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.