Author: MrM0untfield

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When Raquel ruled

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress.  Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego.  Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles.  Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers.  This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming.  Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

 

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her.  Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since.  Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

 

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist.  Why?  Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam.  Which makes sense.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission.  Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence.  Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

 

Yes, it’s all very silly.  In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible.  But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

 

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs.  The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage.  Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch.  Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s.  It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

 

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career.  I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films.  Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

 

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969).  However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.  Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him.  Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

 

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero.  Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed.  The cast is excellent too.  In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle.  You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

 

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings.  Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

 

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western.  It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965).  And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

 

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

 

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured.  The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring.  But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero.  Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher.  The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists.  There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

 

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

 

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s.  He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers.  The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen.  Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy.  At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic.  They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous.  With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work…  But somehow, they do.

 

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos…  And so on.  Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed.  But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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Singapore unmasked

 

From unsplash.com / © Brian Asare

 

Earlier this month Singapore’s Ministry of Health announced that it no longer perceived Covid-19 as a threat and the city-state’s ‘disease-response level’ would be lowered from ‘green’ to ‘yellow’.  For those people visiting Singapore, this means they no longer have to buy Covid-19 travel insurance, and visitors not fully vaccinated no longer have to show test results to prove their uninfected status.  It also looks like Singapore’s Trace Together app – something I had to constantly use when I arrived here a year ago, and without which I would probably have spent my first few months living on the streets – will be discontinued.  The most noticeable relaxation of all, however, is that, since February 13th, face-masks are no longer compulsory on Singapore’s public transport system. *

 

Thus, riding Singapore’s buses – as I normally do twice a day, to get to and from work – has been a strange experience during the past week.  I’ve had to mentally adjust to seeing the entirety of other passengers’ faces.  Not that all of them aren’t wearing masks now, of course.  A lot of passengers still are, mostly, I have to say, the Singaporeans ones.  It’s largely passengers from the country’s sizeable Western community who are suddenly, brazenly flaunting their facial features for the first time in a couple of years.

 

Perhaps I’m just odd, but I don’t actually mind people wearing masks around me.  The masks make me take more notice of their eyes, the windows of the soul, and create a general air of mystery.  “What marvellously alluring eyes that person has,” I might say to myself.  “But I wonder what lurks lower down, concealed by their mask?  Perchance a mouthful of Shane McGowan-style dental work?”  Such are the thoughts I entertain as I make the 45-minute bus journey to and from my workplace in central Singapore.  “Could that masked person be a gorgeous Singaporean equivalent of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman from Batman?  Or do they really resemble Lon Chaney Sr, from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)?”  And in fact, I’ve seen a number of articles in the past few years claiming that a Covid-19 mask adds to a person’s aura of attractiveness.

 

It’s no surprise that an East Asian country like Singapore has stuck with its mask mandate for so long (way after Western ones have abandoned them), and its population has happily complied with it.  Wearing a surgical mask when you’re unwell with something that might be contagious has never been a big deal in this part of the world.  It was one of the first things I noticed when I started working in Asia, in Japan back in 1989 – folk suffering from a cold or a dose of the flu would mask up to avoid passing something on to their fellow citizens.  Indeed, the surgical mask is so engrained on Japanese culture that there’s even a well-known figure of urban folklore, Kuchisake Onna, whose gimmick is that she wears one.  Since Kuchisake Onna is a homicidal spirit who takes the form of a seemingly beautiful woman, that mask has a macabre function.  It conceals a grotesquely widened mouth, its ends cut open as far as the ears.

 

© JollyRoger

 

Inevitably, the implementation of measures against Covid-19 was, in the West at least, immediately incorporated into the culture wars that these days rage between the right and the left in just about every area of politics and society.  The sort of people who rant and rave against woke universities, LGBT rights, asylum seekers, critical race theory, restrictions on gun ownership, taking action against climate change and, in the latest manifestation of right-wing insanity, the so-called ’15-minute city’, have spent the last three years rupturing their hernias about mask mandates, lockdown orders and Covid-19 vaccinations.  In the USA, millions of gun-toting, Trump-loving, QAnon-believing macho-men pooped their pants in rage when it was suggested that they don a small piece of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to prevent them getting a virus and, equally importantly, prevent them possibly passing it on to their fellow human beings. The very thought of such a thing was a violation of their rights and ’freeee-dum’, apparently.

 

The UK was also beset with Covid-19-induced whinging, most notably at alleged news station – though these days it’s more a drop-in centre for conspiracy-theory nutjobs – GB News.  Much of it emanated from GB News pundit and supposed archaeologist Neil Oliver, whose schtick is to stare ashen-faced into the camera for six, seven, eight minutes or more and deliver a doom-laden monologue of right-wing paranoia, dog-whistles, unsubstantiated claims and windy, overwrought rhetoric that his hard-of-thinking viewers probably think is Shakespearean.  He’s spent much of the pandemic lamenting about anti-Covid-19 measures and how, say, they’ve deprived children of a vital, communal story-telling tradition that’d hitherto existed unbroken since tribal campfires on the far side of the Ice Age.  Or some drivel like that.

 

© GB News / From indy100.com

 

Oliver’s nadir came in 2021 when he declared, “If your freedom means that I might catch Covid from you, then so be it.  If my freedom means that you might catch Covid from me, then so be it.”  And presumably, if the person who caught it from him was a highly-at-risk octogenarian or person with serious underlying health issues who didn’t want to catch Covid-19 from anybody…  Well, tough shit.  At least they’d die of the virus with their freedom intact, which was the important thing.

 

Then, swooping off into realms of total doolally-ness, Oliver likened the Covid-sceptic minority in Britain, himself included presumably, to the pilots who flew Spitfires and Hurricanes against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain: “They risked everything for freedom.”  Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the entire population of Britain during World War II surrender a whole bunch of their freedoms whilst trying to unite against, and overcome, an external threat?  I can’t imagine Oliver lasting long in London in 1940 if he’d insisted on having his houselights blazing every night because doing so was in the name of ‘freedom’.  Yeah, leave my rights alone, Mr Churchill!

 

Anyway, for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to wear a face-mask while I use Singapore’s public transport system.  I’ve had Covid but my partner hasn’t.  Though she’s fully vaxed and boostered up, she probably hasn’t developed the level of immunity to it that I have, and I’d hate to bring the thing home one day and pass it onto her.  Also, I’m not convinced we’re out of the woods yet with Covid.  I’m sure it’s possible that future, nasty variants will appear and wreak more havoc.  And thirdly, I’ll keep wearing my mask because it’s the sort of gesture that Neil Oliver would wholly despise.

 

And if it’s despised by him, it must be the right thing to do.

 

From unsplash.com / © Anshu A

 

* Face masks still have to be worn, though, in Singapore’s hospitals.

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More sinister sides of Singapore

 

© Epigram Books

 

A couple of months ago on this blog, I reviewed an anthology of horror stories set in modern-day Singapore called, appropriately, The New Singapore Horror Collection, written by local author S.J. Huang.  Now I’ve just finished reading a collection called Fright 1, containing 11 more scary stories set in the southeast Asian city-state, which my partner was kind enough to buy for me as a Christmas present.

 

Unlike The New Singapore Horror Collection, each story in Fright 1 is penned by a different person.  These 11 writers were the top-ranking entrants in a short-fiction competition held last year.  As the book’s introduction explains, Fright 1 “showcases the winners and finalists of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, and celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.”

 

The first thing that struck me about Fright 1 was the preponderance of female writers – eight out of 11.  This might be a surprise to the many people who’ve traditionally associated the horror genre with male writers, although anyone familiar with the work of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, May Sinclair, Daphne du Maurier, Anne Rice, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the criminally underrated Dorothy K. Haynes, to say nothing of Mary Shelley, would argue otherwise.  Thus, the collection was doubly interesting for me.  Not only did its stories have a setting, Singapore, that I’m not very familiar with, but many of its themes were ones that impact on women – arranged marriages, pregnancy, sexting and, generally, being wronged by duplicitous men.  These being horror stories, such themes are refracted through a lens that sends them into the realm of the supernatural and macabre.

 

Fright 1 gets off to a solid start with Meihan Boey’s The General’s Wife, which is set in past times and is about an unremarkable young woman (‘with crooked shoulders and a pockmarked face’) whose family are desperate to get her married off to someone, anyone, so that they no longer have to be responsible for her.  When a mysterious, older, wealthy man known as the ‘General’, living on one of Singapore’s little satellite islands, requests her hand in marriage for no obvious reason, they don’t ask questions.  She’s hurriedly packed off to the island.  What follows is a tale of skulduggery involving deceit and sorcery, with suggestions of Bluebeard and even Jane Eyre (1847), impressively told and grippingly paced.  My only criticism is that I found the ending slightly rushed, although it contains a satisfying hint that the story’s narrator is no longer the shrinking violet she used to be.

 

Also set in historical Singapore is Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree, which is about a kampung – the Malaysian term for village – that’s terrorised by a pontianak when it takes up residence by the tree of the title and starts making “agonised wails that pierced the night and made all the villagers rush to slam their windows shut, bolt their doors and hold each other tight.”  According to Wikipedia, a pontianak is a supernatural creature found in Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that “usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a child.  Alternatively, it is often described as a vampiric, vengeful female spirit.”  A woman in the village – evidently the only person there with a spine – resolves to go and tell the ponianak to, basically, shut up.  To her surprise, she finds herself developing a bond with the creature.  She also learns that they have more in common that she could ever have imagined.

 

Meanwhile, a non-folkloric and very modern supernatural being is devised for Kelly Leow’s story Breakwater.  This posits the idea that people subjected to extreme humiliation on social media, so that their lives are ruined, they end up living in shame and they vanish from their former social circles, actually, to a certain extent, ‘die’.  Not enough to leave behind a ghost, as many people believe happens when you physically die, but enough to create a semi-ghost, a ‘shade’.  Breakwater features a serial online-abuser being trailed, unbeknownst to him, by the shades of his former victims – one of which partly narrates the story.  I liked Breakwater a lot, not only because its central conceit feels genuinely new, but also because it’s set in Singapore’s East Coast Park.  The park is at the back of my residence and is an evocative place at night, one where, as Leow observes, “Cargo ships form a ghostly city out on the horizon, lights glittering in rows like the windows of apartments.”

 

Among the male writers represented, Teo Kai Xiang’s Untitled Train Story uses another well-known part of Singapore as its setting, the city’s MRT system.  Workers digging out a new MRT line discover a mysterious tunnel that seems to have existed a long time before trains began running underground.  It’s apparently man-made, its walls are covered in strange symbols, and it’s formed out of some ‘sleek and almost metallic black substance’.  I began the story wondering if it would turn into a Singaporean variant on H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal story Pickman’s Model (1927), which helped establish the trope, now common in the horror genre, of fleshing-eating, ghoul-like creatures living in secrecy under the streets of a modern-day city – see, for example, the movies Death Line (1973) and C.H.U.D. (1984).  Later, however, it becomes clear that Xiang’s story has more in common with a different strand of Lovecraft’s work – his tales of cosmic horror.  There’s something at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just deadly.  It also has the power to do disturbing things to the minds of those who encounter it and manage to survive.

 

For my money, however, the collection’s best tale is Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau, which in Malay means ‘green ghost’.  It’s narrated by a young girl who becomes obsessed with a ghost, a female one, that’s said to haunt her Singaporean public housing estate: “Some doubted her existence; merely a hyper-localised myth to get children to return early and in bed before eleven, but I knew she had always been here, biding her time.”  The story is atmospheric and also manages the important trick of making the reader both frightened of its ghost and sympathetic towards it.  At the same time, Chua makes it believable by lacing the supernatural plot with descriptions of the block and its assorted inhabitants (“Despite the decrepit state of some of the storeys, the residents were full of kindness and humanity”) and with accounts of the girl’s mum – a hard-pressed single mother whose desperate attempts to make money and keep them afloat gradually become shady and even criminal.  With its blend of the ghostly, the grittily realistic and an urban myth that might not be so mythical, Hantu Hijau reminded me slightly of the Clive Barker story The Forbidden (1986), which later became the basis for the Candyman movies.

 

Not quite everything in the collection was to my tastes.  I felt a few stories had rather too much happening for them to be properly frightening.  Also, a couple of times, the social issues being explored were used for ‘body-horror’ moments that had me thinking of films like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) – good, grotesquely-surreal fun, yes, but too far-fetched for the build-up that’d preceded them.  Maybe it’s just me.  I feel that to be truly scary, a story has to be at least partway believable.  But if it contains too many incidents, or too much over-the-top gloop, it becomes less believable and hence less scary.  Overall, though, I was impressed by Fright 1  and I strongly recommend it.

 

For the record, the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize judges ranked Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree as the third-best entry, Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau as the runner-up, and Kelly Leow’s Breakwater as the winner.  The collection can be purchased here, as can an audiobook version of it.

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Norm!

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

 

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives.  Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins.  Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former.  As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love.  Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

 

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go.  To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement.  From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

 

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky.  Morales survived and divorced him two years later.  For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

 

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott.  Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs.  Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

 

And yet…  I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees.  This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

 

© Rhinehart & Company

 

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II.  Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.  It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war.  The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot.  They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other.  In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union.  The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

 

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island.  If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

 

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word.  Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly,  Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’  It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

 

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process.  Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together.  However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park.  This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

 

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

 

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs.  Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot.  Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

 

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water.  At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam.  To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here.  About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself.  Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too.  At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person.  Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

 

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight.  This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine).  With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event.  It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country.  Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it.  And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

 

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good.  Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all.  And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest…  The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

 

Random House USA Inc

 

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.  Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously.  It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler.  Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

 

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish.  Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night.  Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book.  Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

 

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street.  He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

 

© Penguin Random House

 

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies.  Sounds good, yes?  Well, no.  The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987).  And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality.  It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

 

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’.  (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.)  Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this.  Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

 

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day.  This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die.  Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.”  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  “I made you come 16 times – in a night.”  “And none of them was any good!”

 

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad.  I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993).  Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange…  There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash.  Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel.  Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them.  Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff.  My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

 

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man!  Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!”

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

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Favourite Scots words, M-O

 

From wikipedia.org / Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

Burns Night falls this evening, with – by my calculations – 264 years having now passed since the birth of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns.  For many decades, January 25th witnessed one of the greatest ironies in Scottish culture.  All over the country, schoolchildren would be made to memorise, then get up and recite Burns’ poems in front of their classmates and teachers.  Those poems, of course, were written in the Scots language and thus were loaded with Scots vocabulary and grammar.  However, any other day of the year, if a schoolkid had dared to speak Scots in the classroom, they’d have received a teacherly reprimand: “No, don’t speak like that.  Speak proper English…”

 

Actually, a famous scene in William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, where the hero’s son gets battered by a teacher at school for daring to utter the Scots word sheuch (meaning ‘gutter’ or ‘ditch’), seems sadly credible.  At one time, speaking the language of Burns on a day that wasn’t Burns’ birthday was probably enough to get you belted in certain Scottish schools.

 

Anyway, here’s another slew of Scots words that I like – this time, starting with the letters ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘O’.

 

Makar (n) – a poet or bard.  In 2004, the Scottish Parliament established the post of ‘Scots Makar’, i.e., a national bard or poet laureate.  Since then, the post has been occupied by Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and, currently, Kathleen Jamie.

 

Malky (n/v) – a Glaswegian term meaning ‘a murder’ or ‘to murder’.  Research tells me that malky was originally a nickname for a razor used as a weapon, and to malky someone was to slash them with such a razor.  That said, the catchphrase of popular culture’s most famous depiction of Glaswegian crime and crime-fighting, “There’s been a murrr-der!” in the TV cop show Taggart (1983-2010), wouldn’t had the same impact if it’d been, “There’s been a malky!”

 

© STV Studios

 

Manse (n) – a manse is the house provided for a Church of Scotland minister, so basically it’s similar to a ‘rectory’ or ‘parsonage’.  Someone who grew up in a manse, because their father (or mother) was a Church of Scotland minister, is known as a son or daughter of the manse.  The Scottish Labour Party has, for some reason, given us several children of the manse, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Scottish Labour Party leader Wendy Alexander, and Wendy’s wee brother Douglas, a former cabinet minister.  Political children of the manse inevitably cite their backgrounds as evidence of their strong ‘moral compasses’, though I have to say in my time I’ve met a few inhabitants of the manse (children and parents) whose moral compasses have gone a bit wonky, usually after a few glasses of whisky.

 

Mawkit (adj) – extremely dirty.

 

Merle (n) – a blackbird.  I understand that merle is also the French word for ‘blackbird’, so presumably it’s another example of the linguistic legacy of the Auld Alliance that once existed between Scotland and France.

 

Messages (n) – shopping of the everyday variety, i.e., buying a few groceries rather than buying in bulk at Tesco or Sainsbury.  Hence the common expression: “I’m daein’ ma messages!”

 

Midden (n) – a dunghill.  A word often employed by Scottish parents while they complain about the condition of their teenage kids’ bedrooms.  Also, at one point, the celebrated British sci-fi comic 2000 AD featured a character who was a Scottish bounty hunter with a gruesomely mutated visage.  His name was Middenface MacNulty.

 

© Rebellion Developments

 

Mince (n) – nonsense. Hence such exclamations as “Och, ye’re talkin’ mince!” or “Yer heid’s fu ay mince!” or “See thon new Avatar movie? It’s mince!”

 

Ming (v) – to smell badly, with the present participle mingin’ used as adjective to mean ‘stinking’.  As a result, when I was a kid and watched the old Flash Gordon serials (1936-40) on TV, I could help wondering if the villainous Ming the Merciless was so named because of his fearsome body odour.  For a while, ming passed into popular usage all over Britain with a tweak in meaning, so that the word ‘minger’ became a common slang-term for describing someone who was ‘severely deficient in the looks department’.  But I don’t hear it used much nowadays.

 

Mowdie (n) – a mole.

 

Muckle (adj) – very big.  This adjective was immortalised in the much-loved children’s poem Crocodile by J.K. Annand, which begins: “When doukin’ in the River Nile / I met a muckle crocodile. / He flicked his tail, he blinked his ee, / Syne bared his ugsome teeth at me.”

 

Incidentally, here’s some pictures of a muckle crocodile I once met, at the side of the stairs going up to Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar.

 

 

Neb (n) – a nose, beak or projecting point.  Once upon a time, ladies of a certain age had to put up with uncomplimentary remarks about nebs whenever they played their Barry Manilow records on the household stereo.

 

Ned (n) – a young hooligan.  Depending on which story you believe, the word ned was derived from the term ‘never-do-well’ or was an acronym for ‘Non-Educated Delinquent’.  For a time in the early 2000s, it was ubiquitous in Scottish conversation, used as a label for any undesirable-looking youth with a penchant for wearing shell-suits, bling and Burberry-patterned caps and for swigging from bottles of Buckfast Tonic Wine.  Its popularity was no doubt increased by the ‘neds’ sketches in the famous Scottish TV comedy show of the era, Chewin’ the Fat (1999-2005).  Indeed, ned became the north-of-the-border equivalent of the word ‘chav’, used in England to describe ‘an anti-social lower-class youth dressed in sportswear’.  Just as with ‘chav’, there were fears that ned was being used to demonise all young, working-class people. If I remember correctly, the Scottish Socialist Party MSP Rosie Kane tried to have the word banned from the Scottish parliament in 2003.

 

But before the controversy, I remember hearing the word ned as long ago as the early 1980s.  Folk from Glasgow I knew would use it to describe anyone who was small, mouthy and annoying.  In that way, it wasn’t much different from the abusive Scots term nyaff, which urbandictionary.com defines as “a very irritating person.  When they come into the room, you want to leave.”

 

© Southern Television

 

Neep (n) – a turnip.  That’s why in the 1970s kids’ TV show Wurzel Gummidge (1979-81), Billy Connolly played a turnip-headed Scottish scarecrow called ‘Bogle MacNeep’.  Turnips and potatoes together on a plate are, of course, known as neeps an’ tatties.  Meanwhile, my American partner assures me that whenever I talk about neeps an’ tatties, it sounds to her like I’m describing something extremely lewd and filthy.  Goodness!  (Or better still, jings!)

 

Neuk (n) – a corner, including one – i.e., a bend – in the coastline.  The most famous geographical example is East Neuk in Fife.

 

From maps.google.com

 

Nip (n) – a short, sharp measure of alcoholic spirits, often whisky, though I’ve heard people talk about ‘nips ay gin.’  I’d always assumed that, when describing a measure of whisky and the spiky, tingling effect it had when you downed it, nip was synonymous with jag.  But looking online, I’ve seen claims that it comes from the word ‘nibble’, as if a nip is just a nibble at the cake that is the full whisky bottle.  Also, I’ve seen it attributed to the archaic word ‘nipperkin’, which was ‘a unit of measurement of volume, equal to one-half of a quarter-gill, one-eighth of a gill, or one thirty-second of an English pint’.

 

Nippie sweetie (n) – an irritable, sharp-tongued person.  This is usually applied to the female of the species.  Disgruntled Scottish Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labourites frequently fling the term nippie sweetie at Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon.

 

Numpty (n) – a stupid person.  To me, though, a numpty is more than that – it’s a preposterous, pompous person who is also stupid.  In In the Loop (2009), the movie spin-off from the satirical TV show The Thick of It (2005-12), the preposterous, pompous politician played by Tom Hollander becomes a laughing stock when the wall of his constituency office endangers public safety by toppling over.  Jamie MacDonald, the ferocious Motherwell-born spin doctor played by Paul Higgins, taunts him about ‘Wallgate’ by calling him ‘Humpty Numpty’.  (To quote MacDonald in full: “If it isn’t Humpty Numpty, sitting on top of a collapsing wall like some clueless egg c*nt.”)

 

© BBC Films / UK Film Council / Optimum Releasing

 

Offski (adj) – ‘away’, ‘leaving’, ‘going’, as in the common Glaswegian phrase, “I’m offski!”

 

Orraman (n) – in agricultural communities, an orraman was an odd-jobbing farmhand who’d muck out sheds, dig holes, put up fences, mend drystane dykes, lug bales of hay around, drive tractors and basically do whatever needed doing at the time. Now, with farming heavily mechanised, and with one farmer on a tractor (towing the appropriate machine) capable of doing what it took half-a-dozen people to do a few decades ago, the days of the orraman are probably past.

 

Oxster (n) – an armpit.  Dundonian poet Matthew Fitt deployed this word when he wrote the Scots-language translation of the 2013 Asterix-the-Gaul book, Asterix and the Picts.  In the original French text, Asterix’s hulking sidekick Obelisk made a joke about ‘oysters’.  Fitt converted it into a joke about oxsters / armpits to make it more Scottish-friendly.  As you do.

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Look, a sky-walker

 

 

Among female deities, surely few are more formidable than Simhavaktra, a gilded bronze representation of whom I recently encountered in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

 

The name Simhavaktra means ‘lion-faced’ and this leonine-faced she-deity, so the information panel told me, “strides over seas of blood which represent the world caught in an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.”  Important in Vajrayana Buddhism – the form of Tantric Buddhism that developed in India and elsewhere, most notably in Tibet – she’s a protector of Buddhists “in the higher realms”.  And she’s a dakini, which in Tibetan means a ‘sky-walker’, “who guides followers along the right path to enlightenment.”

 

All very well and good, but it’s Simhavatra’s garments that make the biggest impression.  She wears a cloak of flayed human skin, “symbolising the peeling away of surface appearances to reveal ultimate reality.”  Look carefully at her statue in the Asian Civilisations Museum and you’ll see that the arms of that expanse of skin are knotted around her throat, with their hands hanging on either side like gruesome tassels.  Check out her back and you’ll see the head of the poor bugger who donated this skin dangling from her nape, and at least one of his feet adorning the cloak’s bottom corner.

 

 

That skin cloak was presumably removed from its former owner by the tool Simhavaktra wields in her right hand, “a curved flaying knife with a vajira (thunderbolt) handle.”

 

Incidentally, I thought the Asian Civilisations Museum was one of the most attractive and interesting museums I’ve visited in a long while.  Expect to hear more about it in future posts on this blog.

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Not the best book from an 18-year-old Shelley

 

© Heperus Books

 

The genesis of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is well-known.  It was written by Mary Shelley in 1816 while she and her husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva as guests of Percy’s fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron.  Mary was 18 years old at the time and Frankenstein sprang out of a resolution by the group to each write a ‘ghost story’.  This was largely because the wet and dreary weather that summer prevented them from doing much outdoors.  Mary duly concocted Frankenstein, which of course is one of the seminal novels of the horror genre.  Also, while it certainly wasn’t the world’s first horror story, there’s a good case to be made that it was the first work of science fiction. Victor Frankenstein, after all, assembles his creature out of pieces of dead bodies and brings it to life using technology, not magic.

 

Actually, a joke I’ve seen on social media runs along these lines: Mary Shelley went off and invented science fiction so that she didn’t have to endure listening to Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley talking shite all summer.

 

I think Frankenstein is an amazing book, though a logically flawed one.  The creature is totally inarticulate when he comes into the world, but soon picks up the ‘lingo’ by spying on a room where a foreign woman is receiving language lessons and secretly learning alongside her.  Before long he’s able to read and understand a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and spends five whole chapters talking non-stop at his understandably flummoxed creator.  As someone who’s spent a good bit of his career teaching the English language to people, that’s a result I could only dream of.

 

Later, Victor Frankenstein retreats to a remote island in the Orkneys where he manages to find the body parts for, and assemble, a female mate for the creature without being noticed by the island’s inhabitants. He then ends up adrift in a boat that takes just one night to float all the way from the Orkneys to the coast of Ireland, and there the creature frames him for the murder of his best friend, Henry Clerval, whose body is discovered on the same coastline.  We last heard tell of Clerval in the central Scottish city of Perth, so how did the creature get his body to Ireland and know where to dump it?  After being freed, Frankenstein is collected by his elderly father, who makes a journey from Geneva to Ireland even though earlier we’d been told he was too infirm to travel between Geneva and Ingolstadt in Bavaria.

 

Yes, the fact that Mary Shelley was only 18 at the time does show through occasionally in Frankenstein’s plotting.  You get the impression she’s impatient to get on with the story, and move from one event to the next, and like any impulsive teenager isn’t too bothered about the logistics of how exactly she manages this.

 

But hey…  I’ve recently read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s short novel Zastrozzi (1811), which he had published at the age of 18 (though he wrote it a year earlier).  I have to say that compared with the scribblings of her teenaged husband, the teenaged Mary Shelley that’s suggested by Frankenstein is a model of good sense, decorum, level-headedness and maturity.

 

I’ve nothing against a good gothic potboiler and Zastrozzi begins in good-gothic-potboiler fashion. The mysterious but obviously villainous Zastrozzi of the title, and his two henchmen Bernardo and Ugo, abduct the book’s hero, Verezzi, from an inn near Munich and drive him off in a coach – or ‘chariot’ as the young Shelley insists on calling it.  They transport him while he’s asleep and the implication is that he’s been drugged, though this isn’t made clear – you’re left wondering of Verezzi is just an abnormally heavy sleeper.

 

Verezzi wakes up to find the three rogues imprisoning him inside a cavern – “Verezzi beheld the interior of this cavern as a place where he was never again about to emerge – as his grave.” – and Zastrozzi gets to inform him: “Resistance is futile.”  Yes, that’s the catchphrase of the Borg, from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94).  Subsequently, a violent thunder-and-lightning storm tears asunder the rock above the cavern and exposes it to the elements.  This doesn’t provide Verezzi with an opportunity to escape, as you might expect, but leaves him with a ‘burning fever’ and ‘delirious with a despairing illness’.  Verezzi is going to suffer a lot of despairing illnesses during this book.

 

Deciding it’d be a mistake to keep the ailing Verezzi in the cavern, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo convey him instead to a cottage ‘on an immense heath, lonely, desolate, and remote from other human habitation.’  Verezzi recovers and, this time, does manage to escape, though with his three persecutors giving chase.  He makes it to the Bavarian city of Passau, where he meets and is offered refuge by an old woman called Claudine, who’d suffered the death of her son just the previous week.  The work done by her son had provided Claudine with a little income and she’s quick to invite Verezzi to take the son’s place in return for board and lodgings in her humble cottage,

 

From British Literature Wiki

 

While Verezzi finds a temporary hiding place with Claudine, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo, still hunting him, become lost in a forest.  In a baffling plot-twist, they stumble across ‘a large and magnificent building whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, seemingly by accident.  This, it transpires, is the suitably gothic abode of Matilda, the noblewoman who’s masterminded the scheme to abduct and imprison Verezzi.  Matilda, you see, is madly in love with Verezzi, but Verezzi is unfortunately madly in love with, and betrothed to, someone else – a lady called Julia, who’s currently resident in Italy.  Matilda will consider committing any crime to thwart the relationship between Verezzi and Julia.

 

Meanwhile, it’s hinted, and in the book’s final pages confirmed, that Zastrozzi is not simply Matilda’s loyal minion.  He has his own reasons for wanting Verezzi to suffer.

 

And here, the plot seems to stop – or disappear up its own arse – for a long time.  Verezzi crosses paths with Matilda, whom he likes if doesn’t actually love, and about whose nefarious scheme he knows nothing.  She persuades him to leave Claudine’s cottage and stay at her chateau in the forest for a while.  There he falls critically ill, again – Matilda telling him a malicious lie about Julia being dead has something to do with it.  And the book’s most interesting character, Zastrozzi himself, fades into the background, leaving the reader to wade through pages of melodramatic blather where Verezzi and Matilda indulge in many ‘ecstasies of melancholia’, ‘floods of tears’, ‘gentle sighs’ and, yes, ‘heaving’ of ‘bosoms’.  There’s also much wandering done in the local forest, with the word ‘cataract’ cropping up as frequently as the word ‘chariot’ does elsewhere.  Now that he believes Julia to be deceased, will Verezzi get over his grief, succumb to temptation, and do the business with that duplicitous minx Matilda?  Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less.

 

At least things pick up later.  The action relocates to Venice, Zastrozzi becomes prominent again, and the book’s two most annoying characters are unexpectedly killed off 20 pages before the end.  Matilda and Zastrozzi end up on trial for their lives, in front of a horde of torture-loving Inquisitors.  Matilda  crumbles and finds religion: “God of mercy!  God of heaven… my sins are many and horrible, but I repent.”  However, the atheistic and – surprise! – Byronic Zastrozzi is made of tougher stuff and goes to his doom unrepentantly and defiantly.

 

I’d be more generous towards the book – which was, after all, the work of a 17-year-old – if the plot was less flabby.  It needed to centre less on the tormented, wimpy and seriously illness-prone Verezzi and more on Zastrozzi, who has some dynamism and agency.  Indeed, the book’s most memorable scene has Matilda out in the forest, sitting on a granite boulder, while a fearsome storm rages around her.  Zastrozzi is suddenly revealed to her by a flash of lightning: “His gigantic figure was again involved in pitchy darkness as the momentary lightning receded.  A peal of crashing thunder again madly rattled over the zenith, and a scintillating flash announced Zastrozzi’s approach, as he stood before Matilda.”  It’s uncannily reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein where Victor encounters his creation during a tempest in the Alps.  Mind you, it’s a shame that Zastrozzi’s most notable feature here – his gigantic stature – isn’t actually mentioned by the author, or remarked on by the other characters, when he appears in the novel’s early pages.  This gives the impression that somewhere along the way he had a sudden and impressive growth-spurt.

 

The foreword to my edition of Zastrozzi was penned by Germaine Greer, who’s unexpectedly indulgent of Shelley’s excesses.  She views the helpless, fever-stricken Verezzi, at the mercy of the conniving, dominating but not undesirable Matilda, as symbolic of the fixation the very young Shelley had for his mother: “…Shelley’s mother, who was more in sympathy with him than his father, was from all accounts a very beautiful woman…  As the youngest of five children, Shelley’s infant passion for his mother probably went largely unrequited; his best chance of getting her to himself was when he was in the throes of one of his childhood illnesses which were, like Verezzi’s, ‘of a nervous or spasmodic nature’.”

 

However, while I struggled through Zastrozzi’s purpler patches, I found myself less in sympathy with Germaine Greer and more in sympathy with Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder, who in the 1987 TV series Blackadder the Third said witheringly of the Romantic poets: “…there’s nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid.”

 

© BBC

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Jim Mountfield walks among the shadows

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction, has just had his first short story published in 2023.  The story is entitled Temple Street and it appears in this month’s edition – Volume 17, Issue 6 – of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Temple Street is set in the northern Sri Lankan town of Jaffna – a town so north in the island and so close to India, in fact, that it often feels more Indian in culture and temperament – and it’s particularly inspired by Kovil Road, the street where I usually stayed during the many occasions between 2016 and 2020 when I was sent to Jaffna as part of my job.  I found Kovil Road fascinating for the same reason that the story’s main character finds the fictional Temple Street fascinating: “Though it was narrow and its traffic consisted mainly of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and bicycles, it’d taken him past properties that seemed to represent every point on every spectrum of town life, from ancient to modern, poor to rich, wild to civilised.”

 

 

One night, though, I had an eerie experience walking back along Kovil Road after spending a few hours in my favourite local watering hole, the Colombo Restaurant – no, it wasn’t a restaurant and no, it wasn’t in Colombo either.  A strong wind was blowing, shaking the tops of the trees overhead, especially the palm trees, and I couldn’t help noticing how bestial-looking the shadows of the palm-fronds looked on the road beside me.  They seemed to twist and writhe on the asphalt like giant, black, shaggy beasts…  And that gave me the idea for Temple Street.

 

I’m wary of horror stories written by Western writers and featuring Western characters that use ‘exotic’ – i.e., non-Western – locales as their settings.  Often, intentional or not, the implication is that the locale is mysterious, dangerous and less ‘civilised’ because it’s culturally different from the West.  The laziest of these stories appropriate something from the local culture, from its mythology, legends or folklore, and use it as a cheap way to rustle up a monster and / or some horror.  Since I didn’t wish to do that with Jaffna, Temple Street stresses that the bad stuff comes from a combination of conditions that could arise anywhere in the world, Western countries included.  Unfortunately for the story’s protagonist, those conditions just happen to arise one night while he’s walking along the street of the title.

 

For the next month, Temple Street can be read here, while the main page for Schlock! Webzine is accessible here.

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Mad-lands

 

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

 

The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson.  That was a mere four months ago.  What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity.  To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity.  As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

 

But oh well.  Here goes.

 

So, Prime Minister Liz Truss.  What could go wrong?  Everything, basically, at top speed.  On September 23rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing.  This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19th century Carpathian peasants.  The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.

 

Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?”  On October 20th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won.  It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity.  Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).

 

Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man.  Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her.  AT LAST!  A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24th.  HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15th.  LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment.  The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS.  The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.

 

It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks.  After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits.  But probably they won’t.

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

 

By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present).  There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10th Doctor, David Tennant.  Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

 

Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic.  Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament.  Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen.  Great work if you can get it.  Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM.  And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations.  However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

 

Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25th.  This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin.  Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness.  He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19th century rather than the 21st.  He’s minted.  He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds.  And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”

 

Really, Rishi?  Working class?

 

“Well, not working class.”

 

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

 

In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper  commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn.  He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning.  Soon after – screech!  Sunak announced he would attend it after all.  (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.)  Mandatory housing targets?  Screech!  No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens.  A ban on onshore windfarms?  Screech!  “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.”  Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment?  Screech, screech, screech!

 

However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91).  Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill).  At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”  Her dream?  She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.

 

To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason

 

Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch.  After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.

 

To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.”  To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work.  What else do you think it involves?”  To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.”  To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”

 

Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account.  When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case.  Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.

 

Honestly, who cares?  Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit.  But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.

 

Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands…  Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?

 

The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”

 

From unsplash.com / © Peter Leong