Snake-oil And Nutrobabble

You might well think that with so much real trouble in the world it's a little superficial to worry unduly about T.V. programmes, but every so often the schedules take on a character so horrific that it pushes war, famine, pestilence and the destruction of the planet's ecosystem into the background.

Specifically, there's You Are What You Eat, hosted by "Dr." Gillian McKeith. It has been suggested that Gillian's doctorate is the kind you get by sending off a coupon from a Cinnamon Grahams box with a fat cheque, but I'm less bothered by her qualifications or lack thereof than the fact that she's a whining self-righteous rat-faced Scottish bitch with scruffy hair who makes a living stalking the airwaves peddling snake-oil to the stupid and gullible.

On the "Frequently Asked Questions" page on Gillian's website you can find the following exchange:
Q. The Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex - do I take it as a course of medication? What's the recommended dosage?
A: Follow directions on the label. It may be taken regularly or when needed. It’s food from plants, and thus nourishing to the organs, energising, strengthening and totally safe.

Note the reassuringly scientific tone of "it's food from plants, and thus nourishing to the organs." And yes, the Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex allegedly does what the name suggests - it helps you to get It up. There are probably other Complexes on the website to help you keep It down, stop It pointing off to the left, or make It whistle Camptown Races. Dr. McKeith may sell magic stuff that will make It a size, shape and colour so otherworldly that It looks like something dreamed up by H.P. Lovecraft. As I said earlier, Gillian peddles snake-oil.

Anyhow, back to You Are What You Eat. Every week Gillian visits a fat person who has an unhealthy diet, humiliates them, talks a lot about poo and gives them advice, most of which is blindingly obvious. The rest is just pseudo-scientific nutrobabble*. This week the subject of Dr. G's derision was a woman who, at eighteen stone, was around eight stone (or a complete small person's worth of lard) overweight due to a diet composed entirely of cakes and chips in enormous quantities.

"Stop eating cakes and chips!" cries Gillian. "Eat more healthy stuff!"

"Ohmigod!" squeals the fat person, weeping with gratitude. "Dr. Gillian has shown me that my fatness is caused by eating cakes and chips in enormous quantities, something I did not know already because of my immense stupidity. This will change my life. Or at least reduce the number of cakes and chips in it."

Before that, of course, we have to listen to the scrawny Scottish cow talking about bodily functions. "Do you fart a lot? Are they smelly?" The fat girl shamefacedly admits that, yes, she does, and yes, they are, and is then dragged off for colonic irrigation, which of course we get to watch. Transparent tubing. That's all I have to say.

Later the same evening there was a programme following the experiences of four heroin addicts as they went cold turkey. Live.

I didn't watch that one.

*pronounced "newtrobabble".

The Five-And-A-Half Bugbear Man

The trouble is there are just too many things to worry about, what with the streets of London being full of ugly blokes with beards wanting to cut our heads off, retired terrorists in Northern Ireland whining about not being allowed to form a government despite being blatantly unfit to do so, and all manner of terrifying apocalyptic stuff going around. It's depressing, but taking your mind off it's easy - just watch a T.V. programme about really fat people!

And not just any ordinary fat people. This wasn't some slightly plump mum from Basingstoke needing to lose ten pounds to restore her confidence. This was Patrick Deuel, the Half-Ton Man. When filming began Patrick weighed 78 stone, which translates on my calculator as 1092 pounds, or about five and a half of me. Patrick, unable to walk (or in fact stand up, or lie on his back without suffocating under his own lard) looked a lot like someone piloting his own hovercraft from a prone position. With a life-raft on his back.

Strangely, perhaps because of his helplessness and immobility, Patrick was less disgusting to look at than you'd expect, so you couldn't really begin to hate him properly until you got to know him. Then it became apparent that what we had here was Jabba the Hut, but uglier and without the charm. After being carted off to hospital Patrick lost a lot of weight (about three people's worth to be exact) but still remained convinced that his bulk was due to some sort of tragic genetic twist of fate rather than being down to the consumption of the fifteen thousand calories a day shovelled into him by his wife, who was not only a bit of a monster herself but also clearly completely insane.

The strangest thing about the programme was that nobody grabbed this imbecile of a woman by the ears, slammed her head against the wall and screamed "WHY DID YOU KEEP ON FEEDING HIM, YOU EVIL TWISTED FUCKING MORON!? After Patrick had been allowed to come home (still huge and pretty much unable to get around unaided), his wife had the task of monitoring his diet. It went like this:

Interviewer: "So have you got Patrick on a special diet?"
Wife: "No, not really. It's just a question of counting the calories."
Interviewer: "So how many calories are in that?"
Wife: (Staring blankly at a pan containing five poached eggs.) "I have no idea."

Good luck with the weight loss, Paddy, me boy.

The Next Piece Of Dross

The other night (Tuesday) I found myself slumped in my customary TV-viewing position on the sofa (head and pelvis at roughly the same height, beer within easy reach, you know how it goes). There had been a certain amount of negotiation required beforehand, because I wanted to watch what turned out to be a light-hearted and pretty dopy documentary based on Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In a Boat at nine o'clock.

Now, my stepdaughters are highly intelligent girls, but you'd never know it from their choice of TV programme. Their preference for nine o'clock viewing was Teenage Tourette's Camp, but after a few minutes of blustering, whining and, eventually, sobbing, I got my own way. The downside, however, was that as a compromise at eight o'clock we all sat down to watch My Child Can't Stop Eating, which as a title gave a pretty good idea as to the subject-matter. I'd sneered at the programme title earlier, on the basis that the TV production companies churn out crap at such speed that they don't have time to think about what to call the next piece of dross. ("Oh, look, just call it People Having Accidents And Hurting Themselves A Bit But Not So Seriously That You Feel Bad About Laughing and leave it at that. What's the next one?")

Being a pompous middle-aged snob I'm not happy with the direction popular TV's taken over the last few years, in particular the "reality" stuff, which, call me old-fashioned, seems no more than giving viewers the opportunity to either laugh at or be smugly appalled by people whose houses, figures, lives, children, finances or personalities are more fucked-up than their own. Of course in my part of Surrey people probably see these shows as aspirational lifestyle guides. They won't get to laugh at anyone until Bankrupt Zombie Lepers hits the screen. But I digress.

Anyway, despite my stepdaughters not having any Weight Issues that I can see (although I grant you a jowly middle-aged 200-pound bloke is perhaps not the best judge of these matters), they seem to enjoy looking at fat people on TV, so we began to watch My Child Can't Stop Eating. I'd joked beforehand "I don't understand the problem. Why don't they take their food away? Or do they just start on the pets and the furniture?"

Well, actually, they do. Pet food, anyway. It turns out that they suffer from Prader-Willi syndrome, which not only leads to reduced IQ and severe learning difficulties, it also prevents the production of the chemical which stops you feeling hungry when you've eaten enough, and also, in a final fit of spite, slows the metabolism of the sufferer so that they can gain weight on nine hundred calories a day while wanting to consume about nine thousand. Not only has the condition a name you can snigger at, it has a nasty sense of humour too.

It's possible that the programme had an uplifting and life-affirming message in it somewhere, but it was just too depressing, so we turned it off. No respite from Terrible TV though, as the alternative choice turned out to be Gillian McKeith's New Year Detox, of which more later, perhaps.

What do you think Teenage Tourette's Camp was about?

Tif?

Tif, poet and sometime visitor to this site, seems to have shut down her blog. I rarely commented on Tif's stuff because I could never think of anything intelligent to say about it, but it was apparent, even to me, that the girl had talent.

As Libertybob has pointed out, Tif's decision to shut the shop seems to have something to do with harassment from an ex-partner. A link to his blog suggests him to be a violent moron, and it angers me to think of all the bright sparky women in the world who have had their lives ruined by stupid, controlling men who, rather than celebrating them, feel somehow threatened.

I hope Tif is okay, and I also hope that she continues to write, if not for our benefit, at least for her own.

I also have to confess that I'm childish enough to want to go onto the moron's blog and call him names. I'm fighting the urge, but it's tough.

In Borneo

Great excitement amongst wildlife enthusiasts this week as they've discovered a new species of carnivore in (on?)Borneo. (The in / on thing's been concerning me since the news reports this morning. Presumably on the basis that Borneo's an island the reporter said "on Borneo", but it's a pretty damn big island, so I'm more comfortable with "in Borneo". After all, you don't say "on Australia".)

Anyway, they have a couple of photos of this thing, which is described as being slightly larger than a domestic cat, red in colour, with long back legs and a long fuzzy tail. Sounds completely terrifying to me, but then as you know I'm even unsettled by chipmunks. And the word "carnivore" covers a multitude of sins. If this thing eats slugs and a few mice then I'm comfortable with it, but what if it has a deep-seated urge to feast on human flesh?

And suppose it stows away on a cargo boat bound for old Blighty? I could be happily making my way round the supermarket and the next thing I know some sabre-toothed ginger wallaby has leapt out of the organic bananas and ripped my throat out. These things happen.

Apparently this is the first discovery of its kind since the famous ferret-badger of 1895. They didn't describe the ferret-badger, which I was pleased about because I was upset enough already. Bet the fucker ain't pretty, though.

Thanks Suzie

Thanks to the firm-bodied young accountant's almost complete lack of workload, which gives her ample time to investigate the mysteries of Blogger, I now have some permanent links to other blogs, and will add more soon.

"Morialekafa" is a real find - a retired anthropology professor who has a fine writing style and a reassuring hatred for Bush, Cheney, and all the other faulty human beings we'd like to see loaded into a siege catapult and fired a mile out to sea.

Mmmmm, ample.

Not So Bright

I would dearly love to have permanent links to other blogs, like Libertybob, Tif and others, but I'm too stupid to work out how to set them up in my template. If any of you other Blogger users can give me simple instructions I'll be grateful. As well as better informed.

I'd also like to draw your attention to Suzie Creamcheese's blog. She's a fine big healthy girl, and her heart, like her breasts, is definitely in the right place. Ahem.

Hard Currency

Sooz and I are going to Dorset for the weekend, to visit our friends Dave and Diana who moved to a village called Winterborne Stickland a couple of years ago(thatched cottages, local inn full of colourful rustic types, slight but all-pervading smell of cow-shit, that sort of thing.)

Dave is a cartoon animator by profession, and at the height of his success he worked on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down , amongst other things. He is small, Scottish and a fully paid-up manic-depressive, and as he plays tenor saxophone he has acquired the nickname "Toots", which he bears with dignity and grace. In common with many people who have decided to move to the country, Dave now makes a living doing just about anything he can, including painting cutesy-wootsie murals in kids' bedrooms, teaching saxophone, building work and so on. As he says, "Everyone has their price and at the moment mine is two bob and a pickled egg*."

Diana is bright, sparky, and looks a lot like a Disney fairy godmother (in fact for a while I thought that Dave might have drawn and animated her rather than go out and get a real girlfriend.) She has a tendency to sing Frank Zappa numbers after a few drinks and works as an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer, which means her job is to try and help dissaffected youth(s) to moderate their behaviour before they end up dead or in jail. It's the sort of job that most of us could probably stick at for about fifteen seconds before punching someone in the mouth, so in my book she's as fine a person as Mother Teresa, and a lot more cuddly.

The other reason that I'm going to Dorset is that my guitar-player son Matt has a couple of gigs there, and I've volunteered to drive him. Sooz and I have booked a room at the inn Matt's playing at tonight, so this evening we can have dinner, watch a young white boy playing the blues like an old black man, have a few drinks and crawl straight up to bed. I'm taking my bass with me, so at tomorrow night's gig, after Matt's finished his acoustic blues and ragtime set, Dave and I, plus a few local musicians, will join him for what is likely to turn into a lengthy and drunken jam session.

It promises to be a a good weekend.



* For the benefit of overseas visitors and young people, this is an archaic expression which refers to pre-decimal U.K. currency. Any attempt to explain pre-1971 British currency to a foreigner or even to a Brit born after about 1965 will lead to an embarrassing amount of ribaldry and disbelief, but here goes...

Before we had a system with one pound being equal to one hundred pence, British currency was made up of pounds, shillings and pence, which was naturally abbreviated to "L.S.D." Huh? I know, I know. It gets worse...

There were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pennies in a shilling and therefore two hundred and forty pence in a pound. In addition there were coins worth a quarter of a penny (known as "farthings"), half a penny (pronounced "haypenny", don't ask me why), three pence (called a "thruppenny bit"), six pence, twelve pence (a shilling), two shillings (called a "florin"), and a coin which was worth two shillings and six pence and called a "half-crown". The "crown" coin, worth five shillings (or a quarter of a pound) was no longer in general circulation even when I was a child, although special occasions sometimes warranted commemorative issues. Paper money started at the ten shilling note which represented serious spending power when I was five years old.

Considering all of the above, the indigenous population of the British isles got along okay with the complexities of the currency, although arithmetic lessons sometimes got a bit tricky, as I recall. We didn't have so many tourists back then and we hated the ones we did have, so the fact that our money system rendered foreigners confused and tearful was regarded as a bonus. The old advertising trick of showing something costing £10 as £9.99 came out in those days as £9 19s 11d. There was also an imaginary unit (no notes or coins)called a "guinea", which was worth one pound and one shilling and was somehow considered to be slightly more upper-class than mere pounds, and used by expensive tailors and the like.

As well as all the above, there were slang words for some of the coins. A sixpence was a "tanner", and (getting perilously close to the point of all this), a shilling was known as a "bob". Like the "quid" for some reason it was always singular, as in "Can you lend me ten bob?" (Poking fun at Americans who say "It cost me fifty quids" remains one of the few pleasures left to the British, so don't tell your friends any of this.)

So...bearing all of the above in mind you will realise that Dave (remember Dave?) is suggesting that he is prepared to work for a very small amount of money indeed. And a pickled egg, of course, which is always worth having.

Singing Mice And Stuff

Scientists have discovered that mice have a much wider vocabulary than previously suspected. Not that they could take a philosophy class or anything, but apparently when you record their squeaking (the mice, not the scientists) using microphones sensitive to very high frequencies and then play the noises back four octaves lower, you get a series of sounds not unlike birdsong. (Why do people say "not unlike", instead of "like"? Is "not unlike" as like "like" as "quite like"? I heard someone say "not unfond" recently, and almost managed to stuff him into a sack with a dozen ravening weasels, but, alas he was oily and wriggled free.

I was surprised that the fact that mice can sing is considered to be newsworthy; after all, they did a perfectly workmanlike job in Disney movies back in the fifties and sixties. I know they had a tendency to pronounce "Cinderella" as "Cinderelly", but I have to say that's really just nitpicking considering that they probably worked for cheese, and being able to persuade your cast and crew to work for dairy products instead of hard cash has always been key to bringing a movie in under budget.

Oh, and the other item of news this week is that David Blunkett has resigned from Tony's Cabinet. Blunkett might be considered to be unfortunate because he's blind, but for the same reason he probably doesn't know how terrifyingly fucking ugly he is, so it balances out.

The News

One of the things that's noticeable when you go to the U.S.A. for the first time, apart from the fact that everything seems familiar because you've already seen it in films and on television, is that your home country ceases to exist as far as news broadcasts are concerned. When I spent a few weeks in upstate New York I quite enjoyed the U.K. news blackout, but I know people who are enraged by Americans' apparent ignorance of and lack of interest in anything outside the U.S. To tell you the truth I'm quite happy for Americans to remain blissfully ignorant about the rest of the world, because when they do decide sit up and take an interest it seems to end in tears. Or carpet-bombing. Or both.

Anyway, despite being innately grumpy I'm a reasonably fair-minded man, and I don't think the average Brit is much more interested in or better informed about the outside world than the average Yank. We don't even really care what happens in France and it's only thirty miles away, and despite paying lip service to all that European Union stuff, the rest of Europe is still, well, just too foreign.

Other Europeans aren't like us, though. We had a German couple (guests at a friend's wedding) staying with us at the weekend; her English was very good. His English was better than mine. They were highly intelligent, well informed about just about everything, and confounded national stereotyping by having a passably decent sense of humour. I don't speak any German, and all I know about the Germans is that they came second in World War Two and in the 1966 World Cup Final and that they've just elected as Chancellor a lady called Angela Merkel. (The "g" is hard, as in "angle".) I've been to Frankfurt once, but it was a business trip, meaning that rather than seeing any of the city I just saw the inside of an airport, a hotel and an office, interspersed with cab rides. All I remember is that Frankfurt airport is a dull place in which to be delayed for four hours and that the cable channel in the hotel had the most disturbingly gynaecological porn movie I've ever seen, which was about as sexually arousing as watching a cow give birth to a two-headed calf. (And if that's your favourite thing please don't tell me.)

Anyhow, back to the news. In case anyone's interested, the U.K. news items on the radio this morning included the following:

- The Government has announced plans to introduce a partial ban on cigarette smoking in public places but has chickened out of a total ban, despite its success in the Republic of Ireland, where tobacco sales have fallen by almost ten percent as a result. In England smoking will not be permitted in pubs which serve food, but will be allowed in premises which don't serve food and in private clubs, so in all likelihood tobacco consumption will not actually reduce but just move from one place to another. Parliamentary opponents of a complete ban have unexpectedly found themselves possessed of a fierce desire to protect the rights and freedoms of the individual. And an equally heart-felt and noble reluctance to place in jeopardy the £8 billion a year the Government collects in tax on cigarettes.

- Ex-Manchester United footballer George Best, famed for his phenomenal talent on the pitch (and enthusiam for alcohol, partying and long-legged blonde ladies off it) is in hospital and at death's door. George had a liver transplant a few years back but due to an oversight was fitted with only one new liver rather than the four or five connected in parallel which he needed to cope adequately with his prodigious consumption of hard liquor.

- Chris Moyles, breakfast-time radio presenter and self-styled "saviour of Radio One" now "attracts" 6.5 million listeners every day. Moyles is a pointless potato-faced twat who, unpleasant even by disc jockey standards, has managed to confound critics by being even more irritating than his Breakfast Show predecessor Sara Cox, herself responsible for more radios being flung through more windows than any other presenter since the birth of public broadcasting. Moyles is famed for being rude to and about just about everyone and everything, and manages to achieve this without once displaying a single spark of empathy, humour, or humanity. It is of course a simple matter to turn off the radio to avoid Moyles; at the time of writing, universal access to a switch which would subject him to a series of excruciatingly painful and ultimately lethal electric shocks remains, disappointingly, just a dream.

- Five hundred years after becoming extinct in the U.K., European beavers are once again living wild in Gloucestershire. Six Bavarian beavers have been released on a five-hundred acre site in the hope that they will breed and establish a self-sufficient colony. Apparently the animals were originally hunted to extinction for their fur and also, to quote the BBC, "for the pain-relieving properties of their anal-gland secretions." I don't really want to speculate on who first discovered these properties or indeed under what circumstances, but if you happen to be walking in the Gloucestershire countryside and see someone with a beaver's arse clamped to his face, give me the benefit of the doubt and assume I've got toothache.

For Tif

I haven't got much time to write just now, but I knew Tif would be keen to see a photo of the band...

Smells

Thy say the Queen thinks the whole world smells of paint because every time she goes anywhere they redecorate a couple of days before the visit.

I think that the Queen always smells of wee, firstly because she's an old lady and secondly because nobody would ever have the nerve to tell her.

Organ Donors

There was an item on the radio last night concerning the shortage of organs available for transplant; apparently we're not keen on carrying donor cards ourselves and we're also a bit squeamish about the thought of our loved-ones' squidgy bits ending up inside some total stranger. There was a lot of discussion about how to change things, but no conclusion was reached. I have a suggestion.

In exchange for a signature on an organ donor card we give every seventeen-year-old boy in the country a motorbike and just enough tuition to make him over-confident.

"You need a liver? Come into the store-room with me, I'll pick you out a nice one."

Turre

I hadn't been to Turre before, but Sooz had, and apparently it used to be a pleasant little town. Times change.

There's a lot of new building construction in Turre and as buildings going up look a lot like buildings coming down the first impression is that the town's been subjected to sporadic and inaccurate shellfire in the recent past. The air is hot and full of dust, and the skyline is ragged and unfinished and cross-hatched with cranes. Even half-finished, you can tell that the buildings aren't going to be pretty, although compared with most of the others along the Avenida de Almeria they don't have much to beat.

The supermarket shelves are stacked with HP sauce and Cup-a-Soup (although Sugar Puffs have been renamed "Globs", which is cheering for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.) Trolleys are being sulkily pushed round by grumpy fat blokes wearing Arsenal tops or by scrawny blondes with Croydon Facelifts*, big hoop earrings and those thong-height spinal tattoos which seem to be compulsory on stupid ugly loudmouthed women. One has a tattoo of a Smurf: classy. They communicate with each other by gobbling in a Sahf Lahndun dialect so untroubled by consonants that it could almost be Chinese, as in "I goh'ah noo tah'oo." They communicate with the checkout operators through a series of gestures and grunts. The Spaniards are poker-faced and surly, and who can blame them?

Some of these people are tourists, but most are expatriates who have sold up back home and have moved to Turre because property's cheap, it doesn't rain much and because there are so many other Brits you could spend the rest of your life without ever having to speak a single word of Spanish. Believe me, there is no other reason for wanting to live in Turre.

Our apartment is a couple of miles out of town and has a nice view of the Sierra Cabrera (on the far side of the inevitable golf course.) You can sit on the terrace with a beer and watch the moon come up over the hills, oblivious to the fact that Eastern European crooks have broken into an apartment at the other end of the block and are stripping it bare.

*For the benefit of my occasional Transatlantic visitors it is perhaps necessary to explain that a "Croydon Facelift" is the term used to describe the facial expression caused by wearing the hair in a dangerously tight ponytail, leading to the appearance of inexpertly performed cosmetic surgery and popularised by women in Croydon, a town in the South of England a visit to which is guaranteed to make you feel a surge of affection for your own town, no matter where you live. I would venture to suggest that a weekend in Croydon would even make Libertybob feel a measure of warmth towards Chicago.

Holiday Reading

I probably shouldn't confess to this, but on the basis that I may save someone from wasting time, I have to confess that last week, in a spirit of curiosity, I tried to read The Da Vinci Code. I'd already heard that it was poorly written, and while I'm nowhere near well enough educated to aspire to being a literary snob I have trouble with stuff that's clumsily put together. I'd also heard that it was worth persevering because of the "interesting" revelations and all that bollocks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I was uneasy from the start, because any novel which introduces the character of a masochistic red-eyed albino assassin monk in the first chapter is unlikely to turn out to be Great Literature. By the time I got to the discussion of the multitude of significant hidden references to female spirituality in the work of Walt Disney my main regret was that the copy I was reading belonged to someone else so I couldn't throw it in the pool.

So for what it's worth, my opinion is pretty much as follows: clumsy prose, laughable one-dimensional characters, superficial research, complete lack of any wit or humour, predictable "revelations". On the plus side, uhhh, no, there isn't a plus side. To sum up in the words of the late Bill Hicks, "Piece of shit. Walk away."

I walked away. I didn't finish it. I neither know nor care What Happens At The End, nor do I want anyone to tell me the identity of The Teacher. Someone commented on a radio book programme that Dan Brown has "succeeded in lowering the bar when it comes to writing a novel", and that means that Suzie Creamcheese will probably now be encouraged to finish her book and find a publisher, and quite honestly a world where that can happen isn't one I want to live in.

The Flight

As you probably know, these days the police in London are allowed to shoot you in the head for just looking a bit shifty, so when they made the usual announcement about turning off mobile phones before the flight I didn't argue, particularly as it's not that long since most terrorists had accents like mine, and also because a few minutes before, the X-ray machine had spotted that my step-daughter was trying to smuggle a weapon onto the plane, in the form of a corkscrew with a little knife-blade attachment. Fortunately she's young, white, blonde and posh, so the authorities felt it wasn't necessary to kill any of us.

I don't really understand the concern over mobiles; airlines are always reassuring us about safety, to the extent that I firmly believe that the systems are so sophisticated that pilots are only really there to tell jokes and flirt with the cabin crew. Navigation? Plane steers itself. Forget all that following railway lines stuff, type in "Almeria" and you can do the Guardian crossword and then doze off for a couple of hours. Landings in poor visibility? No problem, computers do all that. I'll bet if I had a tenner for every pilot who's "landed" a plane with a stewardess sitting on his face I'd be a wealthy man. Or at least I'd have several tenners.

Get a phone call from your mother, however, and within seconds you'll be plummeting towards the Pyrenees wishing that know-all friend of yours hadn't explained to you that the "brace" position is only used because it's easier to identify bodies that have still got their heads on.

Uneventful flight, though. No drunks, no screaming babies, no praying nuns. Being Easyjet of course there was also no legroom, no in-flight movie and no free meal. On balance, though, I'm happy to pay five Euros for a slightly sweaty chicken baguette as long as they spend the profits on basic maintenance.

A Whole Month

It's been over a month since I wrote anything on here, partly because I've been on holiday in Spain for two weeks and partly because to take two weeks holiday requires me to work like a five-year-old in a Nike factory for two weeks before that.

But Spain was an interesting mixture of good, bad and ok and I'll tell you about it within the next couple of days.

The Deal

As an Northern Irishman myself I have always felt entitled to indulge in what I would describe as "forthright" comment on the behaviour of my lying, cruel, cowardly, secretive, self-pitying, ungrateful, whining, greedy, backward, whey-faced, morally bereft fellow-countrymen, but today, the day after the I.R.A.'s announcement that it has given up murdering people in cold blood, I can only wish them well.

I wonder what has led this bunch of roguish, rosy-cheeked, twinkly-eyed assassins to arrive at their momentous decision? I can't see that there's been any real progress in terms of Ulster politics, although as it's a place where "progress" translates as "not going backwards as fast as usual", I might be failing to pick up on some of the subtleties of the situation.

Many times over the last couple of years I've tried to work out Tony Blair's rationale for supporting Bush in Vietraq; Bush's agenda was crystal-clear - after the September 11th attacks Someone Had To Be Seen To Pay, and although nobody believed Saddam was involved he was unpopular, virtually unarmed and not quite white. I don't go for the Iraqi Oil conspiracy theory - it ascribes to the U.S. administration far more guile than I believe them capable of.

But what was in it for Blair? The decision to take the country to war made him deeply unpopular at home and in the rest of Europe. Surely he must have made A Deal?

So that's it, I reckon. "George, old chum, we'll back you up in Iraq if you stop funding the I.R.A. and if they step out of line you have to let us fuck 'em up. We might even have to give Dublin a bit of a seeing-to. A sort of slight carpet bombing kind of thingy. How's that sound? All right with you, that's great. And can you make sure they know we've made this deal? That'd be lovely. Thanks, mate."

Could be completely wrong, of course. Anyway, apparently the lads are going to "de-commission" their weapons (whatever that means) although apparently they won't allow the process to be filmed or photographed because that would be "humilating", and of course it would be.

Their spokesman declined to comment on whether it would be more or less humiliating than having to hire someone to wipe your arse for you because your hands have been blown off by an I.R.A. bomb.

July 27th 2005

If my Dad hadn't had a dodgy ticker which dropped him in his tracks for good way back in 1986, he'd have been ninety years old today, probably still drinking too much whisky and wandering about singing "Minnie The Moocher". I'm absolutely sure that I was the only five-year-old in the village of Saintfield, County Down, Northern Ireland who'd heard of Cab Calloway, and much good it did me.

My Dad was an intelligent, kind and strikingly ugly man, who looked a lot like Quentin Blake's drawings of Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant, although he wasn't thirty feet tall, which was fortunate as it would have made his career as a teacher pretty much impossible. Before going into teaching he had served in the Middle East and Africa in the Pioneer Corps, which left him with admiration for the African tribes of Basutoland, a profound dislike of Egyptians and the ability to swear in Arabic, which came in handy when stray dogs got into the garden and crapped in the flowerbeds.

I'd only just grown out of thinking my Dad was a buffoon when he went and died, and I have a lot of regret that I know so little about his life as a child and as a young man. He was a teenager during the Depression of the thirties and the family moved from the North of England to London to try to find work. On the outbreak of war he joined the Army, reaching the rank of Captain and meeting Sergeant Sarah McMillan of the ATS, who ended up as my mother, was eighty-five years old last month, and is also, I know, thinking about him today.

Happy Birthday, Dad. We miss you.

Bent u zekere Greta bent geen travestiet?

You know I wouldn't lie to you, so I know you'll believe me when I tell you that I spent last weekend at the U.K.'s First International Boogie-Woogie Piano Festival. As it's a bit of a minority interest here, musicians and audience could be crammed into the village hall at Fontnell Magna, Dorset, later spilling over into the local pub, where much Woogie-ing and consumption of foaming ale continued into the early hours.

I've never had much time for the piano, believing that musical instruments should be things that you can pick up and cuddle; playing the piano has always seemed to me too much like sitting at a machine and pushing buttons. (The fact that it's a lot harder to play than the bass guitar might also have something to do with my inability to get to grips with it.) Were it not for the fact that my friend Matthew is a keyboard player and was keen to go to check out the opposition I'd probably have given the festival a miss.

Anyway, I can tell you that those Boogie-Woogie chaps are fiercely competitive and one of them was pretty damned funny for a German. They also show off almost as much as rock musicians, although playing the piano with your teeth or behind your head is not really an option. You could set it on fire, of course, but you'd need a lot of lighter-fluid to get a really satisfying blaze going.

Interestingly, apart from one Brit most of the performers were from the European mainland; two pianists from the Netherlands, one from Germany ("Now I vill tell you ze joke about ze muzzer of my vife, yes?"), and one from (I think) Belgium, plus a Dutch vocalist called Greta, who was so tall, so blonde, so pretty, with such big hair and such a sparkly frock that I assumed she was a transvestite until I got up close and took a good look at the hands and the adam's-apple. I'm fairly sure she was a girl.

After a couple of hours of Boogie-Woogie I had to suppress a desire to leap onto the stage and slam the piano lid down on the wrists of the musician, but by downing many pints of muscle relaxant and breathing deeply I was able to recover my sang-froid.

A little of that stuff goes a hell of a long way.