Lord Vaughan of Wherever has been worrying about the status and relevance of blogging in both general and particular. I went out yesterday evening determined to try his idea of asking thirty people “Do you know what a blog is?” but in hindsight doing so in a bar on a DJ night was probably a mistake. Still, thanks to a lot of kind and patient people by the end of it all I was in no doubt where the toilets were.
I started with the intention of investigating blogs but ended up asking myself another question of at least equal probable importance namely: Why do the managers of bars and clubs insist on providing and paying for entertainment which makes the communication of orders and prices at the bar absolutely impossible?
Anyway, during the long wait to be served as the sparse barstaff and numerous customers screamed at each other, several blog related questions ocurred to me.
Does the blogosphere have blatitude and blongitude?
Has it made a contribution to the enrichment of the blanguage or is it all just blithering?
Has internet access raised the standard of world wide debate and the transmission of knowledge and wisdom, or has it in fact merely provided a platform for the blogus and the blobscure?
Your views, please.
Just sending some bloggy support over here today to someone who seems to be feeling a bit out on a limb at the moment. Oh the irony! A man with something to say who can't get listened to. Well PB at least you get read, and by lots of people.
Over my few short months of web exploration there have been certain blogs I was reluctant to read based on an assessment of their names. To whit:
Naked Blog - obviously dodgy
Mad Musings Of Me - a clear warning that the woman's demented
Troubled Diva - her too
Audi Olympics - oh God, not cars
My Boyfriend Is A Twat - I'm not sure I should be getting into this...
Wrong every single time. And the last and most spectacular misjudgement was IFBIS by PB Curtis, philosopher and occasional commenter here, and a man in the middle of a purple patch that would make Prince proud.
Pure reading pleasure and as wide a range as anyone could reasonably ask in a blog. Here's someone who could really use a book deal and actually has an entertaining and realistic outlook on sex to boot.
If there's anything much better in the blogworld at the moment then I'd like someone to tell me.
Summer seems to have arrived which relieves me of one dilemma at least. I actually own a very nice Burberry macintosh. I didn't buy it, it was given to me by my father-in-law when he realised he would never leave his house again. It's very nice; classic, uncrushed by use, and clearly a stranger to the raindrop. My father-in-law was not a great emerger from houses at the best of times but a massive stroke signalled the end of his wanderings. If coats had mileometers this one's would read about 1.7.
So there it hangs, opposite the study door, with its accompanying inner lining gibbeted just beside. Too posh for the park or the woods, a gig or a terrace, or in fact anywhere that I ever actually go.
So what is the dilemma? Well, it's the lining innit? If I did ever wear it out and about would people know it was real if they caught a glimpse of its glorious inner plumage? Fashion is not my strong point and the brain numbing possibilities of the bluff and double bluff involved here are well beyond my analytical powers. Lionel Blair, even Tony Blair I can navigate, but this one is, I know, beyond me.
It's not all bad though. Some study of the coat and the woollen lining has made it easy for me to spot bootleg Burberry a mile off. I can tell it from the real thing as easily as I can distinguish Jennie Bond - the heavy weight Royal watcher, from Sarah Ferguson - the heavy Royal Weight Watcher.
Anyway there's still enough fire in my belly to consider wearing it inside out and making a defiant virtue of a grim necessity but thankfully the warmer weather has saved me for this year. And by next year maybe something else will have grabbed the nation's attention and I can wear it where and when I choose, without taint.
What an exciting weekend, packed with fresh air and culture.
On Sat we went to a children's concert which included Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Lionel Blair. He clearly didn't have much real life experience of cats and insisted on giving us actorish miaows while the Cat was sneaking up on the Bird. Still, he was better than the ex-Blue Peter presenter they had at the last one. When asked for my opinion on that occasion I claimed quite truthfully that I couldn't hear her properly. I didn't mention that it was because I was actually asleep throughout most of The Sorcerer's Apprentice or whatever it was she was emoting at the time, but that will have to remain my little secret.
On Sun the first lawn mowing of the year was the usual seasonal joy and cleared the way for the erection of a tubular metal goal frame that we had acquired via cousins over the winter. This proved a great success despite the fact that it disintegrated every time a shot hit it or got through into the net. Jake seemed unconcerned at the time and actually seemed empowered that his shots could demolish a goal, a feat utterly beyond him at school or in the park.
Later, after I retired inside pleading an injured knee, he rediscovered the rugby ball I had bought for him after England's historic World Cup win in Nov. The missing altitude that so discouraged him in his earlier attempts at place kicking miraculously appeared, announced by the intrusion of the ball into my line of sight as I lay in the sitting room on the sofa. He had discovered that if the ball was placed upright in a small plastic flowerpot it sailed effortlessly upwards and clear over the goal frame. It was very hard getting him back inside, a feat we only achieved when the last flowerpot lay cracked and discarded at his feet.
Not a great weekend for sport on telly but Mel enjoyed the snooker. Like watching someone slowly and calmly tidying up, apparently.
I've been pondering the mysteries of Culture a lot recently and I still feel that the quality and originality of popular entertainment have declined since I was young. Perhaps that is because the long walk I took in the adult section of culture had the intended effect on me and my tastes matured, so that when I returned to the bright and gaudy sections dedicated to the Young I found them shallow and unrewarding. Perhaps not. I think I can see three crucial points at which the culture in question changed for the worse. These are Punk, Video and Madonna. Today I'd like to go back 27 years and have a look at the first of these three.
It was 1977. I used to listen to Fluff Freeman on Radio One for three hours on Sat afternoons, mostly for the music but partly for his brilliant mispronounciations of British placenames. I can see now that, even as I listened, a corner was being turned in the history of pop music (or rock music as I liked to think of it then). The balance of power was imperceptibly but permanently shifting from the musicians to the media.
The history of rock culture up to 1977 is about rock musicians. After that it's the history of rock journalists.
Why? Because Punk happened that year, in a few places in the South East of England, and was then dragged onto a wider stage by an unholy alliance of manipulators, all with their own agendas. Malcolm MacClaren, the music papers, the national press and the major record companies all chipped in.
I accept that some saw punk as liberating and uplifting, refreshingly direct and unsullied by considerations of respect, free from the tyranny of apprenticeship. I'm afraid I never liked it. I felt it was a massive wrong turning. It led us into a wilderness of overblown prose, a period where the empty flash musicianship of Prog was replaced by empty flash journalism. How long and how creatively can anyone praise incompetence? And what an impossible trick it all was. How can anyone build a career based on the idea that they are no good at what they do?
I needed answers but none came. How bad did it have to be before getting a seal of approval? How long before the naive virtues of spontaneity wear off? Was it all right to say that most of it sounded awful? Its monochrome anger palled quickly with me.
I concede that if you listen back now, the Sex Pistols one album is magnificent but at this distance it strikes me as a rather well made record. Rotten's voice and lyrics also dust it lightly with an angry genius largely missing from the genre as a whole.
In the end lessons were learned, but sadly the wrong ones by the wrong people. The arch manipulator McLaren was much imitated. Shock value reapplied for its old job; nihilism traded in its Russian roots for British nationality. Smart suits in corporate circles took note.
Punk was so indistinct and garbled in its message that it needed talented and creative music writers to explain it. Amazing that journos could get so worked up about it all. Would they like it if punk writers started appearing all over the place and outselling the skillful ones? Would they wade through endless paragraphs of badly spelled, poorly constructed 'punk' novels and then work out ways to praise them? I think not.
I was never a hippy - too young, too fond of comforts - so I'm not to be charged with having hippy dreams about the value of music. I am no advocate of music addled by drugs over music addled by anger but I do think something changed at that point. Punk was not the first democratisation of music - Skiffle and Blues were both as liberating in the previous twenty years alone - but it was the first modern form that clearly demonstrated the power of skilful marketing and it was the first modern form that let the journalists buy in heavily, into an entirely clear field. It was the first Manifesto movement in popular music and as such was as liberating for music criticism as Abstract art was for art criticism.
And it all went wrong. Instead of naturalness and spontaneity we have had thirty odd years of media manipulation. Incompetence in the studio was followed by new levels of recording trickery. In the end we were treated to a generation of artists who pretended that they didn't care whether anybody liked their records, and that never rang true, for me at least.
I just think it was a myth. Any lasting achievement that can be laid at its door actually contradicts the basic philosophy that inspired that same achievement; by definition it would have to transcend Punk's stated limitations. The generation of artists it gave us have spent the years since living it all down. Even Lydon, the man who actually used Expressionism to express something was aware of this early on.
“Ever get the feeling you've been had?“ was how he put it, I think.
I think you all deserve an update on the more banal aspects of our home life.
Recent highlights include:
- the start of the new term.
- the finding of smart shoes required for the new term.
- the polishing of shoes to coincide with the start of the new term.
- the taking of photographs of Jake wearing his Form Captain's badge for the last time after a successful six week tenure as he left for the start of the new term.
- the purchase of a Rod Stewart tape from Help The Aged on the High Street. The satirical possibilities buried in this transaction have left me positively dizzy for hours, but after due reflection I have concluded that the perfect symmetry of the event needs no further comment from me.
Last night Mel asked me why I didn't call her 'darling' ever. I replied that it wasn't something our generation was obliged to do and furthermore that she didn't call me darling and therefore I wasn't going to start it. I consider that sort of thing would be the marital equivalent of jumping the lights, i.e. it smacked of over enthusiasm and there was no telling what it might lead to. Anyway I reckon there is quite enough redundant language around this and many other homes without adding further clutter. Things like “Is that you?” when I use my key to get in, or “Are you out of the bath?” when I walk into the kitchen.
I finished off by pointing out that she called the chldn all sorts of (nice) things and that by contrast she seemed a little remiss towards me in that area. She replied that she thought I probably didn't want to be called 'sausage'. I concurred.
Lastly, a minor triumph to report. I came second in a search for “paul + dacre + odious” a mere one place behind the Guardian. I might point out that I had all three terms in one sentence - in fact contiguously - and they didn't, but rules are rules. They had them in the right order. I am conscious that history now accepts that West Germany were robbed in 1966 so I feel able to keep it in perspective. I am, however, curious to know who was searching and am now mildly concerned that I will receive a writ for libel from the Daily Mail editor's lawyers.
Can I just raise my voice here in a polite appeal to the rest of the world to stop going on as if sex were the only thing on people's minds, ever? I am specifically addressing those individuals in charge of our newspapers and the advertisements they contain, the producers of television programmes, the makers of films and the singers and writers of popular songs that profess to liberate us from our inhibitions but which actually enslave us to unrealistic ideas of what other people are out there for.
I'm fed up with it - a graphic phrase that I feel supports my thesis. I think that eating has an equally strong claim to be at the centre of everything we do. We all think of food many times a day, and I would be grateful if someone would tell me how 'scientists' have 'proved' that the 'average male' thinks about sex every (pick a number of) seconds.
Of course our relationship with food is uneasy and unsatisfactory in many ways, and our attitudes to it have to be developed carefully over many years, but it's a more regular, universal and non-gender specific experience than sex and is more vital. Meal out first, bedroom later is generally the rule, I think. Traditionally travellers are greeted with food, not a quick shag. Persons voluntarily deprived of sexual activity survive indefinitely. Persons voluntarily deprived of food don't.
So what is more central to our lives? What primarily influences society and history? What can none of us live without? Is it sex? No. The rag tag army of semi-informed followers and twisters of Freud have had it their own way for too long. May I modestly propose an alternative world view that does not revolve around the endless tedious superficial recitation of the dogma that sex is everything to everybody all the time and is the hidden clockwork that makes the whole world tick? That's not a truism, it's a falsism.
So let's just try putting food at the begining of everything instead. Some questions occur.
What do we all need to do several times a day? Make love? No. Eat.
What can we all do that gives us all guaranteed pleasure and which doesn't require the detailed cooperation of another person on an intimate level? Eat.
What works every time? Eating. (Except in MacDonalds.)
How can we give pleasure unfailingly to others? By eating food prepared by others for us.
What do mothers immediately do for their newborn children? Give them food. Our conscious lives start with the desire for food. Not sex.
Why do we have children? To ensure a supply of food when we are too old to hunt or gather food for ourselves.
What are the shops full of? Food. Not sex, which cannot be sold in shops.
What starts revolutions? Hunger. Have the streets ever been filled with angry workers striking for more breasts in their newspapers? Bob Marley wrote “A hungry man is an angry man” not “A randy man is an angry man”. Actually a randy man is generally not thinking straight, a central requirement for the acquisition of food.
What starts wars? 1. Disputes over territory.
What does territory provide? Fields in which to grow food, along with subjects to plant and harvest crops.
What starts wars? 2. Disputes over trade.
What does trade provide? Food, and money (with which to buy food).
What drives world events? Famine, drought, and migration. All of these affect food before they affect anything else and have absolutely nothing to do with individual libido.
Notes.
1. These arguments may be only partially convincing but they are no worse than the arguments used to support the idea that we all need to read, view, buy sex all the time.
2. I have no wish to offend people with eating disorders. For the sake of the above I wish to point out that people who do not enjoy eating are suffering from what are precisely defined as 'disorders'. We are at our most basic when we are babies and babies don't have body-image problems. What do babies want? Food. In general they devote their entire attention to getting enough food.
3. I am not calling for an equivalent saturation of our media with coverage of food. I merely wish to highlight by contrast how intensely boring our media lives would be if the same emphasis were given to food as is meted out to sex. In fact people regularly complain that there are already too many cooking programmes on television. I am trying to point out how over-attended sex is in our cultural lives. It's samey, uncritical and unenlightening.
4. I like sex, but I do not wish to be pummelled by lust fascists at every turn. Lay off. We're not all still thinking like teenagers.
5. I would probably have liked Belle de Jour a lot more if she'd worked in a cake shop.
We've had the video of The Sound of Music out from the library and to my astonishment it's been a big living room hit. I remember hating it as a child and squirming with embarrassment as nuns burst into song about climbing mountains.
Last night Mel got rather carried away on the outside of two glasses of wine. By 9 pm she was proposing a walking holiday in Austria, enchanted by a vision of fresh air, stunning scenery and musical precocity. My vision of our lot trudging along singing is much less uplifting and could never be made into a film with family appeal. My working title would be 'The Sound of the Baskervilles'.
I declined as gracefully as I could. Like Rome, but much quicker.
And now the end is near
And so I face the shower curtain
So sang I in a high clear voice as I finished in the cubicle this morning before climbing out, glistening like an Adonis and smelling rather appealingly of ginger. 'Float like a butterfly, be like a Sting', that's how I feel right now.
The chldn, however, currently seem listless, quite possibly exhausted by the Scoobython that gripped them on French Cartoon Network over the Easter weekend, an act of unimaginative programming I find hard to fathom, stringing together hours of plots weaker than Ali McGraw at the end of Love Story. One of those a week may have passed muster for uncritical junior consumers in the innocent Seventies but sixteen in a row in the knowing Noughts? A hand distinctly overplayed there, a bit like the BBC trying to capture a new generation of viewers for Match of the Day by putting on a Special consisting entirely of Great Goal Kicks. Not very exciting at the best of times and distinctly samey.
And though the arrival of Scrappy Doo was doubtless an attempt to pep up the show with new plot complications, like in a soap opera when all the characters have already bedded/wedded/revealed their hidden blood kinship to all of the other available characters, the introduction of Scooby's horrible little nephew Scrappy was, as our host Steve pointed out, a disaster on a scale comparable with Dennis Lillee's attempt to introduce the Aluminium Cricket Bat.
With the introduction of young Scrappy, the Doo family simultaneously lost any ability to entertain or amuse while acquiring the ablility to speak quite fluently, unfavourably showing up the throwback uncle who still speaks as if permanently under a duvet. I think Scooby's marriage prospects evaporated the instant little Scrappy appeared. Sadly for Dennis the Bat had to go; sadly for Scooby Scrappy has remained at the crease ever since.
In an unrelated story I came first in a Tiscali search for 'oleagenous'. (Use of, not epitome of, I'd like to think.) Number One, ahead of Melanie Phillips. Now there's an opening line if I ever get to meet her.
Last week I allowed Jake to stay up and watch the Arsenal-Chelsea game with me. A mistake, it transpired, as the palpable tension and drama of the occasion were entirely lost on him. How come TV nonsense like Beyblades or Pokemon can throttle him into silence with tension and drama whereas any such throttling during football matches is a job that falls squarely on my shoulders alone?
Anyway, the ebb and flow of the game were constantly punctuated by 'What would happen if...' questions of the bizarre kind that only an eight year old can frame, the sort that a caring parent cannot ignore but which would take five precious minutes to address properly.
It put me in mind of the Pink Floyd line about 'We don't need no thought control'. Perhaps they would have been less liberal after being asked “What would happen if the referee dropped his red card and one of the players picked it up and showed him it, would the referee be sent off?”
I watched the Newcastle game on my own last night.
Last night I had a strange dream, probably brought on by too much French cheese judging by its vividness. It started ordinarily enough with me standing outside my local convenience store, but there seemed to be something different about it. A sign by the door read: 'London’s first proper Right-wing retail outlet. No More Compromises'. Under new management, clearly.
I was in a hurry, just looking to pick up some odds and ends, so I walked briskly past the large man with SECURITY written on his helmet. I looked around. There were no other customers.
“Quiet in here,” I said in a friendly way to the man at the till.
“Yes,” he replied cautiously. “There’s been some changes”.
A sign above his head caught my eye. 'Shoplifters will not be prosecuted. They will be beaten up, or hung on the spot for thefts exceeding £5.00.'
“Mmm,” I said. “Is that strictly necessary?”
“Well, it certainly works,” replied the man at the till. “Pilfering's down to zero since...” He pointed to the Security guard. “We decided not to bother the Police any more. They don't like the paperwork. And we all know how useless the Courts are. Actually,” he confided, “in practice we only hang the illegal immigrants. no one knows they're here anyway, so...” He looked happy and made a two handed movement as if sweeping the floor. “Privatised justice in the hands of a responsible citizenry. That's the way ahead.”
I looked around. The shelves were virtually empty. They seemed well supplied with fire extinguishers though, which were placed at the end of each small aisle.
“Had a fire then?” I asked.
“Not yet. But we might. So we're prepared.”
I walked past the once crowded video rack which now contained only two items. I read the spines. One was 'I'm A Racist - Get Them Out Of Here' which I hadn't heard of and the other was 'The Passion of the Christ' which was much more familiar. The till man spotted it in my hand and announced:
“It's the Director's Dad's Cut. All the Jesus bits are edited out so it's just close-ups of shifty-looking Jews plotting among themselves. I prefer it,” he added.
The once bustling Pharmacy area looked a bit bare too. The counter display that formerly held colourful condom packets was empty, like a football terrace denuded of spectators after the match. Condoms were not on my list but my natural curiosity got the better of me and I asked why.
“Condoms have always given us a headache,” he sighed. Don't put them on your head then, I thought. A rather good joke about the perils of being a dickhead occurred but his intense seriousness deterred me from such jocularity.
“Obviously we'd like to sell them, especially to the lesser races and stupid people, but they can't afford them, the rate they go. We could sell them at a loss, just to keep the problem manageable, but we decided we shouldn't. Things like that distort markets y'know. Of course if the NHS gave them out that would in many ways be a good thing, but it would really be just another unwarranted burden on the taxpayer. Difficult, see? Anyway we don't stock them now. Frankly we're waiting until a rightminded government gets in and sterilises the lot of 'em.”
“All right,” I said. “I'm a little pushed for time so perhaps I could just read you my list and you tell me if you can help.”
“You're not gay are you?” He looked at me closely.
“No,” I replied.
“OK,” he said, although he didn't sound convinced.
It went like this.
Dates? No dates because the Muslims are all trying to kill us and it would take too long to check each box for killer ants or disease carrying flies. Bananas? Yes - but none of that Fair Trade nonsense. Must support the US and the multinationals and keep the Carribean safe. He lifted a finger at another sign which read: 'We Do Not Stock Products Grown With Foreign Aid. We look after Our Own.' Cereal? Corn Flakes yes, but I wanted a Variety Pack. No Variety Packs, because they encourage the notion that a multicultural Britain is a viable project.
At this point he announced that Dasani was on Special Offer because he supported Coca Cola who were 'sound' on the Family and needed a little help right now. I reckoned I was pretty sound on the family too but I didn't rise to the bait, not with the Security man comfortably within earshot.
I left with twenty Marlboro and the Sunday Telegraph.
Been away over the Easter weekend - to France - a trip I always enjoy, if only for the many contradictions it presents. La France, land of futuristic bus shelters and stone age toilets; a country in which the concept of equality is taken so seriously it seems to extend to the very fabric of the houses and requires that floors and walls both be covered with carpet; a culture where educated people can seriously contend that New Zealand cannot possibly produce good white wines because if they did then they would be in French supermarkets, wouldn't they?
We returned to find that a cousin of mine has a new son and there is a naming conference in progress. I have long been fascinated by the way that famous family names seem to migrate leftwards and become first names. The names of many of our mediaeval noble dynasties have been thus appropriated; for instance Neville, Percy, Dudley, Howard, Stanley, Montague, Stuart. Mercifully our nation's children have been spared Tudor or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha down the years but more recent times have given us Russell, Spencer, Cecil, Clifford, Milton and Windsor.
So where next? How long till we have little treasures called Beckham, Timberlake, Bush, Sainsbury or Cent?
We're into the holidays now, so it's long lazy days for the chldn punctuated by visits to museums and pointless bickering.
Zoe's Form play went off pretty well in the end although she did have a bad dose of performance anxiety about her solo in the last days of the build up. I told her she couldn't have it both ways, to seek glory and yet at the same time be reluctant to put herself to the test.
Ambition is a two edged sword, I said, offering the prospect of triumph but also necessarily implying the possibility of failure. She said she thought all swords had two edges. I said that I meant two sharp edges, and privately resolved never to use such a vague and inaccurate cliché again. I decided to be less oblique and simply likened the conflicts inherent in aspiration to feeling car sick and yet wanting to go faster to get home sooner. This seemed clearer to her.
As reassurance I reminded her of her success as a tree in the Aesop's Fables production of two years ago and her confidence seemed to return. I didn't remind her of the time three years ago when she made plaster Snow White fridge magnets for the Winter Fayre which were actually fridge repellents because the magnets were the wrong way round.
Sooty and Sweep have been having a small revival round here, prompted by the discovery over the weekend of a box of forgotten videos. Too young for them? I think not. Out came the appropriate glove puppets afterwards, followed by much 'cooking' activity in the kitchen. Real water was allowed but it was made clear early on that any flour required for recipes would have to be strictly imaginary, an elementary precaution that seems to have eluded the Corbett household for two generations.
Jake has always preferred Sweep (the naughty one with the squeak) while Zoe has always preferred Sooty (the bossy one with the magic wand). I apologise to any US readers if Sooty and Sweep are unfamiliar. They're a bit sparsely represented on the web so these links are the best I could find.
Yesterday Jake covered himself in glory in a marvellous moment that convinced me there is still hope for the nation's youth.
“Look,” he said as I arrived home. “Sweep can rap!” and he started a familiar set of moves that I recognised instantly as from Blazin' Squad's video for 'Here 4 One', accompanied by a creditable impression of the bassline. Sweep struck up the chorus which, for those of you without the honour of its acquaintance, goes like this, in a sequence of two syllable lines:
We're
on-ly
here for
one thing
oh oh
oh oh
which Jake, with masterful squeaker control, managed to get Sweep to render as
uh
ih i
ih i
Yi i
i EEE
i EEEee
It sounded better than it looks in print but it has made my holiday.
It's been Swearing this week, the family forum topic, that is. And how to stop it, if possible.
It really started when Jake became fascinated by Eminem's 'Cleaning Out My Closet' on the radio a few months back. At first I encouraged him to listen, mistakenly believing that he was taking an interest in neatness and cleanliness inspired by hero worship, but I soon realised my mistake after paying a little closer attention myself. It was not orderliness nor the Oedipal psychodrama of the record that had intrigued him, it was the gaps. Well, not gaps exactly but the alluring wisps of voice that were left once the swearing had been removed, the tell-tale sounds of little brushstrokes propelling bad words under the carpet.
“What did he say there, Daddy?” he asked eagerly.
“Well,” I said, honesty personified, “they're swearwords actually.”
“REALLY!!?”
He hasn't heard much serious profanity in his young life. We have a strict rule not to swear in front of the chldn. Because of the chldn is all right. Just not in front of. The exchange above was followed by a week or so of try-out home grown swearing involving curses such as zwib, fhwss and shhhp. I didn't have the heart to disabuse him.
And that is where we stayed for a good while. Just as long as something didn't go wrong on Blue Peter I thought the import of bad language could for the moment be resisted. Of course I reckoned without the playground, which in the last month or so seems to have turned into a lexical equivalent of a manure heap. My next strategy has been to remain unshockable, to blunt whatever little swords my precious boy manages to pick up.
The last one was 'bitch'.
“That’s not rude,” I said firmly.
“Well Mrs Bingham seemed to think it was when Oscar called her that,” replied Jake sweetly.
“A bitch is a dog, a female dog,” I replied calmly and correctly.
Twenty minutes later, after a session upstairs with his sister, Jake came back into the kitchen holding his cuddly black labrador.
“Morty has got a song. Would you like to hear it?” he asked. Nods from the parents, but nods that somehow expected the worst. He sang, emphasising the first syllables with particular relish:
Bitch a dog, a female dog
Bitch a dog who smells my bum
Me a name I call myself
Bitch a name I call my mum
The floodgates have a flimsy look about them.