, the list of things not to desire is rather longer: 'thy neighbour's house… thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.' It's against envy, basically, chiefly though not specifically relating to possessions. I don't think that this instruction was put last because it was seen as the least important. Rather, it underlines the whole list. Jealousy can cause us to break all the other commandments. It can lead us to theft and (when one starts coverting wives) adultery most obviously, but also to slander, dishonouring parents, even murder. Greed can make us work on the Sabbath. Ultimately it can create a god other than the one who speaks in the Bible.

Which it has done, of course. Perhaps we covert even more regularly than we blaspheme or represent the things of the earth. We covert every day and we are told it is right to do so. The whole of modern consumerist society is based on coverting. We're told to buy one thing after another not because of their worth because somebody else already has them. Even if the 'neighbour' in question is just a person in an advert with a pleasing smile, the principle is the same. I don't think that it's just uneasiness about the word 'ass' which makes the religious right gloss over this final commandment.

Finally, what isn't in the Ten Commandments? A ban on abortion for one, unless you add some words which aren't actually there. Nothing about homosexuality, sex outside marriage or single mothers; those who take up religion as an excuse to hate other people have had to root through St Paul's letter tray to excuse them here. There's no mention of drugs or cigarettes, which is understandable as neither to the people in the desert at the time. Nor of alcohol, less so because it emphatically was.Less encouraging are other omissions. Assault which isn't intended to cause death. Rape. Kidnap. Prostitution, pimping, usury, arson, blackmail, bullying… and those are just off the top of my head. A man could live a life which is evil by every definable standard and still claim not to be breaking any of the Ten Commandments. Which leads to the thought that the list can't be used alone to form a set of laws, either religious or civil. It can't even be the keystone, as the Constitution is in America. Too much is vague where it should have been precise, too much is specified when it should have been left open. God's instructions to Moses were a starting point and nothing else. Little wonder that His son later felt the need to come down and sort a few things out.

A Thin Story

London Fashion Week used to be marked by endless accounts about how silly the clothes on display are. The dresses are just as daft this year. Nobody's taking any notice of them, however. Instead, all focus is on those wearing them and their resemblance to living skeletons. Many journalists are concerned that teenage girls will take one look at them and instantly embrace anorexia and/or bulimia. Interestingly, this comes in the midst of a more sustained moral panic about obesity. Again, the primary focus is on teenage girls. But, just for the moment, the greatest threat to Western civilisation isn't being five pounds overweight. It's anorexia, and it's all the fault of those evil models.

These public outrages tend to happen in isolation. Few ever try to link them up. Nobody has suggested, for example, that some may be encouraged by the models to shed a few unnecessary pounds. Or that another possible cause of anorexia is every branch of the media constantly screaming "You're a lard arse!" Or even that models, together with actresses and female singers, are possibly so thin because gossip columnists slap the 'fat girl' tag on them as soon as they try looking remotely normal. Journalists need simple wrongdoers and this can never be other journalists.

As a result, women's bodies have become a constant subject of public debate. Perhaps, as a heterosexual male, I shouldn't mind this too much. But I'm also a heterosexual male who likes to read some actual news occasionally; like who my country's at war with this week, for example. Anyway, this isn't the GQ-style "Phwoar, look at the jugs on that" sort of enjoyable nonsense. It's the endless tutting of elderly, prudish tongues. The only reason it isn't accompanied by claims of "When I were a lad, models looked like real women" is that this would be too obvious a lie. Models have always looked the same; Twiggy didn't earn her nickname for nothing. Not only is this 'story' not news, it isn't even new.

Incidentally, for any journalists who really disapprove of London Fashion Week: It isn't like Miss World, which survived for decades without coverage. The only people who care about it are other journalists. If you ignore it for long enough, it really will go away.

Huh?

OK, so let's see if I'm interpreting the latest ICM poll, as reported in today's Sunday Mirror, correctly:

45% of people want Tony Blair to resign immediately. That's double those who chose the next most popular option, for him to do a full fourth term. About the same number want Gordon Brown to be the next Labour leader, and therefore Prime Minister. Nobody else comes anywhere near Brown's popularity. Yet 57% believe Blair makes a better premier than Brown would. In other words: there must be a substantial number of people out there who think Tony Blair should hand over power right now to somebody who would do a worst job.

A couple of weeks ago I said the Blair-Brown contest was the dullest political feud in English history. I take that back. Now it's just getting plain surreal.

Health Forum

Regular viewers of this blog (not that there are any; even my mum only dips in sporadically) may notice a change in the links opposite. HealingWell is out; Health Forum is in. My new favourite only started on Monday, so far offers naught but message boards and a chat room, has about 15 members to date and boasts a frankly rubbish name. But I really can't recommend HealingWell anymore, save for nostalgics wanting to experience old school totalitarianism.

Earlier this week a good friend of mine was banned from HealingWell. This followed an argument in the chatroom. It was sparked off when a newbie insulted a friend of hers without justification. I don't know exactly what was said. But 'exact' seems a redundant concept when all my friend was told by the site administrator was that her behaviour was 'inappropriate'. HealingWell, presumably, frowns upon people defending those they care about. Her friend was banned as well, for being around at the same time I guess. The site administrator didn't even have the courtesy to tell her why. He got in touch with me after I sent him an extremely snooty email complaining about his decision. This appears to be a man who is impressed by pomposity. He had full logs of the argument, he said, and I didn't know the full story. As he didn't even summarise his side of it, this has to be one of the feeblest defences I've ever heard.

And last weekend the epilepsy forum moderator was summarily removed from her post by the same administrator. She wasn't given any warning beforehand or, again, much of an explanation afterwards. Her crime appears to be to have taken a weekend off to spend with her family. The next day in the chat room she told a member that she'd been fired rather than quit. In a private conversation, incidentally - but the administrator reads logs of these as well when the mood takes him. He read this one and she was also banned from the whole site. Forum moderators are volunteers who give up a lot of their time and have to put up with a lot from snotty buggers like myself. This one had done the role for two years and, you would think, deserved a little more respect. Now I notice that some of her recent postings have been pulled off the forum. Had she been anything of a dictator, I would say this was exactly like a fallen Soviet leader being airbrushed from history.

I know about the rights of administrators to make these decisions and, right now, I don't give a toss. Sites like this are supposed to be for the benefit of their members. This particular member is disgusted and I'm not the only one. So if you have a medical condition you need help with, check out the Health Forum. You'll be part of a new venture right at its inception, you'll get to talk to kind, sympathetic and often very funny people. And I promise, eventually us disgruntled old HW members will calm down and stop slagging off our old site.

The Diddy Men

I see Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy aka whatever else he feels like that week, has been prevented from yet another rebranding exercise recently. An obscure British DJ noticed that Combs was about to take his own stage name. He threatened the American millionaire with court, winning exclusive rights to the alias and his legal costs in the bargain.

An uplifting story, until you see the name they were disputing. Diddy. I mean, Diddy? A name which, unless I'm mistaken, was first coined by everyone's favourite wacky tax evader Ken Dodd. Is this what rap, a genre which once gave us magnificient creations like Queen Latifa, Niggers With Attitude and Grandmaster Flash, has sunk to? Or has this unsettling undercurrent always run through it? Perhaps the cataclysmic East-West rivalry between Tupac Shakur and The Notorious BIG in the 1990's was really over who had the right to change their name to Flopsy-Wopsy.

Name calling has always between an important part of rap. But for God's sake, boys, stick to calling one another hoes and muthafuckas. It's far more dignified.

Stasis

Recently I've actually been warming to the Conservative Party. Not, of course, because of Cokehead Cameron and his 'Tony Blair without spin (or policies)' appeal. But because the Tories would have sorted out a leader as divisive and redundant as Blair a long time ago. A few secretive meetings and said leader would be floating in a gutter with a knife in his back. Then we wouldn't have had to endure a week as monumentally fatuous as this last one. And journalists, instead of spending their time gossiping in Westminster bars, might actually do some proper reporting. For example, telling us about what appears to be an actual war being fought by British troops in Afghanistan.

Which would be a bit tough on the journalists, of course. But the Blair-Brown feud grew tedious about five years ago. There's no word for it now. The nadir (to date; I'm sure it will sink lower) had to be Charles Clarke criticising Brown for laughing after a meeting with Blair. This would be an astonishing non-story whoever said it - but Charles Clarke? The man booted out of the Home Office not because he'd been shagging his secretary but because he was simply no good at his job. Why does he imagine anyone cares now what he thinks about anything? More to the point, why do they?

Clarke's fall partially explains why there's no end in sight to this business. None of Blair's allies, the people he might have willingly handed power to, have lasted the course. Alan Milburn was even less competent than Clarke. David Blunkett has become a highly entertaining disaster area. John Prescott gave up long ago even trying to persuade people that he has any credibility, Peter Mandelson likewise for honesty. Only Gordon Brown has remained. Who was actually promised the job, who has propped up this Labour administration from the start but who, judging from the way he's treated, seems to have stolen Blair's lunch money when they were at school.

And until he finds a sucessor he trusts, Blair clearly doesn't want to go. Every piece of ground he concedes on the issue is miniscule and reluctant. He says he will go in a year. He hasn't actually set a date though, because apparently he wants an orderly transition. Normally that requires actually knowing when the transition will occur, but I'm not sure that that really masters here. In a year's time he'll probably say he'll go within a year again, and this time promising not to cross his fingers. Meanwhile Brown daren't act openly while he's still so obviously the only one who will benefit. It's considered acceptable to have naked ambition in Westminster. But acting on it is still seen as bad form.

So here we're all stuck. Blair and Brown, Brown and Blair. The one a fraction to the left of the centre ground or the one a fraction to the right. Perhaps the most long-lasting, subtle and, above all, spectacularly dull feud in the entire history of British politics.

Write And Wrong

The other night I had two conversations about writing with two people holding remarkably different opinions. One of them, a marketing man, believes that you should always identify your target audience before beginning. This will give you the ideal tone, style and even subject for your creation. A piece of writing is simply a product and its sales potential must be built in from the start. The other person is working on a novel which is effectively an autobiography. She has only considered getting it published in the sense of deciding that she doesn't want to ever get it published. Too much of the content will be painful and personal. The idea of some stranger reading it might preventing her from writing the truth.

I instinctively side with the latter extreme. Not just because reducing literature to a commodity is creepy – though it is, of course – but because I don't see the point in it. You can never really know what that target audience thinks. You can only presume, on the basis of what they've read before. So you have to give them the same again. The whole idea of writing being a way of expressing your unique self instantly vanishes. Instead it's just a glorified copy and paste exercise. If you're writing a book then you're no better than those Mills & Boon hacks putting flesh on the same rigid skeleton. If a web site, your output is just a flagpole on which to hang those income-generating banner adverts. Which is fine for some. But I already earn a living doing tasks I don't give a toss about. When I go home and put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, I want to please myself.

Up to a point. I write novels which will almost certainly never get published. Mostly because they're bad, of course, but also because they straddle several genres in a manner which satisfies nobody except me. Yet, unlike my friend, I would like to get the things sold eventually. I may do nothing to facilitate this once they're finished, but the intention is always lurking in my mind as I'm writing them. (And of course I've had the usual day dreams about getting rich from them, of quitting my job after telling my boss, in a tangle of mixed metaphors, what it is and where he can insert it.) It helps, this thought. It makes me sharpen my style, lengthen my descriptive passages, develop my characters more coherently. When I'm writing entirely for myself, I get lazy. The notion of a panel of waiting judges forces an effort I don't want, but nonetheless need, to make.

The idea of an audience has also pushed me in new directions. I generally say I started this blog to express thoughts which will just knock around my head annoying me until I write them down. Not wholly true, actually. They always fade eventually even if I leave them alone. And I never used to be motivated to do anything with them. This post – and every single other one on this blog – proves I still don't exactly take my ideas to reasoned conclusions. But these are lengthy and lucid essays compared to the incomprehensible paragraphs I used to scribble down and shove to the bottom of a drawer. My web site, too, was originally intended to be a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff I'd already produced. Yet it's encouraged me to start work on some of the abandoned pieces again. Especially my ill-considered York guide which is now perhaps a quarter instead of a tenth complete.

Why? Because of that notion of a reader. Even if said reader is only a bored student who will scan a few lines, sneer and move on, it somehow gives my work a greater purpose. A reader, moreover, who I will never meet, will never even learn about. And that removes the risk from the process – an anxiety which has largely stopped me showing anything to family or friends. I try harder because I think I'm being judged. But I'll never, thank God, learn what mark I get.
I don't think I'm alone in feeling this. The combination of publicity and privacy has helped drive the blog phenomenon, encouraging thousands to home-publish their private diaries and poetry. Look further and you see the same mood in chat rooms, personal web sites, message forums, artificial 'friend' sites like MySpace. It neatly captures where we many of us stand as individuals. Willingly isolated and yet still craving for greater connections with society.

In other words: The middle ground I occupy, compared to the two extremists I talked to, is basically the correct one. So nyaahh.

D Minus For Effort

More and more I think a lot of features of the natural world are just ludicrous. Life's supposed to be a trial, I know. But some things just seem sloppy. So I'd be grateful if God, evolution or both could sort out the following:

Clouds on mountains

The only point of mountains is the view you get from the top. Half the time you don't get one because of the damn clouds. And the higher the mountain, so the better the potential view, the more likely there is to be clouds. If we must have clouds anywhere except the sky, let them go down to the plains. There's nothing to see there anyway.

Pain

Yes, I know. Pain is useful because it's a warning. But I think we've reached a stage in our development where we recognise that blood spurting out of our skin, say, is a bad thing. And for the less visible bodily malfunctions, some sort of bell or light device can surely be devised. Anyway, it's not as if we actually do anything when we feel pain. We just take some painkillers.

Moths

They come out at night and then just fly for the nearest source of light. I mean, really. If you like the darkness so much, stay in it. And if you prefer light, why don't you just come out during the day? It's pretty much everywhere then.

Snot

I challenge anyone to find a point to this. If it's actually a punishment for something humanity's doing wrong, fair enough. Tell us what it is and we'll repent. Otherwise we rather need those nostrils to breath through, thank you very much.

Volcanos

The most fertile soil is found on the slopes of volcanos. So everyone farms there and lots of people die whenever there's an eruption. Oh the irony etc. What's wrong with putting the best land in the safest parts of the world? And anyway, why should being covered with molten rock make soil fertile in the first place? It's absurd when you think about it. (See also: why should being covered in cow crap make soil fertile?)

Pandas

Even nature commentators, trained to adopt tones of awe when telling us how something can eat beetles, sound exasperated when they get to the pandas. They only eat bamboo. They only eat a certain type of bamboo. And bamboo is rubbish for nuitrition. Plus, they seem to hate sex. This is a species yearning for extinction and perhaps we should just let them get on with it.

Ducks and pigeons
Both are phenomenal flyers. Ducks can reach the fastest speeds in the world; flocks of pigeons can swoop and soar in beautiful formations. Why, then, do they all spend most of their time waddling clumsily along the ground getting in our way? Go to your strengths for Christ's sake.

Sleep
What guarantees that you won't get to sleep? Thinking about going to sleep. Actually meaning to do it. You can only get sleep if you forget what you're supposed to be doing. It's survival of the absent-minded and explains an awful lot about our species.

The New Religion

Reading back on one of my old blog entries, during a period of naval-gazing excessive even by my standards, I realise I was rather hard on religion. The modern Christian church, I wrote, repelled me because of the large numbers of bigots it still attracts. Thinking about it, I realise this was based solely on what I've read in the newspapers about Christianity. An argument which is only acceptable if we can assume that journalists are empirical and rational reporters of truth. But what's been my actual experience of practicing Christians - and those of other faiths? That almost all are tolerant and clear-minded, strong in their beliefs but unwilling to impose them on others. The bigots come in other hues.

A lot of my group discussions about religion have been like this. A careful, thoughtful examination of contrasting opinions. And one voice which states "I think religion's a load of bollocks." It starts early and continues striking as regular as a clock. Even when the owner is assured that you heard him/her the first time, they continue. Because they feel that this statement which should be the start and end of the debate.

Press them a bit harder and things get no better. This sort of person isn't just an athiest themselves, they're outraged that anyone is anything else. Science, you will soon hear, has proved that religion is a load of bollocks. Believing something just because it's written in a book is ludicrous. Uh huh. Unfortunately much scientific 'fact' is in fact just hypothosis, much of it gets disproved later and the first civilisation to offer rational alternatives to religion, the ancient Greeks, got virtually everything hilariously wrong. There's also the problem of where the athiest actually learned so much about science. Did they actually do the experiments themselves? Or did they, well, read about them in a book and put their faith in them? Plus I'm not sure that a great deal in the Bible, say, has been comprehensively debunked. The world took rather longer than six days to create and that's pretty much all you can say. The best science has been able to do is prove that miracles are extremely unlikely. I think people always knew that. That's why they called the things miracles.

Oh, and there's the killing. This is the fervent athiest's next and apparently irrefutable argument. People kill one another because of religion so it should be abolished right now. Well, yes, it has caused a lot of bloodshed. And people also fight wars because of political systems, property, territorial boundaries, ethnicity and trade. Often these are the sole cause and religion is just used as fancy dress. So we'll get rid of all of them, shall we, and go back to living in the ocean. People fight wars for a lot of reasons and one of the most common is intolerance.

Athiesm has become an alternative religion in western civilisation over the past two centuries. It has its prophets (the Enlightenment thinkers) its holy books (Origin of Species or, to those of a certain hue, Das Kapital) and its icons (the DNA symbol, the Genesis-refuting dinosaur bones). It has the vast majority of its believers perfectly willing to accept that others may have different opinions. And it has its bigots spitting venom at the heretics - and being especially bitter because they can't even threaten anyone with hellfire.

SOAP Operas

So brace yourself for the imminent arrival of Snakes On A Plane, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated dreadful movie of all time. Whatever its faults, and they promise to be legion, you have to admire the honesty of its title. Like Nick Cave's 'Murder Ballads' (basically lots of ballads about murders), SOAP does exactly what it says on the can. There's a plane and there's, well, snakes on it; and that seems to be the extent of the plot. Star Samual L Jackson reputedly vetoed all attempts to make the title more sophisticated. It's not On The Waterfront or Casablanca, he objected. It's Snakes On A Plane. And so it is.

This rumour surfaced in the internet frenzy which SOAP's whole-hearted dreadfulness has inspired. Hype which has allegedly affected the 'script' itself. Discussing ways in which SOAP might be made even more terrible, somebody suggested Jackson should say "I want all these motherfucking snakes off this motherfucking plane." Lo and behold, the line has appeared in the final cut.

If true, I know how this anonymous contributor must feel. A little bit proud, a little bit awestruck and remarkably depressed. I sometimes feel that researchers follow me around, noting my sarcastic suggestions for lousy TV shows and then turning them into reality. If so then I'm afraid Celebrity Big Brother is one of mine. So too is that program where bossy women go into people's homes and inspect their toilet seats for stray pubic hairs. And watch out in the future for Hitler's Fattest Nazis ("Heinrich Himmler. Fifteen stone of pure evil!") Grumpy Old Celebrity Chefs, A Sticky Situation (where poor people are tarred and feathered by rich businessmen, the last to lose consciousness winning a million pounds), Ready Steady Sell Your House! and When Colonic Irrigations Go Wrong.

Obviously I'm just being paranoid. However awful we imagine films and TV can get, they always outdo our expectations. I'm reminded of the satarist who, hearing that Kissinger had won the Nobel Peace Prize, announced his retirement because he could never invent anything as twisted as reality. (I can never remember his name so assume he made good on his promise). We're virtually past the level where any sort of parody or mockery is possible. Just enjoy the descent, I suppose; and don't assume that SOAP is the lowest Hollywood can ever sink. There's a long way to go yet.

Profile Of A Moron

A phenomenal amount of shite has been written and spoken since the dismantling of an alleged terrorist plot at Heathrow last week. But Lord Stevens in the New of the World wins my award. Seeking to keep our airplanes safe while avoiding huge delays caused by the stringent security procedures (and these delays continue to dominate the headlines, probably because journalists worry that they themselves will be affected) he recommends 'passenger profiling'. Namely, only men of Asian or North African appearance should be searched rigorously. Because they're the only ones who have been involved in bombing plots to date, so will presumably be the only ones who ever will be. The only problems Lord Stevens anticipates with his plan is liberals bleating accusations of racism.

Well, I'm a liberal and I'd like to bleat an accusation of racism. Mainly because the plan is, in fact, racist. I've another problem with it too, however. Islam is a largely racially based religion But it's quite sucessful at finding new converts from various walks of life. Jemima Khan and Muhammad Ali, for example, would slip through this meticulous 'profiling.' And the recently converted are more likely to be amongst the most fanatical. Any 'Muslim' psychotics would be delighted if Lord Stevens' cack-handed plan was implemented. They'd just have to find a particularly white or black fellow psycho, load him up with explosives and be fairly sure he'd pass through airline security unchallenged. Lord Stevens doesn't seem to consider this. He does mention that Israel uses passenger profiling "and they've got probably the safest airports and airlines in the world". Something which must be of great comfort to the people of Haifa right now.

Lord Stevens, incidentally, used to be Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. One reassurance during these unsettling times is that he no longer is.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

On the surface, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is claiming to have the three most clearly delineated roles in film history. It’s simple. A good man, a bad man and an ugly man – respectively Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. Their roles is even announced by captions at the start and end of the film, albeit in Spanish. As the plot develops, though, the walls start to dissolve and this infantile moral clarity becomes something rather more interesting.
Wallach is Tuco, the Ugly Mexican bandit. A cursing, capering goblin of a man, “known as The Rat,” only rescued from total absurdity by his lethalness. Any miniscule shreds of dignity he briefly manages to collect are quickly lost. Take the three-cornered showdown at the denouement. Eastwood gets to shroud himself in an enigmatic poncho; Van Cleef has a cool all-black ensemble. Wallach must make do with a scruffy maroon jacket splitting open at the seams. Even his very status is ludicrous. The Good and the Bad are binary opposites of the moral scale; the Ugly is a jokey alternative which doesn’t even belong on it.
In most films Tuco would be played solely for laughs before meeting an untimely death. But Sergio Leone actually makes him the undeclared star of his piece. Eastwood may take top billing but Wallach has the most screen time and the most rounded character. Only he, for one, has a proper name. Eastwood and Van Cleef are only known by nicknames, Blondie and Angel Eyes, which aren’t even particularly accurate. Wallach’s constant mutterings almost serve as old-fashioned soliloquies to share his thoughts with the audience; a marked contrast to the legendarily taciturn Eastwood. And, unusually for a Leone character, Tuco is given a background and a family. The scene where he meets is estranged priest brother and learns his parents are dead is one of the most powerful in the film. Wallach is almost shamed into repentance for a second by his brother. Then he comes back with the angry speech, “In our village, if one did not want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit. You chose your way, I chose mine. Mine was harder.” Tuco is not set apart from the moral scale after all. He is actually a battleground of values, a struggle epitomised when he finds a wagon full of corpses. Instinctively he crosses himself like a good Catholic – and then gets on with looting the bodies.
Eastwood is The Good. Of course Eastwood is The Good. But precisely how Good is he? He doesn’t seem to loot corpses but does make fresh ones out of living men with no apparent compunction. We first meet him making a living by turning in outlaws for the bounty and then rescuing them from the noose. Only the greater brutality of the Civil War seems to shake him into something resembling humanity. “Never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he famously mutters as he watches the savage battle for the bridge. Afterwards when he meets a dying Confederate soldier, he covers the boy up and gives him a last smoke. (Cigars seem to be Eastwood’s sole way of expressing kindness. He offers them to Wallach on the two times they are starting to build a proper friendship.) But this strange version of last rites is an aberration, not an epiphany. Hearing Wallach ride away to try and grab the gold, Eastwood immediately strides off and starts firing cannons at him. It’s also worth noting that Eastwood started the double-crossing which constantly mars their partnership, robbing Wallach and leaving him trussed up in the wilderness. And that in the film’s spectacular climax he appears to be inflicting a particularly macabre fate on his ex-partner, only to turn it into a particularly macabre practical joke. Sergio Leone always liked to subvert the image of cowboy as image of moral rectitude which John Wayne epitomised. In this respect The Good, The Bad and The Ugly stands on a line beginning with A Fistful of Dollars and ended by Eastwood himself with Unforgiven.
Lee Van Cleef, at least, is fairly unambiguously Bad. Leone was always more comfortable with pure evil than pure good. It’s interesting, though, how peripheral Van Cleef is to the film. After introducing himself with a flurry of murders, he vanishes for a long time. And he needs a great deal of effort to intrude on the quest-cum-vendetta of Eastwood and Wallach. In both For A Few Dollars More and Once Upon A Time In The West, the whole purpose of the story is getting revenge on Gian Maria Volonte and Henry Fonda respectively. Van Cleef is just another contender for the chest of gold. One defeated, moreover, not by a quick draw buy by a piece of trickery. Eastwood secretly empties Wallach’s gun before the three-way shootout. This leaves him free to focus on Van Cleef whose concentration is divided. You can almost feel sorry for Angel Eyes as he falls into his handily open grave. He was at least willing to fight an honest duel at the end. The Good man had other plans, however.

The taming of the old West has entered American mythology. The conquering of its last frontier, replacing an anarchic land where the gun is king with the rule of law and symbols of Eastern civilisation. The theme winds around many Westerns. Only the treatment has shifted gradually. Originally it was celebratory, represented by heroic, blue-eyed Americans vanquishing evil Red Indians. By the 1950’s the tone was becoming more melancholic, particularly in John Ford’s films; realising that freedom, too, was being sacrificed. Finally the outright cynical came to the fore, in Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
The old West is dying in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly too. Or rather, thanks to the Civil War it is being ripped apart and only desolation is appearing in its place. An innkeeper, rejoicing in the imminent victory of the Northern because he can make more money from them, anticipates the greed which would finally conquer the frontier. But he doesn’t benefit, his inn being quickly destroyed by a stray cannonball. A wagon miraculously appearing in the desert turns out to be full of corpses. Leone fills his landscapes with ruined buildings and subverts the symbols of law and society. A train ploughing majestically through the wilderness is also an instrument of torture for a Confederate spy tied to the front. Eastwood, who makes a living cutting nooses, ties one around Wallach as a grim practical joke. A bridge, that most basic achievement of mankind, is the reason for a pointless battle and the loss of thousands of lives; its destruction is the cause for celebration. One of the few structures which remains, a monastery which cares for wounded soldiers, seems almost grotesque in context. Wallach flinches in disgust when he sees the scenes of solace inside. He would be more at home in the graveyard where the film ends. There is a wide, empty space in its centre where the final shootout takes place. That would be where the church ought to be. But there is nothing. The whole area is just a disposal area for corpses, the graves marked by the most rudimentary of signs.
Passing away, too, are the personifications of civilisation. There are a few symbols of moral rectitude and none suffer happy fates. Two are doomed army commanders, one the victim of gangrene, the other slowly poisoning himself with alcohol before a bullet quickens the process. Both, incidentally, are fighting for the North. The Union is dying even as it wins the war. The only institution still standing by the end is the church, in the shape of Tuco’s brother. But he is left severely compromised, surrendering to anger, knocked to the ground by Tuco and, in his final shot, begging futilely for forgiveness. Even commercial greed and evil cannot stand up to the savage force ravaging Leone’s world. Van Cleef starts the film as a hired gun. At the end of his introductory sequence, though, he double-crosses the man with the gold and dispatches him. Similar fates meet the families trying to manipulate Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, the rail baron who thought he controls Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time In The West. The values and morals of the old West may have vanished from Leone’s films. Brute force, though, still rules supreme.

A recent poll put the score from The Lord of the Rings as the best ever written. It’s a decent little tune, I suppose, if rather derivative; rather like the trilogy itself. But the result simply shows how much poor memories influence surveys. Nobody who has watched a Sergio Leone film in the last ten years could have voted for any other. Many movies, including The Lord of the Rings, are improved by their scores. For all its many other virtues, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly simply couldn’t exist without its music.
Ennio Morricone worked on all Leone’s major films. The professional harmony of the pair was legendary. One Once Upon A Time In The West, Morricone wrote the score first and Leone instructed his actors to modulate their movements around it. In one scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Eastwood holsters his gun then Wallach spins his spurs to announce his unexpected appearance, the sequence perfectly spaced by the famous signature riff. Sometimes, with their sparse dialogue, Leone’s works seem more like a ballet than a film. Or as one critic described Once Upon A Time In The West, ‘a dance of death.’
There is a sense, too, of the pair trying to outdo each other. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was easily Leone’s most ambitious piece to date, transcending the brutal revenge tales of the other Dollars films. And Morricone tried to match him on his flight upwards. Leone piled layer upon layer, creating a plot which was both an intricate, ingenious device and a simple extended duel. Morricone built fantastic, almost unearthly compositions, employing choirs, trumpets, steel guitars, a number of instruments I can’t begin to name. Every sudden shift in mood is followed perfectly by the score. The poignant suffering inflicted by war, the tension of the gunfight in the deserted town, the savage march through the desert; most memorably, the quirky theme tune announcing every plot twist or black joke. Even these, though, are overshadowed by the film’s astonishing climax.
Morricone gives us two compositions for this. Each begins quietly then builds gradually into an amazingly stirring chorus. Keeping pace with him, of course, is Leone’s direction. As the music swells, the camera moves faster and faster. The first crescendo leads to one extended blur of movement. For the second there is a series of repetitive images appearing and vanishing quicker than a blink. The effect is amazing, the film leaping out and bludgeoning you into submission.
What, though, is the story behind these monumental crescendos? A man running through a cemetery looking for a grave which is supposed to be full of gold and isn’t. And then three men having a fight over a rock supposed to have a name written on it; which, as it turns out, it doesn’t. Squalor, basically, greed and trickery. Cinema is often accused of manipulating the emotions of the audience. Leone and Morricone both manipulate ours as much as they can and all to spring another practical joke on us. At the end of each sequence, Morricone’s music is abruptly cut. There is a quick fumble of movement and the issue is resolved. Reality hits us between the eyes. And in the sudden silence, we realise exactly what we were gaping at a second ago.

Hatred

A friend recently said he wished he understood more fully the latest Israeli/Lebanese bloodbath. My response was that it's fairly simple. It's about hatred. Religion, territory, race and water to some extent; but primarily about hatred, mutual and unquenchable. This was a slightly drunken men-in-a-pub conversation we were having, but I'll stand by that assessment. The only way to comprehend the motives of the main participants is to realise that they just hate each other, and probably always will.

My friend was also searching for an analogy. I'm also going for a simple one here: the school yard. One boy kicks a bigger boy without provocation. The big boy responds not with another kick but with a savage, unrelenting assault. That's what happened on the Gaza Strip. The Hizbullah attack on the Israeli barracks only varies in that it seemed to be an attempt to rescue the first boy as he fell bleeding to the ground. Interestingly, Hizbullah rejects this interpretation. They claimed they had been planning their raid for months. But then Hizbullah have never been easy with any justifications that a sane man might recognise.

The only strange part of this depressingly familiar cycle of events is that it's possible to sympathise with one of the governments involved. Lebanon can't have expected Hizbullah to suddenly strike after years of dormancy. They can't have expected the Israelis to respond by bombing not just Hizbullah positions but pretty much the whole of Lebanon. The excuse given for the second is that Hizbullah forms part of the Lebanese government and there's been no attempts to disband the organisation. But like it or not, Hizbullah remains very popular in south Lebanon and some of their representatives tend to get elected. And a direct move against them would have probably pushed the country back into civil war. I think Lebanon has had enough of that for the time being. Defending the Israeli reaction is like saying they would have been justified bombing Britain if the IRA killed any of their soldiers in the 1970's and 80's. Sinn Fein, after all, technically formed part of the British government; they had elected representatives in Westminster even if they chose not to take their seats.

The British and, especially, American response is another reason to sympathise with Lebanon. A democracy, a democracy striving towards peace, being bombed by a neighbour for actions it didn't carry out. They might have expected a little protection from America, the self-appointed guardian of peace and freedom. Not when the aggressor is Israel, however. Even though Lebanon is a largely Christian nation and the Bush administration contains some serious anti-Semites. Still this golden rule cannot be broken for America: Israel Is Always Right. This is one detail I do wish I understood better. Bush lives in a world of black and white, good and evil. So why does he side with Israel even when they blatantly break his own infantile rules? Perhaps the reverse of hate is being shown here. Love, which excuses and blinds whenever necessary. Or perhaps it's because this is the school yard. And nobody should expect the biggest kid of all to play fair.

Not Fit To Speak

I did promise I wouldn't use this blog to whitter on about my personal life. (On the basis that total strangers reading it wouldn't be interested and I didn't want them knowing anyway). But since this particular episode concerns web use, I though it might be worth relating.

I'm a member of the epilepsy section of HealingWell, the health site with a link opposite. Recently a 12 year old girl did the standard introductory post to the forum - 'Hi, I'm new here, got epilepsy, don't like it, can anyone give advice' etc. Rather than helping, the forum moderator instantly put up a message telling her that she was too young to post anything. Then the site founder weighed in with the announcement that US federal law required all contributors to be 13 or older. I don't know what happened to the poor girl, but assume she instantly had her membership revoked.

Rather irked, I put a post of my own. I told the girl that there seemed to be an age limit to receiving help and support and suggest she come back in a year when her right to exist might be acknowledged. Slightly sarcastic, I know, but not especially offensive. I'm informed that some of the site regulars put up similiar posts, albeit phrased more moderately. I never actually saw them, however. Less than a day after I kicked off the debate, the moderator struck again. She deleted all the criticism and replaced them with a huffy message of her own which said that negative or unpleasant posts wouldn't be tolerated. Looking on the site today, I see that the whole thread has been wiped off.

An amusing episode on one level, less so in other ways. I don't know if the moderator emailed the girl to guide her to a children's site where she could post. (Unlikely, according to one person). I also don't know who thought to pass a law shutting children out of sites not about sex or violance but helping people through a pretty unpleasant medical condition. It's also hard to get past the censorship issue. We weren't mocking or insulting anyone. We were challenging the rules of the site. Print magazines and newspapers frequently carry letters criticising their own content. But it seems that in the free, untramelled internet, that's just something you're not allowed to do.

Record Breaking

As I gradually melt into a rather putrid pool, I read that this is the hottest July in Britain 'since records began'. I thought it might be. Every month seems to be the something-est one since records began - the hottest, the coldest, the wettest, the sunniest, the darkest, the fattest (particularly common in these obese times) or just the nicest. We're rarely told whose records they are or when precisely they did begin. I suspect they're reset every few years so that every month, like every child in a talent contest, can have a prize.

If the heatwave continues, be sure of another story re-emerging soon. Some, perhaps, all of the water companies will announce that their reservoirs are empty so can everyone please stop turning on their taps. And then the reaction. How much of the water from said reservoirs is actually distributed around the country through holes in leaky pipes - usually around a third - and why nobody spends any money fixing these pipes. Spokesmen from the companies will give the usual response, which can be summarised as "You think we're wasting a lot of water this year? That's nothing to how much we wasted five years ago." But just once I'd like one of them to stand up and scream, "So we're cutting back on essential repairs to maximise profits? We're a private company. That's what we're supposed to do. If you don't like it, you shouldn't have sold off the bloody water industry in the first place."

If that happens, and if the government responds by re-nationalising the water companies, they may make it the sanest month since records began.

A Levy On The Lords

As the 'loans for peerages' scandal gets more melodramatic and the Metropolitan Police show their theatrical side again - thankfully without shooting anyone this time - a question keeps running through my head. Why does anyone actually want a title? None of my circle, which includes not just raving lefties but a few raving righties too, believe they have any prestige attached whatsoever. Several centuries of mockery have seen to that, notably PG Wodehouse and all his 'Lord Wotwotleighs.' A knighthood might, just conceivably, be desired. It would put you in the same company as Alex Ferguson and Bobby Robson, after all. But a true peerage involves sacraficing your name, one of the most crucial parts of your identity, and instead calling yourself after a piece of scrubland in Northamptonshire.

There's still a small amount of political power attached, I know. This can easily be removed by doing what should have been done a decade ago i.e. properly reform the House of Lords and make it an elected upper chamber. Even if this ever happens, though, a small group of people will still be clamouring, and paying, for titles. The rich businessmen who have the Humvee, the private jet and the mansion by the Thames and want to get one status symbol ahead of their peers. A claque who have almost entirely separated themselves from the rest of the country.

Lord Levy - an unfortunate name in the circumstances - the Labour Party and the Conservatives may have broken the rules and even the law. But have they actually done anything damaging? In the 'cash for questions' affair of the 1990's, Tories recieved personal bribes to manipulate Parliament. Here it's political parties getting money to fight elections - quite important to democracy, incidentally - in exchange for glass beads. They're fleecing some very dim men who can certainly afford to be fleeced. It's probably the only way to persuade these men to keep their money in the country and invested in something remotely useful, so how wrong is it?

The honours system has always been a phenomenal scam. It was only ever intended to formalise bribery and patronage. Lord Levy's crime isn't to pervert this system, as some have said, but to operate it in perhaps its most perfect form.

A BBC Announcement

As a BBC-style add-on to the last post, I should say: If anyone suffers conditions described in the poem below, please click on the Healingwell link to the left. You will receive lots of useful advice and meet all sorts of nice people. And a few self-important bloggers, but that's the internet for you

Yet More Poetry

More than my usual reservations about this. It's an attempt to tackle a 'serious' subject with very limited tools. And I'm still slightly worried that, for once, I might offend people I don't want to offend. But after taking council from someone brighter than me, I'm posting it anyway. All I can say is that the second stanza is an attempt to describe what epilepsy appears to be doing to my mind when I'm having a seizure. It's a personal account and nothing else.

Sticks and Stones

No: that isn’t it.
That’s not the worst thing at all.
The taunting or the fear
Or the names: epi, spasmo.
Jokes about frothy lips.
I’m supposed to care?
Those who matter won’t make them
And anyone who does
A great excuse to loath them
As they should all be loathed.
So bring it on, archaic stigma
For I have studied you
And I will hit you right back
And I hit below the belt.

But something hits me harder
With its sticks and all its stones
They penetrate my thickest skin
Strike deep inside my being.
No words left to deflect them
No words left at all.
Just primeval rituals, ancient hopes
Expressed in gibbering prayers
That next second or next minute
The blows will start to fade
And mankind will creep back slowly
To this dumb, misfiring ape.