Long Have I Waited…

When I decided to start writing ODHSNM again, I thought I’d begin with an explanation of why I hadn’t blogged for so long.

It’s been nearly three years since I last wrote anything on here.

Three YEARS of real-world measured time.

It hasn’t just SEEMED like three years - it really was.

But then I looked back and noticed that I had opened roughly one in every three posts since 2014 apologising for not having blogged for ages.  

As if anyone cared.

So I’m not going to do that. I’ve been away for three years and now I’m back. It happened. You lost. Get over it. Etc.

To be honest, I thought about starting all over again with a new blog. Looking back at the last ten years of ODHSNM I have to cringe at some of the hot takes I’ve put forward, some of the political positions I’ve advocated and some of the pretentious drivel I have foisted upon the world.

Please feel free to search the Blog Archive on the right for something “problematic”.

I’m sure you’ll find something you don’t like.

But I decided NO!

NO!

This is all part of my “creative output” and so I’ll keep it here on the internet as a testament to the lived experience of whatever on earth I had been thinking at the time – even if I can’t figure out what that was now myself.

If I said something I no longer agree with, it’s because I’ve changed my mind.

Can you believe that? In 2020? Someone changed their mind and admitted to it?

Sometimes, I changed my mind because new facts came to my attention.

Sometimes, I realised that things I had thought were right were, in fact, wrong or incompatible with other things I think are right.

I know.

Quaint.

Anyway, there are a few good ones on here:

• the one about In The Night Garden
• the Vasectomy series
• the one about Frozen

So NO! The past happened, for good or ill. I’m leaving it there.

What you can expect on “New ODHSNM” (which we may henceforth abbreviate to NODHSNM) will be a little different from what has gone before.

Because one of the main reasons I haven’t been blogging is that I have been writing a novel.

And now it’s nearly finished.

And I’m going to release it as a paperback and an e-book in the near future.

So I’m going to write about that.

Because if there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s people writing about writing.

LOL.

Wish me luck. 

Juvenilia, Part 4

Happy chocolate egg-themed spring fertility/rebirth event everyone!

To celebrate the seasonal cycle caused by the tilting of the earth on its axis as it orbits the sun, which our ancestors symbolised as the death and resurrection of the natural world - which in turn has been metaphorically embodied over time in the various figures of Ishtar, Horus, Mithras, Dionysus and of course Attis (who chopped off his own cock and balls) - here is a photo of me when I was five years old, delighted on a trip to the zoo at seeing a seagull.

I don’t want to spend too much of your time poking fun at the self-appointed culture warriors whining about the removal of the word “easter”from egg hunts – which didn’t even happen – but it is particularly ironic that the derivation of the very word in question comes from the pagan festival of Eostre... 

Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that nothing is "pure" and everything is the product of syncretism. Which makes a lot of people either insincere or idiots. 

Anyway, on the subject of idiocy...

Going through my old school books again, I came across this story “The Nutter” – illuminated with the author’s own illustrations, in the manner of William Blake - which I would like to submit for analysis in its entirety.

Are you bored of this yet? Well I don’t care.

“The Nutter” concerns a boy named Terry, who we are told is very “dim and stupid”. The story relates the less-than-hilarious consequences of (i) Terry being given a budgie (ie he loses it) and (ii) Terry buying a model battleship (ie he loses that as well).

The only thing I can really see that Terry does wrong in the story is taking the budgie home on top of his head. His mother’s suggestion – that the correct way to carry a bird is “in a paper bag” – sounds, if anything, worse.

When he buys the battleship and puts it in a bag in his pocket, but nevertheless, loses the bits when they drop out, this just sounds like bad luck. However, his mum decrees “no more pocket money for you”.

I particularly enjoyed the epilogue – “so Terry could not go out and make a mess again”.

On reflection, I think this piece tells us not only about attitudes towards mental health in the early 1980s, but it also leads us astray. We are all Terry. The real “Nutter” is of course Terry’s mum, who thinks birds should be transported in paper bags, which is even for the imagination of a 7-year-old, stupid.

Anyway, the teacher – as you can see – thought it was “very good”.

Juvenilia, Part 3

I was born on January 30^th 1976. This is how the Southend and District News Observer chose to celebrate the auspicious occasion – with ads for exhaust pipes, a “slimming programme that really works” and ...erm....a luxury sauna and massage club. Which is almost certainly NOT a brothel. Probably. If you read the ad closely, you will be delighted to hear that "Penthouse" boasted such facilities as a "colour TV". 

Sadly, my parents did not save copies of any national newspapers from the day of my birth – just this local classified section. However, extensive research (by which I mean a couple of minutes on Google) shows that the only event of global significance occurring on my date of birth was the appointment of George H W Bush as the 11^th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Working on the Dalai Lama principle for that date, I could have been the reincarnation of EITHER Texan blues musician Mance Lipscomb or Percy Tyson "Plum" Lewis, a South African cricketer, both of whom died on the day I was born - my arrival on this plane thereby providing a suitable vessel for their immortal souls. Whether this would have been a karmic promotion or relegation for either of them, it's hard to say. 

However, when Tibetan monks presented my infant self with items that had belonged to Messrs Lipscomb and Lewis I failed to recognise them, causing me to be disqualified from the succession. One of my earliest memories is the monks’ heartfelt frustration over the wasted journey they had undertaken from Lhasa to Essex.

Speaking of lamas - this works better if you read it out loud, of course - here is a picture of me and my brother (far left) being conveyed around London Zoo by one of the popular South American camelids in 1981 or 1982 #nofilter #swag #llama

Juvenilia, Part 2

It was 1984. Return of the Jedi had come out a year ago. 

A disappointed global public had realised that an apparently great cinematic villain was not only such a poor leader that his army could be trounced by a gang of stone age teddy bears but also that – beneath his iconic helmet – he resembled a cross between Humpty Dumpty and a bruised scrotum.

It may seem incredible today, but with no immediate prospects for further Sith work, Darth Vader was reduced to doing PAs for furniture companies at sports centres in west Suffolk.  

And that’s where I met him. True story. There’s his signature to prove it.

"Never cross near parked cars" - that was his other catchphrase

Now, my parents were quick to assure me that this was indeed the “real” Darth Vader – viz. quondam Green Cross Code Man David “Stop, lookand listen” Prowse. Of course, the helmet remaining firmly in place, it could have been anyone tall.

Oh yes, it’s not all exercise books. I have loads of other peculiar fragments of my childhood to show you. 

“Peculiar fragments” being largely all there is. We have always lived far away from our wider family, and in 1987, me, my mum, dad and brother moved away from Bury St Edmunds to Boston in Lincolnshire. I was 11. I wrote letters to my friends, but that fizzled out by 1990 or so.

As a result, my sense of my early life is composed almost entirely of what I remember – without much third party corroboration at all. Where I live now, there are loads of people who have always lived in the area, who have known the friends they see every day since they were babies and whose parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on all live within a mile radius. Their senses of personal history must be pretty well integrated.

That’s not me. I’m not complaining: it is, as they say, what it is. It just means that looking through old stuff I haven’t seen for 30 years or so gives me a very weirdly vertiginous feeling, that the conscious Roger of Sicily is only a part-time tenant of this brain and that the true landlord is somewhere else entirely.  

Enigmatic, eh?

Not as enigmatic as this story about a “family of dwarfs”, who uncovered a plot by spacemen to take over the world – admittedly, while waiting in ambush to murder them with pointed sticks, which takes some of the sheen off their earth-saving heroism.

When the spacemen declare “the time to conquer the world is here”... it ends! 

That’s the last page of the frigging book! 

What was I thinking? I’d give my eight-year-old self a piece of my mind for leaving such a cliffhanger unresolved, if such a thing were even remotely metaphysically possible. 

Juvenilia, Part 1

Every day, I look at the news and wish I hadn’t. I look at social media, and I wish I hadn’t. Then 30 seconds later, I look at social media again. Still wish I hadn’t.

Back in the days when I wrote on this blog regularly, I wrote about a lot of political stuff. I can’t bring myself to do that now. The world is so horrible, so depressing and so embarrassing that I find myself unable to engage with it. I can’t even take the piss out of it. If piss-taking changed anything...well, Trump, Putin, May, Farage, Brexit, James Corden... shall I carry on?

So I’m off on a voyage of inner emigration – talking and thinking about other things, to distract myself from the disintegrating world out there. Ah, for a more innocent time...

Well.

Recently, my mum gave me some boxloads of my old school exercise books, photos, newspaper clippings. And so, I intend to share some of the highlights with you. Consider this a Bildungsroman –a portrait of the arsehole as a young man, if you will.

The picture at the top, for example, is from what appears to be my first ever school book – summer 1981, when I was in Class 1 at Hardwick Primary School. As you can see, I saw some men with bagpipes. "Nice" - I am sure you will agree with my teacher.

If bagpipes are not enough to prove that I – like Tiny Tempah – lived a “very very very wild lifestyle”, what about this? My brother’s third birthday party (he’s now 38) – which was attended by “some frends”. All of whom, it would seem, were dressed as garden gnomes. That was the 80s, young people.  

Let’s move forward in time a little. Here is an account of what I did on a weekend in 1983. If I remember rightly (and it’s entirely possible that I do not), this was the year that I vomited all over Mrs Almond as we lined up to leave the swimming pool. If Mrs Almond is reading this, I am very sorry. The memory of puking on you still haunts me.

If only I could go back to those days, when all I had to worry about was not wanting to go to Needham Market – and then being bored when I did have to go there.

Having said that, I feel that there is a real Joycean quality to the work here. Nothing much happens, but we are relentlessly, inescapably inside the consciousness of the narrator, who may or may not be unreliable. Even at eight years of age, I showed a precocious tendency towards modernism. And utter self-absorption. 

Moving on a few more years, here we are at secondary school in 1987, doing maths under the late Larry Veale. He retired at the end of that year, having started teaching at Boston Grammar in 1952. He was – quite literally – old school. Certainly, culture had changed dramatically between when I went into that school in 1987 and when I came out in 1994. 

While these days, school children occupy themselves with iPads, sexting and deradicalisaton programmes, back in 1987, we drew triangles. Lots and lots and lots of triangles. Big ones, little ones – but all three-sided and covered in angles. 

As you can see, I was shit at it.

Ban This Sick Filth

When I was a kid, I read comics like the Beano.

Before I get started, I have a confession. Once, I told people at my school that I had had a letter published in the Beano about dressing up as a ghost and frightening my family. That was a lie and I am sorry to everyone I misled. I don’t know why I lied about it – especially when it could so easily have been disproven by reference to back issues. I have been carrying that around with me for over 30 years now, and I feel a lot better getting it off my chest.

Anyway, my kids Roger Junior and Tancred also read comics. They are 8 and 6 years old, respectively. It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about how boring new-born babies are, about potty training, about pieces of rubbish found in nursery gardens. It’s like you, me, them and Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.  are all growing up together, isn’t it? It’s kind of like a Bildungsroman, only longer and without anyone ever really learning anything.

Dr Strange-Bean is not even a pun

I was glancing through Tancred’s copy of the latest issue of Mega! comic. You may not be familiar with this periodical. You may (on browsing it in your local newsagent perhaps) believe that by mistake you have picked up a 30-page advert for Lego.

The whole thing reeks of "will this do?" And I should know. 

It is not, however, my purpose today to complain about the bombardment of young children with marketing messages for Mario, Skylanders, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and whatever Marvel character happens to be being whored all over the place at any given time.

It’s not even my aim to draw attention to what appears to be the laziest photo feature I have ever seen

– this one, where Mr Bean’s face is superimposed on various pop culture figures familiar to children and a weakly punning name (involving the word “Bean”) added.

No, what I would like to draw your attention to is this cartoon strip, entitled “The Poo Crew”.

This concerns the adventures of a group of anthropomorphic stools. There they all are:

• Colonel Kernel - So called, I presume, because of the oft-remarked indigestibility of sweetcorn kernels
• MC Plopz and Big L.O.G - Some kind of faecal hip-hop collective.
• iFloat – Not really sure what iFloat’s deal is as he doesn’t seem to feature in the story. I can only surmise that he is buoyant.
• Dumpo – A kind of everyman turd, from whose perspective the story appears to be told. 
• Runny Ronnie – This name is fairly self-explanatory.

Now, this is very much the sort of thing I would have made up as a teenager. Indeed, my sons find few things in life as amusing as toilet functions. The magazine also came with a small plastic toy version of MC Plopz.

This all appeals to my non-parental side in a way, and yet I find it a little shocking. Back in the 80s or 90s, Spitting Image produced a sketch called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds”, but that was in a late-night show for adults. This is in a comic for young kids. 

I would also like to draw your attention to the liberal use of the word “fart”. When I was young, this was deemed a rude word.

Anyway, as is often the case with these things, the story made no sense at all – in the end Big L.O.G saved the day by pouring a tin of beans over himself. This frightened off the rat and snake antagonists of the strip (I didn’t catch their names) for whom a living, speaking, bespectacled shit covered in beans is infinitely more disturbing than one that is not.

Oh and before anyone asks, I am claiming the right to reproduce these images under the Fair Use terms of the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988 (as amended) – specifically Section 30 (for the purposes of criticism or review) and 30a (for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche), as well as the common law public interest defence – re the fact that parents are probably unaware of the contents of the comics they buy their kids and might be somewhat surprised to learn of them. So any lawyers reading this – go fuck yourselves.

Shocked by what I had seen, I put down Tancred’s copy of Mega! and had a look at Roger Jr’s copy of Toxic, wherein I began to read Team Toxic’s adventures in “Day of the Bottoms”.

Look at that - I got to the end of a post without mentioning Brexit or fascism. 

That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More

Bloody Foreigner - coming here wanting to know what love is

I tried not to write any more blogs about Brexit, really I did.

I’m not one of those people who want to rerun the referendum or stage a military coup to overturn the result (although I do confess to saying that a few times on June 23). I have enough respect left for democracy to accept that the rules of the game whereby if your side loses, you accept the result and move on.

Hell, I even gave serious consideration to voting leave. When I heard the result, I will confess to a little frisson of excitement about what would come next – I’ve always had a soft spot for Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction.

In fact, I now see – and I hope to god that the Americans take this lesson on board quickly –that more often than not, attempts at creative destruction just result in destruction.

In our case, of anything resembling the kind of liberal political values which have held British society together for the last 70 years and which people like me have taken for granted as defining the sort of country we live in. In the USA’s case, it could be “human life on earth itself” if that fucknugget Trump gets elected president – a proposition which still sounds like something JG Ballard would have not bothered writing a story about on account of it being too far-fetched.

Still, if we are all reduced to radioactive smears on the wall within the year, we would at least not have to witness any more parades of smirking wannabe fascists like this week’s Conservative Party conference.

No, I have gone along with Brexit. I was relatively pleased when Theresa May become prime minister, instead of Boris Johnson or any of the other maniacs left at the wheel of the clown car. I had assumed that the immigrant-baiting we’ve seen over the last couple of months was for show – to please the angry mob with promises of something, sometime, and to scare the European Commission into settling on better terms. That it was just more politician talk that would end up in nothing much.

Until this week. The last straw for me was the idea that businesses should have to report on foreigners they employ doing jobs that could be done by British people, floated by the home secretary, a person called Amber Rudd.

The scales fell from my eyes at that moment. This is really happening. They really want people to be hounded out of their jobs and their homes until they leave the country. People I had assumed were liberal-democratic politicians who would – when it counted – stand up for the values I had assumed we had in common, would genuinely rather see ethnic cleansing on our streets than put their fucking seats at risk.

The country voted, by a narrow margin, to leave the EU. It did not vote for some atavistic, blood and soil, Alf Garnett dreamworld. There must be people who voted leave who do not want what Brexit is turning out to be, who will speak out. Because to my eyes, “Brexit means Brexit” means “Brexit means fascism”.

Do not think for a moment that it couldn’t happen here. The opposition is giving up on parliamentarism in favour of a movement on the streets (and if you look at the form, Black on Red street action tends to work out badly for the lefties when things get serious). Supposedly liberal people are calling for democratic decisions to be voided and while others think that a 52-48 margin means that all discussion of what the leaders put forward is beyond the pale. 

It’s not just the Tories who are contributing to the Weimarisation of this country. We don't realise where we're heading, because we arrogantly believe that it could never happen here - because we're British. 

Are we that stupid and passive and short-sighted that we will sleepwalk into this AGAIN before the last veterans of the Second World War are in their graves?

Apparently, this is my 200th post. Happy anniversary to me.