Last Django in Paris

Surrealism at home - 3

2011-06-22T06:17:00.001-07:00

A lithe Oriental lady of my close acquaintance and I frequently start the day with a conversation that runs broadly along these lines.

"Have you finished in the shower, my darling?"

"I'll be out in a moment, dearest."

"Can you mind the freshly-fed Guthlac while I perform my ablutions, Precious Jewel of the Orient?"

"I am already running late, Thruthelthrolth son of Ethelbreth. What you ask is impossible."

"But as to the young Guthlac, Most Favoured Daughter of the Yellow Emperor?"

"You'll have to take him into the bathroom with you, lord of the semi-detached mead-hall."

"But that is - and I freely admit my shortcomings in this area O Glowing Lantern of the Huaren - beyond my powers."

"You are in this respect a typical man, he of whose DIY and garden-related incompetence the bards sing extended comic lays, in that you find multi-tasking beyond your pitiful handful of so-called competencies."

"So are you in fact telling me, Paragon of Wifely Control of the Nansha, that you are better at multi-tasking than I, a fact which I am more than ready to grant you?"

"That is undeniable, O ring-loser and sword bender."

"Then why can't you have Guthlac in the bathroom with you?"

"Stop talking now."

Just a quick shout....

2011-06-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

... for the Roaming Trail event. I'll be there if I can...

Surrealism at home - 2

2011-06-13T03:25:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was out in the garden viewing - with considerable sadness - the latest attempt by the foxes to excavate a major development underneath the decking.

Guthlac had come out with me, and was dancing around on the lawn waving a plastic mattock (part of a set of child's gardening tools which a well-meaning friend had given him in the vain and naive hope that he would employ them for honest horticultural labour rather than whacking his sister on the kneecaps) and chanting "Working together, we get the job done! Working together, we get the job done!"

In an attempt to enter his cultural world, I asked him "Are you being Bob the Builder?"

"No, I'm a axer."

"You're an axeman?"

"Yes. I'm a axeman."

I believe one should work with one's children's enthusiasms. So I'm buying him a real axe and a fox identification guide.

The blog-life balance, and how to achieve it. Sort of. Sometimes.

2011-05-31T05:01:00.001-07:00

Alert readers will doubtless have been wondering what I've been doing these past months. The short answer is "having a life", away from the keyboard.

"What is this 'life' of which you speak?" some of them doubtless wish to ask.

Well, today I had the following interaction with my offspring, Djangolina (12) and Guthlac (3).

"We have to eat up the leftovers that are in the fridge. There's one portion of burgers and pasta bake, one portion of rice and stir-fry, or the soup and a sandwich option. Guthlac?"

"Burger an' pasta bake, please."

"Certainly. Djangolina?"

"Hmng?"

"What would you like?"

"Same as him."

"By all the tuneless shriekings of Rkslthrlp, blind idiot god of swamp, fen and parts of Milton Keynes - what part of 'one portion' dost thou not understand, wench?" I explained, hurling my horned helmet to the rush-strewn flagstones of our semi-detached mead hall.

"Oh. Sorry. Chicken-and-leek soup and a sandwich then."

I relaxed my grip on the plaits of the visigothic handmaiden I had seized in my annoyance and lowered her back onto the mead-bench. "And would you prefer your sandwich cut into triangles or squares?"

"Triangles, please."

"Triangles it shall be. Pass the two-handed axe, there's a dear..."

Black Country wisdom

2010-11-01T02:22:00.000-07:00

Last week - being the half-term break - saw us returning home to the Dudley area for a brief holiday. While there, we took Guthlac to the slightly shabby but nonetheless enjoyable Dudley Zoo, one of his favourite places.

While trekking round the reptile and creepy-crawlies house, we overheard the following dialogue:

Small girl (standing nervously in front of the tarantulas): Mummay! Iss freakin' me owt!
Mother (from round corner): Well doe look arrit then.

Sound common sense, as so often found in this so down-to-earth part of the country.

And widely applicable, I believe. Make someone called Aynuk UN secretary-general, and many of the sources of global angst would disappear.

"We are deeply offended by the blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)!"
"Well doe look at them then."

"We deeply oppose the idea of building a mosque in our beautiful, Christian city."
"Well doe look arrit then."

"This celebrity magazine has Katie Price on the cover."
"Doe look arrit then. In fact, bairn it. Bairn all celebrity magazines."

I'd vote for it.

Dungeons, Dragons and Ballpits

2010-10-05T04:06:00.001-07:00

When I was a geeky teenager with bad hair, I and some similarly afflicted chums found solace from our socially disadvantaged state by retreating into the imaginary world of Dungeons and Dragons, where all fights could be sorted out by rolling several 20-sided dice and doing an immense amount of looking stuff up in tables, and all women were well-muscled, clad in skintight leather and entirely imaginary.

One of my pals in this undertaking - in fact the one who had introduced the rest of us to the pastime - was a particularly sadistic plump boy named Lucas. Lucas had a vicious streak and often acted as Dungeonmaster - nothing to do with naughty goings on in leather underwear (fortunately, as you'd agree if you'd seen him) - but rather the person who designed the virtual dungeon which the rest of us would explore in our alter-egos as Halfkutt the Barbarian Warrior, Thruthelthrolth the Wizard and Gimni the Dwarf or some such.

"There is a door on the right. What do you want to do?" Lucas would ask neutrally.
"We'll open it!"
[Consult tables, look at graph-paper, roll dice]
"A huge spiked steel ball on a chain has swung down out of the darkness."
[We throw dice against our dexterity scores]
"Your head has been smashed to pulp, splattering your brains 20 feet down the passageway and qualifying you for a job teaching classics at Wellington!" he would announce with an evil grin.

I often wonder what happened to him. Last Friday I found out - he's designing softplay areas for small kids. It was pouring with rain, so the usual Friday session at the park that Guthlac and I enjoy was off. A quick internet search revealed an appealing-looking softplay venue not too far away, so off we went.

For those without small kids, let me briefly outline what a softplay area is - it's basically a large industrial building (usually a converted warehouse) containing a few tables, a snackbar and a massive construction made of scaffolding covered in brightly coloured vinyl padding and containing a labyrinth of walkways, slides, rope ladders, tunnels and ball-pits. The basic idea is that parents take their kids along, post them into the labyrinth and then sit down for a cup of tea until the kids escape.

Except that Guthlac - a kindly and generous boy - wanted his hapless father to share the fun experience, having failed to register that all the tunnels, passageways etc were designed to small kid scale rather than overweight middle-aged man scale.

Worming my way uncomfortably after him, I suddenly heard in my mind's ear the sepulchral voice of Lucas saying "You have attempted to squeeze between two rollers and have become trapped halfway into the Death Ballpit of Nagoth-Rha. A bevy of evil goblins disguised as small children will now pelt your bald head with brightly-coloured plastic balls while you squeal like a pig, enhancing their enjoyment considerably."

I hope he goes bankrupt.

Surrealism at home

2010-09-30T05:08:00.000-07:00

Scene: My home, this morning.
Dramatic personae: Gyppo Byard, Guthlac (aged two and a half), Djangolina (Aged 12)

Guthlac: Daddy?
GB: Yes?
G: A'am Spar'kus.
GB (blankly): You are sparkers?
G: No, a'am Spaaa'rkus.
GB: You are starkers?
G: No, a'am Spaaaaaaaaa'arkus"
GB: You are Spartacus?
G: Yes. I am Spartacus.
Djangolina: No, I am Spartacus!
G: No, I am Spartacus (launches spirited attack on sister's midriff)

I have to go through this every day. So do they...

An open letter to Pastor Terry Jones

2010-09-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

"Gosh" both my readers must be thinking at this point "Just what the world needs - more comment on International Koran-burning Day!"

My initial response was to call for 12 September to be designated "INTERNATIONAL BURN ALL THE POINTLESS AND COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE MEDIA COVERAGE OF SOME OBSCURE FUNDAMENTALIST PILLOCK'S BURN A KORAN DAY DAY", but having thought again realised I could squeeze out a blog posting on the matter while it is fresh in everyone's minds.

So here goes:
------------------------------------
To Pastor The Rev Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach Center, Gainsville.

OI! TERRY!

You daft git.

What the hell were you thinking? Are you just trying to stir up trouble for perverse sadistic pleasure?

On balance, I think not. Were you attempting that, I'm sure you could have done better. Were I seeking to offend the Muslim Ummah, I would announce that I would shortly be hosting "International Bar-B-Q Some Pork Chops Over A Pile Of Burning Koran Briquettes And Then Force-Feed Them To Ms Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Day". But I'm not going to, because I'm not a nasty person by nature. Not that sort of nasty anyway. And even then not against Muslims, who despite having a tiny lunatic fringe are in my wide experience of having lived in a Muslim country for six years charming and lovely people.

No - this isn't about offence. Really. I find myself drawn to two key facts about your "church" - it has 50 worshippers and it doubles as a furniture factory. Those hardly propel it into the ranks of influential global spiritual centres no, do they?

There you are, doubtless with ideas well above your station, grinding your teeth about the insufferable injustice of feeling yourself a world-class religious figure and being confined to the rigours of preaching to (and more to the point receiving tithes from) some 50 people, a significant proportion of whom doubtless arrive for divine service in pickup trucks containing arsenals of illegally-held banjoes.

The tithes from such a flock are not even enough to afford crystal meth and gay masseurs like a real preacher, are they?

O for a truly major publicity stunt, eh? Preferably one that would bring in money from and influence over the South's extreme right. Even better, you don't actually have to risk setting fire to your cuffs by igniting anything. Make the threat, get the damn-fool media to splash it all over the world and then back out.

And you know what? You've succeeded. Gimp.

The BBC - it's the new C of E

2010-08-26T04:15:00.001-07:00

A thought long fermenting in what I am pleased to call my brain makes an interesting historical link between the curates of the Victorian era and the linen-suited denizens of Broadcasting House's corridors today.

Under the Great White Mother and Kaiser-i-Hind, Oxford and Cambridge produced a surfeit of vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps who lacked the drive and physical fitness to go off and join the army or indeed any discernable professional skills, but who nonetheless thought of themselves as part of a God-chosen elite destined to order others about. The only appropriate career thus open to them was the Church, in which they could stand in pulpits and lecture the population at large about the moral, aesthetic and intellectual deficiencies of their hard-labouring, poverty-haunted lives.

Oxford and Cambridge - never institutions to go charging ahead with radical reform - still manage to produce a worrying surfeit of vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps and similar young gels who share the desires, ambitions and lack of appropriate talents of their Victorian forebears. But nowadays, alas, the C of E provides very little in the way of full pews to harangue.

And in any case, the church today provides very little for anyone in the way of career benefits besides camping about in fancy tat and drinking free wine, qualities which have led the priesthood to become colonised by inverts to a degree that makes it impossible for the weak-kneed Silurian buffoon occupying the throne of St Augustine to avoid giving them pointy hats and crooks.

Where was I?

Oh yes - the decline of the church has led to ever decreasing cushy job opportunities for vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps to lecture the rest of us, which is where the BBC comes in - as an employer of first resort for vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps and a bully pulpit for telling everyone else how to live their lives in a patronising but uncomprehending manner. I rest m'case.

Things that occur to me at 3am

2010-07-29T00:52:00.000-07:00

If - in furtherance of its attempt to join the EU - Istanbul offers to harmonise it national holidays to include those celebrated by current EU members, could we get away with using the headline "TURKEY VOTES FOR CHRISTMAS"?

World Cup games as they should be played: England vs Spain

2010-07-07T05:32:00.001-07:00

Pre-kickoff: Spanish manager Philip II orders Italian designer boots for his team, unfortunately failing to realize that Italian boot sizes are different from Spanish ones and thus creating a problem that will get worse the longer the match continues.

English striker F. Drake - widely tipped by the English press as the man to watch - surprises everyone by making a sudden dash down the wing during the singing of the Spanish national anthem, which ends dramatically with him setting fire to the Spanish goal and stealing the goalkeeper's water bottle, gloves, shorts and head; and then disappearing into the dressing room.

Though somewhat caught off balance by this, the Spanish start strongly, moving into the English half in a crescent formation against which the English defence can do little. Comfort for the home fans comes in the form of English defender Frobisher luring the Spanish striker Galleas onto rocks. Queen Elizabeth leads Tilbury supporters' club in a rousing chant of "You're not rowing any more!"

Half-time: With the still score at nil-nil, Drake reappears to suggest setting fire to several of the more expendable English players and shoving them into the Spanish dressing-room, a plan enthusiastically adopted and carried out.

Second half: Disconcerted Spanish try to mount further attack at which a thunderstorm interrupts game, affecting the taller and more metallic Spanish disproportionately.

85th minute: A late run up the wing for Spain ends in disaster when captain Medina Sidonia is caught by an unexpected Gulf Stream and wrecked on the Irish Coast. If you can imagine such a thing. Queen Elizabeth leads Tilbury supporters' club in a rousing chant of "You only whinge when you're sinking!"

In the absence of the Spanish team the English claim victory by default, while Drake takes possession of the Spanish goalmouth and quickly bangs in a hat-trick, before stealing the man of the match trophy and leaving for Portugal.

Answering the eternal questions - 2

2010-07-04T02:07:00.001-07:00

Gentlemen - having settled the previous matter - rightly - in favour of The 5678s, let us apply ourselves to a scientific matter taking in elements of ethology, palaeontology and ctyprozoology.

I would phrase this vital question thus: In a pub car-park fight, who would win - Godzilla, or the T-Rex out of Jurassic Park?

Godzilla:

The T-Rex:

Answering the eternal questions...

2010-07-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

There are so many vital things for philosophy to determine, but which mainstream philosophers have simply ignored, preferring such pointless abstractions as defining synthetic and analytic statements or - even worse - getting hung up on jouissance and differance.

Useless.

In an attempt to open up the truly important philosophical questions to the people, Last Django presents the first in a series of queries to establish truth by democracy once and for all.

Question Number 1 - Which was the better swampy surf-punk Japanese all-girl band of the 80s - Shonen Knife or The 5678s? By way of helping my students with their own research, allow me to present Option A:

And Option B:

[Footnote for No Good Boyo - neither of these bands contains twins. Sorry.]

World Cup games as they should be played: North Korea vs South Korea

2010-06-24T02:15:00.000-07:00

Alas for me, who cannot raise any level of enthusiasm about football on any level, let alone the World Cup. It doesn't even have the mildly entertaining residual political spite of Eurovision, the voting of which can be predicted quite accurately without hearing the songs (in fact that's preferable to hearing the songs, any of which are capable of melting a musically-trained brain).

And on thinking that, it all became clear to me: If we put international relations and football together, slack-trousered youths would take more of an interest and the games would be far more interesting to people like me who care not a jot for sport.

So in the usual helpful spirit of public enlightenment that regular readers of this blog (both of them!) have come to rely on, LastDjango offers a match summary of North Korea vs South Korea (aka "The Korean Match").

Pre-kickoff: The US assistant coach tells journalists that the South Korean penalty area "is not part of his defensive perimeter".

1 min - The North Koreans kick off (with encouragement from Russian consultant coach J. Stalin) and quickly put together a strong move into the South Korean half. South Korea claims it wasn't ready. North Korea score.

5 mins - The South Korean manager pulls nine of his players off and substitutes them with members of an international all-star XI, who quickly overwhelm the North Korean defence and equalise. International all-star XI celebrate by trying to introduce freedom, democracy and random death in the North Korean half. South Korean fans start singing "Inch-on, Inch-on, with hope in your heart..."

7 mins - As North Korea kick off, the pitch is invaded by 473 "Chinese volunteer players" who stabilise the situation in midfield.

10 mins - a US player is brought down by a Chinese opponent. The US player is evacuated by helicopter and handed over to the care of Maj. 'Hotlips' Houlihan and her magic sponge. The game is temporarily halted while several hundred 40-something geeks who watched MASH as sex-starved teenagers in the late 70s roll about on the pitch hoping vainly for similar treatment.

13-90 mins - The game degenerates into a pointless stalemate on the halfway line, which is eventually de-footballized and across which the two teams glare at each other impotently.

As of writing time several hours later, the game has yet to end officially.

Wifely compassion - an historical overview

2010-06-21T02:31:00.000-07:00

The suburban foxes are back (see this blog, passim). Only now there are more of them - we saw a vixen and two cubs playing merrily in our garden at twilight the other evening (it was an elaborate game called "first one to dig up and savage a plant with an expensive-looking garden centre price tag gets to crap in Guthlac's sand-pit!"). They also started excavating a seven-room luxury earth under our decking.

It was therefore only a matter of time before Mrs Byard politely ordered me to "fox-proof" the decking by wedging bricks into gaps and adding an extra plank to cover the long gap at the front. While simultaneously "minding Guthlac". Trust me, the mixture of hammers, nails, planks and an inventive two-year-old is not what one, as a male, wishes to have imposed on him for multi-tasking after a hard day at work.

Anyway, I gamely set about the impossible task. Guthlac was surprisingly keen to help, and while I was lying prone on the decking trying to wrestle the plank into position, he picked up a hammer which shortly afterwards came into sharp contact with my head. For a moment, I was unable to restrain my natural eloquence, upon which Mrs Byard took his side, helpfully explaining that "He was just holding the hammer and you nudged it with your head!"

One wonders whether Marie Antoinette scolded Louis XVI for nudging le guillotine with his neck and thus spilling blood on his new shirt; or whether Alexandra's last words to Nicholas in the dank Yekaterinburg cellar were an admonition to stop nudging the unwashed Bolsheviks' bullets. Did Archduchess Sophie turn to Franz-Ferdinand as Gavrilo Princip stood and fired and say "That's what you get for nudging Serbia"?

Probably not. But then, they had servants to fox-proof their gardens. It's alright for some...

Mechanical eptitude

2010-06-15T02:24:00.000-07:00

Recent comments on Guthlac's misadventures with vintage engines have set me thinking about the critical part that "being practical" played in the lives of my father's and grandfather's generations, and how a mechanically able man still commands blokish respect. No man wishes to sound, for instance, clueless in front of his garage mechanic (partly lest they slap a 200% clueless twerp surcharge on your bill for 'adjusting the sparkplugs on your diesel' or similar, but partly out of desire not to lose face).

The male half of humanity, it seems, is divided into tattooed Morlocks who can tune an engine and linen-jacketed Willas who write supposedly hilarious and heartwarming columns in the broadsheet press advertising their cluelessness in terms which still produce a torrent of Black-Country eloquence from my father's aged lips.

The former is represented by my biker mate and sometime commenter on this blog Mr Wessex, a motorcycling gentleman of intimidating bulk who is capable not merely of stripping down and rebuilding vintage motorbikes, but of lifting them with one hand and eating them; or by my friend Hubert, an engineering graduate whose idea of helping to fix a car is (deliberately and expertly) to replace the gearbox back-to-front so that the car has one very slow forward gear and five reverse ones. The latter is - surprisingly - the realm of No Good Boyo, a man whose unfamiliarity with his own car led to him being unable to close the sunroof during a snowstorm.

And then there is me (and, I suspect, several million others) squatting nervously in the no-man's land of this particular cultural divide. I am not the man to turn to when you have broken down, taking painfully long periods to complete even relatively simple mechanical procedures and needing to "pop out to Halfords" twice in the middle to buy new tools that I need but don't have, only to return and find that I did have one after all lurking in the depths of the toolbox and now have two, which is twice as many as I will need for the one time in my life I shall be called upon to use them.

And yet I cannot raised myself to the lofty Mandarin magnificence of the resolutely unmechanical. I can change a wheel, do an oil change, rewind fuses and change tap washers. Most of the shelves I have put up are still in place. I can even explain what most of the bits under the bonnet of my car do, albeit with a large sprinkling of metasyntactic variables: "Yeah, that's the oil filler cap. And that's the cylinder head thingy. And then that doodad goes round and round so that the whatsit wobbles up and down on the oojamaflip..."

I put my state of partial confusion down to a traumatic experience in my teens. One Saturday morning when I was 14, my father sought me out in my foetid lair. "Son" he said in a kindly way, "You are now approaching manhood, and there are things you should know - " I prepared a teenage sneer and was just about to roll my eyes at his naivety "such as how to remove, strip down and replace the gearbox on a Ford Escort. Follow me." Gobsmacked, I complied.

His method of instruction took an unusual form. He donned a boilersuit and eye protection and then sat himself on a stool with the Haynes Manual open upon his knee while I grubbed around underneath the car, struggling to understand his instructions. The conversation was full of exchanges such as:

"Now pick up the radial torque wrench and fit the 3/4" Hackett ratchet sprocket."
"What's that look like?"
"It's the one we had to have surgically removed from Uncle Frank after the incident at Lutterworth."
"Ah. I'll just put rubber gloves on..."
"Now unlatch the self-tapping grommet plunkets."
"Where are those, Dad?"
"There boy - just behind the 4 1/2" pillion bush!"

And so it went on. The result of this form of mechanical education is that I ended up knowing with a fair degree of certainty what things were and how they worked, but not what they were called.

Furthermore, in my mind's eye all cars are now Ford Escorts. If I open the bonnet and see things that look like the equivalent on the Escort I have a fighting chance. Any other layout or form of engine and I'm sunk. Front-wheel drive is still an impenetrable mystery. But even that's better than everything being an impenetrable mystery.

Now if you will excuse me, Mr Wessex and I are just popping out to replace the sparkplugs on Boyo's diesel. And we're only charging him 50 quid...

Futurism - it's so last century...

2010-06-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

As I may have noted in passing before, our two-year old offpsrog Guthlac is a pushover for anything mechanical and - preferably - noisy. The other night he was heard talking in his sleep, muttering in an agitated but intelligible voice "Mummy, no, Guthlac flyyyyy de plaaaaane..."

When Djangolina and her visiting friends from Germany opted for a trip into Birmingham, it quickly became apparent that the one place I knew Guthlac would adore was not on their agenda. So we agreed to split - the girls would go to the Sea-Life Centre to coo over cute turtles and seahorses, while Guthlac and I would head for the science museum at Millennium Point to coo over steam engines, old cars and Spitfires.

I was right - he did adore it. I let him have a run around first, richocheting from wonder to wonder in a state of chronic indecision as to which admire the most - the traction engine? The steam locomotive? The vintage cars? The vintage motorbikes? The Spitfire and Hurricane suspended tantalisingly out of reach from the ceiling? We then had a spot of lunch, after which I plonked him in the buggy for a more leisurely tour. This time, we headed for the other end of the hall, where the assorted industrial steam engines are kept.

There is something hypnotic about the workings of an old engine, and one very good thing the Birmingham musem does is keep as many of the machines turning over as possible. In addition, there is a series of enlightening hand-cranked exhibits showing how piston movement is tranferred into rotary motion, how a governor works, and the motion of planetary gears. Personally, I prefer that to Damien Hirst's sliced dead things any day - but then, I grew up in the Black Country where such things are considered the summit of our culture.

Much as I hate to agree on any level with tedious proto-fascist madman Dick Marinetti (purists may argue that his name was Filippo, but personally I've always thought of him as a Dick), there is beauty in the workings of machines. And particularly, the kind of machines that were around at the end of the 19th century.

It's not just the pleasing steam-punk elegance of turned brass handles and white-backed, glass-fronted dials; it's also the fact that so many modern machines are impenetrable 'black boxes' which do clever things but cannot be seen to be doing anything at all. And that had me wondering sincerely about when exactly the point was when futurism became retro. Was it when valves replaced cogs? Or when transistors replaced valves?

At this point, I became aware of a subtle change in the sound of the machine in front of me, and upon looking down realised that the noise was being caused by Guthlac's hat, which in an experimental turn of mind he had fed into a gear mechanism.

Condensing the entire experience, I have learnt two important things:
1) Form guided by function can be as aesthetically beautiful as pure art, possibly because the challenge of achieving a funtionally working form gives vital grist to the designer's mill, and
2) A two-year old in a museum requires absolute 100% attention at all times.

Are you really a urologist, or are you just taking the...

2010-05-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

Different people have different ways of dealing with pain. Some grit their teeth and take it stoically. Some scream and thrash about. I usually lie there wondering how I can turn the experience into an inappropriate anecdote I can use to put other people off their food during a meal.

This morning's procedure was no exception. Friends and relatives who have gone through "stent removal" (the stent in question being a small flexible silicone tube put into the ureter from kidney to bladder to protect it while it heals from the damage done by a kidney stone ripping along it, and not a particular retired BBC journalist of such irritating mien that on three separate occasions he came within a gnat's wing of being picked up by the shirt collar by an enraged Gypsy and shaken until his fillings rattled) have cheerily told tales of doctors putting a foot against the patient's stomach and pulling with both hands. The consultant merrily told me that the doctor in question "will just brace his back against the door and yank it out with both hands".

While in the waiting area outside the alarmingly sound-proofed treatment room, I was buoyed up by the fact that several other people arrived prepared to go in after me, who would be a perfect captive audience for my well-embroidered narrative when I came out.

As it turns out, the procedure of getting the endoscope into the bladder in the first place is a lot more teeth-gritting than that of pulling the stent out - even then it's more stinging and discomfort than actual pain. When the doctor pulled the thing out with a flourish he held it up, writhing and twisting like a decapitated snake. Within minutes I walked out again with my stent in a jar to embark on the enjoyable process of winding up the waiting patients.

There was a nice-looking chap sitting there in his hospital gown with his wife next to him, looking very nervous. I put the stent jar down on the table, without announcement but clearly visible to all. The man flinched slightly.

"Oh god - is that what it looks like?" he said to nobody in particular.
"That's the stent, yes. Are you here to have yours out?"
"Yes" he says, looking somewhat pained. "What's it like?"
"Well" I went on jauntily "Once they've got the pliers in position and lined up the hospital's tug-o-war team..."

He blenched, and crossed his legs. His wife, however - clearly one whom, like most experienced wives, it is hard to fool with mere blokishness - took a more rational view.

"Well, he's standing up and smiling" she noted of me dryly, sending detectable waves of "I've had a baby, you pathetic worm" vibes in my direction, "So it can't be all that bad."
"You'll be fine, mate" I said, changing tack rapidly, and moved off towards the changing cubicle in an exagerratedly and utterly unnecessary bow-legged manner calculated to convey both extreme discomfort and immense, stiff-upper-lipped bravery.

Had I remembered to keep it up when I emerged shortly afterwards having clearly had no difficulty dressing or tying my shoe-laces, it might even have looked convincing.

Spotted on Indonesia's roads...

2010-04-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

It is now something of a cliche that the humble motor-scooter is used as a cargo vehicle on Southeast Asia's roads; nonetheless the following are all pictures I've taken from the car in the last few days rather than being borrowed from existing websites.

Among the things we've seen have been a mobile restaurant:

A year's supply of snacks:

A delivery round's-worth of electrical appliances:

And an entire village's fuel supply:

Misfortunes - the complete set of three...

2010-04-28T03:16:00.000-07:00

Just when everyone had either assumed my demise or lost interest, here I am again after what seems to be turning into Last Django's customary spring break!

As I dolefully predicted in January, my much-loved mother-in-law steadily declined and messages urging us to go and see her "as soon as possible" piled up from the family. Mrs Byard duly went out ahead of us leaving me to trail in behind her (and stay on afterwards, to cover more possibilities). This meant I had all the fun of keeping the two-year old Guthlac happy during a 20-hour flight. Lucky me.

As it turned out we were too late - she passed away two days before my wife arrived, although at least Mrs Byard could attend the funeral (something she'd happily have passed up for five minutes with her mother, of course). Anyway, we duly trailed in and had to visit graves and carry out the ceremonies demanded by Chinese tradition, the highlight of which was Guthlac picking up a packet of cigarettes that had been acquired for offering on his grandfather's grave to be told forcefully "Just take one!"

Mrs Byard and Guthlac then trailed off back to blighty, leaving me and Djangolina to go round and do some things that can't really be done with toddlers in tow. The first day of this odyssey I had a few abdominal pains and took an immodium figuring it was just the normal travel bug-type thing. The next night the pain was getting worse and I took some painkillers. By noon the third day I couldn't stand up and could no longer urinate properly. At this point I was rushed to hospital, where an ultrasound scan revealed that my urethra was blocked by a kidney stone the size of a Glaswegian's liver and that my right kidney was swollen to double its proper size. After a day of extreme pain and discomfort, an x-ray revealed the bloody thing was stuck and refusing to come the normal way, so and endoscope was inserted, and the offending mass removed. (Lest anyone think this is a play for sympathy, let me assure you that a) I know my readers better than that, and b) kidney stones are eye-wateringly painful without being a serious health threat - they are the stuff of black comedy rather than tragedy).

This was followed by 72 hours on a hospital bed attached to assorted drips and catheters, at which point I found out misfortune number three - thanks to the Icelanders being as careless with their volcanoes as they were with their banks, I couldn't return home on time and was facing a further fortnight of enforced holiday in Indonesia. Frankly though, were I to choose any country to get stuck in through no fault of my own, it would be this one - so this stands as the tail-end sweetener to a catalogue of visits by the cock-up fairy. Onward and upward, eh?

Oriental women - widely admired, widely misunderstood...

2010-02-16T04:36:00.000-08:00

All things Chinese have been much on the mind recently, what with the dawning of a new Year of the Tiger and what-have-you. I brightly greeted Mrs Byard on Sunday morning with "Kong hee fat choi!", to which she responded by furrowing her brow and replying "Did you just call me fat?"

Djangolina - or Liem Kwee Lee as she is now styled in connection with all things Chinese - is quite fired up by this being the Year of the Tiger, which is her birth year. Having established my credentials as one cohabiting with 1.5 (ethnic) Chinese women, let me share a few intriguing observations for those watching from further afield.

The popular stereotype of a delicate, tottering, parasol-twirling "Lotus Blossom" character is utterly, utterly wrong. Chinese women are very, very tough in all kinds of unexpected ways.

I have already had cause to mention Mrs Byard's capacity for eating palate-scorchingly hot food and shaming "hard lads" in the process. Last year, we were served a platter of seafood at a restaurant in Indonesia which included whole crab. After a while, the following dialogue took place:
Her: "Aren't you going to eat your crab?"
Me: "Um, I've got nothing to open it with."
Her: "What are you on about?"
Me: "Well, in Europe you'd get crackers and a pick to open the shell up with so you can get the meat out."
Her: "Oh give it here, for goodness' sake..." (Picks up crab claw and cracks it open with teeth)

We have had similar conversations back at home - steered elegantly toward the conclusion that I am a useless wimp - over my pathetic attempts to find oven gloves rather than just pick up a roasting tray fresh from a prolonged stint in a hot oven with my bare hands.

I have encountered little old ladies - albeit in Indonesia, but I'm credibly informed by a Sinologist friend that China has an extensive supply too - capable of carrying loads on their backs you wouldn't believe. I once felt very proud of myself having scaled a relatively modest volcano in Java, to find at the top an entire drinks stall which had been carried to the peak, in its entirety, in a scarf wrapped around a 70-something lady shod in flip-flops.

I paid her an exhorbitant sum for a luke-warm bottle of jasmine tea (the legendary Tehbotol - Indonesia's finest soft drink....) and slunk back down the mountain feeling duly humbled. Which is no bad thing, after all...

New programme ideas for 2010

2010-02-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

In the effort once more to catch the attention of the major channels, I shall offer up again some programme ideas that would be at least better than half the appalling drivel that graces my screen.

Britain's Got Talons - A show in which birds of prey from all over the UK compete in a series of falconry and singing challenges, the winner of each (species-based) round being decided by a combination of phone-vote and Simon Cowell's toupee being carried off by a Golden Eagle.

What's in that Rock? - Palaeontology quiz hosted by geomorphologists' crumpet Hermione Cockburn in which professionals (e.g. Shubin, Conway-Morris, Fortey) would be teamed with celebrity fossil enthusiasts (e.g. David Attenborough, Alex James, Mark Gattiss etc) to identify fossil-bearing rocks on camera. I'd watch it...

Police, Camera, Action-Man! - Teams of policemen compete to make stop-motion animated films featuring action men.

Cashews in the Attic - A camera follows Mrs Byard and myself for a fortnight as we struggle through our overcrowded loft to try to find a bag of nuts we were sure we'd left up there.

Hannah Monsanto - Miley Cyrus gets genetically modified.

The Top 100 Polkas - Three-hour countdown show mixing old footage intercut with amusing reminiscences and witless fan-speak from radio DJs and stand-up comics.

Serious offers from channel heads only, please.

Nude X-factor Big Brother drugs terrorist Avatar

2010-01-29T04:49:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I attended a training event on the subject of Search Engine Optimization, which is basically the matter of spiking your interweb offerings with terms that you think enormous tits will be typing into their free viagra search engines, thus ensuring that a form of virtual guaranteed penis enlargement takes place in your page rankings and numbers of visitors.

I hoped the trainer would start by showing us the Robert Pattinson-Zac Efron gay sex tape, but apparently no such thing exists. The same could be said for the hardcore pics of Angelina Jolie which also failed to appear. We did talk a little about the uncensored Roswell/Area 51 film and the proof that 9/11 was a conspiracy engineered from a UFO powered by a perpetual motion device though. Actually we didn't; I just made that bit up...

Americans - what the **** is wrong with them?

2010-01-21T03:35:00.000-08:00

My generally positive view of our cousins in the rebellious colonies - which rose sharply a year ago with the election to the highest office in the land of a man whose intelligence placed him well above the cnidarians for a change - has taken a double whammy in the past 24 hours.

I mean, I'm not, deep down, anti-American. I love many things about the United States (in America), not least among them jazz; the optimistic, can-do attitude; Neil Shubin; the Marx Brothers and much else. But there are times when you have to wonder.

Whammy No 1: A firm supplying gunsights for US and UK troops in Afghanistan is putting Bible references on their products. I mean, Shrubya calling the war on terror "a Crusade" was bad enough; handing a propaganda victory to anyone who wants to see things in black-and-white 'clash of religions' terms is just downright stupid. Furthermore, do the fundamentalists at Trijicon realise how dangerous it is to hand such an obvious feedline to people like me? New Testament sniper sights? I mean, come on guys... "I am the night-vision goggles of the world"..."'WWJD?' 'Aim off a little to the right to allow for the wind'"...

I am not a Christian as such, although I do sing in church for the music. As such, I've heard quite a lot of the Bible and seem to remember JC being quoted saying things like 'turn the other cheek', 'blessed are the peacemakers' and 'put up your swords'. I've honestly never hear the bits from the Sermon on the Mount in which His followers are reminded to conceal themselves against a light background to make muzzle-flash less obvious or told "blessed are they who aim high at long distances to allow for gravity acting on the round".

And one final thing - if the founder of Trijicon was so devout a Christian, shouldn't he have found something other than weapons to make?

Whammy No 2: And then, the people of Massachusetts managed to go one better and elect a Republican senator, almost guaranteeing that health-care reform will be mired in an insanely complex and expensive legislative gridlock. How come - and I ask this in a spirit of affectionate puzzlement - when Bush brought forward major policy initiatives like "invade Iraq", "remove all environmental protection" and "let our Wall Street cronies smeg up much of the global economy", Congress sat supine and allowed them through on the nod; yet will fight tooth-and-nail to oppose Obama's big idea of "shouldn't it be possible for the world's richest nation to provide afforable medical care for all its citizens?"

Dark clouds on the horizon

2010-01-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

Reviewing last year's posts on this blog thingummy, I notice a distinct trend of tales of international travel, flippancy and bad puns which turned a little darker at the end owing to the loss of a beloved aunt.

This year promises to be worse, and more serious overall, with the Byard vardo heading towards metaphorical bumpy roads and barricaded campsites. We recently had news that my mother-in-law has been bouncing off various doctors with contradictory diagnoses of her breathing difficulties, varying from "nothing at all to worry about" to "advanced lung cancer". Eventually my sister-in-law accompanied her to Singapore to see a more reliable doctor, who confirmed the worst case scenario of advanced lung cancer. We are now preparing to get out to Indonesia at Easter to see her for the last time. I know that looks melodramatic but it's the exact truth, unfortunately. We are still struggling to cope with the awful finality of knowing a loved one is going to die in the very near future.

Less awful but also not at all frivolous - Djangolina moves up to secondary school in September. Guthlac is in the midst of toilet training, I shall turn 45 and Mrs Byard 40. My Open University studies are moving onto a couple of courses which I don't particularly like the look of but which I have to get under my belt to move on to what I want to do, but on the bright side my own parents will be celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, with my sister and I united in an attempt to convince them to have a 'do' at a hotel *we* like.

Rather than dwell on the bad news and forthcoming grief, I shall conclude by sharing with you instead the worst yodelling ever committed to film (from 6'45" in this short film):

My mother - her part in WWII

2010-01-05T03:32:00.000-08:00

We spent New Year happily up in the Midlands, at my parents' place. Djangolina is doing WWII next term as a history project and was keen to quiz her grandparents on their memories of the conflict. Much of this I had already heard quite a few times over, but my mother came out with a tale I'd quite honestly never heard before.

I knew about her role lighting a fake flarepath to encourage the Luftwaffe to bomb her aunt's village in Somerset, but her activities as a fifth-columnist guide to the last successful invasion of Birmingham had not been told before, at least not in my presence.

You have to bear in mind that my mother grew up in The Last House In Worcestershire - the bottom of their garden was the boundary with the City of Birmingham, which is traditionally Warwickshire. Our side - Black Country (Hooray!); over there - Brummies (Boo, hiss). Though outsiders are pressed to recognise a difference, the border is obvious and major to the peoples of Worcestershire and Staffordshire.

Anyway, some brass hat decided it would be a spiffing idea to give the Home Guard some useful practice at setting up road blocks by ordering the Worcestershire Home Guard to invade Birmingham. The Brummies thus set up positions on all the major roads leading into Birmingham, a fact obvous to anyone who had just walked past them up the end of their road on the way to school in Halesowen, such as my mother and her friend Ann. And just down the road they met a column of Worcestershire Home Guard advancing purposefully up Mucklow's Hill.

For reasons we had probably better not probe too deeply, the Worcestershire Home Guard fell into conversation with two gymslip-clad pubescent girls, who informed them brightly that "the Brummies had set up a road block just up ahead, and was that anything to do with you? Because we can show you a way round through the backstreets if you give us a ride..."

Birmingham was deemed by the umpires to have fallen before lunch.

In her defence, my mother was at pains to point out that she was helping her own side invade the cess-pit of evil and filth that was, and shall ever remain, Bromycham, rather than aiding and abetting an invader.

Into the wild west

2009-12-09T05:36:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in a recent post, we have recently lost our Aunt Elaine to what turned out at post-mortem to be an advanced but undiagnosed cancer. I duly loaded Djangolina, myself and some sombre clothing into the new car for the drive to Cornwall for the funeral.

We agreed with various family members to meet up at the pub next to the church in Aunt Elaine's home village, way down into West Cornwall. We parked, and walked into a curiously empty pub.

"Good afternoon" I said to the diminutive lady behind the bar. "Are you serving lunch?"

Had the place not already been silent, it would have fallen so. She looked at me as if I had just asked the way to Castle Dracula.

"Ooh no m'dear, we bain't servin' vooood t'day. But you can get a pasty at the shop next door."

That sounded fair enough, so that's what we did. After eating through negligible proportions of two enormous pasties, we returned to the pub to get a drink and await the arrival of sundry Byards. As I took a couple of J2Os and turned from the bar, I heard the landlady inform one of the few regulars now arrayed around the bar in wellies and woollies "Thart do be the man what arsked fer vooooood!", followed by murmurs of disbelief and - presumably - suggestions that pitchforks be fetched and torches lit. We then retired to the loos to don mourning clothes.

When we emerged the atmosphere changed dramatically. "Are you here for Elaine?" one of the regulars asked. We assured him that we were. Thus - and I hold this entirely to Elaine's credit - we were suddenly welcome. Before long the pub was fairly full of awkward people in black, looking forlornly out of the window at the driving rain. We had been asked not to sit in the church but to walk behind with the family, which is undoubtedly an honour but on this occasion a rather wet one. The church was packed, a tribute to Elaine's sociability and wide circle of acquaintance.

We heard 'The Helston Furry Dance" (in the original town band version, not the twee popular arrangement - it makes quite diginifed funeral music in fact, in a manner not dissimilar to the opening of Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary) and then The Song of the Western Men. Let nobody say it was not a "prarper job" of a funeral.

Lookalikes

2009-11-17T08:08:00.001-08:00

Have any of my readers noticed the uncanny similarity between Indonesian radical cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and has-been paedophile glam-rocker Gary Glitter?

Glitter:

Ba'asyir:

I wonder if they might be related?

A phone call I didn't really want to have to make

2009-11-16T04:12:00.000-08:00

I don't feel like even trying to be funny today.

When I got home from work yesterday, my wife greeted me with the news that my aunt - the second wife of my dad's little brother, and a much loved stabilising presence in his life and the wider family - had died on Saturday night of a heart attack. My dad phoned up to tell us while I was at work, having got the call from his brother at half past midnight and spent the rest of the night sitting up unable to sleep, nursing his shock and dismay with an unspecified number of whiskies and soda.

We knew she was unwell, having recently had a hip replacement and not having recovered according to plan. But on Saturday night my uncle noticed she was looking a bit grey in the face and called an ambulance. She collapsed and was rushed to hospital, but was pronounced dead an hour or so later. None of us were expecting anything quite that dramatic.

I dread phoning or writing to people in these circumstances, never knowing quite what to say, but I plucked up the courage to call my uncle. I wish I could report that I found inspired words of solace, but I didn't. I think I started with "I heard the sad news. I really don't know what to say..." In the circumstances, that was probably as good as anything and certainly better than not calling at all. I told him how fond we were of her (especially Djangolina, who always got on splendidly with her - she was wonderful with children) and how if there was anything we could do etc etc - all the normal cliches. But what else can you say in these situations? I meant every word, however hackneyed the phrases I used. Anyway, the hard bit's done. I'm now waiting for a funeral date.

Boyo - Les cahiers de conversation, trois

2009-11-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

At the sight of Mr Big Big Bossy Big Boss making an inspection tour of a nearby area, I slip away from my desk in pursuit of a cup of tea, fearing the impact on the organization should someone important make the mistake of asking me a question. Along the way I meet Boyo, who is similarly pursuing tea but without ready cash about his person, and is lurking with the intent of prising a cuppa out of some misguided but well-intentioned soul like me.

On our way back, he asks me what Djangolina is up to.
"She's off for a week on a school trip to a place on the Isle of Wight called 'Little Canada'," I respond, truthfully.

"I can imagine what they do there - eat donuts, play ice hockey, learn to discuss lesbianism. In French. 'I'm from Saskatchewan, eh?'..." He is getting into his stride by now.

At this point, we reach a door. Approaching from the other side is a strikingly attractive South Asian lady whom neither of us have seen before. I stand aside chivalrously to let her through. Boyo - his head twisted through 90 degrees to continue holding forth to me, fails to register her presence walks past her saying, in a high-pitched mock-Djangolina voice "Daddy - all the men here are called Mr MacKenzie!"

I smile wanly at the woman as she flees for her life, clearly having come to the snap decision that the place is a madhouse.

A new love

2009-11-08T02:35:00.000-08:00

I have recently gone through a life-changing experience. This has not been easy for a middle-aged, respectably married man; but there is a new object of passion in my life.

I saw her in the street, and was captivated by her beauty. Her body has the most seductive curves I have ever seen. I should have admired from afar and left it at that, but I searched out more about her on the internet, and my desire grew, and became a consuming passion; I fantasized about running my hands over her lovely body, to possess her, to be - I blush to say it - inside her.

I had to have her.

I summoned up the courage to tell my wife.

"I'm sorry, but I cannot live without her. I don't want our marriage to end over this; what I would like ideally is for her to come and live with us and us all to try and get on together. And I think Guthlac will love her..."

She looked me right in the eye, remaining calm and poised.

"If you insist, then yes she can come and live here. But on one condition."

I felt my heart pounding.

"And your condition is?"

"That you put me down on the insurance as a named driver."

"Daddy, what's your favourite action film?"

2009-11-03T04:27:00.000-08:00

"I like the one about the young maverick palaeontologist who crashes his Micra into what turns out to be the mineralized remains of a basal male bovid."
"Is there such a film?"
"Yes Djangolina - it's called Nissan in Fossil Bull."

[Note to self - it was a mistake getting Djangolina her own Samurai sword. Must lay hands on a needle and thread...]

Boyo - Les cahiers de conversation, deux

2009-10-26T03:37:00.000-07:00

Fellow bloggagers sometimes sigh "How wonderful it must be to have the chance, on an almost daily basis, to hear the beautifully crafted pearls of wisdom that drip from the lips of the great No Good Boyo rather than have to wait for days at a time for him to complete a posting."

For such pining addicts, I offer the following conversation I had with the man himself this morning. We were queuing up in the canteen, and Boyo - having mislaid his glasses - was sorting with unnecessary care through assorted foreign coins and buttons for something the Inca princess manning the till would accept in payment for a coffee and a muffin, while a queue of deadline-stressed journalists and radio presenters built up behind him like a writhing snake.

As he finally sorted out his debt and moved on, he opined "What's that island where they use 2-ton rocks as currency?"
"Yap."
"That's it. I reckon we should adopt that as currency - for a start, nobody would pick your pockets, and also which nation in the UK has the most rocks?"
"Wales?"
"Wales, exactly. Wales consists largely of piles of rocks. You can't move in Wales without falling over huge, sprawling piles of slate, and anthracite, and - "

He paused for a moment while he struggled to think of another type of rock.

"Ignitheous twat-bollocks."
"I'm not sure that's a type of rock, Boyo."
"Eh?"
"Look, basically you've got three kinds of rock: Igneous, which comes out of the middle of the earth in a molten state and then sets hard; sedimentary, which is loads of bits that settle in a layer and then go hard; and metamorphic, which start off sedimentary and then get cooked in to something else like dough turning into cake."

His brow furrowed while he attempted to synthesize this new and exciting information.

"Gyppo - you forgot the fourth sort."
"Which is?"
"Kraut."
He nodded emphatically like Stan Laurel delivering a non-sequitur and wandered off to massage the coffee into his scalp and crumble the muffin down his trousers, as per normal.

Jeremy Kyle - the answer to global conflict

2009-10-22T03:07:00.000-07:00

One of the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures is an unhealthy addiction to the Jeremy Kyle show. It's a sort of human version of those "Police, Camera, Unbelievably Thick Tosser in a Stolen Ford Escort" programmes that also rank among my guilty pleasures. I suppose the warm glow they occasion stems from a deep-seated smugness that however much one's wife complains about "getting too close to the kerb" when one is colliding with a lamppost or whingeing about 5 minutes spent filling in an innocent Sudoku while one's small children amuse themselves with knives, weedkiller sprays and pans of boiling water; there are others who are even worse at managing their daily lives.

Anyway, it struck me recently that if world leaders are serious about global peace and disarmament, they should appoint Jezzer secretary-general of the UN and have all peace conferences on daytime TV.

We can imagine what the result would look like:

JK: On Today's show - exes at war over nuclear weapons [Video clip of North Korea shouting at South: "Well you go runnin' off with America an' that, warram I s'pposed ter think? Eh?", and South shouting back "Tell them about the violence. You didn't mention that to the researchers, didja? You invaded me!"]

And a country that desperately wants to be father to it's ex's breakaway province [Video clip of JK intoning gravely - "Russia, Georgia: The DNA results show that the biological father of South Ossetia is -"]

That's all coming up later. But first, a family dispute that's dragged on for a long time, and threatened to involve the whole neighbourhood. Lots to unravel in this story. Now first up we have India. India has been arguing for years with sister Pakistan over a disputed cashmere. Please welcome India.
[India walks onstage and sits down nervously. If you can imagine such a thing.]
JK: Welcome to the show.
I: Good morning Jeremy.
JK: Now if we can go back a bit - you have been arguing about a lot of things even before this dispute we're here to talk about today.
I: Yes, even when Raj was alive we used to argue about religion a lot.
JK: Raj was your mother, yes?
I: Yes Jeremy.
JK: Please let's not get onto religion, but can you just tell us the sort of arguments you had?
I: Well Pakistan was always causing trouble, mistreating the cow, lookin' down like on anyone who thought diff'rently an' all. And after Raj passed on we decided to go our separate ways.
JK: Fair enough. So you wanted a clean break and to have nothing more to do with her.
I: Yes Jeremy - I could go my way and she could go hers and as far as I'm concerned, at the end o'the day, we're not related any more.
JK: But this current dispute is over a cashmere?
I: Yes - Raj had promised it to me as I'd always liked it, but at the funeral Pakistan made a scene and grabbed at it, tore it in half, and has kept her half saying she'll only sew it back together if I hand my half over to her.
JK: Which you're not prepared to do...
I: Which I'm certainly not prepared to do, Jeremy.
JK: OK, now take a breather. After the break, we'll talk to Pakistan and hear her side of the story. Don't go anywhere...

The Great Indonesian Novel - 4

2009-10-19T03:24:00.000-07:00

Continuing the ongoing series with This Earth of Badly-Raised Twilight - Chapter 4 - June 1914

Ho Li Kow stroked the head of his beloved elder son, William of Orange Polder Windmill Rotterdam Pancake Li, and fed the boy a piece of Dutch chocolate. William loved being in his father's study, with its array of Dutch books and gramophone records. Here he could bask in the glories of the European culture that his father loved - reading the novels of Shakespeare and the poems of Jane Austen; and listening raptly to Wagner symphonies and Bach operas. Today he would be going off to the Dutch school to start learning Dutch. If only, he thought, his mother had not been a benighted native, he could really go somewhere. Holland, preferably.

As if on cue, his beautiful but cruelly mistreated and ignored native mother Raden Roro Royabot and irritating younger brother Hayamwuruk Gamelan Komodo-Dragon Hopeless-Dream-of-Independence Batik Li entered, soiling the Dutch carpet with their ugly, brown native feet. Royabot placed a small stone in the leather strap decorated with a Merlion and a picture of Sir Stamford Raffles, swung it round a couple of times and propelled the stone into her husband's forehead with a satisfying smack.

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU THAT FOR NUMBER ONE IDIOT WIFE? AND WHERE'S MY DRINK? I ASKED YOU TO BRING ME A SINGAPORE SLING!"

Royabot looked at the floor in dismay and confusion.

"I am sorry lord. I did not know the difference, lord. And in any case, that gag doesn't work in Javanese. Or even in English, unless the readers know at least a smattering of Singaporean history."

Ho Li Kow rubbed his sore head. "What do you want, anyway?"

Royabot overcame her nervousness and looked him straight in the eye.

"Do you remember how, in Chapter 2, you promised that after I had borne you two sons, I would be free to leave?"
"Nothing would make me happier."
"Then I ask you to free me."
"OK, bye then."

She hesitated, prepared as she had been for A Scene. She thought of shedding tears copiously, like chunks of freshly sliced lontong onto a banana leaf, to be covered with the satay of humilition and drenched in the peanut sauce of continuing poverty, but quite frankly she couldn't be arsed. She straightened up and walked out, taking Hayamwuruk Gamelan Komodo-Dragon Hopeless-Dream-of-Independence Batik Li with her.

"Wait a moment" her husband called after her. "Where will you go? What will you do?"

She turned back and looked at him. "I will go to the market and sell batik like a native woman. Which I am, of course, as you never let me forget. Not that I want to in the first place."

She paused.

"Where was I? Oh yes - batik in the market. And if that doesn't raise enough cash, I can offer sexual favours to visiting Filipino sailors. After marriage to you, nothing else can ever humiliate me more."

She walked proudly out, wishing inside that she had married Min, the simple village goat-carrier, and been poor but happy.

-o-o-o-o-

Far away in the village, Min - the simple village goat-carrier-turned-dokar-driver-turned-satay-seller who nursed within him a hopeless passion for Royabot - had finished serving satay for the night and was counting his takings. The business was doing well. Suddenly he heard a sharp sigh from his one remaining customer, sitting alone over his satay at a low table. Min walked over to him and asked, sympathetically "What's the matter sir?"

"It's hard to explain - you see, I am the vice-president of Goodyear Tyres (Southeast Asia) division and my marketing strategy is in a total mess. I would far prefer to be in a small business selling something simple like goat satay."

"Pak" said Min soothingly, "I am but a poor village goat-carrier-turned-dokar-driver-turned-satay-seller and know nothing about these things, but it strikes me that the main barrier to tire sales at this point is the non-viability of motor vehicles owing to poor infrastructure. If you could lobby the colonial government for a coordinated road-building programme, and go into some kind of loose associative partnership with the oil companies and vehicle importers to push for greater and more effective use of road transport using the internal combustion engine, the market would expand greatly and an existing network of franchisees fitting your firm's tires would be well-placed to take advantage."

"Wah, Min - you are so clever. We should swap places - you can be vice-president of Goodyear Tyres (Southeast Asia) division with responsibility for marketing and I will be the satay seller. For your cleverness, you deserve this."

"Daddy, what's your favourite rom-com?"

2009-10-18T00:13:00.000-07:00

"I like the one about the shy young geologist who impresses a beautiful American woman geologist by discovering successive layers of perfectly-preserved Llandovery, Wenlock, Ludlow and Pridoli limestone right next to a geo-thermal vent."
"Is there such a film?"
"Yes Djangolina - it's called Four Beddings and a Fumarole."

[Note to self - Remember not to do this over the dinner table when squirty-ketchup is within Djangolina's reach.]

"Daddy, what's your favourite family film?"

2009-10-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

"I like the one about the man who goes to the West Indies to search for deposits of iron sulfides."
"Is there such a film?"
"Yes Djangolina - it's called Pyrites of the Caribbean."

[Note to self - Djangolina is getting increasingly strong and fearless, and thanks to misguided school sex education lessons, knows where one's nadgers are.]

A tale of two balls

2009-10-12T02:26:00.001-07:00

Warning - this post is clean, but contains disturbing traces of snobbery

The more I learn of England, the more I am convinced I am an alien. Either that or everyone else is normal and I'm deeply eccentric. Or that I've had a bizarrely skewed upbringing. Or all three.

What am I on about?

Well, this weekend last Mrs Byard and I had a rare opportunity to go out and socialise, not once but twice. On Friday, we attended a charity ball at a converted stately home set in the rural magnificence of Berkshire (or was it Hampshire? Somewhere near the border, anyway); and on Sunday we turned up to an Indonesian community party in a village hall definitely in Berkshire, and indeed perilously close to Mrs Pouncer.

The charity ball was in part organised by some of Mrs Byard's new work colleagues (she's just started a new job), and she felt it would be a good opportunity to socialise with them and scare them by presenting me. The tickets were quite reasonably priced, and clearly stated that the dress code was black tie. Now one's formative experiences in ball-going were during one's Oxford years, during which - as a friend of mine put it "one learns three important life skills - how to tie one's own bow tie, how to punt, and one has forgotten the other one."

So out came the dinner suit, cummerbund, mirror-polished patent leather pumps, dress shirt, lapis-lazuli cufflinks and hand-tied blue paisley bow-tie to match (because black tie need not be black for a jolly social occasion. Mrs Byard looked radiant in a full-length gown the colour of which I can't quite describe but if pressed would call "grey with a hint of lilac" and a lilac-ish shawl of that flimsy transparent (but pretty) material the name of which I've forgotten. Mrs Pouncer would know. (It's a good job I'm not a celebrity columnist, isn't it? Can you imagine what a butt-clenchingly embarrasing mess I'd make of describing the frocks worn by A-listers on the red carpet?)

Anyway, we had got it about right. For our table. Mrs Byard's colleagues were indeed in decent evening dress, but with bow-ties in various jolly hues to match or compliment their partners' evening gowns. Our fellow guests on other tables, however, seemed to lack the poise and savoir-whatsit that a decent upbringing and/or education delivers. They were, one would guess, rat-faced estate agents and similar riff-raff who had no concept of "black tie" and for whom a grey polyester off-the-peg chain-store suit is the smartest thing they own. But they had read and acted on the words "black tie" by wearing straight, black ties; and consequently looked like rat-faced estate agents attending a funeral. They then descended on the bar to equip themselves with pints of lager in plastic "glasses" and blue vodka concoctions for their loud, over-made up accompanying slappers, after which they descended into looking like pissed rat-faced estate agents attending a funeral. There was also a live band playing ABBA covers after dinner, which effected a gender segregation of which a Saudi Imam would have approved, were it not for the fact that he wouldn't have approved of the pissed slappers threatening the dance-floor with imminent collpase and the rat-faced funereal estate-agents forming a lager-crazed scrum at the bar.

There are times when I horrify myself with my own opinions about the people around me. This was one of them. I stress that it was a worthwhile cause, that anyone willing to turn up and support a major cancer charity is worthy of praise rather than snobbish sarcasm and that Mrs Byard's colleagues are lovely people. But even so...

Anyway, event number 2 - a belated Lebaran (end of Ramadhan) party with the local Indonesian community at the village hall. Entrance price - none (but bring food...)Dress code - none (but batik is always appropriate). Alcohol - none. Band - us, playing gamelan. Games and face-painting for kids, silly party games for grown-ups thrown in for good measure. Money raised - £800 for the Sumatran earthquake appeal, so again a worthy charitable cause benefitted. A fantastic time was had by all. What I particularly like about Indonesian parties is that Indonesians are capable of having uproarious fun without needing a drink first. And they understand their own dress codes. And they don't dance like knob-ends.

Does even thinking such thoughts make me a bad person?

Simon Jenkins. Twat.

2009-10-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo - a man who rightly relishes the opportunity to provoke unnecessary violence - earlier drew my attention to a highly annoying article in the Guardian, by the aforementioned Jenkins.

Jenkins writes in what he clearly thinks is a moving and evocative way of a part of Romania which is a strong contender for the title of "Europe's least developed region". Furthermore, it is on target to have a Roma majority before long; a prospect he described as "the most exciting and daunting cultural challenge in Europe" (public-school tosser weasel-speak for "I say, do you think these primitive pikeys will manage when the grown-ups are away?")

Jenkins scrupulously avoids the word "Roma" throughout, preferring the outdated and moderately offensive "Gypsy", presumably to conjure up an image of picturesque simple folk in gaily emroidered costumes playing their jolly music. He clearly has an eye for the boys too:

There is no water or sewerage and no tarmac roads. The village well and a few desultory horses and carts are attended by attractive Gypsy youths.

No water or sewerage and mainly horses for transport. Sounds just wonderful, doesn't it? But of course "simple picturesque people" like the Roma would only be spoilt if you let them share the benefits of modern society. And their 'attractive youths' might not be quite so available either. Far better to tailor aid to their modest needs:

A truly minimalist venture had a Gypsy in the village of Floresti asking for, and getting, a tiled roof over an appalling hovel shared with his wife, two horses and a mountain of manure.

We wouldn't want to remove the manure, now, would we? Old Florian has grown so fond of it, and it provides such a lovely photo opportunity and story to tell over a glass of wine back in Hampstead.

And here we touch on his true concern for the region, if not its people:

There is thus a race to save the most endangered pre-industrial landscape in Europe from poverty-stricken newcomers understandably eager for modernity. One day these villages will be as treasured as those of the Cotswolds, Provence or Umbria, but until then they must pass through the valley of the shadow of possible death.

Yes folks - tired of how overrun with braying middle-class English pillocks your favourite holiday area is? Then come to Romania and patronise some Gyppoes. They won't mind, you know, they're happy with an unmetalled road and a pile of horse-poo!

I am seriously minded to start a new charitable organisation, possibly with EU funding, to provide the Roma of Transylvania with the development they actually want. Top of the list would be a supply of AK-47s and some leaflets explaining to them how all rich English tourists in 4x4s are agents of Satan.

Monosyllablism - it's the Anglo-Saxon way...

2009-10-04T04:54:00.000-07:00

Last night my wife and I had a chat. She said that one thing she likes about the tongue used in this land is that there are a lot of words with but the one sound in them. This was not like her own birth tongue, in which a lot of the words have three or four sounds in them. "This is true" I said. "A lot of the key words used here have but one sound in them - earth, sun, moon, man, child, birth, death and so on. In fact, I bet you I could write a whole post on my blog and not have to use one word which has more than one sound in it."

"Go on then" she said.

Please feel free to add a word or two or your own. But be sure to use just the words which have one sound each in them.

Lookalikes - 2

2009-09-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Have any other readers of this blog noticed the uncanny similarity of my boy Guthlac and celebrated monorchidous anti-Tziganist Austrian lance-corporal fuckwit and mainstay of the GCSE history syllabus Adolf Hitler?

Adolf Hitler

Guthlac

Grammatical lunacy - a view from between the coconut palms

2009-09-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of No Good Boyo's erudite blatherings will recently have been entertained and/or baffled by a mind-warpingly detailed discussion of the relative ease-of-use of Latvian and Polish. And lest there are any monoglot Brits out there saying to themselves "So, do all these foreign languages come draped with unnecessary and impossible-to-memorise grammatical fripperies?" I say unto them "No, indeed not."

Indonesian (or Malaysian as the Malaysians insist on call it. Or Malay as the Singaporeans insist on calling it... Or indeed Melayu as the Bruneians insist on calling it*) is a wonderfully intuitive tongue, which does away with articles, tenses, cases, and - largely - the verb 'to be'. So, for instance, to construct the statement "I am a teacher", one need simply say "Saya guru" - literally 'I teacher'. Whatever the head word is comes first and modifiers follow; so 'My teacher' would be "Guru saya". Neat, eh? (Unfortunately it also means word order is sometimes flexible and sometimes critically important - I once intended to ask someone the time and instead asked them how many watches they were wearing ["Jam berapa?" vs "Berapa jam?"])

This makes Indonesian in general a delightful language for grammarphobes (they say it takes 2 months to learn it passably; and the rest of your lifetime to learn to speak properly). However, when grammarphobic students get to lesson five or thereabouts and have to start forming transitive verbs, many of them start whimpering as it is discovered they are also morphology-phobes. Like all Austronesian languages (Tagalog, Malagasy and Maori to name but three), Indonesian is agglutinative, meaning that forming sentences may be easy but forming the words in them can sometimes be bafflingly hard.

This is partly because prefixes not only slot onto the start of roots, they cause the initial consonants to mutate into homorganic nasals (so 'p' and 'b' become 'm', 't' and 'd' become 'n', 'k' and 'g' become 'ng' and so forth). This means that untangling prefixes and their warping effects is a critical skill to acquire before you can even use a dictionary - you'll find 'pengecilan' (diminution), for instance, under 'k' for 'kecil' (small) - a letter under which the uninitiated would never think of searching since it doesn't appear anywhere in the word. On the plus side, learning a few comparatively simple roots and add-ons makes learning vocabulary comparatively easy.

There is also the excitingly randomising feature that while most words with multiple affixes (the catch-all term for prefixes and suffixes; and in some Austronesian languages infixes and simulfixes, which are even more fun) can be built up lego-like from their constituent parts, occasionally a word can acquire an unexpected meaning that can throw you off.

I once encountered an American who had attempted to translate the English word 'shyness/emabarrasment' from the root adjective (or stative verb, depending on which side of that particular grammatical controversy you place yourself) by taking the root word 'malu' ('shy, embarrased') and adding the ke-****-an simulfix, turning it into an abstract noun. Unfortunately, 'kemaluan' is a common euphemism for genitalia. What he meant was to say he was very diffident about doing something (making a speech, I believe it was). What landed in the ears of his Indonesian listeners' ears was "I have an ENORMOUS todger!" ["Kemaluan saya besar..."]

Someone else of my acquaintance, when on a language course in Bali, found the window of his boarding-house room stuck and wished to open it. Unfortunately, he had confused the word jendela (window) with celana (trousers). Add to which the curiosity by which the same verb - buka - is used both for 'to open' [a window, door, box etc]and 'to remove [an item of clothing]', and you have the ingredients for classic comic misunderstanding. He sought out the landlord's 17-year old daughter and asked what he thought was "Can you help open my window?" What came out, inevitably, was "Can you help me remove my trousers?"

When she recoiled in confusion and embarrassment, he effortlessly made the situation far worse by saying "Just come to my room - I'll push from the inside and you can pull from the outside!" It was at this point that he had an opportunity to reflect on what a graceful thing a Balinese girl's running action is when seen from behind to the accompaniment of melodious shrieking.

*The number of native speakers is consistently underestimated owing to the consistency with which the countries where it's spoken happily chat to each other perfectly well and then insist vehemently that their languages are mutually incomprehensible (see also Czech vs Slovak, Hindi vs Urdu, Serbian vs Croatian, Norwegian vs Swedish vs Danish...)

The Great Indonesian Novel - 3

2009-09-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

Continuing the ongoing series with This Earth of Badly-Raised Twilight. Chapter 3 - March 1911

William of Orange Polder Windmill Rotterdam Pancake Li hit his little brother, Hayamwuruk Gamelan Komodo-Dragon Dream-of-Independence Batik Li, over the head with a Dutch toy train.

"I tell you b'fore, 'Ruk, native not allowed in First Class'!"

"But why, elder brother? Is the native less of a man than the arrogant European? Is his money somehow tainted by being offered in a brown-skinned hand? Do we not ourselves have the blood of native royalty running through our veins, and must needs feel ourselves at one with the benighted peasantry of our homeland? I may be only two years old, and you may be older and wiser than me from your education in a Dutch kindergarten, but this book sorely needs some rousing speeches in defence of our oppressed native folk, to give them hope that one day we may cast of the yoke of oppression."

William hit him with the train again, and went off, smirking, to find his father to have a Dutch storybook read to him. In Dutch.

Hayamwuruk shed tears of despair and frustration thick and fast now, like rice flour pouring into the bubur ayam pot - there to be soaked in the resentment of economic and political oppression, raised to boiling point by growing consciousness of his national destiny, garnished with the chicken shreds and onion flakes of dreams of independence and served up to an overweight British tourist at a breakfast buffet in a four-star hotel, only to be proclaimed "a bit bland" and left largely uneaten.

He toddled into the servants' quarters to find his beautiful but cruelly mistreated and ignored native mother, Raden Roro Royabot, who was making a meringue.

"Why are you only keeping those egg-whites, mother?"

"It's for you 'Ruk - remember how you made that speech earlier urging me to cast away the yolks of oppression?"

"That's yokes, mother."

His mother looked at the floor in dismay and confusion.

"I am sorry, son. I did not know, son. And in any case son, that gag doesn't work in Javanese, as you should know by now from your extensive reading of the works of Ronggowarsito."

She looked at his disappointed but sympathetic face and forced a smile. "But come, my darling boy - let us sit together and read endlessly impenetrable passages from the Babad Tanah Jawi together, telling of the glorious deeds of your ancestors before the Dutch ever arrived."

"Yes mother, I would like that very much."

Sometimes, she thought wistfully, her beloved younger son reminded her not of her evil, rapacious husband but of the only man who had ever moved her heart with kindness - Min, the simple village goat-carrier.

-o-o-o-o-

Far away in the village, Min - the simple village goat-carrier-turned-dokar-driver who nursed within him a hopeless passion for Royabot - had delivered his last passenger of the day when he heard sobbing from a satay stall at the side of the road. He left his horse eating grass at the roadside and went to investigate. The satay seller was sitting alone in tears.

"Wah - I am but a poor old man who is unable to sell any goat satay. Why will people not buy my delicious charcoal-grilled meaty skewers?"

"Pak" said Min soothingly, "I am but a poor village goat-carrier-turned-dokar-driver and know nothing about these things, but I know a little about goats and even from here I can see that you have cut the meat longitudinally along the grain of the latissimus dorsi, but then at 45 degrees downwards from the line of the spinal column along the gluteus maximus. In both cases, you have the main muscle fibres running along the length of the satay, making it difficult to chew. Were you to cut across the grain to start with - laterally away from the spine for the latissumus dorsi and then upwards at 45 degrees along the gluteus maximus - the grain of the muscle fibres would be cut into easy-to-chew mouthfuls and the satay would be more appetizing."

"Wah, Min - you are so clever. We should swap places - you can be the satay seller and I will drive the dokar. For your cleverness, you deserve this."

An opportunity sadly missed

2009-09-22T03:41:00.000-07:00

Driving home the other day, I spotted fraudulent stage conjurer Mr Uri Geller wandering along looking like the tragically new-age pillock he undoubtedly is. (No, this wasn't someone who looked a bit like him, I do actually drive past his house on a daily basis. Like most rationalists, I love honest stage magicians like Penn and Teller, James Randi and Derren Brown - all of whom are far better than Geller has ever been - and have the deepest, most bilious contempt for exploitative fakes like Geller.)

Only after passing him did it strike me that I had just missed a glorious opportunity to run the smegger over, or perhaps shout hurtful abuse from my car window.

And then it occurred to me that the two beautiful things about running over Uri Geller would be:

1) You wouldn't hurt him, since he has miraculous healing powers, apparently. So you could do it on a daily basis and never feel guilty.

2) Think of the fun you could have with the police interview:
Inspector Knacker: Now then Gyppo, you say you didn't ram Mr Geller with your car.
Me: That's right, bor.
IK: But there is clearly a Uri Geller-shaped dent in your front bumper and bonnet.
Me: I didn't touch him - he did that from a distance with his mind-powers, just like he does with they spoons.
IK: Fair enough, You can go then...

Punfight at the OK Corral

2009-09-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

It is a matter of public record that No Good Boyo and I are both - for better or worse (usually the latter) - gainfully employed in the same organisation.

It may have occurred to some readers to wonder what, exactly, we get up to.

Well for a start, I am in the habit of sharing particularly entertaining worky-nuggets with like-minded colleagues, of whom Boyo is one.

Today I came across the appealing Malaysian headline (while reading up on the latest moves in the ongoing Malaysia-Indonesia bitch-slapping festival):

Malaysia: Minister Says Government To Review Levy Charged on Indonesian Maids

I pasted this under a subject line musing that this was a piece of good news for Captain Scott "Scottie" Scott.

Boyo promptly responded with:
Somewhere in the Irrawaddy Delta: Burmese Minister Says Government to Construct Levies from Indonesian Maids

Not to be outdone, I parried with:
Somewhere in Israel: Levy overcharged for Indonesian maid

Boyo was not done yet:
Somewhere in England: Lord Levy Questioned in Indonesian-Maids-For-Honours Scandal

Scraping the barrel somewhat, I moved on to:
Somewhere in Hollywood: Indonesian maid removes Levis

Boyo then added a rather soiled cherry to the top with:
Somewhere in England: Lord Scott of Quetta Renounces Title in Honour-For-Indonesian-Maids Move

And there matters would have rested, but for the fact that a North Korean headline then caught my eye, which suggested a natural response:

In Pyongyang:
Korean Central News Agency: Floral Tribute Paid to Bust of Kim Jong Suk

In Reading:
Rrom Peripheral News Agency: Floral Tribute Paid to Bust of Barbara Windsor

Boyo always rises to a challenge (see "Red Hot Amsterdam Video Productions Ltd vs Boyo, Aberyswyth Assizes, 1992"):
In Wales: Government Grant Paid to Bust of Charlotte Church

Unwilling to let him have the last word, I returned with:
In LA: Hugh Grant Paid for Bust of Divine Brown

The bit firmly between his few remaining teeth, Boyo shot back:
In the past: Cary Grant paid to squire bust of Marilyn Monroe

At which I responded desperately with:
Shortly after: Arthur Miller paid to bust Marilyn Monroe's squire

It was enough. Boyo's final e-mail:
Help!

I win game, set, match and managerial reprimand!

Lookalikes

2009-09-17T04:12:00.000-07:00

Have any other readers of this blog noticed the uncanny similarity of my boy Guthlac and Captain Yoshimoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy's air arm?

Capt Yoshimoto:

Guthlac:

I wonder if they could be related. Should I hire a private detective?

The Great Indonesian Novel - 2

2009-09-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

Continuing the ongoing series with This Earth of Badly-Raised Twilight. Chapter 2 - September 1906

Ho Li Kow put a Dutch record on his Dutch gramophone and took a sip of his Dutch beer.

How perfect life could have been had he but married a Dutch woman, he thought; but here he was - running his family's successful rice-lending business and already in the contention for the "Mr Exploitative Bastard" contest of the Dutch East Indies, to be sure - but married to a native woman.

As if on cue, his beautiful but cruelly mistreated and ignored native wife Raden Roro Royabot tottered painfully into the room.

"You sent for me, husband?" she asked, in the demure tones of one resigned to her terrible fate.

"No I didn't, but the plot exposition clearly demands your presence. And why are you tottering?"

"It is these clogs, lord. I cannot walk properly in them. Please stop making me dress like a Dutch woman."

"And you are bare-headed. I explicitly told you to wear a Dutch cap. And why haven't you borne me a child yet?"

Royabot looked at her clog-shod feet in dismay and confusion.

"I am sorry lord. I did not know the difference, lord. And in any case lord, that gag doesn't work in Javanese. And why would you want children who, after all, will be half-native and therefore disgust you?"

"It is necessary that we have two sons for the sake of contrast - an older evil one who will take after his father and be obsessed with European culture, and a younger, sensitive one who will side with you and through whose eyes we will see the events of the next few decades. And if we don't hurry up, he will be too young to attend the 1928 Youth Congress in Batavia, as Djakarta is currently called, where he would allow readers to see an epochal event in the history of the independence movement through the eyes of a sympathetic character. Now leave!"

As Royabot turned to leave, tears poured from her beautiful native eyes like chopped chilis into gado-gado sauce, to be ground by the pestel of loveless marriage into the stone mortar of European disregard for the feelings of native royalty, blended with the peanuts of political powerlessness and poured uncaringly over the steamed vegetables of cruelly oppressed indigenous cultures, before being tasted yet almost immediately discarded as being too spicy by an overweight British tourist in an overpriced cafe.

She thought longingly of the only man who had ever spoken kind words to her, Min, the simple village goat-carrier.

-o-o-o-o-

Far away in the village, Min - the simple village goat-carrier who nursed within him a hopeless passion for Royabot - had put down his last goat of the day when he heard the crash of a badly-driven horse-drawn dokar colliding with a carelessly placed house. He sprang up to help, but already the poor, wizzened old dokar driver was looking in despair at the damage.

"Wah - I am but a poor old man whose hunger and sickness are a crude metaphor for the plight of the peasantry labouring under an uncaring colonial government. And look at my horse - if either of us knew anything about bread, it would put us in mind of a toast-rack because I cannot afford food for it!"

"But Pak" said Min soothingly, "I am but a poor village goat-carrier and know nothing about these things, but surely horses eat grass, and if you were to let the horse graze on the grass growing freely at the side of the road, it would be healthier and stronger; then you could take more passengers in a day and have more money for food for yourself."

"Wah, Min - you are so clever. We should swap places - you can be the dokar driver and I will carry goats as much as I am able. For your cleverness, you deserve this."

That Malaysia-Indonesia spat - a bluffer's guide

2009-09-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

As Malaysia and Indonesia get into yet another diplomatic spat over cultural identity, many analysts across the region are asking the question "F***ing Malaysians -what are they like, eh?"

So in the ever-helpful spirit regular readers have come to know and roll their eyes at, Last Django is pleased to present an in-depth analysis of the issue:

Malaysia and Indonesia are two countries sharing a common language, and are thus destined to engage in endless low-level nastiness as a matter of course.

Malaysians see Indonesians as a bunch of chippy peasants incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery. Indonesians regard Malaysians as a bunch of stuck-up bastards with no culture of their own. Malaysians frequently employ semi-literate Indonesian peasant girls as housemaids and a small minority mistreat them cruelly. The two countries are also in dispute over the Amabalat sea area and its underlying oilfield. Malaysia has previously claimed the Reog folk dance and the popular song "Rasa Sayang" as Malaysian (both are Indonesian in origin). Every time there is a dispute, EVERY bone of contention gets dragged up and hurled violently at the other side.

This time round, the Discovery Channnel (Asia) - which has no connection with the Malaysian government - put together a cut-n-paste ad for a series called "Enigmatic Malaysia" which featured a Balinese pendet dancer.

Cue angry, stone-throwing mob outside Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta - "OI! YOU MALAYSIAN BASTARDS! CLAIMING OUR CULTURE AS YOUR OWN AGAIN? F*** OFF! AND PISS OFF OUT OF AMBALAT. AND GIVE OUR HOUSEMAIDS A DECENT MINIMUM WAGE! AND DON'T GET US STARTED ON MANOHARA ODELIA PINOT..."

When interviewed in a corner of SOAS bar, Indonesia expert Dr Terry McCassey said "You have to remember them Malaysians is thieving gits, bor. National Flag? British East India Company ensign with an extra bit sewn on. National Anthem? Indonesian popular song with the words changed. Language? Indonesian as spoken by someone going over a cattle grid in a sled. Top entertainer Mr P. Ramlee? Indonesian, from Sumatra. Largest city? Declared 'F*** this for a game of skittles, we're declaring independence!' in 1965 and hasn't looked back since. Manages to annoy all its neighbours and exports terrorists. Tastiest birds? Chinese - look at that Michelle Yeoh, eh? Eh? And now they're claiming the Balinese pendet dance as Malaysian."

In response, Malaysian cultural attache Mr Muhammad "Muhammad" Muhammad struck Dr McCassey forcibly on the head with a carved Iban rice-mortar. Dr McCassey was heard to murmur "That's Indonesian too, bangsat!" before passing out in pool of Filipino beer.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience!

2009-09-06T03:38:00.000-07:00

When we announced to Djangolina that this year's holiday would be in Indonesia (again), we offered her by way of consolation the chance to propose one holiday visit or activity of her own choosing. She had been hinting for ages that she really wanted to swim with dolphins, so we were unsurprised to hear that as her choice. And so we duly booked a long weekend in Bali (the next island over from where we were going anyway) at a hotel and wildlife park which has its own dolphin pools and, indeed, offers swimming with dolphins as its main draw.

For some reason, swimming with dolphins is one of those things that keeps cropping up on various lists of "things to do before you die". It is, as they say, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. When you think about it, the phrase "a once-in-a-lifetime experience" implies something that you wouldn't want to do for a second time. And this is pretty much what swimming with dolphins is.

The hotel's brochure chooses its words carefully, always referring to "the dolphins playing with you". And within seconds of entering the pool, it became clear why. The dolphins do play with you. They use you as the ball. Furthermore, the two dolphins involved are young male rescue dolphins previously abused by a cruel circus owner (allegedly). An honest description would be "swimming with psychologically disturbed teenaged boy dolphins", but for PR reasons they keep these facts as part of the small print.

The nearest I can get to describing it in words is this: Imagine donning a lifejacket, climbing into a swimming-pool full of salt water and then being batted about with giant rubbery sausages the size of pillar-boxes. That's what swimming with dolphins is like. Glad I did it once, wouldn't want to go there again.

And that set me to thinking of a few things I've done once in my life which I wouldn't want to repeat ever:

1) Having bacillary dysentery
2) Having a full-blown unmedicated asthma attack
3) Spraining my finger
4) Waiting on Sheffield station for 4 hours
5) Being hit from behind while stationary by a Ford Sierra driven by a total plonker who failed to notice the red light because they were on a mobile phone at the time
6) Sitting an O-level German exam
7) Being trapped in a corner of a pub by an obsessive New-Age nutter who "recognised me" as a fellow Atlantean
8) Going down the 'Boa Constrictor' waterslide at Coral Reef pool the wrong way up
9) Falling off a cliff
10) Watching a really piss-poor B movie called "Drug Smugglers" on video at full volume on an Indonesian overnight bus

In the interests of starting another blogosphere meme, I hereby tag Boyo, Gadjo, Scarlet, Inkspot and Daphne to produce their own similar lists.

The Great Indonesian Novel

2009-09-02T04:54:00.000-07:00

For the few of you out there who haven't, at some point in your past, been compelled to read the Great Indonesian Novels of Abdoel Moeis, Mochtar Lubis and Pramoedya Anantar Toer, I now offer you the chance to read one single, compact Great Indonesian Novel as a series of easy to follow (or indeed easy to ignore) blog postings. This work - to be entitled "This Earth of Badly-Raised Twilight" - will encapsulate the entirety of modern Indonesian literature, and add some sorely needed gags.

Chapter 1 - May 1905
Ho Li Kow lit his Dutch pipe with a Dutch match, shook the match out, and blew out a cloud of Dutch tobacco smoke. He didn't want to be here at home; he would far rather have been back at the Dutch school, learning Dutch like a modern, civilised man should.

And now his parents were compelling him to marry a native woman. The shame of it! He had always dreamed of marrying one of the Dutch women whose pictures he'd seen in his Dutch magazines. His ideal wife would be one of them, not brown-skinned with splayed feet thrust into peasant sandals, no; she would wear proper European leather boots - also fishnet stockings, latex corset, fluffy handcuffs...

His reverie was interrupted rudely as his mother stormed into the room. He pulled himself together and placed his hat before his groin to conceal his thoughts.

"She is here, Number One Son. You will do the right thing by your family and marry her!"
"But mother - she is a native."
"She is minor royalty. Her family have fallen on hard times. By marrying her we will gain the privileges of royalty."
"And what privileges do native royalty have, mother?"
"Not having their houses burnt down every time there is a riot, idiot boy. Your father may be the second-biggest rice lender in the province, but people still hate us because we are Chinese. You will marry the girl, and you will like it."

Before he could answer, the bride that had been chosen for him walked demurely into the room and knelt before him, trembling slightly. Raden Roro Royabot was but 15 years old, and beautiful as only a native woman could be in this literary genre. In contrast to the pretentious Dutch furniture and European-style clothes of her prospective husband's rich Chinese family , she wore a simple kain panjang and kebaya, her hair arranged in a plain bun and a frangipane behind her ear.

Ho Li Kow looked her up and down dispassionately for what seemed like an age.
"Why do you have a cake behind your ear?"
"I beg your pardon, Lord?"
"You have a frangipane behind your ear. Shouldn't that be a frangipani?"

She lowered her beautiful, dark eyes to the floor in dismay and confusion.

"I am sorry Lord. I did not know the difference Lord. I have only had 10 minutes education, and that mostly at the hands of dyslexic Japanese biker nuns. And in case Lord, that joke doesn't work in Javanese."

"TEN MINUTES?" Li Kow's mother's screech startled them both. "SO SHE IS AN EDUCATED WOMAN! SHE WILL BRING NOTHING BUT TROUBLE!"

Tears began to well up in Royabot's eyes. She bit her lip, determined not to cry. She remembered what her father had told her: "As number 14 daughter, your role in the plot is to be sold to an uncaring husband to pay off our debts in a crude and obvious allegory of colonial economic exploitation. And above all don't cry - if you shed a tear in the rice-lender's house we will be liable for tear-tax which we cannot pay, and we'll have to offer another of your young brothers to Mr Piedovijl in the Provincial Administration in lieu. And we need all your brothers to hold up the roof because we can't afford walls!"

Li Kow put his hands on his hips, looked off to one side and laughed harshly in a way that suggested a cameo role for a superannuated Hong Kong action star in the film adaptation.

"Very well mother - the path of duty is clear. I will marry her, but then mistreat and ignore her in an ironic parallel to the Dutch colonial government's treatment of native people."

Royabot thought longingly of the only man who had ever been kind to her - Min, the simple village goat-carrier. Her tears fell thick and fast now, unheedingly, like chocolate sprinkles onto a kue bandung; only to be smothered in the condensed milk of Chinese pretention, hidden by the chopped nuts of economic necessity and finally folded into the pancake of historical oblivion and scoffed uncaringly by an overweight British tourist on the rain-soaked, night-time streets of Kota Baru. It was all so hideously unfair, just like Dutch rule...
[to be continued]

Back from my little jaunt

2009-09-01T04:15:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm back. Anything interesting happened while I was away?

We've been on the once-every-two-or-three-years trip to Indonesia to pay respects to Mrs Byard's extensive family. Young Guthlac met his relatives for the first time and is now going through attention withdrawal at only having his parents, big sister, neighbours, child-minder and grandparents cooing over him. Djangolina has acquired a Chinese name and had her ears pierced, and we got to do some apparently quite desirable holiday things, of which more anon in future blog postings. So much to blog, such rubbish internet connections...

The soundtrack to the holiday was Indonesian pop phenomenon Mbah Surip, the reggae-singing tramp. Sadly, after decades as a street busker - often living rough - Surip achieved belated stardom this year and then died suddenly at the age of 60.

Swine flu. Have I had it?

2009-08-16T00:15:00.001-07:00

This may sound like an appallingly stupid question, but it's absolutely genuine. I have just had three days of lethargy, a sore throat, mild diarrhoea, a high temperature and feeling generally "bleeeeeeeeeeeeeugh", but having been advised by the NHS phone types not to see a doctor or indeed go out at all, I have no professional diagnosis.

It could have been "ordinary" flu (although I've never had flu in August before). Then again, it could have been swine flu - but can you recover from a deadly global pandemic disease within 72 hours? That strikes me as an unreasonably short time to get over something that is potentially so serious. Was I just panicking and had three days of psychosomatic man-flu because my work colleagues were going down with similar symptomns left, right and centre? Is there a different, less serious viral infection going unnoticed because swine flu is getting all the attention?

If I'm lucky, I've had swine flu, and will therefore now be immune for a relatively small amount of trouble and discomfort. If I'm unlucky, I'm still ill and they'll prevent me from flying tomorrow (I'm supposed to be off to Indonesia to be reunited with my family, who've been there for three weeks already).

On a lighter note - a neutron goes into a pub, and says to the barman "How much for a pint of bitter?" and the barman says "For you, no charge."

The late, great Jimmy Edwards always recommended wearing squeaky shoes for doing stand-up comedy, so that you don't have to walk offstage in absolute silence...

After the striking success of my last fossil-themed song...

2009-08-11T02:40:00.000-07:00

... behold, a new and similarly pointless, obscure oeuvre. To be sung to the tune of Desmond Dekker's "Israelites":

Driftin' on de current through a cloud of phytoplankton
So that every mouth can be fed
Ooooooooh - oooooooooh
Me graptolites

[Long pause while singer waits for audience to look up graptolites in the vain hope of understanding wtf the song is about, after which the audience leaves hurriedly through a fire exit, taking their drinks with them]

Flights we have enjoyed.

2009-08-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo - a veritable walking encyclopedia of Slavic eccentricity - has recently waxed suitably lyrical about the joys of small post-Soviet airlines. I have only flown on one such carrier - Air Azerbaijan - and they fly internationally so are relatively normal. The only refreshingly Soviet-esque part was the cabin service, which consisted of a scarily made-up ex-KGB torturer who made one pass through the cabin during the five-hour flight, to ask the monosyllabic question
"DRINK?" of each passenger.
"Just a water please", I asked her.
"WITH GAS?"
I wondered which gas was on offer for a moment until it dawned on me that she meant "Still or sparking?"

Anyway, my formative mad airline experiences - decades before this relatively tame incident - were at the hands of assorted Indonesian airlines, who have something of a chequered safety record and thus add a frisson of terminal excitement to the otherwise mundane business of air transport. It is said that travelling by plane is a million times safer than crossing the road. Indonesian air travel is a million times safer than crossing an Indonesian road, which still renders it akin to Russian roulette (or indeed Borneo roulette, which involves propositioning long-earlobed ladies from cannibal tribes for oral favours. Apparently.)

Where was I? Oh yes - Indonesian air travel in the golden days of Suharto; before the bombs started going off, when Muslim headscarves were a rarity eliciting pointing and laughing from the assembled peanut gallery and when Garuda Indonesia stewardesses would give you their private phone numbers and agree to meet you for a drink after landing. And Garuda was still an option, as at that point the EU hadn't banned all Indonesian carriers on safety grounds. Personally, when young I was prepared to accept the chance of a fiery death in return for a date with a stewardess. But alas, the past is a foreign country; and a foreign country's past is, er, something which as yet lacks a word.

Who remembers the DC10? There was a time in the mid-80s when the things seemed to be falling out of the sky on a weekly basis. I was therefore less than 100% happy to find that my 1985 flight from Jakarta to Hong Kong was on a DC10. I availed myself of a window seat and, as we taxied out, was moderately alarmed to see a piece fall off the wing. I seemed to be the only one even marginally bothered by this ("It happens all the time, and in any case everything is the Will of Allah..."), and the flight took off as scheduled.

Landing in Hong Kong before the new airport was built was an experience never forgotten. The runway was built out into Kowloon harbour at the foot of a mountain, meaning that approaching aircraft had to turn over the peak and make their approach down the mountain, between the skyscrapers. My memory may be playing tricks, but I could have sworn we could look into people's apartment windows level with the plane. If the plane overshot the runway, it would end up in the harbour. Modern air travel just seems to offer the remote peril without the excitement.

Bali's Ngurah Rai international airport has the runway built across a narrow isthmus, meaning that if you undershoot or overshoot you end up in the limpid azure water.

In the early 90s Emirates started connecting to the the Far East at quite reasonable prices; a fine option if you had no objection to changing in Dubai. On one occasion I had booked to fly Jakarta-Singapore-Dubai-London; but shortly after take-off from Jakarta we collided with a giant armour-plated toxic exploding vulture and mullered the tail. They didn't tell us this until we'd landed in Singapore; but they did break the bad news that we were going to be there until replacement parts were fitted, no matter what.

So for six hours we were confined in the plane on the ground at Changi. The flight was full of devout Muslims from East Java (which is Indonesian for 'Norfolk' or 'Alabama') going on minor pilgrimage. They had obviously never flown before - jostling on boarding to make sure they got a seat and didn't have to ride on top with the baggage, bringing their own lunch pails full of rice, praying in an alarming fashion when we took off or encountered turbulence and so on. They were getting agitated and the cabin crew were having difficulty explaining the problem, having only modern - rather than Koranic - Arabic and no Javanese (there is also the issue that as far as I know the Koran is somewhat light on mentions of aircraft bird strikes and repairs to avionics systems, but I could be wrong).

I was trying to explain the situation to a nice old bearded geezer sitting across the aisle from me, and a stewardess noticed. She bustled over to me. "Can you communicate with these people?" "Um, sort of" I replied. "Well could you come up to the front and announce over the PA system what's going on?"

The problem with studying the social use and ancient literature of a language is that your vocabulary of modern jets tends to be a bit poor. And being asked to move from "explaining things to the bloke next to you" to "making an official airline tannoy announcement" is a challenge at the best of times. As I switched on the microphone, my mind went blank. "Ladies and gentleman" I started in Javanese, followed by a long pause. "We've been run over by a giant evil bird."
There were encouraging murmurs of understanding from the peasantry, presumably accompanied my sotto voce mumblings of "Well they would 'ave that in that Singapore, wouldn't they? That's the sorter thing they 'ave."
"So we must wait while they mend our chariot."

To me surprise and relief, there are broad smiles of understanding, . The pilgrims duly sit down assuaged and the stewardess is touchingly grateful. Not grateful enough to give me her number, but extra-smiley nonetheless. My connection to London was screwed, obviously, but that's a relatively small price to pay for remaining alive, in my book.

But the most endearingly ramshackle flight I ever took was on a Mandala Airways Vickers Viscount from Padang to Jakarta. With propellers. I remembered having a model of one when I was a small kid, and somehow there was a lost world glamour to travelling on a vintage plane. Not long afterwards Mandala scrapped them all in favour of anonymous modern jets. Indonesian pilots have an understandable respect for thunderclouds, of which Java in particular has more than any other place on earth. Lacking the ceiling to go over them or the suicidal tendency to fly through them, the pilots would weave in and out of the cloud-stacks, banking at crazy angles to avoid being shaken to bits by the turbulence.

Padang is a 'walk straight out of waiting room across grass and climb steps' sort of airfield, of a kind I rather like (the only one more basic I've ever encountered was 'Mid Wales Airport' near Welshpool, where air traffic control consists of the canteen manageress popping her head outside to have a look around and then clearing you for landing via a walkie-talkie, but that's another story). Walking out, getting on a prop-plane, going for a roller-coaster ride through stormclouds. That's flying...

Another of my foetid classmates...

2009-08-04T02:35:00.000-07:00

Sproggis is not the only one of my schoolfellows I have been thinking of lately.

Yesterday I was reminded of a much nicer and utterly non-criminal chap whom we shall call Cyril Mazzard-Crusher (not his real name), with whom I went through school from the age of 4.

When we about - ooh, 13 or 14 - the whole class went on a coach trip. Two days before, two somewhat impressionable girls lacking a certain degree of rationality announced tearfully that they had both had identical dreams that the coach would crash into a wall and that Cyril would be killed. There was, I recall, a fair amount of belief in the irrational at my school - ouija boards, astrology, lucid dreaming and similar pap. The two girls in question and their friends begged Cyril not to board the bus, but stoically he did so. Nobody wanted to sit next to him for some curious reason.

And why was he particularly in my thoughts yesterday? Because he sent me a friend invitation on Facebook.

One song in the style of another - 6

2009-08-02T01:47:00.000-07:00

A brilliantly simple concept as usual from Mr Weird Al Yankovic - Bohemian Rhapsody redone as a polka:

Sproggis - a further argument for nature vs nurture

2009-07-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

I have in the past seen fit to blog on the subject of Margaret Mead, Samoa and the standard social science model; and how it held nurture to trump nature in the formation of character.

Looking back, I was predisposed to be sceptical because of a boy whom we shall call Sproggis (not his real name for reasons which will soon become apparent), who was with me through primary and comprehensive schools from the ages of 10-16.

Sproggis was from a street which we shall call Carlsberg Avenue (not its real name). Being from Carslberg Avenue carried an instant air of "bein' 'ard" around our parts. This was because our local council, for reasons best known to themselves, put all the council house rent defaulters into Carlsberg Avenue. This meant that over time the entire road filled with the kind of people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show - dads absent, unknown or in prison; divorced mothers with kids by several different fathers, alcoholics, drug abusers, the long-term unemployed. It was a street down which nicely-brought up kids from up the hill (like me) Did Not Walk, for fear of being ambushed for fun and left tied to several different lampposts. At once.

Sproggis put the fear of God into the other inhabitants of Carlsberg Avenue from the age of seven. He was not large and imposing - most large imposing people I know are actually softies inside. Sproggis was a skinny, rat-faced ginger with scarily light blue eyes, which had no hint of human softness to them. Regarding his face was like staring into twin pools of smoking bleach, and was unadvisable at the best of times anyway for fear of getting a "What are YOU looking at?" beating.

By the age of 10, we all knew to treat him with circumspection. Sometimes he would be friendly, and you would enjoy those times like a brief interval of sunshine between thunderstorms. Inevitably, something would set him off; and senseless violence and the infliction of pain would follow.

Sproggis was not stupid - his intelligence frequently manifested itself in acts of devious larceny requiring considerable forethought and planning. The problem was that he was utterly without empathy. I still believe that he was - and is - a genuine psychopath. No morals, no remorse, no feelings for the pain inflicted on others. And recall that this was all apparent by the age of ten.

If you had come into our classroom in the third year of junior school (that's year 5 in new money) and said "Now then kids - which child in this class will be convicted of murder before their 25th birthday?" There would have been but the briefest of intervals before we all swivelled round and pointed our jam-smeared digits in Sproggis's direction.

A brief interval of hope appeared when he became quite a proficient break-dancer in his late teens; I remember reading in the local free paper that a judge had let him off a shoplifting charge because he was trying to turn his life around.

The judge's confidence was misplaced. Not long after he was arrested for burglary - carried out to feed what by then was a serious heroin habit. While in prison, he murdered his cellmate, and act that was covered for a day or so by the national press. I've always wondered how you could possibly come up with a plausible alibi, having been locked in a cell with one other person, who is then found brutally murdered the next morning. But then, this is psychopath territory - "he annoyed me so I killed him".

Bizarrely, he was released after serving 10 years or thereabouts. Still on heroin, he turned up at Carlsberg Avenue to call on his ex-girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend's mother answered the door, and refused to let him in. Upon which he beat her (the mother) so severely she ended up in hospital and will carry scars for the rest of her life.

As I write, he is back in prison.

Now the point of all this is not to impress you with what a hard school I went to (it wasn't that bad; Sproggis was a glaring exception to the general rule), but to point out that by the age of 10 we, his classmates, had already worked out what a professor of sociology would presumably deny - it was in his nature to be bad. Nurture didn't come into it.

Had they but taken our advice, he would have been preemptively locked up, saving at least one life and a whole lot of pain and anguish. Discuss.

Understanding international relations through British comedy. 1 - North Korea

2009-07-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

Lou and Andy from 'Little Britain' explain Beijing-Pyongyang relations:

Lou (dressed as Hu Jintao): Now you've got a bit of money to spend from all that dog fur you sold to the Russians to make furry hats.
Andy (who does bear more than a passing resemblance to Kim Jong-il but with lanker hair: Yeah I know.
Lou: So what would you like to spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: Are you sure?
Andy: Yeah.
Lou: Why don't you spend it on economic development? You like economic development.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: So what will you spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: But you always say that nuclear ambitions are the mark of the imperialist warmaniac bent on oppressing the world's progressive people and stifling the desire of all compatriots for peaceful reunification.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And besides, if you have nuclears again the IAEA inspectors will want to inspect them and will call for UN sanctions if you defy the ban, and that's a right kerfuffle.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And nobody will give you any food aid for your birthday.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And you like food aid.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: You're absolutely sure you can do without food aid and will have the nuclears instead?
Andy: Yeah.
Lou: So what are you going to spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: Well if you say so.
Andy: [Leaps out of wheelchair while Lou's back is turned and starts enriching uranium]
Lou: So what do you want for your birthday?
Andy: Food aid.

I was outside this hotel in Catalunya at 4 am when the police arrived...

2009-07-25T23:41:00.000-07:00

This title is entirely true, yet curiously may need some background explanation:

We have an old friend called Henry, with whom we occasionally keep in touch. Henry recently e-mailed me to announce that he was getting married, and invited us to his wedding. We agreed to go to - as we thought - Spain for this happy event, so we said yes, booked a hotel room, tickets with RyanAir (air transport's equivalent of really bad beer - you hate it but you keep going back for more), packed black tie/ evening dress as per the dress code and so on.

On or shortly after arrival we were disabused of several things - we were not in Spain, we were in Catalunya*, a totally different country which has never had anything to do with Spain, good Lord no! Whatever gave you that impression? Also, Henry was marrying into a seriously wealthy aristocratic family who know how to throw a serious party, and are also full-on Catalan independence supporters (the bride wore a separatist flag at one point. Over her wedding dress, I hasten to add).

Young Guthlac, meanwhile, discovered a previously unsuspected taste for being picked up and cuddled by glamorously dressed Catalan ladies, and at his age (16 months) was easily able to achieve this end by holding his arms out, adopting a cute expression and saying "Ek?" to them.

At 3am we decided to leave, as Guthlac's dancing and flirting were starting to show signs of tiredness. I duly returned to our table, scooped up a dinner jacket that looked plausibly like mine and joined my family in a taxi back to the hotel. On arriving there, I removed the dinner jacket and suddenly realised that various items were missing from my pockets. And that the sleeves were too long. And that it was a different style from mine.

Although it is undoubtedly an advantage of male evening dress that it's all pretty much the same and therefore doesn't require a new outfit to be bought for each event you go to, and that you don't lose any time or suffer any stress working out what to wear, it does leave open the possibility that you pick up the wrong jacket, especially when stuffed with 26 courses of food (yes, twenty-six, 22 of which were tapas-style appetisers) and addled with a selection of outstandingly good wines.

I staggered downstairs and asked the charming and suitably unflappable lady on night duty at the reception desk if such a thing as a taxi was available at this time of night. It was, but I had to wait a while. I opted to go out into the fresh air, where the receptionist joined me for her smoke break and a chat.

At which point, as per the title of this post, a police car pulled up to find me hanging around at 4am outside a hotel with a lady other than my wife in what, strictly speaking, was a stolen jacket.

"This can mean one of two things" the receptionist remarked. "Trouble, or coffee."

The cops sauntered over in the "I have all the time in world" manner common to cops the world over. As in the collapsing Uzbek lamppost incident, one could instinctively understand the entire conversation which transpired:
"Good evening officer. I trust all is well."
"Oh yes, just doing our rounds to check..."
[Expectant pause]
"Would you like a coffee?"
"Ooh - it hadn't occurred to us that you might have some coffee again this morning as on every other morning for the past year, but now you come to mention it that would be very nice!"

*Previously known to me only from George Orwell's book about his experiences importing French cheese to Barcelona, as detailed in his book "A Fromage to Catalonia".

"Daddy - why are there no pop songs about fossils?"

2009-03-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

A good and compelling question, I trust you'll agree, and one that Djangolina asked me the other day.

In an attempt to fill this void, I composed for her the following lyric, to be sing to the tune (if that's the word I'm looking for) of Miss Dynamite's eponymous theme-song:

When you're digging through the strata underneath your house
And you come across a fossil like a three-part woodlouse
Don't think it's a dead-end with no eyesight -
It had eyes made from rods of calcite
It's Miss Trilobite-ee-ee
She's found in rocks paleozoic - what a stoic!
It's Miss Trilobite-ee-ee
Don't ever think that she's demented - she's just segmented

When you're strolling along on a Dorset beach
And you're looking for a fossil that's within your reach
Just look around your feet, and there without fail
You'll see a fossil that looks somewhat like a snail
It's Miss Ammonite-ee-ee
She's found throughout the rocks Jurassic - zone-fossil classic
Miss Ammonite-ee-ee
A kind of Nautilus that's early - her shelll is curly

If you're digging through chalk you may just see the glint
Of a finger-shaped fossil like a lipstick made of flint
You may throw it aside, but just think what you did -
You've thrown out the arse of a squid
It's Miss Belemnite-ee-ee
She's found throughout the rocks cretaceous - she's silicaceous
It's Miss Belemnite-ee-ee
It's just her tail that turns quite stony - she wasn't bony.

[Pause]

Djangolina: OK Daddy, now I understand.
Me (proudly): About zone fossils?
Djangolina: No, about why nobody writes songs about them. That was rubbish.

Colonel of the month - March

2009-03-08T03:38:00.000-07:00

Turning from the upright, Boy's-Own-Paper derring-do of the Campbells and Hayes-Newingtons for a while, we take time to explore the dark side of the colonial colonel this month, through the personage of the thrilling yet disturbing Richard Meinertzhagen.

I first encountered Meinertzhagen in an entertaining passage in Bill Bryson's excellent book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', detailing the consternation at the Natural History Museum when they opened the crates of bird specimens left to them by Meinertzhagen and discovered the museum's own labels on most of the contents. This, Bryson notes "explained his habit of wearing a large overcoat even in warm weather".

I have also come across quotes from him in various accounts of the campaign in East Africa in WWI, throughout which he appears to have sat on a deckchair behind the lines smoking a pipe and criticising his superiors - a dream job for most of us, I suspect.

There is an outstanding Wikipedia biography, from which the following quotes come:

Colonel Richard Henry Meinertzhagen CBE DSO (March 3, 1878 - June 17, 1967) was a British soldier, intelligence officer, ornithologist and expert on bird lice. He was influential in life and had a legendary reputation for his exploits around the world. Studies on his work on birds and historic notes after his death however raised serious questions on his integrity and have made him a controversial character.

In East Africa in 1905, he crushed a major revolt by killing the Orkoiyot (spiritual leader) who led it. He collected some of the tribal artefacts after this revolt. Some of these artefacts, including a walking stick and baton belonging to the Nandi tribal leader Koitalel arap Samoei, were returned to Kenya in 2006.

His unpublished diaries hint at a successful rescue attempt of one of the Russian Grand Duchesses, possibly Tatiana

Tom Segev considers that Meinertzhagen was "at once a great antisemite and a great Zionist". He justifies this analysis by this excerpt from Meinertzhagen's Middle East Diary : "I am imbued with antisemitic feelings. It was indeed an accursed day that allowed Jews and not Christians to introduce to the world the principles of Zionism and that allowed Jewish brains and Jewish money to carry them out, almost unhelped by Christians save a handful of enthusiasts in England".

He was a prolific diarist and published four books based on his diaries, which make fascinating and often insightful reading. However, his Middle East Diary (1959) contains dozens of entries that are probably fictional, including those on T. E. Lawrence and on Hitler. Meinertzhagen's claimed to have mocked Hitler by giving a Heil Meinertzhagen salute in response to those given by the men around Hitler. He also claimed to have carried a loaded gun in his coat pocket at a meeting with Hitler and von Ribbentrop in July 1939 and was "seriously troubled" about not shooting when he had the chance, adding "If this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two." Lockman in his book shows that Meinertzhagen later falsified his entries on T. E. Lawrence. The original diaries kept in the Rhodes House Library contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and there are oddities in the page numbering.

"Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain..."
– T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Note the equating of the beating to death of unarmed POWs with "an unscrupulous jest".

While in India he killed one of his personal assistants in a fit of rage and had the local police officer cover it up as a death due to plague...

Gavin Maxwell wrote about how his parents would scare him and other children to behave themselves when Meinertzhagen visited with "...remember...he has killed people with his bare hands..."

Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard.

That has to be the most magnificently colonelesque inquest verdict ever...

One song in the style of another - 5

2009-03-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

It's so obvious when you think about it - Messiaen's magnificent Turangalila symphony played Hank Marvin-style on an electric guitar with a tremolo arm.

Embedding is unfortunately disabled on these videos, you'll have to follow the links. Sorry...

The Romance of the Stage

2009-02-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

In a response to Mrs Pouncer's moving musings on stage curtains and ancestors, I commented that my own parents' relationship had blossomed when my father lit my mother in sundry productions; and Mrs P asked me to expand on the tale.

Bear in mind that I have the fragmentary evidence of my parents and my grandmother for this version, since for obvious reasons I wasn't there other than as a twinkle in someone's eye.

My parents had known each other in some degree at their mixed grammar school - of which my mother was head girl - and there may even have been some romantic attachment (my father on one occasion wistfully alluded to the long grass behind the tennis courts, upon which my mother silenced him with A Look That Could Kill). Anyway, they then went their separate ways - my father to do a degree in electrical engineering and then get hoiked off to do national service in the merchant navy, my mother to drama school (Rose Bruford's) in London and then to teacher training in English and Drama in Birmingham. She was strikingly good-looking, I may as well point out at this stage: dark and petite, in a sort of vaguely Audrey Hepburn-ish way.

Years went by; at length my father returned from the sea, but according to his version of the tale still carrying a torch for my mother, but having long lost contact with her.

And then one evening his mother was reading a local paper bearing a review of an amateur production of something or other in which she played the female lead (as she usually did). "Do you remember that Janet ------?" she said, reading out my mother's maiden name (which, along with my bank account number and sort code, I have no intention of publishing on the Internet). He did, and hope rose within him at the apparent revelation that she was not yet married.

Being also eligible for membership of that dramatic society (old pupils of the aforementioned mixed grammar school), he contacted them to enquire whether they needed a lighting man, casually dropping the fact that he was now an electrical engineering graduate. Unsurprisingly, they said yes - setting him up neatly for a studiedly nonchalant reunion with him leaning suavely over the lighting gantry.

I have difficulty reconciling the romantic hero of the tale with the father I know, love and frequently take cover from during incidents of DIY. My mental picture of him always involves him dropping bags of spanners on her head or similar, but clearly that can't have been the case. Imagining one's own parents as carefree young lovers is always difficult.

But anyway, something clearly blossomed because he asked her out, then asked her to meet his parents (on which evening his father - also an electical engineer - received an emergency callout from a local coalmine and insisted my father accompany him down the pit, leaving my mother and paternal grandmother awkwardly alone).

All being well, we shall be joining them next year to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.

Bangladesh - a marked improvement...

2009-02-20T20:40:00.000-08:00

Having somewhat got over my frustration at being in a luxury hotel (oh happy frustration, some might well say), my Bangladeshi homies took me for a ride last night. It crossed my mind that after some of the less than generous things I had said about their fine country, they planned to batter me insensible with a coconut and leave me floating face-down in a jacuzzi; but in fact they wanted to show me some of the real Bangladesh. And a far nicer place it looks close-up than from behind a hotel compound wall.

It is quite uncannily reminiscent of the Indonesia of the 90s - incomes are rising, leading to more cars on the road without more roads necessarily being built; above street level there are mind-boggling tangles of wires carrying cable TV and broadband Internet access into the apartments of the rising middle classes, old houses are beng replaced at a rapid rate by new apartment blocks to squeeze more accomodation into the city. Occasional power brownouts are the result, above all, of so many people being able to afford fridges, AC units, TVs and computers. These are all signs of a country on its way somewhere; as is the laudable development of grameen banking - a Bangladeshi invention.

There are still some beggars about; many of them congregate around the hotels in the hope of tapping the sentimental guilt of suckers like me, of course - the equivalent of walking out of a posh London hotel to be accosted with the words "Big Issue?"; but also the streets are safer than you may imagine. I fussed about leaving my bag in the car when we arrived at a cafe and parked in the street. "Leave it there, it'll be quite safe" my colleague told me. So I did, and it was. That's not something I'd like to try in Reading. Complete strangers make eye contact, and smile, and greet you politely - again a marked improvement on Reading.

I am reminded, re-reading my last posting, of the 'Goodness Gracious Me' sketch in which Dave Lamb played a British reporter with a repertoire of cliches; standing with grim-faced concern talking about "the grinding poverty" and similar while happy Indians clustered around him, beaming broadly and saying "Mark Tully! Mark Tully!"

Furthermore, a story that has gathered much media comment is about an elderly woman abandoned by her successful, professional children to live on her own, which the papers are lamenting as an introduction of "Western values".

As the Bible should have said "Before removing a mote from another chap's eye, remove the plank from your own eye - then you'll have a plank handy to hit the blighter round the head with if he makes a fuss."

I would very much like to come back for longer, learn a modicum of emergency Bengali (perhaps from a colonial era language book, just for entertainment value. I could stride around in pith helmet and khaki shorts bellowing "Tell the men not to clean their rifles with sandpaper" or "Look here! I'm going to ask you six questions..." while Boyo stands by with dustpan, brush and valuers guide to Gypsy teeth). It would be nice to get out of Dhaka - to see Tagore's compound, or the world's longest unbroken beach at Cox's Bazaar. It would also be nice to stay somewhere more in touch with the country around it, to stop me being such a wuss about things.

How self-centred am I?

2009-02-19T20:19:00.000-08:00

I suffered a major pang of first-world, post-colonial guilt the other night, occasioned by a coconut palm and a jacuzzi. I will leave you speculating on the mechanics of that for a moment while I explain the background:

I wrote in my last post that I was in Bangladesh. This is only partially true: I cross a few hundred yards of Bangladesh twice a day, en route between a five-star hotel and an air-conditioned office. I can see Bangladesh through plate-glass windows. I can hear it teeming, bustling, wailing and honking outside. I can smell its polluted air, its lack of adequate sewage and habits of public urination and defecation as I scurry to and fro; but I am not in it, in any meaningful sense.

And how could I be? I can't speak or read the language, I don't know my way around, I have little idea of what I could be interested in if I cared. And like so many western business travellers, I too easily delude myself that this sterile, cocooned existence counts as experiencing a country.

But I know deep inside that have no excuse. For when I was young and energetic and had more time than money, I travelled properly. I spent years living in a developing country; I spoke its language fluently, socialised entirely with its people and studied its culture to a high degree. I subsisted exclusively on its food and suffered its endemic diseases in all their sweating, puking unpleasantness. I rode its crowded public transport and tramped its chaotic, dusty streets and got to know it intimately well. Ultimately, I married a local girl and made an attempt to settle down; until gun-toting, head-stamping, ethnic-minority-burning chaos reared its ugly head and we decided that moving to the UK would be a better idea in the long-run.

And through all this I self-indulgently allowed myself a fair measure of mixed pity and contempt for well-heeled foreigners who gave it a week or so, sticking grimly to the same coachload of their own kind, staying in luxury hotels, whizzing round sights of interest in a crocodile of clicking cameras and hideous shirts before returning to the luxury hotel for a swim. I really knew the place - I told myself conceitedly - while they did not.

I also vowed to myself that I would never become shallow enough to visit a country whose language I did not speak. And here I am, 20 years down the line, becoming what I despised; though in my half-hearted defence I am here to work and not to travel per se; and the work is going well.

The night before last, I returned from the office feeling somewhat rumpled and went for a swim in the hotel pool before dinner. From over the wall I could hear and smell Bangladesh, but inside the hotel compound all was carefully manicured luxury - coconut palms waved serenely over the surrounding gardens, stars shone in the blackness of a clear sky overhead, and a bat flittered manically over the pool scooping up as many whirring insects as it could manage.

I had the pool to myself; everyone else presumably having enough sense not to expose their pasty skin to the evening shift of mosquitoes. On a dais next to the pool stood an open-air jacuzzi, bubbling away invitingly; so I climbed out of the pool and started towards it, at which point a coconut detached itself from the tree and fell 5 metres or so onto the slabs, missing me by a worryingly small margin. (I used to think that the statistics showing that 'falling coconuts' are the major cause of untimely death on some Pacific Islands were funny - right up until the day that I was nearly hit by one. Those things are lethal, since they fall from such a great height - and the coconut per se is only the stone inside a much larger fruit with an aerodynamically sharp bottom edge...)

Should I complain? Should I point out the potential danger? "Good Lord man - never mind the millions of your compatriots living in grinding poverty and the daily body count caused by unsafe transport (that day a truckload of people rammed on an open level crossing; the next a river ferry capsizing with over 100 on board), have heed of that dangerous coconut palm next to the jacuzzi! Get your priorities straight!"

I said nothing, and was unable to sleep that night.

"All Bengalis are poets"

2009-02-17T20:14:00.000-08:00

Some of my more literary acquaintances have recently mused about the reasons we all write. It strikes me that in one sense the task of the writer is to chase down the thoughts that flitter, moth-like, among the thickets of the subconscious and collect them for display to the world. We are the unacknowledged entomologists of the imagination.

"Ooh! Get you!" my less literary acquaintances are probably saying to themselves by now. In my defence, I shall quote the title of this posting - said drunkenly and tearfully by someone at an office leaving party I once attended in India - and point out that this week I find myself in highly literary Bangladesh, among the highly-literary Bengalis who produced Rabindranath Tagore to name but one. (OK, so Tagore was from West Bengal, now in India; but that hasn't stopped Bangladesh adopting one of his poems as a national anthem).

Permit me to direct you to the highly literary blog of my Dhaka-based friend and colleague, the highly-literary Mr Amaro'to Kotha-chhilo by way of evidence.

Among the less poetic elements of the country, I should point out by way of balance, are the airport baggage carousel and the free-form scrum that formed around it (an hour and a fricking half to retrieve one bag! I ask you...); and the fact that the office is only a short walk from the hotel, but across eight lanes of homicidal traffic. Having lived in Indonesia, I feel quite at home. I have readopted my erstwhile tactic of adding myself to a large group of locals to get across, reasoning that while a driver may be tempted by the target of a lone westerner, they're less likely to mow down a dozen of their own. Although tragically, pedestrians in many parts of Asia seem to be regarded as an expendable commodity.

Yesterday's main English-language paper carried a surprisingly colonel-esque headline: "GUNBATTLE AT JU [Jahangirnagar University] AGAIN". It was the 'again' that caught my attention - as if one isolated inter-student gunbattle would barely be worth reporting. The article also contained the inescapably arresting detail that 50 had been injured in the shoot-out, "five of them with bullets". This says volumes about either a shortage of ammunition or a serious perception gap about what guns are actually for. (I think the university should introduce a short course taught by a retired colonel: "Firearms 101 - How to load the bally thing with bullets, point it at yer intended target and pull the trigger, you long-haired nicompoops!" or some such.)

The calls to prayer from the city's many mosques are, as always, hauntingly beautiful. When I lived in Indonesia the sound of 15 or 20 mosques within earshot all going off at once, as it were, was a constant delight; forming a kind of accidental found choral music of Messiaenic beauty. Here, the effect is marred not a little by the incessant honking of horns and whooping of 'VVIP' motorcade sirens. Not that anyone moves aside for them, of course. On the way into town from the airport, I saw the faintly pathetic sight of policemen in an escorting truck waving batons listlessly at the oblivious traffic, with the forlorn expressions of men who know full well that they're just going through the motions.

Tagore himself said of Indonesia when he visited it in the early 20th century "I see India everywhere but I do not recognise it." At the time, of course, Bangladesh was part of the India he meant. Looking at Bangladesh, I understand him perfectly.

Please help me settle a family argument...

2009-02-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

This morning, as I drove young Djangolina to school, she outlined for me the rules of a fun, new game called "Red car, blue car". These rules are simple to elucidate - one player looks for red cars, the other for blue cars. On seeing a car of the specified colour, one cries out "RED CAR!" (or indeed blue car, as the case may be), while hitting the other player on the arm.

Djangolina took the blue corner, I the red. Every time any car of blue-ish hue hove into view, she would cry "BLUE CAR!" and slap me.

Whenever a red car appeared, she would swiftly interject "NOT THAT ONE! IT'S BURGUNDY!" or similar. The final result was - Djangolina - 24, Daddy - a bruised arm.

Was her conduct within the spirit of the rules?

Colonel of the month - February

2009-02-08T00:17:00.000-08:00

Moving forward in time from the heroic and much-wounded Campbell, we come to an equally delightful character of WWII vintage - Col Eric 'Crazy' Hayes-Newington, "the oldest surviving officer of the 4th Bombay Grenadiers".

My source for this is the Daily Telegraph (of course) obituary, posted here.

As usual for a Torygraph 'moustache' obituary, it dedicates much of its first part to an account of the action in Burma in which he won the DSO:

Hayes-Newington sustained a wound in his shoulder, but this gave no pause to his vigorous leadership, and he himself slew three Japanese soldiers at point-blank range as they bore down on the tanks, shrieking.

So far so good. It then details his career up to that point, which involved the quintessentially colonial colonel activity of fighting in Waziristan - "a very active service which involved climbing peaks and
avoiding accurate sniping by tribesmen who regarded fighting as a normal
way of life".

After retiring from the Indian army he moved to Kenya, Lest anyone think that 'retirement' is a time for taking it easy, the Telegraph puts us straight:

When the Mau Mau insurrection broke out in the 1950s, Hayes-Newington joined the police, and was soon running the operations room at Nyeri.
During his 12 years' service he became Acting Superintendent of the Kenya Police, and on retirement was awarded the Colonial Police Medal.
In his late 70s he became Chief Game Warden ("Number One White Hunter") at Treetops Hotel, where he escorted Royalty, and appeared on a BBC Blue Peter television programme.

I remember that programme, which of course gave barely a hint of the man's daredevil courage and homicidal magnificence.

But what, I hear you ask, of personal eccentricity and field-sports, without which no portrait of a true colonel is complete?

Although very modest and reticent, he had a low threshold of boredom and if he felt that a dinner party was too dull, would begin eating his table napkin or do something equally unusual.
As a young man, "Crazy" had been a good hockey and soccer player, and he was always a first-class shot. He enjoyed riding a powerful Norton motor-bicycle, in spite of the practice being deplored by his seniors.
Invariably cheerful, with a dry sense of humour, he was an excellent organiser, and extremely good at putting people at their ease. Part of his younger days had been spent in Ireland, where he had become a skilled trout fisherman and a good horseman, and partly in Bruges, where he became fluent in the language. He skied, skated, won medals at cross-country running, played polo, and planned and built his own home in Kenya - where he developed a great fondness and affinity for elephants.

Present and correct on all counts, sah!

Samoa examples of gonzo anthropology

2009-02-05T03:19:00.000-08:00

A propos of my recent thumbnail description of gonzo anthropology, young Miss Scarlet enquired whether having sex with as many locals as possible was the principal goal of anthropological fieldwork. Rather than answer her directly, let me tell you - from a hitherto unexplored angle - the story of one of anthropology's major controversies.

In the 1920s, the young Margaret Mead, an American anthropology student, went to Samoa to do research on adolescence. Speaking no Samoan, and failing to do any gonzo anthropology herself, she formed a picture of sexual mores among the Samoans which painted a picture of a tropical paradise full of happily shagging, carefree, laughing young people.

The book she wrote detailing this conclusion - 'Coming of Age in Samoa' - was one of the most influential books of the 20th century; not merely among anthropologists but as a foundation stone of the Standard Social Science Model, the apparent triumph of 'nurture' over 'nature' explanations of human culture and character, and as a seminal (if you'll pardon the expression) text of feminism, counter-culture and 1960s-style 'free lurve'.

We then fast-forward to one Derek Freeman, who re-interviewed some of Mead's informants - now respectable Evangelical Christian grandmothers - and came to the conclusion that they had been winding Mead up for casual amusement and were in fact virgins up until marriage, in stark (as it were) contrast to Mead's fervid imaginings of goings-on among the lush tropical palms. Both Freeman's and Mead's interpretations have their supporters today, it must be said. To outline the problem, here are my own reconstructions of the kind of interviews that are alleged to have taken place.

Mead's 1920s fieldwork, according to Freeman:
Mead: Hello!
Interpreter (an overweight, overdressed and rather rumpled male missionary who has been Out Here Too Long): Hello Miss Tatala.
Samoan informant: Whassup, innit?
I: She says hello.
M: Can I talk to you about your attitude to sex?
I: Big White Mother want to tok himfella jiggy-jiggy.
SI: Whatever.
I: She says she is happy to discuss the goings-on that every night, fill the air of this very Eden with carefree laughter...
Mead: So, despite being a giggly 16-year old, are there lots of boys interested in you?
I: Them boy-fellas want jiggy-jiggy?
SI: Yeah, they all do (snigger) 'cos I'm well sexy, innit.
I: She says yes, they all desire congress with her ripe, curvaceous nymphet body, light glinting playfully from her oiled, rippling...
M: Oh my goodness! And does she, you know, do the deed with lots of them?
I: You do him jiggy-jiggy with rugger team?
SI (rolls eyes): As if! Them boys is all queuing up for it though, innit? I have to carry a whip to keep them off.
I (sweating slightly): She says she is in the regular habit of offering her lithe, sunkissed body in acts of guilt-free physical pleasure to the boys of the village, naked as God surely intended them to be; before scourging their muscular buttocks with a lash of... (starts frothing at mouth)
M: Steady on Mr Scott!
SI: Puketa!

Freeman's 1970s fieldwork, according to Mead's supporters:
Freeman: Good afternoon madame. Do I have the honour of addressing Mrs Tapuni, chairwoman of the church ladies committee? I gather that you were one Margaret Mead's informants back in your younger days.
SI (warily): Ye-essssss....
F: Well if you wouldn't mind sitting here between your husband the high court judge and your son the church minister and parliamentary candidate, I'd like to ask a few questions.
SI: I'd be glad to help, professor.
F: Is it true that you spent most of your teen years behind a coconut palm with your grass skirt around your ankles, as described in the celebrated article 'Having it off in Rumpipumpi?
SI (grinning with teeth while looking murder with eyes): Good lord no! I was pulling her leg all the time. We love a joke, we Samoans, you know; don't we Reginald?

Now it is my firm contention that had Mead done the proper gonzo anthropologist thing by dressing in a grass skirt and flower garland, shacking up with the young Reginald to learn the language without even needing to get out of bed, offered herself to the Fagamalo Rugby Club Under-19s first XV behind a coconut palm and then observed the results of this research on her standing in the community, she could have settled the question then and there.

I rest my case.

L'esprit de l'escalier

2009-02-03T06:04:00.000-08:00

Some hours after reading No Good Boyo's post about nudism, it struck me that I should by rights take umbrage with his description of me as a 'gonzo anthropologist', pointing out haughtily that the correct term for 'gonzo anthropology' is 'participant observation'.

Then it struck me that actually, 'gonzo anthropology' is better.

The theory goes that one can only understand certain things - ceremonies, diet, acrobatic monkey sex with local men/women according to gender and taste, performing arts, sex, socialisation, sex, superstitions, sex, cosmologies, more sex, language and even more sex - if one participates in them rather than merely observing them as an outsider. It is a theory most anthropologists (and their fieldworking fellow-travellers like ethnomusicologists and ethnolinguists) have gladly embraced, along with substantial proportions of the populations they have studied.

It was fairly standard procedure, for instance, for the tutor to bring in his/her native-speaker spouse along for oral language exams (titter ye not) when I was a grad student at SOAS. Other standard procedures included wearing ethnic-print clothes and smoking suspicious roll-ups (when kretek were available our entire Javanese class - tutor included - would slope out onto the landing for a smoke break halfway through a mind-bendingly thorough treatement of homorganic nasalisation in transitive verb formation, back in the days when this was still allowed. The smoking, that is, not the grammar. Ah, the memories...)

Before the politically correct take offence, I should point out once again that Mrs Byard and I are equal-opportunities miscegenators - I fulfil the role of sleeping dictionary/proff-reader (sic - just spotted both the typo and the deliciousness of the irony) for her every bit as much as she does for me. And we have the advantage of being able to hold private conversations wherever we are confronted by insurance salesmen and similar subhuman wretches.

Furthermore, given that Boyo claims his research was on homosexuality in the Russian navy, I think questions can legitimately be asked.

John Martyn - a personal memoir

2009-01-31T23:46:00.000-08:00

As most of you will know by now from assorted news and blogs and what-not, noted singer-songwriter John Martyn has passed away. A colleague mentioned this to me on seeing the news and asked if I'd heard of him.

"Heard of him?" I retorted, "I've supported him."

And oddly, this statement turns out to be true. Let me reminisce a moment...

In 1990, I returned from my first two-year stint in Indonesia and was living in a series of crapulous bedsits in Oxford while justifying my pointless existence on the grounds that I was 'a graduate student'. I had just scraped together enough dosh to pay one year's fees at a college which I knew would have me (I knew and had played gigs with my prospective supervisor), and supported myself thewhiles by a fissile mixture of TEFL and semi-professional music. I was for a time in a band that played for 'drinks and tips' at a muso pub down Cowley Road, at 'folk evenings' MC-ed by a chap called Frank Underwood whom I had known on-and-off for a few years. The next few years saw me yo-yoing between Oxford and Central Java on 'fieldwork' (usually arranged by getting TEFL jobs at places desperate for native speakers).

Frank's main paying gigs at this period were as part of the duo 'Mortlock and Underwood', Mortlock being a folk fiddler of considerable skill and charisma. Alas, in a rock'n'roll style breakup Mortlock threw his fiddle down on stage in front of a large crowd, called Underwood a few unparliamentary things and stormed off, leaving U grinning desperately at the audience and saying "Yeah! Baroque'n'roll!"

He now had the problem of how to do gigs for which 'Mortlock and Underwood' were booked, and asked me to fill in as an ersatz Mortlock for a while.

Thus in summer 1993 I came to be on a beach at Hastings playing to an enormous crowd at a free festival, immediately before the headline act, which was - I'm getting there - John Martyn.

There had been many acts before us, over the period of about 4 hours; and free drink provided to performers throughout. This is often a mistake, and with a heroic drunk like Martyn it was quite disastrous. The man - genius though he may have been - could barely stand up through his set. I watched from the side of the stage, beer can in hand, willing him to get through the set. He just about did, but there was a palpable sense of "WTF?" among the crowd, hundreds of whom had come down from London and elsewhere specially to see JM perform. I think the people who appreciated it most were those as sloshed as he was.

Colonel of the month - January

2009-01-29T02:35:00.000-08:00

One of the things that first drew me towards No Good Boyo as a connoisseur of the amusing (rather than the "certain diminutive evil Welchman" that one of my trainers warned me of on my first day in the same workplace) was our shared delight in the foibles of gloriously moustachioed military and colonial gentlemen. For those who share our passion, either currently or in the near future after reading this, I offer up a few highlights on one of my personal favourites: Colonel (later Major-General) David Graham Muschet "Soarer" Campbell of the 9th Lancers.

The nickname 'Soarer' comes from the horse he rode to victory in the 1896 Grand National. I first came across this delightful character in Richard Holmes's excellent book "Tommy - The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918", in which Holmes quotes the medical officer who found Campbell lying in the long grass after charging into a superior force of German cavalry in September 1914. "I'm sorry to find you like this, sir" the medical officer recalled saying.
"Nonsense my dear boy - I've just had the best quarter of an hour of my entire life!" retorted the thrice-wounded Campbell.
Subsequently he was promoted to command of the 21st Division - a 'New Army' formation composed primarily of men who had answered Kitchener's 'Your Country Needs You' call. He was in command of this division when it was badly mauled in 1918, and said of the affair "Monday (27 May) was the worst day I have spent in this war, which is saying a lot".

Blimpishness aside, it says much about the man's character that his 'best quarter of an hour' involved leading from the front, crossing swords with the enemy and receiving multiple wounds, while his 'worst day' involved being in command but behind the lines while his men were suffering.

There is a good short biography on Birmingham University's Centre for First World War Studies page, which features the magnificent aside "Wounds were to be a feature of his military career". Though British generals of WWI have not enjoyed a high reputation on the whole, there were nonetheless some genuinely brave and charismatic men among them. Campbell certainly seems to have been such a man.

One song in the style of another - 5

2009-01-27T03:28:00.000-08:00

Yes, the insanity continues.

This time, it's a Cha-Cha version of Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water', from Germany's legendary Senor Coconut:

I wish to thank my mate Russell for introducing me to this artiste. Other may deeply regret it...

Have a good laugh, and then feel uncomfortable...

2009-01-25T02:07:00.000-08:00

A friend forwarded me a slightly old article from the Daily Mail today:

What Daddy's little girl wants Daddy's little girl gets.
So when Missy Quinn insisted on a big white wedding with her boyfriend, her father said Yes. It didn't matter that she was only 16 and the groom 17.
Daddy also said Yes to a £16,000 wedding dress (which looked suspiciously like a crop top and skirt) and Yes to 150 guests at the reception. Then there were the cars, the hotels, the tiara and the £500 bouquet.
In the end, making Missy's wedding dreams come true cost her father - who lives in a caravan and surfaces driveways for a living - a whopping £100,000.
But as his princess, who hasn't been in a classroom since she was nine and wants to be a glamour model, posed for photographs, her father Simon, 35, declared it was worth every penny. 'I'm very proud of her today,' he said.
Missy was just happy to be the undisputed centre of attention.
Her dress, studded with Swarovski crystals, and with a 10ft wide train, was so heavy that it took ten guests to help her struggle out of the Rolls-Royce Phantom that brought her to the church.
'It was huge. I wanted to outdo everyone else's wedding dress,' she said.
'It was extremely heavy and just standing in the church was really difficult. But despite all that, I felt just like Cinderella.'
The bill was around five times the cost of the average British wedding.
Missy said: 'It cost a fortune, but I've always wanted a big wedding and my dad has been saving for ages to pay for it.' She met Thomas at Alton Towers theme park when she was 13.
They continued to date despite her traveller family leaving their caravan park in Stoke-on-Trent every summer to tour the UK while Thomas lived with his parents in Wolverhampton.
Missy said: 'I just knew he was The One from the beginning. He's perfect.'
Her mother Theresa, 33, who married Missy's father at 16, said: 'I was surprised they wanted to get married so young in this day and age. But we could see they were madly in love.'
The couple married six days after Missy turned 16 at St Mary's Catholic Church in Congleton-Cheshire. After the ceremony-guests in feathers and crystals enjoyed champagne and an all-day buffet at the reception. Girls as young as nine showed off bikini tops, high heels and make-up.
Guest Victoria Docherty, 23, who wore a £700 hotpants and bra outfit, said: 'This isn't unusual - it's just what we do at weddings. It's all very extravagant. Everything is paid for by the bride's daddy.'
Missy and Thomas honeymooned in Turkey before moving into their own £18,000 caravan -a wedding gift from her parents.

Do click on the DM article for the photos...

The tone is surprisingly subtle for the Daily Mail, but the article still manages to push all the 'let's have a go at pikeys' buttons that the average DM reader would need (key words: 'lives in a caravan' 'surfaces driveways', 'traveller family', 'hasn't been in a classroom since...'). The person who sent this to the friend who forwarded it to me even titled the e-mail "Chav wedding of the century".

I object.

These people are not 'chavs' - they work for a living, pay their own way, get and stay married and know who their parents are. They're not asking for benefit handouts, nor are they wallowing on drugs and alcohol in subsidised housing or committing petty crimes. They have an aesthetic to which they aspire which - although it may be the target of self-gratificatory snide remarks by London-dwelling arty-farties - is a matter of their taste, not ours.

Moreover, the parents are supporting their daughter by paying for a lavish wedding. Since when has that been a crime against anything? They come from a culture where this is the kind of thing you spend big money on, rather than over-inflated houses or share portfolios (both of the latter investments are looking slightly less wise now than they were last year, it must be said...). Events like this help to bind traveller communities together. Why have a go at them?

(I should also add the standard Roma disclaimer at this point "They's not Gyppoes, they's Tinkers". But I shall still stick up for them. Someone has to. I was pleased and not a little susrprised to notice that many of those posting comments on the DM site also defended the Quinns.)

Lookalikes...

2009-01-21T04:21:00.001-08:00

Was anyone else struck yesterday by the similarity between Rev Joseph Lowery's benediction and the lyrics of Mr Big Bill Broonzy?

Big "Bill" Broonzy:

Rev "Joseph" Lowery:

One song in the style of two nutters...

2009-01-20T02:48:00.000-08:00

Not that I'm trying to upstage Gadjo or anything; actually, my enthusiasm for comically bad singing was reqwakened by Scarlet's championing of the divine Mrs Miller. She has a living legacy, the torch being carried on in a slightly wobbly manner by living legends such as the two I present here. Screaming Jay Hawkins was a good musician but with a slightly tenuous grasp on reality. I reserve judgment on these good ladies.

First, we have the lovely Wing, covering ABBA's 'Mamma Mia' in her own inimitable style:

While the same song was also given the Margarita Pracatan treatment some years before:

Wing, bless her, has also tackled AC/DC in her time:

People who annoy me....

2009-01-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

As I promised but a few days ago, I am not going to complain about my life and lot this year. No - I shall cease moaning, count my blessings, and turn my ire on other people who frankly get on my wick.

So, who's first up? So many to choose from... but let's start with cyclists.

"Oh no Gyppo!" I hear the multitude cry, "Surely you can't be having a go at anyone who rides a bike?"

Umm - no, I'm not. There is an important distinction to be made. Ordinary People On Bikes (OPOBs) are one thing; evangelical cyclists in lycra, slipstream helmets and visors - let us term them cyclologists for ease of distinction - are quite another.

OPOBs ride along at an appropriate speed for a bicycle, wear ordinary clothes, look and signal before turning and stop at red lights. They don't get in the way of your car or run you over when you're on foot. I have no problem with such people. I wait patiently behind them until it is safe to overtake, I let them go at junctions and they thank me for it, I exhange cheery words with them at the pelican crossing. They are not the problem.

Cyclologists are people who regard bikes not as a means of getting from A to B but as an ideological statement. They fervently believe that they should have the right of way over anything and everybody because they are 'the good guys' and the rest of us are filth. They take delight in riding along narrowish busy roads at rush hour at a speed just fast enough to make it impossible to overtake safely, yet slowly enough to cause a massive tailback. They dress like prats. They sweep out in front of you without looking or signalling when turning right and only then turn to give you a filthy look when they hear the squeal of brakes. They swear at drivers and pedestrians alike and make rude gestures by way of apology after causing accidents to other people. They ride heedlessly through mud splattering inoffensive walkers on country paths. They ignore traffic signals and rights of way, and they still seem to think that they are better than the rest of us. Has it occurred to these brain-dead zealots that causing a massive traffic tailback by bimbling along in front of it at 10 mph under the speed limit causes more pollution than just getting in a car and driving at the same speed as everyone else, to say nothing of not causing major blockages TO SINGLE-LANE BRIDGES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING RUSH HOUR?

Truly, they are the Esperantists and Socialist Workers of the transport world. And already I can predict their response - "But if everybody rode a bike..." And frankly, that's crap. Because I have been to cities where everyone rode a bike - China in the 80s was very much on that model. And it was fine. But if everyone in this country did ride a bike, the cyclologists wouldn't be riding along happily with the rest of us. They would be jostling for position, giving OPOBs filthy looks, trying to push to the front of the queue at red lights and swearing at pedestrians. Because in the final analysis, it's not about exercise or pollution or expense - it's about being a self-important, lycra-clad git.

("No, please -" I hear the multitude cry, "Just go back to moaning about your everyday life or posting silly music videos...")

One song in the style of another - 4

2009-01-17T23:26:00.000-08:00

Slightly more surprising, this one, in the sense that it qualifies at all - I knew it as a Gypsy Swing standard long before I had heard the original.

This tune started life as a Russian song in 3/4 time, before being carried off on the back of a vardo to become a Manouche standard in 4/4 in the scarred and twisted hands of Django Reinhardt.

This version features five of the six finest Gypsy swing players alive today (Jimmy Rosenberg was, iirc, in a Dutch prison at the time) - Bireli Lagrene, Stochelo Rosenberg, Angelo Debarre, Tchavolo Schmitt and Dorado Schmitt, starting off with Django's solo in unison before each doing their own thing. Bireli's comping at the end of Stochelo's solo around 5'45" paticularly sends a thrill down my spine every time I hear it:

This version is from Tony Gatlif's Swing, in which a bunch of non-Sinti musicians (as seen in the 'Song of Peace' clip) all join in for a joyous jam session at a Sinti campsite. It's how life isn't, but should be:

Dementia

2009-01-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I visited our canteen, got myself a cup of tea, and went to the till to pay for it. The cashier handed me a footlingly small coin in change. "You know" I mused out loud "Maybe you should have a charity box here for people to deposit small change like this."

Patiently, she indicated the bright yellow collecting box placed prominently next to the till, which I had totally failed to register.

I was unsurprised to see that it was for the Alzheimer's society.

I deposited the change silently and slouched off, tasting the ashes of humiliation. The way I'm going, I shall need their help soon anyway...

THREE more songs in another style

2009-01-14T02:26:00.001-08:00

The subtitle for this one is "Attack of the Lounge Lizards from Planet Easy Listening" - three worthy contenders for the title of 'best lush swing arrangement of an overly serious, teenage angst-ridden piece of pretentious drivel from a spotty, unwashed grunge or indie-band'.

First up, Paul Anka does Nirvana:

Next, Frank Bennett does Radiohead:

And finally, Mike Flowers does Oasis:

One song in the style of another - 3

2009-01-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

Let me tee this one up by asking you a question: Did you ever listen to Carl Perkins - or one of the many rockabilly cover artists who sang his stuff from Elvis onwards - and think to yourself "What this really needs is a backing group of Transylvanian lautari armed with cimbalon, taragato and violin and capable of more adventurous modulations than three chords allow?

You didn't?

Well, these guys did:

Happiness

2009-01-13T02:27:00.000-08:00

The more I amble gently through life, the more I am convinced that happiness - or at least contentment - is an inner state of mind unaffected by the buffets of the external world.

This was rammed home to me recently when it became obvious that some people, regardless of the apparent enviability of their lives, find it necessary to complain endlessly about things which really should be the cause of no complaint at all.

I catch myself doing it occasionally, in particular complaining about being woken up at ungodly hours by a crying baby. While this puts a certain strain on one's moods, it is nothing compared to the heartache of losing said baby or having been unable to conceive said baby in the first place. I have resolved not to whinge about it ever again. Children are good, and wonderful, and I love both of mine more than I can ever say.

It's like that with anything I can find to complain about:
The gearbox on my car is thoroughly grendled and has moods of refusing to go into first, usually at a busy junction with a queue building up. And my exhaust pipe has just exploded and will need replacing. But I have a car.

I find it tiring to get home after work and have to set to cooking supper. But we have food to eat.

The heating system needs an overhaul to prevent it going on an off at random and making strange noises. But we have heating.

Everything that bugs me from time to time is something that would be an enviable blessing to many others - my job (I have one), the untidiness of my house (I have a house and posessions with which to be untidy) and so on.

Therefore, I have resolved not to complain about my life any more. I am lucky. I am, basically, a happy man.

Henceforth, I shall only complain about other people who annoy me. Is that a plan or is that a plan?

One song in the style of another - 2

2009-01-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

Staying for the moment on an elevated plane of inspirational reinterpretation before slewing off into complete madness, let me take up the baton from Gadjo Dilo, who has contributed to this meme an accordion interpretation of highway to hell, bless him.

Aside from accordions, another great instrument that has the capacity to bring any song - however pretentious - down onto a level of healthy ridicule and instant fun is the ukulele. The finest exponents of ukulele music currently practising are the divine Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Almost anything from their repertoire could fit this thread, but I think their finest work takes an overblown piece of tosh by borderline vampire Kate Bush and makes it a thing of incomparable beauty:

I is dissing your slang, innit?

2009-01-08T02:27:00.000-08:00

Regular reader Ms Pearl has noted her increasing inability to keep up with yoof slang and 'the word on the street, innit?' or whatever they have over the pond there in Good Old Uncle US of Stateside.

My personal campaign to eliminate irritating patois among the slack-trousered adolescents of Albion takes a simple yet effective form - I use it in front of them, in an exagerrated cut-glass public-school accent. This causes them to redden, squirm and on one deeply satisfying occasion explode with embarrasment, and quickly convinces them that if I am using such slang, it must needs be thought hopelessly uncool and unfashionable.

Shortly before Christmas I took my daughter to the local theatre where she was participating in a music festival. There we hooked up with a family we know well, in which there are daughters aged 12 and 14. As we sat there waiting out the gap between dress rehearsal and performance, my daughter called out to a friend who was wandering past, but her voice was lost against the background hubbub and the friend went on, heedless. "I say" I commented to my daughter "She is dissing you bad, innit?" The 14-year old exploded at this point; her face taking on a crimson hue and her eyes popping out as half a sandwich was ejected across the table in a spray of crumbs. "Oh my GOD that is so embarrassing!" she yelled in a voice so loud that all conversation within a 200-yard radius temporarily ceased.

I smiled quietly to myself, satisfied at the thought of a job well done.

I am not, I hasten to add, the only one to see the comic potential in this form of linguistic transvestism:

One song in the style of another

2009-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

As rashly promised, here is the first in an ongoing series of genre-busting covers.

First up, we have the sublime Hayseed Dixie reimagining Motorhead's heavy metal song 'Ace of Spades' as Bluegrass, and improving it considerably in the process:

The missing link in this is, of course, Skiffle - often overlooked as a feeder-stream of later rock music. Brits play a mutated form of hillbilly mountain music as skiffle, same Brits go on to form bands which create heavy metal, Hayseed Dixie bring it home.

Flying monkey business

2009-01-05T02:29:00.000-08:00

Fellow grendler of random anorak-wearers No Good Boyo has recounted an incident in which he dealt with a green-inker who had a thing about vampires. Apparently.

The same file of correspondence also yielded a complaint about something we had published about Sri Lanka. "Please to correct this article!" the person of injured pride had written "If you check the holy book of Ramayana you will see that Tamil was in Sri Lanka before Sinhala!" Or perhaps the other way round.

The shambling, haunted-looking colleague of ours whose daily task - mandated presumably by a community service order - it is to plough through the assembled lunacy of the interweb-viewing public around the world passed it over to me, asking how on earth he should reply. Now I may not know a lot about Sri Lanka, but I do know the Ramayana, having spent a lot of time studying performing arts in parts of Southeast Asia where the Ramayana and Mahabharata form the bedrock of all dramaturgy. I reassured him he could leave the problem safely with me, and drafted the following:

"Dear Sir,
We have indeed checked the 'holy book of Ramayana', and come to the inescapable conclusion that the correct order of arrival for ethnic groups in Sri Lanka was as follows:
1) Ten-headed demons, some of whom were capable of flight and self-transformation;
2) Talking monkeys, at least one of whom was also capable of flight;
3) A couple of guys from Uttar Pradesh, who then went home again.
We shall correct our article forthwith to reflect these important findings.
Best wishes,
&c &c"

He never sent it.

A short break for New Year...

2009-01-04T01:35:00.000-08:00

We managed to get home briefly for New Year. Home - as distinct from where our house is - is on the Worcestershire-Staffordshire border just West of Stourbridge. It is stunningly beautiful and very good walking or horse-riding country; but almost unknown by outsiders (who, after all, ever thinks of going on holiday to the fringes of the West Midland conurbation?) My daughter and I - with Guthlac asleep in the back and Mrs Byard having a rare moment to herself - went to the local park to walk around on the frosty grass, watch the ducks coping with a frozen pond and give Guthlac his first experience of a playground swing. Of such simple shared pleasures are truly golden memories forged.

The park pond offers up, however, a deeply depressing sight - bunches of wilted flowers and mawkish messages scribbled in marker pen, attached to the fence where a depressed teenager jumped over and drowned himself. Sometimes I find the sentimentality around these events more grating and nauseating than the everyday tragedy itself; part of what Alan Bennett aptly called 'the Liverpudlianisation of Britain'. There is much to be said for keeping the upper lip stiff and the private grief private.

The occasion on which I felt least comprehension for the country of my birth was the aftermath of Diana the Princess of Wales's death in 1997. I watched the media coverage from afar (Java, in fact) and was asked by many locals to explain what was happening. I couldn't, since I totally failed to understand it myself. The nearest I can get to it is a feeling that it was a kind of emotional anarchy; the media - in a desperate attempt to hide their own culpability in paying top whack to the pursuing papparazzi - had told everyone that a self-indulgent outpouring of public grief for someone they never knew was now permissible.

Anyway, after being made miserable at the park, we drove out into the country, via Ismere, Caunsall and Kinver before returning to the parental/grandparental homestead. From Ismere we could see the tops of the Clee Hills, their lower slopes hidden by mist so that the summit appeared as an apparition-like blue-grey line in the sky. (Oddly enough, the oldest administrative document dealing with the Anglo-Saxons in this part of the country mentions the local tribe as the 'Usmere'; in the reign of Aethalbald in the early 8th century land at Ismere is granted to one of the king's followers.)

I sometimes daydream about finding a job in that area and being able to move out of the Thames Valley. The Thames Valley is a very congenial place to live in many ways, to be sure, but most of the people we know are economic migrants like we are rather than people rooted in an ancient community. Even though it may seem strange for someone with a family tree like mine to be going on in a way that is perilously close to the 'blood and soil' rhetoric of the far right, I can't help feeling more at home in North Worcestershire than I do in Reading. Though come to think of it, many of my ancestors were the economic migrants of a few generations back. Maybe my great-grandchildren, if they live around Reading, will feel about it the way I do about the place I grew up.

It is a curious fact...

2008-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

... that in Cantonese, there is no way of saying "my backing singers are in tune":

Marriage, perception and memory

2008-12-21T04:25:00.001-08:00

Surely I cannot be alone in my uneasy feeling that my lawfully wedded spouse and I inhabit parallel universes. This could explain the commercial success of books like "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Newcastle" or whatever the overhyped tomfoolery was called.

The rift in human perception on which it drew was recently brought to mind by a discussion of 'the incident at Heathrow' some years ago during which a caster became disengaged from the bottom of the oversized piece of luggage upon the bottom of which it had started the day.

My recollection is that it was a poorly made piece of luggage, dangerously overloaded by its female owner and unwisely trusted to the vagaries of airport floors and killer baggage carousels rather than the adoption of the sounder policy of keeping your luggage within the limit you can carry and lifting it clear of the floor. While getting out of the lift between the car park and the concourse, a wheel slipped into the gap between lift and floor and broke off, a fact that cannot be in any way blamed on the helpful, chivalrous gentleman attempting to drag it (and three other bags) at the time.

My wife's recollection is that rather than lift the thing clear of the sill 'like someone with common sense', I first got it jammed out of sheer malevolence and then spent fully 20 minutes pulling fruitlessly at it as queues built up around me, until overwhelmed by a combination of my Herculean strength the extent of which I apparently don't realise and the violence of my language - which allegedly attained a command of demotic Anglo-Saxon so advanced that students of linguistics within 200 metres got out pads and pencils and started feverishly making notes as their eyebrows ascended high into the stratosphere - the poor abused suitcase gave up and shed its wheel into the liftshaft where it subsequently 'must have' caused mechanical failure and congestion on a Biblical scale, too vast ever to have been noticed by anyone.

I suspect I can guess which demographic groups will instinctively believe each version.

On the subject of Slavic music videos...

2008-12-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

Before I get over this music video-posting craze and get back to serious blogging - Noted cultural commentator Gadjo Dilo has recently posted some interesting Ukrainian music videos. In a spirit of serious musicology, I would like to share the following video - Russian band ANJ's tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, dealing with some seriously heavy political and economic issues within the music video form - with the three people in the world who haven't seen it yet:

But for other serious Southeast Asia specialists, I present an interesting art rock US/Cambodian fusion band ("Oh God, not another one" I hear you cry):

Gyppo's video jukebox...

2008-12-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

In a feeble attempt to match the technological nous of others, I hereby present an attempt to get a video to play on here. This is the 'Song of Peace' from Tony Gatlif's 2002 film 'Swing'. I particularly recommend the bit at 3' when Gypsies gatecrash an earnest peacenik 'everyone sing together' exercise with some kick-arse swing. Sharing Tony Gatlif's biases, I thoroughly approve:

Smartening up rap music

2008-12-10T03:44:00.001-08:00

As my colleague and time-wasting companion No Good Boyo has recently explained, he and I have come up with a plot to render rap, hip - and furthermore hop - music socially acceptable by asking the conceptual question "If this was being recited tunelessly over a repetitive rhythm by a decent chap with a sound public-school classical education under his correctly positioned and properly-tightened belt rather than a mumbling ghetto indigene with his trousers slipping down around his unwashed ankles, what words would be used?"

This train of thought led to the previous post, which - arriving unannounced and unexplained like a Burmese baby in a cardboard box on a Tory MP's doorstep as it did - seems to have confused more than it amused.

While Boyo applied his misshapen head to the improvement of Mr Schoolly D's lyrical outpourings (though he was unable to answer my query as to whether the School in question was Charterhouse or Winchester), I turned instead to Mr 50 Cent, duly relabelled 'Mr Ten Shillings'; whose 'In da club' I have thus reworked for a more upmarket-audience, to be sung to an appropriately uplifting tune:

At One's Club
Proceed, young lady chap, it's your birthday
We shall celebrate as if it's your birthday,
We shall sip Chateau Lafitte (the 92) as if it's your birthday,
And you know we're not unduly concerned that it isn't actually your birthday!

You can find one at one's club,
A magnum full of champagne
Look Mater I have a bag of ether,
If you fancy the idea of illegal substances I would not be averse to intimacy
So come give me a hug if you need the application of embrocation
When I park, you see the Bentley badge
Decent chaps heard I put one over on Dre*,
Now their appreciation has appreciated appreciably
When you sell like M&Ms, and the garden tools they wish to use
If you watch how I move you'll mistake me for a professional cricketer...

It continues, but is anyone going to read even this far?

*Presumably Reginald 'Tooler' Dre, leg spinner for Northants 1953-60

Jeevz N da Hood

2008-12-07T01:24:00.000-08:00

It was one of those mornings when, as Jeeves once put it, God's in his heaven and all's right in the world, if that's the phrase I'm after. Jeeves would doubtless know.
When he shimmered in with the morning tea I did detect a certain frostiness about his manner, doubtless the result of his sulking over my purchases of a gold tracksuit, Air Jordans, a Malcolm X baseball cap and copious amounts of bling.
"Dashitall Jeeves - one must move with the times, don't you know. This gear is all the rage at the Drones Club."
"Indeed, sir."
"I mean, Tupac Fotherington-Thomas has promised to teach some of the chaps to break-dance. It's this frightfully jolly dance where you spin round on your head, apparently."
"I fear that Mr Fortherington-Thomas may be unable to impart his skill in that particular exercise of terpsichorean agility today, sir."
"What on earth are you blabbering about, Jeeves?" I retorted. Brainy as the chap may be, he sometimes fails to make sense at all.
"One heard from Mr 'Biggy' Little's manservant Beddoes that Fotherington-Thomas showed disrespect to Mr Little, upon which Mr Little's homies took him for a ride in Mr Little's stretch limo and popped a cap in his mother****ing ass, sir."
I reeled. "Oh I say Jeeves! Hardly the act of a preux chevalier, what?"
"Indeed not, sir."
As I sipped the refreshing brew my head seemed to clear somewhat.
"Jeeves?"
"Yes sir?"
"Do you really think the bling gear is a frost?"
"Yes, sir."
"You'd probably better get rid of it."
"Thank you sir. I already have"

My life as a French farce

2008-12-04T03:59:00.001-08:00

Looking back over what I can remember of my chequered career, the incidents which stand out with the greatest and most appaling clarity are the ones involving the highest degree of buttock-clenching embarrasment.

The one which stands out particularly as being the sort of incident which - if I wrote it into a sitcom script - would be most obviously cut as contrived and implausible, happened when a student couple, both of whom I knew well, split up.

I was in my flat attempting to deal telephonically with a terrible crisis which had befallen a language student friend, and to cope with which I had to buy them a plane ticket home from their 'year abroad', when there was a knock at the door.

It was a tearful young lady - let us call her Beatrix for the sake or argument - who informed me that she had just chucked her boyfriend, an acned youth (let us call him Rodney) whose relationship with the sweet and extremely pretty Beatrix was a mystery to all. "Go and have a seat in the living room", I told her, "I'll be with you in a moment."

I then reapplied myself to the intricacies of coping with the multiple-choice button-pressing telecommunications nightmare that was the BA booking line in the early 90s, when I was interrupted once more by a knock at the door.

I gurgled helplessly as Rodney strode in, saying "I've just split up with Beatrix, I need a drink..." and made his own way to the living room. It was a good 10 minutes before I could join them, during which I gather silent recrimination was the order of the day.

Both eventually forgave me, though never each other, curiously enough.

Glimpses into forgotten worlds - 3

2008-12-03T04:54:00.001-08:00

A kind colleague brought an absolute treasure into the office the other day - a copy of Major W. Turner's 1943 "Guide to Military Urdu", including a sample elementary examination paper. It belonged to her father, who served in India during and shortly after WWII.

As you would expect, it is a magnificent collection of phrases which no pith-helmeted, khaki-shorted gentleman should be without:
"Your rifle is dirty, why have you not cleaned it?"
"How many mules have you brought?"
"We shall be able to capture the position in half an hour."
"Tell the men not to clean their rifles with sand-paper."

There are sections devoted to military discipline:
"March the prisoner in."
"You are charged with disobeying the Havaldar's orders"
"- Being absent from parade on Saturday morning."

Bayonet training:
"Don't bend the left arm so much."
"Keep the right arm against the butt."
"Make the 'withdraw' in the same line as you pointed."

Anti-gas training:
"What is the first aid for mustard gas casualties?"

And enrolment of new troops:
"You will not allow your caste usages to interfere with military requirements."
"Look here! I am going to ask you six questions. You will have to answer them truthfully."

But overall - disappointingly - it lacks the crusty, bat-stretching insanity of the slightly earlier "Malay Made Simple" or "The Modern Pushtu Instructor".

Until we get to the sample examination. Here, we start to get slightly more entertaining phrases:
"He got up and threw an orange at the Havildar."
"We hoped that the train would start again, quickly, as we saw a man coming towards us. when he got near, we all began to sing."

Best of all is a story regaring a man's ill-advised kindness towards a snake on a cold day, which concludes:
"The man got very angry and killed the evil snake with a stick. That snake was just like the Japanese. We must remember this story, and never let the Japanese get into our homes."

I showed this to Mr Shandonger, whose respect for the Indian Army rose appreciably...

Great lines to overhear....

2008-11-30T05:40:00.000-08:00

Today a colleague told me a merry anecdote of her time in Aleppo which included the line "So anyway, we jumped over a pile of skulls..."

My life has been far too sedate to match material like that. The nearest I came was walking through a pool of someone's blood, which was bad enough and gave me occasional nightmares for a year or so afterwards. And it wasn't even my blood.

For those with an interest in the Islamic world, my colleague's anecdote was in response to an office discussion of when exactly Idul Adha falls this year.

Nigella 1, Heston 0

2008-11-24T02:22:00.000-08:00

Since our house contains an unfeasibly large number of recipe books, I feel I am sort-of qualified to comment on their relative usability. Many of them remain unused after a single disastrous experiment, others are cheerfully dog-eared and full of bookmarks, turned-down corners and scribbled pencil notes.

So here is a small selection of those we have found useful and those we haven't:

THE GOOD...
How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson.
It is only the barest of exaggerations to say that before acquiring this book I could not bake, and now I am infallible. Every single thing I've cooked/baked from this book has worked admirably first time of asking. Now I should stress that I grew up in a household where everyone was expected to cook, and did. I was non-negotiably assigned to helping in the kitchen from around the age of nine, and cooking has remained a pleasure rather than a chore all my life (one of the many varied things I have to thank my parents for). However, I wouldn't go so far as to claim to be an outstandingly good cook, and baking was always a stressful mystery. Nigella changed that for me - in her books I have at last found a cookery writer who explains things at my level, always giving easy-to-understand hints about judging whether things are ready or not. Her rhubarb grunt and baklava muffins in particular have been delightful revelations. The same principle goes for her other books too.

The Cranks Recipe Book/Entertaining with Cranks
My copies of these date back to the 1980s when my sister turned vegetarian and I then started going out with a vegetarian. This meant I needed reliable veggie recipes at my fingertips. My copies of these have been used so often, and had so many things spilt on them, that you could probably survive a week just by licking them. I still use them regularly, as my sister is still vegetarian.

The Covent Garden Soup Company recipe book
Like the ring-binder and wipe-clean pages; deplore the lack of an index. But the recipes are mostly fabulous anyway. Our copy has an interesting array of paper-clips/post-it notes sprouting from its upper edge.

The Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner - Annabel Karmel
OK, we're into specialist territory here I admit; but for those struggling to feed a baby with healthy meals this is a goldmine.

Larousse Gastronomique - Prosper Montagne
The serious foody bible - great for browsing, but the recipes are often a bit hit and miss and require a clasical training to understand at times. They are also wildly extravagant, often turning on phrases like "three days before serving, make a stock out of 15lbs of wild venison and 30lbs or freshly picked vegetables..." or "take the yolks of 12 eggs..." Makes good reading outside the kitchen, though.

THE BAD...
Anything by Heston Blumenthal
Probably magnificent if you're a brilliant cook to start with and can fathom what he's on about, but a path to dismal failure for the likes of me. I love his cooking - I've eaten once at the Hind's Head in Bray and it was one of the best meals I've ever had. It's just that his recipes are over my head - attempt them without being able to judge by eye when, for example, clarified butter is hot enough and you're sunk.

THE UGLY...
Gordon ****ing Ramsay.
Someone bought us a Gordon Ramsay book as a present. We tried one recipe. It was a disaster. As with Mr Blumenthal, this may be as much down to my native incompetence as Ramsay's impossibility, but the fact remains it was a mistake I won't be repeating.

Agenbitten.

2008-11-17T02:27:00.000-08:00

No Good Boyo has developed a noticeable tendency to use variations on the phrase "agenbite of inwit".

I hereby propose the in the unlikely event of his ennoblement, he should take the title "Lord Agenbite of Llantwit".

The Mouth of Orlac

2008-11-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

I have something of a social disability: My mouth has a tendency to answer people before my brain has woken up and realised that someone is even talking to me.

This unfortunate tendency is, indeed one of the things that attracts me to blogging - I can edit my comments before releasing them to the world. There have been occasions in my life when I have sorely wished this could be done with spoken comments.

In particular, there was the unfortunate incident with the nun and the crucifix. The Jesuit college at which I used to teach had, as is the way with Jesuit educational institutions, rather gaudy painted crucifixes of considerable size fixed to the wall, over the blackboard, in each lecture hall or classroom.

Coming in to class on the first day back after the Easter break, I was confronted with a dozen or so of my students who had turned up early (or more likely had been hanging around after an earlier class). Without planning, forethought - or indeed wisdom - I greeted them merrily with "Did you have a good Easter?"

So far so good.

I then turned to the crucifix and enquired "And did you have a good Easter?"

Most of them laughed in a slightly shocked manner. The main exception was the nun in the front row, who was clearly trying to judge my combustibility for a public heretic-burning.

The dear old provost of my dear old college

2008-11-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

A recent thread on Mrs Pouncer's Counsel caused me to recall my Oxford days, when my college - let us veil its identity by calling it Christnose - was presided over genially by a provost of the old school (or more to the point, the old wine-cellar). Let us veil his identity by calling him Lord Fnord.

Anyway, Christnose had a reputation (before more recent, academically-inclined killjoy management decided it wanted 'results') of having more gaudies (college feast nights) than any other house in either of the two universities. Some time after midnight on one of these evenings Lord Fnord emerged from the Hall and wove his way gently towards the Provost's Lodgings, past the library. A thunderstorm was in progress, and as he passed the library a bolt of lightning struck one of the carved stone eagles which decorated the roof. It detached itself from the fabric of the building and plummeted into the lawn.

Fnord stared at it for a while, then concluded he'd better tell someone. Turning around with difficulty, he wobbled all the way to the porter's lodge and tapped on the glass to attract the night porter's attention.

"Good evening your grace."
"Th'librarary eagle. 'Sh flown off the roof. Whoosh!"
"Yes of course it has, sir. Shall I get someone to take you back to your lodgings?"
"Nonononono - y'don't undershtand. Eagle. On liberarary roof. 'Sh f***ing flown orff."

The conversation apparently went in circles for some time before His Lordship gave up and went off to sleep face down in a flower bed. He was vindicated on the morrow, however.

Last Django in Paris

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Just a quick shout....

Surrealism at home - 2

The blog-life balance, and how to achieve it. Sort of. Sometimes.

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Dungeons, Dragons and Ballpits

Surrealism at home

An open letter to Pastor Terry Jones

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World Cup games as they *should* be played: England vs Spain

Answering the eternal questions - 2

Answering the eternal questions...

World Cup games as they *should* be played: North Korea vs South Korea

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Are you really a urologist, or are you just taking the...

Spotted on Indonesia's roads...

Misfortunes - the complete set of three...

Oriental women - widely admired, widely misunderstood...

New programme ideas for 2010

Nude X-factor Big Brother drugs terrorist Avatar

Americans - what the **** is wrong with them?

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My mother - her part in WWII

Into the wild west

Lookalikes

A phone call I didn't really want to have to make

Boyo - Les cahiers de conversation, trois

A new love

"Daddy, what's your favourite action film?"

Boyo - Les cahiers de conversation, deux

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"Daddy, what's your favourite rom-com?"

"Daddy, what's your favourite family film?"

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An opportunity sadly missed

Punfight at the OK Corral

Lookalikes

The Great Indonesian Novel - 2

That Malaysia-Indonesia spat - a bluffer's guide

A once-in-a-lifetime experience!

The Great Indonesian Novel

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Swine flu. Have I had it?

After the striking success of my last fossil-themed song...

Flights we have enjoyed.

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"Daddy - why are there no pop songs about fossils?"

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One song in the style of another - 5

The Romance of the Stage

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How self-centred am I?

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Please help me settle a family argument...

Colonel of the month - February

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L'esprit de l'escalier

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Colonel of the month - January

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Lookalikes...

One song in the style of two nutters...

People who annoy me....

One song in the style of another - 4

Dementia

World Cup games as they should be played: England vs Spain

World Cup games as they should be played: North Korea vs South Korea