It didn’t know what it wanted to be. I wanted to like it more but couldn’t.
“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him” - Jonathan Swift
Viz’s Spoilt Bastard spins his wheel of fortune.
Ignatius J. Reilly has a ’singular worldview’. He is an unemployable 30 year old; spoilt, corpulent, belligerent, verbose, a hypochondriac, windy and frequently ‘assaults the glove’. Ignatius believes that he has the answers but ‘Fortuna’s wheel’ is forever spinning downwards, taking him with it. The story reveals that it is rarely, if ever, Fortuna that debases Ignatius’ life, and all who come across him, it is Ignatius.
All the characters in the book are not believable as real people but, given the quantity of pages which are allocated to them, each become fully realised cartoons and fun to know. Ignatius’ Adrian Mole/Spoilt Bastard paragraphless and tiny-fonted monologues go on too long and nearly made me give up on the book mid-way through - I’m glad I didn’t.
Worth the time investment.
Lance Corporal Tommy ‘Nutcase’ Atkins VC, has died at the age of 93. In June 1944, under heavy fire and having run out of bullets, Atkins attacked and captured a German machine gun emplacement in the dunes of Juno beach armed with only a ration book and a packet of matches…
Until a few years ago, the broadsheet obituary pages always contained a story such as the one above. At every rank of the three services, ordinary young British men did extraordinary things during the middle decades of the 20th century and were then demobbed to run a factory in the West Midlands. They have all now died - or so it seems.
I, personally, while recognising their talent and energy, can’t get excited about recently deceased captains of industry and noted members of the art world, to whom the obituary pages are now exclusively devoted. What that says about my attitude to human achievement is probably too primitive to articulate.
To the Atkinses; them were the days.
Alice Francis and I very nearly won the London 10K yesterday, with a time of 1:02:16.
After hearing of the troubles at Marks and Spencers, I thought I should visit a branch to see if I could pinpoint the problem and offer some much needed advice to the management team.
On entering the Menswear department I immediately spotted a rack of ‘work ready’, perfectly respectable khaki coloured chinos at a sale price of £9.50. This is when my hitherto latent patriotism kicked in.
I was well aware at the time of purchase that my action was highly commendable, for the following reasons:
1. Britain’s high street needs positive and forward thinking chaps like me to boost morale in the retail sector
2. The speccy four eyes slightly misshapen checkout girl looked thrilled to see me at her till so on a micro scale I boosted the positivity in the local area by a factor of at least one
3. My debit card transaction will keep nitwits in London’s Docklands busy monitoring the bank’s database and therefore boost the vibrancy of our capital city as a centre of international finance
4. M&S trousers are manufactured exclusively in the West Midlands. Thus I have kept some non-witted, copper-skinned, garble-tongued harlot from getting pregnant and wasting her life in a fugue of vodka and baby effluvia for as much as 10 minutes.
5. It’s one in the eye for the Americans and probably the French too - who can only dream of such reasonably priced trousers
6. Wearing the trousers in the office will increase my bearing as a consummate professional and motivate my colleagues to even greater heights of achievement than even they have magnificently achieved to date
7. My eye for a bargain is the first line of defence against ‘Rip Off Britain’ and as such the hard working and oft-maligned officials at the trading standards department will directly benefit
8. I also bought a new T Shirt from Gap, which contributes to the physical and mental well-being of the youth of our former colonies on the Indian sub-continent.
Those trouser weren’t for me.
I line up the shelf and mark where I need to make the holes. The drill is set to hammer - earmuffs are on. I wedge myself against the other wall and tense up. The drill can’t move anywhere but where I want it to - straight in, nice and easy.
Raaaaarrrr! - OK, that first one’s a bit rubbish, the rest will be better.
Raaaaaarrrrr! - Hmm, that one is nearly a centimeter from where it was supposed to be.
Raaaaaarrrr! - See, that one’s fine.
Raaaarrrr! - Blimey, there’s nothing behind this paster board and will a rawplug work OK if the hole is on the squint and there’s a massive cave where there used to be bricks?
Why won’t the screws go in? Why does the rawplug stick out of the wall by half a centimeter? Why do the screws just spin when I try to tighten them? Was filling the hole with No More Nails a good idea? Why is the shelf listing to starboard so much? This thing will never support anything.
Gah!
Shocking, in the early sixties.
The synopsis sounded promising, Rabbit, real name Harry Angstrom, was a lauded sports star at college. However, once out of school, he finds that being successful at basketball isn’t enough to make him successful in life. He isn’t satisfied with his humdrum existence and runs off. I know people like that.
This is the book that launched Updike’s career. The profile it achieved was probably a lot to do with the amount and type of sexual content. To a modern reader, having soaked in exponentially increasing levels of abstracted and exaggerated filth/gore presented through art in the fifty years since the book was published, it isn’t all that outrageous. Running off with a prostitute and getting her up the duff seems to hark back to a golden age of romance nowadays. Even the dramatic climax of the novel, butter fingers Janice and her less than textbook baby bathing arrangements, is just a bit unpleasant rather than book burning terrible.
Couching the bump and grind of Rabbit’s not so atypical as to be unbelievable sex life, is the prose. It felt like an exercise in being a smarty pants. There were too many adjectives, too many rambling monologues, it clunked and it was dull. In the self-indulgent ‘Afterword from the Author’, Updike seemed smug about the tense he chose to write everything in. Maybe that persistent tense is what made the book so boring - a 300 page monotone. In addition to being a jumped up literary geek, I imagine that the young Updike must have quite fancied himself doing the things that Rabbit does and as such the book is a visit to his small town America fantasy world.
I’ve got a much better book to read next, thank crikey.
It’s not half as good without cut away footage of Tim Henman’s comely wife looking resigned to Timbo’s inevitable walk of shame.
All we’ve got now is Andy Murray, who is too miserable and ugly to even get a girlfriend - so what’s the point of it?
(For part 1 click here)
In the early 2000s, it started to go wrong.
With the natural limitations in innovation almost reached, the advantage of being an athletic adventurer, rather than an adventurous athlete, began to diminish. The door was opened for the pointy headed geek obsessive to prevail with their soulless practice and repetition of what they knew would win competitions. At every event, more people appeared who had never battled tigers in the Hindu Kush, wrestled bears in California, women in New Zealand or anacondas in the fetid jungles of South America. The dullards had come: And they would win.
Alongside the implications of development maturity within the sport, its ability to hold the rest of the paddling world’s attention began to wain - interest in watching a man spin on his head 30 times can only be sustained if one has a hope that on the 31st rotation something extraordinary could occur. The question began to be asked within the sport, what could it do to hold or increase its position?
The dullards (adventurous athletes) argued themselves purple that the sport needed to be more accessible to the media and more professional. The diminishing band of athletic adventurers proposed that the sport needed to travel to some far flung corner of the world, somehow, where there happened to be a humongous great big wave, where, if a man were going to spin on his head 30 times at least he would be doing it ‘large’ while also manfully dealing with dysentery. Diarrhea and 36 hour bus trips, bouncing amongst the reek of chickens and unwashed humanity, is not something that the organisational types within the dullard contingent generally favour and as a result they came up with a million (crap) reasons why it would not be a good idea. The dullards won - it was inevitable.
A succession of minding bogglingly dull World championships followed, which motivated the adventurer types to dust off their creek boats and do something more interesting instead. This final exodus of the original participants sealed the fate of competitive freestyle. When the International Canoe Federation (ICF) came calling, there was essentially no one left to say no.
The ICF is the organisation that has administered disciplines such as slalom and white water racing since time immemorial. The rules of those sports were essentially set before I was even born. It institutionalises torpor and had every promise of doing the same to freestyle: it is a body wholy unsuitable to dictate how a sport whose future in not yet certain runs itself. The ICF is committee led and even less accountable to the sports it represents than the body that at that time administered freestyle. What the ICF wants, it gets.
The ICF promised the dullards money, international recognition and status. Some of the dullards had got it into their big fat heads that freestyle was Olympics material and as such alignment to the ICF was the appropriate course to take: so they took it.
It wasn’t providing money that was top of the ICF’s priorities for freestyle. One of its first actions was to start a programme of drugs testing the ‘athletes’ at competitions. Drugs testing freestyle paddlers should be held in the same contempt as the police turning up at Abbey Road while the Beatles recorded Revolver. Creative types are attracted to risky activities, which includes drugs (recreational). It might not help their performance but it’s part of who they are.
Although going to the wave with your mates for a session is still great, the dullards have steered the competitive sport of freestyle into a backwater from which it will never escape. It’s now even less interesting than slalom to the vast majority of the paddling world. The public at large, if they were to ever see it, would probably try to throw a rescue belt at the ‘athlete’ fearing they were drowning or having a fit (or just failing to paddle upstream). The hey days of limitless innovation are long gone and if the dullards and their descendents ever do find themselves wrestling tigers in the jungle somewhere, no one is going to care.
The house is getting back together (note jaunty angle of door). Elaine in the White Room.
These two, Charlotte and Socks, no longer detest the very notion of each other and in fact now rarely go anywhere without the other.
