freedom costs money

Today a spider scared the living daylights out of me from beyond whatever the arachnid equivalent of the grave is. It must have thought "jings, a'm feeling a wee bit oan the peeky side, a'm goan find masael a wee hidin' place fr'm which ma wee emaciated corpse can scare the shit out of some poor bugger", and it went on to select for that hiding place my gigantic teacup, which was at the back of the cupboard awaiting the winter.

Not all television is bad: The Royle Family last night was marvellous. Made me cry. Really.

I had always found the Beatles' When I'm Sixty-Four a perfectly innocent song, quite nice to listen to whilst doing something not too mentally demanding, like solving the Ripper murders or coming up with a cure for that irritating cancer difficulty. But ever since Cherie Bliar massacred it in Japan (admittedly some time ago now) whenever I hear it I see her horrorstruck I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this gob and hear her abominable staccato wail instead of the soft dulcets of that Liverpudlian chap, whichever one of them it was (they're surely interchangably annoying or dead these days, bar Ringo, who did Thomas the Tank Engine and so absolved himself of being irritating or dying, although somebody might've told Death about that). She's done for it what Niel Kinnock did for D-Ream, or whatever it was they were called. Can't be D-Ream, can it - that'd surely be the fourth bundle of five-hundred, wouldn't it? Anyway, what was I saying? It was going to be something about Pavlov's dogs and a cruel joke about the Prime Minister's wife. Tony Christie? On the subject of Tony Christie, I should like to say that I think it's pretty amazing that he's been so thoroughly rehabilitated already: acid-bath murderer to man-we-love-to-hate crooner in less than a century. Impressive, if nothing else. But the point! I had a point! Honest.

I had a most unsettling experience last night: I dreamt I was walking through a town that was more or less entirely derelict. The streets were empty and the buildings were either completely ruined or boarded-up.

As we all know, seagulls love nothing more than a bit of an aerial heist involving some unsuspecting tourist's fish & chips or candy-floss. Successful seagulls therefore invariably end up on the portly side, which can affect their ability to do their day-jobs. Steve Seagull is not such a creature. Judging by Belly of the Beast, which was on (unsurprisingly) Channel 5 the other night, Steve Seagull has had a summer where his cup hath runneth over as far as fish & chips and candy-floss is concerned, and yet still he acts just as ever he has. There he was doing his usual thing (this time the McGuffin was Seagull's daughter, who had been kidnapped by some absolute bounders with guns), but looking alarmingly like a sort of cross between Gordon Brown and Dale Winton: it was great.

Detective Inspector Aaron Cardigan peered over Sergeant Finial’s shoulder at the fuzzy monochrome image that the computer monitor displayed. It showed a back street overshadowed by vast neo-classical buildings without windows; an estate car was parked in the street, tailgate open. Finial clicked onto the next image: it showed a man struggling under the weight of what looked like a urinal. It was a urinal. Whether he was unloading it from the car or loading it was unclear; he seemed about to drop the heavy urinal. Thank god he didn’t, mused Cardigan.

Yesterday afternoon I seemed to stray into a landscape tailored to the needs of witches: It was a tangle of branches, glittering bogs and silver cobwebs, full of mushrooms and toadstools of vivid colour and inventive shape; in it I came across lizards, frogs, toads, spiders, insects of all sorts, lots of little tiny fish and the biggest owl I've ever seen. It was all, all of it together, rather surreal. The owl in particular appeared to have been waiting for me, and once it had observed me and noted that yes, indeed, I had made it safely through the wood, it revolved its head in that way owls do, flopped lazily off its branch and soared away between the trees. Formerly this was a wood I'd always found faintly sinister, but yesterday it felt uncommonly friendly. It was all very lovely.

Looking for that elusive Hungarian cover of Galveston?

You'll be needing The Igors, I think.

Raise the antenna...

The following is one of a series of articles published in Apropos, the parish magazine of Rimmington Mains throughout 1978 and 1979; entitled On The Rocks, they were one man’s lament for the loss of the Britain of his youth, a Britain that he thought ought not be lost. The author, Major Laurence Alamein, was something of a war hero, fighting in North Africa under Montgomery (he captured an airstrip practically single handedly using only a Mills grenade and a captured Axis motorcycle) and later became Managing Director of Shoshone Oil. He died at Armley in 1985.

This is a format which I have shamelessly stolen from Osbert Lancaster's Scene Changes: Great Houses of Fiction Revisited. It's really an excellent book that's worth seeking out, though I think it may be out of print now.