Separated at birth

Lavatoria

I enjoyed Mick Hume's most recent article in spiked. However, I'm left torn over issues such as 'awareness ribbons'. I hate anyone who wears one, or at least I would if I didn't know lots of generally decent people who do wear them, but I find it hard to scoff at the whole concept of 'awareness'. If any positive change is bought about in Darfur by UN intervention then we can thank the medias interest in the region, compared to, say, the Congo which is far harder and more dangerous to get cameras into. Take the Poppy Day phenomenon: I don't wear a poppy because I don't see any particular need to remember the first world war, but I do give money to the collectors more often than I give to any other charity can janglers because I don't want to think that I'm refusing the Poppy for reasons of parsimony. The cause is a good one, and they've pried some money from me which would no doubt have gone on drink, and indirectly the entire Poppy gimmick is to thank for it.

I visited the lavatory of a London pub, and while urinating I noticed a machine selling 'novelty condoms', including what looked in the picture like condoms with clown faces on them. I dread to think what sort of man would look at his equipment and think 'It's good but it could do with being funnier'.


Some artists gain fame by their elusive, boundry-breaking genius, some by their obsessive dedication to the detail. Some, however, are just in the right place at the right time. Case in point: Andrea Della Robia, probably the only Old Master whose work I would pay a gallery owner to take out of my house.

Why we should take the police out of policy

In concert with Hamilton's exposure of Metropolitan idiocy and double standards, I find it objectionable that the police will freely propose new and uncomfortable restrictions on our lives every time they decide they don't like an aspect of their job. Crucially, the post-adolescent years between 18 & 21 are (give or take a cheeky annum) most people's bright college days, in which we live in unfortunate and sometimes electric proximity to the permanent residents of provincial towns and villages. It is important to usher as many of us as possible into pubs and clubs on any given evening, where we can do less damage to ourselves and innocent bystanders. And whatever happens, we will get hold of the stuff - without delay or exception. Anyone who swallows the equation NoHooch'Til21 + ThirstyStudents = AppleJuicesAllRound seriously needs their head examined. Peter Fahy, the Cheshire Chief Constable who has suggested the minimum age be raised, has unwittingly requested much more work. As the situation stands, he only has to police the 2% of 18+year-olds who are actually out of control. If and when he gets his way, he will have to police 100% of the 18-21s who like alcohol - and I imagine that's 100% of them.

Newtballs: "Your life is worth more than a chocolate bar." An insight provided by DCI Cliff Lyons of South-east London.

Barring university students from pubs will undoubtedly make them drink more responsibly!

The chief constable of Cheshire has said that parents of teenagers are 'abdicating responsibility for their children.' He goes on to place the blame for Britain's supposed 'binge culture' squarely at the feet of advertisers and the drinks industry. Abdicating responsibility is a terrible thing, isn't it?

An interview with a futurist

Hamilton: "Mr Ernesto Giacometti Dolcelatte, you are the worlds foremost, and indeed only, Futurist Curator. You curate the Academy of Primitive and Archaic Art in Luxembourg. Your unique attitude to the presentation of painting and sculpture has won you few friends in the Art Establishment. Perhaps you could tell us a little..."

(At this point I was interrupted; the impatient Mr Dolcelatte had noticed my nephew's tricycle lying abandoned on the floor, and clambered onto it. With his knees round his ears, and puffing smoke from his cigarette like a small steamship, he was describing frantic circles on the floor. I tackled him off the bike, and hit him sharply across the face. After a tussle, and then a loud debate, we agreed that he could conduct the interview between laps of the room, and every ten minutes he could go into the garden to let off some firecrackers.)

Mr D: "The thing you must understand is that up to this point all art has been too slow. While it may have other points of interest, it is rendered unpalatable to the Futurist sensibility by its stultifying lack of motion. The APAA was constructed to overcome this difficulty."

Hamilton: "And how do you achieve that?"

Mr D: "Well, initially we employed a number of small devices. Early on in the project we discovered that any small statue, for example a Cellini nymph made out of gold and bronze, could be glued to the blades of a blender. When the machine is switched on the piece becomes high speed, kinetic, Futuristic. If only Cellini had worked in a more durable medium, like cast iron or steel, he could have been a noteworthy artist."

Hamilton: "Where did you go from there?"

"Mr D: We soon realised that we would never be able to truly explore the potential of these pieces as long as people insisted on viewing them as objects, rather than high speed events. We held a Titian week, during which we shot a series of his preparatory sketches out of a cannon at a group of Ukrainians, but ticket sales were surprisingly low and budget issues forced us to stop on the fourth day. However, other schemes have been a great success, for example, where else can you see a piece of Native American woodcarving mounted on a trolley and accelerated down a hallway by magnets, or one of Lucas Cranach's early alter pieces swung from a ceiling rafter by a steel cable?"

Mr Ernesto (left) and Colleague (right) work on their controversial new method of introducing the work of Eric Gill to a potential gallery goer.

Hamilton: "Bold and radical stuff indeed! What does the future hold for the APAA?"

Mr D: "Once sufficient funding has been achieved we will convert the entire gallery into a train which travels from Paris to Shanghai in just eight hours. The dining car will serve ozonised steaks and beetroot from the vacuum still. The front of the train will be fashioned like a gigantic fist, and a number of inbuilt whistles will make the train scream unbearably as it moves through the air."

Hamilton: "Thank you Mr Dolcelatte. It has been a pleasure..."

(I spoke in vain! No sooner were his final words out of his mouth than Ernesto Dolcelatte had vaulted lightly out of the window and into the cockpit of an idling autogyro. As he flew away over my house he dropped an aluminium square on which were printed the words 'Due to it's unnecessarily stationary nature, I am about to knock off your chimney pot'.)

Broad Brushstrokes

From the morass of cynical EU laws and directives has surfaced the clause prohibiting the routine vaccination of animals against Foot and Mouth disease. A more pernicious piece of legislation you could not wish for. As Matthew d'Ancona very properly points out in The Spectator, there is no good reason why animals should not receive the vaccination in view of the large number of antibiotics and medicines with which they are already treated. Of course, the explanation is as simple as it is offensive: this flabby, regressive, jealous, grasping body of protectionist bureauworms cannot bear the idea of denting consumer-confidence in European meat; so naturally, they prefer to enforce measures that are potentially (potential that has the potential soon to have been realised twice in 6 years) catastrophic. From where I'm standing, Euroskepticism has never looked so appealing.

=Dogtooth spent most of the weekend visiting the National Gallery. Far from gaining a new appreciation, I left in something of a hot mood, feeling angry and disappointed with many of the painters who, up until this point, I have revered. It is clear to me now that, in all respects, the late Nineteenth Century was an inferior forty years. For Courbet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne, I have unshakeable admiration. By advancing the cause of portraiture they bore the only worthwhile fruit of that twoscore years. Portraiture: bold and infinitely fascinating! And how feeble and self-indulgent appear the so-called 'experimentations' of Monet's Poplars or Seurat's bloody dots in the shadow of a magnificent Ingres, a Delacroix, a Gericault or a Velazquez. Even Constable's landscapes knock the Impressionist efforts into a gaping macaroon. Go back another few centuries, and you have the likes of Titian, Lippi, Raphael, Masaccio and Caravaggio to contend with - painters who actually strove to represent human bodies and engender action, atmospere and interest, as opposed to few wispy forms shimmering ineffectually among some blurred trees. Who did Monet think he was, sitting in his boat? Claude (-Oscar?) Monet! The macaroon gapes for thee, thrice wider than for other men!

2012: The Year of the Elephant in the Room

I started watching boxing after Lennox Lewis beat Evander Holyfield in the second fight of 1999. What this means is that in my viewing lifetime there has never been a heavyweight fighter of any charisma or talent. Our current undisputed heavyweight champion is the uninspiring Ruslan Chagaev, who gained the title by fighting the walking freakshow Valuev, a seven foot Russian slugger styled 'The Beast from the East'. Over in England we have had the occasionally talented but soulless Danny Williams, the former kickboxer Matt Skelton, and the supremely unlovable and arrogant Audley 'Fraudley' Harrison. Any of these dubious characters could easily knock out one of the talented and exciting fighters to be found in the light and middle weight classes at the same time, but they could never hope to acheive the same level of respect or popularity.

What this means is that the pleasure derived from sport is not dependent, as is sometimes claimed, on the sportsmen being the best in the world at their endevour, but rather on more intangible qualities like elegance and heart. There is no reason therefore why the Paralympics should not be taken as seriously as the Olympics. That being said, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the Paralympics. Mostly it is the rather worrying ethic which seems to pervade the games that it is not about the winning, but about the taking part. Nobody ever boos the opposing amputees, and if Britain's wheelchair rugby team fail in disgrace at the next games we can be sure that there won't be any angry tabloid articles berating them. The overwhelming feeling of the Paralympics is 'aren't they doing well'. I won't take the games seriously until contestants start taking performance enhancing drugs.

There's no news like a lack of news

A long car journey today gave me ample opportunity to savour Radio Four's dreaded hour and a half of news headlines (between 5 and 6.30 if you want to enjoy it yourself. It's almost a pleasure when the Archers comes on) and I was amazed by the amount of non-news on the Foot and Mouth incident. It strikes me that news outlets assign the number of minutes each story gets according to importance, rather than how much there is to say. I accept that another outbreak of Foot and Mouth would be a dreadful and significant event, but I don't see why I need to hear constant speculation and reminders that the situation has not changed in any significant way since yesterday. When there is news, tell me it, until then let's hear about something else. It's a bit like the compulsory ten minutes of time allocated every evening for over a week to telling us that areas of the UK affected by flooding have been damaged just as badly as everyone thought they would be, but no worse.

Dogtooth's recent mockery of Green envirobeefery bought to mind a new training regime which I have myself adopted. I get on a treadmill and rack it up to a goodly pace, and then fix my eyes on the calorie counter. A medium sized egg is 80 calories, so I run until I feel tired, and then see how many eggs worth of calories I have burned. I then go home and consume that many eggs. I sort of think that moving the calories through my system, rather than letting them hang around in my subcutaneous expanses, has the effect of flushing out unhealthiness, or something of that sort. At the very least it allows me to eat a lot more eggs than I otherwise would.

Meditation on Thais

Thaksin Shinawatra has bought Manchester City FC. This is just bizarre. Thaksin, lately the Prime Minister of Thailand, was deposed in his absence after a military coup in september of last year. Since then he has been living in London. In 2004 he laughably attempted to buy Liverpool FC. Presumably he tasted the delicious prospect of owning his own club then and has never looked back. Hmmm. Football and coups d'Etat? This is really the London Prodigal's territory. Although Dogtooth was in Bangkok when the tanks rolled in and was compelled to keep tabs on the whole affair. How strange that I should have witnessed the ousting of Thai statesman, yet I have never watched a Manchester City match.

Where's the beef?

There's no idiot like a pedantic idiot. Research done by Chris Goodall, Green candidate for Oxford West, endeavours - by way of a quite breathtaking departure from reason - to show that driving to the shops is four times greener than walking the same distance. Greater idiocy hath no rationalisation than the empirical evidence offered to support this claim: that a brisk walk to the shops will result in the sudden and uncontrollable urge to devour 100g of, say, beef, the production and delivery of which leaves a hefty carbon footprint in its wake. No doubt Hamilton's trusty abacus could provide us with some reliable stats and figures, but I imagine that a national aggregate of two to three main meals is eaten daily, discounting intervals of snacking. Appetites tend to be large or small, and rarely fluctuate. Clearly a 7km treadmill session would put the wind up the conscientious calorie-counter, but I have never known anyone to return from the 400 yard hike to the post office gasping for 100g of minced beef to quell their raging metabolism. That a significant number of Europeans expand quite markedly in their middle years is proof that we are overeating/underexercising anyway, and that the amount of food we need has little bearing on the amount we eat. Goodall's statistics may apply to a hyena abroad on the African plains, eating according to its requirements; but since the dawn of what might broadly be called civilisation, they have not been applicable to our lot.

This just in: Dogtooth popped out to the shops earlier to pick up some basic groceries. When I returned I drank a chaste glass of orange juice. I breakfasted modestly this morning; notwithstanding, the impulse to gorge 100g of beef is not overwhelming. I will hang on until supper-time.

My Day Job

I recently had a long meeting with my Literary Agent, who also manages my PR and acts as proxy in a number of prolonged legal disputes I seem to have got entangled in, and we agreed that with the Harry Potter phenomenon finished this was a good time to step into the breach and introduce a new generation of children to the wonder of the written word. Because of the recent success of The Dangerous Book for Boys we agreed it should be an old fashioned yarn of derring-do etc. in the mold of Conan Doyle and John Buchan, and luckily for you people it will be serialised for free upon this very blog. Gather the children around then, as I give you the first instalment of:

Sir Arthur and the Mystery of the Cordwainer's Toe
"Silence is the condemned man's only prerogative" said Lord Entwistle, pushing the decanter across the table toward me, "but perhaps you'd care to tell us what became of the Brigadier, and the aeronautical device of the Philadelphia Jesuits?"
"With pleasure" I said, selecting a cigar from a proffered box, "It all began last January, on a bitterly cold afternoon. Like any sensible fellow I was seated before a roaring fire with a monograph of Chaldean adverbs, the last of my uncle Nungent's '66 Taylor's, and a large sixpenny whore. I was disturbed from my comfortable reveries by a hoarse salutation, and from the thick London peasouper which swirled round the far end of my study stepped a curious figure. His bearing and demeanour were undoubtedly that of a naval man, but he was dressed in the clothes of an off duty magician, or the proprietor of a second rate dog training school. He sported a large ginger moustache, of the sort which might be worn by an army chaplain recently defrocked for unnatural sexual practices,and on his cheek were tattooed a number of cryptic symbols.
'Sir Arthur' he cried, 'I come to you under the orders of the foreign office. I am told that you are a daring fellow, who would gladly put his unique talents to the defense of the empire overseas'.
'Why' I replied, 'I am a man of no particular talents. I am considered, I admit, the finest blow pipe marksman in Europe, , and a world expert in Persian dietary habits, and I'm anyone's match at Hungarian kick-boxing, but other than that my interests are somewhat obscure. However I will gladly put my few poor abilities at the disposal of my country.'
'How would you feel' he asked 'about undertaking an exceedingly dangerous mission to Constantinople?'
'Dash it' I cried, 'it sounds just the caper I've been looking for! Pull up a whore and tell me all about it.'
The visitor sat down and produced a Mussulman water pipe. For a period he was silent as he carefully filled and lit it. Eventually he looked up, his head wreathed in fragrant smoke.
'What do you know' he asked 'of the nation of Russia?'
'As I recall it was a small province of the Rhine Palatinate, which briefly attained the status of an autonomous Lutheran republic during the Thirty Years war, before being claimed as a crown possession of the Austro-Hungarian empire'
'So we have long believed. However it now appears that this was a misapprehension caused, through circumstances too Byzantine to enter into, by the idiosyncrasies of an eighteenth century archivist in the department of records, by the name of Paisley. Russia is in fact a huge and powerful nation, ruled by the Romanov dynasty and profession the Orthodox faith, situated to the far east of Europe. Its climate is extreme and its main export is timber. Its embassy is situated on the Strand, between the Royal Anthropological Society and the Pickwick Hotel.'
'Good God!' I cried. 'I always thought that building was some kind of dry goods emporium.'
'That' said my visitor darkly 'is closer to the truth than you realise.'"
"Confound it!" ejaculated Lord Entwistle passionately, "This web of intrigue is so deep and mysterious it seems that it might go on forever."
"Yes" I replied, allowing, I must admit, a wry smile to play on my lips, "it seems that it might."

Saturn Devouring His Pension Plan

One of Dogtooth's recent posts raised the topic of art and value. He suggests that a copy of Sunflowers should be valued according to its similarity to the original. Not so. I can receive all the artistic value of Hamlet from a paperback copy (let's assume there has been no textual jiggery-pokery) but that does not mean that the manuscript for Hamlet would not be worth far more money. When I buy, for example, one of Goya's black paintings (see above), I am not only paying for the artistic value but also for a unique artifact. Of course as an impoverished sea creature I might think that rarity value a ridiculous extravagance, but I bet I'd change my mind if fifty million came rolling through the door.

The Treason of Metaphors

What I want to say concerns an article (predominantly the second half, or last seven paragraphs) by Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline's illustrious editor. The article is a slightly flat and uninspiring variation on an original theme: the erosion of civil liberties. It's quite good stuff, if a little jaded; but notice O'Neill's rhetoric getting the better of him towards the end:

...a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.

I don't see this. How would a written catalogue of civil rights have less application to the 'man on the street' than lawyers and academics? How would its application be more complicated than the Law, which has no trouble treating its subjects impartially? O'Neill has fallen victim to the felicitous metaphor. He has happened upon an analogy so fruitful that he cannot bear to part with it. The focus of his piece (a written bill of rights) is now dictated by the logic of the metaphor (an artefact on a high shelf behind thick-plated glass in a museum). Never mind that these two things are not analogous: rhetorical logic is irresistible, even to the orator.

The Treason of Images

Dogtooth is not usually known to equivocate, but in the case of Robert Thwaites I find myself once again navigating a tight passage between liberty and practicality. The value of authenticity has never diminished - much to the consternation of Roland Barthes, who would argue, probably quite sensibly, that a flawless forgery of van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' should fetch the price of the original. Or alternatively - as our economics would have it - the price of the original should fall to the aggregate of the collected fakes. In essence, Thwaites's crime was only to take advantage of the absurdly inflated value of original works of fine art. His forgeries received high praise from everyone up to and including his sentencing judge, not to mention that the paintings were of such a quality to dupe the art experts who purchased them. Honesty in one's dealing should of course be encouraged, and serious fraud exposed and punished. But as a country that hands out serious prison terms to forgers, we should reflect soberly on the how selling high-quality paintings under the name of a past-master (these were not copies of originals, but original works in the style of John Fitzgerald, a 19th century dreamscape artist) came to be a criminal offence.

Giblets to stuff the turkey of inactivity

According to Madeleine Bunting, who frequently leaps fully-clothed into freezing lakes, "we need that attentiveness to nature to understand our humanity, and of how we fit, as just one species, into a vast reach of time and space."
People really should think before they commit this sort of thing to paper.

In Memoriam

I was going to impose Ingmar Bergman's face over the knight, but I'm looking for a job and I don't really have time. To be quite honest the biggest shock about Bergman's death for me was the fact that he was still alive. Ho hum.

Tangentially, one of the most mysterious disappearances that I have ever experienced was a rented copy of Wild Strawberries which removed itself from a video player and disappeared altogether when I left the room for fifteen minutes for a cup of tea and a chicken tikka pasty.

Attempted fun with maths:

Last night I was watching Mock the Week, which I fully accept is unforgivable, and one of the news stories mentioned was a claim by police that one in twenty drinks in nightclubs is spiked. Eagerly I dusted down my calculator and got tapping. Assuming that all drink-spiking victims are women, and that everybody drinks two drinks each on average, that means one in five women drinks a spiked drink every night. Good work sturdy women of Britain, who seem to be largely able to consume spiked drinks and go home unmolested!
Also, in a nightclub which sees five hundred patrons a night there will be a thousand drinks, of which fifty will be spiked. Assuming that the prolific drink-spikers manage five Micky Finns a night each, that means that one night club patron in a fifty makes a concerted effort to drug someone else. Factor in the likelihood that most of these spikers are men and the figures become more mind boggling still.
Imagine my disappointment when a trawl of Google failed to turn up said report.

Even so, it is very hard to credit the idea that drug rape is remotely as common as it is perceived to be, though no doubt it is deeply horrible when it does occur. Only 2 percent of women who claim to have been molested with the aid of drugs showed any traces of narcotics in their systems other than alcohol or recreational drugs. Although I am not arguing for the matter to be ignored entirely, it does seem odd that a person of sinister intent would run the risk of introducing an illegal knock-out drop into somone's drink rather than just wait for someone else to suffer the inevitable effects of voluntery overindulgence.

The Death of the Novel

I am reading The Da Vinci Code. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? as Lord Rees-Mogg queried, and Pope before him. Nevertheless, here is a little list of things that have irritated me already:

1) In spite a 500 year tradition of referring to the peerless Renaissance trailblazer as Leonardo, Dan Brown has now decided that we ought to be calling him 'Da Vinci'. This is quite simply monstrous.

2) The use, or possible conception, of the verb to serpentine. This usage is sufficiently disgraceful, and although I am, in theory, in favour of the organic advancement of the English tongue, I feel Brown is perhaps not the person to whom to entrust this delicate task.

3) Bad grammar (split infinitives, etc); awkward syntax that trips over its own untied clauses; a prose style that would make McGonagall blush; gratuitous use of italics for effect and suspense; a cheap, faux-Hollywood turn of phrase that should never be found outside a 12 year-old's creative writing assignment; and, finally - though doubtless more complaints will arise as I progress (if progress it be) - a bollock-gnawing propensity to patronise his readership by feeding us very basic points of information e.g. that his protagonist will be able to seek refuge at the US embassy because, apparently, it is not within the jurisdiction of the French police.

What I did on my holidays: an incident in the high Himalayas

Making my way through India's frozen north I arrive at length in the backpacker's paradise of Manali. On the drive up from the bus station I notice that several of the eateries spread along the winding mountain path have 'trout fish' advertised on handpainted signs outside. 'A pan fried trout, drawn freshly from the glacial streams, is just what I fancy after the grindingly relentless diet of dal, paratha and momo, enlivened only with the occasional gnasher crumbling piece of grit, which I have enjoyed up till now' I thought to myself. That very evening I dressed in my finest threads and sauntered down to the nearest cafe.
'Trout please' I say to the smiling waiter. He disappears, only to re-emerge with what apears to to be a large piece of hashish, which he places on the table in front of me.
'No, no, I want trout.'
He gestures to the narcotics.
'Ne, ne. Charas ne. Trout hai. Trout fish.'
He must be simple, for he cannot understand my flawless hindi. He just pushes the drugs a little closer to me.
'Trout. Trout. In pani hai. Ribe da. Ribe.' I realise I have lapsed into bastardised pan-slavic. I have little option but to leave fishless and forlorn. I have similar experiences at all the subsequent eating places. Perhaps 'trout' is some sort of code word. It looks like it's dal for supper again.

...But everybody hates the Jews

The following message is directed specifically at anyone who has ever speculated about the root cause of Hitler's anti-Semitism: DON'T! I've heard ludicrosities spanning the whole breadth of human insanity, from rumours about Hitler's own Jewish origins to half-baked anecdotes about bad childhood experiences with Jews. Like many others in Weimar Germany, Hitler had scrappy notions of Jewish Communism as the cause of Germany's political impotence, layered with Romantic notions of an Aryan Germany. You might as well suggest that Ken Livingstone's political affiliations can be explained by his having been daily cuffed around the head as a boy with a hardback copy of The Road to Serfdom.