Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger has passed.  The BBC features interviews with Billy Bragg, commenting on folk music, protest songs and the importance of popular protest.  Billy remarks that today, the youth have means to express discontentment.  He's right of course, but are a thousand Twitter posts ever going to be as important as 'Where have all the flowers gone?'?

One thing that is very clear from the interviews Mr Bragg gave.  The chap can sing.

And of course, what is quite obvious, he's probably the best singer/songwriter of love songs recording today. Possibly ever.

You disagree?

By al means, hit 'comments',  - but only after you have listened to 'milkman of human kindness'.

And of course...'St Swithins Day'.

Nature Notes - Cull-ture club and coughing cows

Ruddy ducks, bloody deer and bastard badgers are just three species to have the misfortune to find themselves on the front pages of the newspapers next to the word ‘cull’.

It’s hard to think of another creature as inoffensive as a duck, unless you are a loaf of bread in which case you probable have a lot to fear.  Only my nephew can challenge a duck when it comes to a complete lack of guile.  This is a child that was once outwitted by a goat, a tale still referred to round the dinner table by the title ‘Billy and the trousers’.  Deer, it would seem are a victim of their own success, they breed in numbers and rub their antlers on trees.  Well, obviously, something has to be done about this rutting arboreal menace.

The problem for badgers is not that traditional shaving brushes have suddenly become very fashionable but rather that they give cattle bovine TB.  Whether they sneak up behind an unsuspecting cow in dead of night with a syringe full of the stuff, or whether they just cough on them has not been made clear.  What has been made clear is that cows make milk and therefore money while badgers make beloved characters in childrens’ literature but this is not enough to prevent them from the sort of persecution until recently reserved for kiddyfiddlers, 1970s teevee personalities or, worst of all, kiddyfiddling 1970s teevee personalities, the cull of which has also been front page news.

 If coughing cows is not reason enough to dislike them, Nazis obviously had badger sympathies, as is evidenced by their sharing of the same colour scheme.  All footage of Nazis shows them in black and white.

Culling is a traditional country pastime and one imagines that rather than Predator Drone strikes, traditional country cruelty will be employed.

Cultural vandalism

Scottish food is not just a load of stodge in a polystyrene container.

Scottish cuisine has, shall we say, something of a reputation for not being the healthiest in the world.  Maybe, but if you've spent the day staggering in a blizzard through the gloaming looking for a stranded coo or bewildered hiker, a dinner rich in radish is not going to cut it.  Ideally, you want something rich in fat, grease and wobbly bits that go crunchy when fried.  Even if you work in an office and live in Glasgow.

But is it as bad as all that?  

The Canadians think it's worse.  It's reported that they have outlawed a wide variety of British foods, such as marmite, but also the fabulous Scottish beverage Irn Bru, which is either a fizzy, tasty and refreshing drink, or a vile cocktail of artificial colours and flavourings just not found in nature, or food shops in North America, apparently - but are found in chemical weapon factories in angry countries, and Scottish corner shops.

It's not like Scotland can hit back in some sort of tit-for-tat trade war.  Canada bans Irn Bru and so Scotland bans, er...well, I'm sure there's a Canadian export that could be targeted.  Obviously not any kind of alcoholic produce.  Moose? Do they export moose?

As far as I can determine Canada's chief exports seem to be belligerent people with French accents and comedians who pretend they are American so that they can get a career in Hollywood.  So that appears to be it, if they ban our Irn Bru, we introduce strict prohibitions on Rick Moranis.

It's also served on fine china.

You'll have had your tea

Myths persist for three reasons.

Firstly, repetition.  Repeat something often enough and it will gain, if not credibility, then at least popularity or even notoriety.  The great thing about the repetition of a myth is that it can be done by people who have not even heard the original source material, but wish to confirm something in a manner that indicates they are privy to information others are not.  For instance 'I hear the Pope has six toes on each foot'.  'Ooooh, yes, I heard that too.' and so on.

Secondly, the myth is something we want to believe.  Alien life visiting our planet and fumbling with yokels' trouser parts is a far more interesting belief to hold than, say, we are alone in the universe and even if alien life did visit, it wouldn't try to touch us up because we are such a repellant species.

Thirdly, it's credible.  There could be an undiscovered creature living in the Himalayas.  There could be a dinosaur swimming in Loch Ness.  Haggis is a Highland creature.

The fabled 'Pyramid of haggis'.  

If there's a better way to display tinned haggis, it's yet to be invented.

Let's be quite clear, haggis is not an animal found in the Highlands of Scotland, it's a mixture of offal and meat, like a big spicy sausage.  If the haggis were an animal, I would imagine that it would not come in a vegetarian option.  I may not be a qualified vet, but I'm not aware of any animals that are actually vegetables.

Haggis does however, taste exactly like the meat of an animal that lives a very rough life in the Highlands of Scotland, subsisting on a diet of heather, rain, granite and the occasional lost hiker.  If Haggis were an animal, then hunting season would be early January (of course they're hunted in the wild, whoever heard of intensive haggis farming?), to adorn the plates of diners on Burns Night.

Robert Burns's verse on the side of the Scotish Parliament building.  

If you're verse adorns the side of a Parliament building, you are a national treasure...

or possibly a little sod with a spray can who styles himself a 'graffiti artist'.

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, arguably Scotland's greatest poet.  Arguably the United Kingdom's greatest poet if you consider having the poet's verses reproduced on tea towels as a measure of fame.  Without doubt the worlds greatest poet if you measure fame by having a dinner named after you - take that Shakespeare, Thomas and Yeats.

It's Burns Night tonight.  All over the country people will be dusting off their best tartan biscuit tin, downloading a verse or two from the Internet, calling potatoes 'tatties' and using the celebration of the birth of a gret poet to drink a lot of scotch.

There is, apparently, a right way to partake of a Burns supper.  This involves, depending on your means, a piper, or some recorded pipe music (bag, not pan).  It also involves many, many toasts and an address to the haggis which is, apparently, the great chieftain of the pudding race (coming as a surprise to all those who thought that was rolly polly and custard).

This example of Scottish cuisine can be enjoyed any night of the year.

The problem is when you enjoy it every night of the year.

It's also the one day a year when Scottish cuisine is enjoyed.  The rest of the year Scottish cuisine is merely feared and respected in equal measure.  The world over, people eat traditional Scottish fare, neeps, tatties and of course haggis.  Well, let's be honest, people eat what they think is traditional Scottish fare.  If people were tucking into traditional Scottish fare then, in my experience, dinner tables would largely feature a double portion of chips liberally soaked with saltandsauce, washed down with Irn Brew.

It's easy to knock Scottish cooking.  And it's fun too.
And unfair.  I bloody love Scottish cooking and I think it's wrong that it gets ridiculed.  True, Scottish people do like hearty food, leaning towards the meaty, and well cooked.  Stews, mince and flat sausage all pander to the 'if it's brown, wolf it down' sensibilities of the Scottish palate but it's unfair to knock exotic items like the deep fried mars bar - if Heston had come up with that, it would be hailed as a work of genius and possibly even 'witty'.
Certainly, I'll be tucking into my haggis and probably partaking of a dram or two.  Cliche?  Possibly, but also an opportunity to toast the great man who wrote 'my love is like a red red rose' and 'Tam O'Shanter', poetry which, like Scottish cuisine, deserves celebration.

e publishing

It’s called a Kindle because it’s the next best thing to burning books!  Centuries of traditional type and publishing have given us everything from the Bible to Penguins – the books, not the bird or the biscuit.  Ten minutes with electronic publishing has given us fifty fucking shades of fucking grey and fucking fan-fucking-fic.  Time was when you wanted to read filth discreetly you wrapped a copy of the Times around your Razzle and the only thing fans produced were scary shrines and purple-printed fanzines advertised for sale in the back of the NME. 

And what of the second-hand bookshop?  These are among the greatest places on Earth, what will happen to them without any second-hand books?  And what about the smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  What about the proprietors of these magical places?  Do you know how hard it is to find a job in retail that enables you to open and close when you want to and to wear carpet slippers on the job? And what about their smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  Do you know why so many wannabe writers complain that they could paper their walls with rejection letters from publishers?  I’ll give you a clue, it’s not because editors, agents and publishers are all sadists.  Time was when self publishing was rightly described as vanity publishing and was the only way the otherwise unprintable memoirs of retired men with forthright views about foreigners saw the light of day.  Now, any idiot with an iPad and a few hours to waste can publish their ‘original’ moody bloody vampire novella.

As for digital magazine downloads, what a shocking idea.  Every edition of the ‘People’s Friend’ had a free rain-hood stuck to the front cover. Try giving away free essential old-lady apparel as a digital bloody download.

Services with a smile

A pint of beer.  Lovely.  This is best enjoyed after briskly walking the dogs or engaging in some rewarding manual labour prior to slumping in a chair and sighing.

Whetherspoons, the pub chain famous for selling very cheap beer and for being open for breakfast so that patrons can enjoy a croissant with their cider, today opened their first pub on a motorway service station.

This is, depending on your point of view, a sound commercial decision and a move that will allow weary travellers to have a decent meal at an affordable price prior to resuming their journey refreshed and alert, or madness.  In particular, motorway madness.  And that’s the worst type of madness.  Apart from madness involving power tools.  Or genocide.

Wheatherspoon’s argument for having a pub in a service station – a place where drivers’ pee and guzzle coffee prior to resuming a journey on a very busy road full of speeding traffic – is that this is a place where a motorist can stop and have something to eat and a tea or a coffee or a wide variety of drinks or, if they are drinking alcohol, a sensible amount.

So what’s a sensible amount?  I’ve been on the M40.  A sensible amount of alcohol to drink whilst driving on it is none at all.  A sensible amount to drink when you arrive home after driving on it is a fucking shedload.

Even if the driver isn’t boozing, is a pub breakfast or lunch, which can involve sausage, beans, eggs, double chips and an extra sausage, really the best thing to eat prior to undertaking a motorway journey?  Isn’t the best meal to drive on three amphetamine tablets rattling around in one of those wee paper cup things and a strong coffee?

Those who oppose the opening of the pub argue that THIS IS A PUB IN A SERVICE STATION!

I can’t actually recall the name of the pub, but surely this is ripe territory for a competition.  ‘The Drivers’ Arms’, with the pub sign being a couple of hands on a steering wheel?  ‘The Coach and Party’?

Possibly this is a throwback to the romantic early days of motoring, when roadside coaching inns enjoyed a brief revival as roadhouses, offering beer, fags and hearty fare to weary motorists before all those pesky laws about drink driving or social conventions about smoking a pipe in a car full of infants came into being.  Our roads though, are somewhat different now.

I’m a huge fan of pubs, and I’ve got nothing in particular against the M40, but I’m not sure that a pub in a motorways service station is a great idea.  There are many things that one can usefully do at a motorway service station, but ‘tarry’ is not one of them.

Which makes me wonder about a pub patronised by a transient community.  Or will it be?  Who will be the regulars at the Drivers Arms?  I’m romantic enough to hope that this will be a destination location for those in the locality who fancy a quick drink in convivial company and are willing to toil across the no-mans land, and possibly six lanes of speeding traffic, that surround these places for a pint and some lively conversation.  Possibly these will be the same people who when faced with the question ‘where shall we eat tonight’, don’t hesitate to respond ‘the KFC at the service station…we can get a drink at the pub first’.

A ringing endorsement

Once, we all knew where we stood with advertising, especially advertising for products that were actively bad for us, instead of products that we simply didn’t need.  We don’t require any encouragement to buy things we don’t need, but things that are actively bad for us require a little thought.  Specifically, fags and booze.

Time was, it was simple.  Shot of a bloke smoking, or having a drink, or both, with a final five second pack shot so that you knew what packet of fags to look for the next time you were in the fresh vegetable aisle (ahh, simpler, happier times).

Then, things got tricky, as new rules were introduced to stop booze being advertised to children and as making you successful with women, and fags being advertised…er, at all really.  Luckily, the new restrictions on advertising came in at the same time as creativity and coke consumption surged in the ad agencies and ad budgets blossomed to ensure that your average TV fag ad had a bigger budget than Bond and more creative talent working on it than ‘Blade Runner’, and booze adverts became funnier than the ITV sitcoms that interrupted them.

Now, there’s no money to buy coke or film big budget ads and the created world can’t compete with the reality, which is that if you go to the pub and nip out into the storm to smoke your fag, your bird will have been pulled by the time you get back by a non-smoker with a gym membership or a sports car (either, but not both, affordable with the money he’s saved on fags), a taste for wine and, probably, a sex dungeon.

Instead, manufacturers have turned to subtler means to influence our buying decisions, such as product placement. 

When James Bond was washed up, in hiding and hopelessly out of condition in ‘Skyfall’ his booze of choice was Heineken.  He may as well have been drinking cider on a park bench.  Once he got himself sorted out it was back on the vodka martinis but the message was clear – drink booze!

So in times when advertising budgets are stretched and audiences are sophisticated to a degree that a pack shot of a horsemeat lasagne with the phrase ‘buy me!’ flashing on the screen twenty times a second is more likely to have people running to post abuse on Twitter than running to the supermarket, manufacturers are working hard to associate their products with success and things that are high profile, or beloved, or both. 

This means that premiership soccer teams have their sponsor’s logo shirts, stadiums are renamed after tile grout or whatever and from 2014 anyone getting a tattoo of their soccer team emblem will be legally obliged to have the name of the sponsor added below.

I’d like to see endorsement and sponsorship developed.  There are, oh I don’t know, bloody hundreds of soccer leagues and thousands of teams, surely if top-tier soccer is supported by global brands then lesser teams should be sponsored by second and third division products, more poundland than premiership.  There must be loads of obscure stuff out there that could benefit from a marketing push; energy drinks imported from North Korea?  Snacks featuring horsemeat, because horsemeat has proved hugely popular, and that was before people knew it WAS horse.  Just re-brand Findus frozen lasagne as ‘Jockey Jerky’ and away you go!  And what about brands that are big in New Zealand or Australia – ‘Kangerpee, the true taste of Brisbane’.

Apple are famous for their product placement, in films maverick computer geniuses rarely save the world using anything other than a powerbook.  What’s noteworthy is that Apple have taken product placement to a new level by product placing in real life, making a deal ensuring that every Starbucks coffee shop must have at least one person in it using a powerbook.  Early tests where that person was a bloke with a beard working on the script for his documentary which he hopes will be filmed in black and white have been so successful that later this year Apple will role out its upgrade – ‘hot girl using laptop while wearing huge headphones over a knitted cap.’

Culture Corner

Throughout 2013, Gentleman & Player has never been short of an (unpublished) opinion, informed or not, about the cultural landmarks of the year (such as asking ‘is the Costa or the Orange the one for lezzas?’ before not dashing off 700 words on modern literary prizes).  In an outstanding year for the arts, here were some of the highlights.

Television

Reviews and articles about the final season of ‘Breaking Bad’ continued a trend started by coverage of ‘The Wire’ which implied that the audience is somehow intellectual simply because they were watching the thing.

Strictly Come Dancing continued to amaze, Sir Bruce is a testament to either the wonders of animatronics, or the existence of necromancy.

‘Day of the Doctor’ was best enjoyed in a cinema.  Not just because sitting in the dark gave fans a chance to touch a girl, but because the 3D was perfectly realised and there was, appropriately, yet another dimension to the experience by sharing it with others.

BBC ALBA was a revelation.  You can see premiership football and rugby on the BBC.  OK, it’s Scottish premiership football and rugby, and the football is mostly Partick Thistle, but it’s excellent for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, in the world of Scottish sectarian football, Partick Thistle are like a DMZ, wearing a Jags scarf is guarantee of safe passage in Glasgow.  Interesting to see if this continues if they continue to be quite good.  Second major bonus is that all the commentary is a Gaelic, so nobody can understand a word.  But it all sounds poetic and wonderfully passionate.  Blissful.

Art

Manet at the RA was a masterclass in how to do a lot with not very much at all.  Manet was rich enough not to be arsed to finish most of his paintings.  Still, the new audio guides are good, including a little screen where you can see a picture of the picture obscured by the crowd in front of you.  This was a blockbuster and with London so handy for the Eurostar judging by the accents, and the manners, quite a lot of French had made the trip to see the exhibition.

The RA Summer Exhibition 2013 – surprisingly un-shit this year.

Doig at the Scottish National Gallery – confronted by enormous, colourful canvasses of tropical landscapes, the indigenous population didn’t know what to make of them.  Is a blue sky modernist or surrealist?

Theatre

The exceptional performances in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ underlined the casual cruelty of the fairy folk.  Sheridan Smith deserves special credit for being able to divert attention from David Walliams, who appeared to be possessed by the ghost of Frankie Howerd.  Smith’s legs are even better than her acting talent, which is exceptional.

Jude Law’s stellar performance as Henry V confirmed that it’s always a great idea to put a film star on the boards.  In a spellbound audience, you could hear the collective raising of hairs standing up on end during the ‘breach’ and ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speeches.  The tears in my eyes were due to an excess of dry ice used as smoke for the battle scenes.

My Sherlock

Let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London 

or Switzerland, where would you go?

Basil Rathbone was always my Sherlock Holmes, just as Nigel Bruce was always my Doctor Watson, and they always will be. 

My affection for these two actors as the definitive Homes and Watson was seeded when I saw their films as a child.  Years later and working my way through the DVD collection, the magic is undiminished which is, I am discovering now that I have had the opportunity to revisit other childhood favourites through the magic of Youtube, a rare experience.  Some programmes were, apparently, very much of their time and have not aged well; maybe one is less discerning as a child, or simply addled with artificial flavourings from Monster Munch.

Now new generations are inheriting their definitive Holmes and Watson.  Jeremy Brett was, for many, the epitome of Holmes.  I’ve never seen the ITV adaptation myself because they are afflicted with the same menace that besets all ITV drama – adverts.  One moment the game is afoot, the next you are confronted with an ad for something called ‘Anusol’ and before you can hit ‘mute’ you hold the answer to the riddle ‘what on earth is Anusol?’, something you can never unlearn.

On the big screen, various big names have taken turns trying on the deerstalker for size, none I think more successfully than Robert Downey Jr.  Is it because he mixes just the right amount of manic energy with the conviction to addiction only somebody with his past can bring, along with a physical aptitude for violence that the books always hinted at?  Partly, but mainly because I saw the first film with my Mum as a Christmas treat and so it’s now embedded deep in the ‘positive association’ wing of the mansion of my mind (which also has a f**king enormous wine cellar).

The BBC reboot of ‘Sherlock’ though, is nothing short of a tour de force in fan creation, as if it’s made of cult.  And it was interesting to see evidence of that the other day when I was near Barts (for reasons, I should be clear, entirely unrelated to the sort of condition requiring something that might be advertised on ITV).

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is in the Smithfield area of the City of London, with St Paul’s, The Old Bailey and the famous meat market nearby, and is famous for a number of reasons, including having the only statue of Henry VIII in London atop one of its entrance gates.  It is also where John Watson studied to be a doctor and where Sherlock abuses corpses in the name of criminal science and where, in the episode ‘The Richenbach Fall’, he apparently jumps to his death.

Red telephone boxes are not an unusual sight in London.  Far rarer than they used to be of course, victim first to a campaign by BT to replace an icon with stainless steel monstrosities with about as much charm as an abattoir floor, and then to the rise in popularity of the mobile ‘phone, which saw a move away from people having conversations in soundproofed boxes on a landline to a fashion for bellowing your business at passers-by.

And telephone boxes with pieces of card in them are not an unusual sight.  Indeed, there was a period when they were prolific as prostitutes advertised their, er, goods, in telephone boxes.  It has to be said that the trend in covering the glass of a telephone box in ‘business’ cards also afforded privacy for that other function of a telephone box so beloved of late night revellers.

The telephone box near Barts though bears not adverts but messages of love and support for Sherlock.  Presumably, these have been left by fans of the show from all over the world who have come here.  It may seem odd that fans would visit the site of the faked death of a fictional character but the notes, if they are authentic and not a prop, are surely simply a continuation of the same fan fervour that seized the readers of ‘The Strand’ when Holmes went over the Falls the first time in 1893.  And let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London or Switzerland, where would you go?

Gentleman's (and Poacher's) Relish

Gentleman’s Relish!  It sounds more like the title of an erotic serial publication (‘porn mag’ to you) from the seventies than a spread.

 

Just as Poachers Relish sounds more like a nocturnal knee-trembler with a milkmaid up against a stout oak that a tasty toast topping.

Both sound more like foodstuffs likely to be encountered in literature published in the 1920’s than encountered, never mind consumed, in real life.  However, they are available in real life, via Fortnum & Masons food hall.

And both are pleasingly tasty, but then I’ve always been the sort of chap that favours the savoury – a pickle, a pork pie and a smile, that’s me – over the sweet (although obviously the glove compartment of the car is stuffed with confectionary).  The Poacher’s Relish, essentially ground game, was something of a pokey surprise, like essence of mince.  Gentleman’s Relish is the piscine alternative, a spiced anchovy paste and an excellent way of bolting fish like a pelican, or accessing anchovies if you are tired of pizza.

Both come with cultural baggage.  Consuming either, spread thinly on toast, gives one a not unpleasant sense that you are setting yourself up for a day that is going to involve a pregnant maid, a butler out of control in the pantry, trouble at the hunt and, probably, the baffling murder of at least one houseguest, precipitating the arrival of an eccentric detective. 

You don’t get that with marmite.

It’s good to overcome class prejudices and try new things, even if a trip to the penguin enclosure is inadvisable following consumption of anchovy paste.  There are certain foods associated with certain groups and we shouldn’t be afraid of trying pies just because they are consumed by footie fans, or fried chicken just because it’s – based on my observations of the clientele orbiting the various chicken franchises at the rough end of town, not to mention an entire routine by teevee funnyman Mickey Flannigan – favoured by delinquents.  And I’ve been known to involve a kebab.  They are very tasty, you don’t actually need to drink for seven hours beforehand to appreciate a good kebab.  Obviously you do if you want to enjoy a bad kebab, but those are the rules.

Some foods just have a class association, there’s no getting away from it.  Anything served by a footman, killed (intentionally) on your own estate or pulled from your own river, or indeed all three, and it’s probably upper class nosh.  Anything served in a wrapper, probably not so much.  Of course there are foods that defy classification, anything grown in the garden or allotment is surely fit for a King, every Englishman’s home being his castle, so every Englishman’s garden is his estate and every Englishman’s allotment is…well actually it’s a place to get away from the wife and to stash porn in the shed while cultivating carrots, but for the purposes of this metaphor let’s describe it as his small place in Tuscany.

A matter of scale

Do you want your name to still be known centuries hence?  In a good way?  That’s not used to frighten children?  Do you want to be an answer to a question asked in school?  A question that is not ‘who do we avoid if he’s hanging round the gates?’  Do you want to leave a lasting legacy of your time on the planet? 

If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.

And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure.  Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.

For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date).  So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.

A word of warning however.  Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two.  Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps.  Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.

So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.

For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale.  By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.

I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson.  The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).

Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement.  The metric equivalent is The Farage.  

There is a demand for this.  Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites.  How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.

*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified.  For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents.  What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called?  Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.

Happy New Year

According to the media, this is the time of year to make changes to your life.  The newspapers are ironically bloated with ways to lose weight and undertake other activities designed to better you in a socially improved manner.  Brave indeed would be the glossy magazine that proclaimed ‘fuck it, 2014 is the year when it’s OK to spend the entire day in your pyjamas - you can combine a lie-in with an early night so you only really have to rationalise the late morning early afternoon hump’ or, ‘want to de-clutter?  Throw out those cook books – takeaway leaflets use up so much less space’.

Other ideas revolve around walking, cycling and fresh air.  Handy if you live within walking distance of a coastal path, not so great otherwise.  Often there are walking routes which culminate in a charming country pub.  The reality is that for most of us our walking route is the shortest route to the nearest pub, where charm is balanced against convenience.  The only time the gym is mentioned in 2014 is in the money pages, where the advice is to quit your membership as studies show that when you did go last year, you spent most of your time in the hot tub.  Fatty.

Unlike a landmark birthday, which often prompts one to consider starting to do something and stopping doing other things (starting to make old man noises when rising or sitting for instance, or stopping being able to tolerate Radio 1), the New Year is a collective experience and so there is much greater support for starting juggling and stopping smoking.

Last year, I rested the blog.  Not the result of a resolution or even really an active consideration.  I could write that like a farmer I wanted to leave the area of my musings a fallow year to recover and come back more fertile than ever.  But that’s bollocks.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, the world continued to produce events that were worthy of comment.  Popes retired, former Prime Ministers and Presidents passed away and oh my suffering Christ Operation Yewtree caused the greatest amount of retrospective damage to cherished childhood memories since the release of Star Wars Episode I.

At times like this, Twitter just doesn’t cut it.  The problem with tweeting is that you can’t build up a full head of steaming rant in 140 characters including spaces and grammar.  If you read Twitter posts about events, it’s like watching a conversation between people learning a language at elementary level: ‘The Pope has resigned and it is a shock.’  ‘I am shocked that the Pope has resigned, this does not normally happen.’  ‘Has the Pope resigned because of Operation Yewtree?  LOL.’  ‘Don’t say that about the Pope, the Pope is a great man’.  ‘Now he’s not, he wears a dress.’

And so on.

So, time to blog again.  About what, I have no idea, but my New Year prediction is: food, drink, social media, social irrelevances and that firm favourite - minor issues that outrage me to the point of incoherence.