Another Year?

Another one? Where do these bloody things keep coming from? They're worse than Reader's Digest.
Having received an unbroken run of five spectacularly shitty years I suppose this next one will follow suit and head straight for hell in a handcart.
Hey ho.

As for resolutions for 2015:
I hereby resolve to get older and bitchier, to be more cynical, drink too much coffee, read books, moan about politics, mercilessly mock religion, swear a lot, read more books, jest in a most unseemly manner, spend money I do not have, act in as ungracious and curmudgeonly a fashion as is humanly possible and generally to fail dismally at love and life; resolutions I am confident of achieving with flying colours.
Happy crappy new year, peeps.

An HIstorical Figure Writes …

Sheesh …
Suddenly I feel very old.
This lunchtime we had a semen hour presented by one of our young London office staff who is doing her Masters degree on Erno Goldfinger's London tower blocks.
The last of these went up in the seventies and my own training was tangled up in such socio-political concepts that arose from the later phases of postwar slum clearance and the rebuilding of entire areas of bombed out housing.

While it was clear (or at least partially intelligible through the fog of "y'know"s and "er"s and "like"s and nervous giggling) that the poor girl had no concept whatsoever about postwar social housing needs and the events and politics of the time that led to the building of Goldfinger's blocks - or even of the social and architectural theories of Goldfinger himself (though she had found a photo of him on a website), I managed to keep from rolling my eyes until she started answering our questions by saying that she obviously had a lot more research to do but that most of her ideas had come from "reading a book about the history of the nineteen-sixties and seventies" …

And so the fun began:
An artillery barrage of shock and awe proportions from myself and those crusties even older, some of whom had helped design and even lived in the buildings she was researching left her floundering, before she was comprehensively sunk by one of the senior partners who took her conclusions to pieces with admirable artistry, asked how she hoped to achieve a Masters degree in a subject she was clearly unfamiliar with, and finally wondered why she never asked any of us who were there and were a part of it what actually happened during this "historical period".

So at last I have officially become an historical figure, as I always suspected I might. Not that I mind that so much as the fact that the children in our offices would rather read a book on historical figures than ask us questions directly. At least they are still ABLE to read a book and not get their entire theses from wankipædia, though on today's evidence they are seemingly unable to absorb learning from that book and are completely at a loss when it comes to attempting to articulate their conclusions.
I weep for the reeking and rotten corpse of our educational system.

Anyhoo, before she burst into tears we offered our help …

Our suitably chastened student has now decided to hurriedly rewrite her entire thesis based on the actual events and the experience of people who were there and asks us for our assistance in letting her know what happened and why in that remote dark age.
Interviews have been scheduled and I have already given her a two page outline of the socio-political and architectural situation pertaining at the time together with a long list of criteria to consider and an essential reading list of genuinely relevant books that will take her a decade to complete. Another crusty has informed her that he worked for years in Goldfinger's office and has offered his own first hand observations on the man and his methods.
At least she will now stand a chance of obtaining her degree.

Why she never thought to ask in the first place leaves me in some considerable doubt as to the survival of our species beyond the next generation and actually rather glad if it crashes and burns.
The Eloi and Morlocks spring to mind.

(Exits - rolling eyes and waving arms in despair) …

The Last Box Club

Like Groucho, I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member, but this one I can no longer avoid.

Yesterday I filled in an Autodesk survey asking me for some feedback on their 3D software and gave them a refreshing fistful of honesty that should help dampen their hapless spirits as much as their software dampens mine.

Their revenge came with the little line of boxes asking for my age. I happily and honestly ticked the one that said 45-54.

Today, however, I am acutely aware that I can now only tick the '55 and over' box. The last box in the line. There's nowhere to go from here; no more boxes to fill except the wooden one.

And so - miserable and pouting - I join the Last Box Club.

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fucking fuck.

Well Done, Older Person …

Dear Guardian,

Okay, so I'm fifty-four, but I don't need my newspaper to remind me of the fact.
It is a sad reflection on the state of the nation that simply being able to recognise trees labels me an "older" person.
Were I not laughing so hard at your quizmaster's gentle, patronising mockery I might have taken offence.

Best Regards

David (elder).

A Grumpy Old Man Writes …

Guess who's fifty-smegging-four today …
Yup.
And I'm grumpy as hell.
I get to spend my birthday driving to bloody Birmingham (the real one, not the one in Alabama) and my special birthday treat is attending an all day convention on dementia care home design.
Then I'll drive all the way back and fall into bed.
Party!
Not.

A Fifty-Three Year Old Man Writes …

A huge thank you to Speedway.
I awoke this morning to find I was fifty-three years old.
Aww, crap …
I was somewhat surprised that I didn't start screaming as soon as consciousness allowed, but no; my reaction was more of a "meh …"
Oh, well, what the hell. Another year closer to blesséd oblivion.

And so, stumbling around the house like a zombie with a half-grown Frank Zappa moustache, and groaning like Grandpa Simpson I arrived at the downstairs Mac, coffee in hand, to find a birthday greeting from our Speedway in my email inbox.

Of course I clicked on the link. What unalloyed delight!



I've admired the genius of Florence Foster-Jenkins for many a decade, but to be woken and serenaded by her on my birthday was … well, let's just say that this is probably the best thing an opera buff living on his own can wake up to in the morning, so my gratitude overflows copiously in Speedway's general direction.
I laughed so hard at the high notes that I couldn't eat breakfast.
And I dare say Mozart giggles in his grave whenever anyone plays this.



Here's how it SHOULD be done: the beautiful (even in that Star Trek wig) Diana Damrau giving it to Dorothea Röschmann's Pamina in Colin Davis' glorious adaptation of die Zauberflöte at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (the one with Simon Keenlyside as Papageno - a regular rainy Sunday DVD treat over at my house … come on over).

Halloween, Schmalloween.

I'm giving it a miss.
This evening I might sit in the dark and listen to Schumann's Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations - written when he was convinced ghosts were taking over his mind, during the writing of which he attempted suicide and then died in an insane asylum … yay fun), but that's about my limit.

The sad news is, we no longer do Halloween here. Or at least we no longer do it right.

A couple of decades back some idiot imported the nastier side of Halloween from across the Pond but never got around to importing the good stuff. We somehow managed to turn "Trick or treat" into gangs of teenagers in cheap Scream masks demanding goods with menaces, terrorising lonely elderly people and plastering the fronts of people's homes with eggs if they don't get what they want. I got that treatment regularly myself when I commuted to London and was unable to get home in time to stop it, and believe me, caked-on egg takes industrial machinery to get out of brickwork.

And yes, you heard me. I said the good stuff. Stop falling over and pretending to faint. I'm actually fessing up to being jealous of the Colonies for doing something right.

If there's anyone from England sneaking in here to read this, just check out Petrea's post from Sunday or Robyn's . I defy you not to go all gooey at these übercute kids from Robyn's Halloween Party  and you simply must go back and watch that wonderful Buffy Halloween episode (series 2, episode 6) to see what we're missing (apart of course from my favourite sexy witch Willow).

Back when I was a kid (around the end of the last ice age), the neighbourhood parents would get together and put on a great time for kids at Halloween. We dressed in old sheets, made paper witches' hats, baked potatoes in bonfires, carved swedes (that's the vegetable, not the people from Sweden) into little jack'o'lanterns (in austerity Britain pumpkins were for the rich) and bobbed for apples and played games while our mums and dads stood around getting quietly plastered and eating themselves silly. Good innocent fun. And nobody went around demanding "trick or treat."

Now all that is gone and I honestly don't know how to get it back. We seem to have had all the fun sucked out of us as a nation since Thatcherism destroyed the last shreds of our decency, Blairism drained us of our souls and Cameron the plastic-faced bankers' buttplug took away our jobs and stole all our money. England is a truly shitty place to live now.

It's been over fifteen years since I last saw a group of cute little kids all dressed up as ghouls and witches, politely knocking on doors and chaperoned by friendly parents (that was the time I asked the biggest kid how many of them there were so I could count out chocolate bars and he counted all the others and forgot to count himself - He looked so crestfallen I had to laugh but I gave him his chocolate anyway).

Now it's just gangs of thuggish kids and drunken teenagers in hoodies wearing cheap, unimaginative plastic masks instead of home-made costumes, sneering "Trick or treat" by which they mean "Give us sweets or money or we'll trash your house."
There's no dressing up, no community spirit, not a pumpkin to be seen in my entire village, no parades or neighburhood parties and definitely no fun. If someone decorated their house and front lawn like the one in Petrea's photo the kids would just destroy it.

For God's sake, America. Come over here and show us how it's done.
Please?

WTF Monday - Five Long Years

What the fuck?
Er … Welcome to my sixth year in Blogville.
On Monday, August 7th, 2006 I started this thing and at almost the same moment Robyn started her own blog over in Ohio. To be frank neither of us have any idea why we're still here but here we are, so happy birthday to us, the oldest neighbours in our little Blogville street.

I was going to have a party but I hate parties.
I was going to spend a few days going back through the best and the worst of the last five years but there's getting on for fifteen hundred posts back there, some of which are thousands of words long, and that's too much like hard work.

I was going to write about how Blogville has changed over the years, much like any other small town.
I was going to write about the people who moved out and the other people who moved in, but going through old comments boxes from years ago and wondering where those people are now got me all maudlin so I won't.

Suffice to say that five years ago yesterday I started this stupid blog with no idea of what a blog was. And here I am today, older but still no wiser.

Where Did All These Aches Come From?

In the studio with Michael and Phil this afternoon for a good therapeutic thrash after all the panicky London work.

For three old guys we certainly know how to make a racket. Unfortunately I've not yet mastered my new camera sufficiently to figure out how to take videos (What me? Read a manual?), so you'll have to wait to suffer that until another time.

What I have realised is that amps and guitars are fucking heavy and that as I no longer gig regularly every hour played will cost me approximately five hours of aches and muscle pain and back problems and will leave me hicking around the house moaning like Grandpa Simpson.

Be warned: next time there will be video … if my back holds out.

March?

I woke up today and all of a sudden it was March. Holy crap, how did that happen?
Those three missing days docked off the tail end of February really mess me up now that I've reached the age when I need to write a list before getting dressed in the mornings.
Yesterday was the 28th (I checked) and the fuzzy logic circuits in my frazzled old brain told me the milk in my fridge had four days before "use-by." Today it's almost out of date. What the fuck?
A pox on this calendular perversity!

Let's Go Play In The Dictionary

Start each day with a poo and a poem and you won't go far wrong.

As a general Rule For Living I suppose that ranks alongside my 'Always live east of where you work.'
Half a century of learning from my own dumb mistakes has given me my own set of rules. As for those two: living east of where I work saves me getting blinded by sun-glare off wet roads on my way to and from the office and starting each day with a poo and a poem clears both body and mind ready for whatever horrors the day might throw at me.

Not groundbreaking, I know, but an accumulation of such nuggets helps me stumble along without bumping into too many sharp things.

This morning's poem (I'll spare you this morning's poo) turned out to be Mandrakes For Supper, by James K. Baxter (am I alone in ascribing ludicrous names to people who insert intrusive initials in their signatures? James Baxter has this morning been variously called Kleptomania, Kniphofia, Kimberley and Knickers and it's his own fault).

Anyhoo … His poem:

Mandrakes For Supper

Memory feeds us on a prison diet
Of bits and scraps. 'Remember Mr. X-,
That simple solemn man, so deathly quiet;

'And Sally Z-, compounded of raw sex
And circumstance' - 'Ah yes, her corn-gold hair …'
A land where roams Tyrannosaurus Rex,

The giant lizard, calloused by despair -
In Nowhere I received my education
(If memory can be trusted) mooching there

Like Dante's ghost, among a faceless nation.
The white antarctic Gorgon was my mentor:
Her cloudy arms, her eyes of desolation

Sisterly gazing from the whirlwind's centre,
Received, embraced my naked intuition.
The town of Nilburg too I shrank to enter

(If memory serves me right) and wept contrition
For indistinct all-but-committed crimes
In gelding-rooms and caves of parturition.

Yet undeniably I laughed at times
With those who shared my headless hullaballoo:
Fogeaters, Dwarfs, Green Quims and Paradigms.

Cellars of Nilburg! how I hated you,
Your Ixion wheels, hot frogs and icy toads,
Your existential climate where I grew

Into an adult Mandrake. (Memory loads
My plate with mushrooms.) But I woke at length
And left you, travelling light by mountain roads
To elsewhere; drank at desert wells; gained strength.


I don't know why I like that quite as much as I do. Perhaps the quirky rhyming rhythm, perhaps the freewheeling imagery or the playfully obsessive gallimaufry of punctuation, but more likely my childish word-glee, born of a love for Anglo-Saxon poetry that revels in such words as 'Fogeaters' and capers with the joy of 'hot frogs and icy toads.'
I do love to play with words and this poem set me up rather nicely for the day.

For the year, in fact as I am (according to my calendar and birth certificate) fifty-two today.
Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Or perhaps that should be: 'Oh, bugger! I've wasted another smegging year.'

Either way, I'm off for a swim in the River Lexicon with Fogeaters, hot frogs and icy toads.
Care to join me?

Worth The Wait

Last Wednesday evening finds Old Dive the Samuel Beckett fanboy sitting, tense with excited anticipation in the middle of the third row, around ten feet from the front of the stage at Norwich's beautifully refurbished Theatre Royal.

I am waiting for the start of one of my very favourite plays. I've seen eight productions since we made a mess of it in the sixth form at school, but this promises to be the dream team production and it doesn't disappoint.

Samuel Beckett's glorious Waiting For Godot, with Patrick Stewart as Vladimir and Sir Ian Mc.Kellen as Estragon.

I mean Holy crap! What's not to love? The most wonderful play ever written about the comedy and despair of the human condition, starring a couple who were born to play Vladimir and Estragon and who have just reached the perfect age to do so.

I won't bother going through these guys' stage, cinema and tv history; we all know and love them.

Suffice to say that Sir Ian Mc.Kellen and Patrick Stewart are both blessed with THE VOICE and at seventy and sixty-eight years old respectively at last have the gravitas and credibility to play these two fabulous rôles.
They are at the peak of their powers and - like Didi and Gogo - have been building a genuine relationship for fifty years in some truly wonderful plays.

So … The curtain rises …
How did they do?

Godot is a very easy play to get spectacularly wrong. All eight productions I have seen have been wildly different.
A lot of productions go for the easy option and play it for laughs.
Which is fine as far as it goes, as Beckett has written a gutbustingly hilarious script.

But that is only half of it.
From around 500BC and the first Greek theatre, the masks of comedy and tragedy have been inseparable and this play needs them both in perfect balance.

One particular production - and a very good one - eschewed the comedy altogether, making the funny lines bitter or wistful and omitting the slapstick routines Didi and Gogo have developed over fifty years of life on the road together.
The result was overpoweringly bleak. Hugely impressive, but not the most fun I've ever had in a theatre.

The Guardian theatre critic must have been a fan of that particular production as he criticised Mc.Kellen and Stewart (mildly in an otherwise rave review) for "playing it for laughs" in the first act.

I find their double act perfect.
To feel the full tragedy; the shock, horror and devastation of the latter parts of the play, you need to build up sympathy for Didi and Gogo and this production has, in my view, given us the perfect Godot.

The set is reassuringly dark and bleak, with the tree bare for the first half of the play … the pitiful display of leaves that bedeck its broken branches as the second act opens betokening the pathetic hope life gives us a moment before dashing it away.

But the first act …
Mc.Kellen clambers painfully and slowly - as befits a seventy year old man - over a pile of masonry rubble and enters the stage; sits, exhausted and tries forlornly - and with little success - to remove the remains of his boots from his swollen and bloody feet.
Enter Patrick Stewart as an only slightly more dapper Vladimir and we are off.
Their rapport is instant and marvellous to behold.
Like an old married couple who have long ago forgotten why they married in the first place they bicker, fight, make up and bicker again. They are the most believable and instantly lovable Didi and Gogo I have ever seen.

The audience erupts into gales of helpless laughter. Mc.Kellen and Stewart turn out to be a classic and wonderful comedy double act, yet through the sheer class of their acting the pain and despair of the two protagonists is constantly there, nagging at us as we roar with mirth, both with them and at their misfortune.

Being as close to the actors as if they are here in my living room with me is amazing. Although Vladimir and Estragon are completely alone in their desolation, some audience interaction is inevitable and there are several instances of eye contact with them both; one in particular, where Mc.Kellen sits musing and gazing out over "the fog" that is the audience, he catches my eye and keeps it for a long, long time. There is such an intensity, such a sparkle in the old charmer's gaze that I am transfixed. He's still a seductive old bugger at seventy!

There is indeed a magic about both of them; in the programme notes I had read over coffee in the upstairs restaurant beforehand while studying my old script, they had discussed how they approached the rôles. There was reverence there, but also a determination to make this Godot their own. Not as two individuals, Vladimir and Estragon, but as a cohesive and inseparable whole.
They succeeded spectacularly.

One passage in particular, shortly before the first arrival of Pozzo and Lucky is so tricky to get right and can often appear crass:

Vladimir: What do we do now?

Estragon: Wait.

Vladimir: Yes, but while we're waiting.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?

Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection!

Estragon: (highly excited) An erection!

Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Mc.Kellen and Stewart play this with such a rush of pure, innocent, childlike wonder it is marvellous to behold. A pair of old, old men, careworn and hopeless seeing a glimpse of light in the darkness; the opportunity for one last erection and then blissful oblivion …
But of course it - like all hope - fades …

I've seen that played straight, played for laughs, played cringe-inducingly badly, but with Mc.Kellen and Stewart at last I really believe it.
And they keep it up (no pun intended) for the full two and a half hours.

Of course even a top-drawer Vladimir and Estragon can see all their work ruined by a poor Pozzo and Lucky.
No so here.
The casting for this production is peerless.
Simon Callow plays the rôle of his life as Pozzo. He takes the part of the casually vicious, Stalinesque buffoon and plays it to the hilt as the monstrous ringmaster of his own hideous freak show.
Wonderful.
Hilarious.
Horrifying.
An explosion of light and colour and noise and brutal violence against the grey but cheerful innocence of what's gone before; he is shockingly good.

And cowering, half-dead at the other end of the rope in mute submissive resignation is Ronald Pickup as Lucky.

I've seen him play Beckett before and I knew he would be good, but he is simply astonishing.
His breathless, rabid, bespittled and totally insane "in spite of the tennis" monologue/diatribe shakes the audience with its intensity; he starts stark raving mad and gets more psychotic by the second, building to such a frenzied climax that - as Vladimir siezes his "speaking hat", wrenching it from his head and Lucky freezes, wild-eyed and staring blindly out at us, drool running down his front - there are five long seconds of dead silence and stillness and then - as he collapses - the auditorium erupts in a thoroughly deserved and prolonged ovation while poor Ronald lays prostrate and exhausted at the front of the stage.

I am not usually a fan of spontaneous applause during a play, but this is the first of many on the night and every one brings a twinkle to the eye and the twitch of a grin to the corner of the mouth of the cast.
They are brilliant and they know it.

The first half is perfect, but the second even better.

Mc.Kellen and Stewart are just as funny, sparking off one another, totally believable as Didi and Gogo but suddenly the laughs are uncomfortable; the humour the deepest black.

The false hope of the leaves on the tree is about to be dashed and our whole world will tumble, crashing around us in bitter ruin.
They have indeed played it for laughs quite deliberately, but only to set us up for the fall.

The slow-dawning realisation of the hopelessness and despair of our heroes' purgatorial dilemma creeps like dread out over the audience and freezes our hearts.

When it comes to the climax it is shattering.
Pozzo's shocking blindness. The horror of knowing that there but for the grace of God-knows-what go Didi and Gogo; how close Vladimir might have come to the tyranny of Pozzo and Estragon to the Hellish hopelessness of Lucky.

As Lucky lays unconscious, with Mc.Kellen administering a shockingly violent and realistic kicking to his unresisting body we are aghast!

And then comes the truth …
The stage is quiet and dark; Pozzo and Lucky have once again departed as we wait for the inevitable appearance of the Boy with his never-changing message.
Estragon sits, nodding off in utterly exhausted despair and Vladimir wanders the stage, bereft; his soliloquy on the human condition made all the more poignant and heartbreaking by the laughter that has preceded it and set us up for this devastating sucker punch.
We knew it was coming and willingly walked right into it.
Tears sting my eyes and pour down my cheeks. As they do those of everyone present.

And at the last, just before Didi and Gogo turn to go but realise they never can, they try once again to hang themselves but - inevitably - the wretched piece of rope that had been Estragon's belt snaps in half and Mc.Kellen's trousers drop around his ankles.

But we do not laugh … We cannot laugh any more.

There they stand …

Us.

A huge standing ovation goes on and on, with three curtain calls for the cast, variously and all together (including a very fortunate local schoolboy as the Boy) and then Stewart and Mc.Kellen return once more and give us a music hall dance routine, juggle with their hats, strike a pose and are gone …

Like Vladimir and Estragon in their interminable and unreasoning wait for Godot I have waited fifty years to see this production.
However long I live I'll never see a better one.

It is still touring.
If you get the faintest chance of a ticket, take it!
You must see this production.
It truly deserves the classic review: "You'll laugh; you'll cry; it'll change your life".



Apologies to Sir. Ian Mc.Kellen for nicking some of these photos from his website.

私はとても年を取ったと感じますよ

先週私は四十九っさいでした。
今日は私の五十代始めます。
私はとても年を取ったと感じますよ。

… which at least got me some sympathy hugs from the girls last night … that is after Mayuko had finished laughing.

Every week, after our initial teacher-pupil introduction thang (very Japanese and also quite funny when your teacher is only half your age), Mayuko always asks us:

先週何をしましたか。

… which is a polite way of asking what we've been up to all week.

I put on my most pathetic, hangdog expression and opined:
"先週私は四十九っさいでした。
今日は私の五十代始めます。
私はとても年を取ったと感じますよ。"

Which means:
"Last week I was forty-nine years old.
Today I enter my fifties.
I feel totally old." (though in Japanese there is considerably more comic emphasis in that line).

Actually, if you feed that into BabelFish (something always worth doing if you have no intention of finding out what something means) it comes up with:
"Last week I was 49 [tsu] occasion.
My five teen it begins today.
I feel that you grew older very."

You'll have guessed I've got nothing to say today.
The weather today is cold, grey and miserable, pretty much like me.
Hey ho.

Addendum:

Aww crap!
Here I was feeling miserable and then I checked out Engrish.com and laughed my lunch out through my nose.

Tempting, eh?

Fucking Fuckity Fuck

Fuck me.
I'm fifty tomorrow. How the smeg did that happen?

Time to wallow in self pity …

I wonder what seventeen year old Dive (lithe and toned and enjoying copious sex with the hottest girl in school - hi, Judith) would have done had I known that at fifty I would be a saggy, balding sack of shit, living a loser's life alone in the middle of nowhere, without a girlfriend for so many millennia that if a naked woman were to drop into my lap I wouldn't have the faintest idea what to do with her.
Add to that a seven hour a day commute through the lower regions of Hell, bed at nine o'clock every night, alarms shrieking at four-forty in the fucking morning, a social life somewhat less romantically eventful than that of Lonesome George (look him up) and nothing to look forward to until the merciful oblivion of death.

It's gonna be a fun birthday.

I very much doubt seventeen year old Dive would have said "Yay! Good one, dude. That's just the way I planned it!"

I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Roll on death
(it's like roll-on deodorant only much, much heavier).

At least I'm another year closer to it.
I am so fucking glad there's no afterlife.
Joy might say "Look forward to your next incarnation."
Shan might hand me a fire extinguisher and wave me off with "Good luck down there, you miserable sinner. Send me a postcard."
But thankfully, here in the real world dead means dead.
Finito.
Nada.
Oblivion.
A total cessation of the existence of self.
Forever.
Woohoo!
It can't come soon enough.
All that will be left of Old Dive will be the constituent atoms of my flabby old corpse which will be free at last to go off and do something more interesting, exploring the wonderful world of rotting and decomposition; whooping it up with all those fun chemical processes.

At least my atoms will have more fun than I'm having.

While I'm waiting for that I might as well use my fiftieth birthday as an excuse to be really fucking grumpy and to snap at people.
Not that there'll be any people to snap at; I'm working from home tomorrow.
With the curtains shut.
I might celebrate by slamming some doors.

In the evening I'll go to Japanese class and smirk at my shiny little teenage classmates so full of innocent hope for the future - HA! - smug in the knowledge that they've got all this crap to come - a lifetime of misery, despair, heartbreak and rejection, lost hope and failed dreams - and wondering if they'll fuck up their own lives as totally as I've fucked up mine.

At least that's an achievement of some kind.
I'm a first rate fuck-up.
In the game of life I've played to lose and have been spectacularly successful.
So where's my framed certificate of loserdom?
Eh?
Bastards!

What's it like, having a life, bloggy-people? I honestly can't remember.

And what the fuck DO I do with a naked woman should one drop into my lap?
Do they come with a Haynes Manual?
Or a tool kit?
Which hole do I blow in to get a tune out of one?
How do I change the plug?
Not that I'll ever get a girlfriend so you don't need to hurry with your answers.

Fuck fifty.
Fifty is the new bleah!

Can you tell I'm not at the peak of my perkiness today?

Goodwood - Hope For The Elderly

People of Blogville, I give you hope for all of us as we get old.
The man himself - his iconic, open-faced white helmet with earflaps and goggles, his skull rebuilt from metal like something out of Terminator, last weekend celebrating his sixtieth year of competitive motor racing, the world's fastest seventy-nine year old, Sir Stirling Moss.

Here he is at last weekend's Goodwood Revival Meeting, sawing away at the wheel of his 1955 C-Type Jaguar as he fights to control it and drifts slide-ways around the double apex of Lavant Corner at full throttle.

You've seen him in every year's Goodwood Revival post; you've seen him this summer, racing his '59 Aston Martin DB3 up the hill at the Festival of Speed.
You haven't yet seen him sitting and chatting with Phil at Mc.Laren's race headquarters because that photo stands beside Phil's computer but you've seen him scattered across this blog for years.

Here are some Stirling facts:

His dad raced for Ford in the 1924 Indianapolis 500.

His little sister Pat was a great rally driver.

He's been around a bloody long time. To give you some idea of just how long, after successfully racing in various classes for years he was signed up by the Mercedes Benz Grand Prix team in 1955 to partner the legendary Fangio. That very first year he beat Fangio into second place to win the British Grand Prix and he hasn't stopped since.

He has won sixty-six Grands Prix for Mercedes, Maserati, Vanwall, Cooper and our very own Lotus from the mid fifties on into the sixties until a near fatal accident here at this very Goodwood circuit ended his Grand Prix career in '62, leaving him smashed up and paralysed.

But they rebuilt him (his skull now goes clang if he bumps his head) and he continued to race in just about every other category and during his professional career raced in more than 80 different types of car.

Since "retirement" he seems to have stepped up a gear, which is why we find him still tearing up the tarmac at seventy-nine and showing no sign of slowing down yet.

This year at Goodwood, as well as racing all weekend he was celebrating another great Grand Prix driver, Tony Brooks, seen here acknowledging the acclaim of the crowds in his 1952 Connaught A-Type.

Here is quite a rarity: Sir Stirling in a sweet '58 Aston chauffeuring another great racing legend Jack Brabham, who came over from Australia especially for the weekend's celebrations.

Later on that day, in the classic touring cars race, Stirling drove (like a madman) Rowan Atkinson's 1952 Jaguar M.VII.
Yes, Mister Bean is an enthusiastic classic car owner and racer. You can see him in older Goodwood posts monstering the circuit in his Ford Galaxy.

Overseeing the weekend's events is the man who owns the circuit and who has built up the Revival meeting over the past ten years to become the greatest vintage car racing event (and the greatest fancy dress party) on the planet, Lord March himself, here waiting for the start of a parade of classic supercars between two of the competitive races.

Also racing here at the weekend - among many great names such as Jackie Oliver, Bobby Rahal, Patrick Tambay, Christian Horner, Andy Rouse, Tony Dron, Jochen Mass, Martin Brundle, Anthony Reid, Stefan Johannson and celebs like Rowan Atkinson and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason (that was him is his GTO in the earlier post) is notorious curmudgeon and ex. Grand Prix world champion Jackie "I'll never race again" Stewart.

Here's Jackie going back on his word (the board tells us he's already on lap seventeen). Hee hee. A welcome return.

Before I go, I can't resist re-posting that glorious shot of Sir Stirling squeezing past the Aston on the outside of Lavant.
Woohoo!

The average age of competitive racing drivers in this country is forty-five (Sir Stirling is by no means the oldest at seventy-nine - one Argentine Count is still racing here in his nineties). More and more people (women as well as men) are taking up the sport as they get older and their kids leave home.
There's hope for us all yet in our sunset years.

Let's Make A Racket - XX

Bloody hell! Is it Thursday already?

Here's a quickie from deep within the geological strata of my archives. An early Cheese Mechanics rehearsal tape.

Steve, Dive, Michael and Ron …
God, were we ever that young?

Not Fade Away

Fuck me.
Today, Mick Jagger qualifies for his old age pension.

To keep me from despair, let's remind ourselves just why we loved the Stones in the first place.

This is fucking awesome!
Footage of the Stones playing live at the 1964 NME Poll Winners' Awards Show, just prior to their first US tour.
Introduced by creepy Jimmy Saville, Mick, Keith, Brian, Charlie and Bill thrash their way through Not Fade Away, I Just Want To Make Love To You and I'm Alright.
Brew up a coffee and sit and enjoy this.
Feel free to scream.

Disco Boy

Yup; another lyric title; this time good ol' Frank Zappa.
"Disco Boy … Run to the toilet and comb your hair."
To take my mind off the pain in my foot, Katie had me singing "Disco Inferno" at three o'clock this morning (see yesterday's comments).
Which kinda helped …

But it also reminded me that I have never really understood the strange beast that is the "discotheque."

Of course, back in the golden age of my youth there was no such thing and life was blissful in the Garden of Eden.
People danced to live bands.
They talked and socialised in the intervals between sets.
Life was intercoursingly groovy.
People even wanted to listen to a bunch of teenagers playing Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes and Focus songs.

And then it all went poo-shaped.

I remember the first time I met a discotheque.
It was the early seventies and we had been having problems in the band with girls inexplicably wanting to listen to David Cassidy and "go down the disco" in preference to watching a spotty kid in glasses play a twenty minute guitar solo.
I still can't figure that one out.
Sigh …

Much against my better judgement I decided to see what was so wonderful about this "new craze" that would drag girls away from real music.
So I got dressed up in my best flares and a flowery shirt with a collar that would not look out of place billowing from the mast of an America's Cup racing yacht.
To which spectacular sartorial splendour I added the indescribable aroma of Brüt (the ad for which had elderly boxer Henry Cooper growling "Splash it on all over!" … probably not the most alluring image for teenage girls).
Thus rendered as irresistible as I could be to the fair sex I ventured forth and … er … bicycled into town.

Where I forked over perfectly good money (something I still resent having had to do) only to find myself in a large, dark room with some flashing lights and somebody playing records loudly.

What the fuck?

People were actually PAYING to have someone play records at them?
I could go home and do that.
With far better records!

So I did.

I've never been in another one.
My drummer couldn't figure it out either.
"I mean what the fuck's that all about? It just goes THUD - CLAP - THUD - CLAP on and on and on. Where's the skill in that? It could just as well be a bloody machine."
Prophetic words indeed. I have quite a collection of drum machines.

Years later I found myself booked to play in a grown-ups' disco, or what was termed a "night club".
It's the only time I've ever been in one of those, too.

My idea of a good time would never even come CLOSE to … er … jigging up and down in a sweaty crowd in the dark, having people scream into my ear to be heard whilst paying more for a round of drinks than I did for my car.

Somebody PLEASE tell me: What the fuck is the point of discos and nightclubs? Why do people go there?
To scream at strangers in a dark room?
To get covered in beer and sweat?
It can't be to socialise as you can't see or hear one another.
Help me out here.
What's the story?

It's not just that I'm old; I felt the same way at thirteen.
Sometimes I feel that not only was I born in the wrong decade, I was born into the wrong species.

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."

Talking 'bout My Generation

… and moaning about the next one.
Maria's post about her experience with a house full of twenty-somethings woke up a bugbear of Old Dive's …

Designing schools for a living as I do, I get to hang around kids a lot, and over the years I have noticed something rather dispiriting: The Young are fast becoming what the Old were when I was young (if you follow me).
Though the flipside of that, however, is that my generation have become irrevocably and indisputably cool (which we knew all along).

Grab a coffee and let me explain …

I'm going to hit fifty this year, yet I feel younger, cooler, more culturally aware and way more of a rebel than most of the dull, grey kids and twenties I see these days.
Kids - and I use my usual definition of "kid" here: anyone under the age of thirty-seven (or indeed over that age but "a bit too excitable") … kids seem to me now as boring, conventional, dull and lacking in any department that could possibly be connected with "cool" as my grandparents appeared to me back when I was a kid.

Youth is indeed wasted on the young.
As the admirable J.M.Barrie observed in the equally Admirable Crichton: "I'm not young enough to know everything", which was kinda mean, coming from the guy who wrote Peter Pan, but also true. At seventeen, kids know everything; then again at twenty-seven. It's only when they hit thirty-seven that they realise they know fuck all and start to learn stuff for real.
Even though the young people of today are generally opinionated, self-obsessed and a bit too full of themselves they are - rather tragically - totally unable to comprehend that they know "nothin' 'bout nothin'", and that they have created or achieved nothing of any value that has not been created or achieved before; usually (much to their chagrin) by their own parents.

The teenagers I go to college with on Thursdays bizarrely think I'm "cool" for my musical tastes and for having done all the crap I've done (and because I really am cool) and they are forever "borrowing" stuff off my iPod and asking my advice on bands, clothes (! … this is inexplicable to me, but the kids at college buy the same shoes as me and dress much the same - Louisa even sent off to Kyoto for the same 浴衣 as I wear), movies, drugs, relationships, all sorts of crap.
It's genuinely weird when I'm sitting in the refectory, reminiscing with Lin, the only other forty-something still in college and a bunch of seventeen-year-olds are hanging on our every word, mouths agape with amazement (and not just amazement that people can live this long and still be sentient).
When I was a kid, people as old as I am now were dead to the world (and smelled of wee). At seventeen I would never have dreamed of asking a fifty-year-old about new and cool music (they'd have just said "I don't understand all of that rock and roll rubbish; it's just noise."), or where I could get shoes like theirs, let alone the finer points of "how to give a good blowie" (thanks for asking that one, Louisa; it's just a shame that you insisted on using our thumbs for the demonstration … hey ho; at least it made Lin laugh stuff out of her nose).

Anyhoo; Maria was bemoaning feeling old among the twenty-something kids …
But listen up, my fellow baby boomers:
We are the lucky generation.
The cool generation.
The best generation.
We grew up when it was all NEW!
We did it first and we fucking loved it.
We were the first Beatles fans; the first punks; the first metal-heads; we saw Dylan and Bowie The Clash when THEY were young!

Por exemplo, from the potted history of Old Dive:
I'm a fifties kid; born with rock and roll; from the post-war generation, whose dad came home from messing about with nuclear bombers in the air force carrying boxes of Black American music; Fats and Chuck and John Lee (we're talking real R&B … not the derivative crap "product" the marketing morons call R&B these days) and of course Elvis.
Boy did we hit the sixties swinging …
Along came The Beatles and I got my first guitar. I went to school surrounded by mini-skirted dolly-birds, the pill and the space race and the very first colour TV (back when they had programmes worth watching).
We didn't have wimpy fucking al Qaeda to piss about with, we had full-on nuclear armageddon, to the accompaniment of dope and psychedelia and CND and Vietnam and presidents getting shot or impeached, and it was cool and it was fun, waiting for some twat to press the big red button.
I was eighteen when Punk happened and it was brilliant (when kids call themselves "punks" these days it is so pathetically sad), playing in bands and having a fucking glorious time.
I dropped out of college and played lead guitar in rock bands back when it was the cool thing to do.
As my generation has got older, "cool" has moved along with us.
And conservative, reactionary, responsible boredom has moved the other way until the kids these days think and act just like my grandparents did.

Look at your kids …
Unless you're Chavs, they don't smoke or drink and they disapprove of recreational drugs.
They're conscientious and responsible.
The closest they come to rebellion is wearing a Nirvana hoody (for fuck's sake, how long has Cobain been dead, you cretins?) or acting sullen (yeah, that's new).
They "borrow" cool from our generation (the Nirvana hoody, the Ché teeshirt, Converse All Stars, anything "punk") because they have neither the wit nor the imagination to do or to create anything remotely cool themselves.
Shit, even the teen pregnancy rates have stalled; daughters no longer come home at five in the morning, tattooed and pregnant (again, Chavs are fighting a brave but lonely rearguard action here).
They listen to dull, derivative muzak product; anything remotely new and exciting is too "weird" for them (it's all noise, like rock and roll was to my grandparents). Shit, even today's most "exciting" indie and dance bands are just pale and insipid re-hashes of seventies and eighties music. We've heard it all so many times before. Come up with something new, you fucking morons!
They watch the cookery channel and they go to the gym instead of hot-rodding old cars and cruising for girls (Phil was so totally awesome at customising cars, and he's mercifully never grown up) with a back seat full of beer and the music up FUCKING LOUD ("Fucking Loud" copyright Bob Dylan; Manchester Free Trade Hall, 1966, kids; listen and learn).
They manage their money and SAVE (fucking hell) instead of blowing their student loans on guitars and riotous living and sleeping in a squat and stealing milk off doorsteps and food from the backs of supermarkets.
They talk about mortgages and insurance!
They wouldn't know how (or why) to kick against the pricks, they're such dumb, TV-addled crap-corporate-consuming retards.
The fucking idiots believe what they're told!
They don't make bombs and blow shit up like we used to (okay, so maybe that was just me).
They are "sensible". They have "careers advice" instead of just saying "Fuck the future; I'm gonna play in a band, take drugs and screw around." (Hey, it worked for me)!
They don't sit in a dingy room with a bag of grass, a couple of pipes, some pretty guitars and some very pretty girls and not worry that the only food in the house is half an onion and a sausage (maaaaan, those were good times).
They don't go on protest marches and photograph the secret service men who are photographing them (that was always so much fun).
They don't drive around the city following a police car, tokin' on a monster Camberwell Carrot and waving it at the nice coppers.
They have fucking pension plans (kill me now).
They don't try to bring down multinational corporations; they apply for fucking JOBS in them!
They cut their hair! Sweet Cheeses of Nazareth, what is the world coming to?
And THEIR PARENTS EMBARRASS THEM!

As Douglas Adams put it: they're so un-hip, it's a wonder their bums don't fall off.

The sad conclusion I have reached is that The Young Are The New Old.

Our children have squandered their glorious inheritance … all of our hard work of rebellion, sexual freedom, irresponsibility and FUN has been subsumed by the unimaginative, the responsible and the tedious.
One can only hope that the next generation rebels against this pathetic lot of uninspiring sad-sacks and kicks their sorry arses hard!
They so richly deserve it.
Townshend was almost right in "My Generation" when he said "hope I die before I get old"; what he should have written was "hope I die before I get to see my kid grow up to be a fucking accountant."
Kids; we're not angry, we are just very, very disappointed.