With The Glums

Now you will say that I don't look old enough but honestly my younger, yes younger, daughter was 21 on Saturday. So her mother and I toddled off to that London for a bit of celabratoriness with the offspring. We drunk a couple of bottles of champagne, we stayed in a nice hotel and we went to see Les Miserables. Which I have to say is really jolly good. And this song is up there with the all time great songs to get you in the mood for killing people. Now this is quite a specialised category of music but it is an important one which includes Welcome to the Jungle, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, The International and probably Jerusalem, all of which in their variousness should ensure that I've offended someone somewhere. Job done then. So gird your loins and sing along as you man the barricades.

God And Mammon



Premier League eat your heart out

Nobody, or at least nobody who has watched and understood Bull Durham, will fail to appreciate that there is a poetry, spirituality even, to the playing of competitive sport. Especially team sport. That poetry is sorely challenged by the intrusion of money but it does survive even the most extreme exposures to the forces of avarice. As witness to which please see Exhibits A and B, yesterday's AFC and NFC championship games. Pats and Giants Win Classics The day of the conference finals is a far better day's sport than the overblown and stamina-sapping Superbowl. The blood lust of home fans and the absence of the ludicrous half-time show combine to make this proper raw sport notwithstanding all the money sloshing around the players. At another extreme please also see last Friday's Heineken Cup tie at a dog track in Galwey wherein Connacht beat up a perplexed Harlequins team in a stinking gale. Brilliant. You can't make this stuff up. 

The Rise Of The New Man

Our more seasoned observers will have welcomed the return to the commentariat of that beacon of reason Viperjohn. We wish him a prosperous new year. You may gather that Viperjohn is a man for whom the adjective vituperative might have been invented but before my liberal readers hasten to condemn him, let me tell you a few facts about the man. He is one of my closest friends and I happen to know (from the privileged position of professional involvement) that he puts his money where his mouth is. My dear you simply wouldn't credit it, he actually employs people in businesses that make things. How unfashionable. How bloody laudable. I also happen to know he works his bollocks off which rather puts the Overgraduate to shame. And he can take his beer, boy can he take his beer. And he's effortlessly better than the Overgraduate at golf, the bastard.

All of which in a rather round about away gets me to today's point because what I am about to say will, I suspect, confirm him in his belief that I've gone soft in the head. Here's the thing - for the past couple of weeks I've tried to be a Monday to Friday vegetarian. I do this not for any reason of conviction but because I thought it might just be a way of stimulating some post-Christmas weight loss. News flash - if you start from the point of being a greedy carnivorous bastard who eats too much, this system can work. Hero of the experiment is the world's best vegetable - the humble leek. There's lovely.

But here is a promise to Viperjohn. In late April will come a day when we dine on Sea Food Chowder, followed by gargantuan King Rib, rounded off with a proper man's pudding and swilled down with the black stuff, a sauvignon blanc and, what else, a robust rioja. We will talk eminent good sense throughout. And we will be temporary kings.

I've just realised that my spell-checker recognises neither sauvignon blanc nor rioja. I'm sacking it.

Abject Terror ... Plus A Good Television Programme

Sometimes you should be careful what you wish for. Like for instance the lead part in an amateur production of a farce. I read for It Runs In The Family, which is one of them Ray Cooney jobbies, that is to say mistaken identity, cross-dressing and double entendre. I now face the prospect of learning a shit-load of lines and the renewed terror of being on stage. Darling I'm positively dripping with fear. As for the play, well high art it ain't but you do have to admire the dramatic craft and ear for low humour. I play an arrogant hospital consultant (oxymoron?) which shouldn't be too much of a stretch attitude-wise.

Unlikely tv star

But most importantly, today I want to urge you to watch this if you get the chance - Jonathan Meades On France. I really can't tell whether or not this is what the licence fee should be spent on but I love Meades - he's unapologetically clever, rude, opinionated and stimulatingly deadpan. Half the time I don't even know what he's on about but it's great fun watching him say it. 

200th Post

Yes, it's been that many, and not a dud among them.

Back to salaried serfdom today (in truth not as trying as self-employment had become when I ducked out back in 2008) and the day was enlivened by opening up my desk diary bearing daily one of Shakespeare's insults. I am not going to do this every day because, well, it would soon get boring for me and even sooner for you, but I do reserve the right to quote the chosen extract when it catches my fancy. As today.

Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man's appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. 

Coriolanus 1.1.178 (OpenSource Shakespeare internet edition)

I like the Roman plays, bloody good job because they will play a significant part in my thesis. In particular I like Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus. Admittedly both predilections are not unrelated to contrariness on my part but I think I can muster a defence of both these relatively neglected texts. I've blogged about Titus before so let's deal with Coriolanus. The magnificently scathing words above are close to the very first that Coriolanus utters in the play. His mood doesn't ever get any better. This is the point. His tragedy is that he cannot temporise. Like a good Yorkshireman, he knows what he likes and he likes what he bloody well knows. One's view of him depends very much on whether one shares his disdain of the great unwashed. So the play can be structured as fascist encomium or socialist dismissal or, best of all, as neither. Questions are so much more interesting than answers.

Well known Overgraduate impersonator

Here is a picture of that Charles Dance who once played Coriolanus at Stratford. He is my idea of what the tragic Roman should look like. In common with your correspondent he has also played Maxim de Winter, he on commercial television, the Overgraduate on the stage at Holly Lane United Reform Church, Erdington. Even my Mum thinks Dance was better.

If you fancy some fun with Shakespeare but can't be arsed to buy a book try the quite excellent website OpenSource Shakespeare. If nothing else use the concordance to see how many times, if at all, the bard uses your favourite swear word. 'Bum' appears on three occasions, twice in one play. But I'll leave you to find out which for yourself. Welcome to my world.

A New Discovery

Timon of Athens. A Shakespeare/Middleton cooperation according to modern scholarship; an infrequently performed piece of the canon; an alienating drama; reportedly Marx's favourite play. Well I watched the generally dependable BBC Shakespeare production this afternoon and I rather liked it. I can see why Marx would have approved. I note that the National Theatre are doing a production next summer and it will be interesting to see what the Hytner/Russell-Beale axis makes of it. Perhaps my mates at Goldman Sachs will get a mention. If I was them I'd get in and sponsor the season pretty smartish. Come to think of it they probably already have. Dumb they ain't.

In The Final Analysis

Anyone can make predictions, but only the brave (such, of course, as your correspondent) are willing to be measured against them. So here is what I said back in January:

Predictions for the year, O wise one, I hear you cry. Well since you goaded me here goes: myriad Liberal Democrats will continue to suffer political altitude sickness, some will ignore advice, look down and promptly fall off and land on Simon Hughes; England will win the Six Nations; New Zealand will finally win RWC again and Richie McCaw will go to heaven where he will immediately be sin-binned by St Peter for entering from the wrong side; I will pull my hamstring again; the Euro will implode/contract; The asset bubble in China will burst and my investment in India (which I keep meaning to make but never get round to) will look wise; Obama and Cameron will continue to refine the art of the platitude whilst doing very little of any import; finally and justifiably I will still be just as bloody cynical by the year end.

How did Ido?

• All right I admit the Liberal Democrat thing was an easy call but you have to admit they are bloody funny. At least we hear less of St Vince these days, although only because he's become so bleeding tedious.
• England did win the Six Nations.
• New Zealand did win RWC. Richie McCaw is still invisible when offside.
• Hamstring went again. Twice.
• The Euro is on a marginally slower fuse than I thought but just watch this space.
• Chinese communism must fail. This is in the greater interests of mankind. India needs to harness the strengths of its democracy to a decent capitalism which does not mimic the greed of Goldman Sachsianism. India remains the world's great hope. America and Russia categorically are not.
• Obama is a vacuous appeaser of mediocrity. Cameron is less effective. Both will still be in place in a year's time, though do not be surprised if Cameron is free of the burden of coalition.

2012? Well France will win the Six Nations now they have a decent coach. Wales will not be as good as their followers are being encouraged to anticipate. England will be half-decent which will make the appointment of a permanent new coach all the trickier. Anticipate serious civil unrest in southern Europe. My capital wealth will be further eroded by the malfeasance of others. Goldman Sachs will prosper, though hopefully not in India. GB will win 16 gold medals at the Olympics. Our press will charcterise this as failure. Public sector employees will eventually have to accept that their pensions are unsustainable and their industrial action will fail to attract its own Billy Elliot style romanticism - there will be no ballet dancing son of a geography teacher plucking at the heart-strings of the public.