Everyone is rushing there but me.
Stooped down like bears, most of them.
The rest are waiting, worried:
Worried, because they're not rushing:
There must be something wrong if they're not rushing.

Labels: poetry

Ken Livingstone has been suspended from office for four weeks for his "Nazi jibe" at a Jewish reporter last year. All my sympathies are with Livingstone on this one; this is another blow for freedom of speech, and it's particularly absurd since the particular insult involved was pretty weak and really not very offensive. In fact, I struggle to see how it's offensive. It's not as if Livingstone was promoting being a Nazi prison guard; on the contrary.

Here's to Red Ken and more politicians like him. If even he could be forced to cave in by the hypersensitivities of political correctness then the Evening Standard will come even closer to ruling the country.

Tagged: Livingstone, Suspended, Nazi.

Dripping dreams of life away.
Dreaming drips night and day.
Can you hear the waters lap?
How many dreams left in the tap?

—Spike Milligan

That two-tone sky
Of suburbia.
It has clearness,
Sharp colours. I cry

On a calm day
In Spring. It all feels
Perfect, like it
Hides nothing away.

I know better.
The sky will crack as
Truth tumbles down.
The world gets wetter.

Tagged: Spike Milligan, SpikeMilligan, Poetry.

Labels: poetry

I just opened a bottle of Chilean Merlot, which was sealed with replacement cork. So far so good. But... it's corked. Actually corked. How can a wine with replacement cork be corked? There's seriously like, bits of cork in it. And it isn't even anything that was in the glass. This is strange.

Tagged: Merlot, Wine, Cork.

The last four days a friend and I borrowed someone's gorgeous flat in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. It has £3,000 granite work surfaces and half the weekend was spent trying to get a coffee cup ring to come off the bedside unit with the use of bleach. Apart from that, it rained and rained and rained and rained, Britain the only country where you can go on holiday in the middle of the worst drought and driest winter since the 1970s and have no more than a single two-hour let-up in the monsoon-like conditions.

We were rescued by a fabulous restaurant/cafe/bar/bistro at which we dined every night and were served wonderful affordable food with really friendly service. We thought that the owner might have been eyeing me up with a view to marrying his daughter; she did eat her bread flirtatiously; these are the true mysteries of life. There is a conspicuous lack of twenty-somethings in St Leonard's, and an unfortunate proliferation of over-60s drinking out of cans on the seafront and getting alsatians to fetch pebbles. Monforte Caffe Continental 1 Eversfield Place, St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN37 6BY. This was easily the best place I've dined since LZ took me out to San Carlo in Leicester, the chief difference between the two being price, though; San Carlo may be wonderful, but it can also easily cost £40 or £50 a head.

The pier had wonders all of its own. Hastings' pier epitomises the twilight-zone feel that all piers have, comprising as it does a tanning shop offering "200W Golden Showers —You'll feel the difference!" and a very odd-looking shop called BJ's on the Beach, something which the over-60s drinking out of beer cans are probably used to but in light of which I am not eager to research. Then there's the sweet shop that doesn't sell rock.

Tagged: St Leonards, StLeonards, Hastings, Rain, Restaurant, San Carlo, SanCarlo, Leicester, Monforte, Britain.

• The story of Dick Bruna and Miffy. My favourite bunny. Tagged: Miffy, Dick Bruna, DickBruna, Guardian.

Occasionally you just have flashes of revelation where, for a moment, everything seems crystal clear and you know exactly what must happen. For just a few seconds you have a vision of self which means you can accurately project a route for yourself. The strength and failing of this revelatory moment is that it is necessarily impartial: we can only be "self" through and through when we step outside the real, absolute, universal and into the realms of the irrational, relative, particular. Only in the latter case can we tell ourselves the story which allows us to live in the full contingency of an agent being; in the former we can come close to truth, but we can only ever be immobile, completely without identity, and completely without direction. What is better? To tell the lie we all must tell and to have what we imagine to be life, or to be dead to the world in the involuntary pursuit of truth? Involuntary is the key word — no-one chooses to lose their self. But, as Alan Bennett says, we don't call depression (which is fundamentally a loss of selfhood) 'mental illness', because then we'd all be insane. And as Buber says, it is thus that the physicist can shake hands with the theologian at the end of the day.

Tagged: Buber, Alan Bennett, Depression, Mental Illness, Revelation.

• Looks like the Blackberry might not be disappearing after all. The patent infringement which led the manufacturer to believe they would have to cease their service provision could be worked around... Tagged: Blackberry, Patent, Business.
• Beat parking tickets. I once got a parking ticket for being less than six inches over a double yellow line on a no-through road. Tagged: Parking, Ticket, Council.

Yesterday the sun was shining and it felt a little like summer and all the nutters came out of the woodwork to start doing their bizarre busking routine in Manchester city centre. The famous (among hundreds) guitarist/screamer/lunatic who used to stand outside Boots and jump around and cause a twenty-yard voluntary exclusion zone in his vicinity has long disappeared, perhaps never to be seen again: but never fear, there are plenty to take his place. First, there's the man who has a violin but clearly can't play it — at all — and whose busking consists of playing the strings without adjusting their tuning in any way with his left hand, and intermittently stopping and doing a strange thing somewhere between shouting and speaking and singing and sounding like Grandma Flanders. Second, there's the man outside the O2 shop who busks by playing on his recorder (with a reasonable degree of talent, compared to his violinist friend), but who attempts to smoke at the same time as playing his recorder, indeed often interrupting the music mid-phrase to take a drag. Third, and the most talented of the lot, was a small ensemble of West Indian musicians who were making remarkable music. By the time I passed them on my way back to the train station, though, they had been joined by someone I presumed to be a stranger, who had joined them and was improvising on her cello, which provided a very odd juxtaposition with the rest of the instruments.

But I like it when there are buskers around. It really makes a place feel alive, and somehow joins people together who would otherwise just be walking around town in a daze. When Stuart and I visited Marburg with crazy Ruth last year (Marburg being the place where Luther met Zwingli on the eve of the Reformation, you will remember), we met a busker there who, remarkably, was going around the town with a complete upright piano. How it stayed in tune I do not know. Ruth went and talked to him, which I'm sure he hated.

Tagged: Manchester, Busker, Busking, WestIndies, Marburg, Music, Piano.

• (Or view the complete archives.)

• U.S. Congress polishes up and censors Wikipedia entries. Tagged: Congress, Wikipedia, Censorship.

In complete contradiction to my previous post, I confidently assert that life would be reduced without Newsnight to figure in my evenings. I laughed out loud this evening as J.P. told vociferous extremist Islamist Anjam Choudri (who was refusing to shut up): "We're moving on, matey!" I heart Jeremy Paxman.

Tagged: Choudri, Choudry, Cartoons, Islam, Democracy, Paxman, Newsnight, BBC, Islamism.

Last night there was a programme on BBC Four all about English folk music and the folk revival in the 1950s. Stuart said how folk music wasn't very prominent in Britain whereas it is in the States and in Germany, and he was right, because English folk music probably declined roughly in line with the English Industrial Revolution, which represented a social upheaval so immediate and radical that the likes in the West have not been seen since. The Industrial Revolution marked a paradigm shift which endured for about two centuries. This industrial paradigm, I argue, basically came to an end in the 1990s.

Why on earth are there programmes about folk music on BBC Four? Who watches them? Who watches BBC Four? Why do people watch them? Proposition one: Television is a representation of something real, but it is not something real in itself. It offers the illusion of a relationship, the accidents of a relationship, with that something, but there is no substantive relationship at work. It is pure representation. When a BBC Four programme apparently deals with folk music and the history of folk music and of a folk music revival, it does not only represent these things, but transforms them irreversibly through this representation into something completely non-existent. What we actually experience through the representation of "folk music" on BBC Four, paradoxically but quite deliberately, can bear no possible actual relevance to anything it claims to portray. The essence of folk music, in this example, is RELATION and ENCOUNTER, both of which can only exist in the living of folk music, and both of which are negated in the regressive act of watching.

Television is regressive because it is a substitute for relation and encounter, but people believe it to be the real thing. Eventually we lose track of the "real thing" and are left with nothing but representation: this is Celebrity Big Brother. There is absolutely no way that the audience could ever have any actual relationship or encounter with what is being represented; but what is represented is what people feel to be as close an encounter as anyone could ever have: twenty-four hour surveillance. But surveillance is not executed IN THE LIVING, thus surveillance remains, again, only a representation.

We live in virtual realities.

February

Earth is bathed anew
in mid-February blue.
The snow is gone,
and the clouds now chase
for the summer's return
to humanity's face.

A familiar buzz
replaces what was
a drizzly din.
Lawn mowers are out,
as people emerge
from their wintry bouts

of wintry depression,
and find new expressions,
like smiles, and hugs!
"If all year were summer,
I'd never be sad!"
I tell you, remember

they'll soon be complaining,
"I wish it was raining!
It's far too hot."
Those dreams of winter
will come once again.
The cyclical thinkers

rejoice in the rain
as it flows down the drain.
Another year passes,
the flowers neglected,
the lawn mower shelved,
the cycle completed

by January talk
of long summer walks.
"I wish it was summer,"
the speech will begin.
Human nature as constant
as the weather has been.

Tagged: Weather, Winter, Poetry.

Labels: poetry

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

—C16 English madrigal

I'm an idiot who won't learn his lessons and hurts people as a result. That's why we have Genesis 3 and the like. The Fall wasn't all bad; we gained something by it, too. When Adam ate forbidden fruit, he marked childhood's ascension to manhood; he marked the transition from creatureliness to humanity, and however hard human nature pushes us, we always keep faith in humanity, humanitarianism, human rights, human dignity. The vocabulary which man's fall gives to us also offers us the grammar by which he is redeemed from day to day.

There are great resources in adversity.

Tagged: Genesis, Fall, Humanity.