The Private Psychedelic Reel

...don’t look at the sun if you have an Ilfracombe. Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room. Bonedigger, bonedigger, buried underneath; born with ‘Portsmouth Football Club’ engraved on his teeth. Scab and matter custard, topped with cockroach legs. I can tell you a funny story about poached eggs. Dungeness crab and weasel a la Bristol Temple Meads; that’s the kind of breakfast a man such as me needs. If man is five, if man is five, the devil is six; Paul, Ed, Will and Ginger are picking up sticks. The cornet player’s cornet player, banging on the door. Plato ate a potato shaped like a Henry Moore. Sign says woo!
stay away fools,
off of my land!
Turn and fully return knob, hold child on stand...

Frank Key

We've been busy. Having already made this week what in fashionable football parlance is referred to as a 'marquee signing' in the shape of The Yard, The Dabbler is quickly establishing itself as the Manchester City of the blogscape.

The legendary Frank Key is the latest big name recruit of the transfer window - he will be writing a weekly column called 'Key's Cupboard', including brand new Dabbler-only content.

But for a kick-off, you can sample his unique genius in the infamous cautionary tale "Impugned by a Peasant".

Longleat

Over at The Dabbler (beta) I post on a terrifying 16th century family portrait, which I saw at Longleat House.

Have you been to Longleat? You get to drive around amidst lions and tigers and wolves and, most thrillingly, deer. Not monkeys at the moment, alas, they all have herpes, naughty things.

We took Brit Jnr a few weeks ago. What a waste of time; tots can’t see anything. At one point you can wind your windows down and feed the deer repellent pellets. One monster was literally poking its enormous head right onto Brit Jnr’s shoulder, but she only had eyes for a plastic cup. It crinkled. The lions, tigers and giraffes were quite lost on her but she got very excited about some chickens. More on her scale I suppose. Plus, she’s got no frame of reference by which lions should be more interesting than say, Yorkshire terriers. It’s a good day out though, if your kids are a bit older than 11 months.

The Dabbler

Those of you who enjoy Think of England and other associated sites in this corner of the blogosphere will be very excited to learn of the imminent launch of The Dabbler.

The Dabbler - http://www.thedabbler.co.uk/ – is a new multi-contributor culture blog. Your pals Gaw, Worm, Nige, The Yard and I will be amongst those multiple contributors, along with numerous internet visionaries, luminaries, lunatics and special guests.

Over the coming weeks it will be launched properly in a swanky magazine format, probably using Blogger’s trendier cousin Wordpress.

But for now, you lucky Think of England readers can check it out in a nascent Blogger incarnation, including the very first post in which I select my 6 Clicks for the Endless Voyage (a feature). Subscribe, add it to your favourites, and remember you were there at the beginning; in a few months The Dabbler will be bigger than Dawkins.

Palms and needles

Outside my office is a palm tree, and next to it is a wintry conifer. This seems a bit of a jarring, climate-messing juxtaposition. Is it unusual? I know little of such matters.

Birthing Partner reunion

A flurry of birthday parties these weeks as the bumps of the antenatal class reach the grand old age of One. The mums have seen each other a great deal in the last year and a bit; for the Birthing Partners this is a reunion of changed, chastened men. The beards, interestingly, are mostly gone. The consensus amongst us is that the ‘classes’ might just as well have been coffee mornings for pregnant women, since the sole but very worthwhile thing to come out of them is the mum’s network.

On Saturday we were in the garden of the cheeky church loudmouth for Evie’s birthday. There are a lot of Evies about, it was the hot name of 2009. The babies scramble on the lawn for our inspection. Lee and I feel a natural affinity as his Ben and my Brit Jnr (the two youngest, funnily enough) are the only tots to have worked out how to walk. The rest of these Dads don’t know what’s about to hit them. We talk about destruction and sleep and vuvuzelas.

Lee’s wife trundles over. We blench. Somebody says “Oh, wow.” She is enormous. “Yes,” says Lee. “We’ve got another one coming. Already. Due in October. ”
“October?” says the church loudmouth. “Wow….”
“Gosh,” I say.
“It was a bit of a surprise,” says Lee.
“Wow,” says somebody, again.
“Yes,” says Lee.

My biggest break

When, much later in my career, fawning interviewers ask me the inevitable question: “So, Brit, what would you say was your biggest break?” I shall reply “Sixteen.”

It two reds and two blacks. Nobody was more shocked than me, it was a full-size table and for the first red I had to use the absurd long wobbly rest. This gargantuan score was easily sufficient to win an intra-company snooker biggest break competition yesterday, by a margin of twelve. My prize: a 2010 Wacky Races calendar, good for five months.

Things you can buy at Chief Trading Post, part 6

A No Smoking Gorilla.

A Sailor (Chef?) Teddy Bear Rocking-Chair (one Sailor/Chef Teddy Bear Arm missing), a Rocking-Aeroplane.

An Obscene CD-Rack (carved).

Local Hero

Watched Local Hero the other night, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid. If I had a top ten of films, which thank God I don't, Local Hero would now be in it. I could happily have watched it again straight away, but it was really late - like, 10pm or something crazy like that.

Much of the rest of my top ten, if it existed - which it most certainly doesn't - would consist of the movies of Wes Anderson. He must surely owe a debt to Local Hero in terms of tone. "We have an injured rabbit also" could easily be a line from Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums.

The three-legged dog of Westminster

What is there to protest about these days? This is an interesting piece on the 'Democracy Village’ protesters in Parliament Square. Tasty titbits include the description of some protesters protesting against other protesters within their own protest for being Christian; and the fact that uber-protester and London landmark nut Brian Haw views the Village as yet another dastardly plot by the State (the sole, overriding and thus far remarkably unsuccessful purpose of the British state being, of course, to prevent Brian Haw from protesting).

But for me the most striking thing about Tanya Gold’s article was the line “A three legged dog lies on the grass.” Unexpected and jarring, it looks like it’s been put in the wrong place:

There are 20 tents, some homemade signs and a sailing boat near a sound system which the inhabitants use to make speeches and read poems. It is not, as the mayor and other critics have claimed, filthy, but it does have a chaotic, never-to-be-seen-again curiosity: a campsite surrounded by the Treasury, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. A three legged dog lies on the grass.

Why is this three-legged dog suddenly brought to our attention? Who is its owner? Is it part of the protest or merely an innocent observer? Or is it a metaphor for something? How significant is the missing leg? Did the State remove it? Does the dog represent the protestors, weakened but defiant? Does each of the three remaining legs correspond with one element of the Treasury/ Palace of Westminster/Westminster Abbey triumvirate? What breed is it, what colour? Above all, is its tongue lolling out so that it looks like it has a big silly doggy grin on its face?

Burka

Philip Hollobone’s arguments for a France-style burka ban make little sense – “it’s part of British culture to see people’s faces and say ‘Good morning’”? Oh really? Has he been to any British cities lately? Anyway, by that logic we’d have to ban low hats and high scarves in bad weather. But France generally gets it wrong. From the British perspective the only thing that matters is whether all the women who wear burkas are being forced to wear them against their will. If some but not all are being forced, then the possible ban available would be on the forcing of burka-wearing. And by all means, feminist or moderate pressure groups can feel free to encourage Muslim women not to wear it. But if at least some women are choosing to wear the burka, then that’s the end of the ban idea.

The thing was neatly summed up by a correspondent to a BBC Radio 2 programme yesterday morning. “When I’ve been to Arab countries,” she wrote, “I have had to cover my head and body. I strongly feel that when they come to this country they should obey our rules.” Her error, and the nub of it being, of course, that we don’t have rules like that.

My middle name is Hussein

Flicking idly around the sports channels, I was amused to note that the Chicago Cubs baseball team includes a player called Starlin Castro. This, surely, must be one of the most UnAmerican names ever?

For the Corsa Lady

Last night a queue at some traffic lights was just long enough to block the clear left branch down which I wished to scoot. The Vauxhall Corsa in front noticed this and obligingly inched, squeezed and squoze forward so that I could scrinch, scrunch and scronch past and away. As I passed, the Corsa Lady gave me a big smiley wave, which I returned. Ah me, it was a warm human moment.

I hate the way that driving brings out the worst of us – mostly, I suspect, because of fear. Saintly and rare indeed is the person who is as good-natured inside her car as she is outside of it. Amen.

Terrible blow for warmists

...Prince Charles is on board. And thus the zeitgeist disappears over the horizon.

Paywall

On the subject of the Times paywall, I’ve been asking myself: why do I buy newspapers? In fact now I only regularly buy the Sunday Times, which costs £2 a week, the same as the paywall that I’m still unwilling to breach. So why do I buy the Sunday Times for £2 a week?

1. telly guide
2. cryptic crossword
3. a general Sunday ritual
4. columnists
5. film, book and music reviews

For those reasons in that order. I’ll read the sport and some of the news, but it will be stuff I already know from the TV and internet, mainly the BBC. I don’t care about most of the ST lifestyle supplements. I’ll leaf through the mag.

The Times paywall can only offer me 4 and 5, in a different format. But The Guardian is just as good for reviews, if not better, so 5 is irrelevant. That leaves the columnists. The Times probably does have the best roster of hacks, but are they worth £2 a week compared to free papers and blogs?

Possibly, but the other side to this, strangely, is that if I did pay £2 a week I would feel obliged to read them regularly in order to get my money’s worth, and I don’t want to feel tied.

The Times Online needs to tempt me with something new that only it can offer. The web offers interactivity, so perhaps it needs to make its columnists work much harder. Get them all to interact with readers in the way that Peter Hitchens does - in the way that, um, bloggers do for free.

Chief Trading Post: Bronze tart update

In an earlier post I erroneously stated that the price of the full size tart in bronze, reclining was "just under £1,900". Not sure where I got that from -low-res image and faulty memory - as I was miles out.

Having been back to Chief Trading Post, I can confirm that the price is in fact an eye-watering (and oddly specific) £12,312.86.



Chief Trading Post also claims, rather dubiously in my opinion, that the bronze is a "Lady Coffee Table, Lyling (sic) Sexy". I don't doubt the Lyling Sexy bit, but it's far from clear where you'd balance your coffee.

While we were there I purchased a tropical fishy mobile/windchime thing (£2) for Brit Jnr's room. I asked the assistant how often people bought the large, sexy bronzes. "Not that often," she admitted. "It's always a bit of a surprise when someone wants one, to be honest."