freedom costs money - Eddie the Gent's Word in Your Ear

A Nasty Shock

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 18:19:50 +0000

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.

Television

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:39:35 +0000

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

Cherie Blair Goes Pop

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:59:22 +0100

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.

Fetching the Camera

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 15:36:06 +0100

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.

Steve Seagull and the Plympton Boots

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:11:33 +0100

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.

Fountain

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:33:31 +0100

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.

Witch Landscape

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:59:05 +0100

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.

Hungarian Country

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:36:07 +0100

Looking for that elusive Hungarian cover of Galveston?

You'll be needing The Igors, I think.

Raise the antenna...

On The Rocks (April 1979)

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 17:16:03 +0100

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.

Scene Changes: Bly

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 19:05:00 +0100

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.

The Threat Board

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 11:51:32 +0100

I shan't be writing about what I've done and where I've been in Europe. Two reasons: First, such articles always, no matter how whimsical, no matter how much of a disaster the trip, always but always read as rather arrogantly boastful; Second, I have hated writing What I've Done On My Holidays pieces ever since Mr Tennyson, an otherwise excellent teacher with wild white hair, an out of control tie and a cane which he used for pointing out the words to the hymns, forced me against my will to write just such a piece about a catastrophic holiday in Wales (mumps, rain, woodlice). The experiences of one's formative years are not easily overridden.

Stingray

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 08:41:24 +0100

Steve Irwin, the chap with the irrational lack of fear, has finally come a fatal cropper in an encounter with a stingray, which he had probably only just described with wide-eyed incredulity as "grumpy". I can't help but feel a pang of regret that he's gone; normally I'm scornful of anyone in nature programming that falls short of the Attenborough (D) standard, but Steve Irwin's insane enthusiasm and total lack of caution were fairly endearing. And amusing - who can't be amused by the spectacle of an Australian being chased up a tree by a crocodile?

Escape From Europe

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 19:52:15 +0100

I have escaped! Escaped! I repeat again: escaped! I have returned to damp and cold Blighty (in fact, damp and cold doesn't quite do justice to the torrential icy downpour I experienced this afternoon, which was severe enough to stop the car in one of those annoying stuttery ways that involves red and orange warning lights and the smell of petrol and oily water and a sudden lack of motive power in an esposed wet and windy location).

Hemingway

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:04:02 +0100

Out, Hemingway.

I’ve just finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s Across The River And Into The Trees and been enormously underwhelmed by it – disappointingly so, for I had read and enjoyed his short story Hills Like White Elephants, which is a delightfully caustic examination of a relationship gone wrong in which the spaces between the words hum with meaning - it's about a couple not saying everything they need to say, and it's probably a work of genius. Perhaps a fluke, though, since Across The River And Into The Trees is a maudlin romance about a dying old colonel and his relationship with an eighteen-year-old aristocrat in (yawn) Venice. It is full of tedious euphemism, dull conversation and far far far too many commas. As I tripped over sentence after unwieldy sentence, I was reminded of James Thurber’s opinion of commas: he saw commas as “so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability” – climbing over Hemingway’s commas was tiring work, and I was glad to finish the book. The novel as a whole had struck me as being a tiny bit Dick Francis, and I had wondered if I’d missed something somewhere. I wondered if it was, as the saying goes, just me.

Kirk Adams for Governor

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:13:30 +0100

I had a dream. Not one about four little children and the content of their character - a different one. One that, bizarrely even for me, came in the form of a campaign broadcast for some backwoods American businessman ("big in logging, bringing good honest work into a good honest county for over thirty years") who wanted to become County Governor, or something. It never quite became clear. He was called Kirk Adams, and his campaign slogan was Kirk Adams - I'm your friend, which he would say with a healthy smirk on his tanned lantern-jawed face and then tip his cowboy hat back on his head as though he really was somebody's friend, but probably not yours.