Tom Stephenson

More LifeStyle!

2012-02-12T03:41:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine came into the boozer with this very impressive handbag the other day, and I have just realised that it fulfils all Grouchy's hopes and fears when he asked me if I was about to do a post on knitting, and I answered that I could rustle him something up in chain-mail. Here it is.

This extremely lightweight bag is made entirely of the aluminium ring-pulls from drinks cans, artfully woven together by starving children.

Ok, I made the last bit up, but I bet the original models were made from recycled cans in an impoverished and far-flung country before some grasping designer pinched the idea from them and bought in thousands of unused ones for his own use, shipped them out to the original inventors and bullied them into making sleek ones like this for the Western market. That's me - I like to see the best in everyone.

Anyway, I really like it - not that I would be seen dead 'wearing' one, you understand. I looked up from taking this photo and saw that one of the girls behind the bar was wearing a chunky necklace made from ring-pulls too - very bling.

If the worst came to the worst, you could always scrap it in for cash, the way metal prices are rising these days.

A few brave but misguided USAF pilots used to go into action over Vietnam (yes, sorry - it's that war again) wearing chunky, solid gold bracelets in the belief that if they were to eject from their crashing plane over Viet Cong territory, they could bargain for their lives with them.

Well, stop me if I'm wrong, but once you have been captured anyway, how are you going to stop your enemy from just taking it off your wrist - either before or after he kills you?

LIFESTYLE!!!!!!

2012-02-11T11:32:00.000-08:00

This is a rare and celebratory LifeStyle post, because I have installed a new OS system on the machine, and Cher has stopped me from looking at her low-fat suggestions, none of which appeal to me anyway (flounce).

Get some salmon fillets, skin them, then flash them up quickly in a pan until they change colour. Add salt and pepper to taste as you do this.

Then pour over some runny double cream and add the herb of your choice as you wait for the potatoes to boil.

Cook whatever vegetables you like.

Heat up the salmon and cream to finish off the cooking, then mash the spuds and serve it all out, making sure you pour the cream and salmon over the spuds. That's it.

Your guests will not believe that you have not slaved over this dish for at least an hour, nor will they believe that the only other ingredients are merely salt, pepper and herbs.

Try it - it works - that's what I am cooking tonight.

Available August 28th

2012-02-11T03:19:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks as though Cher has finally given up on me and stopped following, and it looks as though she's banished me from her site as well. I haven't dared to comment on her latest post this morning for fear of rejection and noticing that I am now down to 84 this morning, I trawled through the list to see who had jumped ship, and her name was nowhere to be found.

It has to be because of the photo of the packet of oats that I lifted from her abandoned post last night and posted up on my own, along with the finishing off of her sentence with a rather flippant serving suggestion which had John in a complete tizzy which culminated in his storming off in a huff because of the amount of times I deleted his contribution of "Huh?". I very rarely delete comments (as Chris will attest), but I just thought that when Cher did get around to looking at it, it would only compound the confusion to explain something which was unexplainable - a simple hi-jack and piss-take. Shame, really - she is my closest physical neighbor, only a few miles away from Bath, but her contributions to my scribblings had pretty much dried up anyway.

Anyway, I've torn the post down, screwed it up and thrown it in the bin now, but I doubt if that will be that. Well, I hope not anyway.

I'm just plucking up the courage to install Snow Leopard (TM) on this Mac, so this post is more of a displacement activity than anything with real substance. I suppose it is a heart-felt request for a group prayer, really. If it all goes wrong, then you might not hear from me for some time anyway, but I might make a sacrifice to the gods if it all goes right - maybe I'll put up a sacred blog which contains all the deleted comments from the past 868 posts. It would be a very short, very dull and very unpopular entry though.

I don't know how often or how deeply you ever delve into the darkest recesses of your computer, but it is a scary experience if you don't know what you are doing. I always feel as though I should take a virtual ball of string in with me so that I can find my way back again, but have never found one long enough. Apparently the corridor lighting on this latest operating system is vastly improved - let's hope they have put up a lot of signposts down there too.

The thing that Macs are known for best is their ease of use, and a lot of the development goes into making them 'idiot-proof'. The downside of this is that they tend to turn the average user into an idiot in the process, they are that clever.

I have an image of row upon row of 22 year-old geeks, sitting in air-conditioned offices in California, all mumbling to their nearest neighbor in undecipherable Beavis and Butthead-speak as they rattle off codes and cyphers late into the cicada trilling night as pre-recorded messages from Steve Jobs echo from unseen speakers around them, keeping them on message.

I wonder what will happen when those messages run out? Mr Jobs was a pretty good talker, by all accounts, so I will probably be dead before his utterances become obsolete. That image says, 'Available August 28th' - let's hope they don't mean this August.

Right - time for that prayer.

A reassurance

2012-02-10T01:55:00.000-08:00

One night in 1969 (about the same time this photo was taken - sorry for it, but read on, please), I was hitch-hiking between Farnham and Guildford - about 12 or 15 miles - when a car pulled over in the dark to let me in.

The road between the two towns is a long, almost straight stretch of isolated, high ridge called 'The Hog's Back', and the final approach to Guildford is about two miles of downhill, until it abruptly terminates in a right-angled bend just under a bridge, where it (used to) join the A3 as a T-junction.

It was only a matter of seconds before I realised that the reason the car's boot was open and up, obscuring any view through the rear window, was not because - as I first thought - he had a large object in it, but because he was so drunk that he did not know it was open.

As we rose up the couple of miles to the ridge, the driver chatted away as drunks do, and by the time we leveled out, he had started on a topic which he obviously felt very strongly about, and he began to rant as we picked up speed and approached Guildford. I started to worry, and asked him to let me out, but he refused to stop the car.

I looked at the speedometer when we approached the downhill stretch and, if I remember correctly, we were doing about 90 MPH - very fast for an old car in the 1960s. I tried to warn him of the upcoming bridge, bend and road, but all he did in response was to increase his speed out of sheer, drunken contrariness.

We hurtled down the hill and straight toward one of the massive, concrete pillars which held the bridge up, which I was sure we were going to hit. In any event, if we were not abruptly slowed down by hitting the pillar, we would not make it around the bend without overturning the car and rolling it onto the busy A3, and if we did happen to make it around the bend without rolling, we would plough into all the traffic which was speeding downhill, and cause a massive and fatal pile-up.

In that moment, I knew that I was probably going to die, and an extraordinary thing happened which has never happened to me since. I became as calm, peaceful and content as I had ever been - I was almost elated at the prospect of dying.

Then another series of extraordinary things occurred as I impassively looked on. He somehow saw the pillar at the last moment and flicked the car 90 degrees to the right, kept it on the tarmac without rolling it and came to a halt in 3 seconds with only about two inches of bumper overhanging the white lines which separated the two roads. He must have been too drunk to understand that this was impossible.

Suddenly my sense of fear returned, and I let him take me into the outskirts of Guildford before getting out and escaping when he pulled over for a piss on a grass verge.

The point of this story relates to the comments in the last post, and the point is that it is very difficult for an outsider to assess the mental state of someone without using empathy, or simply identifying with whatever predicament the other person seems to be in.

I should have been absolutely terrified that night, but I was not - probably due to a massive, involuntary release of endorphins into my system like a shot in the arm. If you had seen my face, you probably would have thought I was frozen with terror, but you would have been wrong.

If you are unfortunate enough to have watched someone die what seems to be a long and painful death, don't always assume that the experience is as bad for the dying person as it appears to be from the outside. All you are watching is that 'chimp' of a body doing it's best to survive against the odds - that is what it's programmed to do.

There is always another detached and sentient being watching the event from the inside, just the same as you are from the outside, and this being is a lot calmer than you are, but unable to tell you that in most cases. I know this.

In a comment to Cro in the last post, I mentioned the fact that there has been many cases of Tibetan nuns and monks setting themselves alight with petrol in protest against China in the last several weeks (but not very well reported in the British media). How can they do this so calmly when anyone else who caught fire by accident would be flailing around and screaming in an attempt to put themselves out? Because they have already decided to die, and are well practiced at it.

Strange fact: During post-mortems on immolated monks, it has been discovered that there is absolutely no smoke or fire damage to the inside of their lungs as there is in people who die in fires by accident.

They actually chose to die before the fire killed them, and the fire was just an outward sign of commitment.

I am sorry for the picture above, but it really isn't as shocking as it appears to be. It is certainly not as shocking as the entire Vietnam war which started the fire.

All the King's horses

2012-02-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

There was an article in a national British newspaper today, which featured how a selection of medical doctors would choose how to die, given the choice.

Apparently, most of them said that they would decline all of the major treatments for cancer, having seen the end results and the symptoms which lead up to them.

It seems that they have been caught out so many times with regard to the prognosis of life expectancy in untreated patients, and been disappointed by the extension and quality of the life of patients treated with chemo and radio therapy, that they would rather not go through the same procedures themselves - thanks anyway. What - after all - is two or three months extra, when the quality of that time is so severely compromised by the treatment?

In the summer of 1943, a nurse was leaving her house on The Paragon, Bath, and just stepped onto the pavement to go to work at a nearby hospital, when she received a direct hit from a German 1000 pound bomb.

The bomb not only completely demolished about three of the terraced houses, but also utterly vapourised her, so that no body part has ever been found in the vicinity for burial.

In some way, she is still up there, and the houses that were rebuilt a couple of years later must contain some remnants of her corporeal form, even within the mortar and foundations.

I wonder what that experience is like as a way to go? Do you think it speeds you on your way, or slows you down?

Look to the East

2012-02-09T02:57:00.000-08:00

Chicken and Peregrine Falcon turning a brave face to the East wind on 'St. Michael's Without' this morning, as we all must. I've never seen him up on the cross before.

All this sausage mullarky is beginning to stick in my throat, so I think I'll concentrate on wildlife this morning. Lifestyle posts don't suit me anyway, despite my enviable life style, and all I do is make the rest of you jealous with my extravagant serving-suggestions.

It's colder than ever before here in the south, despite that the thermometer seems to be registering a few degrees above last week. Yesterday, my feet didn't warm up until I got to the pub, despite my cheery little coal-stove. Someone suggested I should put some carpet on the concrete floor of the workshop, so I am having a quote from a local company to fit wall-to-wall, including underlay. It will be a nightmare to vacuum, but if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

Talking of Snow Leopards (TM), my latest operating system still hasn't arrived from Apple (TM) yet, which is why I can still communicate with all you darlings out there in Blogland. You will know when it is successfully installed when I go quiet. ('Can't wait', I hear you say. Well you know what you can do with your serving suggestions, don't you?)

A French (?) eBayer has contacted me this morning, saying that she wants me to make a load of little stone plinths for her, just like the one Napoleon is mounted on right now, and asks how much this will cost. So it looks as though I may make some money out of Bonaparte after all. Loss leader?

Talking of leaders, what is the Prime Minister of Great Britain doing commenting on the resignation of an England football coach on the media this morning? Hasn't he got anything better to do?

Talking of better things to do, I had better go and freeze my arse off out at the workshop now. I've put it off long enough. I have spent quite a while this morning sending pictures of glass and candlesticks off to a customer in Australia who loves all things 18th century. I feel sort of guilty about sending chunks of English Heritage down under, but times are tight and we spent quite a lot of the 18th century sending people down under, so I guess they have a right to it.

A PUBLIC APOLOGY - and some bad news...

2012-02-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

Apology: I have, in the very recent past, been guilty of attempting every joke about sausages that includes the obvious likenesses to certain male attributes, and these poor-taste jokes have also come complete with serving suggestions at another blogger's expense.

Well, all this talk about bangers (including some really explosive serving suggestions) reminded me of the much under-rated Black Pudding, of which I used to be quite fond a few years ago, and still opt for in the hotel breakfasts which are brave enough to offer it. So I bought one tonight. A prize, 'Bury' one, in fact.

I suppose I could exploit the classic shape of this porcine delicacy to make jokes about female anatomy, but who do you think I am? All I am saying is that oranges aren't the only fruit, and you can read into that what you wish.

Basics: Why is pork meat white? Because the first thing they do - having killed the pig - is hang it upside down and slit it's jugulars, to drain the system of all the blood. Much of this blood goes to waste - either as fertiliser or pet-food - but a few buckets are taken away, mixed with pearl barley, pig fat and spices before being stuffed into a cow's intestine and cooked to produce the classic sausage known as Black Pudding, and very tasty it is too.

Now the bad news: The British chef who has done most to promote the use of the entire pig's carcase - Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall ('nose-to-tail eating') - house has just burnt down somewhere in the North of England, and the fire seems to have started in the kitchen. At least it means that I won't be subjected to how bloody wonderful his house is in the near future, having unwittingly signed up to his newsletter when accidently visiting one of his restaurants.

Anyway, go out and get yourself a Black Pudding if you eat pork at all - it's such a waste not to.

Come on you miserable vegans - do your worst. You're too bloody weak to get the better of me in any case, because of your meagre diet! (Contentious? Moi?)

Dropping in for dinner

2012-02-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday's dinner party, as the snow fell outside and the council closed the road behind us.

I hadn't been to a dinner-party for years, and now I have been to 2 within one month. Somehow, the dinner-party circuit has been broken for me, but maybe it's not only me - I don't know many others of my generation who still give them - which is probably why I am not invited too often.

There used to be about one every two weeks, and I would host one about three times a year, excluding autumn sunday lunches - cosy affairs preceded by a long walk in the country. The average age of these parties was about 30 - 40, just old enough for the children to be left alone or (as in the case of my two main friends who sadly died of cancer one year apart) just young enough to have avoided having children until later. The main man was as old as I am now, so was always available.

I have to admit that I would sometimes use these parties to get off with the hostess, if the hostess was single, but I don't feel too guilty about it - sometimes the whole dinner was engineered to get me round - or so I believed at the time.

One such dinner was held at a massive country house where the hostess rented a converted stable-block from her titled friends (Viscount and Viscountess, no less). She had visited my workshop on behalf of her landlord, and I ended up making something for them (I forget what). Having ascertained that I was educated enough to spell the word 'Viscount', she came back later and invited me to dinner that weekend.

It was a very jolly evening, and as it came to a close, all the other guests went off in their horseless carriages as she detained me in conversation until it became too late to leave, so I stayed.

The following day, she booked me in for another dinner the next weekend - this time just the two of us.

About two weeks went by before I realised that I had completely forgotten the assignation and - I am ashamed to admit - I was too cowardly to call her up to apologise. How could I have explained simply forgetting? So I lay low and pretended it didn't happen.

About three weeks later, I was flying in a very large hot-air balloon (I had friends who owned them at the time) along with many other paying tourists - it was one of those double-decker baskets which took about 15 people.

We were heading in the Chippenham direction, looking for a place to land. The pilot spotted a clear patch next to a road, and as he descended, one of the ground crew radioed up to tell him to climb again - the farmer who owned this land was notoriously hostile to balloons, and locked them in fields until a large ransom had been paid.

So we climbed up to about 1000 feet again and - to my horror - began approaching the large country house where I had 'dinner' about a month previously. As we approached, the two owners and my hostess could be seen running from the rear of the house to stand on the grass outside, waving cheerily up at us as their horses went mad in the nearby paddock.

"They look friendly enough," the pilot said, and began the final approach toward a patch of open grassland right next to the house. I began panicking.

When a balloon lands gently, it is still very buoyant, so nobody leaves the basket until instructed by the pilot, and I watched from about 100 yards as the pilot chatted away to the lord and two ladies before being given permission to get out. I thought about running toward a nearby bush and hiding, but that would have taken some explaining, so I just walked up to the group on the lawn and showed myself.

"Hello!" I said to my hostess. "Sorry I'm late!"

More anthropomorphism

2012-02-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

Double anthropomorphism - This ostrich was found lying in the freezing, muddy road outside my rural workshop, and spent just as much time as it takes to take a bad phone picture of it as a mascot, before it was returned with it's owner.

Who was it's owner? The grandchild of the man who came walking down the lane with the biggest Golden Retriever I have ever seen, towing him along in it's wake? No, it belonged to the Golden Retriever himself, who ran the last 30 feet toward me to be reunited with his toy -his owner helpless to stop him. This dog is seriously big - it leapt up, putting two feet onto my shoulders, and it stared me in the eyes. It looks like it weighs as much as I do too.

Single anthropomorphism - my cigarette break in the drive of my friend's house this saturday night allowed me to make a bit of pop-art on the windscreen of her Merc. Sadly it started to rain about an hour afterwards. The creature lives on here though.

No anthropomorphism - I thought that we lived nice and central, sitting on the eastern city wall as we do, but look at this compact but adorable city flat - in the moon-shadow of the Abbey - taken as the bells were pealing this Sunday. This is central.

A little holiday in Wales

2012-02-06T11:33:00.000-08:00

Number 72 was full of optimism when he arrived at Trelawnyd....

True Blue - True Green

2012-02-06T02:04:00.000-08:00

Monday, and it looks as though one of the defectors from the Pig-Killer's blog has come over to the light that is Tom Stephenson. Welcome, The Broad. I'm glad you have seen sense. Now we are 84.

The 'right-wing' rural lot here in the UK are vehemently anti wind-farms, and I can't say that I blame them. Have you been through rural Northern Germany in the last few years? The bloody things are everywhere, and even then, only about half of them are inefficiently whirring away.

You only have to stand next to a small weir and watch a few tons of water a second going over the edge to viscerally experience the power of water.

The Severn Estuary off Gloucester has the second highest tidal swell in the world, and Bristol is one of the deepest natural port approaches in the world also. When you think of the untapped power caused by the countless millions - trillions - of tons of water rising and falling every day - pulled by our close neighbor, Diana the Moon - it is an absolute no-brainer when trying to choose between wind power and sea-power to generate electricity.

The problem is that there are a lot of wind-generating companies trying to make a lot of money out there, all trying to strike long-term deals with the National Grid and the government, and the 'Green' lobby is trying to help them by convincing us that in order to meet energy requirements without destroying the world, we have to destroy our own countryside instead.

Yes, there is an 'alternative' put forward by the Greens - place the wind-farms off-shore, right above the real alternative - the sea - so that they can chop up flocks of migrating birds before they set foot on land after a long journey from southern Africa.

You don't have to be a Conservative to be a conservationist, but it helps. What we need now is some small 'c' conservatives to oppose all the big c***s now in government.

Empire Made

2012-02-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

My latest chance-find acquisition - Napoleon Bonaparte pretending to be a 2 inch Caesar, made out of cast iron (and no, John, you can't have it, no matter how good it would look on your mantle-shelf).

The little bust was found at a flea market last week, and I think it must have been discovered by a metal-detector because it was caked in old mud when I bought it. I gave it a clean, then re-patinated it with a special solution which turns Damascus gun-barrels brown (I knew it would come in handy one day), before giving it a light wax and buffing it with a fine, stainless steel brush. Handsome, eh?

I turned the little stone base on my lathe at the workshop (yes, you can turn stone - you can even chop it with an axe - I have many old stone-axes which I have used for carving a lot), and mounted the head on it.

The stone comes from Ham Hill, near Yeovil, Somerset, and is always this rich, rusty brown. This is a particularly fine-grained version - some of it is extremely coarse, with great mud-beds running through it.

There are two quarries at Ham Hill, both named after the owners. One is Harvey's (where this stone comes from) and the other is Richard England's. Richard England is now quite old, but when I dealt with him a lot, he was busy popping over to the USA because he was building a house for Clint Eastwood - made entirely out of Ham Hill stone!

Mr Harvey's claim to fame is that his daughter is the famous British musician, P.J. Harvey, and the hill's claim to fame is that it is the site of an extremely unusual and complex set of pre-historic dwellings. This means that - although there is plenty of stone to go around - the quarries and the archaeologists tread a finely balanced path when it comes to each other's interests. There have been quarries there since medieval times, and the whole of nearby Sherborne is made either of Ham Hill, or Sherborne stone itself. It is surprising how small a hole is left after enough stone has been pulled out to build a few towns, though.

Napoleon - having declared himself Emperor - was often depicted as a Caesar. I suppose that - having killed the entire royal family to form a republic - they would hardly depict him as a king, but even so, it does show more than a madman's sense of grandeur to call yourself 'Emperor', let alone 'Napoleon'.

Actually, you can have it, John, but this time it's going to cost you.

Steve Jobs - come back!

2012-02-04T06:09:00.000-08:00

Sorry about this techno-post so soon after the eco-post of this morning, but I just had to tell someone... (sob)...

Anyone who bought an iMac any more than about 2 years ago would have also bought the roller-ball mouse that went with it, and would have spent many hours - days - trying to keep the bloody thing functioning by cleaning the stupidly small, grey plastic ball that stops working at the slightest hint of dust or grease. My hands are either dusty or greasy at any given time, so I eventually gave up cleaning the ball and have spent the last month or two just clicking on the blue bars to drag them down so I can see what is happening at the bottom of the page.

The day before yesterday, I walked into the Mac shop here and asked the young man if they had improved on the useless scroll-ball on the Mighty Mouse, and he replied that they had done away with it altogether, and showed me a ball-less mouse which responded to a gentle stroke of the finger.

"Perfect," I said, "How much is it?"

"£59."

gasp...

"We have some without boxes which are £49, if that helps."

I asked why they did not have boxes (fearing that they had been returned for being as useless as the others) and he told me that some people preferred the Magic TrackPad (TM) when they bought a package. I asked what that was, and he showed me the gizmo above. I tried one, and I liked it and the idea - it seems to do even more than the touch screens on iPhones.

"How much is it?"

"£59."

So I reluctantly bought one, having been assured that they were dead easy to install and connect - via BlueTooth (TM) - and the minimal instructions were inside the box.

Someone in the pub later asked me if I was going to instal it that night, and I replied that if I was going to smash it to pieces, I would rather smash it to pieces when sober, so I would link it up today, saturday, and that's what I have spent the last hour attempting to do.

When you turn on BlueTooth (TM), it is supposed to fire up an onscreen installation facility, and all you (are supposed to) do is follow the simple instructions. No such thing came up, so after about ten attempts at shutting down and re starting both machines, I gave up and went to a Mac software department for a free download which supports the thing, but it would not start up, so I resorted to calling up the shop and asking for advice.

The bloke took me through all the procedures that I had spent the last hour doing myself before asking what operating system I was on. 'OS X .4' I told him, and he said that this system was too old (about 3 years) to support the Magic TrackPad (TM) and that I would have to instal 'Snow Leopard OS 10 .6' (TM) in order to stand any chance of using the Magic Track-Pad (TM), and it costs £26.

I groaned, and said I would come in and buy the disc, but he said I couldn't - I would have to buy it online from the Mac Shop after which they would post it to me. So I did.

I ended up talking to a Mac man on the phone, because I was worried that I was paying this £26 about 3 times, there were so many pages coming up saying 'Buy Now' which I kept clicking on.

He said I wasn't really licensed to buy Snow Leopard (TM) as I should start off by buying a Mac box kit of OS 10.5 (now obsolete) costing £87 before I upgraded to Snow Leopard OS 10.6 (TM). I asked 'why?!' and he said that someone has to pay for all the research and development which results in all the wonderful products that Apple (TM) sells to us for vast amounts of money, and I responded that I had - in the last month alone - already paid about twice as much on accessories for my Mac as most people spend on a good PC laptop, but since they no longer stocked the obsolete OS X system, he had to send me Snow Leopard (TM) anyway.

He asked me why I wanted to upgrade my operating system anyway, I said SO THAT IT CAN SUPPORT THE £60 MAGIC TRACKPAD (TM) THAT I HAVE JUST BOUGHT FROM BLOODY APPLE (TM), BECAUSE THE STUPID ROLLER BALL ON THE MOUSE KEEPS GETTING TOO DIRTY TO USE AND I AM FED UP WITH TRYING TO CLEAN IT ALL THE TIME!

He calmly said that he has been using one of those mice for years and has never cleaned it once. I said that MAYBE HE HAS GOT CLEANER HANDS THAN ME, BUT WHATEVER - I NOW NEED TO GET THE FUCKING MAGIC TRACKPAD (TM) WORKING, so he sold me a disc with Snow Leopard (TM) on it.

So I paid the £26 and I will let you know how I get on after it arrives. Should be a laugh.

Black and White situation

2012-02-04T03:04:00.000-08:00

The explorer David Hempleman-Adams has been on a radio travel program this morning, talking about one of many trips to Antarctica he has made, and as he talked, the first predicted flakes of snow fell from the sky and settled on the frozen streets of Bath outside.

D.H-A. lives in Box, just outside Bath, as does the other famous British explorer, John Blashford-Snell. What is it about Box which attracts explorers, and what is it about explorers that attract double-barreled names?

I have never met David H-A, but I am fairly good mates with his brother, who drinks at my local. I don't know what David is like as an explorer, but one thing I do know is that the Hempleman-Adams family is extremely good at producing stunningly beautiful daughters - his brother's 16 year old is jaw-droppingly pretty, as is his own 16 year old who he recently took on a trip to the Antarctic, making her the youngest person ever to have set foot on the continent. I think that her cousin went with her in the party, but I will ask her that next time she is with her dad in the pub.

When I lived in Box, John Blashford-Snell's daughter, Victoria, worked behind the bar of my then local, The Chequers - what is it about the beautiful daughters of famous explorers and pubs?

When asked about his hopes and fears for the frozen continent, D.H-A. expressed his deep and justified dread that some other country will lay claim to the vast resources of oil that are predicted to lie beneath the ice cap, with the inevitable consequences to the pristine environment.

As you probably know, the unwritten law which applies to Antarctica is that anything that is taken in there must be taken out again, and this applies to (not to put too fine a point on it) human waste. The presenter of this program (broadcast from Buckingham Palace!) chose the 16 year-old Amelia to ask the rhetorical question regarding poo to - from a panel of about four 50+ year-olds - which I thought was a somewhat cruel choice. I suppose we have to make allowances for the fact that he spent a year or two chained to a radiator in the Lebanon, though.

The imagery of an oil field disaster in the area is probably the most the most potentially 'iconic' of any other image of any other disaster possible. Never mind the fragile existence of bird life, etc.

Black on White.

Just think of it - Black on White. Could there ever be anything so shocking and irreversibly tragic as photos or video footage of square miles of thick, black crude spilling out over a virginally white landscape - a landscape which has remained pure and untouched for longer than any other on the planet?

Never mind if Blackpool is razed to the ground by an earthquake - keep on fracking. We can always build another tower.

The Stately Homes of England (cue music...)

2012-02-03T02:17:00.000-08:00

These pictures are of what may possibly be the last tin of 'ANTIQUAX' (gedditt?) to be sold in the West of England. It's certainly the last one to be sold in the Larkhall ironmongers, as they have now gone out of business (the wax-producers, not Langridges), and will not be making any more. I apologise for the smear of glue which my glamorous assistant has left on the lid - he refuses to use all the nice bits of cardboard I leave out especially for the purpose of mixing glue on (grrr...).

It is actually no great loss to the world of marble restoration and conservation, because wax is wax, and there are plenty of substitutes with exactly the same ingredients - i.e. wax.

Given the tin's claim that this product is widely used by the nobility of England, I am amazed that they should go out of production after all these years. After all, white marble needs a good waxing every now and then (don't we all?), no matter how old it is. There is something missing from this tin's advertising which would probably have assured it a solid position in the market for many years to come, though. Can you guess what it is?

Yes that's right - a Royal Appointment seal of approval. A crown or the three feathers, discreetly placed in a prominent position on the lid may have increased the shelf-life for as long as Olde England exists in it's present monarchic form, but noblesse oblige does not seem to extend as far as the Antiquax factory.

Having said that, I have a sculptor friend who received all the trappings of a Royal Appointment after he made a sculpture for Princess Diana when she was still with her last husband, and he is now out of work I believe (the sculptor, not Charles). Mind you, look what happened to Diana - maybe it was a curse?

The thing I will most miss about this packaging when the tin finally runs out, is the little portrait of Lance Hattatt above the motto.

Trig point

2012-02-02T01:57:00.000-08:00

I love this crisp weather - or, in up to date parlance, 'I'm loving this crisp weather'. The view from our kitchen window this morning: Solsbury Hill. Yes, the same hill made famous by local resident, Peter Gabriel, who was credible right up until he claimed to see an eagle flying out of the night. Also in modern parlance, "SHU' UP!!!"

It was massive, Iron Age hill-forts like this one which the invading Romans had to overcome before they could get down to building the Baths, straightening and mettling roads, plus all the other little day to day details which made our lives so much more bearable than it was before they arrived and pummelled us into submission. 'What have the Romans done for us?' Well....

A friend of mine took his girlfriend up there last weekend, and asked me if I knew what the funny, obelisk-shaped lump of concrete with a metal mount set into the top of it was on it's highest point. He's about 12 years younger than me, so I suppose he can be forgiven for not knowing. "It's an O.S. trig-point" I told him. You can guess what the next question was.

Just about every useful thing that has been invented in the last 150 years has been designed for military use, and trig-points are no exception. This computer was designed for military use, as was the internet which supports it. That hill-fort was designed for military use as well, but not as well designed as the Roman machine which overcame it.

All the best invaders have good intelligence, and the best intelligence often involves accurate maps. O.S. stands for Ordnance Survey, and the reason for the topographical surveys was so that artillery could be aimed more accurately, and these concrete mounts on the high points of hills were to put theodolites on to take triangulated readings from another two points within sighting distance. (Stop me if you know all this).

It's always best to get as high as you can to find out where you are going, and before aircraft were invented, hills were the highest. You can't get much higher than the window of an orbiting satellite, so now these posts are pretty much useless and O.S. maps are used by retired ramblers more than anyone else. I use O.S. maps for armchair exploration - don't you love doing that? I use Google Earth for flying too - don't you love doing that as well? These days, I use Google Streets for spying on myself and others - don't you love doing that too?

Alright, Peter, you could see the city lights, but from thereon after I don't believe you. It must have been a buzzard.

Petrified babies

2012-02-01T03:10:00.000-08:00

Hard frost, but no snow as promised by the screaming news articles. Last night, the drunken students set a new record by cavorting in the minus 4 streets in T-shirts until 5.00 a.m. Now it is only rain and poverty which keeps them indoors when everyone else is trying to sleep.

I spent most of last night and all of this morning formulating a plan to save such a cavorting student from his own excesses, and today I laid down the law which he has to adhere to in order not to spend the rest of his life working in a factory. I know it has always been traditional for students to live it up and get into debt, but this boy is pushing his luck. He has about a week to save himself, and the rest of the summer to redeem himself, otherwise the game is - once again - up.

Now I will put on another jumper and go to the workshop to light the little stove again, so I can carry on working on another petrified baby to release into the big, wide world.

Clarence Green and the last match

2012-01-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the flat one saturday night, the phone rang. A high, falsetto voice with a strong Jamaican accent asked, "Is that Mr Stephenson?"

"Hello Clarence", I answered.

"How you know it was me?" came the reply in usual deep baritone. I would often get calls from Clarence quite late at night, but this was the first time he had tried to fool me by 'disguising' his voice.

"Come and play cricket tomorrow - we need another man."

"I haven't played cricket since school, and even then I was crap."

"It doesn't matter, man. Just come and play cricket tomorrow."

"No. I don't want to, and if I did you wouldn't want me to either."

"You're scared of the ball!"

"No I'm not - I just don't want to play cricket tomorrow, that's all."

"Yeah man - you're scared of the ball!" With that he gave up trying to persuade me, and I went back to watching T.V. I could hear his taunting, high pitched laugh as I put down the receiver.

The next night - Sunday - the phone rang again but this time it was a mutual friend, and his voice did not sound happy.

"It's Clarence," the voice said, "He didn't make it."

For a while I was confused, but then the story came out. Clarence had been fielding at a remote part of the windswept pitch up on Lansdown when he dropped to the ground like a felled oak. Everyone thought he was feigning boredom except Dougie - a red-haired and bearded Scotsman, who - realising that Clarence had suffered a heart-attack - ran to his aid and began attempting mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Dougie received a mouthful of Clarence's vomit for his pains and - turning away - vomited himself onto the grass of the pitch. The game was up.

Clarence - a gentle giant of a man who towered over my 6' 3" frame - had been one of my best friends for the last five years of his life, but it wasn't until his death that I knew how many others he had running concurrently. He was not secretive, but every area of his life was compartmentalised, and everyone in it received a similar level of attention.

At his funeral, we all met - some of us for the first time - and there was around 200 people there in Trowbridge. A good many of them were high-ranking British Naval officers - Clarence worked for the Ministry of Defence as a limousine driver.

Sometimes he would park his limo outside the pub as he waited for me to arrive for a drink and a chat - he was not a big drinker. One day I tested our friendship by asking to borrow the huge, black, government car outside, and - giving me a hard stare which said it all - he silently tossed me the keys and watched me walk outside and get into it.

As I drove it up the hill toward one of the handful of MOD encampments, I suddenly realised what I was doing, so turned around and returned it as quickly as possible. They would have sacked him had they found out about it, and they probably would have sent him back to Jamaica - which he had not set foot in for about 35 years - as well. For some reason, he lived in silent dread of deportation, as I found out when I invited him over to Germany for a little break with friends.

After ten minutes of cajoling, he quietly said, "They would not let me back into England." I think they would have, but he dared not try.

I once asked him if he could explain to me what Rastafarians were about, and he gave me the most concise explanation that I have ever heard, before or since.

"All it is, the man goes up into the mountains, grows his hair long, smokes a lot of dope then comes down and talks a lot of rubbish." Now I knew.

I knew that Clarence had - in the past - received pioneering surgery for a congenital heart condition, but it was not until one night when he had come back from the doctor's after a routine check-up that I found out what sort. He was laughing hysterically and couldn't wait to tell me what he had discovered that day.

"Guess what, man - they put a PIG'S HEART inside me! A PIG'S HEART!"

I said that this could not possibly have happened, otherwise me and the rest of the world would have known about it, but he insisted it was the truth.

"Yeah man - it's true! They took out my heart and replaced it with a pig's!"

He seemed almost disappointed when I told him that it was more likely that they had used the heart valves of a pig to replace his defective ones, but was still pleased that he was probably the first person in the country to have had this treatment. I think though, that - unlike your average Ratstafarian - he would have preferred the idea of the whole heart.

The week after his funeral, there was to be a cricket match with the same team, to be played up on the field where he gasped his last, and I decided that - for the first time since schooldays - I would play in it in his place.

At the very beginning of the game, the captain placed me in an almost suicidal position, about 12 feet away from the opposing batsman's left hand, and the very first ball was hit for a potential six, straight at my eyes.

There was no time for anyone to shout - there was no time for me to make a decision as to whether to duck the ball or try and catch it as it sped the short distance toward me at about 120 miles per hour, so I just cupped my hands and waited for the impact. I didn't have to wait long.

The ball hit the palms of my hands, then forced both thumbs backwards to almost breaking point, before escaping them and flying up to my right shoulder where it impacted with a noise that could be heard from the other side of the field. I stood there - stunned - for a second, trying to work out whether or not I needed an ambulance, and everyone shouted 'CATCH!' I thought I had, or at least made a good effort at it.

Then everyone began screaming at me to turn around, and by the time I did so, the ball dropped gently at my feet as I looked at it with a stupid expression on my face. It had ricocheted off my shoulder and risen vertically to about 25 feet, then dropped slowly offering me an easy catch for a first ball - which I missed. When I took my shirt off later, I saw a perfect imprint of the ball's stitching in blood-blisters, which stayed for about two weeks before fading.

'Scared of the ball' - Ha! That showed him.

Smokestack Lightenin'

2012-01-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

Balls on Sunday

2012-01-29T04:42:00.000-08:00

Sunday. I managed to get through the night without being troubled by the doll, but that's probably because I didn't really buy it. Someone else has probably had bad dreams instead. I passed a peaceful night impersonating Colonel Gaddafi as I slept. I'll have to get a uniform and dye my hair black.

Last night we watched the George C. Scott version of Scrooge in 'A Christmas Carol' on DVD which was quite relaxing. Scott's English accent actually improves as the film progresses, so they must have shot it in sequence. I don't know about you, but I always feel like bludgeoning Tiny Tim to death with his own crutch every time he says, "God bless us all" which may explain last night's doll post. I have to say that Alistair Sim makes a better Scrooge, though.

I am getting some bad vibes from H.I. as I write, because she thinks I should be cleaning the compact but adorable city apartment instead of wasting mine and everyone else's time by writing this drivel. So I will, but I'm going to finish this first and weather-out the vibes.

Actually, what is there to finish? I had better start cleaning...

Choose Life

2012-01-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

You know when you visit a dog sanctuary, and one little fella comes up against the cage, seeming to say, "Choose me! Choose me!" ?

Well, it was a tough choice at this auction - but look who I came away with, just so she could creep up on me in the night and whack me over the head with an axe.

Blood all over my new, Colonel Gaddafi King-Sized duvet cover. Damn.

Nighty night.

Colonel Gaddafi's bed

2012-01-28T12:20:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in the last post, today I bought a new duvet cover and sheet. 100% Egyptian Cotton, and drastically reduced in the sales. What they didn't say (and what I couldn't see through all the plastic) was that it was glazed cotton.

H.I. asked me if I had fitted my new sheets yet and I told her I had, so she went upstairs to take a look. When she came back down she was laughing quietly to herself (actually not so quietly), and I asked her what was so funny.

She said, "It looks like Colonel Gaddafi's bed", then continued laughing into the very nice Rose wine that I had just bought her, as I was cooking her meal...

Armchair explorer

2012-01-28T03:07:00.000-08:00

Are saturdays as inexplicably exciting to any of you as they are to me?

I am self-employed, so I can choose which days I take off out of all seven available, and I have been known to have lie-ins on weekdays. I can also choose which days I want to party, and usually the best nights out are impromptu ones which just sort of happen amongst a few friends on a week night, though they are now quite rare because most of my friends and I have given up binges of any sort.

I have never had the slightest interest in any sport, so I am not looking forward to any football matches or whatever, and a lot of rugby now seems to happen on sundays.

I suppose I just breathe in the general air of holiday and relaxation which permeates town on saturdays, and I always have.

When I was a kid, saturdays for me consisted of getting up at about 9.30 having woken up in the luxurious knowledge that I did not have to attend the hated school, eating a bit of breakfast, then catching the number 63 bus into town. In town I would head straight for the newly opened'Wimpy Bar' and have a fashionable espresso coffee whilst ogling the slightly older girls who I did not dare to approach for fear of rejection (oh the misery of adolescence).

Then I probably just wandered about, trying to avoid eye-contact with the Teddy-Boys, squaddies and later Mods and Rockers (more Mods than Rockers - Woking was a Mod stronghold, and home to some famous Mod pop-stars). Woking (an absolute shit-hole of a town) was full of these desperadoes, and probably still is. The closest thing to any meaningful activity was finding a way of spending my half-crown pocket money on something completely useless (this was before I developed a taste for glass and candlesticks).

These days, I do something very similar with my saturdays, but without having to catch a bus to go into town. If I am on holiday, I often find myself on a glorious, palm-fringed beach remembering that it is a saturday, and actually feel a pang of regret that I am not in a British town, aimlessly wandering about. Even I think this is a sad and pathetic response from a pitiful creature of habit.

Aside from not driving to work, saturdays do not differ much from any other day of the week for me - I still follow the same sort of routine, like the visit to the pub for a couple of drinks with friends, always leaving before 7.00 in the evening to go home and cook.

I suppose this apathetic attitude to to life in general and saturdays in particular which I have been displaying since childhood may put me in good stead to deal with extreme old age, even though it has severely affected my career as a Polar explorer.

"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits."

I've just added this picture of some 1950s Teds - the very sort which used to scare the daylights out of me as a child in Woking. There was one who was about 7 feet tall in his stockinged feet, but about 6 inches higher in his crepe soles with quiffed hair - no joke. If he caught your eye, he would scream, "WHO ARE YOU STARING AT???!!!"

Scapegoat

2012-01-27T03:25:00.000-08:00

I pinched this photo from someone else's blog recently, but I can't remember whose, sorry. She seems to have pinched it from someone called Ellen Van Deelen, so let's give her the credit for it. I'm only posting it up because I like it so much - no hidden meanings or anything.

You may remember (or may not) that rats have a special significance in our household, and I have a drawfull of 'Rat' line-drawings, some of which I have posted up here in the past. My little (term of affection) 17 year old girl has grown up with them (as has her brother), and recently, she and a few of her friends opened the draw and spent 20 minutes or so leafing through them all, letting out cries like, "Aww!" and "I remember that one!". She thinks I ought to put them into a children's book, but some of them are utterly obscene. I suppose I would have to leave those ones out, but that would be missing out on a lot of history.

Rat came about around 20 years ago, when certain food items mysteriously went missing from our cupboard when H.I. happened to be out. She would come home and ask, "Have you eaten the last .... ?" and I would deny it, but tell her that I just caught sight of a rat creeping into the cupboard before she returned, and he took on a life of his own thereafter.

I don't think that our compact but adorable city apartment has ever had any rodents in it since it was built about 250 years ago - at least nowhere other than the basement - but something had to take the blame.

A few weeks ago, H.I. came into the kitchen and said with a sombre look on her face, "I think we've got mice."

I asked her why she thought this, and she took me to a cupboard to show me a plastic carrier bag which seemed to have been torn into shreds to make nesting material, and I took a close look at it.

The happy ending to this story is that I can now confirm that Waitrose was not lying to us when they said that their plastic bags were bio-degradable, all those years ago.

Little axe of kindness

2012-01-26T02:16:00.000-08:00

There has been a radio drama set in the First World War here recently, which I have been listening to with one ear (not literally, for reasons below), and it features a young soldier who has had the bottom half of his face blown off and is in a French, military hospital awaiting the basic reconstructive surgery available at the time.

His sweetheart and betrothed arrives from England to visit him, and is actually pleased that he has been wounded and not killed, but does not know the full extent of his injuries.

He refuses to allow her to see him, and believes that the possibility of their spending the rest of their lives together are now over, so he writes her a letter (he cannot talk) and gives it to the Sister in charge to hand to her.

In the letter, he tells her that he has found a new sweetheart who he has fallen in love with and intends to marry in her stead. He apologises for what has happened and says that he hopes that she will be able to find a new life without him.

As he watches the Sister read the letter, he asks, "Is that cruel enough?"

I have - in my youth - employed similar techniques when ditching girlfriends who have out-lasted their sell-by date, and I've always felt a bit guilty for doing so. Please don't get the wrong idea, because I was ditched as many times myself - but in these cases, I thought that for them to experience anger in the place of sadness would be better all round. Or at least, that's what I told myself at the time.

Looking back, I think that doing this was an act of cowardice, not compassion. It made it easier for me to deal with, but not necessarily her. Surely it would have been better to keep still and take the onslaught of abuse as she went through all the stages of logical and illogical grief that most people have to experience in order to come to terms with being dumped?

WW1 was so extreme, that it could almost be defined by the countless acts of 'bravery' and 'cowardice' that took place - for the most part, unrecorded - and the dividing line between those two qualities was very fine indeed.

Mr Perrot RIP

2012-01-25T01:50:00.000-08:00

The quintessential English pub: wood paneled walls, dim lighting, pictures of WW2 aircraft on the walls (signed by original pilots), no piped music, warm beer and - above all - nobody else in it. Peace, perfect peace.

The Green Tree in Green Street, Bath, has been a pub with that name since about 1710 or so and has survived many social upheavals because - as far as I know - it has been a 'free house' (not assigned to a national brewery which plays monopoly with property) and remains in private hands to this day.

I occasionally nip into it during the winter months (too claustrophobic in the summer) for a quick nap over a beer, drifting off and allowing the historical ambiance to wash over me as the flat ale gets flatter, but sometimes I have to leave as quickly as I can.

The drawbacks to this otherwise charming place is the size of it, combined with the fact that it never plays music - the negatives are the same as the positives.

It is the same with all pubs - they attract a higher than normal amount of complete arseholes whose natural tendency toward arseholeness is exaggerated by the alcohol they consume. When one of them sits at the opposite table to you in a place like the Green Tree, there is no escape, and the lack of loud music means there is no blotting them out either.

If the place is packed (and it only takes one team of bell-ringers to pack it) then it is possible to find seclusion - in the same way it is possible to be lonely in a crowd - but if it's just you and one other, you have to be very lucky to find a soul-mate in him, especially if you are as misanthropic as I am. Women never go into it on their own.

When smoking was allowed in British pubs, sometimes it was difficult to see from one side to the other of this tiny room, and even I - a dedicated smoker - found it unpleasant. I do miss the nicotine-stained ceiling though - it had a patina like a creme caramel which the most skillful of decorators could not have replicated.

About 100 years ago, there was a brewer near Kelston, Bath, called Mr Perrot. A friend of mine recently bought the old buildings where his brewery used to be, but that's going off on a tangent.

Once a year, a small brewery here makes an ale in his memory called 'Mr Perrot's Ale'. It is a thick, black, Porter type drink with an extremely high alcohol content for a beer - something like 7% when most other beers are 4.5 or so.

The Green Tree usually buys a couple of barrels of this during the winter season, but sets one aside to rot down in the little, cramped cellar beneath the bar. After a couple of months, this barrel is tapped on a certain day, and the date for the tapping is announced by a hand-written poster over the fireplace, allowing anyone who wants to try it to be there before it runs out.

By the time they get around to tapping it, the alcohol content has risen to about 13% (they did test it once I believe), and drinking any more than a pint of it can lead to memory loss, or worse - sometimes it's best to forget.

I went in a few years ago with a friend who tries my patience to the extent that I try to see as little of him as possible (I can only tolerate him when drinking), and I drank three pints of the stuff. Delicious.

The next thing I knew, I was shouting at my bewildered friend, more or less telling him to shut the fuck up.

In vino veritas.

The Kraken Awakes...

2012-01-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

... or The Krabben Returns, more like. This is the little cafe today on the shores of the North Sea in Germany...

... where we ate the little brown shrimps (krabben) what seems like only yesterday. Strange times indeed.

Some days, during the summer, life appears to be as depicted in those 'Shell Oil' posters from the 50s, and other times it looks like the cover of 'Olde Moore's Almanack', what with sinking cruise liners, people being struck by lightening whilst stealing high-voltage cables, and cars falling into the abyss due to lack of road maintenance.

Trailblazers

2012-01-24T02:28:00.000-08:00

Some of you might recognise this early OS X shut-down option which I foolishly installed on a 'toilet-seat' iBook designed for OS 9, thereby leaving me with about 3 available megabytes to do what ever I wanted with - i.e. not a lot.

I paid £30 for the iBook (a design classic, even 18 years ago, so I was reminded) and spent the first few weeks getting to know it by wiping every email that had ever been written by the seller, his brother and his brother's son from the hard-drive before finding out that it was still too slow to play movies, and struggled with sending pictures by email on a pay-as-you-go, dial-up server. I still loved it, though. I recently sold it (for £30!) to a woman in a remote part of Scotland, and I hope she still loves it too.

I have the honour of being the first stone-carver in Europe to have had his own website, and the second in the world. As you might expect, the first stone-carver in the world to have a website was an American, and his name was/is Walter S. Arnold. Look him up and say hello from me. For many years we used to send each other Christmas cards via snail-mail, but I have since lost touch with him, though I know he still maintains a web-presence as a sculptor - unlike me.

My host for this website also had the distinction of being the first internet cafe in the whole of Britain, right here in little old Bath. Looking back on it, we were trail-blazers.

The cafe was equipped with top of the range Macs, and we had many American visitors who admired the speed of these machines when surfing and sending emails to loved ones back home whilst staying in Bath. Of course, they would be stupidly slow by today's standards, but in 1994, they were cutting-edge.

The cafe was run by a young woman (who also designed and set up my website for me - html!) who came from Bristol, and my abiding memory is of her telling me a story about how she attended a party where Una Stubbs got a bit out of hand one night - but I cannot go into details. Now, whenever I see Mrs Hudson in Sherlock, I cannot get that image out of my head.

I never got any work from the website, but I came close once. A Texan architect contacted me to price for replacing a lot of carved Portland stone work for a church in the U.S. Virgin Islands which had mysteriously burnt down, as many churches do.

I had visions of overseeing all the work whilst sunning myself on the island, but - in the event - the contract was awarded to someone who happened to live about three miles away from here, and he was contacted by the usual, non-technical channels.

The internet cafe finally went bust, taking my website with it. For several years afterwards though, I kept coming across photographs of mine that used to be on it, floating around in cyberspace, supported by agencies unknown. Now Walter has plenty of other companions.

Be nice - Stay nice

2012-01-23T14:01:00.000-08:00

Here in the UK, there has been a sudden and rather frightening series of (so far) verbal attacks directed against foreigners who have arrived during a time of financial hardship which has hit everyone, and they are being accused of 'milking the system' with regard to state benefits, and even street-trading which - for some reason - has been perceived as the sole right of naturally born British people who find themselves homeless for whatever reason.

Of the 2 million officially 'unemployed' people in Britain right now, attention is being centred on the Romanian Gypsies who have spent about 600 years traveling from place to place around Europe, and since the demise of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the restrictions to travel further than mainland Europe have been lifted, allowing them to quite legally set foot upon England's green and pleasant land.

I don't know how many Romanian Roma there are in the UK right now, but I am guessing that they number no more than about 30,000 or so (maybe more, no official figures exist) - not many in the scheme of things, I would have thought.

And so what if they are milking the system? If their activities are legal, then they have the right to do so, whether we are over-stretched or not. You cannot blame them for trying to improve their lives by exploiting a 'generous' welfare state. A good many Poles came to this country during WW2 in order to provide flight crews and land-army to an over-stretched Britain in time of need, as did many Asians. I'm sure that if the Roma of Eastern Europe were not being gassed by Hitler in huge numbers along with the Jews, then they would have done the same thing. The above picture is of Roma people.

One generation away from the last great European depression which saw the rise of Hitler -who blamed the economic catastrophe squarely on the Jews - we are beginning to think along the same lines by forgetting the global bankers and real criminals in order to kick the weakest in society - Big Issue sellers. How much does a Big Issue cost? £3? Less? And the profit on that? 50%.

Be very careful about who you start kicking in frustration in the next few years, and don't allow any government to hoodwink you into thinking that any viable scapegoat exists outside of the system where they are all still hiding and thriving. You really don't know where it will lead - actually, you do.

Now is the time to be generous in spirit, even if you cannot afford to be materially generous.

Stay hospitable, for pity's sake.

Onion bottle

2012-01-23T01:48:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of a classic 'onion' bottle which is conveniently dated '1701'. The bit of glass found by the river in the previous post was the bottom part of one of these, which you would see if I had photographed it in profile, showing the massive indentation of the wide base which they all have/had.

A friend of mine collects these - I wouldn't mind one myself as a decanter, but they fetch around £300 each when intact, so I have not bothered to buy one.

I was watching a mechanical digger cut a service trench on the site of my old workshop in town some years ago, and as it dropped a bucket of hard earth onto the ground beside it, I saw a perfectly intact, Roman glass bottle roll out and come to rest on the bank. As I reached down to pick it up, a great clod of earth landed on it, smashing it to pieces. The thing had sat there for about 1800 years, then broke just as it was about to be saved.

The Eastern approaches to Bath are absolutely saturated with Roman and later remains - I saw the bones of a Middle-Eastern trader discovered in Walcot street, stuffed into a box in the cellars of the Roman Baths recently. Right next to the little cardboard box which was his last resting place, an archaeological pathologist had reconstructed his face using the skull as a base, and he stared at me across the years, down in the dark passages of the Baths. Those reconstructions are extremely accurate, as shown by modern murder cases which have been solved using the same technique.

It is crazy, but you can buy Roman glassware for a fraction of the price that the 18th century equivalent costs - cheaper than the Romans bought it for 2000 years ago. A roman drinking glass cost the equivalent of about £3000 in it's day. It would now cost you about £200.

Bone

2012-01-22T12:26:00.000-08:00

H.I. and me took advantage of the sunny weather today to go for a walk along the river here in Bath. On the other side of the weir, a small trench had been dug, and the little pile of earth contained loads of interesting detritus, including this human finger (or toe - I haven't decided which yet) bone.

It is obviously very old, but I would have to have it tested to find out exactly how old. There is a good, dark patina on it, and my feelings are that it is no younger than late medieval.

In amongst the rest of the earth were other objects which should have given me a clue, but - putting my Sherlock hat on - in fact, they could only muddy the waters, so to speak. There was a piece of glass which was the broken base to a late medieval or 17th century 'onion flask' wine bottle, some terracotta pieces, animal bones and quite a lot of fresh-water shells. It was the shells which gave me the clue about how uncertain I can be about the date of this bone.

There has been much work done in the area of Pulteney Bridge in the last 300 years, and most of it involved dredging some of the river bed up to make way for the bridge itself, as well as later weir improvements.

For thousands of years, people have used this stretch of the Avon to dump all sorts of things, and these things will have included corpses, both natural and murdered. The mud at the bottom of this river is rich indeed, and who knows what else lies undiscovered - thrown from Roman and Medieval bridges.

I found an almost identical bone at Ephesus once, but left it there. This one I have kept.

Power-saver not in use

2012-01-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

These monitors have not been turned off for about 3 or 4 years...

I must get a better camera, then I may be able to follow what the hell they are left on for...

Anyone recognise the screen-saver? No wonder J.B. Sports are going bust.

http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/blog/16ajune

New Year's Resolution

2012-01-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

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Barbara Streisand and the Super-Spider

2012-01-21T03:37:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd give you a little tour of the workshop in the bleak mid-winter. This is as far as I have got with the pear-tree motif - perhaps you will now believe me when I tell you how lazy I am.

There are two different types of hammer in this shot - the pneumatic air-hammer is to the right, plugged into a massive compressor next door. This little, Italian tool is wonderful for taking away large amounts of stone very quickly, but the drawbacks are that it is bloody noisy (no listening to the radio with this thing going) and prolonged use destroys the nerve-endings in your fingers. 35 years of intermittent use of this tool means that my fingers go white in slightly chilly conditions and this condition is irreversible, but I just cannot afford not to use it. They are extremely simple in design, but brilliantly engineered - they cost about £400 each, but well maintained, they will last a lifetime. Like many expensive masonry tools, they usually pay for themselves in one job, then carry on working for the rest of the owner's life, with the help of a couple of drops of oil.

The traditional, fruit wood mallet on the left I had made for me, also about 35 years ago. It is made from a piece of apple tree, cut on the end grain. You will recognise it immediately for what it is, because the design has remained unchanged for about 6000 years or more. Some of the chisels I use with it are 250 years old, and still work just as well. The secret to keeping a chisel in use for this amount of time is in the sharpening - no grind-stones, they take away too much metal.

Now time for a bit of name-dropping. Before I moved into the country, my workshop was in town, and one day Barbara Streisand took a fancy to a French stone fire-surround in the yard, but it was the wrong dimensions for the compact but adorable city apartment that she had just bought here. It was also the wrong style and period, but we were not going to point that out. It had a really ugly, lion's head motif on the front of it, and this bit of plaster cast is an impression of a half of it, so when she asked me to make it to her size, I would have something to refer to with regards to the style. Thankfully, she did not go ahead with it, which is just as well - Bath City Council would never have allowed it to be installed in any case.

One saturday, Ms Streisand was just leaving the office of the reclamation yard who were my landlords, and as she walked out of the door another customer was coming in. She said to the guy in the office, "Bye James. See you next saturday." James replied, "Bye Barbara."

The customer looked wide-eyed at James and asked, "Was that Barbara Streisand?!"

James said, "Yes. She works here every saturday morning to supplement her income." The customer actually believed him.

In one corner - in the little window - of the smaller part of my workshop, there lives a super-spider.

It looks like any other medium-sized spider, but it isn't. I first noticed it a couple of years ago, leaping out of it's funnel and latching on to some flying creature which it dispatched within seconds, then threw down in disdain - it doesn't seem at all interested in eating anything it kills.

Then one day, I heard the heavy buzz of a bee coming from near it's lair, and went over to witness an epic battle between super-spider and an enormous bumble bee. S.S. would lunge forward and bite the bee about three times in quick succession, then retreat away from the bee's sting before striking again like a swordsman. This grisly but fascinating spectacle lasted for about ten minutes, and then the bee became paralysed by all the bites and fell into a torpor. S.S. picked it up and threw it away from the web, then retreated back into it's hole.

Sadly, I wasn't around when it fought - and won - with this gigantic hornet, which still swings from a ragged web at the window. It is a bad photo, taken on a flash-less phone, but if I tell you that the hornet is about an inch and a half long, and if a human gets stung about three times by a hornet he is in serious trouble, you will understand just how super this spider really is.

News of the world

2012-01-20T02:26:00.000-08:00

I've just been listening to that silly old fool, Paul Johnson, on 'Desert Island Discs', and was reminded (again - sorry) of that dying breed of Fleet Street journalists, the survivors of whom are now only one generation ahead of me.

For the sake of anyone who was not brought up in Britain when Fleet Street was the journalistic epicentre of G.B., I am going to do a bit of explaining about how the whole thing worked before they all moved to Wapping and became tee-total on pain of their jobs - that's what happened. Prior to this, about 95% of all news articles were written by hacks when they were about 10 times over the legal limit to drive, let alone operate a type-writer.

I think that Mr Johnson (83) survived simply because he did not seem to be drinking himself to death, and he has spent the last 30 or so years sheltering in the virtual mausoleum of the 'Spectator' magazine - an old-people's home for distressed journalists.

You do not have to be an old-school Catholic to work on the Spectator, but it helps. If you were unfortunate enough to be born an Anglican, then a conversion to Catholicism would certainly ease your passage into the smoke-filled offices of that 200 year-old organ (full of 200 year-old organs), but due to the recent legislation about smoking in the workplace, the smoke is now virtual too. When Auberon Waugh was editor, he actually made it a rule that anyone working in his office had to smoke, in order to keep their jobs.

The late father of the actor (see previous post) who tragically died so young recently, was once editor of the Spectator, but - even by his own admission - was not a very good one. To me, this shows that he might have been a rather better human being than his more successful predecessors, but his lasting claim to fame is that he inspired the immortal 'Private Eye' character, George G Ale (his name was George Gale - GEDDITT?), who epitomised the boozy tradition of Fleet Street at the time.

I have just heard Paul Johnson say (admit) that he was a member of the Labour Party for 24 years until turning into the loony right-wing maniac he is today; that he once invited Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts) fox hunting (she declined on the grounds that it would mess up her hair-do); that he despises Nelson Mandela but hero-worships General Pinochet, and that his favorite record is Shirley Temple singing 'Animal Crackers in my Soup'. Need I say more?

I used to subscribe to the Spectator, but after a while I finally became fed up with the meaningless and isolated little lives that the contributors seemed to lead, which were (and probably still are) partially funded by fools like me who actually paid about £5 for the bloody thing. The final straw for me was the relentlessly misanthropic column written by a prison doctor called Dalrymple, who not only got paid by the government to administer sedatives for all the convicts under his 'care', but also supplemented his income by publicly ridiculing them in the magazine, laughing at the stupidity of heroin-addicted, single mothers who found themselves locked away because of their habit, and making fun of their 'lower-class' accents and tattoos. His hatred made me feel physically sick, so why would I want to pay to read it?

About 25 years ago, I used to drink regularly in a nice little wine-bar here in Bath, and one of my companions was the famous, drunken journo, Colin Welch. He was fabulously funny and entertaining with his stories about trying to order a simple whiskey in the Houses of Parliament bar during the summer, when everyone else was ordering Pimms. It was the waiting that got to him, as all the fruit and vegetables were individually chopped up to make a Pimms.

The routine was that I (and almost everyone else) would sip away our drinks as he downed Scotch after Scotch, then at the end of the evening, he would be incapable of speech, let alone walking.

It would then be my job to physically lift him up and put him into a waiting taxi, and the taxi would drive to the other side of the road and push him out again so he could collapse in the flat of his friend (another journalist) who lived opposite the bar. He never missed a deadline, though - he could still type, if he could not talk.

Those that are not already dead are a dying breed, and I am not sure whether or not I really miss them - like The News of the World.

Anyway, enough of this - go over to Groucho's and take a look at this - you won't regret it.

My early days at dance school (Grouchy)

2012-01-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

Crack up

2012-01-17T16:15:00.000-08:00

Ok, I admit it. Although I know the 'Reichenbach' story very well, I actually blubbed when Sherlock threw himself off the roof when I watched it tonight. I was blubbing for Watson and Mrs Hudson, you understand....

The wallpaper has ears

2012-01-17T01:53:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year when all of us in the Northern Hemisphere wish we could escape the post-Christmas drudgery by visiting a little restaurant (restaurent - restorant?) like this one above, which can be reached by wading through some warm water just off the coast of Zanzibar - birthplace of Freddie Mercury.

Call me an old romantic, but being a practical sort of person, I have to admit that when I first saw this picture, my immediate thought was 'I wonder what happens to the sewage from the toilet of the place - it must have a toilet'. Anyone reading this who may have eaten there might be able to answer this question for me - it's a public health issue which I need to resolve before I make the booking.

Right. Back to reality.

It has come to my attention (a phrase which my headmaster was fond of using just before he publicly selected a boy for a flogging) that certain software exists which - once installed - will put on screen before you any blog which contains certain words which it has been pre-programmed to pick up on, and it automatically finds these words by sorting through the millions of blogs which are posted - worldwide - every day, and it takes the program about a quarter of a second to do this.

As you would expect, this software is generally used by corporations or institutions who have an interest in what others say about it, and has probably been used to bring lawsuits against bloggers who thought that they were talking to themselves, or just a small handful of loyal followers, like I think I do most of the time.

I always suspected that a system like this which is a lot more sophisticated than a general search existed, but recently I have seen it work first hand, which has not helped my ongoing treatment for paranoia one little bit.

A company (we will call it the Acme Sausage Company - I'm not stupid!) not too far away from here has a floor-worker who takes what some might think to be an over-zealous interest in the firm, and has installed this software on his own machine, simply asking it to look for the phrase, 'Acme Sausage Company'.

Blow me, within a matter of weeks the alarm bells went off on his Dell, and he was directed to the Google blog of a customer of the Acme who lives in the same town as him, and this customer happened to mention in an otherwise innocuous post that he didn't think much of the way Acme's sausages are produced, though the sausages themselves were quite good to eat.

So the worker went to the managing director with this information, and the M.D. has sent around a couple of P.R. men to the blogger's address to re-educate him about Acme Sausages, as well as giving the rest of the workers a bollocking about the perfectly valid points the original blog made about some short-falls in production techniques.

I don't know about you, but I find this sort of technology somewhat threatening to the notion of free speech and free enterprise, and it throws up the old and futile argument about whether or not the internet should be policed, and if so, by whom?

Nobody would argue that extremely unsavoury websites should not be targeted by spyware to help catch child abusers, etc. but who regulates the regulators? The older I get, the less anarchistic I become in one way, and the more in another. I'm still a crazy, mixed up kid at heart, but try telling that to the 25 year-old bar-maids that sell me beer every night.

Short and easy to read

2012-01-16T02:43:00.000-08:00

As Weaver has reminded us over on her blog, today, Monday, January 16th, is officially the most depressing day in the British calendar and perhaps the rest of northern Europe as well.

I initially thought that it was all about being at the arse-end of Christmas, when the credit card bills arrive and unlit decorations swing forlornly in the dark and chilly streets, but there seems to be some cosmological significance to the date, because Weaver sites instances of a depressing nature stretching as far back as the 14th century when, presumably, proper records started to be kept.

But here in the south of England, today is a bright and sunny day and there is a liberal coating of genuine frost on all the decorations which should have been taken down days ago to avert a year's-worth of bad luck for those who walk underneath them. As early as the year before last we were being warned about how ghastly 2012 was going to be, so a little extra ghastliness will probably go unnoticed by most people.

Whoever carried out the survey which claims that 'the British are the most optimistic people in Europe' has chosen today to announce the results, but I cannot help thinking that the timing for the announcement was sponsored by some covert government department, and that in itself shows a level of pessimism which appears to contradict the findings of the 'survey'. Our government has been trying to engender a 'spirit of the Blitz' type attitude toward the mess and hardship they have created for quite a while now, but they have conveniently forgotten the black-marketeering and pimping that went on as bombed rained on the towns and cities all the way through the 40s and 50s - having legalised it in the form of privatisation for departments which previously would have been controlling rationing.

Anyway, enough of this - today this post is all about reasons to be cheerful and, so far, the weather is the first. Oh yes, the Olympic Games are to be held here this time as well - should that make me happy? Well, no, actually.

It occurred to me last week that I have rather a lot of Portland stone to pick up from Portland soon, and because all the water-sports (stop sniggering, you boys) are being held off Portland and Weymouth, you will not be able to get in or out of the place for about 2 weeks in a few month's time, so I must remember to pick it up well in advance of the Olympics. The last time I went there (during the summer of 2011) an extra half an hour was added to the journey because they were busy spending billions of pounds of public money 're-generating' the road systems immediately in the vicinity, well in advance of the thousands of extra vehicles which will flood the area this year.

Every time I travel from Weymouth (Dorset) to Bath (Somerset - just) by car (or truck), I imagine the utter confusion of all the Continental lorry-drivers who arrive at these shores for the first time via the Weymouth Ferry.

They drive their huge trucks off the boat and through customs, then the first signs they see are warnings in French and English on the right-hand side of the road, telling them they should be on the other side whilst driving in England. Then they make their way past the marina and onto the by-pass, following signs for the North East and places like Blandford Forum, etc.

Then - without warning - all the signs disappear and the road becomes so narrow and twisty that they are convinced that they must have taken a wrong turning about 10 miles back.

This stretch of road between Weymouth and Warminster (via Shaftesbury), was designed for small horses and carts, and without demolishing about 15 very pretty, 17th century villages and estates, would be impossible to straighten out and widen to allow for the hundreds of juggernauts which travel on it every day. There is one village (forget the name) which was laid out by the vast manor house and grounds which have dominated it both physically and politically for about 300 years, and to get past that, drivers of 40 ton trucks have to negotiate about six 90% bends which are about the same width as the lorries they are driving. It is a very pretty route which I love to drive, but the signs in both directions saying "BEWARE - ONCOMING VEHICLES IN MIDDLE OF ROAD" are a little disconcerting, especially at night.

Yesterday, I went shooting clays for the first time in about a year, and the new girlfriend of my male friend came along as a guest, to shoot a shotgun for the first time in her life. I have only met this woman about 3 times, but I love her already. She has just my sort of humour, and in great measure. We sit in the pub and laugh so much that we can hardly breathe. She looks good too, which is always a bonus. Another reason to be cheerful.

As I tippy-toed around a vast pool of mud up on the farm where we shoot (worried about getting it all over the interior of the car later), I said, "You can tell I am not real countryman, can't you?"

She just said, "No, but you're a real c***". More laughter.

Fiction and oboes

2012-01-14T03:57:00.000-08:00

The 'library' in the 'office' of our compact but adorable city apartment - just how I imagine thousands of others look like, all over the world. Dozens of disparate books of fact and fiction, carefully placed side by side in a manner so haphazard that I sometimes look for a particular volume for months - on and 0ff - before I find it whilst looking for something else.

I think I may go back to reading fiction again, as well as the reference and historical facsimiles which have been my sole reading matter for about 15 or more years now. The trouble is that - unlike H.I. - I cannot read in bed. When ever I try, I get about three lines in, then the next thing I know, it is 4.00 a.m. in the morning and my face is pressed between the covers of the saliva-soaked book like a wild meadow flower picked by a Victorian poet, so I push the book over the edge, turn out the light and return to sleep.

I stopped reading fiction because I was halfway through writing a dark, comic (so I thought) novel based in Waverley Abbey (don't ask, it's a long story) when a friend of mine in the writing industry read through the first draft and said he liked it. He then said it reminded him of Tom Sharpe, and that scared me so much that I put down all fiction until I could be sure that I was not subconsciously plagiarising any part of it - even the style. They say that you subliminally assimilate words very easily just before you go to sleep (a technique used by students swatting for exams) but since I cannot read in bed for the above reasons, I don't think this could be a danger for me, apart from the all important opening hook-line. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." etc.

A similar thing happened to me with music. I used to (badly) play a lot of woodwind instruments ('Oh no', I hear you groan, 'is there anything he hasn't tried?' Well there is actually, but it would be inappropriate - and dangerous - to list them here), mainly the clarinet. Someone asked me years ago if I had always played music, and I said "Oh yes. I don't think I could live without it."

Then I thought what a bloody stupid thing to say that was, so I put down the instruments and never picked them up again. No great loss to the world of music.

I think if I were to be cast away on a desert island, I would take a bass oboe with me as my luxury item. If you have ever been transported by Mozart's Oboe Concertos, then you will understand why, but if you have ever tried to play an oboe, then you might not. Apparently it has the most difficult and complicated fingering of all the wind instruments, but I might have time to get to grips with it just so long as they cast me away sooner rather than later. At least I would not annoy the neighbors by practicing all day and night.

The other great thing about wind instruments is the high you get from the great effort of breath-control. After half an hour playing the clarinet, it seems to have the same effect as about 2 hours yoga of the Kundalini variety.

When you first pick up a reed clarinet and try to get a note out of it, your cheeks expand to bursting point, your eyes almost pop out of their sockets and your face goes a bright red, fading to a pale blue around the edges - just to produce a squeak which sounds like the rear end of a ferret which has been run over by a 10 ton truck.

After about two weeks of this torture, you learn how damp the reed must be before also learning which area of the reed is best suited to your lips to produce the mellow, woody note you are looking for - then you can concentrate on the fingering by going up and down the scales until you can hit three octaves. With a bit of luck, you can attempt a melody along the lines of 'Three Blind Mice' within about a month afterwards, and before you know it, your breath-control is such that you can - with the minimum of effort - sustain a note for longer than you could hold your breath underwater. That's when you start getting high by playing the clarinet. Unfortunately, that is usually when the neighbors finally crack and come round to tell you to shut the fuck up.

Maybe I'll start by reading some fiction again.

For Amy

2012-01-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

I've always liked this song - no hidden message, dear Amy - you just reminded me of it.

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman

2012-01-13T02:05:00.000-08:00

For some reason, (you would not want to be inside my head before 9.00 a.m.) I had the idea this morning that 'Stand By Your Man' would be a great song for a drag-queen, then I thought that it must have been done already, so went to You Tube and found this.

The cinematographer is having the same difficulties as Chris at Hung Up On, but at least it means you have a good excuse to lie down whilst you watch it. I think it sort of adds to the rustic charm myself, and you have to admit that this living Dolly has a good voice, which is a shame in a way.

I was rather hoping that I could find a version sung by a butch, country and western cowboy complete with Stetson, but this seems to be the only one available. Oh well, it's good, if a little cliched (here's a squiggle for you to turn the other way round and glue to the top of the e : ` ).

Now look what I have gone and done - the end of that line above looks as though I am trying to convey a sort of tortured, smiley, winking face with one nostril, in text-speak shorthand.

Sometimes it's hard and sometimes it isn't. Full stop

Trip Advisor

2012-01-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

"So, Sarah, Duchess of York - did you enjoy your holiday in Turkey?"

"Oh yes - rather!"

"And do you have any plans to return?"

"Oh yes - I should say so!"

"How long do you intend to stay next time?"

"Oh... I would say about 22 years!"

(Following the crash of the Euro, Turkey is reconsidering it's plans for full membership of the EEC)

James Gale

2012-01-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

The elder brother of a good friend of mine (I have just found out) has died of cancer here in Bath, between Christmas and the New Year.

Jim was an actor, and had been in a few films (described as 'bad' even by himself) and was living in New York, but had moved back to the UK with his American wife and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, where he was getting some good, title parts until diagnosed with the illness.

His brothers said he looked a little like a dark haired Bruce Willis, but I never saw that.

Jim was living on the other side of the river when the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, and telephoned his brother here to give an eye-witness account as they came down.

Now I think of Jim portraying the dying moments of Rutger Hauer in 'Blade Runner' - "I have seen things you people would not believe..."

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Contention

2012-01-11T02:34:00.001-08:00

I saw a great bit of graffiti on the wall of our nearest church quite a few years ago: it said, "99% is shit". That's it. I immediately knew what the artist was saying, and it has never been so true as it is today, about 20 years later.

It was scrawled right next to another bit of writing, and the other bit actually made it into a book of graffiti from all over Britain. That piece said, "I hate seaweed" and was written in a spidery sort of handwriting - the sort of handwriting you could imagine from someone who had been forced to eat seaweed since childhood, and was suffering from muscular underdevelopment as a result. I imagined the writer to be a sort of green colour as well as scrawny.

If I am sitting in the pub trying to talk or listen over some bloody bit of rubbish music and say, "God - this music is terrible" usually someone who ought to know me quite well responds by saying, "Is there ANY music you like at all?" If they bothered to read my late-night posts (usually made when words have failed me) then they would know that my taste in music is so diverse that it is extremely difficult to respond to their irritated demands to categorise exactly what sort of music I do like, so I usually say "I like good music", which makes them even angrier.

Maybe I am being picky, but you have to admit it is much easier to list the things we don't like than the things we do. I found myself listing negatives this morning over my first coffee, and was amazed to rediscover how many sorts of people I instinctively dislike - about 99% to be precise.

Of course, it is a very general, impersonal sort of dislike, but it soon becomes personal if you start to make the list verbally and in public, because it is only a matter of seconds before at least one of the company finds themselves on the list, takes it badly and accuses you of of being an arrogant and egocentric bastard. They are so blinded by rage that they fail to notice that I also include myself in many of the categories, and that I find myself just as useless as they do. I dislike roughly 99% of all my character traits, but I have - like every one else who is not in therapy - learnt to live with them.

Top of my list of people who I hate are artists - even successful ones - and top of that specific list are: musicians; painters (particularly painters); writers (particularly writers); sculptors (particularly sculptors) - actually, ANYONE who misdescribes themselves as an 'artist'. General Franco had the same sort of attitude.

Why do I hate artists so much? Because 99% of them are a waste of time and space, should just get out of the way and stop stealing the oxygen of the one percent that actually know what they are supposed to be doing. It is fine for them to mess about with art in the privacy of their own homes - a kind of personal journey, I suppose - but why should they have to have exhibitions all the time? Why should Anthony Gormley be allowed to defile some of the most beautiful parts of rural Britain? Who wants to read someone's personal and irrelevant scribblings? (Careful - I'm doing myself out of a job here).

It is around this point that I am usually accused of being a fascist, but I retaliate by saying that there is hardly a less fascistic notion than the concept of 'Art is for everyone'. It isn't - or at least the making of it isn't. Any fool can tell the difference between a good bit of art and a bad one, but not everyone can produce it. For this reason alone, I become extremely (probably stupidly) pissed off with people who go to see a crap bit of art, then come back saying how wonderful it is, when clearly it is not. They should know the difference and spend less time accusing the people who do of being arrogant.

Oh, I forgot to put 'critics' on the list above.

The bull-ring

2012-01-09T01:31:00.000-08:00

This fascinating object is in the driveway of my brunch-host friend of yesterday. It is a gigantic stone ball with an iron ring attached to the top, and the ring has a little recess carved for it so that it lays more or less flat against the sphere when laying down. The iron ring is leaded into the stone, and the whole thing is obviously very old - at least mid-nineteenth century.

Because of my hangover, I didn't bother to work out (Sherlock Holmes style) what it could have been used for - my addled brain got as far as imagining it swinging from the end of a crane and demolishing buildings before I went indoors and asked her what it was.

At first, I thought that she said it was a 'ball-ball', and I stared at her with an expression on my face which must have made her think that she was talking to a child - as if repeating the same word twice, it would make more sense. Seeing my confusion, she said, "You know - a ball for tying bulls to." Ah, now I knew.

As all you rural types have known since childhood, prize bulls have a ring fitted to their sensitive nose to encourage them to walk when you want to lead them, or stand still when required - at market, for instance. Women use a different part of the male human anatomy for exactly the same purpose even today, but a fitted ring is optional, not essential.

I expect Thomas Hardy to have been familiar with this sort of thing, but I have never seen one before. In one way, it's a shame it is a little too large to bring indoors, but there again, so is a bull. It looks a little incongruous, sitting about in the drive of her smart, town home and I dare say it would look more functional in a farmyard, but I don't think that farmers these days are made of the sort of stuff which would allow them to cart not only a one ton bull around the country, but a lump of masonry like this at the same time.

This morning, now that my hangover of yesterday has gone, I am able to think a little clearer about how this object came to be made, and came to be made so well.

Farmers - as we all know very well - are not known for spending any more money on a functional piece of equipment than absolutely necessary, so why is it carved into a beautifully sculptural sphere? A rough-hewn lump of any of boulder would have served the same purpose, and would not - when sitting in the back of a moving cart - roll around, threatening to smash the sides off at each twist and turn of a pot-holed road.

Farmers - for the same reasons as above - are also not known for their appreciation of fine architecture either. Many a lovely, Tudor or 17th century farm house has been all but destroyed by an insensitive farmer who - having inherited the beautiful building from previous generations of the same family - have 'modernised' it, or built a flipping great, asbestos-roofed, Dutch barn right up against it so that he does not have to walk any farther than needed at dawn every morning.

With my Sherlock Holmes hat placed firmly on my refreshed head this morning, I am almost confident enough to say that this is how the 'bull-ball' came into existence in it's present form, around 150 years ago:

A farmer - living in a beautiful, early eighteenth century farmhouse - one day looks up to the gate-pillars created by his great-grandfather, and a light-bulb goes on above his head.

He thinks to himself: "What is the use of those two stone balls sitting atop of the pillars? What difference would it make to the function of the gate if one were to be removed? I could tether yon bull to it when at market, then - at last - at least one of those balls would earn it's keep on the farm."

With that, he pushes one ball off one pillar, then yanks out an iron ring horse-tether from the front wall of the farmhouse (he never rides horses to his front door anyway), then fixes it with hot lead into the fixing hole which already exists in the base of the ball and - hey presto - a bull-tether is born.

Of course, that little recess I mentioned that the iron ring sits into, was never actually carved into the stone. It just formed itself as the ball rolled around in the back of a horse cart, bashing against the sides and threatening to knock them off at every twist and turn of the pot-holed highway that leads to market.

Actually, it's simpler even than that. He would not have taken the stone ball to market, that would have meant picking it up. The ring just ate it's way into the stone as the ball was rolled around the yard.

Personal message to Bill Gates

2012-01-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

I've been a bit hung over all day, because of a dinner party at which my host (the mother of a young friend) waylaid me and pinned me against a wall to tell me that she found me very attractive - twice. Well, it was nice food and nice to be complimented like that, but I cannot help wondering if the drink had something to do with it. I'll have to ask her again when her hangover has worn off, then see if she can even remember saying anything of the sort, or even who I am. I wonder how I would have reacted if it was her daughter and not her who had said the same thing... Nah, best not even think about it.

I had to get up ridiculously early this morning (10.30 a.m.) to go to a 'brunch' with another woman friend and 4 of her 6 children. There was champagne on offer, but I wisely declined it, even though I think it would have sorted out my hangover within about 3 minutes.

I still managed to drive into one of the sensors on the pillar of her electric gates though - destroying it - so that I now need to arrange for the company to go round and fit a new one. That's going to be expensive.

I have just been listening to a radio program about the Bill Gates Foundation, and how many large charities will not accept some of the billions he is giving away for world wide health care. There is - apparently - a general suspicion about what would motivate the richest man in the world to give it all away, and I find this very hard to understand, since he does not seem to have any party political motives, unlike the doners to governments who think it is acceptable to part with 500,000 whatevers, simply to get some sort of title which they have hankered after since their parents were selling vegetables in Berwick Street market.

I was reminded about a lord (forgotten which one) who dressed up as a commoner in around 1900, then hung around on a London street corner handing out £5 notes to passers-by, when five pounds was the equivalent of about £1000. Only one person took up his offer all day, despite that he had hundreds of notes to give away. People were suspicious of 'crazy' behaviour, and it seems like they think Mr Gates might be a bit crazy too.

Well, if you are reading this, Bill, I wouldn't mind a contribution to the electric gate repair on my friend's house.

More lies

2012-01-07T03:56:00.000-08:00

I've just had a quick look for the photo of the wet pyramid between the horse's ears (taken on a 1930s camera) but it's so buried under other rubbish that I just can't be arsed to find it now.

Like I said, I was duped into hiring a horse so that I could be duped into hiring a room in a desert military barracks for a week which could only be reached by Jeep or horse. The deal was struck during the middle of an impromptu horse race at the foot of the Great Pyramid, and my man's horse won, netting him an extremely large amount of money. Those dragomen are not poor.

He arranged to take me round to his house for dinner that night, and this was cooked and served by his wife who spent the entire evening keeping to the background, only appearing when he called for her to bring something else. After dinner he showed me his most prized possession (so he said) - a cheap print of an English, 19th century fox-hunt in full gallop. Tally Ho.

This print - he solemnly informed me - was worth £500, but I could have it for £300. He had sent his shifty son out into the night to buy hashish to soften me up for the deal, and this was given to me in a hubble-bubble pipe which had been loaded and lit by his wife. After I had refused his ever-diminishing offers for the fabulous art work, he feigned affront and seemed to become deeply insulted at my lack of appreciation for the fine 'painting', but - like I said - I had become used to the ever shifting ways of the wily Egyptian and took no notice.

I had finally had enough of the evening when he brought around the local bank-manager - a western looking, middle-aged man in a suit - to fleece me over some money changing deal, so I insisted he brought the horse round so I could ride home to the Secret Police about 5 miles into the Sahara, and get some sleep.

His shifty son eventually appeared with two saddled horses, one of which was for me, and we headed out of the back streets and onto the plateau.

To my amazement, a thick fog had descended, and visibility was down to about 30 feet. The shifty son decided he would have a bit of fun with me, and galloped off into the night, leaving me to try and find my own way across the 4 foot wide, rock-strewn paths which criss-crossed their diverse ways beneath the pyramids. Either side of these tiny paths, the land falls away in a steep angle down to little valleys excavated about 40 feet beneath the present surface, and the looming presence of the Great Pyramid could only be felt by it's gravitational pull - it was extremely dark and very foggy.

Suddenly, my horse - probably sensing my fear - became spooked itself and bolted off into the darkness with me hanging on and trying to stop it with all my might. It ran headlong into a massive boulder and fell to the ground. Somehow, I managed to stay in the saddle, and I refused to dismount until it had scrabbled it's way back up on all four feet - a feat which was witnessed by the shifty son who heard the commotion and had come galloping back to make sure he had not got into big trouble by killing both his father's horse and his father's source of income from it.

I was absolutely furious, and verbally laid into the little shit, telling him that if he did not do exactly as I instructed him from this moment on, I would get off the horse and beat him to death. He believed me, and the rest of the journey was conducted at a slow walking pace, with him leading the way about 10 feet in front. My horse had been mortally chastised as well, and all I had to do to steer it was gently touch it with one knee or the other - I think it would have performed dressage if I had demanded it.

I was awoken in the morning by a 10 ton truck parked outside the window of the hut, which was full of about 20 soldiers dressed in desert fatigues - each one offering me sex at military discount rates.

When the shifty son arrived with the spare horse, he took one look at me and asked what had happened to my face. I went to the barracks shower block and looked into the dirty mirror on the wall. Overnight, my face had been host to a massive banquet for mosquitos, and looked as though someone had fired a weak shotgun at it from about 10 feet.

Back the 5 miles to the stable by the pyramids for a breakfast of mint tea (it's mint tea with everything there) and a white cheese sandwich surrounded by groaning and stinking camels - then the dragoman asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my day. As he was asking, a camel stepped on my foot, and I learnt how heavy camels really are.

Since I was paying for the horse 24 hours a day (and the other two animals that went with it), I had decided that we would make the 20-something mile journey into the Sahara to visit the stepped pyramid of Saqqara - the oldest and most remote pyramid in Egypt, and probably the first one to have been built, thousands of years ago. To this he agreed, and Shifty and me set off about 20 minutes later.

About 10 miles into the desert, I turned around to look at the pyramids at Giza, and they appeared no smaller than they had at about one mile away. It is only when you get quite some distance from the Great Pyramid that you realise how big it really is.

After a long and arduous trip across the rock-strewn wilderness, passing sculptural mountains of dumped Coca-Cola cans and stopping off for mint tea at a small encampment of old men in the middle of nowhere, the Saqqara pyramid appeared on the distant horizon, and Shifty stopped, pointed at it and said: "There - pyramid of Saqqara. Now we go home."

I once again became angry with him and insisted on going on to look at it - having come this far - but he told me that all the land from here on was secret military, and we would be shot if we rode into it.

I still don't know if he was telling the truth or just wanted to fulfill the absolute minimum of the bargain (but I have a shrewd idea about it), then get back to Cairo again for some other shifty business, but we turned around and wandered back the way we came anyway.

On the journey home, Shifty (an unwholesome looking youth of about 16), became bored, so spent the the rest of the trip listlessly and shamelessly masturbating beneath the folds of his djellaba.

Not my idea of desert romance.

Tally Ho!

2012-01-06T02:36:00.000-08:00

Sitting alone on a lump of rock, staring at the huge, damaged but serene face of the Sphinx, I was approached by a man on horseback who came galloping up through the dust.

"English?"

"Yes", I replied wearily.

"Tally-Ho" Tally-Ho!"

Catching the bus to the Great Pyramid from central Cairo had been easy - it was number 888. In Arabic, the number 8 is pyramid shaped, so all I had to do was get on any bus which had the pictorial image of my destination and ask for 'Al Ahram'.

These buses drop you at the university entrance and when you alight, you are informed by about 100 young men that what the students need more than anything else is pencils. I only had one ball-point pen, which I handed over before I began the short walk to the Giza plateau, guided by a surprisingly small amount of visible pyramid seen above the buildings and palm trees. Surprising, because the Great Pyramid contains more stone than all the churches, cathedrals, chapels and monasteries in Europe put together.

A little wooden hut 200 yards away from the Great Pyramid contained a man with a wooden desk in front of him, and I paid him the few piastres required to obtain a ticket which officially allowed you to enter the vast edifice, then walked toward the gaggle of people who leaned against the enormous blocks at the entrance.

There is no official entrance to the pyramid, so everyone is obliged to go in via a hole blasted into the side with gunpowder, during a futile search for buried treasure around 180 years ago.

One of the gaggle told me that I had to wait until the party already inside had come out, and I replied by telling him that I did not. These unofficial 'guides' where everywhere in those days, and I had not come all this way to see the object of my childhood dreams and be lied to and herded like cattle by people who had done their utmost to destroy it until they had realised that there was money to be made from preserving it for tourists like me.

I had quickly learnt that all the dire threats and shouting were meaningless and ineffectual, so I ignored them as I pushed passed and began the arduous climb up the wooden staircase toward the King's Chamber, and their voices receded into the distance quite quickly before ceasing altogether.

It takes a fit person about a quarter of an hour to climb up the shaft which was built as a giant telescope before the pyramid was capped off with another few million tons of carefully shaped stone, and then I found myself in the cavernous chamber with a handful of other tourists, illuminated by a single, 60 watt light bulb strung from the roof above on a wire. The 'guide' was busy lying to the others in bad English.

"Here" he pointed to a small hole in the floor, "was buried treasure." Lie.

He then pointed to the only object in the room - a massive, rectangular stone box. "Here was Pharaoh." Another lie. This box was the record of a measurement of volume, and had never contained a mummy - Pharaoh or otherwise. End of tour. He had had noticed me come in and was now telling me that I must leave - now - with the others. Of course, I refused, so he became agitated and marched toward me as if he was going to bodily carry me down the stairs, shouting, "Leave now - you must! You must!" I just laughed and eventually he gave up, taking the party away with him and leaving me alone in the pyramid for a full three-quarters of an hour.

Not many people have been left alone in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, but I was in good company. Napoleon spent the night alone in there once, and when he emerged next day, they asked him what had happened. He replied, "If I told you, you would not believe me."

Well, if I told you what happened to me, you would definitely believe me - not a lot happened, but it was nice and peaceful compared to the outside.

I ended up hiring a horse from the aforementioned hunting horseman, and traveling across the desert every night for a week whilst I stayed in a 'hotel' which turned out to be the barracks for the Cairo Secret Police, but that's another story. I've just remembered that I have photographs of the Great Pyramid under grey skies and soaked in rain, taken between the ears of my horse, so I will definitely use them for another pyramid post.

Fur Iris

2012-01-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

Share my bath...

2012-01-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

Sarah Toa's 'message in bottle' (bah!) post pictures reminded me of the bathroom shelf of our compact but adorable city bathroom, so I thought I would share it with you, since I have just heard that the power-lines at my workshop have been blown over during the high winds of the night, and it will be a while before light is restored.

Aside from the obvious beachy, nautical, splashy-aroundy connotations, it's also a bit of a time capsule spanning around 200 million years, but jumping around 199,9935 years toward the end.

Left to right: A nautilus with the outer layer scraped away to reveal mother from 30+ years ago; a rather unusually whole bivalve scallop bought about 2 weeks ago, but made about 180 million years ago by someone calling himself 'God'; another bivalve collected locally by me, but made around the same time as the other, called a 'Devil's Toe-Nail', but also made by God (there's a lesson in there somewhere); a piece of fossilised wood from Arizona; a star-fish carved out of Bath Stone by someone calling himself 'Tom Stephenson', and on the top of that, an unusual (it's got 6 legs) starfish made from fired ceramic by the 6 year-old grandchild of someone calling himself 'Tom Stephenson'; above and to the left of that, a fossilised fish from the 'Green River' formation in what is now called the USA; another piece of fossilised wood from Morocco; an unfossilised shell of indeterminate age.

All of these items sit on a shelf of Portuguese, pink marble, cut and installed by me about 20 years ago, on the instructions of Her Indoors.

Out of shot, there is also a splash-back of the same pink marble running around the walls of the bath, and the walls themselves have been painted a messy pink by H.I.'s own, fair hand. The end result was all a bit pink for my tastes, but I am sort of used to it now. It still looks a bit like how I imagine the bedroom of Mise's daughter to look sometimes, though.

Splish, splash, splish, splash...

Not all dentists are suicidal

2012-01-04T02:43:00.001-08:00

Here is my German dentist friend (on the right) celebrating New Year's Eve at the little gay bar around the corner from where he lives.

They are standing on the stage of a tiny theatre at the back of the bar (run by an extremely camp Dutchman) which is host to a spectacular transvestite review once a week. Thomas is a part-time D.J. when he's not pulling teeth, so I think this was a 60s disco.

I met one of the main tranny stars when I was there - a 70 year-old man who you just could not imagine dressed up as a woman. He also owns a fabulous vintage sailing ship, moored up in the nearby docks, so I guess he doesn't do the reviews for money.

My friend loves this place so much that he takes all the nursing staff there once a year for the annual celebrations. Germany's a funny place - full of contradictions.

Wake me up when it's spring

2012-01-03T01:46:00.000-08:00

Sherlock

The view from the window of our compact but adorable city apartment this morning,

January 3rd, 2012.

Actually, it's worse than this because it's difficult to photograph wind. I hear it's even worse in Scotland, but there again, so is breakfast. I woke up with the good intention of going into work for the first time since Christmas this morning, but it hasn't got light yet, and I don't think it is going to at all today, so - if I don't hear from my glamorous assistant with the bad news that he is coming out with a delivery - I think I might go back to bed.

Poor old H.I. had to go to a meeting early this morning, so I can stave off feelings of guilt until this evening when she returns. In the immortal words of Tony Blair, things can only get better.

P.S. - Anyone see the latest 'Sherlock' on BBC? Good, isn't it?

Mad About the Boy

2012-01-02T15:54:00.001-08:00

Beauty in the ordinary...

2012-01-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

... or at least in the kitchen.

I wonder what sort of DNA you need to become so good-looking? Us humans have to suffice with shut-off cells which lets us know when to stop growing fingers, or when to start growing webs in between them, etc. but we tend to be constantly dissatisfied with our own personal cell-growth, hence all those adverts sent to some (not me, I've got a Mac - he said smugly) promising enhancement.

Christmas Cracker joke of 2011: How long are a heron's legs? Long enough to reach the ground.

Normally you need a microscope to observe spectacular cell-growth like this little cauliflower, and we would become extremely distraught if we found anything like this growing on us, but this little green vegetable looks good enough to eat - too good to eat, in fact. Spirals within spirals within spirals - where will it all end?

I remember a girl at my art school who was gobsmacked by seeing one of these in a greengrocer's (note the correct use of apostrophe, all you greengrocers) so she decided to cast it in plaster. The material she used for the negative was a hard 'Vinamould' which had a high melting temperature, so when she pulled the cauliflower from the mould, it was already cooked. Vinamould was so toxic, however, that she had to throw it away without eating it.

Sacrificed for Art.

Robert Frost - the greatest poet never to have worked for the Daily Express

2012-01-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

A still from H.I.'s Christmas present to me.

As she said, Robert Frost should have written for Rupert Bear.

He had it all.

Example:

A Considerable Speck

A speck that would have been beneath my sight

On any but a paper sheet so white

Set off across what I had written there.

And I had idly poised my pen in air

To stop it with a period of ink

When something strange about it made me think,

This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,

But unmistakably a living mite

With inclinations it could call its own.

It paused as with suspicion of my pen,

And then came racing wildly on again

To where my manuscript was not yet dry;

Then paused again and either drank or smelt--

With loathing, for again it turned to fly.

Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.

It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,

Yet must have had a set of them complete

To express how much it didn't want to die.

It ran with terror and with cunning crept.

It faltered: I could see it hesitate;

Then in the middle of the open sheet

Cower down in desperation to accept

Whatever I accorded it of fate.

I have none of the tenderer-than-thou

Collectivistic regimenting love

With which the modern world is being swept.

But this poor microscopic item now!

Since it was nothing I knew evil of

I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize

Mind when I meet with it in any guise

No one can know how glad I am to find

On any sheet the least display of mind.

Robert Frost

Saucy

2012-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

I cannot understand how I got through my entire, brief adolescence without becoming aware of this excellent publication from the other side of the pond. Maybe it never made it over until the invention of the web?

I found the last image whilst looking for something else (don't ask, I hate lying) and it wasn't until I enlarged the picture a little to get a closer look, that I saw the 'NRA' logo on the cover, discreetly (or as discreetly as the gun-slinging maniacs are capable of being) tucked over on the right.

*Yes, that is the National Rifle Association as championed by the Republican Party's hero, Charlton Heston. Having never seen the inside of any of these comics, I don't know the relevance of contents to the NRA, other than Guns and Porn both seem to go together like Apples and Pie.* In my youth, we didn't have Manga comics or anything other than Health and Efficiency, and the few copies of that I laid my grubby hands on were either salvaged from hedgerows (thrown away in a fit of remorse by a poor, tormented and spent soul, I dare say), or surreptitiously snitched from the fathers of some of my more liberally minded friends. Let's face it, the dad was not going to say, "Anyone seen my latest copy of Health and Efficiency?" over the dinner table, is he?

In a way, the above illustrations are almost charming, though I cannot see the NRA financing the Rupert Annual in the 1940s and 50s. Someone ought to tell the middle girl that UV sun lamps are bad for you too. I do remember averts in the back of imported Mad magazines (which I loved) for real guns and Confederate money, though. You could buy a real Derringer .22 lady's or gambler's pistol by mail order back then, but I don't know if they would have sent one to a 13 year old boy in England.

Saucy. (Jack the Ripper's favorite exclamation...)

* OLIVE has just pointed out that this NRA is not the rifle lot - see comments below.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T12:02:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me last night that I have been feeling the most misanthropic I have ever felt during the last few weeks. I put it down to about 3 months of continuing face-ache, turning me into a bear with a sore arse.

Anyway, I'll speak to you again next year, and a heart-felt wish to you for a very happy and prosperous New Year in 2012.

Droning on

2011-12-30T03:55:00.000-08:00

Chilling but highly interesting watching. The sense of complete detachment is almost absolute in their air-conditioned control room, somewhere in Kansas.....?

Go, Cream-Team Bath!

2011-12-29T05:15:00.000-08:00

Bath Spa University is famous in particular for one thing, and that is making the nocturnal lives of the city residents a misery by marauding around the streets all night, every night, in groups of about 30, pissed out of their heads and shouting as loudly as they can.

It's a shame that the cream of Bath's intelligentsia are so over-represented by these idiotic binge-drinkers, but that is the way it is I am afraid. Aside from wrapping themselves in old sheets once a year and pretending to be 'Romans' (also pissed out of their heads and shouting), this is the only noticeable effect that the university has on the town - not much else emanates from the campus, or certainly not much of an uplifting nature.

This poster of a Purcell music event by their department of music sort of sums it all up really. They make as good a job at portraying King Arthur as they do at portraying a Roman - just look at it, for God's sake.

What appears to be a student of accountancy sits atop a riding-stable hack wearing a Norman French, chain-mail hood which is not tucked into a Norman French tabard, limply raising a child's plastic sword; wearing blue denim jeans and with Doctor Marten shoes on his feet, which are tucked into the stirrups of a 2oth century saddle. I'm amazed that they haven't included a telegraph pole in the middle distance.

Do you think it is a joke which has gone over my head, or is that the best they could do for a poster? Let's hope the music's better.

Affray in a manger - 'The Sun'

2011-12-28T14:12:00.001-08:00

POLICE were called to break up a fight between clerics — at the church believed to be built on the spot where Jesus was born.

Rival groups of broom-wielding Orthodox and Armenian clerics clashed at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Palestine, when tensions flared during the cleaning of the church for the Orthodox Christian celebrations in early January.

Around 100 priests and monks were thought to be involved in the dispute, which was over the boundaries of the territory the different groups care for within the church.

The former Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Head of the Palestinian forces in Bethlehem were both slightly hurt in the scrap.

Relationships between the Orthodox, Armenian, and Catholic clerics who share responsibility for the church have often been difficult, and there have been similar scuffles in recent years.

Lieutenant-Colonel Khaled al-Tamimi said: "It was a trivial problem that occurs every year.

"Everything is alright and things have returned to normal."

He said there were no arrests made because the monks who were involved are "men of God".

Arise, Sir Thomas

2011-12-28T04:23:00.000-08:00

It's coming up to that time of year when we all sit down and look back at what we have achieved in the past year, and in my case, this amounts to very nearly fuck-all. Looking at it in a positive way, at least I can say that I have made it to 60 without being caught, which is half the battle won in my book. I don't know what I am going to tell the children about their inheritance when the time comes, but - judging from the look in their eyes - I think they must have already guessed. At least I know that when they are nice to me, it is not for fear of being cut out of the will.

I have not yet had the letter from a Whitehall mandarin, forewarning me of my inclusion in the New Year's Honours List, so I suspect that this year - as all the others - I have been overlooked. 'Sir Thomas Stephenson' has a sort of authentic ring to it, don't you think?

I have not had any hints about a lifetime's achievement award yet either, but I suppose there is still time for that. Being a rather shy, retiring sort of wallflower, my profile has been a little too low to allow my status as a National Living Treasure to be fully appreciated, but that may not be a bad thing. People are so fickle.

There was a year or two when Country Life magazine had a one-page feature on the practitioners of various traditional artisan skills like bread-making, smithing, gun-making, etc, and it was called 'National Living Treasure'. This would feature a large photo of the Treasure, at work on or standing near by the product of his trade or skill, together with a few words on his past achievements.

A fairly well-to-do friend of mine who is a 'Brilliant Cutter' happened to see this feature one day, and wrote to Country Life to suggest that they should feature him in this category, and they agreed. In case you don't know what a 'Brilliant Cutter' is, he is a fairly rare breed of glass worker who cuts the bevels on mirrors, polishes floral patterns or words in glass plates which sometimes are clad with gold leaf from the back, etc. - like Victorian pub windows - and cuts through the coloured flash in glass to produce those gaudy items of glassware which are so popular in Bohemia. One of my mate's biggest jobs was to make several acres of unspeakably tasteless glass and gold mirrors for Donald's apartment in Trump Tower, Manhattan.

So one day, I opened a copy of Country Life, and there he was, shown at the wheel of his polisher, cutting a design into a bit of glass and looking for all the world like the dying breed he really is. Beneath the romantically-lit picture were a few well-chosen words about past achievements and future projects, and he sat back to wait for the free publicity to bring him in some lucrative work.

All that happened was - for the next couple of years - every time I saw him or spoke to him on the phone, I would refer to him as 'my little treasure', and I encouraged everyone else to do the same.

I could have warned him of this outcome. About 18 years ago, I managed to sell a four-page article about the restoration of of a spectacular shell and crystal grotto at a country house that I conducted, to the American 'Architectural Digest' magazine. I used the money they paid me to pay off the photographer who I had employed, then I too sat back and waited for the rich and famous to invite me to build them a grotto in fabulous gardens. I received about 70 begging letters from American companies, suggesting that I should buy their novelty door-handles in bronze, etc. They all began, "Dear Designer..."

The trouble with successful restoration work is that it is - by definition - almost anonymous. The best work is the least likely to get you noticed, let alone any credit. As my old aunt used to say, "Thems as asks don't get. Thems as don't ask don't want".

Then there is the 'legacy' thing which Tony Blair is so obsessed with. We are only just beginning to reap the rewards of Blair's mentor, Margaret Thatcher and her ally, Ronald Regan, but Blair and Bush's legacy has started to produce fruit in the Middle East already. Strange fruit, but fruit nevertheless.

Sometimes I think that if I can go through life without causing too much damage, that will be good enough for me, but an OBE would be nice. Maybe next year.

Back to reality

2011-12-27T03:20:00.000-08:00

Last night we sat down and watched the final Harry Potter film again, but this time on DVD. "What do you want for Christmas?" H.I.'s daughter had asked me about a week ago, and I had - almost without hesitation - asked her for it.

I know I have banged on about Potter many times in the past, but I really think that it may be a few years before the true relevance and impact of the series of books and films becomes truly apparent - about the same time as it will take all the children who grew up alongside the kids in the films to reach the age when they can be voted into government - both Slitherins and Griffendors.

Watching the final Potter production has almost - almost - made me want to actually go back to the beginning and read the books. I have never read a single word of any of them. Goodness knows how I would have been affected if I were 9 years old when the first book was published.

Really, they are a grand psychological drama set in a form which is instantaneously made understandable to pre-adolescent children, and it unfolds as they unfolded until they arrived at the other end - battered but unbowed -to begin their lives as young adults.

Right from the beginning, the books and films were attacked from all sides, but the phenomena was just too huge to suffer any damage whatsoever. Unpublished writers attacked the books for being badly written - well they would say that, wouldn't they? Christians attacked them for being the works of the devil - likewise. The not-so-wealthy became horribly embittered and resentful toward the wonderful Jo Rowling, who has made quite a bit of money from her creation, but she remains as humble as it could possibly be about her success, and as dedicated and grateful to her following as she was before being published - or followed. Are the British the only nation in the world to resent the success of their more gifted or lucky peers?

As far as I am concerned, the two best of the films were placed in exactly the right order - the first and the last, with about 7 others in between, I think. Watching the last again last night, I still had not tired of it by the end, so watched the long 2nd disc of extras back to back.

I learned that they did not have to surgically remove Ralph Fiennes's nose for his part, but did so digitally instead for the sake of his future career. He spent the entire time on set with a rather fetching arrangement of coloured dots stuck to his face so that the boys on the computers knew where it was at any given time.

My God - what a job the boys on the computers did too! They were helped in equal measure by a small army of stunt-men and pyrotechnicians, all of whom said that you cannot beat the real thing when it comes to the sheer danger of giant explosions and fire-balls. When the Geeks turn a rolling fire-ball into a galloping tiger, that's when the magic is injected into the film.

The make-up artists were the best in the world too, turning real dwarves into real gnomes with latex and costumes - the youngest of the gnomes on set was about 3 years old - the son of another 'gnome' in real life! The two main make-up artists were attending to Robbie Coltrane in a trailer, when they mentioned their book entitled 'Actors We Have Met And Liked'. He asked to see it, and when he flicked through it, all the pages were blank.

The final scene of 'extras' was the farewell gathering in the set canteen, when all the actors and technicians who had spent over 10 years with each other every year, finally said goodbye and promised to keep in touch. Daniel Radcliffe burst into tears, setting everyone else off, and the three - now grown-up - kids hugged each other for perhaps the last time.

Some of the older, more well-established actors wondered what would happen to the three kids for the rest of their acting lives. Helena Bonham-Carter said, "'ll be alright, but I fear for them." Then she whispered to the crew inside her trailer, "Actually, I am trying to be the Queen Mother at the same time as being Bellatrix, but don't tell anyone..."

Back to reality?

His Master's Voice

2011-12-26T04:29:00.000-08:00

I've been bloody ill all over Christmas - I still am. I must be run down or something. I've got an awful cold which is severe enough to fall into the 'man-flu' category and I am beginning to think that it might be the real thing. I ache all over. I have an extremely painful tongue-ulcer which makes eating an experience to be feared - not best this time of year. I am developing a sty on one eye, my neck aches and I am deaf in one ear. I wasn't going to mention any of this, but I relented and thought I would share it with you.

Luckily, all my nearest and dearest have not been dragged down by my heroic attempts at disguising my misery, and have all had a jolly good time, eating, drinking and generally being merry, and that, believe it or not - far from making me jealous - has lifted my spirits. Now it's all over, I can settle down to hiding away and watching the latest and last Harry Potter DVD which they bought for me. Somehow it managed to creep onto the market without all the usual marketing razmataz - maybe they've made enough money from it already?

The new Bose speakers that I bought for the iMac will come into their own for the soundtrack, somehow magically producing a fairly rich bass from speakers the size of tweeters. I have a friend who is obsessed with playing vinyl records, insisting that digital music is thin and weedy by comparison. If he had his way, all digital music would be banned from pubs etc. He is disturbingly evangelistic about it to the point of turning into a fully-fledged pain in the arse.

Then yesterday, I heard someone on the radio say that the MP3 format was never intended for music, but rather was developed for film sound tracks. The digital format compresses the frequencies into a very small space apparently, and fools the ear into thinking that it heard things which didn't exist - like the bass on my speakers, for instance. This I believe - how else could you get 35,000 tunes into a bit of plastic the size of a postage stamp?

Whenever I try to compare vinyl with MP3, all I hear is the crackling and hissing of the needle as it grinds it's way over the scratched surface of a vintage disc, and as I point this out to my friend, he becomes extremely angry, saying that I have no ears. This - in turn - angers me, and I insist that at least when I whistle, it is in tune, unlike his discordant warblings.

I make a big point of saying "Oh yes - MUCH better!" in a loud voice when he gets up to dislodge the stuck needle as Ella Fitzgerald repeats the same line over and over again at 33 and a third RPM, and this makes him really angry.

At least when a digital soundtrack gets stuck, it gets stuck at about 4000 RPM, which is in itself a type of music that - if you have ears to hear - transcends the original recording and can be quite melodic if you have taken the right drugs.

I am - in truth - in two minds about this digi versus vinyl debate. All I know is that I cannot be bothered to take all those scratched records out of their sleeves and place them on a delicate mechanism to get even more scratched as a bus goes past, shaking the foundations of our compact but adorable city apartment. C.D.s work upside down, you know.

Don't you wish all bankers were like this?

2011-12-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

If bankers were al like the below, we wouldn't feel so bad about bailing them out, would we? Merry Christmas. XXX

Is nothing sacred?

2011-12-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas

24th

2011-12-24T03:37:00.000-08:00

What a girl. What a voice. What legs! Lucky Santa.

Wouldn't you know it, I've developed a cold last night, and I have to do a load of cooking for the brats today. No excuse for man-flu - I have to do it otherwise they will kill me anyway.

Where shall I put this tree?

2011-12-23T14:43:00.000-08:00

She's 17 now.

Great Expectorations

2011-12-23T03:39:00.000-08:00

It's grey, dark and windy here, the day before Christmas eve - a complete change from last year, when it was minus 10 and we had been knee-deep in snow since mid-november.

When I was a kid at home in Surrey, I used to make myself believe that no harm could possibly come to me on Christmas night itself, and would wander out into the snowy dark of the woods without any of the sense of fear and trepidation that would normally have accompanied me on any other night. As far as I was concerned, there could have been an escaped tiger lurking in the bush right next to me, but it would be incapable of doing anything so shocking as eating me on this holy night of all nights, and it was an exhilarating feeling to be so impossibly invulnerable.

There could have been a human Magwitch waiting to pounce as well, but apart from anything else, I had seen the film and knew that - even if it were not Christmas - no real harm would come to the young boy.

The only way I can suspend my disbelief for any longer than a few seconds these days is when I am watching a Harry Potter film, but even these fantasies, J.K. Rowling has prepared the kids for all the dangers and pitfalls which lie in wait outside Hogwarts, albeit in a rather exaggerated form.

I was about to say that not many of us will have to face He Who Should Not Be Named anytime in the near future, then I remembered what happened to me last night, and changed my mind. He is still out there, and up to all his old tricks.

I casually asked a couple of friends of mine how they were, and they replied by saying that they were very worried and depressed by their 20-something year-old son. I knew that their son had been through a grueling and harrowing time whilst struggling to cope with a heroin habit, but I thought that - after a spell in hospital for a well-earned lung infection - he was on his way to recovery with the 'help' of methadone, and was ensconced in his own sheltered flat and not the home of his parents, from whom he had stolen many things to sell for reasons which were not as obvious as they first thought.

When you are on a downward spiral like his, you tend to pick up a lot of dark and unpleasant acquaintances, then as you try to climb out of the hole and into the light, half the battle is trying to rid yourself of all the blood-suckers who latched onto you when you were at your most vulnerable. So it is with their son, and he only has a matter of a couple of days to succeed - up until Christmas day, in fact. His parents can only sit back and watch.

Two extremely unpleasant and ruthless thugs who locked onto him, know that he has to attend a pharmacy every day at a certain time to receive his dose of methadone which he has to drink in front of the pharmacists to prove he is not going to sell it and buy the real thing with the money. This is when they meet him every day, and take whatever money he has on him away, which has left him unable to pay the rent on his flat. This means he will be evicted very soon - probably just after Christmas.

Not content with the small change, his tormentors have forced him to steal from his parents - not for his drugs money, but more money for themselves. They got a little bored with him recently, and arranged to have him pushed in front of their speeding car, but the man who was supposed to do the pushing backed out in the last second, sparing his life. Their son is pathetically grateful for this, and even admires the man for his cowardice.

The most astounding thing about this near murder is that it was all witnessed by two policemen who were secretly following the two thugs, but the police have done absolutely nothing about it. Why? Because if the plot had succeeded, they would have killed two birds with one stone - one more junkie off the streets for good, and three nice, fat convictions for murder which would look very good on their C.V.s.

Now that we know the situation, some strings are being pulled, some favours brought in, some words are being whispered in ears and - with a bit of luck - we can get him left alone to rebuild his life before they literally milk him to death. These guys will not stop until the source of their meagre income dries up all together, unless something is done about them. Something is being done, in the most peaceful and reasonable way possible under the circumstances. Peer pressure.

Lets hope he and his family have a peaceful and restful Christmas this year.

Eskimo Fox again

2011-12-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

One of our favourites from about 18 years ago - worth another airing:

Up on the roof

2011-12-22T03:39:00.000-08:00

I was walking down the street yesterday morning and heard all the gulls going crazy, then looked up to see the local falconer on the roof of the old tramshed, giving his Harris Hawk a bit of exercise.

I really don't know why he bothers (or is paid) to upset the gulls at this time of year, when they are at their quietest. I really don't think there is any use to him upsetting them in the nesting season either, when they are at their noisiest.

All that happens is they all take off at the sight of the hawk, and fly about making even more noise than they normally do before settling back down again after he has gone. This scaring by hawk would only work if he spent 24 hours a day on the roof for about 2 months, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Have a lovely Christmas

2011-12-21T03:28:00.000-08:00

This is my Christmas card to all of you 82 loyal (but quiet) followers - plus anyone else who happens to stumble upon me.

For me (and I suspect many others of my generation!) Rupert Bear sums up a magical childhood Christmas perfectly, but there again, he also sums up the perfect summer holiday too. He is a bear for all seasons and, along with all his chums, leads a charmed, cosmopolitan but reassuringly provincial life style, somewhere in the back of our adult psyches. We have a lot to thank him for.

For an early introduction to philosophy, see Winnie the Pooh. For everything else, see Rupert.

Kim Jong Il - a nation mourns, in -12 degrees on empty stomachs

2011-12-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

We are now all - as a nation - taking the piss out of the North Koreans for their public displays of grief for the death of their beloved ruler, Kim Jong Il.

Haven't we forgotten something? Like the death of Princess Diana, for instance? What short memories we all have.

British school discipline - firm but fair

2011-12-20T02:47:00.000-08:00

It's not all about farts

2011-12-19T16:16:00.000-08:00

I told you I have never grown up...

I met the Canadian Snow Bird team once... sigh...

I'm dreaming

2011-12-19T01:58:00.000-08:00

Right - before we get started (I sound like Melvyn Bloody Bragg now) here are two interesting facts I have learnt before breakfast, one of which you all must be aware of, and the other only a handful, I suspect:

1 - Kim Jong Il has kicked the bucket. Lonery no more.

2 - The origin of the word 'testify' goes back to a time when - if you swore on oath - you would place your hand on your testicles (assuming you had any), not your heart or, later, the Bible (and sometimes your mother's grave).

Down to business - Dickens. This is the week that everyone's mind is firmly set on fabricating the ephemeral notion of a good, secular Christmas, by ingesting an unrelenting diet of Charles Dickens - or at least everyone in the British Isles and it's former colonies.

Since Christmas day falls on a Sunday this year, we have an uninterrupted and clear run-up of 6 whole days to get the big idea, so there is no excuse to have to remind yourself of the correct attitude to adopt when greeting all those relatives who you told to eff off earlier in the year, when they knock on your door in the expectation of eating you out of house and home at around 2.00 pm on the 25th of December.

I sound a bit like a Scrooge myself, but - as I mentioned before - as each Christmas comes around and my grandchildren approach middle-age, I seem to get softer in my attitude to the festival. Maybe it's a case of 'if you can't beat them...'? I never used to beat them anyway, and now they are too big to even think about it.

It is generally believed that Charles Dickens invented Christmas some time in the mid 19th century, and the more I think about it, the more I believe it myself. The only difference is that I am more willing to suspend my disbelief, the older I get. Two other unsavoury facts which go with the Season of Goodwill: The Christmas tree was invented by a German aristocrat around 1830, and Santa Claus was invented by the Coca Cola Corporation around 1930. Who wants to believe that Santa was a Middle-Eastern terrorist anyway? (and who does?)

The other key aspect of Christmas is that it should be saturated with a deep and unyielding - almost overwhelming - sense of guilt too. Remember the starving as you stuff yourself to bursting point. Remember the lonely as you surround yourself with your nearest and dearest. Remember the cold and homeless as you chuck another log on the fire beneath the snow-covered roof of your cosy home. Remember the children who have nothing but old Coke (TM) cans to play with, as little Johnny unwraps the latest interactive Play Station (TM). Above all, remember all those poor people around the world who - by the simple accident of not being born into a Christian society - will not be celebrating Christmas at all this year, and instead sit around in 90 degree heat, thinking of nothing in particular.

My German mate remembers a time when he (an only child), was forced to spend Christmas day with his elderly parents in the chilly north of the country, and most of that time was spent watching crap T.V.

There was a tradition on German television at the time, when - around midnight - a camera team would be sent into a bar in the Reeperbahn district of Hamburg, and as the pictures of all the drunk and happy revelers who raised their glasses to the camera were shown - live - across the nation, the presenter would say in a sombre voice:

"And we should spare a thought for all those poor people who are unable to be with their families at this time of year..."

My mate used to long to leave the house and join them.

Sunday Swedish Schadenfreude

2011-12-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, but I told you that I never grew up...

White Wash

2011-12-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

The last post was set in Badminton, Gloucestershire, and all the houses in the village there are painted with traditional lime-wash, like this freshly painted house in Corsham, Wiltshire, dating from around 1700.

I love proper lime-washes, and I am pleased to see that the old techniques for making and applying it are coming back into vogue. There have been thousands of old buildings which have been partially destroyed by the plastic, petro-chemical products of ICI over the years. The irony is that these plastic paints cost so much more than a traditional lime-wash, that I am amazed that they became so popular.

Proper slaked (not hydrated) lime is mixed with water and a fixative like tallow or casein to make a white-wash, and the colour is achieved by adding earth pigments like - as in this case - yellow ochre. If you mix artificial, modern pigments with lime, they simply disappear within a couple of hours, but natural earth tints are lime-fast, and will last as long as the base stays stuck to the stonework - many, many years.

Corsham is a strange place - a real mixture of country town classic, and single-mother estate hell. It is a dangerous place to be at night, which you wouldn't think to look at it by daylight.

When I took this photo on friday, I had just left a junk shop where I had seen a poster advertising 'Pear's Soap', dating from about 1903, and it is so astoundingly racist, that I almost posted up the pictures of it here to illustrate how attitudes have - mostly - changed in the last 100 years, but actually I think the advert is so offensive that I cannot show it. That's how bad it really is! You can probably guess the content of it anyway, especially given the title of this post. 'Pear's' still make soap!

Where's Henry?

2011-12-17T02:54:00.000-08:00

When, in the 1980s, I first started working for the sculptor, Simon Verity, he was just completing the enormous, Portland stone table top tomb for Henry, 10th Duke of Beaufort, who is buried at the church of Badminton House, Gloucestershire. You will have some idea of how grand this house is when I tell you that the picture above is of it's back gate - several miles gallop away from the front door.

Henry was the epitome of the English hunting man, and the Beaufort Hunt was the hunt of all hunts, so it is not surprising that the Duke was the prime target for all the hunt-saboteurs of England. When they first buried him in the church of Badminton House (yes, it's big enough to have it's own church), some anti-hunt demonstrators crept in during the middle of the night and dug the poor Duke's corpse up, leaving it on show above ground for people to discover in the morning. When they reburied him, they made sure that this could not happen again by covering the spot with a six foot by six foot by six inch thick pad of concrete. That would keep the old boy down. It may also explain why I cannot find any pictures of the elaborate tomb on Google - they do not want to attract any attention, I suppose.

I arrived at Simon's workshop just as he was putting the finishing touches to the table-top tomb, and it stood next to a full-size plaster mock-up in the little room. Next to the mock up was a velvet cushion on which was placed the actual red and gold coronet of the Duke, so that Simon could copy it in Portland stone - including cushion with tassels - to sit like a cherry on top of the cake-like monument in the churchyard. He had to go to Badminton and borrow the coronet, which was given to him by the current Duke's butler, who told him to take good care of it, as this was the only one in existence, and it had existed for about 300 years. It was covered in cling-film to protect it from the dust.

Coming from a sound and sensible masonic background, it was to be my job to oversee it's installation at the church, and this little job was not without incident - some of which were hair-raising in the extreme, and almost involved the loss of even more lives than the Duke's.

When I arrived at the churchyard to assess the situation, I found the massive slab of concrete which covers the Duke, and was looking at the wall of the church where I could just make out the sprayed graffiti words, "BEAUFORT ROT IN HELL" which had been put there by the grave-robbers and partially cleaned off by the flower ladies, when a car pulled up sharply and two men in suits got out and challenged me.

I told them who I was and they relaxed, but I asked them how they knew I was there so quickly, and they pointed to an antennae scanner on the roof of the church. They said that it used to go off every night, and they would rush to the grave expecting to find it being attacked by hunt saboteurs again, but always found nothing. After about a week, they lay - hidden - in wait, and discovered that it was being set off by a fox which trotted over the old Duke's grave at the same time every night.

The tomb is basically four five inch walls and a roof, and when I constructed it, the inside of the walls had to be reinforced with a matrix of concrete blocks, so that it could not be knocked through with a sledge-hammer - a very likely possibility at the time. When we unpacked the blocks for the walls, we discovered that the supplier of the stone had rubbed a small chamfer on all four sides of every block, which - when laid - would have given the impression that the joints in the masonry were about 4 times thicker than they actually were, and Simon (as was usual) hit the roof. Nothing could placate him, and he was furious that he could not blame me for it.

"The first person who is going to see this thing is the fucking Queen, for God's sake!" he yelled, and he was telling the truth. HRH was going to be at the dedication and memorial service for the Duke, and - given her position in society - would be the first one to lay flowers against the tomb. There was nothing for it but to rub about 2mm from the face of each and every block, putting about an extra 4 days on the job.

As Martin (his brilliant but taciturn assistant) and me began to build the finished walls, an elderly lady wandered up, looking confused and bewildered. "I'm looking for my husband. Have you seen him"? she asked imploringly, and it wasn't until a nurse came up to her to lead her back to the house that we realised that this was the Duchess - widow of the very person upon whose grave we stood and who she was looking for. Very sad, and a good example of how death is, indeed, the great leveler.

At last, the time came to lay the table block on the four walls before literally crowning it with the stone coronet. Easy-Peasy.

The piece of intricately carved stone was about 7 feet by 5 feet by 6 inches or so, and weighed about three-quarters of a ton. My plan was to bring a 'shear-leg' tripod on site and sling a chain hoist from it, pick the slab up, build a pedestal of straw bales beneath it, let it down on them, then roller it across a bridging board to the top of the tomb, move the shear-legs to over the walls, pick it up again then lay it in place. Simple - but not simple enough for Simon, who is not known for his patience when it comes to viewing the finished work. At the time he looked upon me as a clay-footed, belt and braces sort of pedestrian, and he insisted that we would pick the thing up on the tripod and simply swing it over to the tomb. Wrong, but he would not hear otherwise.

I tried - in vain - to explain to him that shear legs were made for direct lifts only, and the fact that they only had three legs was proof of this, but he was having none of it, so I began lifting the thing against my better judgement and waiting for the disaster which would inevitably occur. It did.

As he and Martin began to push and pull the huge slab over the four feet toward the top of the walls, one scaffold-pole leg fell out of it's socket and struck Simon full on the head, leaving the 3/4 ton block swinging from two spindly legs only, and Martin and me desperately trying to keep it upright as Simon reeled around the yard with blood pouring from his head-wound.

Somehow, we managed to stop it from falling flat on it's side and destroying itself, the rest of the tomb and Simon all in one go, then cranked it down onto the safety of the four walls before laying the two legs flat on the grass, seeing to our wounds and getting our breath back.

I don't think the Queen ever found out about it. I wonder if she reads this blog?

Bill

2011-12-15T01:58:00.000-08:00

Right. We've done rabbits and pigeons, now it's the deer's turn. This pair were helping themselves to the rabbit's grass the other day as I snapped them with my phone camera.

The dog (a collie who has killed one or two in his time here) just stood at the edge of the field barking at them as they took no notice. I thought I had better scare them off in case the dog decided to get involved, but they took no notice of me either as I walked toward them, waving my arms around. Why, I wondered, does the average hunter think that you need to silently creep up to them on all fours before taking aim with a rifle from about a quarter of a mile? I could have walked right up to this pair and whacked them with a hammer - maybe they know we are a soft touch out here?

I used to look after a big (very big) grizzled, grey deerhound lurcher called Bill when I lived in the country. Bill was a fearless killer, and had been responsible for the deaths of many deer, foxes, squirrels and cats in his longish life. To be fair, the foxes were an unfortunate accident - all he wanted to do was play with them, but the foxes did not seem to understand the concept so paid the ultimate price. It all happens so quickly with dogs, that you are never quite sure who started it.

His technique with squirrels was to simply launch himself at them from a great distance, usually in a public park. My God, how that dog could run. He was like a guided missile. More often than not, the squirrel would be within a quick sprint of a tree, so Bill would collide with the trunk at about 60 miles an hour, knocking himself out cold. Cats were as simple as rabbits, and if discovered in open country, it only took one bite to finish them off.

I once saw him pursuing a hare in a field of tall corn. Because the corn was taller than him, he was forced to run a bit, then leap up every few yards to take a look at where he was going, then dive down back into it again to run through for a few yards, flattening the standing crop on the way. He never caught the wily hare.

I took him out at twilight once, and he spotted a group of rabbits at the far end of a field. Off he went and the rabbits dived for cover, closely followed by Bill. He was gone for ages, and as it began to get dark, I saw him stumbling around in the field trying to make his way back to me. At first I thought he was injured, but when he eventually came up to me, I saw that his eyes had been completely closed by a lot of burr seeds which had clogged in the long fur around them. It took quite a while to pull them all out, and by that time it was completely dark. I had to let Bill guide me back through the wood then, which he did very diligently. One good turn deserves another.

At the time, I was living next door to Chris Patten (the last Governor of Hong Kong, and our MP then), and he had a small, very old and very blind dog which stumbled about, swearing under it's breath and bumping in to things. One sunday, it stumbled into Bill, and I wondered what all the commotion was about. I went out to find Chris's dog underneath Bill, who had it by the neck and was just about to kill it before I pulled him off. It could have been an international incident.

Another time, we were mushrooming together in a dense wood near my cottage (or at least I was - Bill was just looking bored) when I heard a twig snap and looked up to see a large deer stag which had somehow stumbled upon us and stood staring at us from a distance of 10 feet. I thought the deer had had it, and prepared my knife to finish it off after Bill had given it a mauling.

The deer looked at Bill, Bill looked at the deer, then we all looked at each other for a while before the deer turned it's back on us and casually sauntered away through the bushes. We went back to mushrooming and Bill looked a bit embarrassed at his lack of action. He had been taken by surprise and simply couldn't be bothered. The stag knew this, obviously. Bill was great dog.

Rabbit rabbit rabbit

2011-12-13T02:19:00.000-08:00

I saw this New Zealand Sauvignon Plonk on offer in Waitrose last night, and wondered how it got it's name. Maybe the Kiwi vinster was wandering between the vines, when he heard the following conversation between two fluffy bunnies on the other side of the foliage:

"Oi - Flopsy - get your arse out of my face. You're shitting on one of me five-a-day!"

"Get lost, Thumper - this is my patch."

"Your patch?! I've been coming here since the day before yesterday!"

"You weren't even here yesterday, you mixied old fool."

"You weren't even born yesterday. I wasn't here because I was too busy shagging your mother."

"That was my wife, you dirty old git."

"And it was yer mother too - now sod off before I lose my temper , and take your turds with you - this grass tastes foul."

Etc. etc.

I don't think I could bring myself to buy this wine, just because of the label.

Sneak preview

2011-12-12T00:47:00.000-08:00

This is the main image I am using for our Christmas card this year - it's H.I. aged about... er... whatever she is in the photo. Put it this way, I was not born when this picture was taken. I have already used it a few years ago, but that time I applied a sparkly, lop-sided halo around her head, with some more sparkle elsewhere. It was so popular that some people actually framed it, but there again, she is popular anyway, amongst everyone who knows her.

This year, this image is set with an old image of a holly wreath, and I am trying to work out how I can use the sparkly dust that is meant for using in repairs to white marble - I told you about this stuff in the summer, I think. It makes very good and subtle snow. The green holly wreath has no red berries, so the tinting in this picture compliments it nicely - lots of festive red and green.

So I have the image on a CD ready to take to the printers this morning, then when they are ready, I'll have to spend all evening cutting, folding and applying sparkle so that when they are dry, H.I. can spend about 5 hours writing them all out and sending to about 60 of her friends and admirers, as she does every year.

I spent years not bothering with Christmas cards, so consequently I am off most people's lists, but I am usually mentioned as an afterthought in the ones sent to her, so I don't feel left out. It's a bit like the dinner-party circuit - it doesn't seem to exist any more, but I think that they sort of doubled up as dating agencies anyway. I miss them in a way, but I think they are an activity for singles or bored married couples, and I don't fall into either category. I don't know what category I fall into, come to think of it.

Cute girl, eh? She still is.

Bells on Sunday

2011-12-11T04:07:00.000-08:00

I like the pealing of church bells, but they have to be good ones. We are cursed with living virtually under what I suspect to be the worst set of bells in Christendom, and to compound the misery, they are operated by the keenest and most inept set of ringers in Christendom too.

They don't just ring them on Sundays, but 'practice' most nights of the week for about 3 hours at a time, forcing us to turn up the radio in our compact but adorable kitchen, just so we can follow the dialogue on the Archers.

Sometime in the last half of the 19th century, they demolished what must have been a perfectly charming 18th century church and replaced it with the towering pinnacle which is photographed every few seconds by Japanese tourists who ought to know better, but obviously don't. The cost of rebuilding this church was about £9000, and I would imagine that 99% of the money went on the arrogant masonry (bits of which threaten to fall off every winter, and would kill any passer-by), leaving a pittance for the casting of a new set of bells (one original remains, but is swamped by all the others when it rings), and they got what they paid for. Bells like these could only be rung be tone-deafers, and if you weren't tone deaf when you started, you would be after four weddings and a funeral.

The ringers used to go to the nearby 'Green Tree' pub at around 9.30 on practice nights, and one night some years ago when I had just about enough of them, I stormed into the little old pub with the intention of killing them all where they sat, but lost heart as soon as I saw them sitting about with pints of English ale in their hands, looking expectantly up at me as I entered.

There were about 8 of them, with ages ranging between about 90 and 15 (the 15 year-old was nursing an Olde English Coke), and I began by asking them, "Are you the bell-ringers?!"

The 90 year old simply said "Yes", with a benign and welcoming expression on his face, so I left it at that and ordered a pint for myself before leaving without another word. They probably thought I was plucking up the courage to ask them if I could have a go sometime.

I should have killed them all when I had the chance, because I guess that the old one has since died and been replaced by a younger fellow with a lot more energy - they seem to practice for 5 nights a week these days, and continue for about an hour longer than they used to. When you add weddings, funerals, Christmas, New Year and Memorial day to that, I am surprised that their tinny bells haven't worn through at the clapper.

The thing is that I know they can muffle their bells because they do just that on the 11th of the 11th every year, and occasional during funerals, so why don't they always do it?

I did think about offering the use of our compact but adorable city apartment as a Mosque and setting up an amplified call to prayer on the roof-top by an elderly and tone-deaf Moslem smoker, pointing right at their place of worship, but for one thing I don't think it would be allowed to continue for longer than one dawn, and it might attract all sorts of unwelcome attention.

As I write, a large and well-attended rugby match is about to take place on the other side of the river. What with car alarms, police sirens and the rest of it, the noise pollution in Bath is reaching an unacceptable level. I think I might have to go deaf in my old age.

Moon Mirror 2

2011-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

"Moon Mirror, Moon Mirror, on the screen,

am I the fairest you've ever seen?"

"You are my light."

"Seriously?"

"Yes. Look behind you."

Come friendly bombs...

2011-12-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day of Bath's annual 'Christmas Market', wherein tons of appalling rubbish is sold to coach loads of Welsh women who clog the area around Bath Abbey like arterial fat, and I'm sorry to be so curmudgeonly, but I will not be sorry to see it go.

In theory, I love Christmas markets, but this event is more to do with Bath City Council lining it's already bulging pockets so that they can afford to erect more street cameras and traffic lights in inappropriate places, than it is to do with entering into the spirit of things during the festive season.

The councilor who is in charge of the whole corporate jamboree was on national radio last week, and he responded to the accusation that the market took vital business away from local traders by allowing complete outsiders to sell to complete outsiders - (you have to book these stalls about a year in advance, and the biggest costs around £8000 for two weeks) whilst local traders who pay the council massive rents and rates can only look on in horror - by saying that it did not affect the businesses in the newly built 'Southgate' complex in the slightest. He also said that the market attracts 200 coachers per day whilst it runs. The Southgate complex is so desolate and windswept, that it has been nick-named 'Gotham City' by a few local wags.

This shows how completely out of touch with the wishes of his own townsfolk - who he is supposed to be representing and protecting - he actually is. The Southgate complex was built at huge expense, and the only businesses that can afford to operate there are the very large, national and multi national ones - the ones which Bath City Council are doing their best to keep sweet for the sake of the revenue they generate for the Chamber of Commerce and it's offshoots.

The ancient family departmental store, 'Jolly's' which is right in the middle of what used to be Bath's prime shopping street may not survive another year, because Debenham's have been allowed to move into Southgate, and the first thing you see when you get off a bus or train at Bath Spa Station is the Southgate shopping precinct, and for many people, a 400 yard walk further into the old town is simply not necessary. Debenham's also have an outlet in the little sea port of Weymouth, and you can see that one from about 2 miles away - I have never seen a bigger store anywhere, even in the USA.

I already mentioned that a friend of mine lost his very good restaurant recently because his outgoings were £18,000 per month. It did not matter how many people came to eat his excellent food (the place was always packed) he would never be able to cover costs. Guess who moved in to take his place and sell distinctly mediocre food at inflated prices in an atmosphere stripped of all the original ambience which had taken years to build up? The restaurant chain, 'Cote'.

In a way, my German dentist friend may be lucky. Not only does he live in Bremerhaven, which has been voted Germany's ugliest town (unfair), but a national newspaper - Der Bild - has voted Bremerhaven's Christmas Market the saddest in all Germany.

In Germany, what we call 'German Markets' are called 'European Markets'. Not for much longer, I fear.

Moon Mirror

2011-12-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

"Moon Mirror, Moon Mirror, in the sky,

can there be any, fairer than I?"

"None, my sun."

"What did you say?"

"I said, none, my son."

"Seriously?"

"Only joking - LOOK BEHIND YOU!"

Messengers from heaven

2011-12-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

I came across these images above and below, having typed 'Conference of the Birds' into a Google image search, and I found them on a site called 'Blogged be Thy Name'. I liked the images and title so much, that I not only lifted them from there without asking permission, but also signed up to follow this blogger, who describes his/her posts as 'an irreverent study of religion in a profanely sacred world'. I was hooked.

I had originally wanted to simply illustrate a post which carried on from the singing blackbird one of last night and, as so often happens, got thrown off on a wonderfully serendipitous tangent.

This time of year, I am often invited to go shooting pheasants on various estates, but I always decline. It's not that I don't like eating pheasant - I do - it's just that I cannot bring myself to bring down a creature which has been blessed with the power of flight, albeit (in the pheasant's case) so stupid that it prefers to run in front of cars rather than take off out of harm's way.

Also, I have a very personal attitude to killing things for sport - I don't like it, and would rather let others do it for me. Ironically, those others would take an equally dim view if they saw me shoot a pheasant which is standing on the ground - it's just not sporting, don't you know. We all have our codes of moral conduct, and they don't always universally apply.

I share a similar view about killing things for sport as all Moslems in this respect - they don't like it either. In fact, in the Mohammedan outlook to the natural world, birds are the messengers of God, and if you shoot one of them out of the sky, you may not receive a vital piece of information which could have changed your life, as it changed Mohammed's. I don't know what they think about chickens.

I was walking through a big market square in Istanbul, when I saw a small child somehow grab one of the many feral pigeons which were flocking around at the time. The pigeon was flapping and struggling, trying to release itself from the boy's clumsy grip, and the boy could not believe his luck/skill in catching it, so paraded about the square whilst deciding what to do next.

The decision was made for him, when a large man in traditional garb, turban and full black beard walked over to the boy, gently but firmly released the bird which flew back to it's mates on the top of a fountain, then went on his way.

They're not all terrorists, you know.

Black Irish poetry

2011-12-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

Winter is here, and - as every winter - a blackbird sits in a tree at the back of our house and shouts at a fellow male on the other side of the river.

I once happened to be equidistant between two such blackbirds, and - do you know - I understood every word they spoke. One would throw out a melody (I don't know who started it, I arrived late) and the other would pick up the main theme and throw it back again, but better. I did not think that it could get any better, but they somehow continued to improve on the tunes long after I had become tired and hungry and left them. They were still improving at about six in the morning, when I went downstairs to check on their conversation.

They spoke of history. They spoke of beauty. War, peace, love and death. They spoke of everything, but in such a way that it could not be recalled or written down as notation. I understood everything, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Theirs is an oral tradition, like Irish poetry.

Voices from beyond

2011-12-08T02:22:00.000-08:00

Good morning. (That was my Alistair Cook introduction).

I had to down tools yesterday afternoon to properly listen to Peter Tinniswood telling us his innermost thoughts and torments from the grave and through the radio. Various Beckett-like and mundanely day to day snippets of phrases and conversation were repeated during the play, and each time the same words were spoken by the main character (played by the wonderful Roy Hudd), sense of anxiety and angst became increasingly obvious in the tone of his voice - you know when people laugh with their voices, but their eyes betray pure panic?

Then when the character (an old man on the point of his admission to hospital with a terminal disease) exposes his true identity as Tinniswood (who else could it be?) by shouting, "Go away! All these WORDS! What do they mean?!", you realise that this is - indeed - Peter Tinniswood sending us messages from the beyond.

Another playwright - Dennis Potter - did just the same thing when he was commissioned to write a trilogy for T.V. a few months before his death. He knew he would never see the finished plays, and insisted that they should be shown on both ITV and the BBC at the same time, otherwise no deal. In those far-off, analogue days, that meant that the entire, British T.V. watching population were forced to watch them, or switch off and read a book. How he swung that deal is an indication of the esteem in which he was held by the powers which controlled the media, and this concession has never been granted to a playwright before or since.

They begin with the main character who - whilst sitting in a restaurant - overhears the exact same dialogue as he has just written for his last play (the character knows he is dying), but being spoken - verbatim - by a couple sitting at a nearby table. He becomes obsessed with the beautiful young woman who is talking his lines to a sinister figure who sits with her, and switches between sanity and insanity as he attempts to save her life, knowing - because he wrote the script - that she was about to be murdered by the sinister man. No problem, he just changes the script, then leaves her all his money in his will.

The final play - 'Dead Lazarus' - is set in the distant future, and the dead playwright's head has been cut off and preserved for several hundred years in a large tank of preservative. A team of scientists are experimenting with extracting the memories from the playwright's head (they no nothing about his former life) and after a while, images of his childhood in the Forest of Dean (where Potter did, indeed, grow up) begin to flicker on a three-dimensional screen. They are of the strongest experiences that the dead man endured, and include a scene where he he - as a young boy - was raped by a tramp in the woods, and struggles into a methodist chapel for help afterwards, right in the middle of a ceremony.

Soon it becomes evident that the head in the tank is aware of it's situation, and a moral argument ensues as to whether or not it is ethical to keep it 'alive', for fear of committing unwitting torture.

In one of the last scenes, a 'memory' comes up on the screen which turns out to be a psychic prediction in which the playwright communicates to the scientists who have not yet been born, at the same time as communicating with anyone watching the play, after his death.

The playwright sits at his desk, and our viewpoint is of his back. He is scribbling something onto a piece of paper. He slowly turns to face the 'camera' and holds up the piece of paper, a desperate and pleading look on his face. On it is written, "Let me die."

This is where your (and the cast of characters) blood starts to run cold.

The scientists have been trying to prevent a large American corporation from getting hold of the head in order to exploit the commercial potential contained within it, and in the end, one of the team destroys the tank and it's contents by smashing it to bits, releasing the fluid in a great rush. The head - which is covered in wires and sensors - shows a feint smile, and the virtual screen in the room explodes with images of a 1950s childhood in the summer countryside of a 1950s Britain, then fades out to a brilliant, all-encompassing whiteness before going blank.

Heart of glass

2011-12-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

As I brace myself for the arduous task of responding to another 5 comments, I thought I would show you my latest glass acquisition being used in anger.

It is a huge, masculine, beast of a glass. At almost 7 inches high (control yourselves, ladies); it takes almost half the amount of wine that you would have to pay about £6 for in a bar these days, and it purports to date from around 1750. And yet...

When I took it out of the box, I - at first - thought it to have a fake folded foot, but now I am thinking that it is a real one, but somehow too expertly made to go with the rest of it, which is quite crude really, and more suited to an 18th century tavern than a private house. And yet...

How to make a glass like this: Shove a long iron rod into a crucible of molten glass, extracting a large lump. Roll the iron rod on trestles, working it with iron tools to form an elongated stem, at the same time as parting the upper bowl with more iron tools, constantly plunging it back into the furnace to keep it malleable. Once the trumpet bowl shape has been formed, trim off the rim with shears to the required height until you have the desired shape, then keep it hot and malleable whilst you reach for the other, tubular rod of iron, which you gather a lump of the same molten glass on. Blow that into a smallish bubble, the pop it, and using a pair of shears, cutting around until you are left with a cup shape. Flatten the cup shape at the same time as folding a quarter of an inch of excess glass under the rim which will strengthen it for use later. Allow the 'foot' you have just made to cool off a little, the snap it off from the top by hitting it with a small hammer. Pick up the bowl of the glass and bring it back up to heat, pull it out of the furnace and weld it to the foot whilst both are still red. Plunge the finished glass back into the furnace to anneal it, then snap it off the iron 'pontil' onto a soft bed and allow it to cool. Simple.

The trouble is, I have a nagging doubt as to the authenticity of this glass, even though it shows just the right amount of wear and repairs, all the tool marks etc. and shows up well under ultra violet light. And yet...

The other trouble is that - of all of the 4 or 5 British glass experts that I personally know - not one of them is anything other than an utter c***, and I am sick of either hearing about them stabbing each other in the back, or being stabbed by all of them myself, so I will just have to trust my own judgement, based on my own, limited experience. I have yet to hear of a Polish glass house producing these things, but I do know of some Victorian ones that did. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and yet...

A short walk to Reculver Towers on a bracing day

2011-12-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

It was blowing a force 8 one morning in Herne Bay and the 21 year old me had a plan. I would take my 6 month old daughter to Reculver Castle, but via the coastal route. I had no car that I could legally drive, and there was a lot of fresh air flying around to be had. It would do us both good.

Leaving behind the elderly, curtain-twitching neighbors who made up at least 70 percent of Herne's population at that time, we made our way past the minor attractions of the main front that were shut down for the winter - the wheels of the little, French, push-chair buggy squeaking rhythmically as I walked it along.

Soon, the provincial beach gave way to a huge and sweeping curve of reinforced concrete and we came across the backs of about 20 assorted people - wrapped against the wind and rain like a string of jetsam that had somehow blown itself 90 degrees against the incoming tide. They were all watching something ahead. They dared go no further because of the thing they were watching, so we stopped behind them and watched too.

A great swell of grey water was coming inexorably inland, gaining height and vehemence as it approached the concrete quay, then smashed itself against the 30 feet of flat masonry before dragging itself backwards over the edge in a 20 foot high, foam-flecked, falling mountain before repeating the process and taking another run-up at the Coast Guard's station.

As we watched transfixed, I began noticing a pattern, and counted during the intervals between the repetition of it. Great chunks of the North Sea were battering against the coast at that point, and their times of arrival and departure could be predicted to the second.

As one wave began rising slowly and heading inland, the other spent itself against the walls of the station. By my calculations, if I ran toward the incoming wave we would arrive just as the other was washing itself back out to sea, giving us enough time to run the 500 yard stretch on the other side before the new wave hit. I say 'we', but of course she had no say in the matter - she could not even talk yet. It was a good plan, and the only way we were to reach Reculver by foot that morning.

To the horror and incredulity of the assembled by-standers, I began running like a madman toward the tower of foam-flecked water, pushing the child in front of me in the flimsy buggy. It must have looked like a double suicide mission, or - more accurately - one suicide and one murder.

My daughter loved it - squealing with delight as we charged toward the massive wave which was exploding on the concrete in front of us.

My calculations were correct, and we arrived at the Coast Guard station just as the last rivulets of water were running backwards through the iron hand-rail and back into the ocean, but I dared not stop - the next mountain of water would be there any second, and as I looked to my left, I could see it rising up and hurtling toward us like a side-on steam train.

What I hadn't calculated for was the Coast Guard, though, who - having seen me running toward the station (and what to his eyes must have been certain death by drowning) with the push chair - expressed his anger and disapproval by letting off a prolonged blast of the gigantic fog horn just as we passed about 20 feet beneath it.

These foghorns are made to be heard about 10 miles out to sea, so the noise when you stand right next to them is utterly paralysing. Well, it paralysed my daughter anyway, and she went ridged with shock in the buggy. It's a good job she was strapped in, because she would have rolled out like a wooden board if she were not.

Like I said, I could not afford to stop running and comfort her, as the next 25 foot wave was well on it's way and we had to get out of it's path, so I shouted words of reassurance above the noise of the storm as I ran, and we arrived - as I had forecast - on the safe stretch of promenade a few moments later, when the tons upon tons of water hit the concrete behind us. She was almost over the shock of the fog horn by then.

What an absolutely bloody irresponsible thing to do. I should have been locked up for it, and I think I would have been if the mob on the other side had found the courage to do what I had just done and run across to arrest me.

The wisdom of Solomon

2011-12-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

The side of the old Masonic Hall in Bradford on Avon - how secretive can you get?

I am on the end of a long line of London Freemasons, but I am almost the only male member on my father's side not to have actually been one. I decided to become a real one instead.

My father stopped attending the meetings years before he kicked the bucket, but I remember him and my mum getting dressed up to attend the annual ball in the Main Lodge in London's Great Queen Street (no relation to me, John, before you say it). I still have his black tie AND white tie outfits with kid gloves, but haven't as yet worn them. Maybe I'll wear the white tie when I pick up my knighthood from Buckingham Palace, or maybe at the gala evening for my 'Lifetime's Achievement' award.

Before they actually left me in the house alone with my murderous sisters for the evening, there would be a sense of anticipation and excitement, and the kitchen would be filled with the scent of 'Mitsouko' perfume emanating from my mother on one of her rare evenings out. In the morning, there would be fresh, crystalised fruits in the fridge which my father had snitched for me before he left the banquet.

He stopped being an active mason because - he said - it had turned from a charity into an old boy's network which existed purely to line the pockets of a handful of corrupt policemen and business men, and he refused to go cap in hand to them when he hit a bit of financial trouble in the early 60s.

You can take a little tour of the Grand Lodge in London these days, and right next to the young, black woman on the front desk, there is a wooden mason's mallet dating back to early Egypt, sitting in a glass cabinet - still usable after several thousand years. Another part of the exhibition features a lot of medals and regalia made from old tin cans. All this stuff was made by British prisoners of war so that they could continue their secretive practices whilst incarcerated by the Germans and Japanese. Boys always like to play at something - in my boyhood, we used to pretend to be prisoners of war.

I (unlike my brother) was never interested in becoming a freemason - I just couldn't see the point. I can see how they started though.

A lot of secrets are locked up in the massive stone edifices which are scattered around the world, and have been since the days of King Solomon the Wise. The Great Pyramid is a calendar, for instance. Anyone who could measure time accurately could rule the world. The race to invent an accurate clock was started by seamen - there is no good navigation without accurate time-keeping, and no treasures to be looted without good navigation.

I am still benefitting from the ancient secrecy. An old friend of mine once looked at a complicated piece of stone I was working on, and said, "I wouldn't know where to start."

I replied, "Yes you would. You just wouldn't know where to finish."

Christmas story - part two - trailer

2011-12-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

I'm looking backwards to Christmas...

Vicar's Relief

2011-12-04T03:06:00.000-08:00

Mary Ann has just posted this mouse picture, and I said she should make one as a 'bag-lady', then I thought that it has been years since I have seen a bag lady. Do they still exist? I hope not, for their sakes.

They were around long enough to start a complete fashion trend in the same way that drug addiction started the trend for heroin chic. The above picture is taken from a women's blog who calls herself 'Bag-Lady'. Some fashion is just so flippant. At least Armani showed some respect by starting with suits from the Sicilian working classes.

This speculation about bag-ladies coincides with the very day that this year's St Martin in the Fields Christmas appeal began on the media here in Britain. H.I. and me rarely give to big charities, but we usually send a donation to St. Martins, because they are just so damned useful and humane. St Martin's in the Fields is situated right next to the National Gallery near Trafalgar Square in London, so you would think it to be London-centric, but - in fact - it helps homeless and desperate people from all over the UK - some of whom just ended up in London, and others who genuinely need help in the rest of Britain.

As well as running a day-centre, night-centre and canteen from the crypt, they have a separate branch of their charity called 'The Vicar's Relief Fund' (stop sniggering, you boys), which sends comparatively small amounts of money to people in need of a rent-deposit or whatever, who might lose their flats (and their whole civilized way of life that we take for granted) without it, and they send this money in super-quick time, unlike government departments which usually wait until it's too late, thereby helping to put more homeless on the streets. Last year, they raised £1.5 million for this purpose - that's a lot of help.

Most of the people sleeping rough in big cities are there through no fault of their own, other than being basically inept, divorced, sacked from their job, mentally ill or simply ill-equipped to face life as an adult, and drink and drugs are another way of easing the pain - I have to remind myself of this when a junkie pisses me off in town. Many of them don't drink or do drugs either, but they are not so high-profile and have to be searched for by the St Martin's team, who go about on freezing winter nights, looking for them in doorways.

The Salvation Army also does very good work with the destitute like this, but I think you have to sing for your supper.

I reckon that if you are going to donate to a homeless charity this Christmas, The Vicar's Relief Fund (I said stop sniggering!) might well be the best one.

French Rabbit Stew: a lifestyle post - eventually

2011-12-03T06:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a very bad photo of the design (transposed onto the block) that caused so much (deliberately controversial) argument amongst you style gurus a couple of months ago - you know, the 17th century pear-tree motif which you all pretended to reckon was typically Arts and Crafts.

Ok, so I haven't started carving it yet, but if you saw it in the flesh and realised how bloody huge it is, you would know that I have gone to tremendous effort so far, just to get it into the workshop. It weighs 5.2 cwt (that's 583 lbs for you Americans) and is 75.5 inches wide. I'm glad I am not installing it. Dolly the Collie can just be seen in the right hand corner.

I've picked the wrong time to begin my old age - if there ever is a right time. I got a text message from my mobile provider telling me that they are going to raise my fixed tariff by 4. something percent, which - despite the fact that this will be peanuts by almost anyone's standards - was enough to send me into such a state of impotent anger that I stormed out of the pub on thursday, as if it were the bar staff's fault. It's just another few pence being squeezed out of the nation by a bunch of unscrupulous shysters - a small part of a large, concerted and daily financial attack which will not let up until I am too old to work to pay for their failing businesses. It's a good thing that I am in the fortunate position to be able to charge considerably more than the £6.50 per hour that some people are locked into.

Anyway, enough of this - I don't like the way this side-track is going. I have just got back in from shopping in town, and town is heaving with thousands of people spending money they have not got - or at least might not have for too much longer. Well, some of them anyway. I saw two Bentleys, one Aston Martin, a Ferrari, and more big Mercs than I could count. It's still out there.

I went into our butcher and game-dealer and bought a large, skinned rabbit which I got him to quarter for me. Cost - £3.21. It will feed us for two days, and if I ever become completely destitute, I have a gun, several hundred cartridges and access to land where bunnies roam free and cheekily close to where that photo above was taken. I need not even leave the workshop to take a pot at them. One every two days would keep us going for ever at the rate they breed. The only trouble is that Dolly is absolutely terrified of gunshots - even if they are a mile away. God knows how she would react if I let one off right over her head.

Here's the recipe:

Fry up the quartered rabbit until it turns colour with a dusting of plain flour, some shallots and seasoning.

Put the bits into a lidded casserole dish with some stock and a dash of wine to cover, along with some coarsely chopped vegetables which must include carrot.

Here's the magic ingredient:

Add a couple of small squares of good, dark chocolate to the mix before slowly cooking for a couple of hours. Traditionally served with chunks of coarse, white bread.

I remember you 2

2011-12-02T02:29:00.001-08:00

I've been plunged into a somewhat sombre mood this morning, with the news of the death of John's brother, Andrew.

Ok, his death - sooner rather than later - was expected, and his family's fight for funds to help find a cure for the condition which caused it would never have been timely enough to affect this particular outcome, but it is almost crass to say that it doesn't make it any the less devastating for his family. Sometimes the sheer inevitability makes events like this even sadder.

We all know that - statistically - our parents will probably die earlier than us, but when they do die, and someone asks how old they were, if you say "84" (as I did when a colleague asked about my father) and they say, "Oh, well he had a long life then - stop making a fuss" (as this colleague actually did say - not even imply, and I was merely answering his question!), I wonder if they know how offensive and inappropriate that is. Equally, I find any suggestion that a death is 'a blessed relief' for anyone - nomatter what the circumstances - just as offensive, even if it is said in complete ignorance.

Shortly after my father died, my sister telephoned me in a blind panic. I asked what the matter was, and she said to me that no matter how hard she tried, she could not remember what our parents looked like without looking at photos, even though one of them had only been dead for a week or two. I could hear the panic in her voice.

I told her not to worry, as this was a well documented reaction to the death of a loved one, and that crystal clear recollection of the faces of those who could not be forgotten would return in a month or so, without resorting to family photos. Of course, they did.

Funnily enough, last night my father visited me in a dream. He had bought a nasty, Chinese jade brooch of an elephant for H.I. and had pinned it onto her dress, accidentally pinning it through her skin at the same time. H.I. did not want to seem ungrateful, but whispered to me what he had done through gritted teeth, begging me to unpin it as quickly as possible.

I can see him sitting quietly there now, unaware of his geriatric mistake and beaming with satisfaction at his gift, and how clever he was to choose it for her.

What the Butler Saw

2011-12-01T01:52:00.000-08:00

I was putting some petrol in the car yesterday (something you have to do quite a lot if you run an old Volvo) when I saw a mildly unusual sight.

As I was looking through the clear plastic window at all the white numerals spinning around (have you noticed how fast they spin round these days?) when I saw a large fly on the inside, trying to get out. As I was wondering how it got inside there, a spider appeared from somewhere within the pump and got hold of the fly, bit it, then carried it off for what might have been the only dinner it would ever have in it's solitary, petrol pumpish life.

I was so transfixed by this little drama, that I spent quite a few minutes staring at it whilst standing about a foot away from the pump, and it occurred to me that the girls inside the garage shop might have thought that I was so horrified at the price of a few litres of petrol, that I simply couldn't believe what I was being asked to pay, and had to triple check it to make sure I was not dreaming.

Thinking about it later, I realised that the spider and fly scenario in the pump reminded me of the summer holidays I spent in the penny arcade on Brighton's Palace Pier as a child. This arcade was crammed with machines about the same size as a modern petrol pump, and they all had glass windows with static displays of badly modeled, sensational events such as 'An English Execution', 'A French Guillotining', 'A Haunted Graveyard', etc. etc.

They were all late Victorian contraptions, and probably were installed at the same time as the pier was built, and - being in the days of pre-decimalisation - they all required a large, copper penny to get them going. Often, the pennies put into them were as old as the machines themselves, but still in circulation after about 120 years.

The 'English Execution' one involved a rickety wooden scaffold with three dolls standing on top of it. You shoved the penny into the slot, and this fired up a primitive electric motor which began noisily cranking up the gearing which animated the figures. A priest began silently intoning the last rights to the condemned man, the executioner eventually pulled a lever, and the felon dropped through the open trapdoor to his death, dangling on the end of a bit of frayed string. The lights would go out and the machine completed it's final cycle by winding up the dead man and closing the trapdoor again, ready for the next time he had to die.

'The Haunted Graveyard' would begin with the church clock-face dimly lighting up, then striking midnight with 12, tinny-sounding clangs of a spring-metal bell. As the chimes rang out, a drunken man who had collapsed in the graveyard (bottle still in hand) would stare in mute horror at various tombstones which would open up to reveal a hideous corpse which raised itself out of the grave to leer and wobble in front of the drunk. At the twelfth stroke, all the lids would be closed and the lights went out.

My little animated tableau cost quite a bit more than a penny yesterday, but at least I got half a tank of petrol out of it as a bonus.

There was also a 1900s 'What the Butler Saw' naughty video machine which I occasionally used to take a peek at if nobody was around, but that's another story - the ending of which you know too well to have told.

Three strikes and you're out

2011-11-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to form a theory about something which has perplexed me for quite a few years now - why is it that the youth of Britain go out onto the streets every night and behave as if they have just been told that the end of the world is about to happen at 5.00 a.m. the following morning?

Because, I am beginning to believe - the world is about to end for them, and they need to get a lifetime's worth of cavorting in, in a very short period of time.

Scotland Yard has today announced that they are training more Metropolitan Police in the use of plastic bullets, so they must know something that the drunken students suspect. When the time comes to pull the triggers, I doubt if it will be the students they are aiming at though - it's more likely to be the teachers that are out on strike today, giving their charges an extra 8 hours of drinking time in the Union bar.

In my day, it was the students who demonstrated against the 'system' - something that caused even more resentment amongst taxpayers, since we all had huge grants to support us whilst we sat on our arses in the street. These days, the average student leaves college with a debt of about £20,000 - half of which went on tuition fees, and the other half on alcohol.

Being an ex Guildford School of Art revolutionary, I was invited to give a talk to the sit-in students of Canterbury school of art in 1972. I was amazed to find that the Canterbury crew did not have a clue what had occurred only four years previously, and spent their brief period of occupation drinking themselves stupid in the union bar, to the great embarrassment of their union representatives who had invited me in the first place. Nothing has changed in the 40 odd years since then, other than that I am more likely to join them in the bar to help drown their sorrows and dispose of their student loans.

It's an expensive business, this striking, but someone has to do it.

I Remember You

2011-11-29T12:11:00.001-08:00

There was talk today of imaginary friends, and I began to think that - as a child - I never had one. Then I remembered the weeks of lone, hot, summer holidays when I cycled the same 50 yard route outside our house, over, over and over again.

For some reason, the tune "I Remember You" by Frank Ifield was played repeatedly in my head as I rode obsessively across our front entrance, over the lump in the tarmac caused by the bulging root in the Poplar tree, past the other entrance (we had a big house), then round the other three gateways of our millionaire neighbors and back again, just to repeat the process for another 20 or 30 times until the light began to fail and I went in for tea.

It was little like the zoo tiger that walks to one side of his cage then back again - over and over again - but it lasted only until I had reached the point when the average captive tiger would have died through boredom or heartache.

Then today, I remembered that I did indeed have an imaginary friend, but she was an imaginary girlfriend. Nothing unusual about that, you might say, especially in an adolescent boy.

She was American - probably because of all the imported TV I had watched up until that point - and I spent the rest of my early adulthood trying to find her.

In this search, I had many American girlfriends, but none of them were her. I no longer look for her, but she still exists if I really did want to meet her again after all these years.

In any case, I am too old for her now. She is the same age as she always was, but I have grown into an old man. Any further contact would be inappropriate.

The sweet smell of success

2011-11-29T01:22:00.000-08:00

The wind it doth blow outside today, but not as much as it bloweth further north - at least I still have all the roofs to my chicken sheds - as far as I know. Soon the temperature will drop, and I'll be justified in sporting me new titfer at the weekends.

Yesterday, I lit the little stove in my workshop and almost finished drawing out the 1/4 ton frieze panel ready for carving, but it was frosty rather than wet. The acoustics of our part of the valley are such that the whole day was punctuated by distant bursts of heavy machine-gun fire, coming from somewhere in the direction of Devizes - fired by (I guess and hope) the military.

At one point, a heavily armed attack helicopter flew over and hovered around before swooping off in the direction of the mock battle, and on several occasions the array of rocketry slung beneath it pointed at little, innocent me - a dot in the landscape looking up in fear and admiration. It could have blown me off the face of the earth as easily as Nato takes out Pakistani check-points, but didn't. Phew.

In the past, I have had the local police helicopter hovering above my workshop for prolonged periods of time. This aircraft also doubles up as the Wiltshire Air Ambulance, and we are regularly asked to make donations to help keep it in the air, ferrying seriously injured crash victims to Frenchay hospital. I wonder how many criminals have financially supported it, not knowing that the infra-red gear beneath it would one day (or night) pick them out like a rabbit in the headlights as they try to make their escape from an armed robbery or simple mugging.

The reason why it regularly hovers above my workshop is that it is looking for skunk (the notoriously smelly drug-weed) farms. When the infra-red lights are turned on in the winter daylight, they are trying to spot roofs of isolated out-buildings which are abnormally hot from the use of 24 hour UV lamps which speed up the growth of the cannabis plants basking inside.

An acquaintance (note the careful use of language here) of mine once asked if he could hire one of my workshops to grow cannabis in, and I immediately said 'no'. When he told me that he would give me £20,000 for six months hire, I thought about it for a short while, then reluctantly said no again, wiping a tear from my old and rheumy eye. It's a good job I did. The trouble was that this guy was a renowned duffer with the worst luck of anyone I have ever met. He was once struck by lightening.

He ended up renting a house in the outskirts of town, and setting up a drugs-farm on the upper floors, with an ordinary and innocent family living downstairs. He spent several thousand pounds setting up the equipment, which included UV lamps and an automated watering system which was plumbed into the mains supply, bought the genetically modified seeds from Holland, planted them in the sandy boxes and just sat back and waited for the stuff to grow.

For a while, everything went extremely smoothly and he proudly told me that all he had to do was go to the house about once a month to collect bin-liners full of cannabis, plant more seeds and repeat the process, gathering thousands of pounds of profit in between times.

Then one day he received a phone-call from the house agent, telling him that he had sprung a serious water leak in his apartment and the family downstairs had been flooded out, with all the ceilings caved in over their heads. The game was up.

He thought about it, and came to the conclusion that there was nowhere to hide, so decided to hand himself in to the local police station in the hopes of receiving a more lenient sentence by showing remorse.

He plucked up the courage and marched up the steps of Bath police station, introducing himself to the desk sergeant and confessing all. The policeman looked at him with a bemused expression on his face, then said "I don't know what you're talking about. I have no record of any such crime being reported."

Not believing his luck, he turned around and began skulking out of the station, then the copper shouted back at him with a huge grin:

"Only joking! Come back here!"


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