Bovine Quiz Time

So there we were, wandering along the riverbank between Westminster Abbey and Tate Britain and we took a little detour into the garden beside The Houses Of Parliament.

I wanted to photograph this:

This compact and bijou jailette is the room where anti-monarchist radicals and revolting peasants such as myself were locked up after Parliament had convicted them of treason.
They would wait in this little cell for the tide to turn so that they could be taken downriver to the Tower of London for a pleasant chat with the executioner (before the days of public hangings at Tyburn and Newgate, which were much more fun)!

So anyhoo … Here we were, innocently photographing a jail, when we were somewhat rudely interrupted by a brightly-garbed figure lurking in the shrubbery.

What the fuck is this supposed to be?
It's apparently a fake cow, dressed in the robes of a member of the House of Lords.
Er …
Has anybody any ideas?
I know we English are meant to be eccentric but this is all quite beyond me.

Shitty Steak House

As I'm kinda busy today, here are a few snapshots from the trip Phil and I made to London yesterday (as if I don't make enough smegging trips to London).

The first two are for Lynn, to keep Blogville's resident royalist from an attack of the pouties.

Here be the Parasite House, guarded as ever by the royal attack pelicans.

And here are the flowerbeds by the Queen Mum's gate. If the weather hadn't been so utterly shite, this would have been a lot prettier.

Right. Bollocks to the parasitical royals; here's the real London.

Phil stopped me halfway up Shaftesbury Avenue and said: "Look!"
And I did look.
And I'm so glad I ate lunch at the Tate instead of here at the Anus Steak House (I had miso-marinaded salmon on a bed of wild rice with a wasabi dip and salad: £4.95. Plus some chilled green tea. Splendid! And not at all redolent of anus).
I'll post some more when I have the time.
Toodle pip!

Intermission

Off to London with The Monkey God to do the touristy thing today.

No-Brainer

Bleah …
Still feeling like crap this morning, though mercifully not as bad as yesterday.
Thank you for your various nursely advices.
Inevitably I took the advice of my delightful and very personal secretary, 外人ガールちゃん, who has mysteriously reappeared after a six-month alien abduction like the vision of an angel bearing a bottle of Talisker.
So whilst I am still feeling like a family of bears is using the inside of my head for a latrine I am somewhat more cheerful.

Tomorrow I shall be taking a day's holiday from Blogville as Phil's coming down to London with me to loiter in museums and galleries and to lurk in drum shops where he can grunt and bottom-sniff with fellow percussionists.

So - in the continued absence of my brain, here are a few more pretty things to look at, taken last Saturday breakfast time.

The lovely Pull's Ferry (if any newbies would like to see some really pretty stuff, hit the "Norwich" link at the bottom of the post and keep on clicking "Older Posts" until you get to the bottom and the series of posts I did for Peahen). It will give you some idea of why I love living where I live.

Augustine Steward House seen through the Erpingham Gate.
Bendy buildings are fun.

Phil drew this building decades ago, back when he used to sell his arty stuff. You'll have to pop over to his blog and yell at him to scan some of his stuff in and post it.
It's part of the cathedral school. You can see their Hogwarts-style school hall behind.

Pink Stuff

I feel like crap.
In the absence of my brain, here are some cherry trees in Norwich yesterday breakfast-time.

In Mourning

No post today.
Humph is dead.
The world is an immeasurably poorer place.
And much less silly than it was yesterday.
Lynn, Peahen and Phil; what the hell are we going to do on Monday evenings now?

Before any foreigners say "Who's Humph", the beeb has a little movie of his life.
Check it out.

Let's Make A Racket - III

Delta Blues …

Quite apart from all my other nonsense, Old Dive has for decades been one half of an extremely occasional duo.
About once every ice age, we'll turn up at a small pub in Norwich and play for what must be the smallest but most fanatical following of any band anywhere.
I've played in front of anything from twenty-five to twenty-five thousand people (more if you count festivals, but they're not all there to see you specifically, so I won't) but I am never happier than I am when the two of us are sitting in a pub, laughing and playing with a few dozen like-minded folk singing and clapping and cheering and hollering along with us.

This is us: Dive and Michael.

And this is our crappy poster. We are The Blind Willies.

As the poster correctly states: we are "cooler than an ice-cream enema", " hotter than a chili condom" and "more than twelve feet tall" … at least we would be if we were to stand one atop the other.

The Blind Willies are named in honour of those saints of the blues, Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Willie Mc.Tell, which gives you a clue as to the direction our music takes.
We started off as a reaction against all the widdly Stevie Ray Vaughn and Gary Moore travesties that set off the last blues boom a few decades ago, with a stated aim to reclaim the myriad forms the music had taken before the Newport Festival, when it all went electric and white men started muscling in and commercialising things (yes, I know we're white, but nobody else wanted the job).

After Newport, the blues was three chords, a plodding rhythm and self indulgent twaddle on an electric guitar.
Before that, it was Three-line Field Holler, it was Delta Blues, it was Gospel, it was Country Blues, it was prison songs and work songs, it was regional variations from all points on the Mississippi from New Orleans up to St.Louis and north-east to Chicago. It was slide guitar, it was piano boogie, it was a thousand different things all melded together into one glorious tradition of black (and occasionally po' white) folk music.

And nobody gets to hear it played live any more.
Unless you sneak in to a Blind Willies gig (actually, a few more people have started playing it over the past decade but you can still count us all on the fingers of one hand).

We've mellowed a bit and allowed other blues-influenced music to leak in around the edges over the decades, so this is the only place where you'll hear delta blues mixed with Dylan, Neil Young, Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart songs (we are the only band I know who play songs off Trout Mask Replica; in fact the only band I know who CAN play songs off that famously unlistenable classic).

Michael has been my main musical collaborator for nigh on thirty years now, through way more bands and sessions than is conducive to sanity.
He's a fellow Marxist, one of the finest delta slide guitar players I know of and he can play any style of blues and jazz piano from the last hundred years well enough to make grown men weep and other keyboard players break their own fingers.
He's also a librarian at the university and is as anal about books as I am.
And - like me - he's also a fan of appalling puns and wordplay. He has his own occasional (and cheese-fixated) band called Gordon Zola and the Rock Four (Americans may not get that one as I believe they mispronounce roquefort as "roke-fort") and amongst his many strange albums (don't try Amazon; he only releases stuff privately and - the ultimate in anti-Capitalist behaviour - gives it away free) are such punnish delights as "Cheeses of Nazareth", "Alice in Sunderland" and the splendid "Carnal Norwich".
You'll gather from the above that the two of us are probably best avoided socially.

Anyhoo …
Here is this week's racket: The Blind Willies play Muddy Waters' "Can't Be Satisfied".

We recorded this in my little studio one afternoon in the early/mid 1990s after we had completed a BBC kids' TV theme tune with Neil Morrissey that never got past the pilot stage (The Wallies; about some cuddly bees who lived in a wood and had stupid adventures, if you must know. It was one of a series of try-outs that eventually led to Bob The Builder).
We had spent the afternoon with the three of us recording multi-tracked, speeded-up vocals for the theme song and were pretty drunk by the time Neil left and we had some tape left, so we filled it with this.

Michael is singing and playing splendid slide guitar.
I'm playing my vintage Martin and trying not to fall off my chair.
I overdubbed my solo while Michael slept on the sofa.

Oh, Crap. Old Misery Is Back.

Lynn has tagged me for a meme.
Luckily for you, it's a short one; one of the old classics that are still floating about out there.
The meme instructions are:

1. Write your own six word memoir;
2. Post it on your blog; include a visual illustration if you'd like;
3. Link to the person that tagged you in the post, and to the original post if possible;
4. Tag at least five more blogs with links;
6. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Now you know me; I love to break chain letters and I never tag, so this is the end of the line for this meme.
And I'm sure "memoir" is the wrong word, but since most memes come from the language-strangling, Bushism-infested Colonies I'll have to endure it.
Hey ho.

Old Dive summed up in six words.
That's never going to happen as I'm so voraciously loquacious; a logorrhœiac of monstrous and tedious pretentiousness. Concision is something that happens to other people.
As I'm such a first class indecisive waverer, I'll have to sum up Old Dive in a shortlist of six episodes of six words each:

- Why does my head always hurt?

- Life is hateful; roll on death.

- If you exist, God, SMITE me!

- I want it all to stop.

- Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy.

- Filling in time, waiting for death.

I suppose the last one would be the one I'd choose at a pinch. That's what I'm doing. Simply spending the rest of my days searching for pleasantly futile things to do until the sudden confused "Oh, shit" as my heart pops.

You can tell I'm enjoying life at the moment, can't you?
Mostly because Old Dive is back to being single again, singing Smiths' songs and wearing black, but also because some fucking kid offered me his seat on the tube last night.

I knew it would have to happen some day, but it was still a shock.
I just glared at him for a few seconds and said,
"Fuck; do I really look that old and infirm?"
He tried to back off and say "No, no. I just thought you might want to sit down."
But the damage was done.

Actually we had a bit of a laugh about it but I now know that I've entered the next awful stage of my life.
It was as horrifying and ego-shattering as - back in my teens - the first time one of the local kids called me "mister" instead of "Dive" and I realised I would have to go out and face the world at some point as a "grown-up".

Now I have to face it as an old bastard.
All I can say is "Look out, world; you're gonna regret this."

Doing My Bit For Entropy

I just love adding disorder to the universe.

Even though entropy increases naturally over time without my help - the irreversible tendency of matter to move from a state of order to one of disorder; I'm talking quantum rather than thermodynamic entropy here of course - it still gives me tremendous satisfaction to be able to help it on its way toward the universe's inevitable end state of total chaos.

Whether or not God counted "A one … a two … a one, two, three, four …" and kick-started the universe into existence, having set the rules for how it would develop - and I find nothing in physics to prove He did not - it's nice to know that (however much tidying up and housework I do) the whole shebang will end up as chaotic as a teenager's bedroom; a universal floordrobe smothered with the detritus of dead stars, stinky clothes, half-eaten takeaway meals and pornography.

What brought this subject up was Mme. Benaut reminding me in yesterday's comments that:
a) I am a voracious learner, and;
b) the more we learn, the more we realise how much more we have yet to learn.

I like to rephrase that little eternal verity as "the more we learn, the more we realise just how ignorant we really are."
This gives us the delightful paradox that by the very act of learning anything we are adding to the sum total of ignorance in the universe.
Woohoo!

I would love to call it Dive's Paradox, but that pesky Stephen Hawking (and also Terry Pratchett) reached the same conclusion independently. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

So. Having learned that little paradox you are now more ignorant than you were when you woke up, and together we've helped fuck up the universe just that little bit more.
Cool or what?

It's Monday; It's A Crap-Fest

As another week of my life starts up like an old truck on a frosty morning and last week slowly submerges in the reeking pismire that is my past with some amusing sucking and bubbling noises I realise that I am suffering from meme withdrawal; nobody's asked me any stupid or inane questions for ages now.

Hey, and indeed ho.
I'd better ask 'em myself.
(I might slip in some oldies if I get stuck for inspiration - inevitable on a Monday - though not the cum-eating one).
Let's get boring, sordid and prurient:

1. We'll start with the weekend just gone. Be honest; how much booze did you drink?

About half a bottle of nice French Chardonnay and several scotches.

2. And what unnecessary lardy treats did you eat that you really shouldn't have?

Oh, crap. A whole tube of prawn cocktail Pringles.

3. Right; enough chit-chat …
Is there a God?

Nope. Don't be so silly.

4. Okey-dokey.
Now bearing in mind that Jesus was highly unlikely to have been a white, surfer-dude-type and that he was almost certainly a Middle-Eastern chap with a beard (and as such would have REAL problems with US immigration authorities were he to come back), what would you imagine God to look like if you got to Heaven?
(You are NOT allowed to have "cheery old white guy with a long grey beard" … that clichéd mutant cross between Colonel Sanders and ZZ Top is just a little silly … Use your imagination, for crying out loud).

I've always liked the image in that Crowded House song: "Hey! Don't look now, but there goes God, with His sexy pants and His sausage dog; and He can't stand Beelzebub, 'cos he looks so good in Black …"
But I'd really like God to look like THIS.

5. Hey, it's Martin Scorsese on the phone! He wants to film a biopic of your life, but a Marty movie's gotta have some gratuitous, non-sporting use of a baseball bat. He offers to have one person from your own personal past life murdered in a spectacular fashion on screen.
Who's it gonna be and why?

Ming The Menstrual, for sixteen years of mental and physical abuse without ever once saying sorry.

6. Woohoo! Your wardrobe is actually a time machine.
That's going to make the day interesting.
You can travel back in time to any period in the past and have sex with any historical character. Who would you chose and why?

Much as I'd love to provoke an apoplectic response from our Christian blogpals by going back and finding Mary before God got to her, I think I'll choose Audrey Hepburn.
Because she's yummy.

7. Hokay, so you're now feeling all glowy and a little mischievous. You decide to hop back in the wardrobe, find another historical character and hit 'em in the face with a custard pie.
Who, and why?

Rather than go for the obvious, I think today I'll choose Robert Oppenheimer, at the test of the first atom bomb, just as he says "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
SPLAT!
Twat!

8. That was fun! Now you're going back to last week to put something right that you shouldn't have done/said/eaten/screwed/whatever.
What's that going to be? Fess up.

I should have stayed in bed on Friday and saved myself a five hour, fifty minute hell-commute to work and an almost as long journey home.
Sheesh!

9. Shit! You've altered the past and now your wardrobe is just a smegging wardrobe again.
You look inside it and find it contains all the worst clothes you've ever bought. Tonight is fancy dress, so which of your sartorial smeg-ups will you be stepping out in?

Holy frijole! I'll choose my old afghan coat, complete with paisley shirt, flared jeans and sandals (yes, I'm old).

10. Dammit! As ever, there's fuck all on TV. If you were given the chance (and the budget) to create your ideal half-hour programme, what would it be?

It's called "I'm A Celebrity, Beat The Crap Out Of Me" and stars every "celebrity" on the planet.
They are brutally beaten and tortured for twenty minutes in front of a live audience, then put to death in amusing ways by cute Japanese girls in bikinis.

11. Somewhat inevitably, you find yourself on the plane Jesus is using to visit America on his comeback tour. The air marshal looks at him and sees a beardy Palestinian and opens fire, crashing the plane and kinda spoiling things for the folks who've been waiting two-thousand years for Jesus' return.
You swim from the wreckage and find yourself washed up on the meme-writers' favourite: the desert island.
A suitcase from the cargo hold is laying there in the sand. You find it contains (nestled amongst an elderly German tourist's underwear and lederhosen) one book, one bottle of duty-free booze and one item of food. What would you like 'em to be?

For the book, I'll have "The Wit And Wisdom of George W. Bush." That should keep me happy to be on a desert island and well away from "civilisation".
The booze would be Talisker malt and the food, whale sashimi, to upset the squeamish.

12. Another meme standby: It's your desert island; you make the rules.
What are the first three laws you pass?

1 - Denim skirts … punishable by instant death.
2 - No religion … punishable once again by an instant proof that there's no afterlife.
3 - Anybody saying "Hey! Doesn't this remind you of "Lost?" gets fed to the polar bears.

13. Hokay, so now you've read the book, eaten the food and you have a hangover from the booze. Wandering around your new island home you come across a bearded Tom Hanks and a naked Brooke Shields (you really should watch better movies).
What happens next?

I eat one and screw the other. Who gets what would depend on my mood at the time.

14. For some unfathomable reason, a young Meg Ryan turns up and the two of you wind up being hurled back to civilisation from the crater of a volcano (I'm serious; you really MUST watch better movies).
Which country would you ideally like to land in?

Japan, please.

15. Right. You're in your favourite country and you've sold Meg Ryan for a thousand dollars (you got sick of all the faked orgasms). How are you going to spend it?

Unwisely. Probably a night of debauchery in a sashimi bar with the entire membership of Morning Musume.

16. On the flight home, you find yourself sitting next to a big guy in a hoody, carrying a scythe.
You offer him your last chocolate Hobnob and DEATH (for it is he) offers you in return the chance to choose the manner of your own demise.
Being a tricksy bugger he won't allow you to die peacefully in bed, so what's it gonna be?

I want a cartoon death; a piano, a safe or an anvil dropped off a tall building onto my head.

17. While DEATH has been arrested by customs for carrying a scythe and is currently undergoing a body cavity search you notice his pale horse standing in the parking lot. Since you've buggered up your time machine wardrobe you steal DEATH's horse as it can take you to anywhere on Earth at any point in time that someone dies. You realise you can postpone someone's death.
Whose life (other than family) will you save and why (and no, Lynn; you are not allowed to save Princess Di)?

I'd dearly love to save Hitler from shooting himself and let the Russians get hold of him instead. That would be such fun to watch.

18. Your brain kicks in and informs you that DEATH is probably not the best anthropomorphic personification to steal a horse from, so you dash back to the parking lot only to find the Reaper looking pretty Grim.
Being an honest sort of person you tell him you saw someone stealing the horse, chased them and rescued it.
In return, he grants you the predictable meme-standby: a superpower (complete with natty cape, mask and red undies).
Which power do you choose?

I think today I'll chose the power to smite any assailant with a full-on, permanent and irreversible clown makeover; wig, nose, make-up, revolving bow-tie, huge trousers and stupid long shoes. They lose the power of speech and can only communicate with bulb-horns.

19. You could use your superpower for good, but where's the fun in that?
What's the first thing you do with it?

I'm heading for the Houses of Parliament to make Prime Minister's Question Time look and sound like it really should. Woohoo (honk-honk).

20. All of this messing about with time and causality is having some alarming effects. You are suddenly zapped into the TV show "I'm A Celebrity, Beat The Crap Out Of Me" and you get to choose the first panel of four "celebrities" to be put to death in amusing ways by cute Japanese girls in bikinis.
Which celebs deserve to die first?

All of 'em!
But I'll go with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Ant and Dec (not being a TV watcher, they're about the only "celebs" I can think of. No doubt you'll come up with a better list).

21. As a result of the twisted mess you've made of the space-time continuum, one extinct species of animal suddenly reappears; tens of thousands of the buggers, all in New York.
Which species would you like to let loose?

Ooh! Ooh! Tyrannosaurus Rex, please! Fuuuun !!!!!

22. You realise this meme's gone on way too long and that you have wasted a whole train journey writing crap on your laptop.
Are you really going to post this utter tosh?

Yup.
And if I'm really desperate I'll start doing the same one every Monday with different answers.

Global Warming My Fat Ass

Okay, so where the fuck is spring? I'm freezing!

This is my car window. This is the middle of April. This is just plain stupid.

Eccentric? The English?

Yikes! It looks like spring is here at last.
As Tennyson observed, "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love."

In Norwich, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of dressing up in bells and clogs and skipping gaily through the streets.
To tell the truth, one should never mock Morris Dancers. A group of hard-drinking men armed with bloody great sticks and swords can look after themselves quite nicely, thank you.
That's why they make them wear bells; so you can hear them coming and get the hell out of their way.
Just as well, considering that traditionally they would chase the local maidens off into the woods and celebrate spring as it should be celebrated; a pleasant combination of flowering and deflowering.

So, let's celebrate the coming of spring the English way:

"Excuse me, madame; we notice you have a young daughter …"

Young men should also be very, very afraid.

Phil pointed this lot out to me:
"Hey, look! They're dressed as Agrajag!"
This, by the way, is what English people do with their spare time.
I'm so glad I don't have any spare time.

"Don't mess with me, sonny; these clogs can crack your shins wide open."

A question for my Colonial bolgpals:
In what weird way does your local community herald the coming of spring?

Hey ho

Sheesh …
Five hours, forty-eight minutes door to door to get in to the office this morning.
Stupid bloody trains.
I would say more but I think I ruptured my swear-gland on the way in.

Let's Make A Racket - II

Hokay; it looks like Thursdays will be the day Old Dive makes an occasional racket.

Just so you know, I will not be posting any professional or studio stuff for copyright reasons; most of the stuff I put up here will be odd and obscure, usually live and usually crappily recorded and posted for no other reason than I feel like it at the time.
Today's racket was recorded in a small blues club on a hand held tape recorder; hence the total lack of quality.

The subject for today will be "Underplaying".
We've done boring rock guitar with widdly bits last week, but this week we're going to get subtle.

Here's some backstory:
Stevie, my bass player for most of our adult lives tragically developed motor neurone disease a decade or so ago and when he could no longer tour or gig regularly, he assembled a loose bunch of around forty of his favourite British musicians to start what became Sunday Blues, an improv night with different sets of musicians most of whom hadn't played together before, raising money for motor neurone research.

The First Rule of Sunday Blues was "check your egos at the door".
It was all about sensitive understatement and playing with feeling, rather than wanking around and showing off.

Steve hand-picked each line-up from the cream of the session circuit and top bluesmen, such as members of Peter Green's (ex. Fleetwood Mac; you must remember "I Need Your Love So Bad"?) band who regularly played, occasionally supplementing the line-ups with folk from international bands when they toured nearby.
Nobody had to prove anything so we could all chill out and play notes from the heart and the soul, rather than from the penis.

The audience were hyper-critical and anyone who got a little overexcited and showed off would get very short shrift.

The Second Rule of Sunday Blues was that nothing would ever be rehearsed; everything should be improvised on the fly. It was not a jam session; the line-ups were carefully selected to spark off one another and even though the audiences were packed with musicians, nobody was ever allowed to "come up and play". If they were good enough they would eventually get put in a line-up but there was one hell of a long waiting list and very few ever got promoted into the "regulars" (being a regular meant that, if you were lucky, you got to play once every four to six weeks).
You'd walk in and set up your gear, meet the other musicians - often for the first time - and Steve would call out a key and a count-in and off we'd go.
I loved every minute of it. At the end of each number we would all nod and grin like the band in the Muppets. It was just a bunch of "musicians' musicians" getting together to relax and have fun.

This recording is from a night sometime in the late nineties.
The line-up is:
Paul Tinkler: Vocals and rhythm guitar;
Stevie: Bass;
Jason Self: Drums;
Old Dive: Lead guitar.
The song is the old Albert Collins standard, "Cold, Cold Feeling".

For Istvanski: I was playing my custom Strat through the Boogie, Paul was playing his G&L tele through a Fender Bassman.
And in case anyone wonders, the thing Paul yells at me across the stage just before the last guitar solo is "Give it some SEX!" He has a wonderful way with musically descriptive terms.

Here's photo of "beardy twat" period Dive taken sometime around that geological era.

Countryside

A complete change of mood for today.
I'll face the K___i situation later in the year. With luck I'll get away with a good hard slap and a tearful tirade (and possibly a kick in the nuts and a sweary rant from little sis), but for now I'll stick it in the "Pending" tray and move on.

Only Lynn is likely to enjoy this post as we are both regular players of the game of Mornington Crescent.
For the rest of you, there has been (since around the time of the Boer War) a radio show called "I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue" in which the Blessèd Humphrey Littleton gives a bunch of comedians some very silly things to do, one of which is the improv game of "Uxbridge English Dictionary".
In this game, contestants are required to come up with new definitions for English words that sound like they should really mean something else, such as:
Carpentry - a way in for ornamental fish.

I listen to this show on the train and write down any examples that make me giggle.
Here are a few, as a bit of light relief after the trauma of the past few days:

Extort: - having left school;
Bordello: - a blasé greeting
Dilate: - to live long
Hundred: - a fear of Germans
Accomplish: - a drunken sidekick
Colonnade: - a fizzy enema
Aromatic: - a handy gadget used by Robin Hood
Descant: - a white collar insect
Counterpane: - someone who works in the post office
Crèche: - a car accident in Kensington
Damnation: - The USA
Boutique: - to heckle wood
Mobster: - an aggressive crustacean
Diarrhoea: - an ugly bum
Frogspawn: - blue movies for the French
Gripes: - what Australians make wine from
Dictator: - an amusingly shaped root vegetable
Fondue: - an affectionate sheep
Extemporary: - permanent;

and some particular favourites:
Shellfish: - a bit like a shelf
Buttercup: - face down
Gurgle: - to steal a ventriloquist's dummy

Though the very best one of all came from Stephen Fry and caused me to almost crap myself laughing, much to the alarmed consternation of my fellow passengers:

Countryside: - to kill Piers Morgan.

Right, Get your thinking caps on and let's have some more.


Ooh! Oooh! A quick addendum:
This was Engrish.com's photo of the day, today.

Talk about brilliant entertainment!

Hand me a club and let's get started.

A Heartless Bastard Writes …

Well, that's put a stop to that nonsense.
I got in this morning to find four more messages on my voicemail, including one drunken, late night sob-fest that went on for bloody ages.
IT have now blocked incoming calls from K___i's and Maz's phones and I'll be working from home for the next couple of days so hopefully they'll lose interest.

It's not that I'm a heartless bastard, it's more that I'm a big old softie and I'm scared shitless that I'd give in to the wheedling and the sobbing and the big-eyed pleading (and the young and still perky body) and get sucked in to The Village Of The Damned, never to emerge again.

I mean, K___i's young, and - underneath it all - she's very pretty, and yes, I look like a ticket out of Morlok Hell for her; but to me last Friday night, looking down into her eyes was like staring into a vast, sucking whirlpool leading down, down into the hideous stygian depths of madness and despair.

So that's it.
There will be no K___i and Dive.
For a start, she's dumber than a box of rocks. The conversations would not exactly be scintillating.
I'm a pretentious twat and a snob deluxe; I'm used to coming home from work, sticking on some Stravinsky, cooking something wonderful with nice fresh organic ingredients and settling down to read Virgil or listen to the Opera Quiz on Radio 3.
I'm NOT used to coming home from work to a trashed house full of screaming, hyperactive idiot children and a woman admittedly more attractive but slightly less intelligent than a blancmange, lounging drunk in the midst of the apocalyptic mess in a fucking shell suit or a Burberry hoodie with a lapful of deep-fried lard and "recovered meat product", chain-smoking and dribbling and screaming at the kids and watching fucking crap soaps and fucking crappier game shows and - God help us - imbecile fucking shit-brained "reality" shows on a stupid, twatty fucking television.

K___i also comes packed with unappealing accessories, like the tribe of inbred in-laws with thousands of vegetable kids ready to run riot in my life.
They say that before considering a relationship with a girl you should consider the worst case scenario and look at her mother and think twenty years ahead.
That's the clincher …
Holy fucking crapola. K___i's mum is younger than me but she looks like a bull walrus that's fallen onto Boots' make-up counter and thrashed about a bit. She has the personal habits of a drunken and particularly vicious sloth and she has more children than brain cells.

I'm forty-nine, for crying out loud. I can't spend the rest of my days living with a woman who can't spell "duh" and hiding from her family.
Sorry, K___I, but that's the way it is.
And let's face it; if you weren't stuck in the Morlok Village yourself, a girl as young and pretty as you certainly wouldn't be chasing after a fat, ugly, middle-aged bloke like me.

Hopefully, this will be the last post on this particularly grisly subject.

I've Never Murdered A Child … Yet …

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lived a happy, carefree, friendly and sociable little creature called Dive.

Happy, carefree Dive went along to his friend's birthday party last Friday (the "Village Of The Damned" one in the previous post), even though he knew that it would be a traumatic and trying affair, avoiding the attentions of the Morloks. He likes his friends that much.

Happy, carefree Dive spent this morning in a happy, carefree (if somewhat tedious) meeting and then went to happy, carefree lunch, secure in the knowledge that he would be safe from the Morloks for a few more months.

Unhappy, fucking sweary Old Dive has just checked his voicemail …

Okay, Maz, I'm not blaming you until I'm certain who did it (though yes, I am glaring angrily at you), but some fucking imbecile bastard in The Village Of The Damned appears to have let slip to your older sister K___i a piece of information that I wanted kept out of Morlok hands; namely, where I work (and you're one of the only people there who knows).
On my office phone I now have three (count 'em) sappy messages from the micro-skirted, sparkly-nailed, peroxide-haired, fake-tanned, sprog-popping, stiletto-heeled, boob-tubed predatory womb on legs known to the world at large as K___i.

Now I am jumping a foot in the air whenever the phone rings and desperately scanning the incoming number for a north-east Norfolk prefix.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to her?
"Hi, K___i. I only danced with you so I'd have something funny to write in my blog?"
or,
"Yes, I'd love to see you again, but before I do, please scrape off the orange fake tan and the caked-on make-up, get your natural hair colour back, buy some decent clothes, get an education and dump your three idiot children at the local orphanage?"

I'm a coward. I'm just going to keep on ignoring her calls and hope she gets the hint.

And Maz, you are in such deep fucking shit, girl.

A Slow Dance With The Morlok

Brace yourselves; it's time to don protective clothing and go for another paddle in the gene puddle.

Yes, it's Sharon's fiftieth birthday party in The Village Of The Damned.
Actually, this time we are just up the coast from that evolutionary dead-end and are sequestered in a rather nice hotel on the verge of the real world, where people walk upright and punctuate their primitive grunts with the occasional intelligible word; all of which comes as a relief until I realise that there is no available kitchen for Rod and me to hide in; I am stuck in a large room with the Morloks.
My only hope is that they won't recognise me as new genetic material for their terrible breeding programme. That hope is dashed as soon as I walk in the door and realise Shazza forgot to tell me it was fancy dress. Dressed as Dive I stick out like a sore thumb … or more accurately like fresh DNA in Morlok territory.

For those that don't know about this inaccessible and inbred little community, just click the "Gene Puddle" link at the bottom of the post and read the lower posts to appreciate my sense of creeping dread as I enter that room.
I home in on Sharon, looking radiant in a gorgeous ball gown and easy to spot as one of the only two recognisably human life forms in the room other than myself.
We do the kissy, huggy, squealy thing and then Rod comes over, for some reason dressed in immaculate navy whites like he never cottoned on to the screaming gayness of Top Gun. Suitably protected by one on either arm I head to the bar to lube up and to anæsthetise my brain against the inevitable.

The musical entertainment for the evening is being provided - inexplicably - by a Meatloaf tribute band, the lead singer of which is fat, hairy, sweaty and actually astonishingly good.

As I turn to face the room things start to get scary.
Over the years I have come to know quite a few of the inbred denizens of The Village and they flock to me now.
You remember I first described these occasions as "Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on"? I cannot possibly improve on that description as they slowly shuffle and lurch toward me with arms outstretched.
First up is lovely little Kimberley. She is dressed as a heavily pregnant nun and it is only when we are greeting one another that I discover the heavily pregnant bit is not part of the costume.
Kim is eighteen and this is her second sprog, which is very, VERY slow going for The Village.
Next to slobber over me is my beloved little friend Claire, who grew up overnight and is already on her second husband and tonight is a heavily pregnant Little Red Riding Hood, a very disturbing image for somebody I've known and loved since she was a little girl.
It doesn't take much glancing around to confirm that the theme for the evening (much as with any evening in this little anthropological nightmare) is the race to have as many babies as you can before you hit twenty and turn into your mother.

Allow me to recap: The girls in The Village are uniformly gorgeous (Kimberley was a successful underwear model at fourteen) and from the ages of twelve to twenty they squirt out as many sprogs as is physically possible in some awful race to breed a bigger tribe than their next door neighbours.
At twenty - like butterflies in reverse - they emerge from their beautiful cocoons as saggy, haggard, embittered caterpillar women. A lot of them suddenly inflate like Americans yet they continue breeding at a prodigious rate; there are very few mothers here with less than six or seven kids haring round the dancefloor and shrieking.

Thousands of years of total isolation (the sea on one side and impenetrable marshes all around) has unfortunately resulted in a genetic apocalypse in The Village, and sat around the edges of the room are the sad results: the wheelchairs of the "vegetable kids".
The worst of these is S___'s youngest. This poor little boy has been in and out of hospital for all of his short life and has had every major organ replaced at least once; every one, that is, except the severely damaged brain that is his genetic inheritance. S___ie himself is the typical Village male; slow and heavy, yet remarkably cheerful for someone with seven kids, two of whom are little more than decorative plants. He used to roadie for me way back when and is a pretty good mechanic. Though his methods are his own … when the engine management computer went blooey on my car one night he simply nodded (slowly) and drove off to Grockle Hell (the tourist resorts down the coast), returning with a nice new part stolen from some poor sap's car. He's done the same with a wheel, when I got a puncture, and most of the band's bus was rebuilt with parts stolen from coach parks.

The tragedy of The Village is that the inbred denizens seem Hell-bent on producing as many children as they can. The room is full of them, screaming and fighting and bashing into tables and the parents sit around like blancmanges, idiot grins plastered across their faces. A frighteningly high proportion of the kids have genetic disorders, which is why the women are always so glad to see me with my fresh DNA.

The stream of Dive-greeters continues for some time and every one has either a new pregnancy or a new sprog to show me. It is truly heartbreaking as I have grown to like a lot of these people rather a lot over the years.
Scariest of all is little Maz. She is so happy to see me and kissy and cuddly and wriggly as any sixteen-year-old should be, yet she is pregnant with her third baby, by three different men in the Village. It is so awful I can barely stand it.

And then the Morloks move in for the kill; those allegedly female abominations belched forth from the gaping, sulphurous stinking maw of Gehenna and greedy to extract my genes from my jeans.

One of them from Maz's tribe, who goes by the name of K___i and who I know is in her twenties but who looks my age, drags me out onto the floor for a slow dance.
Brr … I'm shuddering even now as I recall the horror.
Let me describe her:
K___i is still pretty and was obviously once beautiful, yet the Morlok uniform does dreadful things to a girl.
She is dressed in the height of Morlok style and sophistication; the denim microskirt and strappy high heels worn with hideously long false nails with stupid sparkly scribbles on them (her fancy dress consists for some unfathomable reason of a fluffy boob-tube and matching rabbit ears). Her hair is platinum blonde, straight from the bottle, with an inch of mousy roots on display; she has caked enough make-up onto her fake-tanned orange face to delight a transvestite army, and she has been dipped in a fœtid, reeking "parfum", the stench of which burns my throat and makes my eyes water.
You know my views on the denim microskirt; the most disgusting and loathsome passion-killer in Satan's Spring Collection. Well K___i's is pressed hard against me in such an unerotic, grunting-animal fashion that I feel it would send even Bill Clinton running for the scissors to cut his cock off.

Oh, K___i … Where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

Like most of the Morlok women, K___i is an unmarried multiple-mother and now she's after more. All I can say is thank God for the Meatloaf tribute band. They know very few slow-dance numbers (and actually surprisingly few Meatloaf numbers) and I am rescued by their launching into a monstrously incompetent version of Motörhead's "Ace Of Spades".
K___i immediately starts to perform a bizarre bouncing "dance" that has her spilling out of her boob-tube in every direction at once. I make the universal sign of the drink and run for the bar where I can hide behind Rod and Sharon.

This goes on for some time. Morloks are pretty tenacious beasts and K___i makes several attempts to climb up me during the evening, the reeking result of which saw all of my clothes get flung straight into the washing bin as soon as I got home.

As soon as was socially acceptable (always look for the first family to take their kids home to bed and leave with them) I do the huggy, kissy with Rod and Sharon and head for the door, where one last horror awaits me.

As I cross the lobby I see Maz standing outside in the cold, sucking hard on a cigarette in the hope that the nicotine might damage the inbred cells of her unborn child and cause it to be born normal.
However, the doorway is barred by a gorgeous girl apparently in her late teens, dressed in what - had it been a foot longer - should have been a 1920's flapper dress but was in fact a teeshirt with frills on.
"Hiya Dive! You don't get out without a kiss."
I would gladly comply but for the fact that I recognise her.
"You're one of S___ie's girls, aren't you?"
"Yeah. So?"
"How old are you now? It doesn't seem ten minutes ago that you were toddling round the dancefloor."
"I'm twelve!" She thrusts her hip out defiantly as if twelve is above the age of consent. Which unfortunately in The Village Of The Damned it all too often is.
"Does your dad know you're out here?"
"Yeah."
Oh, well. She's not going to let me past so I lean down to give her a friendly peck on the cheek.
At which point she grabs my head and forces her slobbery tongue into my mouth.
I break free and back off quickly.
"God! You bloody kids grow up way too fast these days." I protest as she giggles and shrieks with mischievous glee.
At which point Maz reaches round from behind me and gives my balls a - mercifully - gentle squeeze, before laughing at me and pouting "You're no fun any more."
Fucking Hell!
This whole village is just one big rut.
I reach the safe cocoon of my car and look back to see the girls still giggling and waving and "flapper girl" lifts up her dress and flashes her knickers at me in farewell.
I just know that the next time I see her she will have joined her sisters in the race to make vegetable babies.

On the news as I drive away is yet another report on the evacuation of hundreds of women and children from a polygamous sect's compound in America, where pædophile allegations have been made against some filthy old perverts.
Come to rural Norfolk and live the dream.

Give me a couple of weeks and I'll be able to laugh and joke about The Village Of The Damned again. But right now I am shaken and somewhat disgusted and no amount of showering and hairwashing seems to be able shift the lingering reek of K___i.

Let's Make A Racket

That's usually the last thing I say on stage before the count-in for the first number.
Or more accurately, I'll grin at the band and say "Right! Let's make a fucking racket! … One … Two … Three … Four …"
I love that moment more than any other. The click of the drumsticks counting in the first number and that last breath before all the lights come up and the racket kicks off. Just a bunch of musicians grinning at one another in anticipation. Wonderful.

So here we go with yet another in my interminable series of occasional blog themes that end up going nowhere: sound files of Old Dive making a racket.

This particular racket was recorded on stage sometime in 2000 with the band that featured Rod (drums) and Sharon (vocals); the folk whose party I'm off to tomorrow night in The Village Of The Damned.
Whenever the singers disappeared for yet another costume change, they would leave the stage to the musicians and we would dick around and have some fun.
This is Rod (drums), Steve (bass), Michael (keyboards) and Old Dive (guitar) fucking up Gary Moore's old tune, "Parisienne Walkway," live on stage.




I've got tons of this crap so I might make it a regular feature.
Better buy some earplugs.

Low Stuff

Let's go to Lowestoft.

Do you remember all of those pretty pictures I posted of the beautiful Norfolk Coast near my village?
Well, it's getting close to tourist season again and it's about time I did my bit in the battle to keep the fuckers from clogging our country lanes with smegging caravans and throwing junk food cartons into the hedgerows.
This is Lowestoft (pronunced by the locals "Low-stuff" and with good reason).

Actually, this is the only pretty building in Lowestoft; the lighthouse I went to photograph when I got distracted by the local beauties in yesterday's post.

This is the reality … Lowestoft is such a shithole that you're not allowed to take colour photos there.

This is Ness Point; the most easterly piece of land in the British Isles.
Spectacularly beautiful it ain't.
You'd think they would make a little park, or even a visitor centre.
Land's End and John o'Groats actually make a bit of an effort to proclaim themselves the top and bottom of the mainland, but this is Lowestoft and they simply can't be arsed.
People come here at Midsummer and Midwinter to watch the sun rise.
Poor bastards.

And this is the beach.
Or at least it looks like this every time an oil tanker vents its tanks, which is quite often.
I like our local offshore wind farms. Some deluded nimbys say that they're ugly; and that birds might fly into them … They are far less of an eyesore than a beach full of crude oil, with its regular crop of tens of thousands of dead seabirds. Twats. Fuck fossil fuel.

So … Tourists. Thinking of coming to the East Anglian Coast this summer?
Fuck off!
Leave us alone.
You are not welcome here, and besides, it's ugly as these photos graphically attest.
Go to Tewkesbury and see Lynn instead.

Ladies Playing With Balls

I'm still pooped and really have absolutely nothing in my brain to blog about.
So …
Let's dig around in my old photo boxes …

Ah!
Here's one that could do with a caption, should anyone feel like providing one.
Oh, that's Lowestoft lighthouse up on the hill at the top left. I'd gone to photograph it but had got somewhat distracted by these old dears.

Note: For the Colonial readers, these rather stern old ladies are bowling.
The thing you call bowling is actually skittles.
This is the real thing as apocryphally practised by Sir Francis Drake as the Spanish Armada approached.

I do so enjoy being a patronising and insulting bastard. It cheers me right up.

Pooped

Whew.
I've been far too busy to blog today.
For those who sent their support, Amanda is as happy as can be today so thank you on her behalf.
As for me, I'm knackered and I'm going to bed.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzz …

Work Experience

Oh me, oh my …
Poor Amanda is currently hiding under her desk, writhing in anguished despair, squealing that she's never been so embarrassed in her life.
Let me enlighten you as to why …

We have a couple of newbies in the office who started on Friday; Caroline and Andy.
When I say "newbies", they are in their forties and I don't think either of them has even seen a computer before.
Friday for Old Dive was like a non-stop interrogation carried out by dumb people armed with a list of the stupidest questions in the world.
What I needed (desperately) was our interactive training DVD to sit them in front of.
Was it anywhere to be found?
Was it buggery!

It turned out that Amanda (herself only a few weeks into her training) had been using it at home in a commendable attempt to learn her job in her own time.
All very splendid except that the thing was still in her laptop drive at her house.
So …
Friday night, she goes home, presses eject, stuffs the DVD into an envelope and puts it in her bag.
This morning she hands it to Caroline who loads it up onto her computer and - with the rest of us sitting around watching, proceeds to entertain us with a hardcore lesbian movie …

Today we learned something new about our Amanda.
As well as the fact that she can turn redder than a beetroot and squeal rather a lot.
She promises to bring the training disc in tomorrow.
And to buy herself a CD writer pen and write on the stupid things.

In the meantime, Mike and Andy are sipping coffee and watching the lesbian movie and Amanda is now sitting at her desk with her head in her hands.

I love my job.

Morloks In Frocks Again

Oh, crap.
Sharon's fifty.
That's crappy for two reasons:
one: it means I'll be fifty later this year; and
two: it means that I've just been invited to her party in …

… The Village Of The Damned.

Those of you who've not been hanging around here for years better read this to help understand my horror.
An evening out in The Village Of The Damned is like Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on … Morloks in frocks.

Centuries of inbreeding and living in a swamp are not qualities I find particularly appealing in a woman, and this place has been cut off from civilisation (or indeed anywhere where fire has been discovered and the wheel developed) since the end of the last ice age.

Okay, so things are gradually progressing … some of them can walk upright and one or two have been seen using rudimentary tools, but this village owns the smallest gene puddle known to anthropology and evolution is as strange a concept to them as it is in America's Bible Belt; though for different reasons.

So … Friday night, I will be driving off the edge of the map into uncharted territory.
This place is not in any atlas and Google Earth just shows it as a fog bank. Unless you know exactly how to get in, you - together with the rest of reality - will simply slip on past it and emerge feeling slightly clammy and eager to be driving away at speed.
I will descend that long coastal slope toward the distant cluster of primitive buildings and enter what I can only describe as a Heironymus Bosch nightmare set in a seventies disco.

Rod and I will do what we always do. We will fight our way to the kitchen with whatever weapons we find to hand and barricade ourselves in there for the duration, shirts ripped like Doug Mc.Clure fighting off hordes of cavewomen in fur bikinis … The main difference being that ours wear cheap polyester party frocks, the entire Boots make-up counter, yellow-stained teeth; plastic knee-boots and a perfume made from local goats.
They cackle as they reach their horrible, grasping, fag-stained fingers toward us; false nails hanging askew in their desperate attempts to drag us down to the floor and to mate with new genetic material.

Will we escape unscathed yet again?
Will we manage to retain our honour?
Or will we be debauched by primitive harridans?

Do you really give a fuck?

Who knows? Tune in next weekend to hear the results.

A Damned Dirty Ape Writes …

Woohoo!
Chuck Heston's dead.
Maybe now somebody will pry that fucking gun from his "cold, dead hands".
What a truly deluded dickwad that imbecile excuse for a man was.
I'm gonna watch Bowling For Columbine and laugh at him.

Dubya: "This here medal is for being an arrogant apologist for the indefensible and helping to make America a haven for nutjob psychopaths and deranged, heavily armed schoolkids."

Chuck: "Get your stinking paws offa me, you damned, dirty ape!"


It's just a shame he died of old age and didn't get shot by one of his beloved NRA nutjobs.
Good riddance to bad trash.

Sick Saturday - New Kid: Episode 3

Thank goodness I only drew three of these things.
Mercifully, this is the last one.

If you don't like spiders and bestiality, please look away now.
If you do, then you're weird.

I do love a happy ending; don't you?

That's your lot. No more New Kid. I did start sketching out a Christmas Special but that was twenty years ago and I've no idea where it is now.

The Comb-over Killer

Well, whaddya know?
Maria has ridden to my rescue once again with a meme.
What a gal!

This one is apparently called: "33 Random Questions (because why should any of this make sense?)"

1) The phone rings. Who are you hoping it is?

The phone doesn't ring because the fucking thing's on mute. If I could get broadband without having to have a phone, believe me I would. I hate the fuckers.

2) When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?

Hey, I'm an anal retentive. I make sure they're all in neat rows, slotted into one another.
And like Maria, I always bring my own bags. Nice big hemp ones that last for years.

3) In a social setting, are you more of a talker or a listener?

I'm a listener. To the point of creepiness. When I'm with friends I am gregarious and chatty, but in "a social setting" (what a sickening phrase that is) I'll just listen for a bit, decide that these people are really boring and switch off.

4) If abandoned in the wilderness, would you survive?

Yup. I'm a Ray Mears fanatic; plus I would have no compunction about killing and eating anyone or anything I came across.

5) Do you like to ride horses?

They make my hips ache. I like to watch people falling off them.

6) Did you ever go to camp as a kid?

Nope. We don't have that weird thing over here.
Hey! It's the school holidays! Let's abandon our kids in the woods with a bunch of strangers! Yeah, right.
Our pædophiles have to work at it, they don't have parents organising it all for them.

7) What was your favourite board game as a kid?

Chess. It was where I learned to become a weasly, deceitful bastard.

8) If a sexy person was pursuing you but you knew he/she was taken, what would you do?

What's the point of dating someone you know will cheat on you as happily as they cheated on the last person?
I'd act interested, set up a new gmail account, give them the address, let them show just what a worthless piece of shit they are, then send their emails to their partner and watch the fuckers squirm.

9) There wasn't a number nine in the original meme so I'll add one of my own:
What was your favourite toy when you were a kid?

For me it was a lovely little red Alfa Romeo Spider, about two inches long. There's a photo of me taken before I could walk, holding onto it for dear life. Mum and dad must have bought it for me in Malta. Shit I loved that car. It's currently in the collection of cousin Elizabeth and one day I will kill her and reclaim it.
I never bought an Alfa when I grew up as I like cars that don't break down and where all the bits stay on. They still look cool though.

10) Would you date someone with different religious beliefs?

Different to what? I have no religious beliefs. But yes, I'm dating an active Christian. I like a good fight.

11) Are you continuing your education?

That's what life's about: you fuck up; you learn.
Or of course, you fuck up and you DON'T learn, in which case you go into politics.
Other than fucking up, and all the courses I have to do at work, I'm back in college once a week learning Japanese.

12) Do you know how to shoot a gun?

Yup. My mother is and grandfather was a crack rifle shot (grandfather shot for England at Bisley). We're country folk. We shot crap and animals with everything from air rifles, through shotguns to target rifles when we were kids. When dad ran a gunsmith's for a few years I helped clean and mess around with (and fire in the basement range) the stock on Saturdays. I'm a pretty good shot with just about anything, so watch it.
Thank your lucky stars we're not allowed handguns over here any more. I'm a quiet and polite neighbour who keeps myself to myself. Prime nutjob candidate. Look out!

Actually, Weel and I were talking this over a while back and he asked "If you were a serial killer, who would you target?"
I replied:
"I'd go out at night hunting men with comb-overs. As soon as I found one walking all alone … Bang!
One shot; back of the neck.
Mercy killing.
I'd be doing society a favour.
I mean who the fuck are they kidding? Not even themselves.
The papers would call me The Comb-over Killer.
No jury would ever convict me. They'd give me a medal for upholding public decency and æsthetic sensibilities."

So yeah … Let's make that meme question 12A: If you were a serial killer, who would you target?

13) If the house was on fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?

Old Les.

14) How often do you read books?

Seven hours a day, every day.
More, if I can't sleep.

15) Do you think more about the past, present or future?

Now.
The past's fun to think back on but I'm not one to worry about the future. Shit will happen and I'll deal with it when it does.
Then I'll die.
No worries.

16) What is your favourite children's book?

A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking.
It sickens me (as someone who could have been a physicist had there been any decent looking girls in the lab when I was eighteen) that imbecile journalists find it so "difficult".
It would have delighted me as a twelve year old. It's the best and most exciting book for kids I've ever read. It's set out simply, clearly and with no necessity for any knowledge of maths. For fuck's sake a low grade moron could understand and enjoy it. But not - it seems - a journalist.

17) How tall are you?

Six foot, half an inch (I like being just that little bit taller than a boring six footer).

18) Where is your ideal house located?

Sheesh … That's a toughie. Overlooking Green Park in Westminster (at least I could walk to work or throw rocks at the Queen), Venice, Florence, Tokyo, San Francisco … Actually, this is a pretty nice village. I'll live here.

19) Last person you talked to?

The jolly Frenchman I bought a load of stinky cheese off this morning at the market.

20) When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?

What the fuck is Olive Garden? I have no idea.
The last time I was in an olive grove was a few years back in Portugal, watching the guys shake the olives down onto big tarpaulins on the ground.
Ana's dad Jose grew the best olives I've ever eaten. Every farmer has their own "secret" recipe and his involved orange and bergamot and a whole slew of other stuff. Fuck they were fabulous!

21) What are the keys on your key chain for?

Simple answer: if they weren't on there I'd probably lose 'em.
Ask your questions in a less ambiguous way or I'll just be facetious.

Hang on. Let's have a look see …
Spiffy key fob from San Francisco, given to me by the lovely Ame when we laid waste to London.
House: two five-lever locks on the front door; one on the back.
Garage.
Car.
That's it.
The office electronic security widget I hang around my neck as it's a pain to dig out of a pocket when I'm struggling to hold a brolly, a Mac laptop bag, my bookbag, my coffee and my breakfast in the driving rain.

22) What did you do last night?

I went to bed early because I felt like crap. I read myself to sleep.

23) Where is your current pain at the moment?

My chest and ribcage and back ache like hell from all the vomiting and coughing fits. My head is pounding. My nose is red raw. My throat is bleeding. Somebody hug me.

24) Do you like mustard?

This is what I love about memes; the total fucking stupidity of some of the questions.
Splendid!
Yes, thank you for asking, I like mustard. Colman's English mustard (made just upriver from here) on ham and Dijon mustard on steak. Designer mustards are just fucking stupid.
Wasabi rules.
Yes, I know it's Japanese horseradish but I'm an addict so I'll put it in here.

25) Do you like your Mom or Dad?

I love my mum. She's cool and funny. I loved my dad and miss him like hell, though he does tend to come visit my dreams and do weird shit, which is great.

26) How long does it take you in the shower?

How long does WHAT take me in the shower?
My schedule is tight in the mornings. The alarms go off at 4:40AM and I have to be in the car at 5:10 to catch my train. So it's a couple of minutes to wetshave over the basin, then a couple of minutes to shower, bodywash and hairwash. No time for masturbation.

27) What movie do you want to see right now?

Spirited Away (in Japanese with subtitles, the American dubbing makes me puke).
In fact I'll watch it as soon as I've finished up here.
The most delightful animated movie ever made. Disney should watch it then crawl away into a hole in shame.
It's for grown ups, too, so you've got no excuses.

28) Do you put lotion on your dog or cats?

Who on earth would subject an animal to that kind of abusive crap?
Because of my commute I cannot have a cat, so Charlie and Fern from next door own me. I rub and cuddle and stroke and purr with them when they greet me home from work and if anyone tries to put lotion on their fur I'll beat seven shades of shit out of 'em.

29) What did you do for New Years?

I went to bed at eight with a book, read for a bit, then put Radio 3 on quietly and fell asleep.

30) Do you think The Grudge was scary?

The only scary thing about American remakes of Japanese or European or Asian movies is that Americans are so fucking dumb that they can't read subtitles.
Watching a Hollywood remake is like hanging a sign around your neck saying "DUH! I'M FUCKING DUMBER THAN GEORGE BUSH."
Just say no.

31) Do you own a camera phone?

Fuck off! You know my views on phones.

32) What is the last letter of your middle name?

Pick one out of twenty-six and you'll have a one in twenty-six chance of guessing right.
Hey! It's a lot better than the lottery.

33) Who did you vote for on American Idol?

What the fuck?
People who watch that kind of crap can't read or write so how could they possibly be answering a blog meme?
What a shitty ending to what was otherwise quite a fun meme.
Sheesh!

Tags? Bollocks!
You know you want to.

The Last Postbag

Right …
They say "Never Blog Drunk" (unless of course it is National Drunk Blogging Day, something I shall never be foolish enough to try again - clicking on the link will enlighten you as to why); they should add - indeed I shall add it here: "Never Blog At Three In The Morning In The Middle Of A Raging Fever".

I'm still feeling pretty shitty and a bit feverish and shaky and I'm coughing and hacking like an eighty-a-day smoker. I think the Marlboro Man curled up and died in my lungs. I'm also producing industrial amounts of phlegm, but that's probably a little more than you want to know.
And I have a pounding headache. So talk quietly, please.

Anyhoo; the comments bag from my last post (written at three in the morning in the middle of a raging fever) threatens to burst and spill words out all over the room so I thought I'd carry on answering it up here.

First up: Lynn; waay too young to have ever heard "Listen With Mother".
Yup; you have fans.
And yup; Ray Mears is cute.
I never had a copy of Debretts; the only people I ever entertain are musicians and artists (the only people I KNOW), most of whom are happy to eat off the floor or out of a trough. In fact with musicians, dinner parties need not involve food at all; just scatter around a bunch of musical instruments and provide a LOT of alcohol. With today's "celeb" social climbers, perhaps that is a new chapter of Debretts that needs writing.

Pratchett is pure "non-book"; utter tosh, but hugely imaginative, very funny and very, very silly. Each book is a like a little parable, taking the piss out of some aspect of human behaviour (or Australia). The first book is rubbish; the rest are hilarious.
The character of DEATH (Mort to his pals) looms large (and indeed only talks in UPPER CASE). He rides a pale horse. It is called Binky. He also introduces us to what is probably my favourite thing about Pratchett; his idea of the afterlife.
Put simply: whatever you believe in when you're alive, that's what happens when you die; Vikings go to Valhalla, Buddhists get reincarnated, Christians go to Heaven, etc. and Mort sorts it all out for you. A splendid idea and much deeper than it seems on the surface, as are many things in his books.
The only trouble is, Lynn, that once you start you end up with all thirty-seven of the buggers on your shelves.

And my reading chair is a big, comfy, wing-back chair set up by the north window in the living room. I have a Tiffany lamp to one side of it but I also like to set up a huge old iron candelabra to read by candle-light at Christmas. Most people have a TV sofa; I don't. I have my reading chair. The picture (as with radio) is always so much better than TV.

As for reading aloud; try this, folks:
Sit down and quietly read a bit of Chaucer (in the original; NOT the crap modern versions … this is important!) or Dante or perhaps a passage from Waiting For Godot.
Now stand up, take a few deep breaths and read those same passages aloud.
You might find yourself "doing voices", but there's nothing wrong with that. What you WILL find is that things change from black and white to colour, that a previously unknown richness and intensity of meaning leaps from every line. That you are gesticulating and emoting and that it is indeed an absolutely marvelous thing to do!
Don't do it with non-books; that's just silly.

My little pieces on each of my blogpals' writing are not puff pieces, they're simply pointing out the truth, just in case anybody hasn't yet told you today how well you write.

Mme and Lynn: Yes, Sartre was indeed a cad and needed to be locked in a room with Germaine Greer for a few hours to put him right on a few things, but I can forgive him anything for the mantra of the long distance commuter: "L'enfer, c'est les autres."
Simone was a much better writer. A lot easier on the eyes, too!

Germaine Greer I always refer to as the GLA; the Greatest Living Australian. I know she lives just down the road from my office and writes for The Guardian, but she's still Australian at heart and my very favourite Aussie writer. I have many of her books and never miss her Guardian articles and she is one person I will turn on the TV to watch, especially on Newsnight Review, where a bunch of intellectuals sit around acting like tossers until she cuts through all the crap and lets rip. She is brilliant and funny and yes I am a bit in love with her. Germaine Greer and Stephen Fry would be my perfect desert island companions. Hey ho.

And so we come to Shan …
Whew! This is the biggie!
I sat from five-thirty this morning until gone nine, surrounded by a notepad and pens, The Bible, The Oxford History of Christianity, The Oxford Companion to The Bible, several early Christian histories, The Gnostic Gospels, The Qur'an, the Epics of Gilgamesh and of Atrahasis, a bunch of contemporary Roman and Greek histories and I had got as far as page eleven of my hastily scribbled notes (each one ready to expand to several pages in itself) before I realised that answering your comment would involve the two of us sitting down for a month or two in a theological library and that I was probably still a little feverish.
So that lot has been set aside to be replaced by a much shorter non-answer, which I hope won't offend too much.

Suffice to say:
- I am used to having "a Christian in the room" and do not find it at all annoying, but stimulating and exciting. My oldest and dearest blogpal, Robyn, is my original "Christian in the room", being not only a wonderful, smart, funny woman and great company, but also an American Christian from Bible College and we have come to know and respect one another's standpoints (through comments box debates going way back in the archives).

At the moment, I'm afraid I don't see any Old Testament prophesies coming to pass; I see simply a bunch of apes going to Hell in a handcart. I believe that were Christ to return to modern America He would be ridiculed and that it would be the fundamentalist church itself that would persecute, hound and lynch Him. Or more probably simply have Him put in an asylum to avoid making Him a martyr. A church that takes the contradictory and horrifically violent historical records of a militant Jewish desert tribe to be the only truth and seems to ignore Jesus' own teachings would never accept Him.
But that's just my current cynical and pessimistic view. Robyn has done much to soften my attitude toward American Evangelical Christian Churches though I am still wary of them.

Put very simply, I was raised a good Christian and I still remember (and wish I could regain) that wonderful sense of absolute faith; of not merely believing, but of "knowing" with complete certainty, the existence of God and His truth set out in The Bible.
Getting on for twenty years ago I suffered a crisis of faith. Big time. The reasons for which I will never reveal in my frankly silly little blog, written for fun, but suffice to say my faith was shattered, seemingly irreparably.

Oddly enough, before that point I rarely studied or even thought about the events described in scripture; I never looked at contemporary historical records to see things in a better perspective, even though they would have brought those events to life much more vividly. I simply believed, and that was enough.
It has only been since that moment that I have become obsessively fascinated with religion - and Christianity in particular. I know that subconsciously I am scrabbling for something that will restore my faith but I spend far more time now than I ever did as a believer, studying the Christian and pre-Christian era, searching out contemporary accounts and source documents, studying other world religions and early history, simply trying to understand …

I call it my "crisis of non-faith"; my so far fruitless search for a way back "in".

In the meantime, my alter ego, Dive continues to provoke and offend my Christian blogpals (check out the the posts under my "Godbothering" link if you want an excuse to come after me with a gun).
Do you remember Marcion's heretical (yet temptingly rational) interpretation of the Old and New Testament Gods? The OT God a vindictive, violent and vengeful thug and the God of Jesus a loving and compassionate deity?
I think that Dive and myself are kinda made that way.
Dive is deliberately confrontational and offensive and I just pick up the pieces and go round after him with a mop and bucket.
Hey ho.

I have a feeling this one will run and run.
I hope so because I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I wish I had more time to write about it. Perhaps that's what I'll do with my retirement.