I am up early. I find that the fambly has gone. I remember. They went to Manchester last night. So I am doing what bachelors do, which is to blog. I am having experiences and I am determined to write them down.
Hedgehogs are in the news this early morning. We like hedgehogs in this house - well not in this house - but the people in this house like hedgehogs. The real ones, the Tiggywinkle kind, not just the Sylvanian Roadkill family. We don't actualy need hedgehogs in our garden as they mostly eat slugs and our main enemies are snails, so our preference is based purely on appearance and not utility. If utility was a priority the snail thing might indicate that perhaps French hedgehogs would be our best bet.
Exotic animals in our small parkland are still just a dream though and till wealthier times we shall have to make do with a fox who comes and sits on our kitchen roof and grazes through any casual footwear left lying about in the garden. The peacocks will have to wait.
Squirrels are the other main ornament we have but they are shared throughout the area with all our robin harbouring friends and the local panther owners dotted about Peckham. Squirrels don't get us into the national news though. What these little grey menaces do is to dart out from between parked cars and run at high speed along high walls and across roads, defying the Fire engines that thunder regularly past our house on their way to rescue smokers trapped in burning beds.
I am frequently struck by the inappropriateness this highlights in the road safety campaigns of my youth, namely the television adventures of Tufty the Squirrel and his Club, which did not serve drinks late but was the dullest kind of club, the kind where you can't dance but where you get little metal badges and not drugs in the toilets. As I remember Tufty spent his time virtuously not running across the road to get ice creams and being praised for it by badgers dressed as policemen. I bet it was the nuts on the top he really wanted but that is perhaps too narrow a criticism to level at this distance. A more pertinent comment is that if I wanted to select an animal which could impart serious lessons about road safety then I would probably choose a mole who always used the underpass or a zebra who had his own crossing, which would be magic or something. I certainly wouldn't choose an animal that was a complete lunatic when it came to decisions about traffic and never, in my experience, ever looks either left or right before crossing and in fact seems to select the most exciting moment possible to take on oncoming traffic. Now if I wanted an animal to promote a spread-betting website then I would be opening negotiations with the local crack-head squirrels about image rights.
Well, there it is - stream of consciousness blogging where you least expected it. Me too. It took only slightly longer to write than it does to read. And, of course, slightly less time to forget.
There's a bit of a fad going round at the moment for deciding to do new things. You know, listing new things to do before you die, or before you get old and boring. I'm all for a spirit of improvement but I think this new interest in newness has not been properly thought through. I mean, dying would be a new experience wouldn't it, as would becoming old and boring. All these things could qualify as new ground but are somehow excluded at the start by arbitrary rules - this time arbitrary rules thought up by the young, rather than the usual suspects when it comes to arbitrariness, namely the crabby and narrow-minded old-and-boring community. I trust that these circular logical flaws are all too obvious to everyone now. Frankly. for me the whole mentality seems a little too close to the mindset of the sort of people who run advertising agencies and invent new kinds of Coco Pops.
Well, now that those intellectual objections are dealt with I can move on to reveal three things I have done this year which are entirely new to me. One has in fact been covered here already, namely singing choral bass in a long Vivaldi number. As I made my way to the gig I mused that my 'currently listening to on Ipod if I owned one' would have been "Daddy Sang Bass" but buying an Ipod will have to wait its turn on the must-do-new-stuff list. Searching for old naff country novelty records on iTunes Music Store is a delight I can resist almost permanently. I also mused that proper roots reggae should be listened to on an I-and-Ipod.
OK. Second (though earlier in time) was my first outing on a pair of ice skates. This took place at Crystal Palace in January. Ice skating is a kind of torture for the ankles rendered attractive by the reward of feeling the earth move beneath your feet in an entirely uncontrollable manner. Some people seem to enjoy this arrangement but you can rest assured that they are the ones who haven't wrecked both their ankles over the years falling into and over things. It is inexpressibly irritating to see young children whizzing about all over the rink as if they actually know what they are doing. It reminded me of the stab of jealousy I felt when I first heard French children speaking French in a French camp site. It just seemed so easy for them and was such a struggle for me. I suspect these junior slideywizards are really only little Wily Coyotes who do not yet realise that there is nothing between them and the canyon bottom three zillion feet below, and when they do they will fall over, get a bleeding nose and some other skater will run over their ickle hands with razor sharp metal blades. Anyway that's how it seemed to me as I tottered round the edge of the arena, holding on desperately to the hand rail - the one element in my environment that didn't seem to have a malicious hidden agenda of its own. Twenty minutes of rail grabbing added a burning sensation in my wrists to the burning sensation in my ankles. Now can you begin to see the extent of the flaws in all this new stuff? Yes indeed, there are hidden horrors for us all in our restless natures.
The third new experience was yesterday and was giving evidence on oath in the High Court. This involved sitting still while two very clever people had a go at presenting me as a liar or a fool. I recommend this even less than ice skating.
Well, I don't know about you but I thought that the much vaunted Ricky Gervais-penned episode of the Simpsons was very poor. The biggest anti-climax since Mrs Whitehouse got stuck into "The Romans in Britain". There is something about Mr Gervais, but it's not transferably comical. He doesn't do funny-funny, he doesn't even do funny-peculiar. He does funny-excruciating.
This is not a bad talent to have and it served him well in The Office. What beats me is why everyone seems to think that to create David Brent, a laughably overconfident and incompetent man, makes Gervais a suitable candidate for anything else. I caught quite a long section of his stand-up show a few months back on late night telly. Best place for it: much swearing and ridiculing of people in wheelchairs I seem to remember. Oh, and one funny bit about the morality of nursery rhymes. But performance ability? Pure gag craft? Er, no. Not really.
To be given the Simpsons as a toy is a high privilege and a great accolade. But what did he do with it? He wrote a script in which he starred. Starred as an unlikeable man, not too far distant from David Brent (notice gratuitous references to offices anyone?), but a Brent without self-confidence - the one key element in the comedy of The Office. Call me old-fashioned but one of the glories of the Simpsons is its very high gag count, and the barely detectable skill with which high quality word play and satire are woven into whatever the storyline happens to be. So many of the show's funniest lines are almost invisible - in that you don't see them coming and they don't leave a hole behind them.
Gervais wrote umpteen gags for himself, all of which relied on the awkward, egg-on-face pause that followed them. A master like John Cleese could get away with this device consistently in Fawlty Towers because, as we watched Basil dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole dug by his own intolerance and pomposity, we enjoyed his sarcasm and the evasive tactics of those around him. Gervais gave us none of that. Just an uninteresting man that nobody seemed to like, doing something stupid rather ineffectually, namely trying to prise Marge away from Homer. Incidentally I have no idea how that plot-line was resolved, or even left hanging. All I can tell you is that whatever it was neither 1) comprehensible nor 2) amusing.
And it wasn't just me. The children sat stunned on the sofa and declared, almost in unison: "That wasn't very funny. What was all that about?" The promising start had evaporated as soon as Brent/Gervais had appeared on the screen. Biactol for comedy.
And the rest of the humour on offer? We had Lenny saying he was a party machine, then looking at his watch and leaving a party. We had Moe raging with jealousy at the angled cut celery nibbles and how it made his straight cut celery look clumsy and unsophisticated. Potential for development, shattered when Moe simply threw down the plate on to the floor. End of idea. Why throw plate? Er, answers on a Simpsons postcard please. We had Cleetus and Brandine afraid to go to a party because of their fear of the 'uppity box' (lift). Would they usually get invited to Carl's parties?
Bigger stars, much bigger stars, have appeared on the Simpsons and by and large they were funnier and better integrated into the world of flat Springfield. But of course they didn't get to write their own lines, let alone a whole plot. Which he did, apparently. His responsibility, his name on the tin. Incidentally that episode is purportedly the highest viewed episode of the last four months in the US. Well, I wonder whether that is because it was as heavily advertised in the States as it was here. I have never seen one episode of anything pushed so relentlessly.
And why oh why did he feel he had to advertise Mr Murdoch's wholly owned High Definition television technology so thoroughly and repeatedly? The last thing I had Gervais down as was a corporate lickspittle and info-mercial whore.
I heard the Simpsons' script editor talking about the experience on the radio. He said they would be glad to have our Ricky back. Please - no.
I am waiting for the Zanussi men to arrive and fix our tumbler dryer. They have replaced all the parts that move or heat and it still doesn't work. Perhaps it is bewitched. There are some dodgy looking children around here and maybe they are responsible. Or maybe it is bad vibes from Comet in Old Kent Road, a belated revenge for all the bad thoughts I had about them not so long ago.
The fambly are in Manchester as I write, visiting the aged relatives sprinkled across the residential care institutions of the north west. I shall be joining them when the Zanussi men have been, gone and restored the sacred vestal heat missing from the centre of our domestic arrangements. I look forward to my first long distance rail journey for some time. Today is the hard Kakuro in the Guardian G2 so all should be well as I watch the charming English countryside slide by. At a speed to be announced. I file a small reservation in advance here because I have watched that countryside slide by both rapidly and at the speed of a sheepy stroll. We shall see...
Once I am up there we are planning to venture even further north, to border country where a sheepy stroll is viewed as a hyperactive import from somewhere like New York. The highlight may be a Easter Egg hunt with some cousins, or more probably the visit on Easter Monday of Notts County to Brunton Park to play the mighty Carlisle United, who are having their best season for a very long time. I have not been to see them play at home for thirty one years (yes, that shocks me too), but I have bought tickets for all the family in order to blood them into the ways of the round ball. This team, in this season, they must see. It may not fall to them for a similar three decades to see a winning Carlisle side of this quality. These things must be taken when available, sweet fruit caught before the inevitable fall.
The mood has lifted a little and I have begun to dabble in producing records again, having been asked to get involved with a small bandwagon which seems to be moving in the right direction. The usual overconfident hangers on still jabber at the fringes. I love it when people say things like "We understand the market". Oh joy, oh idiocy. I already sense a distant whiff of cocaine, that powdered form of insincerity, that communal form of unjustified self-confidence. If it gets any further you all will be kept duly informed.
So I will be away for the next six days and absence of copy here should not be taken as proof of depression, emigration or resignation. It is, instead, proof of a sheepy stroll being taken in a damp and pleasant land far away.
Mel is away in Manchester attending to her mother, who is having a hip replaced. Her father has gone into a home for an unspecified duration, possibly up to four months - maybe more. In such ways the Lord puts asunder.
My friend, the one accused of abusing his own child as part of some demented plot to discredit the boy's mother, has been damned to hell by a psychiatrist's report. She has never interviewed him but merely reviewed the existing documentary evidence. This is largely a body of opinions assembled by Southwark Social Services, an unimpressive bunch of gullible chumps who sprang to a clear and unshakeable conclusion early in proceedings. It stands as a monument to how a mistake can perpetuate itself if it wears an official hat, and how a conclusion once reached can support itself indefinitely.
The conclusion in this case is one hundred and eighty degrees wrong and has already done incalculable damage. Perhaps the officials should not be blamed; after all they have been misled in a calculating manner by two people with a great deal to hide. The customary, statistically familiar villain, the in-coming partner upon whom the mother of a child is emotionally and financially dependent, has been ignored and replaced in Southwark SS's mind by a pantomime fantasy villain, the outwardly caring father who damages his own child for some unspecified reason as part of some ramified plot, which plot is at the same time both the work of an evil mastermind but also pathetically ill-prepared and deeply unsuccessful. (The father reported the abuse himself - an astonishingly brave doubt bluff, wouldn't you say?) Simple story has lost out as explanation to be replaced by a complicated story. Liberal prejudice in favour of mothers has combined with massive deceit in a most unsavoury manner and these two strange allies are about, so it seems, to ruin a decent and remarkably honest man. The sad truth is that mothers can lie too.
The SSS have effectively found my friend guilty of a criminal offence, but without due process or the semblance of any kind of standard of proof. Social workers are no more policemen than lollipop ladies are surgeons. If they wanted to be then they should proceed as if they were, with at least a little circumspection. Any lollipop lady would surely be stopped at the door of the operating theatre, or at the very least would be asked to wash their hands before setting to potentially lethal work. Not so those in power, very real power, who have decided to take it upon themselves to do the work of the Police and the Royal Courts for them. How considerate.
Unsupported evidence is nothing more than assertion. Corroboration by crying does not count. The mentality behind witch trials has not disappeared, it has just transformed itself into a self-serving cycle where refusing to accept the infallibility of social workers, an unwillingness to swallow their illogicalities, deep insularity and high handedness, is interpreted as personality dysfunction. If you are labelled hostile by someone, someone whom you suspect of idiocy and is stamping all over your life in an intensely destructive and unaccountable manner, then I challenge anyone to accept such an accusation placidly. If hostile you are labelled, then to deny it is also to invite the same accusation. To argue the point is to be labelled argumentative. To refuse to tolerate injustice and sloppy thinking is to be labelled contentious. What can be done with accusations when any defence is used to prove the point at issue for your accusers? In the playground this one goes: "You're upset. Don't deny it. Yesyouare-yesyouare-yesyouare!" This sort of thing used to be called being unwilling to suffer fools gladly. Now it seems it can get you ruined financially, branded a sex offender and condemned to spend the rest of your life's contact with your only, adored, child conducted under supervision. Can lies really win the day, and win so easily, so uncritically? All for under-defending a position which you considered reasonable and refusing to enter an arms race of lies and manipulation.
I have drafted and submitted my evidence. I will probably not be called when the official Court proceedings kick off in a few days. If I am, I will not be believed, opposing as I do a body of professionally sanctioned evidence. My distaste for petty arrogance and the opiate of certainty has never been stronger.
We went broadband. Since then it seems I have read of nothing but misery, separation and death in the blog world. If you were expecting funnies then I am sorry to disappoint. Will try again later.