X Rated

And continuing the subject of lardiness... There are certain things which I would prefer not to even contemplate. One of these emphatically is what John Prescott does with the parts of his body which are below his stomach and above his knees. I concede that the story of his two year affair with his secretary is, just about, in the public interest. I see how it contributes to the general picture of a government in moral and political decline. But please, in the name of God, no more details. I haven't been this revolted, or this amused, since the John Major-Edwina Currie story broke.

Fatheads

Apologies for turning this into a regional newspaper for a moment, but here goes. One of the lengthier rows rumbling about York has concerned the Barbican Centre. Originally this was a perfectly decent public baths. Then they put a god-awful 'leisure centre' around it, mainly a place for archaic rock bands to strut their creaking limbs. The process was like a pearl being created in reverse - the precious stone emerging first then the shit building up around it. The whole mess understandably went bust a few years ago. Now they've decided to revive the leisure centre but leave the baths closed. There are still two public baths left in York. But as one was poorly built in the 1960's and the other has been around since the 1900's, they may have to be closed at least temporarily to stop bits of their ceilings occasionally dropping into the pools.

There's one consequence to York having no public baths left. Children are going to get fatter. Swimming is wonderful for children because, unlike most forms of excercise, it's actually fun for them. You get to fart around and pretend to drown your friends. If you ever run out of ideas most pools have notices of prohibited actions - ducking, bombing etc. - to work through. And you lose calories at the same time.

There's a lot of fuss about fat kids at the moment. They're fatter than ever, apparently, and getting even fatter every second. The usual dire warnings about diabetes and heart disease are issued. And the usual culprits are found - junk food and computer games. Basically, the solutions are to stop children eating and doing things they enjoy. It's about controlling them even more. But children, unlike most adults, will actually do healthy - if not necessarily safe - things out of choice as long as they're enjoyable. They just need access to the opportunities, and those are vanishing more and more.

Football is another example. Not the creepy organised leagues where parents bawl their frustrations at their offspring but spontaneous, unsupervised games, a cross between sport, gang fight and shouting contest. Most school yards and fields in the country are, each morning, still taken over by our allegedly Gameboy-devoted generation kicking tennis balls at each other's heads. After school, though, they're a bit stuck. I used to play on the street a fair bit. It probably wasn't safe then and certainly isn't now, with even the quietest lane taken over by rat-runners. I used to break into waste ground too and it's hard to see any waste ground left any more. Playing fields are the only option left. And with councils and schools merrily selling them all off to balance their budgets and feed the housing boom, that's not really much of an option either. Near York's 1900's baths there's a scout hut. There used to be a playing field behind it. Now there's yet another housing estate. Called, in what must be a deliberate wind-up, 'Greenfields.' 'Greenfields' where there used to be a green field. Ha bloody ha.

Children rarely walk to school any more. Their parents, either paranoid about paedophiles or having enrolled them to a school on the other side of town because it has fractionally better grades, all drive them. They can't swim. They can't play football. And now the moral panic has decreed they can't engage in their only other pleasures - dicking about on the Nintendo, stuffing chips in their face and growing monumentally obese. It isn't much of a life.

There Is No Title

I was going to start this by apologising for not posting any entries for a week or so. Then I realised the comment would be addressed to my regular readers. And, of course, there aren't any. The only people who ever glance at this journal are those idly hitting the 'Next Blog' button, and they will only be scanning it to decide that theirs is much superior. Which, judging by my own research, it will be. The girl writing from Prince Edward Island, Canada, lost a lot of points by using a yellow font on a pink background, while this has a much classier template. But then she could offer in-depth reports on the state of the discos on Prince Edward Island, Canada. All I can manage is snide comments about stories I've read in The Guardian.

Or in this case, nothing. If I'd been a bit more organised I could have done a piece on Easter weekend. There would have been a hi-larious stint on the two dominant themes of Easter - chocolate and crucifixions - and how they might be combined. A little bit about staying the weekend with my grandad, who is not going quite as strong at 87 as we'd like him to be but still getting around quite well without a stick. And something on the dreadfulness of Luton, the town where he lives, and how he used to travel the world seeing beautiful sights and always had Luton waiting for him at the end of it all. But Easter is, as they say, so last week now. And I've nothing else to offer. So this has to be another blog entry about writing, or failing to write, a blog entry.

OK, I promise: In a day or so's time I'll try to get round to slagging off the Queen like any normal Englishman.

Arrivederci Silvio

It's times like this that I knew Latin. Silvio Berlusconi, who turned virtually all Italian media into his private messengers, who wound webs of scandal around himself so thick that they've even trapped Tessa Jowell, who undermined Italy's crusading anti-Mafia magistrates because they went after his friends, who allied himself with neo-fascists to keep himself in power, who basically built a fiefdom in the style of a Renaissance prince with patronage even thrown in (Paulo Maldini v Raphael , the Sistine Chapel roof v the 1994 European Cup winners - it's a close call)... Yes, that Silvio Berlusconi is out on his arse. By the slenderest of margins. And he's claiming dirty tricks have been perpetrated. It's like the 2000 US elections but with the good guys winning. It's also incredibly funny.

So I wish I knew Latin because there has to be some pithy phrase which sums up. All I can think of is et tu Brutus which means something else, though may be a sentence heard amongst the Italian right in the bitter coming weeks. I'll just have to content myself with saying 'he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.' And laughing a great deal.

The Dying Swan

I know, I should have written about the dead swan earlier. By now it's probably been buried with full military honours and the unfortunate Scots close to where it crashed to earth let out of quarantine. But my own medical problems (epilepsy and idleness) have hindered me. Better late than never then: Bird Flu Is In Britain (da da daaaah!)

Perhaps I should be frightened. The next time a duck even looks at me I should rush out and buy the masks and pills and respirators being sold by the usual snake oil merchants. Several things have stopped me, however. One is that like Prof Nof, who I sneered at last week, the medical panic reports have a heavy reliance on 'might' and 'if'. At the moment avian flu can be contracted by avians themselves and those in direct contact with their innards. Ah but if, we are told constantly. If the germ mutates it might be spread by any contact with birds, it might fly from human to human, it might make the Spanish Flu look like hayfever!!! 'If' is an elastic word, however. If the germ carries on mutating further it might grow a little hat and booties and look really cute under a microscope. If the Queen grows gonads, to adapt the old phrase, she'll become a King.

Another thing stopping my absolute terror is a refrain running through my head: 'Sars, Sars, Sars.' Because three years ago we were told we'd be lucky to even make it this far. And we were lucky to even get to the Sars scare, really, given that we should have been slain by the anthrax revival a few years before that. Bird flu ought to just be another horseman of the apocalypse, dimly registered as we dodge between the tidal waves and the terrorist dirty bombs. Sars, admittedly, was contained rather than fizzling out. The alertness which various governments showed was impressive; prevention is always better than cure. But the number of lives saved by press hysteria is the same as the number lost to Sars thus far in Britain. None.

Another mortality count: How many people, between the discovery of avian flu and its arrival in Britain, have died from maleria, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia and TB? How many more until the first life in Britain is taken by the flu, if any are? Those diseases don't get the hysterical headlines, though, and not simply because they've been killing for centuries. You can be almost certain of avoiding them by being relatively wealthy inside a relatively country. Not AIDS originally, and it caused an almighty panic when it first emerged. But since drugs were found to keep sufferers alive it's dropped off the headlines; and activists and aid organisations have to constantly remind us that it is actually eating up a whole continent. Many diseases are lifestyle ones in a way. People catch them by living in terrible conditions or doing terrible jobs, they die from them through a lack of food and medical treatment. They can be negated by wealth. Some new super-germ, though, which skips across class and national boundaries, which can get you whoever you are... that's always been one of the great terrors of the rich. It's us relatively rich who the journalists write for, after all. The ones with the income to respond to the adverts which keep the papers going. And fear, even more than sex, shifts copy.

I might be wrong about the bird flu menace. Maybe it will indeed sweep the world. One day one of the few survivors could read my scepticism and laugh sardonically. That at least will prove the society that we know really has been overthrown: someone reading this damn blog.

Thin Ice

Jesus, apparently, was walking on ice rather than water when he took his famous stroll across the Sea of Galilee. Or so says Professor Doron Nof at least. The Middle East was seemingly plagued by cold spells during Biblical times. And the Sea has salty springs which can stop water circulating at low temperatures and create a localised patch of ice. "A person... walking on it may appear to an observor... some distance away to be 'walking on water'" says Prof Nof, which "might have provided an origin to the story."

Note the heavy use of 'may' and 'might' in Nof's language. He doesn't have a clue really, just as he didn't when he said the Red Sea was parted by strong winds rather than Moses. I thought of this when reading another aquatic story in the Guardian today. The remains of a creature called the Tiktaalik has been found in Canada. A rather unpleasant looking predator, fortunately extinct for quite some time, it had gills and fins but also bones similiar to early creatures with limbs. Excited scientists are saying the Tiktaalik is a missing link and proves all land life evolved from sea-dwelling animals.

Now, OK. But I thought this was already, as the Americans say, a done deal. Text book after text books state categorically that life started in the ocean and eventually struggled onto the beach. And we accepted this assuming that the people saying it actually knew. But they didn't, apparently, until now. They were winging it. Or were, to use a phrase from what is supposed to be a fundementally opposed profession to theirs, making a leap of faith.

My point is that maybe scientists should test the validity of their own dogmas a little more carefully before attacking other people's. Search for incontrovertable facts, build empirical ideas on them... It's a little dull sometimes and won't get them in the papers so often but is supposed to be what they do. If they just want to go on flights of fancy or wind people up then I suppose that's fine. But they shouldn't call themselves scientists or complain about receiving nasty emails (Prof Nof's getting about one a minute) if they do.

Doctor Smith's Letter

Most of my favourite bands are ignored by almost everyone else, and in some cases I can convincingly argue that almost everyone else is wrong. There's no reason at all, for example, why Ballboy and Half Man Half Biscuit haven't ruled the charts in recent years, given that they write catchier pop tunes with better lyrics than most 'mainstream' acts. Or why the more sombre students have flocked to the superficial whinings of Coldplay rather than the intense and intelligent Low. But with certain groups I can build no rational case at all. I try to shield non-believers from them rather than hoping to make converts, unable to explain my devotion. These tend to be the bands I like most of all and the supreme example is The Fall.

The Fall are relentlessly innovative artists. Their lead singer and autocratic leader Mark E Smith hasn't run out of ideas after nearly 30 years. But there tends to be an artetypal Fall song, 5 or 6 examples of which crop up on every album. Guitars, or less commonly keyboards, repeat a catchy riff. The bass and drums thud through a fast, ominous rhythm. And Smith yelps out lyrics in his inimicable voice, sometimes shouting, sometimes growling, sometimes making eternally unsucessful attempts to sing in tune. There's been a lot of variations on this model. Sometimes conventional verses and choruses are included, sometimes these fripperies are discarded. The structure of Dr Bucks' Letter is so loose that it barely resembles a song at all. On City Dweller Smith has to 'sing' over an overlapping medley of conversations. The drum line for Ladybird Green Grass is so intricate that it becomes a secondary tune. That's the basic template, though. And I honestly can't explain why it's so good, why those 5 or 6 songs tend to be the best ones on each album.

The standard defence for The Fall is to cite their scaborous, satirical wit. Listen carefully to the lyrics, though, and this argument starts wobbling at the knees. Any trenchant observations tend to be thrown in at random, unconnected with the rest of the song. "The Dutch East of India Company and the United States of Anything they can fool" Smith remarks in what was supposed to be a guest vocal for an Inspiral Carpets love song, I Want You. Or else they're so opaque ("Designer tramp goes grrrr") that they could, in fact, mean nothing. And most of the time what we actually get is, most likely, gibberish. The phrase "cavalry or Calvary" pops up throughout Blindness with no justification at all. Or take Chicago Now, where Smith sounds like the park drunk he increasingly resembles: "Do you... work hard? You don't... Do you... You don't... Chicago Now!"

The last Fall gig I went to was revealing. More evident even than Smith's contempt for the venue, a tiny York nightclub, was the diversity of the audience (who he also seemed to dislike). There were balding middle-agers who had dug their old punk t-shirts out of the attic for the occasion. There were fresh-faced students looking around nervously. And there were in-betweeners like me and my friend, hooked on the group since The Frenz Experiment and Extricate in the late 80's. And hooked is the word. The Fall will only ever appeal to a tiny minority; but if they ever get inside your blood, you'll never get them out. We will endure Smith's strops, his faulty quality control (at least a quarter of each album is unlistenable) and his habit of sacking all his fellow band-members. All to get some more of those songs which should sound awful and don't. The Fall are ultimate proof that music is the most irrational of all the arts, incapable of being reduced to its component parts and analysed. They are an addiction, pure and simple, and I hope that it never ends.

Entirely Bad Poetry Part Two

The next installment of my 'Office Poems Epic Series'. Fortunately there is only one more which I can even bear to type up.

Fag Break

I stand in the cool freshness
Inhaling my stick of death.
Pyramids of red tiles
Dignified by their dotage
Overlap and jostle
Across the cityscape
On the edge of vision
An old monument to God
Flying rats perch on brick stacks
Daytime bats whistle forth and back
Smoke dribbles into clouds
From my mobile chimney
Peace is with the world.

What exactly were they thinking
When they bolted this terrace
To the top floor of our office?
A playground for executives?
Dragging hampers and business plans
To share sandwiches with ants?
Surprisingly, never happened.
Instead, a haven for us addicts.
We slip out wordlessly
Protected by the silent pact
To add to the heap of orange
Crumpled little relics.
Escaping, just for five minutes
The bright vigilance of monitors.

Erratic heart, hard arteries
High blood pressure, bronchitis
Emphysema, impotence
(Though I think that one's a joke)
Peptic ulcers, which sound lively
And the C word wherever you choose
Throat, lungs, lip or mouth.
Those the terms on offer.
I'll take them every time.

Just Buy The Damn Flowers

Mothering Sunday today, at least in Britain, which like most celebrations has filled me full of rage. More specifically, those whining about it have. You know the arguments, used each year to justify being too mean to fork out ten quid for a bunch of flowers. "It's an artificial holiday." As opposed to other festivals, I suppose, which are organic creations and natural products of our DNA. And of course: "It was just invented by the card manufacturers."

It's remarkable the level of power often credited to card manufacturers. To some they play the same role others give to Zionist conspirators or liberal media barons or, in David Icke's case, giant extra-terrestrial lizards. A shadowy cabal who can bring down presidents and kings. This despite their lack of all the standard mechanisms of power. There are, to my knowledge, no ancient clubs for gentleman card manufacturers nestled within London's Square Mile, no lobbyists for their firms striding through the corridors of the White House. Yet they apparently control our thoughts and deeds and, most importantly, spending habits.

Actually Mother's Day began long before Hallmark and the others fixed their iron grip on the world. An old Greek festival was turned by the Romans into a day honouring Cybele, Mother of the Gods, which was held on the Ides of March. The Christians appropriated this, just as they transformed Saturnalia into Christmas, fixing it to the extensive Lent rituals. By the 1600's in England Mother's Day was the one time of the year when young domestic servants were allowed home to visit their parents. They customarily brought gifts. But it would have been a holiday for the whole family, divided the rest of the year by the power of economics.

One might argue that this has little relevance for modern Britain. (Though any rich families with Sudanese or Filipino maids locked in the attic might consider letting them out for the weekend). Neither does Guy Fawkes Night, however, and there seems to be far less complaints about that. If we can celebrate the disembowling of a seventeenth century terrorist, surely we can commemorate what was a tiny oasis of compassion in a generally awful society. Oh, and I gather that it really, really hurts our mothers to squeeze us out of their wombs. That deserves a few flowers at least.

Some Stereotypes

Some strong contenders for the most logic-defying news stories lately. One comes from America. A certain Curtis Gorkey, clearly one to uphold national stereotypes, is suing himself. As an employee of the City of Lodi, Gorkey smashed a civic lorry into his own pickup. As a private citizen, he then tried suing the city for damages to the truck. The lawyers laughed the case out before it even got as far as court. I think this a shame; there aren't enough old-fashioned farces around these days. I would have liked to hear about Gorkey rushing between plaintiff and defendent benches, perhaps adopting a different hat and voice for each role.

The winner, though, is supplied by the French. They are on the streets again, this time not to demand the EC give them even more subsidies but to protest about a new employment law. This will make it far easier for employers to sack anyone under 26 within the first two years of their job. The government have introduced it on the basis that it will cut the staggeringly high youth employment levels.

You need to be a special kind of politician to follow this logic. The idea, I suppose, is to make young people more attractive to prospective employers. But aren't they so alluring because quite a lot of them will get sacked very quickly and become unemployed again? Never mind, some more might get hired, then sacked - and so it goes on. The RSPCA might as well praise abertoirs for housing large numbers of animals. They don't house them for long, admittedly, but there's always a fresh batch coming along and that's what will show on the statistics.

I said you need to be a special kind of politician. 'Special' because this is the kind running every country in the industrialised world nowadays.