A bit of a misunderstanding

The Gunsmith’s Arms was closed this weekend. A brisk, executive notice stapled to the lintel above the door attested to this fact, informing arriving hopefuls that the sudden closure was owing to the shabby, putrid state of some of the more bibulous locals, whom the pub management had taken it upon themselves to refurbish. Strange, odourless smoke seeped out from the unmended cracks in the windows; so Hamilton and I made our way to the Muted Slughorn for an iced grapefruit and warm Scotch. We had been settled for some time when I mentioned I’d spent the afternoon browsing the website of a firm of London actuaries. Hamilton looked exasperated by the confession and I quickly explained that my attention had been held by the ‘site’s life expect-ometer, an engrossing facility that generated an average life expectancy for every UK postcode. I had discovered that at my present address, I could reasonably aspire to 2.3 years longer than the national average, but less than half a kilometre down the road, that expectation dropped by more than 18 months. Naturally, I continued, I had resolved never to leave the house again for fear of becoming suddenly and statistically vulnerable. Hamilton seemed to be on the point of proffering some tiresome counter-argument when I raised my hand and hissed at him to be silent: in the far corner of the bar we could just make out the bare-bottomed, leatherclad form of F1 supremo Max Mosley, weeping into a tumbler of Rannoch Farm malt. 'You sir,' exploded Hamilton from across the room, 'have borne witness, and enjoyed for your own part, one of the finest, most seminal legal resolutions of the decade. Pull yourself together!' On closer and more sympathetic enquiry, it transpired that the saucy litigant, being poorly versed in the language of the bench, had been frenziedly excited by the prospect of 'punitive damages', and sorely disappointed by the reality. By way of compensation I offered to buy him another whisky and knock out several of his front teeth. He accepted gladly and, afterwards, ran off giggling into the dusky evening.

A weak pun

I made that old error, decried in the work of every philosopher in the Western and Eastern cannons: I got myself a job. Today has been my first day. I dressed in my best, and only, suit, polished my shoes and was into the office no less than 20 British minutes early. As I began my to perform the many small and harmless tasks I had been given I felt glowing with health. My mind began to dwell upon the money I was accumulating. What would I do with it? Would I buy a sandwich with lunch, or a pint after the working day was done? Perhaps I should book a holiday, or put in an order for a new BMW 3 series. I began to be concerned. I was only employed for six days, how would I keep up with the payments? I worked harder, eager to earn a long term contract so as I could continue with the spending that I imagined I would become used to. By 11am I was sweating and shaking with stress, as the weight of my responsibilities and financial burdens began to press down on me. I worked harder, but I became even more worried. I felt a tightness in my chest, and a jagging pain in my arm and side. An ambulance was called, and by 12.30 I was lying in a hospital bed.
'Doctor' I moaned pitifully 'am I going to die? I wish I had spent less time at the office!'
'Don't be silly', he reassured me 'you just seem to have come down with a mild case of Affluenza. You are clearly more susceptible than most. I'm putting you on a course of broad spectrum Monbiotics. Take two daily, with a copy of the Guardian and a cup of herbal tea.'
I think perhaps I will take next week off...

Voila

Wikipidlings

Did you know that there is a religion Vietnam which venerates Victor Hugo. There is. Also, did you know that Celtic Punk is going through a second golden age in Serbia. You are in for a treat.

Max Mosley Update:
The London Prodigal and myself were tucking into gin backed stouts with ribena tops and sambuca chasers in the Gunsmith's arms, when he leaned in conspiratorially: "In a couple of hours I'm going to meet my dealer". I expressed surprise, as I have never known TLP to take any form of narcotic other than his beloved liquor. "No you fool" he scoffed "I mean my cigar dealer". It transpired that my drinking companion had been paying a fortune to have Cuban cigars shipped to him by a shadowy cabal of tobacco dealers. It was only tentatively that I ventured the information that Cuban cigars were not illegal in Britain. As might be imagined this cast a pall over the evening, and we sunk into a gloomy silence. I would have been grateful for any distraction, so I was nothing less than delighted when disgraced F1 boss Max Mosley walked into the pub. Pausing only to artfully catch the tip of his finger in the door he strode up to the bar and ordered a small sherry. He drained it straight down, and ground the glass into his face. I sidled up to him, and expressed my sympathy for his recent troubles. He thanked me: "as you say, what I do in private is nobody's business". As he spoke he idly lit cigarettes and stubbed them out on his arm. "I don't force my activities in anybody's face" he said as pushed a toothpick into his left nostril. "And these accusations of Nazism are ridiculous. We masochists are a tolerant people, doesn't the name Oberhessischer Verein für Volksbildung mean anything anymore." Unfortunately at this moment the landlord re-entered the bar, and hearing the brief snatch of German clearly leaped to an unfortunate conclusion. He pulled out a heavy iron tent peg from under his apron and advanced threateningly toward the beleaguered whore botherer. "Get out of my pub, you filthy Nazi pervert" he shouted at Mr Mosley, who beat a sadly undignified retreat, crying out with alternate alarm and delight as the tent peg impacted around his buttocks and thighs.

Siempre es 26

J.K Rowling's boy wizard wasn't the sum total of our conversation in the Gunsmith Arms; in fact much more time was spent discussing Dogtooth's attire. After being kept waiting, Hamilton and I had expected him to eventually turn up in his familiar donnish guise, instead we were confronted by quite a spectacle: in strode Dogtooth with a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to his midriff, with a prominent medallion nestling amongst his chest carpet. Upon being questioned about his appearance; he retorted rather stiffly that his medallion was in fact a family heirloom handed down to him by his Cuban grandfather and that tradition necessitated him to wear it. Unconvinced by his reasoning, our train of thought was nevertheless disrupted by the revelation regarding his eclectic heritage, which we had been hitherto unaware of. Hamilton took the lead, aggressively testing him on his 'Cuban' background, Dogtooth clearly irritated by this turn of events, stood up in the midst of Hamilton's latest verbal offensive, walked to the bar and demanded a Cuba Libre. Giving no explanation he returned to our table with his cocktail and proceeded to drink the entire concoction in one gulp. Once downed he eyed us with a rather manic grin, as if urging us to continue our cross-examination. Figuring that the act he had just performed was some sort of primitive method of affirming his Cuban roots and that provoking him any further might seriously imperil our well-being, I quickly changed the subject of the conversation to something less contentious; never to mention Cuba or medallions again.

Dennis Potter and the Singing Detective

Dogtooth and I were drinking with The London Prodigal in his cosy local The Gunsmiths Arms when I mentioned that I had yet the read the works of J.K. Rowling. Surprise was expressed, and I was quick to state that although I would rather like to read these books that everyone speaks so highly of, I was buggered if I was going to pay good money for them. Dogtooth, an avid fan, offered me the loan of his own Potter library. I have read the first three works, and have these preliminary observations.

1 - Harry Potter faints a lot. I haven't actually counted, but I imagine that he averages about 3.2 faintings per book. He and his chums also seem to spend a lot of their time in the sick bay.
2 - Although steeped in magic, the world of the Potter mythos seems to be largely nonreligious. If I found myself in the position of Harry, I think that I would have asked a lot more questions about the philosophical inferences which can be drawn from a complete explosion of modern scientific assumptions.
3 - The Castle of Hogwarts has a giant squid in its lake.
4 - These books seem to play on a desire present in most children to be an orphan with a lot of money.

Henry James: a retrospective

In 1896, Henry James began work on a new novel, The Transatlantic Political Marriage. The work was abandoned by James the following year, but the MS survived and, along with other of his extant notes and correspondences, was published in a volume of collected miscellany a few years after his death. The Post-Newt has been able to gain access to the unfinished MS, via a complicated network of cellars and subterranean passages, and is proud to give its readers an exclusive glimpse of the period at which, Leavis argues, James was ‘sweeping the cobwebs from the dustiest corners of his craft, hoovering up the discarded chocolate wrappers from the filthiest recesses of his mind.’ The passage below is also an eminent example of James’s famous gradually-closing manhole conceit.

The evening sun crept elegantly over the cobbled promenade. Emerald Castor had, by an artfulness of prevision not entirely unbecoming – were one to venture the least little bit activating the closely knitted brow of received feminine charm – in a lady of her aspect, though not altogether sensible of consequences as yet unremittingly hidden from her perfect scrutiny in all such matters, chosen, as she thought most felicitous at the present time, to screen her polished waxen calves from the albeit gentlemanly assault of the eventide rays by means of an antique printed Japanese parasol which had been left, sometime idle, to languish in an old armoire of her London apartments.
As she sortied the jeweller and stepped out onto the pavement, Jasper Stein, his plain boot-heels negotiating the cobbles underfoot, danced, beaming, into her path. For a dull moment as the evening drifted into silence, each stood motionless; his spats creased mischievously, delighting in a not unwholesome impartiality towards his interlocutress; her feline ankles wrinkled not indelicately as in subtle but rapturous reception of the intensity of her beholder’s gaze.
‘I could not think, Miss Castor,’ came a voice from somewhere locally but somehow loftily displaced, addressing, as it is to be presumed, the small velvet brooch-box displayed not inconspicuously in her left palm, ‘that such ephemera could command your attention long.’
‘Oh would you call it ephemera?’ our heroine wonderfully laughed, her white soles flinching penitently. ‘I had better thought it might outlive both you and I, dear Mr Stein.’
Darkness descended, though voices could still be discerned to ring out above and around; and it was a darkness at once so dreadful and exquisite that one could but know, in the full knowledge such darkness invites, that sight and sound and all appreciable experience would, finally, at last, here at the end of things, be incommunicable in the vast heart of that crushing dark.

Cartones

Inbox update

As the rolling prairie, wild woods and rugged mountains of untamed cyberspace (which stretch out beneath the vast azure complexity of the blogosphere) give way to the safe patchwork fields of social networking sites, you may see a column of smoke rising from the sleepy Hamlet of my email address (far away from the bustling metropolises of Yahoo and Google). It's a quiet place, but recently enlivened by a new missive - a selection of 'books' which Amazon thinks I may want, based on my last purchases. Do I want Top Gear Top Drives? I do not. What about Robbie Coltrane's B road Britain? Or 3 Para, Time Bomb, Cherie Blair's Autobiography, a children's book by Geri Halliwell, or Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough? I do not want these things. It's all particularly perplexing, since all I have ever bought off Amazon has been a few volumes of poetry and an old copy of The Golden Bough.

I recently misinterpreted an email. 'What do the spammers of Lagos mean by sending me an e-mail of ornithological subject matter' I wondered to myself. Ignoring the warnings, I opened the message. I turns out that I had greatly misapprehended the word 'swallows'.

This was not in my inbox-

Not by E. E. Cummings

if) Springsomewhat,also-just; come before Fall
(con-joining the addversely-seezonal), So
then the hill,yesithink,it were white (as a) ball
&the tree they,Him,nailed to; encrusted by (snow

Whale Watch

Pilot Whales. They're rats of the sea you know. Not content with taking fish from the mouths of Japanese schoolchildren, these blubbery rascals have been copying their larger cousins and going after innocent squid. For too long we have tried to peacefully co-exist with whale kind. We have no more options. The hunt must begin. I'll be down at the wharves with Starbuck, Stubb and Fedellah.

In other squid news, scientists are defrosting the best specimen of Colossal Squid found so far.

The Newt has been following the Max Mosley scandal with a keen interest, and lately the plot has thickened. MI5, sexual perversion, Nazis, motorsport - can this story get any better?

Dogtooth is very fond of Rossetti. I can't imagine why.

Forecast: hand-cut, oven-roasted, lightly-salted, seal-packaged

Yesterday afternoon I received an angry phone call from the London Prodigal, telling me to book flights to Japan immediately. When I questioned the nature of the trip, he made some very rude remarks ('strumpetous, groin-dwelling bible salesman' was, I think, the Parthian shot) and hung up. At the time I was sitting in a bay windowseat of the Cary Grant, a pub that, ordinarily, only exists on a Thursday, but, in this case, had decided to make an exception. Shortly after this incident, a man touring with the Floridian Children's Disney Show sat down near me, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon telling him never to go to Spain.

Squif

not by Paul Muldoon

After a party which raised the rafters
And under a deluge of last weeks telly
I watched her drink down two pills of blue
Handrolled narcotic jelly.

We talked like two sturdy Tyrolean peasants, digging
Dogwood and Bog Rosmary, and cutting planks of ash
Into the exact shape and size of water-maybe
Which I shared with the dog, along
With a little food from the fridge
And slept like a baby.

Thing's have been rather slow for the last week or so...

Here are some cocktails for you to try:

Hangman's Blood - (Created by Anthony Burgess, this cocktail is much more trouble than it is worth.)
"Into a pint glass, doubles of the following are poured: gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added and the whole topped up with Champagne... It tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover."
Papa Doble - Ernest Hemingway's drink of choice. A Daiquiri with double the rum in it.
Hamilton's Encumbered Finesse - This drink was only mixed once, by me. I turned my back for a moment and it was seized and drunk by a passing spot welder.
1/4 gill antebellum rye whiskey
1/4 gill pastis
1 gill heavy water
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda.
The drink is served in a brandy snifter, with an anchovy over the rim and a chaser of carot juice

The prancing phantoms and ghosts of my rude forefathers

Up my, my family tree,
No blue blood, no nobility;
No trace of aristocracy -
Except for Uncle Sebastian
Who once raped a duchess.
My Family Tree - Jake Thackray

Unlike the stalwart Mr Thackray I cannot claim an ancestry untouched by privilege. In fact, I recently discovered that my distant predecessor the Honourable Charles Hamilton was no less a personage than the inventor of the ornamental hermit. Horace Walpole was dismissive of the idea, saying it was foolish to put aside a quarter of one's garden to be melancholy in. Pooh to the workaday doubters of this world! I shall be melancholy in as large a portion of my garden as I see fit.
The whole issue of ornamental hermits has been done to death, but I could not deny you the story of one charming personage, to be found in the pages of Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics -
an unnamed amateur hermit possessed of twenty hats and twelve suits of clothes, each emblazoned with an allegorical device. Two of the best are the 'patent teapot: to draw out the flavour of the tea best - Union and Goodwill' and the 'Wash-Basin of Reform'. One hat even had four mottoes embroidered around it - 'Bless Feed', 'Good Allowance', 'Well Clothed', and 'All Working Men'. As Ms Sitwell remarks - 'you may imagine the sensation aroused by these aspirations expressed in millinery'. This individual lived in a large allegorical garden, in the middle of which hung an elaborate effigy of the Pope, and cultivated a long white beard. We shall not see his like again.

Another of my ancestors, the famous Anchovey Hamiltonne, preempted the Hermit craze of a later century by living for several months in the grounds of a nearby stately home, accosting visiting noblemen for money and neglecting to shave. He was beaten soundly by a local blacksmith, and ejected from the county. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of one's time.

Obama has accused Pennsylvanians of being bitter, and clinging to guns, god and racism. I hope that we see a lot more of this sort of no-punches-pulled campaigning back on British shores. Perhaps Brown could berate the lazy Mancunians, while Cameron makes a speech attacking duplicitous, gobby Cockneys and Clegg launches into a long overdue condemnation of of whiney, theiving Scousers. Anything to jumpstart real political debate, and get a few politicians egged.

The Newt holds hetrogenous views on guns and God, but is in full support of bitterness.

Robot Soldiers

According to this article in Al-Beeb, the US will introduce "robot" soldiers into combat within eight years.

Forgive me for dreaming, but I hope to eventually see a massive robot surge led by a heavily mechanised Gen. Petraeus.

'Scree at Cowthorpe' by Tod Pughes

After the frost-heaving,
Land is still.

Water waits,
Earth bides its time,
Sky chewing its fingernails.

Until the rock bleeds again its green sludge.

The scree is assembled by small goblins.
Maudlin pixies run to and fro.

The sun weeps like a bereaved Viking,
And all around
Chronic animals vomit over the bodies of dead herdsmen.

LTCM

Long Term Capital Management the hedge fund that famously 'blew up' in 2000 is more topical now than ever.

The below video shows the terrifying power of leverage(borrowing) in financial transactions. Once the mainstay of shamans and narcotic users, predicting the future is massive business in finance.
The latter half of the 20th century saw an exodus from academia to wall street where third rate physicists were tasked with building complicated models to predict the market. From the Black-Scholes options model to rational pricing, it seemed that man's power through mathematics was almost limitless.

Of course not every physicist/mathematician/'quant' was successful, but many on wall street believed large profits could be reliably realised through mathematical methods. As the video implies, ultimately markets reflect human behaviour- and this behaviour, often simplified as greed and fear, is ultimately unpredictable. These people never learn and as history gloriously repeats itself. Try to enjoy the ride and be glad your income is high enough(hopefully) not to be affected by the massive rise in food prices.

Parosetrie

The Spark Plug
(not by Seamus Heaney)

From a long time ago I remember
an ostensibly mundane object or event
let's make it a spark plug this time

(I looked up its name in Irish
in a big leathery book -
speouighbhellchoiughsh)

the curve and cylinder of it
filigreed with detail
and hard as a kitten's eye under a gas-lamp.

anyway, now it's a long time in the future
perhaps the very present
and that brassed intrusion

previously described
serves to in some way elucidate
my current situation.