Thank god they're in charge!

"Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking."

George Osborne, 2006      (via)

The secret of eternal life

You see how at the moment before death, your whole life flashes before your eyes? How long do you think that takes? You've got to imagine that every tiny memory, every single one, even or especially those that have for years meandered deep below the conscious surface, is suddenly replayed in glorious technicolour for one last hurrah. No doubt it's very helpful in getting closure, and is probably worth years in therapy - ah! that's what my mum and dad did to me when I was four that made me a neurotic wreck - and also maybe you find out where you left your bag with your passport in Amsterdam that time, and which of your so-called friends nicked your favourite jacket. But if every memory stashed in years of unfulfilled living suddenly gets its day in the sun, that must take some amount of time. I can see that the word "flash" might be relevant here, but so must "whole life", and therefore, speaking scientificially, it must take at least some amount of time to get through the memories of every last cup of tea, episode of Strictly Come Dancing and walk to the newsagent. So what happens when, as you reweave your way through your life's rich tapestry, like so many episodes of The Wire, you finally reach the denouement, the moment just before death when your whole life starts to flash before your eyes?  Do you have to relive that as well, in an endless recursive loop? Because if so maybe I've stumbled on the secret of eternal life. The impossibility of death in the mind of one having their life flash before their eyes on a continual loop. Or perhaps each time it goes round it gets shorter and more grainy, until finally the last embers of life turn to ash and you find out what the hell it was all about.

Protest education

Good account of the student protests yesterday, which mainly tallies with what I saw when I visited the march as it was still filing into Parliament Square at about 2pm, even down to the sarky cop-philosophy "debate", one of which I had to enjoy as well. The police contained a large and growing crowd in one road at the north of the square and refused to let me into the actual square because I was wearing "a student uniform", which is apparently now a coat and scarf, and therefore was a protester. The kettle was forced to open and people filled most of the square but it was obvious that it was going to be put back on and having else to do I left quickly rather than get shut in all day, which is what happened. People were basically told that if they wanted to protest at all, they'd be imprisoned into the night-time. At one point there were so many police behind barriers they looked like a demonstration themselves, perhaps one in pursuit of more overtime, Using the kettle without due  cause, straight off the bat, is a disgraceful way to police protest, and gives lie to their claims of "faciliting" protest.

The Guardian also has, amongst other stuff, a video of the rather lame molesting of the Royal car. Of course the obvious thought is that it was engineered by some shadowy media manipulator, looking for a distracting news angle, but I suspect it was just blind luck


The Telegraph, meanwhile, has a pleasingly looking-glass view of things.


Late add: 17-year-old Barnsley girl's account.

quid hoc sis vult?

I've got a dictionary of foreign terms sitting in my toilet. It's a book with a list list of foreign terms which we (actually a very small subset of we, but never mind) use in English. Phrases like Dieu et mon Droit, which sometimes appears on the side of £1 coins; or quid pro quo, which doesn't and maybe should, but is Latin for something in return - by which I mean "something in return" not "[something] in return", nor even retsomethingurn (or gnihtemos), if you want to get cruciverbalist about it. I chose those examples because I had actually heard of them previous to owning this book, but it's full of phrases I haven't heard of and my plan was that subtly precipitating them mid-colloquy would make me look a great deal better educated than I am. And who doesn't want to look better than they are?

Of course just reading the entries was no good, because one Latin phrase looks much like another after a minute or two, and my memory is so shot it could practically be used to cull pheasants. So I found myself wishing for an index where I could go with an english word or phrase of my own imaginings and have it transformed into a highly rarefied bon mot, ready for insertion into my blogpost. In italics, of course, which is basically just a way of saying ooh look how clever I am, I used such a weird word it has to go on a slant. Or possibly it's just a way of telling your reader it's ok you don't have to understand that word, you're allowed to look it up. Anyway I found myself wishing for such an index and I turned to the back and à merveille! there was such an index. Well, of course fortuna favit fortibus and all that, so I wasn't entirely surprised, and a die my writing has a poco a poco become festooned with exotic phrases, like a prize cow shrouded in rosettes.

The downsides of this policy are, das ist Pech! a) it's an irritatingly unhelpful index and rarely supplies anything like the phrase you need; b) it's amazing how quickly you can slip into sounding like Boris Johnson; and c) surely the very definition of pretentious must be trawling the index of a book of foreign phrases trying to find something to make you sound classically educated. I mean Davus sum, non Oedipus, obviously, but I know that honor habet onus, so I felt obliged to write about it - to put my cards on the table, so to speak - so that we all understood each other.

It's not the economy, stupid

Any of you wondering how to feel about the unanaesthetised surgery being performed on the British welfare state and public sector have only to read this, Nothing To Do With The Economy, Ross McKibbin in the LRB.

Much of the government’s budget strategy is dependent on consequences which might be favourable, on premises which are almost certainly wrong, on sheer fantasy, and on that will-o’-the-wisp, ‘confidence’. It is pretty clear that those on benefits of whatever kind will suffer, however the cuts are interpreted. Anyone disabled, or partly disabled and on employment support, or dependent on housing benefit, or in need of social housing, or reliant on local authority care – indeed anyone on a low income – will lose.

...

The country is not on the verge of bankruptcy. There is no evidence that the bond market was reacting against British debt, despite the best efforts of the Conservative Party to encourage it to do so. Our fiscal position was never like that of Greece, which had cooked the books and was struggling to cope with short-term government debt, though Osborne et al insisted it was. Why was it necessary to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done. Even Darling’s proposed schedule of deficit reduction seems excessively prudent. A less political chancellor might simply have allowed economic recovery (i.e. increased tax returns to the Treasury), modest reductions in new spending and inflation to deal with the debt.

at the idyll of Lidl

It's down to the cheap seats for me right now. Instead of sauntering around Waitrose, my wallet flush with easy Fleet Street cash, I'm reduced to shuffling around Lidl with a few individually counted pennies jangling in cavernous pockets. But that's ok! (for now) because shopping in Lidl is that rare pleasure, the pleasure of the cheap. It doesn't matter that the aisles are so short of breadth they can barely accommodate one hunger-struck dole-queue refugee at a time, because that's the price you pay for aisles stacked this high with cheapness. And while constantly banging into undernourished Accran cleaners and parched-looking old biddies can wear thin, their very presence only proves how cheap it must all be.

It might seem odd for me, who has disavowed supermarkets over the years on some political theory or other, to suddenly be in favour of one merely because it is so down-at-heel, but whereas Tesco's is also cheap as chips, (not as cheap as Lidl chips, obviously, but still, chips) Lidl wins out with its end of the world clearance house ambience. And also some decent vegetables. And whereas Tescos seems like is nothing more than the spawn of Satan's corporate arm, Lidl, with its unpandering approach to its ne'er-do-well clientele, doesn't seem so.

There are two different pleasures in cheapness (you can probably see that I've not got a lot on at the moment, but bear with me) - one is being able to afford lots of things with your meagre bill roll, the other is in seeing: wow, thats 36p less than in Morrisons; cor you can get six here for the price of four in Tesco's. But for that pleasure, you need to keep shopping in all the shops, especially Waitrose and M&S, otherwise you'll soon be found walking around Lidl's going: fucking hell that's pricey, wow, how did things get so expensive? And then where will you go? Netto's, obviously, but after that? The drug of relative cheapness will have worn off, and now you have to shop at Lidl's just to keep from being skint. The pleasure's gone, there's just a dull pain where your shopping habits used to be. You've smoked on the hot pipe of cheap supermarkets, and you're enslaved, a hopeless sunken-eyed zombie, with bad skin and a surfeit of German tinned products. Lidl by lidl, they're gonna get ya.

Easing quantitative easing

As if to prove that I am wasted in this job unemployment, as I asked the question about quantitatitatitative easing, my old chums at Prospect were preparing a long winded answer: Faisal Islam on The Great Money Mystery. It turns out that even though my basic question was, well, quite basic, other questions, vaguely similar to mine, were relatively sensible.

“It was one of the many measures to get confidence back in the system,” says former chancellor Alistair Darling, the man who had to sign off on the Bank of England experiment. “Nobody really knows what impact it’s having,” he says with shocking candour. “Look at the Bank of England [monetary policy committee] minutes, even they are split.”

Quantitative difficulting

Some of you may have heard of quantitative easing, which is apparently a euphemism for printing money, where the government gets down the value of money (and hence its debts) and inflates the economy by printing more cash and then dishing it out, so there's more to go around. Which is fine and all, economics primer stuff by all accounts, but how do they get the extra money into the economy? Stuffing a few extra tenners in wage packets? Programming ATMs to dish out bonus notes to economonically-approved spenders? Does the secret service go around un-pickpocketing tourists in central London? Or do they just give it to their mates in the City to piss up the wall again? If only there was some way I could find out...

reads wikipedia for 30 seconds

Ah, seems that what they do is print some money and then use that money to give to their mates in the City to piss up the wall again buy financial assets from banks, who then have loads of lovely lolly to pay themselves in bonuses lend out to the masses and hence kickstart the moribund economy pay themselves in bonuses

Beautiful. Got that sorted. Happy cuts day to y'all

Swearing by theatre gurus

According to wikipedia, the famous theatre teacher Jacques Lecoq teamed up with Jean Marie Conty.

Later on they went to Italy to work with Dario "Mo" Fo.

Also worth a mention is where, under a list of his former students, it includes "Steven Berkoff, theatre director, genius".

Purveyor of LSD to the Royal Family

"I took acid with the Queen in 1963"
Transcript of conversation with Dr John Mehmart

In the early sixties I had a job as a research psychologist in Cambridge testing out LSD on students, trying to find out if we could use it to treat depression or alcoholism. It was an exciting time, because everyone involved could see straightaway that here was a treatment with absolutely stupendous potential, and although the research results were mixed, there was no doubt that LSD induced a very powerful experience and the question had become about how to go about harnessing that. So one day a call came through from Buck House asking if someone would meet a royal officer to discuss this new drug, and this very odd chap who was clearly utterly against the whole idea came to my office for a meeting where I explained that physically it was safe and that in the right circumstances and with the correct precautions it was totally safe, not realising they were asking me to take responsibility for the Queen. I hate to think what would have happened if she'd gone completely stark raving mad, I'd have probably been guillotined; but in those days no-one had heard of bad trips, they were just called bad reactions and were normally over after a few hours. Admittedly, the CIA had killed a few but, you know, Americans.

So a few weeks later and after feeling a bit suspicious that my phone was being tapped and letters being opened suddenly I got a call to come up to London and, as it turned out, meet the Queen, although I didn't know that before I got there. She was very nice, disarmingly so, a bit like I thought Diana was portrayed later on, very pleasent but somewhat otherworldly, not really like anyone else you've ever met. After some preliminaries she asked me a lot of questions about LSD, and it turned out she was a great fan of Aldous Huxley - who of course had first got me interested in the psychedelic experience as a PhD student - and then she told me she was interested to try some and could I get some and sit with her during the experience. So, I obviously said yes of course and we made an arrangement for a Saturday in May, after she'd returned from some colony or other and I went up to Buck House and it was a lovely day so we sat in the huge garden with all these 200 and 300 year old trees just the two of us with a servant close by and everyone else even Phillip banished and she took a 100µg dose which I think was quite high for a starter but not excessive and we sat and discussed African independence and the trees and so on and she enjoyed it, let down her hair a bit and we sat on the lawn and played games and the servant brought some food and she ate it giggling and he gave me dirty looks and later on I had some paint and paper brought over and she drew these quite pretty pictures of her and Jomo Kenyatta in some kind of embrace and quite soon after she asked when it would finish and I told her to take it easy for the evening, but she told me she had to host a banquet for 150 and there was a moment of anxiety then, until we agreed that she could just keep quiet throughout the evening if necessary. Then she asked could I come back with some more the next week. As a matter of fact it wasn't until the next month that I returned and we both took 250µg this time and again we sat in the garden and she drew mountains and talked about her father and we ate houmous and pita which she'd brought back from Greece and which I'd never seen or heard of before then, and which was like eating lava. She did complain after several hours that it wasn't stopping but I reassured her and we went and watched the fish in the water fountain which she found enjoyable. The most significant thing I can remember was her saying was "Oh how awful it must all be for Charles" and at one point she declared "you know, everything is one" and for a moment I didn't know if she was talking about herself or the universe, and she found that hilarious and kept repeating "yes, one is at one", which I found quite funny. She did get anxious at one point when we were talking about what it was like being the Queen, and she kept saying things like "Who's Queen? Who is the Queen? What is Queen? Who is the Queen?" and started to get upset, but she soon calmed down. Mostly, she was quite good company and of course very well educated and informed on every topic you could think of.

So I returned to work and some time later received a request from the Queen for a few doses of LSD that she could share round at a party she was having at Windsor with a list of luminaries who were all keen on trying it. I was invited along to observe but I think I was busy, at a wedding or something, anyway I couldn't go but I supplied her with 10 doses of 200µg Sandoz acid and bid her good luck. So what should happen but I get a frantic phone call on the night from a servant saying a car is coming to drive you to Windsor because the Queen, thinking the trip wasn't working, took another one and now has climbed a tree and is cackling at the (full) moon. So we drove to Windsor at top speed but when I got there Malcolm Muggeridge had talked her down and she was making a house out of leaves and clay with him and Lord Mountbatten. Anyway she wasn't much interested in me and it was quite dull watching them stare at the sky and laugh so I left them to it and that was the last time I met Queen Elizabeth, although shortly after I got a nice note from her saying wasn't it a shame the Americans were going to criminalise it and what did I think and so on, and it was made illegal over there and soon after over here and I was out of a job. Now, a few years later Prince Phillip came to open a new ward at the hospital I was working at and he took me aside and said now look here Lizbet wants to know if you can get any more of that stuff, and I said I obviously couldn't but I put him in touch with a guy I knew in London called Acid Dave and Dave supplied the royals with loads and never suspected who it was for.

Some years after that I met the servant from Buck House in a pub on Victoria and he said that throughout the 1970s the queen constantly took doses of acid to perk up dull state visits and the like and that they used to refer to it as her remedy and were under instruction to give it to her if she said "one is feeling a bit heavy". He also said that they'd once accidentally given a dose to Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and there'd been fears of a diplomatic incident but he'd turned out to be an old hand at LSD and the pair of them had a gay old time. Apparently she was awesome at Balmoral shoots after taking 120µg, but her favourite place to go in London when high was the Natural History Museum, which she referred to as the huge arcade machine. I asked him if he thought she'd changed much through her LSD experiences, and he said that as well as a brief interest in Indian philosophy, she had become more open-minded and considerate, but it didn't last long after she gave up the drug. Acid Dave had got busted in 1978 and the Queen felt it was the universe telling her to pack it in. Poor old Dave did 15 years at her Majesty's pleasure, little knowing it was the second lot of her Majesty's pleasure he'd supplied. I became fascinated with ketamine in my later years and ended up dying in a chainsaw and petrol incident. The Queen is still going, and how awful it must all be for Charles.

The Same Time

I met a guy from Sydney who was born one day after me. What time were you born? I asked him. 5.45 in the morning, he said. I was stunned. I didn't even need to go and check the time difference on google. I realised what that meant. You weren't born on the day after me, I told him. We were born on the same day! At the same time! Ah, no we weren't mate, it says on my birth certificate, he said before it dawned on his face much like the sun on that blessed day. What time were you born? he asked. I told him: 6.45 in the evening! He paused to think. Was that GMT or BST? he asked. BST! I replied. Fuck me! he said, we're like star twins! Fuck! Amazing! What's your favourite colour? How do you like your tea? Do you have a friend called Nigel? He paused. No hang on a second, he said, it needs to have been GMT. Mate, sorry, we just weren't born at the same time. Close though. I thought about it for a minute. Well, at least the same hour, I said. It'll be hour little secret, he told me.

Chequered, mate

It was when I was in Scotland that I first noticed the chequered shirt. I think it was Jim Jeffries wearing one on his poster that started me off, but once I started noticing them I saw them everywhere, like conspiracy theories. For some reason I couldn't get my head around it - what were people trying to say about themselves when they put on a chequered shirt? I even took to drunkenly asking people in late night boozers: "what do you think your chequered shirt represents?" Mostly they didn't know. It's just a chequered shirt, after all. You don't think too much about it. In fact the chequered shirt is like anti-clothing. It's clothing that says: I'm not thinking about my clothing. It's the everyman's shirt. The lumberjack, the plumber, the delivery driver. It's the equivalent of being called John. It's the clothing choice for the I'm a completely normal, tax-paying, non-boat rocking type. It's zebra stripes for humans, allowing them to blend in with their environment. It's the "mate" of tailoring, the satorial equivalent of Fosters. It's Borehamwood with buttons. The chequered shirt has false consciousness embroidered into its fabric. The chequered shirt spends its weekends watching Sky Sports. The chequered shirt is Adrian Chiles. Any day now the union flag will be redesigned with a red, white and blue cheque and we'll salute it singing the theme tune to Top Gear. Any day now.

Mod cons

I phoned up the AA today and the automated system did that thing where they pretend to answer the phone and the call starts costing money, and then it starts ringing again. Then another, presumably more senior, computer answered, put me on hold and told me I was in a "high-priority queue". Brilliant! What more could I want, than to be on high priority hold? What do they tell the people in the low-priority queue? "Your call is not very important to us, you might as well hang up." My guess is that you go in the high-priority queue if they think they might get some money out of you, and the low-priority queue if they think you're trying to get money out of them. What do you mean there's no low-priority queue? You're not telling me that those words are superfluous nonsense, the equivalent of no-value calories, bulking up the meagre dinner of modern life? I refuse to believe it.

I imagine this has started a bit of an arms race in the phone-queueing system world, because now if I phone someone up and they say just "your call is being held in a queue" I'm going to be like "what, not a high-priority queue? Well I'm off then, to somewhere I can wait in more gilded comfort." Soon you'll be held in a "highest-priority queue" and then a "luxury-priority queue" and then your call will be held in a waiting room with a jacuzzi and masseurs, with Aveda bodywash products and free tea and coffee, while you continue to fester in a dreary council two-bed, wondering when you can book some driving lessons.

so eh how about it

While I was in Scotland someone told me about this ad they used to have up there where a lad practices his chat-up routine before he goes out on a Saturday night. He fancies this one girl, Sarah, and he tries out what he's going to say, tests out various lines, until finally, washed and brushed up, he hits upon his tack, a smooth, sophisticated, gentle, friendly tactic: "Sarah, you know I really like you." Cut to the party, a typically Scottish alcoholistic affair, and our lad, well pissed, spots young Sarah in the kitchen. She looks hopefully at him, touches her hair, and he seizes his moment. He lurches toward her, and over the blaring music delivers his now degraded epistle: "Sarah, I really fancy you so ... eh ... how about it?" Cue repugnanted revulsion by Sarah and Cupid's bow is once again at rest.

The message is, of course, that you don't need to drink 15 bottles of Buckie before you mingle with the opposite sex, in fact you might be better off drinking only 10. Or 11, but no more than you need to keep out the cold. But the Scots didn't much go for that message and instead claimed this advert for themselves, and so "I really fancy you so ... eh ... how about it" became the number one chat-up line round the country, especially used by schoolboys on their teachers. The slogan even has its very own facebook page. I seem to remember that the Heroin Screws You Up campaign of the mid-eighties was said to have given birth to junkie chic. Perhaps government adverts are just always going to go wrong.

anyway, even though I barely remembered the relevant line, the internet still served me up the ad, and here it is



Bonus Scottish health education catchphrases

"It tastes boggin!"
"He jus doesny know when to stop"

Edinburgh roundup & awards ceremony

Cos 7,500 words on the matter wasn't enough, here is my Edinburgh roundup, filled with awards and prizes and also hot tips for people who might go to Edinburgh some day.

Edinburgh Diary part three

Edinburgh sunrise

On my last Sunday I was invited to an open mic in the garden at the Pear Tree, where I got up to try out my stand-up routine, such as it is. Having been rehearsing it during my many drunken walks home late at night, it was mostly fresh in the memory, and I mostly pulled it off. The crew I was drinking with loved it, as did one Cammy Sinclair in the crowd, who straightaway got me two gigs for that night, both at decent venues. One of the gigs was at a small comedy showcase and the other was with him and the well-known Phil Kay, on their Cammy and Phil’s Late Night Nonsense show. We sat boozing in the afternoon sun and he told me that “your problem will be when you get successful, you’ll have trouble keeping up the devil-may-care attitude.” I told him that was a problem I was prepared to put up with.

He's a superstar

Edinburgh Diary part two

Read part one here

The next night I was inveigled to come along to see Camille O’Sullivan, and I stumped up £18 for a ticket on the grounds that with so many good reviews she must have something. Famous for her interpretations of songs by Nick Cave, Jacques Brel and Tom Waits, her posters featured a six-star review from Time Out, plus a heap of five star reviews from other worthy publications; inevitably I found the show disappointing, partly because my expectations, such as they were, were way off the mark, but mainly because I just did not get it. I’d hoped for someone to update cabaret, but she spent too much time giggling at herself to maintain any sort of spell over me at least, although the rest of the crowd, for what it’s worth, loved her.

what makes a good headline

Edinburgh Diary part one

I went to the Edinburgh festival because I was offered a job playing accordion for a singer in her cabaret show. The band consisted of me, Sandy the bassist, who got me the job, and her boyfriend Luke, who played the drums. The singer, Gus, turned out to be the daughter of cabaret-comic Kit Hesketh-Harvey, of Kit and the Widow fame, and we spent a few days at their rather pleasant abode in Norfolk rehearsing. The set consisted of a couple of rock covers (Black Keys and Dead Weather), some French chanson (Francoise Hardy and Piaf), some covers of songs Amy Winehouse had covered, and some of Kit’s songs from a show he’d written about Rasputin, which were not really comic enough for him to do in his own show, and were decidedly odd even in our show. The rehearsals, and even into the run, were frequently livened up by father-daughter bickering over how she should present his material.