the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Just as I posted yesterdays blog, I remembered a quote that summed up rather neatly the point I had been trying making so inelegantly. Actually, I sort of half-remembered it, meaning I couldn’t remember who said it, only that it had been said and that it was pertinent. But thanks to wikipedia (to which I donate and would urge you to as well), I not only have the quote, but also the context in which it was uttered:

The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.^[1][2] In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

So being unable to define a thing, but still be able to recognise it, might’ve been seen as progressive in 1964, but in the culture wars of the 2023, it has been co-opted by ‘snowflakes’ who have inverted it so it is now regressive. A ‘snowflake’ is someone wikipedia describes thusly;

“Snowflake” is a derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.

One sort of expects this from young people, after all it is part of being young that one look at the world their parents and their parents have created and find faults with it, and seek to remedy those faults. Every young person ever has done it. It’s how societal change happens and indeed needs to happen but with a sense that everybody is on board with it. An example being same-sex marriage. Britain in the 1950’s was not the Britain of of 2000’s. Attitudes and social mores changed, possibly too fast for some, not fast enough for others, but just right for most. The ‘Goldilocks’ theory of social change.

This has been abandoned so now something can be denounced as wrong by those looking to find wrongs, but without any consensus that this is so (a Twitter generated storm doesn’t count), and then immediately demand that the perceived wrong is not only corrected, but that every trace of it in recent history is expunged.

But what seems so inexplicably perverse about the all this, is that the very people one might’ve expected to be defending diversity of opinion together with an understanding that nuance exists, championing science based evidence and notionally being liberal, are doing the very opposite. It seems that old divides and values of the left and right which I for one had taken as a given, no longer exist. This is because right – in the sense of not being wrong – is so vehemently contested and liable to seemingly arbitrary change. And because this seems increasingly to be the case – the almost totalitarian idea that who who you are and more importantly, how you feel about things, has greater cultural cachet and influence than those who with almost perverse obtusity, cling to the wrong – consensus is more unachievable than ever.

One thinks of Suzy Izzard’s ‘ Circle of Cool’, the notion that there is a circle of cool and at at the back of the circle is where something ultra cool and groovy morphs into looking like a dickhead. So in a less funny, less looking cool but very much looking like a dickhead kind of a way, the ultra-liberal left morph into very extreme right wingers.

Last night my partner and I were engaged.

I know she’ll read this, so to forestall her brutal realignment of my gender by the repeated and prolonged introduction of her feet to my man bits, we were of course engaged in conversation. You know, the kind that where you can’t exactly how you arrived at a certain point, one which causes you to look back wistfully to a more live and let live world. A world where one didn’t exactly accept things so much as innately understood that just because you didn’t like something, you had a choice. That choice being either to ignore it, and to tut loudly to yourself, or to become Mary Whitehouse and call for it to be banned. A part of the social contract that helps gel society together, a shared but unspoken acknowledgment that one day that one day the your likes might easily be someone else’s dislikes. But then as Mrs.Thatcher said, there was no such thing as society, and as we all know, history has been kind to her.

My partner was telling me about working as an usher at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden many years ago, back in the mists of time, probably when the mists were probably caused by cigarette smoke. Imagine that children, smoking indoors! Shocking! Adults just left to get on with things and enjoy being being adults because it hadn’t yet dawned on someone that just because something they didn’t like was happening, then it should be stopped from happening. Anyway, she told me about one performance she’d ushered where the performer had shit in a bucket.

What was shocking to me wasn’t just that they’d timed it just right so that they could shit on cue, or had taken care only to eat foods that made such precision possible. No what was really shocking that this wasn’t considered shocking by the Theatre, the audience or the staff then – well not to a placard waving mob outside the Roundhouse extent anyway – and that to us both in2023. Yes there are things that are shocking, but shitting in a bucket isn’t one of them. It might be distasteful, but whilst it might be visually unpleasant there is artistry involved. Not my thing, but hey, carry on.

This made me think of Joanna Cherry because according to the BBC and others;

SNP MP Joanna Cherry is threatening to take legal action against an Edinburgh venue which cancelled a Fringe show in which she was due to appear.

She says she will take “whatever legal action is necessary” unless The Stand admits that it acted unlawfully, issues an apology and reinstates the event.

The venue had cancelled the show after staff said they were not comfortable with her views on transgender issues.

The very idea of an arts venue being somehow being prisoner to the feelings of its staff seems to be as ludicrous as it is chilling. How is this not censorship dressed up as ‘safeguarding’? Just because you’re not comfortable with someone’s views doesn’t make those views any more or less problematic, you become the problem by dint of trying to prevent those views from being expressed in the first place.

Giving that power to staff is to fundamentally abdicate any notion of freedom of choice by the venue management. The choice of an audience mainly. Or the choice of the staff concerned to consider that maybe, just maybe, they’re in the wrong job, that maybe working in an arts venue isn’t always going to be finger painting for the under 5’s and balloon sculpting workshops. That possibly an arts venue is exactly the sort of place one might hear their views challenged, and that equally possible, their views should be challenged. People proclaim they believe in free speech right up until the point that they disagree with what the person wants to say, and then it isn’t free speech anymore, because they believe in free speech, of course they do, but this isn’t it.

Mind you, good job they weren’t working at the National Film Theatre when we were hosting the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in the ’90’s. Some of the films…

I wish to apologise to anyone who read my “the shit in the shit on the shitter post’ read the warning that presaged it, and were understandably disappointed to read on only to discover that it wasn’t as gross as they’d hoped. I can only assure them I’ll try and redeem this shocking lack of toilet based obscenity with todays effort, which reading back now before posting is nowhere near as gross as advertised. In my defence, I’m on holiday and therefore can’t draw upon inspiration from Viz’s Profanasurus,

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The body is a wonderful thing, so wonderful that we in fact take it for granted. We give no thought to the frankly miraculous ability for the skin to immediately begin to repair itself after being cut. Or the fact that all broken ribs need is some tight bandaging and rest. Or indeed elasticity, a phenomena whereby by the brain basically heals itself. I could go on, but you get the point. And if the point is your body telling you in unmistakeable terms that you need to eat more fruit and vegetables, you know two things for sure. First being, if its gotten to this state of affairs, any remedial action you take now will only have future benefits and secondly, your body will emit sounds that no human should.

Initially, you’ll notice that you are expending a lot of effort without any commensurate result. We’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, the one’s when feel you’ve extruded a turd the size and girth of a baby’s arm, are sometimes lucky enough to feel still leaving your body as it enters the water, only to see an empty pan meeting your expectant gaze Disheartening doesn’t begin to cover it, and even bother to pretend that you don’t have a Scooby what I’m on about. Because you do. But we’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, what I mean is when you’ve sat on the toilet for so long that your arse goes numb but the water below remains untouched. The air, however doesn’t.

There are many sounds one hears, all of them amplified by the wondrous acoustic properties of covered porcelain and to which I’ve spent rather too much time distracting myself by trying to describe the many sounds of a grumpy sphincter.can make. First off there’s the bog standard one, which sounds rather like like the noise a balloon makes when you slowly let air out it. A sort of high pitch squeak which if you emitted on a boat far out to sea, would be mistaken by dolphins as a mating call. Or if you were elsewhere in the house, perhaps thoroughly engrossed in a good book, might hear and think ‘Ah good, the mousetraps are working.’

Then there are the ones that sound like someones trying to open a door whose hinges haven’t been oiled. Ever. The sort of sound that would be followed by a blood curdling scream in a horror movie. Then there are the strange gurgling noises that issue forth from somewhere below the belly button, but one isn’t sure where exactly. The sort of gurgling sound that conjures thoughts of a mad scientists house and beakers full of foaming green liquid. I start to while away the boredom by wondering exactly how high pitched a dog whistle needs to be, or at what point a humans ear starts to bleed. Anything other than focus on the fact that not much of anything is happening, but consoling myself that I’m in the right place if it does.

When this aural hoax happens, I take comfort in the knowledge that every single human being ever has experienced this. That every person who has ever lived has looked up at the same moon, gazed upon the same sun, felt grass beneath their feet, felt oddly uncomfortable when they see a couple where the female is taller than the male and whose arse has sounded like the last sound a dying bird makes.

Humpty Dumpty used words as and when he liked, with no regard for their meaning, deciding on what they meant according to his own whims. Brian is exactly the same. According to the BBC news site:

King Charles added that he and his wife would now rededicate their lives to “serving the people of the United Kingdom, the Realms and Commonwealth”

How exactly are they planning to do this? Is he going to volunteer one day a week as a teaching assistant at an inner city primary.? Is she going pull all night shifts as a hospital porter at an NHS hospital. No. He just spouts the same old guff and expects us tug our forelocks, bow so much that our noses are scraping the floor and unquestioning believe him. Goebbels maxim regarding telling a big enough lie often enough that it becomes true springs to mind whenever I hear about the ‘hardworking royals’. A single mother who lives on benefits and struggles to feed her family is hard working. A fireman is hardworking. Someone whose most difficult decision each day is what colour tie to wear when he cuts a ribbon for some charity set up just as a tax dodge by isn’t anything other than dressing up and pretending.

The only person he’s ever served is himself. Oh, and that nice old man at the drop in centre that the PR team helped set up once.

As the title suggests, this is not something to read if you are eating.

Don’t say I didn’t warned you.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and indeed it does. I’ve discovered loads of new, irrational prejudices that would’ve remained unknown to me if I stayed at home. But thankfully there are a few remaining grains of sand with which to bedevil my seaside idyll.

One of them is the ever present conspiracy of bed manufacturers. They seem incapable of comprehending the idea that some people are over 6ft tall, and as most can’t take off their legs and prop them by the side of the bed, might need a bed that allows for this. Generously, I might add. It is as much use as a cement football to make beds that are not only small, but also have restraints at the foot of them. Meaning that not only is the bed too small, you can’t even stretch your legs out over the end. You are effectively imprisoned. And why this bizarre affectation for memory foam mattresses? As far as I can tell, the only memory a memory foam mattress has is of every one who’s ever slept on it.

And bed withs are another bugbear…

But nowhere near as infuriating as toilets that are so manifestly unsuited to the task they’re meant to facilitate, it almost makes me believe in the devil and that he’s somehow possessed the minds of plumbers when they install bathrooms.

Take this morning. Without going into detail, (which means I’m about to) I prefer to toilet sitting down for both activities, and for the second of these, being able to spread my legs as far as possible. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t much care for extruding potentially very messy objects out of my body only to have them squashed together at the point of exit and make even more of a mess. (Imagine someone really tightly swashing together a Nutella sandwich. Or perhaps don’t.) I know. Silly me for not wanting to be shitty me.

But the toilet in this place has been sandwiched between a wall and the bath. Between the wall and my left leg there is but the width of two of my calves. On the right, even less, resulting in the less than edifying spectacle of me hoisting the leg into the bath and leaning over to my left to successfully complete the matter in hand. Made all the more difficult when there is a growing sense of urgency about things.

I warned you.

Have just caught the end of ‘celebration concert’ at Windsor Castle, the one to mark Brians ability to sit on a chair and wear a hat. You know, the Windsor Castle the taxpayer paid to have rebuilt after it was nearly burnt to the ground. That one. Mind you, its a good job Brian doesn’t know any smokers.

Anyway, Kate Perry was bothering peoples ears and wearing something that was truly out of this world. Really. The last time anyone had seen that material it had been covering the NASA Lunar Rover on the surface of the moon, but I guess NASA and Lunar sort of told you it wasn’t in the deep oceans.

Then Take That came on and I thought ‘Blimey, the years haven’t been kind to Mark Owen have they?’ He used to be the sweet faced good looking one. But now, not so much. Long hair and cuban heels on a man over 40 is not a good look. Howard or Jason, the one that isn’t Gary or Robbie anyway, looked like he was the sort of bloke that should be helping police with their enquiries.

And not since ‘Live Aid’ have I seen Brian so unconvincingly look like he was enjoying himself. One of the Junior leeches was there. In a suit and tie, of course. What else would a 9 year old boy wear to a concert. And it certainly put the con into concert. Compulsory fun, the audience being told how great x was, how brilliant y was. It made me mad.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that someone has liked my last blog post who I didn’t even know got them anymore, I’d be pulling someone’s hair out by now

You know how sometimes you have a feeling when after you’ve seen something and you just feel sullied by the mere fact of bearing witness to it? That in some unknowable way you’ve betrayed yourself, have let yourself down, are less of a person. I had thankfully never encountered that feeling before. I can’t write that now.

I am currently in Southwold with my partner and her 92 year old mother, ostensibly to have a break by the sea, but specifically so her mum could watch the coronation on a big TV and generally be made a fuss of. This was her third coronation and because her mum has hearing problems, was oblivious to my less than forelock tugging directors commentary.

And there was a lot to be less than forelock tugging over. Where to start? There was just so much ridiculousness to chose from. The very idea of a supposedly forward looking, notionally egalitarian nation still having a monarchy for starts. And that nation more than happily closing off some of its capital city so a a bloke could sit on a chair, put on a hat that even Liberace would baulk at, and all the time wear a pained expression on his face, rather like that of someone whose trying to hold in a really large fart. That would be the same bloke who constantly bangs on about how modern Britain is now multi-cultural and therefore multi-faith, but see’s nothing hypocritical whatsoever in being crowned defender of a faith that most people don’t share. A faith moreover that was explicitly created by one of his predecessors so he could get a divorce.

And a faith, which like them all, reinforces the notion of a higher power, that we are merely their humble servants and our duty is to pledge allegiance to it. In the 21st Century? I mean if the higher power were money or fame, fine, I’d buy that. But an invisible being like Santa? Except that you get presents when you’re alive with Santa, you don’t have to die first. And writing of death I’ve not seen people move so slowly since I helped out at an old peoples home back in my 6th Form days. The whole ceremony could’ve been over in a fraction of the time if people faster than asthmatic geriatrics, there’d been much less singing and less pot pourri. Or poo pourri. Or was it popery her mum was harrumphing about? One of them anyways.

But enough of that, ‘The Big Country’ is on the telly, Leech and Mackay have just had their fight and there’s the duel between McKay and Hennessey over Jean Simmons soon. Epic.Timeless. Proper majesty.

I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but this is due some good reasons and a less good reason. In the former category are two week long holidays by the sea, while in the latter is the fact I’ve been feeling suicidally depressed.

Not that I want to commit suicide I hasten to add but rather that what depresses me most is that others haven’t.

Some of them are handily gathered at COP 27. I thought it’d all packed up and gone home, everyone clutching their macrame goody bags and brimming with an invigorated sense of superior self-righteousness but no, they’re still there, all 35,000 of them, earnestly discussing how something needs to be done by someone else to avoid something no-one wants. To do anything about if all of the previous COP conferences are anything to go by. I mean, has anything substantial been achieved, other than some politicians getting selfies with film stars? Yes, there’ve been protocols and agreements, fine speeches and urgent calls for action but the last time I checked things were getting worse.

Thats what makes me mad is the fact that people in a position to do anything about it didn’t and instead of advocating for necessary changes that might slow the rate of climate change, rather sought to discredit the science they knew to be true – mainly because they’d commissioned it themselves – and argued for an increase of the things they knew to be causing climate change. When exactly ‘Big Oil’ knew is a matter of opinion. Some say 1959. Others go with sometime in the 60’s. The more charitable go with 1977.

Whatever.

Back to COP 27, They’ve been having one of these sandal summits every year sine 1992. Did you know that? I didn’t. And I don’t know what the point of this one is either, apart from young people claiming hey’ve been denied a future that is. A future which, thanks to their parents wilful selfishness in having them in the first place, is growing increasingly uncertain. So whilst doing something, cutting down on doing something else and stopping doing something else altogether is all well good, consuming less still involves consuming. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, the earths human population is far too big. We need a cull, let’s say at age 70, because if you haven’t achieved everything you want to achieve by then, you’re never going to. Knowing there was going to be a cull for everyone on their 70th birthday might actually focus minds. Also no new births allowed from August 2023 until 2043.

Essentially old fuckers need to die and younger fuckers need to stop fucking lest they fuck us all up more than they already have.

We’re fucked enough as it is.

I must confess that up until recently I never had any strong feelings about Judi Dench. Indeed she must’ve thought about me about as often as I though about her. I had though we could continue in this happy state of mutual indifference until one of us died, but alas no.

It turns out that she wrote a letter to ‘The Times’ newspaper – do people still do that – to complain about the forthcoming season of ‘The Crown’, you know, the one no-one has seen yet. Anyway she worries that “a significant number of viewers, especially overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true”

Yes those people who need to made aware in the most obvious way that ‘The Crown’ isn’t a documentary, its a work of fiction.

Like ‘M’ was in all those Bond films, albeit without such lavish sets.

Maybe its just me, what with me having a brain injury and everything or possibly the fact that I’m a demented wrongcock or even that I’m just the sort of warped individual who finds irony in what most would accept is a far from ironic situation. Or is it fact that I lived through the 1980’s and whole Mrs. Thatcher era of firm government and so can’t but help find some grim pleasure in all of this. What comes around and all that. Yes, I’m sure its that.

The catastrophic economic situation that the Tories have plunged this country into didn’t happen overnight. This has been has been years, decades in the making. Not that it was a desire for Mrs.Thatcher to bring about the current chaos, but rather the wholly inevitable result of a belief in the infallibility of the markets, that their ruthless profit based logic was a welcome panacea to what she saw as the failure of the state.

Essentially, the markets were impartial actors, with no interest in social policy and were thus best placed to determine the direction the country should take. According to right-wing economic polices (and I’m massively simplifying here), should the markets take fright at some aspect of economic policy a government was pursuing, they would react accordingly. You know, by doing exactly the sort of thing we’re seeing now, and although this isn’t as dire as Black Wednesday, its dire enough. The value of the £ falling, making government borrowing on the bonds markets more expensive. Interest rates going up. Billions spent trying to fix things resulting in probable tax rises and public sector spending cuts.

For many years the Tories endlessly trotted out the lie that the financial sector was an industry in which UK plc should be proud. They cut regulations, claiming it increased competitiveness in the markets. Labour either believed this or believed the markets did, because when they came to power in the late ’90’s things continued apace. The markets were left alone, despite scandal after scandal. The global financial crisis and the ensuing bailout didn’t stop some in the markets making eye-watering sums while everyone else suffered. The film ‘The Big Short’ explains how and why, but essentially some people bet things were going to turn out the way they did. Richie Sunak knows all about this. He set up his own investing firm so he could better get his nose in the trough.

Anyway now we find ourselves in the middle of shitshow that the markets have created. The markets which we were constantly assured were impartial, which would never do what they’re doing and dictating who or what political choices are open to us. I writes ‘us’knowing full well that ‘us’ has a very narrow definition indeed. If we’re ‘lucky’ about 160,000 Conservative members and if we’re really ‘lucky’ a new PM could be elected by 357 Conservative MP’s before ‘Eastenders’ on Monday night.

Obscenely the only way we can get out of this economic maelstrom is by placating and pandering to those very same markets and the 357 know this better than anyone. Possibly because some of them they hope to work for them soon.

It’s as ironic as Boris’s Johnson becoming our next PM