where angels fear to tread



In a coup for the Conservatives, the lead singer of Coldplay, Chris Martin, has declared his backing for David Cameron, releasing a song that the party hopes will become the Tory answer to Labour's 1997 anthem, Things Can Only Get Better.

atanarjuat - the fast runner



'Getting top performance from an Inuit cast and crew required creating an Inuit 'culture of production' -- with good humour, no fear, a lot of patience and a spirit of flexible cooperation and teamwork rather than military-style control. Inuit have learned through the millennia that people cannot overpower reality. Our objective was not to impose southern filmmaking conventions on our unique story, but to let the story shape the filmmaking process in an Inuit way.'
(Zac Kunuk - Director)



we seem to be living in the midst of a global plague of lists. top ten tips infest the silly pages and the daytime schedules - kissing, teeth-whitening, getting seat upgrades on planes - wherever you look, whatever you're doing, there's someone bursting to advise you on how to do it better, faster, cheaper. by far the most irksome, though, are these top 100 lists. whenever I pay attention (increasingly rarely - apart from Neighbours, of course) to the box in the corner, there seems to be yet another meejah proto-sleb slithering onto the bottom rung of the sleb ladder by hosting yet another cheapskate piece of programming called the one hundred best .... songs, cereals, serial killers, septicemia victims, sump-oil addicts, cervixes .... it just seems to go on and on, hyperbole humping hyperbole until finally - desperate drum-roll - they come to the final superlative - the best!!!! voted by you!!!!! the public!!!!! which is always something by the beatles.

even if it's cereals.

which makes it just a teeny bit embarassing to have to announce that, actually ( meekly raises own stumpy little hoof), I've just watched the finest movie I've ever seen in my entire life.

whenever I've been asked in the past, my stock response, for want of having to go yet again through all that tedious conditional stuff about genres and defining classics and developing tastes and depending on this that or the other, has been to say Tarkovsky's 'Mirror', and leave it at that. but, from today onwards - move over Anzdrey - I have to practice yet another difficult name and title - Zac Kunuk's Atanarjuat - The Fast Runner.

I was little prepared for what this turned out to be, apart from having glanced at a review which had made it sound sufficiently interesting to bother adding to the ScreenSelect list. the fact of its having been released all of four years ago and won a clutch of prestigious international prizes had passed me by completely. these things happen when you take your eye off the ball. I knew it was going to be beautifully crafted and interesting, but I was totally unprepared for an experience which, if you'd told me a day earlier, I'd have said was impossible: the being flung back, as a spectator in the comfort of my own living room, into something very closely resembling that intensely visceral, pre-literate experience of what dear old Aristotle called catharsis.

in the Hellenic dramas, catharsis meant an audience at a tragedy becoming so closely involved in the acted-out experiences of people whose lives are transformed by forces of destiny directly attributable to divine interference that a form of spiritual cleansing and recharging takes place - a rehab for the soul involving purging and renewal through identification. the ancient Greek katharsis has the same root as the word for menstruation. when Aristotle used it to describe the proper objective of the dramatic tragedy he was employing the word in a uniquely affirmative sense that might, incidentally, give pause to those whose view of older civilisations sees patriarchy only as a form of oppression, but that's by the by.

the need for the dramatic experience per se hasn't changed much with time, although the theatre has, and it's been a very long time indeed since I felt anything like what I'm talking about here in the arena of the modern theatre. which just makes it all the more remarkable that this movie should ring that bell so resoundingly, being, as it is, a first major outing for the tiny independent Inuit production company (actually the only Inuit production company), Isuma, filmed entirely on location in the Canadian Arctic using a cast of mostly amateurs, with the dialogue exclusively in Inuktitut. thank heavens for subtitles, although I suspect that the sound of this language alone, one of the strangest I've ever heard, is a significant contributor to the overall effect.

the film is based on an ancient Inuit legend - a simple story about love and jealousy, murder and revenge, atonement and forgiveness, that might have been lifted from the epic canon of any culture at any time. without revealing too much - the less you know about what happens the better - it's safe to say that it contains one of the most astonishing screen chases ever - the protagonist naked and barefoot, running across the melting sea-ice, where the coldest of deaths is one mistake away. it makes the car chase in Bullitt seem like a stately procession in a padded bumper-car.

but that accounts for only five minutes of a three-hour movie which passes by unbelievably fast - astounding that three hours can fly by like that - as if Kunuk himself had temporarily assumed the time-bending mantle of one of the disturbing shamans who play a small but inordinately significant part, negotiating the uneasy relationship between the living and the spirits in this icy world where starvation is an invisible but omnipresent family member, always imminent, and kept at bay only by sets of survival skills that truly beggar belief.

if this were just a docudrama - a kind of latter-day Nanook of the North - it would probably have won anthropological and ethnological prizes for its realism alone: a hundred-times better funded wardrobe and properties department would have been pushed to achieve these sorts of levels of authenticity: from the sinew-belted sealskin longjohns to the polished-bone sunglasses, it all rings resoundingly true, and lacks only the smells (which, clearly, in a sweaty igloo stuffed with the farting and belching bodies of too many randy young men, are mind-bogglingly awful) to complete the picture of life lived as if on another planet entirely.

and the sounds! the crunch of mukluks (or are they kamiks?) in snow, the wind on the tundra, the swish of spit-polished caribou bone sledge-runners on ice, the crunch of fist on cheekbone, the howling of the dogs, the crunch of ice-block laid on ice-block to construct those extraordinary domed homes.

but this isn't an anthropological exercise; however lovely the people (who smile like angels) and however beautiful the landscape, this movie is not about - or only tangentially about - their different kinds of beauty. Kunuk's movie is a hair-raising accomplishment - the enactment of a legendary tale that is so immediate and compelling that, until you stop to think about it (later, when the movie's done what it has to do) you really have no clear idea when it is supposed to have taken place - not now, obviously, because there's no snowmobiles or satellite dishes, but, until you realise that there's no use of metals at all - something that was unavailable to the Inuit until the Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century - it might as well be happening anytime in the last thousand years, up to and including yesterday. the point being that, unlike countless movies that have authentically recreated the appearance of a particular time in order to tell a story, or countless theatre productions which have translated the classics into a different time in order, supposedly, to refresh their impact, Atanarjuat succeeds somehow in melding the timely with the timeless in a totally artful, but seemingly artless way, telling the story exactly as it comes - true to fifty generations of oral tellings-on, whilst simultaneously making it seem as though it is happening right here, right now, and succeeds, what's more, in fusing the epic concerns - of morality, of justice, of the proper application of power and responsibility - and the human concerns - of love, friendship, family duties, work and pleasure - into one seamless, magical garment that favours neither but exalts both.

Atanarjuat is a great artwork in that it totally transcends its immediate concerns, illuminating areas of understanding and empathy that can only be illuminated by great works of art, and which are as needful of illumination now - probably more so now - as when the first artists struck the first flints of artistic illumination. it is our experiences of such artworks that provide, aside from those self-constructed time-markers composed of our own memories and experiences, the most important milestones: markers in the timeline of the experience of mankind that synchronise, momentarily, with our own, and confirm our sense of belonging, of being on the right path, of being, actually, in the right time.

Leslie Walter Roylance 22nd May 1916 - 15th March 2006




As you probably know, Dad was born in Gorton, in east Manchester, in May 1916. He was the eldest of four, having two younger brothers and a sister. Sadly, Godfrey and Raymond predeceased him, although his sister, Molly, who caused something of a stir in the family when she married a missionary and sailed off to Papua New Guinea, is still very much alive and kicking down in Australia, and has just announced that she's planning a visit this summer.

When Dad was born, a mere eight years had elapsed since the first man-powered flight by Wilbur Wright at Kittyhawk. Claude Monet was painting his famous 'Water Lilies' and cementing the reputation of the Impressionists in art history forever, and the composer Gustav Holst was completing his suite, 'The Planets'. Overshadowing everything at that time, of course, was the terrible conflict of the First World War, with the Battle of the Somme only two months away, although the poets Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were forging a famous friendship on the Western Front, and writing the poems which were possibly the only good things to arise from that conflict, and Lawrence of Arabia was charging about on a camel meeting Omar Shariff on the Mesopotamian Front.

Dad was an almost exact contemporary of Len Hutton, a cricketing hero not only of his but of mine as well. He also very nearly shared a birthday with Gregory Peck, Olivia de Havilland, Kirk Douglas, Betty Grable, Yehudi Menuhin, Margaret Lockwood, and Roald Dahl, although if any of these people had anything at all in common apart from a coincidence of birth, I've failed to identify it. Perhaps they all liked ice-cream and mum's strawberry trifle, too.

I have very clear memories of that house in Oakfield Grove where Dad was born and brought up. It was at the bottom of a sloping Victorian terrace and on the edge of a park. Dad's upbringing was obviously strict but generous: my grandmother was a shadowy intimidating matriarch who smelt of mothballs - she died when I was seven or eight. But I used occasionally to call in at Grandad's on my way home from school. We played dominoes and I was allowed to light his cigarettes. He smoked Park Drive and occasionally Capstan, I think, and also had a Rizla rolling machine that I assumed worked by magic. I bought a copy of Roget's Thesaurus with the book-token he gave me on my thirteenth birthday, two months before he died. I still use it.

During my early childhood, Dad was a lay preacher at the local Baptist Church. I found nothing exceptional about this - I assumed, as children do, that that was what Dads did on Sundays, just as they played cricket and mended bikes on Saturdays and went to work during the week, and it wasn't until years later that I realised how exceptional this was amongst Dads, and furthermore, what a fine writer he was and a truly inspiring speaker.

This talent came to a late and glorious secular flowering when, after retiring from the bank, he embarked on a further career as a sometime lecturer, giving talks on his speciality of probate law. Although he finally had to give that up a few years ago as his failing sight prevented him from driving, I know that he got great pleasure from giving those talks, sharing the benefits of his experience with large numbers of people up and down the country. He was as witty as he was erudite, succeeding in making a talk about the amendments to the Inheritance Act of 1938 and the Law of Comorientes seem as much fun as an evening in with Morecambe and Wise.

There's no law, fortunately, that says fathers have to be repositories of homespun wisdom and advice. I say fortunately, because, if there were, I'd be a major transgressor. Either that, or I've inherited, as well as a host of fairly useful things like knowing instinctively how to reverse park and change a plug, the supremely sensible instinct as to when to hold your tongue. This might not be true for Nigel and Yvonne, but it was certainly the case for me - Dad recognised very early on that if he were to try giving me advice, I'd more than likely do the exact opposite out of sheer bloody-mindedness. So I don't, as some people seem to do, have many memories of his ever actually advising me to do anything.

Apart from the business of the little-known Denton West End Primary School playground wars of '54 - I was seven - when he took me aside one evening - he must have got wind of something going on - and said to me that if - he stressed the 'if' , because this was coming from one of the most pacific men I've ever met - if I were ever to find myself needing to fight someone, I should always remember one thing. My breath was truly bated. I assumed he was about to initiate me into some arcane martial arts secret that would have my enemy, David Winston, begging for mercy within seconds of my applying it. It was all about a girl, of course. Susan Haggas, of fond memory. If, he said, this were ever to happen, just remember one thing: don't keep your thumbs on the inside of your fists.

Which, if you think about it, is probably the most useless piece of advice any father ever gave to a son. I mean, what's that about?

Anyway, in the resultant melée, not only did I get my nose bloodied, but I got so confused that I almost dislocated both of my thumbs. Total triumph of David Winston. Except that, to the utter confusion of both of us, I got the girl. But that's women for you.

Tne only other piece of advice I can remember him giving was fairly obvious really, coming from someone whose working life was bound up with untangling the terrible messes people leave to their successors by dying intestate. Almost as soon as I was old enough to sign a legal document , he advised me to make a will. Sound advice. And, to give credit where credit's due, he's been banging on about it ever since. Have you made a will yet? Not yet, Dad. You ought to, you know. I know, Dad, you've been telling me that since 1968. So when are you going to?
Soon.
Alright then.
Alright then.
You won't, will you?
I will, Dad.
Will you?
I will.
Tomorrow.


In common with most people of his generation, Dad's capabilities extended into areas that would put most of my generation to shame: to us, multi-tasking is just a computer buzzword - Dad embodied it.
His career had made him an expert in probate law, although he was well-versed in general legal principles from the solicitor's apprenticeship he had undertaken before deciding to enter the world of banking.
Aside from the expertise he brought to his work, however, he was more than capable, it seemed, of undertaking any of the practical tasks associated with running a household: from concrete-laying to shoe-mending, furniture-repairs to glazing, he seemed to be able to put his hand to anything, as well as playing a mean organ, having a beautiful calligraphic hand, and playing a ruthless game of scrabble.

He was generous to a fault, infinitely patient, scrupulously honest, and unburdened, it seemed, with an ounce of selfishness beyond that required of individual autonomy: you'd almost have to hold a gun to his head in order to get him to admit that, yes, he really wouldn't mind if you offered him that last chocolate truffle.

As is often the case in families, most of my memories of him are connected with family events, and very happy memories they are indeed, but, quite recently, when I was visiting Manchester with one of my own sons, we were walking down Moseley Street so that I could show him the bank where his grandad had worked for most of his life, the Head Office of what used to be William Deacons, long-since metamorphosed into something else in that strange world of corporate evolution, and, as we passed those imposing entrance doors, I suddenly remembered a meal we had shared together, just the two of us, more than fifty years ago. For some reason I don't recall, Mum had dropped me off at the bank, and Dad had shown me around: I was completely overawed, of course, by what seemed to me to be a kind of palace - vast halls, echoing marble floors, dark wooden panelling, ornate light-fittings, and people talking in hushed whispers about very important things. I was introduced to some of his colleagues, and felt very proud to be associated with this man whose life here - quite separate from our home in Denton - had a whole set of meanings which were quite indecipherable to a child of eight or nine, but who was clearly liked and respected by a bewildering number of men and women who were complete strangers to me. Then he took me down to the staff canteen, and there we sat at a table, just the two of us, and ate lunch. I don't recall anything that was said. That wasn't important. I clearly recall what we ate, however: ox-tail soup, roast beef, carrots and mash with gravy, and apple pie and custard. And there we were, just the two of us, me and my Dad, and me glowing, my heart overflowing with pleasure and pride and love.

Parenting is a catalogue of firsts: first gurgle, first smile, first tooth, first step. What gradually creeps up on us as time passes, however, is a corresponding catalogue of lasts, most of which pass by unnoticed: the last broken night, the last nappy-change, the last piggy-back, the last bed-time story. And, little by little, the list of lasts inevitably begins to overtake the list of firsts, until, one day, there's this final set of last things to remember: the last time we ate together, the last time we shared a joke together, the last time we spoke, the last time we embraced.

The sorrow of Dad's passing is great, but I know that time will eventually heal that sorrow and replace it with an ongoing remembrance of his life, an exemplary life, full of kindness, generosity, and laughter, a life which, in the midst of our mourning, we should celebrate, with hearts overflowing with pleasure and pride and love.

the creatives

it's normal to talk about this thing or that thing as being a 'work of art' when, in fact, it's just a pleasing construction: I've used it myself most recently with reference to someone's notebook, a salad, and a haircut.

so why do my hackles rise every time I hear someone talk about a TV commercial as a work of art?

for the simple reason that my own moral universe is predicated on the search for truth, which is a non-negotiable phenomenon, and the advertising industry is entirely about lying - which is not; and, more and more, I get the feeling that there are people out there - especially in the advertising industry - who really believe that some adverts are 'works of art' because they have failed to absorb the catastrophic social consequences of getting confused about this.

so they cruise around, these pampered agency hacks, on some convenient Panamanian-flagged yacht that's completely adrift from any recognisably responsible moral anchoring point, beholden to no form of compliance other than the needs of the client, and, having devoted the entirety of their creative energies to persuading us to purchase something that is utterly superfluous to our needs, compound that impertinence by trying to convince us that the manner in which they are doing it is somehow analogous to the work that an artist does.

bollocks, I say.

and yet again, bollocks.

there isn't an ad in existence that isn't a lie - no brand is the best, all products are subject to a process of market discrimination, our identities are not definitively endorsed by what we consume, Orlay will not stop time and recover lost youth. this doesn't really need saying, does it? if we truly believe that we need this thing rather than that thing merely because it bears a Sony rather than a Samsung logo, we are rightly condemned to spending the rest of our days in the peer-pressure infantilised, arrested-development state of a twelve-year-old.

these so-called 'creatives' of the industry are the evil spawn of a treacherous education system that teases creativity out of our children from the kindergarten onwards only to hijack it finally by trawling the major art colleges for potential artists who are willing to trade their souls for the astonishingly disproportionate rewards of being a 'creative.' so successful has this process become that they don't even have to do any pimping - by the time the struggling young student has arrived at the hallowed doors of Central St Martins or wherever, they've already been absorbed into the bowels of a system that, having industrialised art a long time ago, regards it as just another commodity, and the artist simply as a supplier of creative ideas.

I've yet to see a supposedly original advertising idea that hasn't been purloined from another artist, beit a classical or a contemporary one. the world of low-budget independent film - as vital a forum of genuine artistry as you can hope to find anywhere - is a favourite quarry, shamelessly strip-mined and repackaged as imagery devoid of context, but the entirety of the art world is fair game to these shameless shysters. Vivaldi's Four Seasons used to be a wonderful piece of music. now it's impossible to hear it - especially Spring - devoid of its association with a dozen kitsch, Tuscan-themed commercials for anything from holiday villas to toilet paper.

an image-junkie myself, I'm as susceptible as the next man to the lure of creative brilliance, and subscribe to the suspicion that there's growing to be more creative substance in the commercials than in the programmes they bracket, but as long as that substance is disengaged from any function more necessary than urging distinction between two or more identical brands of beer or jeans or mobile phones, I'll pass, thank you, on greeting them as works of art. I'll also continue a personal scoffing campaign at the toadying meejah-led hagiography of the ludicrously overpaid directors and lackeys of these agencies. as if having supervised a globally successful campaign to persuade people to buy one brand of deodorant rather than another were somehow a laudable thing, rather than a mildly contemptible and totally inexplicable waste of time and resources.

there is, of course, the possibility that I'm completely wrong, and that, in our effectively secular society, whose success is largely dependent on the fabulous profits to be made from waste and excess, 'truth' should be redefined as 'that which confirms our sense of purpose', which, almost by stealth, has acquired the tacit rider 'as consumers'. in such a society, the true purpose of art is to illuminate this truth, or at least to explore the boundaries of choice that contain it, and the ads, since by definition they fulfill this function, are therefore art.

in such a culture, the advertising industry has come to usurp the place formerly occupied by the reactionary establishments of the academy, and in such a case, when art's subversive potential has itself been subverted to such a reactionary cause, the only choice the true (!) artist has left is to withdraw from the field entirely, to refuse either to participate or to negotiate, and to engage only in such activities as could not under any circumstances be defined as art.

the art of editorial juxtapositioning

Artist's homemade gas chamber angers Jewish groups

Jewish leaders approve Rogers' project

(both stories from today's guardian)

all flesh is grass



it’s a funny thing, food. at one extreme, it’s just something to fill our stomachs when we feel hungry, at the other, it’s an art form – close to a religion – with its high and low forms, its galleries and temples, its priests, its acolytes, and its zealots.

there can’t be many people who discover the pleasures of cooking who don’t realise, eventually, that the bibles were written in a different time and a different place (and, more often than not, in a different language), when food preparation was a full-time supervisory activity, the assumption of small armies of assistance was automatic, and the idea of washing-up as you went along absurdly quaint, if not faintly insulting. it’s fun, certainly, and certainly impressive when dished out, to follow the recipe for cochon de lait rôti au four to the letter, but you’ve really got to love your guests a helluva lot to do that sort of thing on a regular basis.

for diurnal purposes, most of us stick to a few old favourites that get rotated until someone says ogod it’s Thursday isn’t it looking down at their plate of pasta and you realise it’s time to change the rotation.

then there’s the meat question.

ecologically, there’s one overwhelmingly convincing reason why we should all become vegetarians: of the world’s major protein sources, the humble soybean makes the most efficient use of land, at 356lb per acre, whereas beef, the favoured protein source of the industrial west, at 20lb per acre, contributes the least. this ratio of relative productivity per cultivar is heavily weighted, throughout the food chain, in favour of the grains and pulses and against the animals. however, by much the same process of cultural carelessness that refuses to accept that an oil economy is a doomed economy in the long-term, hell will freeze over before we happy chomping carnivores accept that a carnivorous diet is unsustainable in the long-term, and besides, tofu compared with bacon? it just doesn’t cut it.

the most efficient use of the sea is something else, with the overfishing of many of the world’s traditional fishing beds having resulted in a seriously alarming number of conservation-driven moratoria on the taking of certain once-common species such as cod. by much the same token as the tofu-bacon analogy, though, I don’t see much future in any attempts to educate us in the nutritional advantages of algae and seaweed over and above those of salmon and lemon sole.


we’re such pussies about eating flesh. either you feel that it’s acceptable to kill an animal in order to eat its flesh – or, more precisely, its muscle - or you don’t, and, if you do, and, at the same time, you consider yourself someone who likes to discriminate between good food and bad food, ie whose taste extends beyond salt and sugar - the fast and the processed and the packaged - you have, at some point in your life (because the person who considers themselves to be a gourmet tends also to be the sort of person who enjoys travelling to those foreign parts where the exotic cuisine is the native cuisine) to confront your cultural prejudices.

the truth is that very few French people (in my experience) choose to eat snails and frogs legs – they leave that to the tourists. considerably more Chinese people, however, eat dogs, lots of Mongolians eat horses, many Japanese eat whales, and the inhabitants of equatorial cities like Manaus like to eat monkeys. to most anglo-saxon christians, of course, this is a partial definition of barbarity (just as our own culture of beef- and pork-eating puts us beyond the pale to an Indian hindu or muslim) because dogs are pets, horses are what wealthy idiots breed and bet on and their idiot spoilt daughters ride and masturbate on, and monkeys are – well – cute. (the whale issue is probably the most divisive amongst Europeans because of the cultural argument – another time perhaps.)

of the four-legged beasts, I have eaten, in my time, the cow, the sheep, the goat, the horse, the pig, the hare, the rabbit, and the deer; of the fowl, I have eaten the chicken, the turkey, the goose, the duck, the pheasant, the quail, the grouse, the woodcock, the wood-pigeon, and the guinea-fowl; of the sea-water fish, the cod, the haddock, the skate, the plaice, the lemon sole, the halibut, the flounder, the salmon, the tuna, the john dory, the swordfish, the herring, the mackerel, the whitebait, the whiting, the turbot, the sardine, the pilchard, the anchovy, the shark, the monkfish, the red snapper, the sea bass, and the skate; of the freshwater, the trout, the pike, and the eel; of the crustacea, the crab, the lobster, the crayfish, the shrimp, and the prawn; of the molluscae, the mussel, the oyster, the clam, the scallop, and the snail; of the cephalopods, the octopus and the squid; and of the amphibians, only the frog (once).

that’s quite a menagerie of creatures destined to have been absorbed into my own organism, to be converted into my mass, my energy. I salute them all, and cherish the memories of those meals – at least one memorable one to each species – which they provided. I regret, on the other hand, every mouthful of sustenance stolen from the miserable lives of those battery chickens and veal-calves whose flesh I have, either through ignorance or misguided choice, consumed, and wonder sometimes, when I consider the vast quantity of blood spilt in order that I might live, whether I have been deserving of that.

once a species such as our own has arrived at the very top of the evolutionary tree, has evolved far beyond the point of being driven by the need to survive only, has discovered the myriad permutations of pleasure in general and that derived from the deliciously clever taste-buds in our deliciously clever tongues in particular, and, having discovered fire, is no longer obliged to chew and swallow the raw – beit root, leaf, grain, or flesh – this omnivorous capability of ours is duty-bound (to the memory of our fire-bearing progenitors, if no-one else) to be explored to the limit, alongside that other remarkable evolved facility – the ability to discriminate at a moral as well as a tactile level.

if what we eat is what we are, why don’t we eat each other?

from a nutritional perspective, there’s nothing wrong with eating human flesh – unless it’s the flesh of a human so pumped up on big macs and cokes and phunny pharms that their flesh will corrode cutlery – but the majority of cultures proscribe it, not for the evolved-instinct reasons that govern the common cultural proscriptions (the pre-scientific cultural encoding of the genetic dangers of inbreeding, for instance), but for the post-moral, crypto-legal reasons that recognise the sanctity of human life – even that of an enemy. it’s recognised as bad – very bad – to mutilate the corpse of someone you’ve killed, but to then eat their flesh is as abhorrent as it gets.

this tension between edibility and moral restraint has extended into differentiating the rest of the animal world as either food or not in ways which reflect cultural conditioning as much as social evolution. in Elizabethan times it was quite common – amongst the aristocracy – to eat swan. for a commoner to be discovered doing so the penalty was death, because the swan belonged to the queen (and to do so now is still to risk a criminal prosecution, because the swans still belong to the queen, although I don’t believe she actually eats them anymore). apart from the obvious illegality, however, I can’t imagine there being many people now – apart from that caucus of sick thrill-seekers that infest every civilisation in the throes of decadence - who would happily sit down to a meal of haunch of elephant, roast panda, poached dolphin, braised koala bear, or seared osprey’s tongues. however, the envelope of what’s acceptable and what’s not is, clearly, extending: there are a couple of ostrich farms in the UK which are trading in more than just big eggs, and kangaroo burgers are appearing with more frequency in the more expensive burger bars.

the religious rules about ‘unclean’ food were established thousands of years ago by the same set of god-crazed patriarchs who made the rules about how women were to behave on the days when they, too, were ‘unclean’. in the days before fridges and of poor sanitation and in total ignorance about bacterial infection such regulations might have been sensible, although it’s hard to justify their continuation - these so-called hygiene laws - into perpetuity, outside of their irrational origins. it’s equally irrational, though, to replace cultural rules based on superstition (or belief, if you believe) merely by rules based on sentiment and aesthetics: the standing rule that a species is exempt from the pot so long as it’s perceived as being either endangered or cuddly is just as arbitrary, and just as meaningless. well – the cuddly part, at least. if it were still around, the mammoth would today be considered cuddly. that a large number of currently endangered species have been driven to near-extinction by hunting for sport – not food – is one of the historic crimes that our species is going to have to come to terms with one day.

somerset boulevard

the front page and two centre pages of the local weekly newspaper were dedicated, last week, to the news that Nicolas Cage had been in town, house-hunting, apparently. literally. I didn’t think that was how mega-slebs did it, but he and his relatively new wife of twenty-two walked into two estate agents in the High Street and made enquiries about properties in the local area. I’d give good money to have been a fly on the wall at one of those encounters.

hi – I’m looking for a house
yes, sir, and in what price range would that be?
oh, let’s talk about that later, shall we?

so there are photographs of him emerging from the Abbey Tea-Rooms, interviews with people who spoke to him, including the owner of the Abbey Tea-Rooms and the person who sold him a few books (titles listed) on spirituality and esoterica in The Speaking Tree, photographs of him signing autographs, photographs of him talking to a reporter, photographs of people who got his autograph, interviews with people who got his autograph -

he was really nice
he was quite normal really

- and a resumé of his career.

and this tiny town is agape at the possibility – the remote possibility – of having a Hollywood film star living here (for a few weeks a year).

apart from the fact that we share a birthday (true) I doubt if Nicolas and I would have much in common, but I nurse, in common with everyone else in town, the sad fantasy that, once settled in, he and I, through some chance encounter or random act of fate, might become friends, and that he and his charming young wife Alice would become regular droppers-in to our slightly humbler abode to pass the time in frivolous pursuits and idle banter. I base this fantasy, as does everyone else in town, on no more solid foundation than the fact that he’s famous – I know diddley-squat about him as a person, although anyone who’s friends with Tom Waits and a cousin of Sofia Coppola earns instant credit by default in my book (and I have to admit that I’ve only seen three films of his – the magnificent Charlie Kauffman’s ‘Adaptation’, the wonderful ‘Wild at Heart’ and the bleak ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ – although I thought his performances in all three were class). this aspiration involves nothing more than desiring to bask in the beneficence of his charisma and inspiring the envy of everyone I know – none of whom would ever admit to it. the bleak actuality of having to hold a conversation with someone who, for all I know, although, since he’s an actor, it’s a fair assumption, doesn’t do conversation unless it reflects on his wonderfulness, doesn’t even enter into the equation – being able to say “oh, have you met Nick” to one or two people I can think of and watch their struggle to retain equanimity against overwhelming odds would be worth a few minutes memorising his IMDb profile.

the offside rule

wouldn’t it be interesting if, in order to play for a team such as Liverpool, say, or Chelsea, the rules were (indulge me – I inhabit a different planet from this) that you had to have been born and brought up either in the city or district from which the team took its name?
yesterday’s match between Arsenal and Real Madrid had only two Englishmen in it, let alone natives of either Madrid or Highbury, and they were both playing for the Spanish team. Hola.

rhinotoon

fan-mail is always (well mostly) fun
fan-pics are better:



thanx max!

"Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants."

all's well

á propos nothing at all, but in common with all my fellow humans, I have periods when I feel I'm the utter shiznick at everything I do, then I have periods when I think I'm the most pathetic failure that ever walked god's green earth, and then I have in-between periods when I just don't have any opinion on the matter - the green periods, the periods of mellow apathasia - when none of that matters, when I'm just getting on with it, or rather it's being gotten on with, regardless of me and my silly little concerns, and it's all just taking its course.

the strutting periods are fun - the cock-a-doodle-do times when I feel that I'm as sharp as all hell and I just can't do anything wrong - except that it's usually woefully delusional and the thing I think I'm succeeding at will prove, in the merciless light of next week, as vapid and flabby as yesterday's spaghetti ; the woe-is-me-wotta-sorry-thing-am-I periods are as depressingly familiar as February but tolerable, as February is tolerable, because Spring is just around the corner; but I think it's those green periods that are probably the most productive, in that they're the least self-conscious times, and consequently the times when I'm liberated from all those concerns about how I'm doing, because I'm just doing.

it would be nice to be able to engineer those times - alas, the habit of self-judgement is as entrenched as a cruddy old tattoo - and it's in their nature that they just happen, as unsusceptible to arrangement as snow at Christmas, but I can, at least, acknowledge them as reassuring flash-glimpses, as if from the window of a train into the window of a passing house, of how, in some parallel universe, all's well, despite how it might sometimes seem, that all is proceeding as it should, and that I am - that we all are - fulfilling our roles, willy-nilly, whatever they might turn out to have been, with due regard to the contingent and necessary protocols.

A Mountain Out of a Molehill Over Danish Cartoons

"The fracas over the cartoons is a sad testament to the impotence of the Muslim world. That clerics and leaders of Muslim countries gain any sense of power over this issue is a reminder of how powerless they really are and also a reminder, as if we needed one, of the moral bankruptcy of our self-appointed moral guides. It is no wonder that these same moral guides have gone on a power trip over cartoons – after all, clerics in Egypt have been arguing over whether married couples can be naked during sex."

(more)

with a little help ...

I try, these days, to minimise the amount of work my liver has to do to separate the toxins from the good stuff, but I'm not evangelical about it - as far as I'm concerned, what you do with your own sacred temple's your own affair. what I do find interesting, though, is the imposition of value judgements onto the users of different categories of toxins according to the arbitrary rules of the day. obviously, the market for cocaine caters to a better class of person than that for skunk and crystal, and this is reflected in the price differential. but this price - inflated by the considerable retail markups that reflect its trading risks on the black market - is obviously worth paying to those who can afford it. people don't ingest these toxins because they're bad people, but because they're a nice way of getting high so long as you can afford it. it's actually no worse or better than any other brain-blasting activity based on freedom of choice, except that it's usually illegal. coke, especially, seems to be a most attractive toxin, providing an exquisite high with few side-effects. only the most delusional devotees of hypocrisy as an exercise in spiritual transcendence would argue that a cocaine habit is 'worse' than any other.

the only reason that we don't have to get our alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine fixes on prescription is that these three particular addictive toxins were adopted, some time ago, as the officially sanctioned reality-bending chemicals of choice, and became instrumental in establishing an excise franchise of such magnitude that government became, essentially, dependent on it. still is. the annual tax revenue from the legitimate sales of tea, coffee, tobacco and booze is staggering. without it, clearly, western democracy would sink without trace. bring it on, I say.

the tacky tabloid shock-horror response to the discovery that x or y - film star, rock musician, or model - has developed a drug-dependency problem has become such a paltry cliché that it's all but lost its value. very, very few people seem to manage to get through life without a little help from our pharmaceutical friends, be that in respect to pain-relief, depression-relief, or limp-dick relief, and far more people than are prepared to admit to it have a dependency problem with same pharmaceuticals. that the vast majority of crimes of violence are alcohol-related, or that a huge portion of the NHS budget is devoted to the relief of pulmonary, bronchial, and cardio-vascular problems directly attributable to smoking is far less sexy news than the fact that x or y have, thanks to their vastly inflated earnings and concomitant VIP admission to the sucker-bait market of unlicensed pharm retailers, developed a dependency on coke or angel dust or whatever. I mean, who cares? who - really - cares?

context is all. the supposedly pharm-free are all in possession - albeit mostly unwitting - of one of the most potent in-house drug-manufacturing facilities imaginable: if you want to point the finger point it no further than at your own neck, since that pesky thyroid gland is responsible, over the course of a lifetime, for regulating the injection into your bloodstream of enough home-made psychotropic substances to kill a prize ox. and, without ingesting a thing, there's not a man jack of us who's immune from the dependencies they promote: from the seratonin highs of falling in love to the adrenaline-rush of facing physical jeopardy, our hormones are the mood-altering tails that wag the dependent dog, and there's not a thing we can do about it.

number please




on a whim, I signed up to the SETI@home project the other day, so our downstairs computer (the boys computer, actually, but they say they don't mind) is now one of half a million or so which is lending its spare processing capacity to help crunch the numbers collected in Puerto Rico at the Arecibo telescope and analysed in Berkeley at the University of California.

SETI has been actively listening for twenty years or so, on and off, and there's still no peep from the deepest darkest reaches of outer space, but you never know - one day that computer downstairs might be the one to flag a spike in the 1.5 gigaherz band that signals the start of a download that ends with, erm, Jodie Foster dropping into a wormhole and meeting an alien in the form of her dead dad ... or something ...

there seem to be only two ET stereotypes: the aggressive invader and the hands-off benign super-intelligence. the one comes with a black exoskeletal carapace and/or big slanty eyes in a noseless ovoid head and abducts us in our sleep to conduct excruciatingly invasive experiments on us up there in orbit on the mothership before wiping our memories somewhat inefficiently and returning us to wander around naked in West Hartlepool or Paris Texas at three o'clock in the morning, and the other wafts around humming in a vaguely melodic language comprehensible only to maths nerds and deaf French movie directors and wearing shimmering things in Steiner colours whilst androgynously assisting us with our homework, helping us get over the deaths of our pets and/or parents, and reconciling warring nations. both are transparent mutations of the figments of the same mindset that saw incubi and succubi and angels around every sexually repressed corner in the Middle Ages and fairies and hobgoblins more recently, so I'll have no truck with either of them. and, to be perfectly frank, although I think that a universe as big as this one we find ourselves in is quite likely to have spawned a few more examples of intelligence other than our own (there has to be something more intelligent than this, please god, there just has to be) I skirt just this side of deep scepticism about the likelihood of our ever encountering it.

the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence proceeds in the shadow of two predominant theories, the one as optimistic (about there being something Out There) as the other is pessimistic:

the Drake Equation sets out the industry-standard variables for calculating just how many intelligent civilisations are likely to populate our galaxy (the consensus is about fifty).

the Fermi Paradox, however, can be summarised as follows: the belief that the universe contains many technologically advanced civilizations, combined with our lack of observational evidence to support that view, is inconsistent. either this assumption is incorrect (and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe), our current observations are incomplete (and we simply have not detected them yet), or our search methodologies are flawed (we are not searching for the correct indicators). in other words, if they were really out there, the skies should be teaming with the buggers, so where da fuck am they?

in order to register the existence of an extra-terrestrial intelligence, we have to aim our Arecibos at a likely wedge of the cosmos and then sift through a wide spectrum of EM signals, analysing these for anomalies - spikes which might originate in a source other than a known astrophysical phenomenon or the doppler-shifted red noise of background radiation. we can 'listen' in this way to the limits of our telescope's range - almost as far back as the big bang. obviously, however, (unless we suppose the physically impossible - that there was intelligent life around before the big bang) there is actually no point in 'listening' this far: our chances of discovering an intelligent source signal are much better if we concentrate on much closer distances - in astronomical terms - distances more congruent both with the time-period involved in the development of our own form of intelligence, and more amenable to the eventual possibility of physical contact.

the closest possibilities - in astronomical terms - namely, the theoretical planetary orbits of Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star - 'only' five light years distant - have already been examined and found to be unintelligent. if intelligence is to be discovered, it will not be found any closer than ten light years or more distant - and most probably much, much more. our galaxy alone is ninety thousand light years across and three thousand light years thick. if, then, a signal were to be received from somewhere in our own galaxy, the possibilities of subsequent communication between us make terrestrial snail-mail seem like high-speed broadband: at best, a twenty-year wait between our reply and 'their' next packet, then another twenty-year wait for the next reply to our reply, and so on. then, assuming that this went well for a few transactions, someone would have to decide whether or not to send out an exploratory team, and this is where it all begins to get a bit sci-fi.

the actual sci-fi solution is perennially the same - the hyperdrive (allowing faster-than-light speeds) and the wormhole gate (allowing instant transmission from one part of the universe to another). neither is available yet, nor even remotely possible (the one disregards one of the fundamental laws of physics, the other is still theoretically possible, but requires a power source akin to the energy released by the fission processes at the heart of a star to achieve). so crawling across inter-stellar space at a best possible speed of a tenth the speed of light is the only realistic option. therefore, the most optimistic estimate of the journey time (one way) for this first contact exploratory team is a hundred years - probably much more. given that this isn't going to happen - even if a first signal were to be received tomorrow - for at least a hundred years, that gives us plenty of time to consider the logistics - not to mention the economics - of such a mission. however, given that the universal lack of government interest in things cosmological is reflected in the ever-decreasing funding of astronomy - NASA is somehow hanging on in there by the skin of its teeth, but SETI is exclusively financed by private donations - it's overwhelmingly likely that the only possible source of funding for such a project would be a consortium of the kind of billionaires who, traditionally, have spent their billions on developing cutting-edge technology in order to develop their personal power base and win prestigious international acclaim by winning prizes for racing around the world in one way or another - people like Howard Hughes, Rupert Murdoch, or our own Richard Branson - a consortium, in other words, of unscrupulous assholes whose company any sensible person would travel far indeed to avoid, and whose claim to being representative of the human race verges on the tenuous, if not wildly presumptuous, if not hysterically funny, if not tragic.

the SETI project has been criticised for being more religion than science, but actually it's an art work - something profoundly senseless and yet essentially meaningful - an artful attempt to reconcile the human need to find meaning in a convincingly meaningless cosmos with the awful suspicion that there is none.

it would be tremendously exciting to get confirmation - even if only in the form of a few anomalous EM signals repeating in a sequence unequivocally associated with intelligence rather than accident - of the existence of the galactic neighbours. it would radically alter our relationship with our world to know - as a matter of science rather than belief - that we were not alone in the universe, although, party-pooper that I am, I have huge misgivings about how we might react to that knowledge.

consider, for instance, the global hysteria that the discovery of a signal would instigate if, at the same time, it were discovered that the alien signallers were actually approaching us, that they were en route rather than planet-bound. the world would, I'm afraid, instantly be divided into two camps, roughly corresponding to the adherents to the two ET stereotypes mentioned earlier, and, fairly obviously, the doomsayers would dominate (in a straight fight between the fundamentalist militias and the hippies I'd bet on the guys with the big guns and the crewcuts, wouldn't you?). so even if ET's ETA were set at two or three hundred years in the future, that event would become the High Noon of global civilisation, and, in the name of planetary security, provide a fine excuse for multinational fascist shenanigans on a scale undreamt of by all the tinpot dictators since Genghis Khan.

by far the likeliest scenario, however, is that there's going to be no result - no contact - and that, sooner or later, we'll come to accept the fact that, whereas we're probably not alone in the universe, the chance of our ever meeting our neighbours is virtually non-existent.

not a sexy result, but as necessary, probably, to the next stage of maturation of our species as separating from our parents is necessary to our maturation as individuals. so long as there's a lingering belief that someone or something out there - a god or a fairy godmother or an ET - will be coming along sooner or later to bail us out of this mess we've made down here, then we'll continue indulging in the sort of prevarication that makes cleaning the oven instead of filling in our tax returns seem trivial - excusing ourselves, basically, from rolling up our sleeves and getting down and dirty on the most urgent of the tasks in hand, namely, taking full individual responsibility for our collective historic bad behaviour and taking the appropriate steps to improve it.

now there's an alien thought

Bush Has Crossed the Rubicon by Paul Craig Roberts

"Many people fighting to strengthen the executive think they are fighting against legitimizing sodomy and murder in the womb. They are unaware that the real issue is that America is on the verge of elevating its president above the law."

give or take

clearly, Marx's suggestion as to how we might more equitably distribute the planet's resources amongst its inhabitants (from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs) is so alien to the prevailing global economic and political ideologies that it (the idea) has had to be progressively demonised to the point that it (the idea) is now almost synonymous with that other braindead idea - the invention of our zombie neocon overlords - 'Terror'.

that there is no nation called 'Terror' on any known maps at which we can point our cruise missiles has become entirely ignored - an invisible obstacle to this entirely irrational, ongoing war. in pursuit of this fiction, H C Andersen's invention of a tailor able to con an entire empire into believing that only his invisible materials were sufficiently extravagant, and sufficiently exorbitant, to clothe an emperor was amateurish in comparison to the ongoing industrial smog-machine of lies and disinformation that has been billowing from the collective arses of the Capitol and Westminster for the last four years.

that there might be, in these egregious corridors of power, the tiniest wisp of real concern for or compassion with those desperately trying to survive their impoverishment and dispossession either through forces of nature or forces of arms or market forces or forces merely of accident is so unlikely as to be ludicrous.

millions - possibly billions - of world citizens have been deprived of the information upon which they might make an educated choice about their economic and political futures because of the hysterical - primarily American - paranoia about socialism. just as Soviet Communism (which, in its devolved post-Revolutionary form of Stalinist dictatorship bore as little relation to the revolutionary proposals of those nineteenth-century European socialist thinkers as does American football to English rugby) had erased from the history books all mention of its opponents, so this so-called free market globalism - a system dedicated, supposedly, to the proliferation of choice in the market place - has restricted choice amongst the fundamental economic ideologies to that of one only, all others having been touched by the devil himself.

as is always the case in the field of capitalist economics, there is no rationale to any of this other than the self-interest of the stakeholders. despite all that queasy self-justifying stuff about wealth-generation and trickle-down effects, the laws of capitalist economics are absolutely indistinguishable from the laws of the jungle - the overriding interests of the zealots of acquisition are totally inimical to any inclination to altruism. the kindness displayed by the wealthy towards the poor - the foundations, the scholarships, the bequests - is no more than facile PR masking some heavy-duty fringe-illegal tax evasions. obviously, a nation which was truly concerned with the welfare of its less fortunate citizens would not need to request anything more than a reasonable (and affordable) tax deduction from the earnings of its more fortunate to make provision for their support. in the absence of any such administrational concern, and in the context of the degradation of the semantics of 'left' both in liberal economics and in governance to the point where it means little more than moderating the more extreme manifestations of naked greed in the markets, 'charity' is nothing more than a routine portfolio adjustment.

the age of revolution is long gone - neither the opportunity nor the means nor the intellectual spine remain, despite the fearsome universal weight of mass disaffection with our beloved leaders - and, such was the effectiveness of the lessons drawn from its (historically) momentary rocking of the geopolitical boat by the emergent clusters of reactionary power, so successfully have those agencies insinuated into the collective unconscious their sophistries and their monopolistic vision of economic progress (a vision predicated on the frankly insane assumption that the planet's finite mineral resources are infinitely expoitable) that unforeseen catastrophe would seem to be the only possible foreseeable engine of radical change - just as the KT boundary extinction event did for the dinosaurs of the Jurassic, so only some equally random armageddon analogue will do for the dinosaurs of the city.

the only reason why capitalism has emerged as top dog in the litter of possible scenarios for a global post-industrial economy is because it's the most aggressive - capitalism and the industries of war being co-dependent, locked together, forever, in a macabre dance of death. and aggressive, by definition, is all about winners and losers.

thing is, no-one wants to be a loser, but, under capitalism, ninety-nine percent are. they have to be. that's how it works. that's how the numbers work. that's why something like 3% of the world's population owns something like 95% of the planet's wealth. that's 'own', as in 'mine - fuck off - try taking it off me if you think you're so smart.' that's how we're persuaded to buy lottery tickets, even though the chances of winning are worse than being struck by lightning.

I doubt that more than a handful of people outside the specialist forums of professional economists and students of economics could name as many as three alternative economic systems to capitalism (Wikipedia lists thirty-nine). such options as the gift economy, or potlatch, for instance, which sustained the entire Native American population until it was displaced by the 'take' economy of the white immigrant invasions, are now regarded, if regarded at all, with ridicule and contempt, in much the same way as we have come to consider that other iconic victim of specicide, the dodo.

disastrous as it might be (and it is - it most certainly is) for the health of the planet and for all but a fraction of its citizens, the mixed economy version of capitalism is embedded for the long term. just how long that term proves to be is in neither the hands of the gods nor the politicians nor the insurance companies, none of whose provisions will be worth a can of beans once the real, non-compliant shit hits the fan. tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.

ipod pas


until this morning, I was about to become a member of the iPod tribe. it being my birthday this weekend, pennies had been saved, share portfolios adjusted, surplus assets in various off-shore tax-free havens disposed of, and redundant body parts promised to a very nice gentleman called Gerald in Nottingham, but then fate came along, as it does, tipped us upside down, dangled us by the ankles, and emptied out all of our pockets with a lively chinking of haemorrhaging coinage, and - hey presto - my dream of owning a lovely white icon of cool disappeared in a cartoon bubble-bursting *pop*.

boo-hoo.

I really really wanted an iPod. I really didn't need an iPod. but I really really wanted one. for why? for no better reason than that of everyone else who's realised the fantasy and joined the tribe - because it's cool.

there are, probably, a few people who've found the umpteen gigabytes of mobile storage space in a wallet-sized minimalist white box a heaven-sent boon - people whose work, perhaps, benefits from their being able to say to someone - you know, that track from the Carl and the Klingons debut album that sounds exactly like track four from Led Zeppelin III - and then being able to provide concrete evidence, there and then, at the touch of a little white wheel. but these people, let's face it, are both few and far between and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather sad.

no, the point is, not what's on it, but simply the owning it, and, by so doing, belonging to that special tribe of people whose taste and discernment is en-branded in the brand. except that, to judge by the sheer numbers of thirteen-year-olds who are sporting the post-Christmas white earbud look this year, it's actually become as exceptional and distinctive to sport an iPod as to wear Nike trainers and chew gum. any brand of gum.

whatever it is that accounts for this triumph of brand-marketing is irrelevant. of course, the design and the interface and the sound quality, compared with the closest of its competitors, is miles ahead. of course it is. it's an apple. but, actually, if, like me, what you want is occasionally to enjoy the experience of music playing inside your head at a really good sound quality - whether you're on the move or not - no mp3 player is ever going to hold a candle to a good CD player - it's in the nature of the compressed sound-file to degrade the sound quality in the compression. absolutely the only practical argument for opting for an mp3 player over a cd player is the increased storage space. and, whereas I can see that it would be nice, if, say, I were about to embark on a three-year-long backpacking trip around the world twice to be able to include in a space no larger than my wallet the entirety of my cd collection plus the option of an ongoing multitude of catch-up downloads, I can't see that I'd ever find that particularly useful, since, even when I spend the entirety of a year in my own home, I never listen to more than a fraction of the cd's in my racks, and, more often, find myself listening to the same cd, not to say the same track, over and over again for weeks, if not months at a time. the fact that I could, if I so wished, listen to anything at all - and, at the current 60 gigs that's seriously possible - would, in my own case, be paralysingly prohibitive. there is such a thing as too much choice.

actually, I find the idea of filling a 60Gb iPod a tad scary - just how much music, how many photographs, how many videos does a person need to carry around with them?
which segués neatly back to that 'want' versus 'need' thing: of course no-one 'needs' that, but needing is not the point - wanting is. wanting to fill that cool white rectangular icon of cool with the stuff that makes it yours - that defines you, that characterises you, that displays your taste out there on that discreet coloured screen - that distinguishes you from that dork in the adjacent seat on the tube who's listening to Status Quo, for godsake!

the iPod is the ultimate bling on the urban armour - that defensive psychic overgarment that everyone who inhabits a city is obliged to don before leaving their home or risk utter madness at the sheer mayhem of the sensory assault that begins the moment they open the front door.

so if, like me, you're fortunate enough to live somewhere where the drive to anywhere is through fields and hills rather than through concrete canyons, it really doesn't make any sense at all to want to detach your senses from the matter at hand. indeed, I find myself less and less inclined to listen to music in the car at all, preferring to listen to the endlessly entertaining (if increasingly daft) interlocutions of my inner voices.

so have I talked myself out of my disappointment?

have I fuck.

"The US report ... said several studies had found an association between drinking and advertising ..."

erm - sorry - am I missing something here?

endurance

the capacity to endure ranks high in the category of life-skills that tend, like the capacity to be generous, to enlarge rather than diminish us.

life (apart from that experienced by our beloved leaders and slebs, of course) is normally hard - it's something that's always come with the territory, whether that's been the early days of trying to stay alive on the savannah or, more recently, having to deal with the anguish of breaking our fingernails on the wheels of our iPods. the hardness is punctuated by moments of lesser hardness - happiness, pleasure, contentment, joy, even - but these are not the norm. the norm is hard. always has been. always will. if it's not hard in the brutal survival sense, in the sense of having to do back-breaking work from dawn to dusk in order to put food on our family's table (the norm, that is, for the greater part of the planet's population) it's hard in the comparative sense - the price 'we' pay for having chosen a competitive rather than a co-operative system as the engine of our socio-economic existence. no matter how hard we try to improve our lot, in whatever sense we might understand 'improvement', we are doomed to failure, since the measure of our success is, by definition, a shifting thing, tied to a vacillating set of indicators as volatile as any trade index, endlessly receding down a road which we are bound to follow, endlessly, fruitlessly, because the promise will only ever be fulfilled tomorrow, when we reach the vanishing point.

endurance is part of the hard, which is why 'we' have developed so many artificial softening strategies: anaesthetic, distraction, denial, inter alia. drugs, normally, play a large part, as do a glorious mishmash of entertainments, some of which, ironically, are about sitting in our reinforced sofas watching others endure things - either in the 'pushing their bodies to the limits of their endurance' sense, or in the 'limiting their self-esteem to the point of enduring maximum humiliation in order to claim their moment of fame' sense.

endurance and patience - nature's beta-blockers.

the one - probably the only - experience that will soften the hard, cushion the crash, compensate for all the endurance, is the unconditional love - if reciprocated - of another human being.

sadly, many humans, especially in England, seem to have to settle for the supposedly unconditional love of an animal - a dog, a cat, a goldfish - when that of a person fails to materialise. this is called transference. (no it's not, you idiot, but it might as well be; if you still give credence to the repressed ravings of the jawless Viennese - no offence, and thanks for the unconscious, siggie - you might as well go the whole hog.) all else - the drink, the drugs, the hobbies, the obsessions, the package holidays, the clubs, the cars, the gadgets, the gizmos, the big macs, the praying (o lordie the praying!), the subscriptions, the flag-waving, the piercings, the yoga, the fan forums - is in some part a substitute for this one significant lack, this hole that cannot be filled, however hard we might try, by anything else.

eeny meeny miny mo




there's a lot to be said for good manners.

people generally respond warmly to 'please' and 'thank you' and to the kind of jokey deference in doorways - after you, no, after you, please, I insist - that actually happens in England, much to the puzzled amusement of the rest of the planet. at the root of politeness, though, is a philosophical view of the world that is prepared to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, and that expects tit for tat when it comes to the diurnal dealings, as in 'do unto others as you would be done by.' there's a distasteful residue of autocratic paternalism in it - a 'gentleman', I recall, is defined by some Victorian novelist (George Eliot, I think) as someone who would never deliberately cause suffering to man, woman, or beast - but anyone who's ever been politely patronised by an English gentleman will admit that, for all his insufferable pomposity, it beats being arbitrarily insulted by an American immigration official for no better reason than that he didn't like the way you looked at him.

sticks and stones.

all mothers recite that mantra as if it were true.

but words are never 'just' words. the word 'freedom', for instance, has been added, with Microsoft's collusion, to the list of words which automatically flag a user's ISP account when typed into a Chinese search-engine. there are, however, some words and phrases that I don't, personally, like.

I don't like the phrase 'spazz out', for instance - as in 'Thom really spazzes out when he's performing Idioteque live' - because I used to have a friend whose child was afflicted with cerebral palsy - a so-called 'spastic' - whose uncontrollable limb movements and garbled speech are the reference for that descriptive phrase. I hate to think that, whenever anyone uses the phrase, 'spazz out', they're passively jeering - however thoughtlessly - at Gabriel's appearance and behaviour. I'm equally disconcerted by the widespread use of 'retard' as a mocking put-down of anyone who manifests stupidity - whether as a hereditary trait, genetic flaw, or social gaff - for much the same reason.

it happens to be the case, despite the fact that difference is the norm, despite the fact that there are far more ways in which we as individuals are different from a random collection of our fellow-humans than ways in which we are similar, that, so long as the smallest crack of distinction appears to distinguish one set of people from another, there's going to emerge a sub-set of people purporting to represent the set that considers itself superior, somehow, to the other, who will jemmy into that crack with all the resources they can muster in order to enlarge it into a chasm.

it begins in the playground with the 'norms' name-calling the 'fatties' and continues into so-called maturity with all the insults accrued historically around the diseased dogs of prejudice and bigotry. so you may insult me by nationality (paki, tinker, frog), sexuality (motherfucker, cocksucker, dyke), race (yid, raghead, sand-monkey) - and by several categories besides that are to communication as toilet-training is to development - something that ought to belong in the late-infant stage of behaviour, along with a fascination with poo and wee and where it comes from, but, alas, as so much else in the retarded (proper use, this time) canon of cultural affect, tends to become embedded way past its expiry date in the absence of grownup guidance.

I particularly dislike the word 'nigger'.

exactly why is difficult to say. my parents had no problem with it. in fact, the only problem they have with it now is that their children chide them for using it. "eeny meeny miny mo, catch a ..." "mum!" in my case (I don't presume to speak for my siblings, although I don't believe either of them would ever use the word) I've come to believe that the word 'nigger' encapsulates, in a single word, the entire weight of historical atrocity that began with the mass enslavement of millions of West African people in the early eighteenth century and their incorporation as wholesale bonded labour into the burgeoning capitalist economies of Europe and North America. I've come to believe that that unforgiveable appropriation by our two cultures - the European and the American - leaves us permanently, and literally, indebted to the descendents of those slaves, since a significant portion of our economic success was established on their unpaid labour. that belief comes from the experience of growing up in the 'sixties, when, to me and to many of my contemporaries, our thoughtless participation in the endemically racist culture to which we subscribed was challenged by the events surrounding the rapidly emerging black civil rights movement. much was achieved, then, through the selfless efforts of a multi-coloured grouping of men and women who dedicated their lives - and, in some cases, gave their lives - to the re-ordering of the social consensus into a more equitable racial distribution.

one of the only two black people I know in this tiny but perfectly formed country town I live in in Somerset is a young man who is a member of a hip-hop group - an incongruous phenomenon here (in the sense that the urban black culture it emerges from and relates to is a good ninety-minute bus ride away - in Bristol - and, en route, you could count the number of black faces you'd encounter on the fingers of one hand) but nevertheless rather a good one, I think. not my thing usually - well, why would it be? - but I have high hopes for them. they're this close to a record deal ... the group consists of seven guys - two black, five white. clearly, between them (they've all grown up together, been to the same schools, shared the same experiences) race is not an issue. the word 'nigger' is employed quite frequently in their lyrics - as it is by a large number of hip-hop artists - almost as a synonym for 'man', as in 'hey, man/nigga, how's it gon' down.'

a 'nigger' was the term by which the slavemasters came to describe their black (niger - Latin - black) cargo - a tool of production whose life was valueless except in so far as it benefited his or her white master. it is an anachronistic term - a shameful reminder of a shameful period in human history. I believe it's actually illegal, now, to use it as a racial insult. and yet we are led to understand that these young blacks are using either 'nigra' or 'nigga' amongst themselves as a term of endearment. so what does this new generation of black artists who claim somehow to have re-cycled it, disinfected, as it were, by art, intend by making it part of the culture of black youth? is there, indeed, intent, or is it just a tragically misguided provocation?

the latter, of course.

the time-honoured course of escape from the black ghetto has been through music and sport - the blues, boxing, basketball. it's obviously racist to deduce from this that blacks are 'naturally' better in these areas - the brute truth is that, for want of any but the remotest hope of success in the more white-dominated professions - has there ever been a black dentist in Surrey, let alone in Alabama? - blacks have had to channel their energies into those fields where success was not colour-dependent. and where are two men more equal than in the boxing ring? slowly, slowly, things have improved. but, in a culture in which a young black guy is still far more likely - by orders of magnitude - to be harassed by the police than his white friends, and where unemployment amongst black youth is still much higher than amongst white, the attractions of musical or sporting success still obtain as strongly as ever.

alas, for every young hip hop artist who manages to secure a contract, there are tens of thousands who are left to live in their dust, where being a 'nigger' - spell it whichever way you like, it still sounds and smells the same - can never be anything other than what it has always been - a powerless victim of a form of semantic oppression that is only further legitimised by its use, however ironically, by the oppressed. it is fundamentally misguided and staggeringly arrogant to think that it can be revived as an equivalent, amongst blacks, to 'mate', or 'dude' without there being a terrible price to pay, in terms of self-esteem, in the larger black community, where its use is only associated with racial insult. hopefully it's one of those tasteless fashion things that will quickly get consigned to the dustbin of history - sooner rather than later, before usage normalises it, because ignorance of history has never been a defence against history's very nasty habit of repeating itself.

I abhor censorship. I believe that the vilest, the most obnoxious opinions imaginable, should be freely accessible - published, broadcast, publicly aired - because I nurse a tenacious belief in the fundamental decency of the majority of people, whose reaction to such opinions is the same: to vilify and condemn them. the British BNP and National Front have been totally marginalised more as a result of grassroots activism and ridicule than any form of official intervention. I wouldn't thank anyone whose well-meaning censorship of the racist's right to free speech prevented me from giving them a verbal horse-whipping. there's not much sport in it, but if there's an 'r' in the month and you can't flush a fox, any young vermin will do, doncha know.