Various ornamental animals including pugs and storks; a large bronze mounted warrior, possibly Genghis Khan?
Two lifesize wooden horse skeletons in crates; a classical statue, possibly Atlas (right, supporting Overflow Car Park sign); plant pots; a 20 ft sculpture of elephants supporting other elephants (left); house for a very wide dog.
Mrs B and I went to the cinema last week for the first time since the birth of Brit Jnr (ten months if you can believe such a thing). Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood seemed the least bad option given the timings, and it was watchable though fell between the two stools of gritty realism and comic caper. So it was probably worse than the Costner one and obviously much worse than Errol Flynn (I think someone should do a proper job on Robin Hood, as Boorman did on Arthur; call it Robyn Hode and make it a bit nasty).
Anyway, I was intrigued by Russell Crowe’s approach to Robin Hood’s accent. I wouldn’t compare it directly with Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, because although Dick’s accent was bizarre (Meeeeery Poppunsh), it was more or less consistent throughout the film. Crowe, on other hand, spoke in a perfectly plausible Geoff Boycott-style Yorkshire brogue, but only in some scenes. In others he spoke in perfectly plausible Dublin, Bootle Scouse and RP. In each scene the accent was internally consistent, but you never knew which one might pop up next.
I could detect no particular rationale behind the choice of accent (was it Irish for lighthearted moments, Scouse for speeches, Yorkshire for domestic scenes etc?) but given the care and attention that Ridley Scott put into the costumes and CGI effects I can only assume that there was one, which I missed through inattention.
The World Cup starts today. I hope South Africa will be good hosts, certainly the song about wavin yo’ flag is a goodie. When I am older I will be stronger – unusual that and rather moving. In recent days I have remembered how much I love World Cups. What would my view of the world be without football? It would be like the American view. Would we even have heard of such countries as 'Paraguay', 'Ivory Coast' or 'Italy'? The Brazilian national team is a world treasure. This year the Spanish have the potential to be the most beautiful team ever and all things being equal they’ll win it – though the strength of football is that all things are never equal; no other major sport produces more upsets because there are so many different ways to score and prevent goals.
It’s not essential to my enjoyment that England are present but it’s preferable if they are because no matter how the party turns out it’s always better to have been invited. I will inevitably get my usual surge of patriotism when England come up against a biggie - we’re always best as underdogs and for as long as I can remember England have suffered with always performing just about as well as the opposition – dramatically raising their game against Germany or Argentina and equally dramatically lowering it against minnows. But that’s all part of the tradition.
My favourite one was Mexico 86. I was nine years old and I can still taste that World Cup. All the colours were turned up to max and Mexico might as well have been Mars. On the day of the final I was staying at a friend’s house and we had to beg his dad to let us watch it – he was Royal Naval officer and a dreadful rugby snob who referred to football as ‘soccer’. He poured utter scorn on my nine year old enthusiams and dreams and I’ve still never quite forgiven that type. In those days the players were still Our Boys going off to do their stuff against the Martians. Today familiarity with the world’s best players through the cosmopolitan clubs has removed much of the exoticism; and Our Boys are loathed as overpaid, overhyped brats.
I wonder now though, whether the fact that everyone accepts that they’re overhyped means that they’re now underhyped. As for overpaid, you can’t really blame them for taking what’s thrown at them and at bottom they are still what footballers always were: big boys who want to run and kick and score goals. I think they deserve sympathy: they’re the generation of players for whom retirement will consist of an endless empty existence in a dream home, listlessly potting pool balls in the basement games room while upstairs a fattening WAG plots the most effective way to fleece them at the divorce court. But that’s when you’re older, so to hell with that, just wave yo flag...
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master...that’s all.”
This bit of Lewis Carroll is used a lot in internet bust-ups but often wrongly. Some seem to think of it as an extension of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, which demonstrated that a purely solipsistic language is an incoherent concept. In fact Humpty Dumpty is just a witty gag. A correct application in an argument would be to satirize a sophist who has deliberately equivocated between two different meanings of a word to make a single point, or who has wilfully misled by pushing the definition of a word beyond the commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness, without indicating that he is doing so.
An incorrect application would be the circular argument whereby you assume a particular definition of an ambiguous word and, in the face of disagreement, produce the Humpty Dumpty. An even more incorrect application would be as a prop for the literalist idea that words have a single, universal, timeless definition. This is a category error and is obviously not the case because words change their meaning over time, have ambiguity, shades, double-meanings etc. They are frequently, perhaps usually, inadequate for containing reality. Commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness are all we have. ‘Black’ and ‘white’, for example, are far from black and white when it comes to describing humans.
Poetry, most jokes and word-coinage would also be impossible if words were ‘objective’ in the scientific or Platonic sense, rather than the ‘generally agreed’ sense (thus ‘objective’ is itself an example of the problem). A good counter-argument to the misapplication of Humpty-Dumpty is another bit of Lewis Carroll. Who is the master here?
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
For family logistical reasons I have in recent weeks been sometimes required to cadge a lift to work in the morning with either of two colleagues. One of them listens to Chris Moyles on Radio 1. The other listens to Chris Evans on Radio 2.
I really cannot decide which DJ I like less; but I would like to express in the strongest terms my dissatisfaction with the BBC for installing in the breakfast slots of the nation’s mainstream radio channels the two most annoying people called Chris in the history of broadcasting.
So the supporters of Portillo-sofa-snuggling Diane Abbott (shall we call her Labour's Decent Left?) are capitalising on rival leadership candidate John McDonnell's 'joke' that if given time-travelling powers he would go back and assassinate Thatcher.
So as I was saying to Nige, I've never had a problem doin' the Pony, the Chicken or the Mashed Potato and I can still just about manage the Alligator on a warm day. My Watusi days, alas, are behind me (skiing accident). My Twist is a little jerky, my Jerk a little twisty. I've long struggled with the Fly, the Tango, the Yo-Yo and the Sweet Pea; and I'm afraid the Hand jive, the Slop, the Bop, the Fish and the Popeye have always eluded me.
These are merely the 16 dances mentioned in the original Chris Kenner release of the song Land of a Thousand Dances, later made famous by Wilson Pickett and covered by such distinguished artists as the Walker Brothers, Roy Orbison and Vinnie Jones.
It is a little known fact that the first cut of the song did indeed contain references to exactly 1,000 different and genuine dances, all of which Kenner would perform with vim at his riotous live shows. It was only for reasons of disc space and commercial viability that Kenner was persuaded to edit the recording down to 2 minutes and 12 seconds, from its original fourteen hours.
The dances included the Sprong, the Fop, the Malty Mash (below), the Slug, the Goop, the Ping, the Nads, the Slurper, the Cloot, the Kingsnorth, the Bleg, the Worm, the Pug, the Big Cahuna, the Lop, the Ligger, the Django, the Spango, the Mop, the Lackadaisical, the Breaststroke, the Egg, the Muggsy, the Gaw, the Grippy Leg Leg, the Spinal Collapse, the Nige, the Monkeyhammer, the Toe Jive, the Cornet, the Risky One, the Kevin, the Googly, the Wrong'Un, the Portly Gentleman Insouciantly Entering a Brothel, the Bog, the Tuesday, the Spinach, the Cupcake, the Vincent Van-a Gogh-Gogh, the Judd, the Possible Weasel, the Miserable Wretch, the Serious Misjudgement, the Monty, the Crabalocker Fishwife, the Wobbler, the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Boff, the Grope, the Git, the Waltz, the Anatomy of Melancholy, the Gang of Small Unruly Boys, the Random List, the Yoghurt, the Welshman, the Willard, the End of All Things, the Fag, the Time I Got That Mysterious Item in My Shoe, the Bang!, the Scooch, the Lembit, the Trouser Press and the Rumba, to name but sixty-five or so.
The best shop in the Bristol area, and probably the world, is Chief Trading Post, in Oldland Common. It is, I suppose, a Garden Centre; but Chief Trading Post is a ‘Garden Centre’ in the sense that Salvador Dali is a ‘landscape painter’.
It consists of a series of vast greenhouses, some which contain heaped junk, rejects and broken things; and some of which (and the boundaries are fuzzy) contain many hundreds of items for sale, grouped into categories all of which seem to be ‘Misc’.
There is also a very good café. The food and drink is relatively normal but the seating is not. For example, inside the main building we have The Satanic Table:
And then just outside in the greenhouse is a bewildering range of themed seating, such as the giant clay pot containing circular benches and a table, and guarded by this sort of African warrior…
…or this one, below, which we call the ‘Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer Table’, for the very good reason that next to it is a model of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a big wobbly head. Above the table is a big blue glass ball, a birdy thing and a heater with the sign: “Touch Button Every Twenty Minutes For Continuous Heat.”
You can buy many things at Chief Trading Post. I will illustrate some of these in future postings, but here is a foretaste:
Despite the expert coaching of the Lancastrian dwarf I didn’t much enjoy shooting and I didn’t particularly like myself for the bits I did enjoy. This might have helped harden my lack of sympathy for the libertarian argument for guns-as-toys, but there are other, grimmer reasons too. Anyway, I don’t see why people need to own guns for reasons outside of occupational usefulness and I think the fewer guns there are about the place, the better. There may be a further tightening of our already tight laws, as after Dunblane – gun legislation is, after all, the only possible outlet for our desire to do something practical in the wake of the Cumbria horrorshow – or there may not. Personally I wouldn’t oppose further tightening on the basis that the British Olympic shooting team can’t practice (who cares?) or that blasting shotguns is fun (so is speeding on the motorway, if you’re a certain type of man).
Just over a week before Cumbria I was strolling the bottommost lunchtime lane in aching sunshine when some unseen shootists above, but not nearly far enough above, began blasting away. It was fearfully loud in the valley and annoyingly unrhythmical– what was peaceful became fractious and tense. After each shot I heard disconcerting whirrings and pings in the long grass above the lane. All local animal life buggered off and all enjoyment was ruined. I turned around and headed back, half-expecting to feel the hot sting of a wayward pellet at any moment (strangely, I specifically felt that my right ear would be shot off, can’t explain why).
The shootists were, I suppose, the camouflaged squirrelhunters for whom the Local Character showed such withering contempt. I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to march up to them to put flowers in their shotgun barrels, but I did want to say “Oh, grow up.”
Adjacent to our office is a small business dedicated to producing magazines about France and Australia. Its employees have been in about a year and they are, with a couple of exceptions, a snooty mannerless bunch who park their cars inconsiderately.
One swarthy chap in particular sometimes strolls about the lanes of a lunchtime, so twice or thrice I have passed him as he walks uphill and I down or vice versa. On each occasion I have arranged my face into suitable nods and greeting-grimaces, even preparing an “Afternoon” or a “Lovely out, isn’t it?”. And on each occasion he has completely blanked me, eyes fixed on the ground as if we were passing in Piccadilly Circus rather than a narrow country lane in the middle of nowhere.
I can only think that he’s a Londoner. At any rate he has no grasp at all of the unwritten but clear rule of Fleeting Greeting: you should always acknowledge a passer-by when it would be more absurd not to do so.
It’s not original to point out the parallels between Greenism and millenarian religion. There is a Fall (from a state of harmony with nature to greedy capitalism) and obviously an Armageddon, currently manifesting itself as rising sea levels and melting ice caps. And God knows there are plenty of prophets and high priests and missionaries and even heresies.
Now I have discovered the Green Torah, or specifically, the Green Leviticus, in the form of a tubular toiletside tome called ‘1000 Ways to Save the Earth’. A thousand ways, as you might imagine, is a Big Ask even for finger-wagging Greens and the barrel is well scraped by the late 800s, but it’s a remarkable work nonetheless. There is, it seems, no area of everyday western life - however humble, innocent or trivial – about which one shouldn’t feel guiltier. Did you know, for example, that you ought to encase your Ipod in something made from recycled Columbian truck tyres?
As with all good religious rulebooks, the Green Torah is a logical minefield. One Way, about wrapping your apples individually in old newspaper so they will remain edible all winter, is followed by another urging you not to buy newspapers but to read them at your local library.
The logic and consistency issues seem to largely stem from two fundamental problems in the Green ethos. The first is that the point of these Ways is that they’re effective when scalable - so even though you will make no measurable difference to the planet by doing these things on your own, if everyone followed your shining example then the Earth could indeed be ‘saved’. But most of the Ways can’t be scaled coherently (if everyone did stop buying newspapers there would be no newspapers to read in your local library nor indeed to wrap your apples in). The second problem is that the quartet of Green Goods in consumables - Locally-Sourced; Fair Trade; Organic; Carbon-Friendly – are often mutually exclusive or in direct conflict with each other.
Naturally, none of this logical or practical business should get in the way of a good self-righteous green fingerwag. In terms of tone, my absolute favourite is Way to Save the Earth number 899, Make use of comment cards, which states: “If you still use the supermarket, at least fill in the customer comment cards [sigh]. Use them to urge your store to stock more organic, fair trade and locally-sourced produce.” (My italics and sigh, to assist with the correct enunciation).
You may recall that I greet Tuesday’s inevitable arrival with no great affection. A post-Bank Holiday Tuesday, in dank blustery rain, and in the middle of what Nige would term a ‘workstorm’ ought therefore to biff my spirits something rotten. Oh well at least it’s a short week everyone will say, but in fact it is well known that four day weeks last longer than ordinary five day ones.
However, I have kept my pecker up on this Mega-Tuesday by recalling a terrific expression uttered to me at the weekend by a northern in-law. “She took me outside and bollocked me from arsehole to breakfast time,” he said, in a broad Lancs accent which you should mimic for the full effect.
