Bring Back the Battle of the River Plate

A pocket battleship - HA HA HA

I was shocked and dismayed to discover that the naval battle recreated in Scarborough’s Peasholm Park in the “Scarborough Naval Warfare” event is now presented as fictional.

Because ever since I heard that a park in Scarborough staged a re-enactment of the Battle of the River Plate, I have been yearning with a passion to go and see what must have rated as one of the most randomly bonkers events going.

What does the very name “Scarborough” evoke, more than the 1939 South Atlantic encounter between the German commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee and Commodore Harwood’s Force-G? Nothing, obviously.

Tancred and I recently pitched up in Peasholm Park. Roger Jr had fallen off his scooter and was being examined in Scarborough hospital within an hour of our arriving in the North Yorks Moors on holiday. Elvira was in attendance, and the youngest and I were attempting to salvage some sort of pleasant leisure out of the whole accursed experience.

Roger Jr was fine, by the way – and that hospital’s bad reputation was, as far as we could see, entirely undeserved.

The Naval Warfare event wasn’t on that day, but the ships were out in the lake. Apparently, they are operated by council employees. People’s council tax is being spent training miniature sailors, for god’s sake.

I know that most people today would probably have no idea what the Battle of the River Plate was, or would give a toss if they did know. And that's probably why it was changed.

SCUTTLE! goes the real Graf Spee

But it seems a terrible shame that they – whoever “they” are – have just turned this event into a demonstration of little boats pretending to fight in a lake, rather than a lunatic commemoration of real history. 

As a Symbol, I Can Be Incorruptible, Everlasting

Dinner dinner dinner dinner: The Batman

Elvira and I watched The Dark Knight Rises last weekend. If you know us, you’ll know that our having gone to the cinema to see it when it first came out was a big deal – we don’t get out much.

And these films today are so bloody long that you need to watch them twice to make sense of them.

The conclusion was that we liked it more second time around than first – not least as (i) knowing the plot twist helps you look out for the signs and (ii) we had braced ourselves so as not to start laughing every time Bane speaks.

Two things will I say about the Blu-Ray experience:

• Just take me to the main menu. Do not FORCE me to watch trailers by telling me it’s “forbidden” to skip through them. Forbidden by whom?
• Special features you have to download? Piss off. Why do you think I’m still watching discs at all?

Re the above: Lovefilm – sort it out. Because I will ditch your punk ass and go to Netflix just like I ditched Blockbuster for you. 

Anyway, it started me thinking...which is always a bad sign in any piece of entertainment media.

In these films (I won’t call them movies because this is ENGLAND NOT AMERICA) the Batman could be anyone.

I say “the Batman” rather than “Batman” not to show my complicity in the idea put across by these films that featuring a man who dresses up as a bat is not inherently ridiculous. No – I say it because "Batman" cannot be anyone: he is, of course, Adam West.

So, the Batman could be anyone because he’s a symbol of something rather than an individual. Which means that the boy from Third Rock from the Sun can be him in the next one.

It occurred to me that this is an idea that our politicians need to adopt. Because every time a political idea gets out and achieves some sort of popular support, the media tears apart the politician at the forefront of that idea’s movement on the basis of his or her human frailties.

So the theory goes – and let it not be said that ODHSNM is unbalanced politically (psychologically is another matter) – UKIP’s ideas are implicitly invalidated by the “colourful” lives of their candidates, or the idea that Amazon and Google ought to be some sort of tax is invalidated by the MPs quizzing them taking perfectly legal and rational measures to minimise their own liabilities. 

This being the internet, we might as well see that through to the Reductio Ad Hitlerum and declare that vegetarianism was to blame for the Holocaust.

My point is that the failings of the person putting across an idea do not necessarily condemn the idea itself. 

So politicians – put on a mask, and become a symbol of your cause instead of a mere mortal! 

Just like the criminals of Gotham City can’t kill a symbol, an idea can’t be caught avoiding tax, molesting children or strangling prostitutes.

POST SCRIPT: This is my 150th post - please help me to celebrate by sending me money or booze. Preferably money. No vouchers. 

People who Smell

One of the worst things about summer – with the obvious exception of hayfever – is that hot weather makes people sweaty.

And a proportion of those people who are sweaty (many of whom can, in fairness, be identified on sight) really start to smell bad.

Now, many of these people will actually be smelly all year round. But in the same way that if you make a bottle of horrible wine cold enough, you can’t taste how bad it is – the usual cold weather has the merciful effect of keeping their stench down to a level where only intimate contact would uncover it.

I realise that at a time when the global economy is in a coma and many parts of the world are exploding in protest, complaining about the body odour of others probably marks me out as a rather trivial person.

Well to that all I can say is, if you want to carry on gathering in the streets and getting battered by the police, be my guest. After all, hundreds of years of experience of it having absolutely no effect whatsoever on power notwithstanding, this might just be the time that waving a placard and being hit on the head achieves something momentous.

Water canon: not always a bad thing

I have nothing to say about these global protestors at the moment unless they smell. Which some of them probably do, while others don’t.

This is not a complaint about homeless people – who have an excuse. 

Water is widely available here in the UK. Soap, deodorant and other means of preventing your carcass from giving other people migraines are inexpensive. Using them is a matter of basic human politeness, the same as not cuffing passers-by around the back of the head.

Can you not tell that you smell like a bin bag full of decomposing vegetables on a hot summer’s afternoon? Do you like it?

If ever I get onto a train with broken air conditioning, I can be assured that the hulking, wall-eyed, polyester-clad, adult virgin staggering down the aisle is going to sit next to me. And he’s going to smell like he’s been wearing the same clothes for a year and has a leaky catheter about his person. And it’s going to get hotter and hotter.

The Bhagavad-gītā tells us “we are not these bodies”.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know we are responsible for these bodies. 

Toddler Strategies for Business Success

It’s every parent’s biggest worry: am I responsible for spawning the antichrist?

The period when your conviction that your little darling is not - in fact - the Beast of Revelation come to bring about a reign of terrible darkness across the world is really put to the test is commonly known as the “Terrible Twos”.

A more accurate description would of course be “childhood, taken as a whole”.

This may be overstating things. I speak not from personal experience here – the eldest of my own brood is but a fiveling – but from that tried-and-tested mix of bigoted exaggeration, wilful blindness to nuance and deliberate trolling which is the hallmark of blogging.

As Marx said in his Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

From a philosophical point of view, I am pretty sure that I have got the whole of toddler psychology worked out.

Unfortunately, I have yet to ascertain how put the crucial insight - “they always work out what will wind you up the most, and then do it” - into action.

Toddler reasoning is essentially unanswerable. There is no reasonable response to hyperventilation, uncontrollable crying or just shouting "BUT I WANT IT!"

I am surprised then that, given their mastery in manipulating human behaviour, no one seems to have seized on the business strategy applications of leading successful toddlers.

Why go through a long and delicate negotiation when a public tantrum has been proven time and time again to get you what you want?

Or suppose you have botched a big client presentation – why not blame your sibling?

Remember, there is no question or challenge that can’t be answered with “but he did x, y, z first ” once you have given up on the idea that you are inhibited by:

• The need for things to be true; or
• The need for parts of your overall argument to have any relation to one another or the point you are defending.

I can’t believe that more toddlers are not leading FTSE 100 companies, given that like most CEOs they are, at heart, innumerate psychopaths.

And now...two jokes

I have a load of maps on the wall of my office. I do like a nice map.

I just turned my head to look at one and my eyes immediately alighted on the part of Egypt shown to the left.

Sacre bleu! So Dora the Explorer is really set on the Suez Canal.

Bridge, Crocodile Lake, Abu Sultan.

Say it with me: Bridge, Crocodile Lake, Abu Sultan.

So you tell Dora... [And so on]

I'm now looking hard for the real-world locations of Wizzle Mountain and the Dancing Forest.

Moments later - out of the window this time - I saw that First Group have a bus called "Chris Moyles".

I'm pretty sure there's a joke there somewhere, but I will leave you to fill in your own details.

Space Raiders

I have never bought a pack of Space Raiders, nor do I know anyone who has. I am nevertheless very familiar with the image to the left.

Which led me to wonder – or “got me to thinking” I might say, if this was “Sex and the City” and not “Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.” – why are there empty packets of this low-price, corn snack in my back garden?

And outside Tancred’s nursery?

And – in fact – every damn place I ever look, why is there a discarded pack of Space Raiders?

They say that in London, you are never more than 6 feet away from a rat. I’m not sure if this is true. It would probably be true if you substituted “a rat” for “a dickhead”.

Well, I would hypothesise that between you and the rat – or dickhead – there is at least one screwed-up, indestructible, radioactive-smelling bag with a picture of an alien on the front of it, which the rat (dickhead) is avoiding.

They’re everywhere. I can feel those over-sized, black, almond-shaped eyes on the back of my neck right now.

I have two theories about this.

The first is sociological.

• Premise 1: Space Raiders are the crisp of preference for the sorts of people who throw empty crisp bags on the floor.
• Premise 2: Space Raiders are cheap.

You may be wondering how, unless I handle these empty crisp bags – which is, to me, only marginally less revolting a prospect than handling discarded underwear – I know this.

Well, I did actually Google Space Raiders this morning. That’s the problem with the internet. You come up with all these ideas about what things might be and why they might be, then you Google it and you find out the truth (or something like the truth).

It is the death of the imagination and of memory, when you can just find out the reasons for something or what something you half-remember was really like with a few keystrokes.

Marcel Proust would have had literally nothing to do with his life if he’d lived in the internet age. He could have just Googled “Madeleine smell” and got four million results.

Anyway, I disgress. I learned from the Space Raiders Wikipedia page that they are:

“A British cheap snack food, intended to fill the same niche market as crisps”

Which seems to the untrained eye an unnecessarily cautious description.

So Space Raiders are cheap and are eaten by people who drop litter. You do not see anywhere near as many discarded packs of, say, Waitrose Hand Cooked Sea Salt crisps.

Get to the point: Space Raiders are prole feed. They are eaten by people for whom a tracksuit is formalwear and whose bin is the great outdoors.

Malevolent little eyes...

OK, that’s theory number one. Coherent? Well-reasoned? Yes, but theory number two is MUCH more ambitious.

Space Raiders packs are not the abandoned containers for low-cost crisp-style corn snacks AT ALL.

They are in fact an invasive species of fungus or algae with astonishing powers of mimicry.

Stay with me. Let’s assess the evidence (you will by now be familiar with what I call "evidence"):

• No one I know or who you know has ever eaten any.
• No one knows how they got where they are.
• No one is willing to touch or remove them to find out once and for all if they are what they appear to be.

I believe that back in the 1980s Space Raiders were a real brand of crisps, featuring cartoon intergalactic pirates and shit like that. Natural selection has favoured members of this invasive species which encourages people to leave it alone – and so they have grown gradually to resemble the most unpleasant kinds of litter, re cheese-stink plastic bags.

They’re an algal bloom, spring from the contaminated earth like a red tide. That alien face is the plant world’s crude attempt to replicate the appearance of a Monster Munch monster – and it has succeeded to the degree that no one wants to look closer as soon as they have established what they think they’re looking at.

Do not touch, or it may release its spores in your face

I find it astonishing that mainstream science has not recognised this. We are all in terrible danger. Space Raiders are coming. 

More Lost Soles

Has it really been a month? Well, yes.

What have I been doing all that time? From what is about to follow, you would draw the conclusion that I had been lurking around woodlands inspecting litter.

That is not untrue, but it is a rather one-sided picture. I have been doing other things as well, many of them connected with my secret “real world” identity.

Apologies, then, if (i) you missed me or (ii) you thought I really was the 12th Century Norman king of Sicily.

And with that preamble still ringing in our ears, let us return to the mysterious world of abandoned clothing.

“Do we have to?” I hear you cry. 

To which I reply, "shut up".

OK, here we go - every parent's minor irritation: the lost single glove. No story here. Kids do it all the time. That's why some (insane) parents attach their offspring's gloves together on a piece of elastic. Clearly, getting beaten up every day of winter is a price worth paying to avoid having to buy a new pair. 

I don't know what this is and so I can't even begin to speculate about its story. 

Naturally, I don't touch any of this stuff. I might be strange enough to photograph stuff I find lying in the woods and in the gutters, but I do draw the line at physical contact. 

Is it a shirt? Is it some pants? Is it a onesie? No, I don't think it's a onesie. 

I suppose I will never know. 

This is a good one. A hoodie up a tree. Who left it there? Was it too hot? Why up a tree? I hypothesise that someone was playing football (or possibly kabbadi - why isn't that on TV any more?), took their top off and forgot all about it. 

Unlike most of my "captures" this looks pretty clean. Can't have been out in the elements for long. Perhaps someone came back for it shortly after this picture was taken. 

Now this is quite a haul. One boot, one sock and a pair of waterproof trousers. The other boot I found a few feet away, in case you were wondering. 

Oh, you weren't? Well, that's where it was anyway. 

I cannot begin to imagine the circumstances that would lead someone to take off their overtrousers, their boots and one or both socks while in a Yorkshire woodland. 

Well, I can imagine them. But I can't imagine them not needing to put them all back on again after finishing in order to get home without being caught. 

There comes a point I suppose where the most perturbing fact about all this becomes, not the never-to-be-told stories of the lost garments - but with what appears to be an unhealthy obsession on my part. 

It was funny to begin with. Especially when it was pants. Look, here are some more! Left in the middle of a footpath! 

But it's starting to look peculiar now. I think I had better stop.