On Thin Ice

The latest instalment of On Thin Ice – the programme in which Ben Fogle, James Cracknell and some Other Posh Bloke, armed with only plucky British amateurism and stiff upper lippery, attempt to walk to the South Pole less slowly than some efficient Norwegians – ended on an amusing note last night.

At the halfway point, Cracknell’s body is wrecked. He has rotten, infected feet, asthma, and pneumonia in his left lung. He hacks disgustingly and flops about like a drunk. A medic at the checkpoint examines him in dismay. This prompts Fogle to come out and say: “It’s not good. At the moment I would rate James’s chance of carrying on the race tomorrow as….. fifty/fifty.”

Fifty fifty! Tis a mere flesh wound!

“Why on earth are they doing this?” asked Mrs Brit.

She was being rhetorical but I answered anyway: “The human condition, emptiness, comradeship. Because they’re public schoolboys. You know how it is: men are different. Nothing we do makes practical sense. Why do we get so worked up about playing cricket against Australians?”

Also self-loathing, self-love, meaningless patriotism and a longing for the days of the Gentleman Explorer. Only the idle upper classes have ever had the time and money to waste on becoming this kind of hero; you can’t do it for a living.

Except, strangely, that this is now Ben Fogle’s living. He and Cracknell have forged careers out of pretending to be Gentleman Explorers. The danger is real but not real: they have medics at the halfway stage and all the territory is charted. The pain is self-inflicted but serves no higher purpose other than entertainment. This leaves the viewer in the curious position of being able to watch somebody going through terrible physical suffering without being obliged to feel the least bit of sympathy.

Slumdog, Bruno

We watched Slumdog Millionaire last night. Yes, I thought you’d appreciate a really up-to-the-minute film review. Next week I’ll be looking at Herbie Goes Bananas and that one where the moon gets a space capsule in the eye.

Anyway, Slumdog Millionaire is rubbish, a mess. The mix of nasty ‘realism’ (child being blinded, prison torture, gangster violence), broad comedy, funky music, cartoonish characters (the evil mob boss is particularly silly) and kiddie movie wish-fulfilment fantasy doesn’t work on any level. Presumably the Oscars were given for the opening shots of the Indian slums, which are brilliantly done, but if it all had been set in northern England the movie would have been written off an inferior Brassed Off or Full Monty.

We also made a rare trip to the cinema and ended up watching Bruno. I hope Brit Jnr couldn’t hear any of it from inside the womb, as the film is absolutely filthy. It’s also pointless, tasteless, grubby, mean-spirited and unremittingly hilarious. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at a film since Zoolander. Oh dear, humanity is so screwed.

Mr Noseybonk

Mr Noseybonk - a poem for children

Mr Noseybonk lives 'neath the stairs,
Mr Noseybonk never says his prayers,
Naughty Mr Noseybonk,
Noseybonk Man.

Mr Noseybonk knows where to find you,
Mr Noseybonk, is he behind you?
Wicked Mr Noseybonk,
Noseybonk Man.

Mr Noseybonk never goes to sleep,
Mr Noseybonk, upstairs he creeps,
Can he see you, Noseybonk?
Noseybonk can.

------

See also:

Mr Noseybonk Returns

Jiggery pokery

Picked up a fantastic CD the other day. The Duckworth Lewis Method is a cricket concept album (by, strangely enough, a couple of Irishmen including Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy). Well, how long have we been waiting for one of those?

Anyway, the best song is called Jiggery Pokery, and it's all about Shane Warne's infamous ball to Mike Gatting in the 1993 Ashes, as seen from the perspective of the portly English batsman:




The chorus consists of a terrific bit of Rhyme Jockeyism:

It was jiggery pokery, trickery, jokery. How did he open me up?
Robbery, muggery, Aussie skulduggery, out for a buggering duck!
What a delivery, I might as well have been holding a contra bassoon,
Jiggery pokery, who is this nobody, making me look a buffoon?
Like a blithering old buffoon?

The woman in the window

Peter’s comment about the beast behind the sea-radiator giving Brit Jnr nightmares got me thinking about the things that frighten children.

In fact, it’s quite hard to predict what will traumatise kiddies, isn’t it? Accidential exposure to horror films can leave no impression while seemingly harmless illustrations in Ladybird books might haunt you for years.

I remember finding the opening titles to Miss Marple terribly disturbing. Particularly that woman in the window.

So I made a nursery

Mrs Brit 1, Assorted male imaginary blogfriends 0

A local character

Quite often when I’m strolling contemplatively the lanes hereabouts, I happen upon a particular local character. He is, I would say, about 70 years old and he looks very like the actor David Bradley but even more weather-grizzled.

He has long grey hair and a grey beard. He usually sports a wide cowboy hat, leather chaps and boots, and he sits atop a huge, very old horse. The horse is a magnificent, muscular beast, like a cavalry charger or something. He also has a very old collie dog. The three of them plod about the fields and roads wearing a sort of war-battered dignity.

I’ve been on nodding terms with him for a while but the other day I stopped for a chat. It’s an odd business, chatting to a man on a very big horse; one feels an urge to call him 'sire'. Anyway, we talked about this and that, and his horse and the weather. I asked if he was retired.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Couldn’t go back to my old way of life now. Too hard, too many stresses. I like the peace and quiet now. I mean, I could work if I had to, but I choose not to.”

“So what did you do, exactly?” I asked, expecting farmer at the least, bounty hunter or stuntman at the most, and horsewhisperer at the most likely.

“Oh I was down in Kingswood,” he replied. “I was a leisure centre manager.”

Blegging

Elberry, pleading poverty, has added a Paypal feature to The Lumber Room. Asking to be paid for your bloggery is an interesting idea, and I don't blame Elberry (he has a fine blog) though personally I baulk at it.

Let’s call it ‘blegging’. Gaw suggests that blegging is objectively no different from publishing a novel and expecting to get paid. I can kind of see that but the market is very different. With so many blogs out there I think what Elberry is doing is more like busking. A blog could potentially give you a springboard for publishing, say, a novel (and being spotted busking or playing a free pub gig might conceivably get you a record deal).

You could, I suppose, demand a subscription for reading your posts, but with the newspapers publishing content for free (a disastrous situation which surely can’t continue for long, by the way), you’d have to be bloody good to justify it.

Nobody asked me to start this blog. I’m grateful to my little collection of readers. If anything, I should probably pay you for your time and comments, though, of course, I won’t.

Pain

My back went again on Sunday during five-a-side football. Ten minutes in. It’s a muscle strain which goes a couple of times a year and when it does I know immediately. I went straight off and pressed myself against a wall to wait for the medical miracle that would allow me to play the second half.

At half-time I talked about giving it a few minutes, see how it goes.

“Don’t bother mate,” said Dave, who recently spent eight weeks out with a calf injury. “You’ll wreck it.”

Ian, who was playing his first game for a month after ankle problems, rummaged around in his bag and offered me a choice of Ibruprofen tablets, Ibruprofen gel or Deep Heat. “It’s ok,” I said. “I’ve got all that at home. And diazepam.”

“Yeah, good stuff diazepam,” said Paddy, who is ten years older than most of us and has suffered his own chronic lower back problems for at least the last five. “Couple of those and a few beers, you’ll have a lovely afternoon. Watch the cricket. Just don’t for f**ks sake try to play on.”

They were right, of course. If you’ve played football with any group for any length of time you’ll know that nobody ever really changes their playing style, they just get gradually slower and craftier. Ian is a combative, elbowy dribbler, Dave is a selfish goalhanger and Paddy is a beautiful, calm playmaker. I watched through the glass as they started the second half without me. Even though I only played ten minutes it was enough to drench my kit in sweat and it would all have to be washed as after a proper game. I will be essentially crippled for a couple of days. It doesn’t matter, there are far worse kinds of pain.

Colly! Jimmy! Monty!

Ah yes, now I remember what Ashes cricket feels like: the miserable business of being both unable to watch and unable to take your eyes off it.

Here’s the first Test: one day of hope and then rude disillusionment. One morning of fun. Two and a half days of grinding tedium and black despair. One day of unbearable tension. A moment of ecstatic joy, at a draw.

It’s a sad sporting fact that prolonged tension and pain are the norms, but prolonged joy is impossible (because a comprehensive thrashing quickly becomes ennui). Test cricket takes this truism to its limit in a way that no other sport can. Ashes cricket is the worst because of the weight of a warped history.

I hate the bloody Ashes, and I hate the fact that I have to wait three whole days for the next Test to start.

Nature notes

Having resolved to turn my back on materialism and reconnect with the soil, I have been strolling contemplatively the lanes hereabouts, spotting birds’n’shi’.

I work in a nice place. Here’s a picture I took on my phone:

If you turn right out of my office and follow Lansdown Lane up its steep course, it turns eventually from a reasonable road into a very narrow road, and then from a very narrow road into an undrivable dirt track before finally spending itself in a field. There is a pleasing symbolism about this steady ascent into rusticity (and conversely, the homeward decline into civilisation). The field at the Lane’s peak is stuck to the side of a valley spread with hedgerows and very noisy sheep. The multiplex cinema on the Bristol ring road is only 10 minutes away. Bath’s Roman remains are 15 minutes in the other direction. But here, nothing but greenery and sheep. Ah, England. England, eh?

Anyway, having already wowed Nige with my accelerating expertise in British wildlife – just the other day I spotted and catalogued a veritable menagerie including: a pair of small dark randy butterflies, a hovering kestrelly-kite sort of bird and a small black tweety bird – I have been continuing to record for posterity the local flora and fauna.

Yesterday’s walk yielded successful identifications of:
- a very small brown bird, shrieking intolerably
- a magpie!
- a robin!
- three largish cows
- two white, very flappy butterflies
- a dog

And, most thrillingly, this:





This, I can only assume, must be the famous ‘shitbird’, of which they speak so often on The Wire.

Tragic life stories

WH Smiths now appears to have a policy of hawking sweets at the counter. The assistant points to an array of untempting chocs and tries to force an impulse-buy out of you. What next, pushing fishing magazines door-to-door? Hustling for Panini football sticker trade on street corners? Smiths used to be respectable. Now, like Woolies, it has lost its identity and become a place that sells a bunch of things which, when you want them, you buy somewhere else. It will soon die.

It also has a book section called ‘Tragic Life Stories’. I was dimly aware of the existence of the ‘misery memoir’ genre – I understand that Irish nuns and fakery are heavily involved – but I had no idea it was so crowded. They all have similar cover art so that you won’t mistake them for real books.



It is, as Worm suggests, time for grunge. Come on, lads, we’re taking to the hills. Start all over again. Burn Brown and Balls on a bonfire of tragic life stories. The Malls are over, the cities are all up. It’s finished. Time for the countryside, time for the soil.

Carbolic smoke balls 2

Buying stuff isn’t fun anymore

They’ve built a great big new shopping whatsebob in the middle of Bristol called Cabot Circus. It’s really quite beautiful though empty because everyone is at the Banksy exhibition.

Before Cabot Circus stole its crown the pride of Bristol shopping was a three-level indoor job called The Galleries. In a misguided attempt to fight back The Galleries has recently rebranded itself 'The Mall.' I went into 'The Mall' on Saturday morning and it was a bleak experience. Something called Head has taken over what used to be Zavvi (and before that Virgin Megastore) to sell off all the stock at bargain basement prices.

In Head I had a moment of crisis. I was stacking up the CDs and DVDs in a kind of buying frenzy (£4 for Tom Waits, £3 for Van Morrison) when I had a sudden flashback to my student days. Back then buying a CD was a big deal. I worked through the summer holidays and allowed myself just one weekly luxury: on my day off I would cycle to Barnstaple and buy a CD from Our Price. It would cost between £14 and £16 and I would agonise over the choice, then take the prize home in triumph and excitement. I would absorb every note, study the lyrics and place the case carefully in my small collection. That was only fifteen years ago but it was a different world. No mobile, no Ipod, never used the internet. Grabbing handfuls of CDs in Head stands in the same relation to those Our Price purchases as an All-You-Can-Eat-for-a-Fiver buffet does to fine dining: gluttonous, desperate, cheaply decadent.

In 'The Mall' Woollies has still not been replaced so the prime location sits empty. I don’t know what they’ve done to WH Smiths lately but it’s nasty; in fact, it’s turning into Woollies. The High Street clothing retailers are trying to be as cheap as the supermarkets but also pretend that their stuff is superior. Waterstones is hanging on there somehow but on Amazon you can buy nearly any book for a penny plus postage, which also takes the fun out of bookhunting.

It’s not just recession, it’s fin de siècle. Sous les pavés, la plage. Buying stuff isn’t fun anymore. I think I might try to work out how to do gardening and what have you. Something tells me we all need to reconnect with the soil.

The Bright Lights, the Desolate Shores

Without thinking too much about it at the time, when I wrote the lyrics for Abba's songs the message I wished to convey tallies well with campaigns launched recently by humanist organisations in the UK, US and Australia: “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Thus spake Bjorn from Abba in the Guardian. Suddenly the devastating anti-ecclesiastical implications of Dancing Queen become clear. He also reckons the teaching of agnosticism should be compulsory in schools, in order to guard against the dangers of indoctrination. He’s battling God-bothering headmasters over this:

The headmasters also put it to me that there were plenty of famous free-thinking, prominent figures who had gone to Christian schools. But really this just annihilates their own argument. These people learned to be free thinkers despite, not because of, their Christian schooling.

One of them is particularly topical this year, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin may have gone to a very Christian school but it didn't prevent him from coming up with the "best idea in the world". Nor did it prevent him from abandoning his faith.

I don’t really follow Bjorn’s logic in the first paragraph there, but his vision of a post-religious world is intriguing. A world where everyone feels like Darwin did after he abandoned his faith. What a lark, eh?

Middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques. Reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks. A thin couple consummates an illicit affair in a wintry Norfolk beach hut; they make cold love by the Bright light of a low-energy bulb then read each other Radiohead lyrics. A botox-bloated former lapdancer stabs a fork into her poached free-range egg and hums Does your mother know? The yolk dribbles over her perfectly pink organic smoked salmon. Geoffrey Hill stops worrying and enjoys his life. A defrocked priest hangs a framed print above his Ikea bed; it depicts the London Tube map. Fluorescent tubes buzz in the clinic. A headmaster explains that existence precedes essence. The pupils respect each other’s individuality then sing the new national anthem:

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad are we,
As we wend our way to the sneezing sea,
With our hampers full of thistles and fronds
To plant round the edge of the dab-fish ponds;
Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.

In the shambling shades of the shelving shore,
We will sing us a song of the Long Before,
And light a red fire and warm our paws
For it's chilly, it is, on the Desolate shores,
For those who are Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
For those who are Seldom and Sad.

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad we are,
As we wander along through Lands Afar,
To the sneezing sea, where the sea-weeds be,
And the dab-fish ponds that are waiting for we
Who are, Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.


That’s one of Mervyn Peake’s Rhymes without Reason. It is, I think, slightly better than Matthew Arnold.

Rhymes without reason

Over here Patrick Kurp plays a listy, desert island discy game. “Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.”

His list is quite worthy. I thought about having a go but these things are hard to do unselfconsciously. Strangely, the first one that popped into my head was ‘Rhymes without Reason’ by Mervyn Peake, which is now out of print, I think.

This surprised me, I must go and dig it out of the attic.