The long and wound-up road...

Oh dear. The McCartney roadshow of revenge and counter-revenge rolls on, shrieking and lashing out fit to bust.

Poor Heather Mills, poor old Pensioner Paul, poor us too, for having to endure this eastenders-type misery amidst what seems to be a total lack of grace or understanding.

Enter Stella McCartney. She has a face that could electroplate hummingbirds from fifty feet. She has a list of contacts that could sway every newspaper,magazine and charity ball towards instantaneous loathing of any individual she chooses.

Poor Heather Mills didn't stand a chance. From the outset she was always going to be " Dad's end-of-life crisis ", a blot on the perfect celebrifamilia landscape. If there's any doubt that Stella Mccartney is the Lucrezia in this opera, then take a look at her collections and ask yourself " Honest craft? Or the lucre of connections?"

That house.

Across the street from us there is that house. It's called that house because the couple who live there are constantly fighting. They do so on a scale that makes their torment public. This is the poem I wrote about it...


THAT HOUSE

In the garden of that house
The pegs no longer hold
the washing to the line

Outside that house
The husband’s BMW
Is only there
from time to time

From that house
We hear screams
Of unimaginable scorn

In that house
The welcome mat
In the hallway
Is looking rather worn

Club Fever

I love golf. I'm ****ty seven years old and I've been playing for two months. By playing I mean going to a golf driving range and hitting bucket after bucket of balls out onto a big green field. This green field doesn't have holes, or bunkers, or any of the standard features of a golf course. But it has enabled me to cobble together a wracked and pitiful swing of some kind.

This is important because without a swing, you can't play golf. Without a swing you're just hitting golf balls randomly. I've been through phases of only being able to hit the ball in a kind of kiss-curl of a slice shot (it goes to the right), or an apologetic hook to the left. No good.

So I've adjusted my grip. Then I've squared my shoulders. I've even taken to sticking my arse out so that I'm over the ball in a good way. I've moved fingers, knees and chin to achieve a swing. Sometimes I forget the twenty seven individual adjustments I have to make in that second of action. The club comes down and I fall apart like one of those little wooden toys held together by elastic bands, you know the type.

So recently, after adding rhythm to my grip, stance, swing and perfectly-still-head, I've decided that at least a thousand balls hit out onto some indiscriminate piece of grass has qualified me to go on a golf course. I played my first round this morning.

Turning up like the new kid at school, and yes, my bag was new and not at all mud-stained, creased or heavily modified. I didn't know where to go, or what to do. Meandering onto the course I was advised by the course marshall to go straight to the third tee, as the first and second tees were occupied by slow players.

There I stood, looking down a piece of countryside shaped especially for this weird golf game. Golf is basically all those day-wasting games you played as a kid on some waste ground, trying to get a piece of concrete to bounce off the top of some abandoned refrigerator, a senseless piece of physical manipulation which somehow completely occupied you until it was done. Then you'd go home for tea.

Golf is that game times fifty. You will never satisfy yourself that you've mastered it, and so all your life becomes afternoons spent in a game that really has no point, except to gather in some nubbin of playfulness in the midst of an adult life with no leeway for mindlessness.

There I am, on the third tee. I'm imagining that my first shot will be one of those shots where, with no effort at all, shoulders, knees, chin, head, arms, wrists, feet, breath and hands all combine WITHOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT into the unmistakable pure pop of a ball being snatched by that piece of metal to be launched into the sky.

In most games you play against some other players, or some target held aloft. You compete to achieve some measurement in time, or length or accuracy. Not with golf. With golf you are competing against the entire idea of time and space. You turn a second into an arc of trajectory which can never be replicated or contained. In golf you attempt to send an object into an orbit of your desire, an orbit which suspends all other thought, concern or care. The moment of hitting the golf ball is pure existence given a discernible presence. It's golf.

So my first shot at the third tee. My first shot ever on a golf course. It went ten feet. The toupee of turf that my club ripped up in this process, that went three feet. Even adding them up together I only made thirteen feet. And a big muddy turf fly.

But nevermind. Later on in the round I chipped a ball up some sixty yards and it politely drummed it's way onto the green. As it rolled towards the hole, across the velveteen super-lawn, I felt like I had given birth to this ball and was watching it take it's first tentative steps.

I need to get a grip. Ha ha.

Keeping up appearances

Okay. Somebody round here has been overly-concerned with the appearance of others and it does nobody any favours to have that kind of stuff flying around.

I've allllways subscribed to the idea that it's better to be a bit cruel than a bit kind, so I'm giving him the chance to make amends.

If I don't hear from his agent (what's that? HE HASN'T GOT ONE?)or the man himself, I'm going to repost the entire series of these publicity shots WITHOUT THE MOSAIC IN PLACE. Is that clear enough for you? Yeah? Really?

I tried so hard to like Madonna...

I tried so hard to like Madonna, I really did. If text had a sound, these words would be a wheedling regretful dirge of unfulfilled longing, a longing to like the extremely gifted and commercially successful Madonna.

I tried, I really tried. Not. To. Comment.

But F*** it. On the news tonight, a wired-up fully-paid member of the professional Madonna-arse-suckers corporation (or lackey), with her taut and anally-pledged hair bunches, impersonally carrying a small black baby through an airport as if it were a bag of smack. Her nervous personal-assistant smile seemed ironic, like a gargoyle's welcoming of visitors to the dark cloisters. She's carrying this boy as contraband, to protect the identity of the real buyer, her boss Madonna.

Here's how it works. Laws apply, people do their best. But not if you're a feisty woman on the million-make. Madonna's making her life complete, by not being outdone by Brad Pitt and his night-mare Angelina Jolie. She's making her family complete by buying a baby (lock stock and barrel Guy?) and he's black. He's poor. She's going to release an album of devotional african songs to show that she's really an african at heart. Really. Madonna can officially trace her roots back as far as the dawn of humankind, well the Kaballah tells her that, and that's good enough for her.

Meanwhile, anybody who objects doesn't care about dying babies. Anybody who objects is just jealous of her fame and fortune. Anybody who objects clearly hasn't seen the DVD of her recent tour where she just, like, blew everyone's heads off with her nasally, childish pop jerky.

Guy Ritchie is looking forward to the moment when little black baby looks up and says in a gruff cockney voice; " It was never going to work. Guy knew that. Little Davie knew that. Blimey, even the sparrers and the barrer boys knew that it was all going to end..in unmanly tears ". Of course, it won't be long before the other Madonna children demand their own adopted babies, but that's a lot easier to deflect than the normal request for a kitten. Or a goldfish.

Madonna you sick and tawdry cow. I find myself spewing illiterate bile here because somewhere in an attic there's a picture of the original Cruella de Ville and she's wearing a pointy bra.

Da-da-da-daaaaaaaa

In 1866 the composer Brahms was 33. He embarked on the writing of " A German Requiem ", a piece of music written to honour the late memory of two of the most important people in his life, his mother and his good friend Robert Schumann.

Brahms was a philosopher and an agnostic, the writing of a requiem from a secular perspective had not been attempted on such a scale before.

"A German Requiem" is a work of great emotional and spiritual depth, which encompasses all the torrid dimensions of grief whilst simultaneously "outing" it's secular roots through the posing of questions on mortality from a more modern perspective.

Brahms " A German Requiem" premiered in its final form in 1869. Accounts of the first performance recall how people; " wept openly after only a few minutes, at the sheer poetry, passion and honesty of the grief being depicted ". At the conclusion of the work; "the audience sat silently for a few seconds, as if they dared not break the cumulative spell of the music". It was a success then and to this day is considered one of the supreme masterpieces of the chorale repertoire.

After the end of "A German Requiem"'s first performance, somebody asked Brahms' dad what he thought of it.

"It's not bad" said Brahms' dad.

Blogging the blog

My mate The Impostune is at it again, over on his blog.

This time he's decrying his own soft-skinned humanity, for liking the film " Love Actually " and a single by Robbie Williams.

When will he get over himself? All the turgid ramifications that he outlines in response to stuff that-doesn't-matter-but-works-in-an-immediate-way, is just so much blather and inert gas.

It works on you because despite the pristine and ascetic construct from which the mass-produced thoughts of The Impostune pour, the human being running on it's little wheel inside the carapace still needs the nothing new of emotions.

It needs it's quota of sobs and smiles. Don't kid yourself that a brilliant mind, a vocabulary to die for and a thorough critique of Pynchon or Foster-Wallace will suffice,it clearly won't.

The idea that a "common" experience, such as finding joy or identification in the obvious and accessible, is a weakness, is in itself one of the biggest weaknesses of all.

Lovely

All's fair in love, war...and satire

Poetry Envy. It ain't pretty.

Okay so this guy has won the Forward prize for poetry. Ten grand and all the brown rice you can eat, good on him.

But then I read a poem from the collection what won it for him.

here it is.

LIZARD BY ROBIN ROBERTSON

Volatile hybrid of dinosaur and toy, this
living remnant throbs on the hot stone:
a prehistoric offcut, six inches
of chlorophyll-green dusted with pollen;
a trick of nature - lithe, ectopic, cuneiform -
a stocking-filler, out of place everywhere
but in the sun. Frisking the wall,
its snatched run is a dotted line
of fits and starts, spasmodic, end-stopped.
It pulses once; slips into a rock with a gulp.

He used the word CUNEIFORM. Sheesh. I've been saving that word up for a poem for F***ing ages. And now he's gone and used it. I can't use it now. That would be like picking up a damp vinegary chip from somebody else's plate.

Hmmm Cherry Pie..

Crikey it's a weird world. This week the conservative conference is rapidly picking up a David Lynch vibe. David Cameron is hmm-ing over the cherry pie of centre ground politics, whilst log-carrying John Redwood is speaking in tongues about tax cuts.

Actually Cameron may be a fetid chinless tadge-bolter, but at least he's aware of what year we are in. He's finally worked out that unless you adopt the Blair administration's policy of "do only what's necessary" the tory party will have this current era go whoosh over their heads, like some obscure joke. Well, obscure to them.

The calls for tax cuts simply defy all logic and political credibility. EVERYONE KNOWS that tax cuts don't come free, that the taxes are simply displaced to some other aspect of our essential lives. Everyone knows, as well, that tax cuts simply encourage an unstable relationship between banks and investors, which leads to higher interest rates. As we are currently a Trillion pounds in personal debt, that's a very taut trigger waiting to be pulled.

The tax-cutters plough remorselessly on, claiming that " the public expects it of us " and "it's our only hope". Their utter dependence on tax cuts is the surest sign of a party rapidly on its way to permanent redundancy and Cameron is at least intelligent enough to realise that.

The centre ground has only one rule. There are no rules. You do what's necessary, nothing more, you can only watch the hyperspeed financial mechanisms whirr on,with or without the government's interference. People and businesses can now hop-skip-jump from this country to any location they desire, and in a flash.

The days when governments set out their stall and everybody fell into line have gone forever. Now, they are simply the book-keepers and rota monitors of a country that ebays itself stupid. Cameron appears cheerfully disdainful of resistance, it's good to see a tory leader actually leading for once and not following the morons from the political provinces.

The conservatives will have you believe they are a party founded on hard work, responsibility and foresight. There's no hard work in tax cuts, it's just giving stuff away to gain favour. There's no responsibility in placing our country in a need-to-borrow situation, after all, the last twelve years have seen us pay off the national debt by an historic amount. Above all, there's no foresight in reducing the level of national resources to a point where one bad month could lead to a total collapse of financial credibility, and more importantly, essential public services.

Cameron has stolen Blair's hymn sheet, and is moving up the charts with his cover-version of the righteous flexible pragmatist anthem. Gordon Brown should be crapping himself, for whilst it previously didn't matter how lifeless this old celt came across on television, now he's going to have to frottage through the next general election with a partner having pertinent desires of their own.

The old guard (and several fresh idiots) of the conservative party are squirming with discomfort at this new trajectory set by Cameron's team. It's only a matter of time before the allegorical body of Margaret Thatcher is found wrapped in plastic with the letters T B under her fingernails.