Strange to tell, but this blog is now coming up to the beginning of its sixth year. While postings have, until recently, been very sporadic over the last couple of years, this has been mainly on account of the dearth of anything vaguely interesting to say and, just as importantly, the lack of a suitable language; the effects of aphasia go far beyond an inability merely to speak. Even now, I find the dyslexia difficult to cope with. The absence of the 'built-in' thesaurus can be troubling at times when you search for the synonyms and antonyms in vain in your mind and must limit yourself to a reference book; yes, I still choose a book over the vagaries of the Internet. There is something reassuring about a book, especially so when that book was bought for your seventeenth birthday by someone who thought it might come in useful and who has now long since vanished into the mists of time.
Writing a blog is a little like writing a 'weekly' column for a newspaper, although far less profound, or well written; well at least by me. I was raised on the commentaries of 'Cassandra', Sir William Connor to his friends, he of 'outing Liberace' fame and the subsequent, unbelievably, lost lawsuit, and Keith Waterhouse, author of 'Billy Liar', in their regular columns in the 'red top' and red-leaning tabloid newspaper, the 'Daily Mirror'; a newspaper in those far-off days which was only just to the right of the 'Morning Star' (formerly 'The Daily Worker', the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain) and nothing like what it has become, a fawning sycophant to 'New Labour' and its policies of not upsetting the middle classes which I thought was the whole point of being (a) socialist!
I gravitated early to the columns in, first, 'Punch'* and then the 'Times' of the wonderful Alan Coren. The anticipation as you spent all week, and then some hours in the public library waiting for a copy to become available, and of that wonderful 15 minutes of suppressing bouts of laughter at the ridiculousness of all that was 'The diaries of Idi Amin'. It would, in reality, have been even more hilarious had there not been a great deal of 'truth' in the caricature of that bloated, vindictive, avaricious and mindlessly cruel windbag; Bokassa was an angel by comparison. Subsequently I became 'hooked' on my weekly 'fix' of Coren; the art of subtly and gently altering the perspective to produce such columns as 'Children's books written by famous authors'; 'The Pooh also rises' (written in Hemingway's style); 'The Gollies Karamazov'; the day the Eastern European 'maid' informed Coren that the Sanity (read sanitary) Inspector was due to call to do an inspection; the spoof of all those tedious books, a la Peter Mayle, about life in an idyllic backwater of France, 'Toujours Cricklewood'.** One of the great comic geniuses of the twentieth century and not a hackneyed, old joke anywhere in sight.
On the political front, I had always had a soft spot for Matthew Parris, his brand of conservatism notwithstanding, whose gentle sideswipes at the UK's Government (or opposition) were invariably insightful and betrayed his one time past as an MP; he no doubt did but it is difficult to imagine Parris as taking the whole business of being in parliament very seriously at all. Parris famously took part in a documentary TV programme in the Eighties in which he to had live on about £26.00 per week, the then payment to a single unemployed person on State Benefits; he famously ran out of money for the electricity meter!
However, I reserve pride of place to the political and social commentator, Bernard Levin. Not because I agreed with him, I rarely did; not because he had good style, although he did; and certainly not for his political views; no, I give pride of place to Bernard because he never failed to exasperate, annoy and make me wish to tear his throat out with my bare hands every Monday morning. Roger Scruton used to come close as a 'social commentator' but Levin was always at the top of my 'hit list'. I would not have you think that I might have in fact acted on my fantasy, given the opportunity; in fact, I used to see him quite frequently in Marylebone High Street, wandering back to his little, or big possibly, apartment near where I used to work (just two doors down, if I remember correctly). Buttoned up in his grey herringbone overcoat, he looked for all the world like some diminutive Jewish tailor or high class jeweller. He always appeared to me to be conspicuous by his anonymity but with a look in his eyes, if you caught them in your gaze, that seemed to say: 'Recognise me, I'm famous!' Actually, infamous would be a better term. He is one of the few people to have had a punch thrown at him (for real, not just Rod Hull and Emu 'playing' with Michael Parkinson) on live television (an edition of the popular satirical BBC TV programme 'That was the week that was').*** It is reassuring to know that he was always a pompous and arrogant ass and he did not simply grow into the part with age.
I apologise to Katherine Whitehorn, Lynne Truss (on football!), Phillip Howard, Simon Barnes; Ben McIntyre and no doubt others that I have forgotten, for not including them; I make no such apologies to Gary Bushell and Richard Littlejohn! May they fester in the 9th circle of Hell, where surely they and their prose belong!
Speaking of journalists, reminds me that a couple of weeks ago, I had a 'roll-up'; those cigarettes which you make for yourself as opposed to ones that come in shiny, and not so shiny, cartons. This was not a particularly pleasant experience, I have largely given up on tobacco and even then I never smoked unfiltered cigarettes, except for the occasional 'roll-up' when poverty demanded. I do not know if they are as ubiquitous in the rest of world as they are here in the UK but it has always mildly surprised me that someone, some business enterprise, could make a living out of selling gummed strips of paper in Europe to populations which outgrew 'do-it-yourself cancer sticks' along with hoola-hoops, powdered egg, slinkies, condensed milk and 'Buckaroo'.
The cigarette, which I rolled myself, with the same kind of inept semblance of a concentration usually reserved for something that you do 'once in a blue moon' like vacuuming under the bed or 'rodding the gerbil'****, was a classic 'Brixton thin'. 'Remand' prisons, of which Brixton, in London is one, very often have an impoverished clientele and they have to eke out their meagre allotment of tobacco as best they can; as a result the roll-ups are about as thick as your average skewer. In the absence of a filter, I did not want anything like a normal sized. ready-made cigarette.
The only reason for mentioning this is something that the company, 'Rizla+' (it should be 'Riz la croix' - rice (paper) the cross' but it's always Rizla in the UK) who make the papers came out with in, I think, the late seventies or early eighties papers that were twice the length and breadth of their conventional papers*****. At first, I was puzzled but it did not take me long, about 5 seconds, to realise what they were for; in my day, you had to stick a number of papers together to get a decent 'toke'! How kind of Rizla+ to make a paper specially designed for your average 'joint'! However, what amazed me the most was not that Rizla+ should make such a paper, there was obvious demand, but that the notoriously 'anti-drug' UK government should not instantly ban their sale; after all, no-one would roll a conventional cigarette using one. They did however ban an ad with legend ,'Twist and Burn', an all too obvious reference to 'spliffs',
* Punch was founded as a satirical magazine in the mid-nineteenth century by Henry Mayhew and the engraver, Ebenezer Landells. Mayhew was the author of 'London Labour and the London Poor', a truly massive dissection of the conditions experienced by the poor in London at the time; one of earliest, and well researched, examples of the 'sociological study' of an underclass. If you want to go beyond the fiction of Dickens or Conan Doyle to learn about conditions for the not-so-privileged in the UK in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, read Mayhew. There is at least one 'selection' currently in print; or was the last time I looked.
** Cricklewood is an area of London. Until the coming of the railways, it was an insignificant little hamlet but has now been subsumed into that sprawling, 'pack the poor in any old how' brick and concrete edifice that is 'Greater London'
*** Ah, don't you just love 'YouTube'. Here's the footage.
**** 'rodding the gerbil' refers to the uncomfortable (for the gerbil) practice, favoured by many in the rodent-keeping community, of regularly ensuring that your gerbil stays free from constipation, a common complaint with dry food pellets. It involves a 'Q-Tip' (cotton bud) and a rather private area of said rodent. I don't have to go into any more details, do I?
***** Rizla+ even make a special paper for the blind; it has the corners cut off of one side, opposite the gummed strip, to ensure that you can 'feel' in what direction to roll.
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