Inspiration interrupted

I haven't been blogging much this summer. It is hard to create a post that (e.g.) seamlessly unites an anecdote involving spilt tequila with an accurate skewering of Nietzschean Ethics when I have to refresh RightMove obsessively every five minutes in the hope of finding a habitable property to rent that is within a) our pricerange, and b) walking distance of the pub. 

Poetry is out of the question of course, because I can only find the focus I need to write it in times of uninterrupted serenity or complete mental anguish.

Sometimes I find inspiration from a photograph, but I don't seem to have been using my camera (alright, phone - who carries a camera these days?) to capture the slowly unfolding bloom of a Norwich City summer. The only photographs I have taken recently have been of Newspaper articles so that I can text them to people to prove that I was right about something previously disagreed on. Like this article in the Guardian that proved that my home county of Dorset is the Afghanistan of the United Kingdom:

The blurry opium fields of Blandford Forum

A blurred photograph of somebody else's photograph. Is this the level of reportage I have sunk to?

Apparently so.

Moving On [insert appropriate preposition]

As previously reported, our landlady is selling our home and we have to find somewhere new to live. Moving used to be a lot less hassle when all I owned was a case of clothes, a dozen or so boxes of books and a chess set. Now I appear to be at an intermediary stage in life when I am rich enough to own furniture, but not rich enough to pay someone else to move it. 

We are trying to be positive and look for a place which will be an improvement on our current flat. Maybe with some outside space? Charlie would like a bit of garden. Spike would like a conservatory, but he doesn't get much of a say because nobody can remember the last time he contributed his share of the council tax. 

The good news is that now she wants to sell the property the landlady is finally going to fix the leaky shower. I am waiting for the 'handyman' to come round now. I am sure he will be impressed by what I have achieved with gaffer tape and superglue in the absence of someone with professional plumbing skills. He may even feel that his presence is superfluous. 

I think we can call that 'fixed'.

And while we are on the subject of superfluity. It is probably time that I showed you folks the latest addition to our household:

A recent visitor to our shores (presumably unfamiliar with British social habits after dwelling on the Isle of Man for a decade or so) presented it to us as a gift in lieu of wine. And not being the sort of people who will examine the teeth of a gift-horse (or even a weird sort of gift-giraffe/zebra hybrid), we accepted it. Now it stands in the lounge looking at me with its weird painted eyes until I turn it to face the wall. In my view, it is exactly the sort of gift you don't want to receive when you are trying to downsize all the accumulated crap in your life ready for an enforced move. I am in a minority in this view, everyone else loves it. So it looks like the charmless thing may be in my life for some time yet. We still call it "...that weird giraffe-zebra thing that Jamie gave us..." Suggestions for names welcome... and if anyone can finally settle the giraffe/zebra dilemma please get in touch. 

Round Numbers

What is the sum of the first four cubes? (I'll put the answer in the comments - but it should be obvious)

Yay, done it!

Okay, I missed one.

Alright, two.

But if you look they are the right colours just the wrong the way round, that's close right? Seriously, I have been trying to solve this for eight years (on and off) and this is the closest I've got.

Incredibly, this is the one hundredth of these blogposts that you have read. Well done you. I looked up the number 100 in my Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers to see if I could crib a few facts to include subtly throughout this post but it turns out that 100 is not a very curious or interesting number. When I read the book, I have to confess, I kind of glazed over in the middle. The early numbers from i to pi were truly interesting and every visitor to the flat that spies it on the bookshelf peeps at the end to see what the highest number is (It's Graham's Number which I wrote about way back in March 2012). 

I wanted to put up a celebratory poem or something not just some pictures of an unsolved Rubik's cube and a stolen fact about the number 100. Unfortunately, the only thing I have been working on is a long history of all the chess sets that have had an impact on my life. It's in blank verse pentameter and is a work in progress as it needs tightening up and I want to add a couple of verses (one about a glass chess set where the felt had worn off the bottom of the pieces so it made a horrible noise when you played and one about the experience of playing digitally) but you'll get the gist. People who hate poetry, especially blank verse, please stay for the title as it has a pun in it!

The Joy of Sets

Battle’s coming. I can hear it in the

Rattle of the box. The sliding wooden

Lid is slid back to reveal two equal

Sides of dark and light: Stout Rook, the frowning

Bishop and my favourite: The Knight - his

Seahorse-head and unique jumping prowess

Makes him by far the most superior piece.

Learned to play the game on Father’s Staunton

Set. One Knight had had his head unscrewed by

Some unknowing toddler’s hand then chewed by

Pericles our dog. For years we played with that

Headless Knight and I’d refuse to swap him

For his twin if he remained uncaptured.

Games could turn on one unnoticed Knight.

Ed brought back from Petersburg a

Soviet Set - pinched Pawns and spiky Bishops,

Atheist King crowned with sphere in place of

Cross. Then, innocent of death and grief still

Far away, we tallied wins and wagered

Desecration rights to the loser’s grave.

(Eighty-four, Fifty-nine to Ed last count).

Lit spliff in mouth: I ponder Jack’s damn

d5 pawn that dominates the yellow

Squares and stops my knight advancing. Bloody

d5 pawn. No way he's worth a Bishop.

Must have played a thousand variations

On the Centre Game before I looked it

Up: e4, e5, d4, pawn takes pawn.

Gothic visions wrought in gold and silver,

All Inset with semi-precious stones, sit

Unloved, untouched. The King never castled.

Bishops bide their time blockaded by the

Pawns who wait forlorn upon the second

Rank. Denied their fates. Never to be
Sacrificed and never to be promoted.

You get the idea...

Ecumenical Matters

Two brothers can't both inherit the farm so traditionally the second-born joined the church. I sometimes think I was cut out for the life of a clergyman (except for the inconvenience of having to get out of bed before midday on a Sunday... oh... and belief in God - I hear they are rather keen on that). 

The first priest I remember is the Reverend Thomas. My mum sang in the church choir and he came round ours for afternoon tea once. There were lots of bookshelves in the house I grew up in and his ecclesiastical eye immediately alighted on a dozen or so Dennis Wheatley novels (sample titles: The Devil Rides Out, To The Devil a Daughter, Gateway to Hell) They all had yellow spines with black writing which really made them stand out. I was a voracious reader as a child and I don't recall any books being prohibited by my parents (except when my dad told me I couldn't read the Silmarillion until I had finished The Lord of the Rings - still rankles). Those Dennis Wheatley novels always came with a stark warning from my mother: "Reverend Thomas told me I should burn the lot!" That made them seem particularly appealing.

After the Reverend Thomas moved out of the vicarage, we got a groovy trendy vicar in the village. I can't remember his name, but I do remember that he allowed alcohol to be smuggled into a youth club party in the village hall and one kid drank a bottle of vodka and had to have his stomach pumped.

I'd not had much contact with the priesthood in Norwich until I struck up an unlikely friendship with Father Peter - an active octogenarian who often pops into the pub with bottles and glasses he has found on the pavement outside. "Do these belong to you?" Occasionally, he would sit outside with a pint of bitter, smoking his pipe and drafting a sermon. Over the years, we got to know each other. I was touched by the little pieces of personal information he would sometimes share. Like the fact that his real name was Julian - but that he had been bullied at school in the 1930s because the name was too feminine so he had adopted his middle name. I told him that I shared a name with the famous Saint of Neocaesaria and naturally this led to a long discussion of thaumaturgy.

Last week, he came into the pub around closing time, much later than I had ever seen him in there before. He ordered a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale (which I knew to take from the shelf not the fridge - Catholic priests can't stand cold beer) and offered to buy me a drink. 

"I'll take a half of Ghost Ship."  

"Make it a pint." (this is the formal reply whenever a bartender says they will take a half - remember this.)

I detected a sadness in his demeanour and spoke with him whenever I got a moment between service. Turned out the church for whom he had worked for half a century were moving him out of his city centre flat and into a nursing home for priests in a village 15 miles south of Bury St Edmunds. With no pub! And worse... he was only allowed to take two of his five bookcases. What a way to treat a man. It's not like the Catholic church is short of a bob or two. I began to think about what I would do if I had to cut my book collection by three fifths. I suppose I could always start by burning a few Dennis Wheatley novels.

Election Selection

David Cameron is determined to interrupt my naptime. This morning was my first lie-in in nearly a week and I was particularly anxious to get plenty of rest today as tomorrow I intend to stay up all night watching the election results come in. However, Cameron has other ideas. In a last ditch attempt to secure my vote he has sent out an army of canvassing leafleteers to shove economically narrow-viewed propaganda through my letterbox. 

My letterbox is currently fastened shut with blu-tac in an attempt to stop it banging metallically against itself in every gust of wind. Our postman has been informed of this and happily re-secures it with a firm tap before whistling his merry way upon his round. But Cameron's faceless minions do not stop for a friendly chat. No doubt they have targets to meet. They hurriedly thrust their glossy lies into my life and leave me to the torture of the arrhythmic clang. Should I rise, pyjama-clad, unlock the door, fasten the letterbox, relock the door, pop the propaganda in the recycling and return to bed? I'll give it an hour, see if the wind dies down. 

The Conservative Party have no chance of getting my vote but they have secured the support of local hotel group that I shall call LIA (For those of you who like riddles - LIA is an easily solveable caesar cypher) in case any of what follows is libellous: 

The 'Beaches' hotel on 'Eerlham' Road

The LIA business model is to buy up hotels and remove all the features that make them pleasant environments and providers of local employment. When they took over the Beaches Hotel (sic - still worried about libel) near where I work they removed all the curtains and replaced them with whitewashed windows for that really classy look. They sacked all the onsite staff, replacing receptionists and night porters with keycode panels on the exterior and room doors. They stopped doing food and drink altogether. Breakfast chefs and waiters and bar staff all laid off. 

The resultant unstaffed hotel was cheaper but unpleasant. I started getting miserable looking customers coming into the pub invariably wheeling hand luggage. They would complain (to me - remember there is nobody onsite to complain to and they would repair to the nearest pub to wait for the manager to answer his mobile phone) that they could not gain entry using the keycode panels or that when they had finally gained access the rooms had not been cleaned sufficiently by the zero-hours-contract cleaning staff employed by a separate company. One guest showed me a picture on his phone of a healthy crop of toadstools that he claimed to have seen growing in the corner of the shower.  "Staying at LIA?" I would ask. "Can you recommend anywhere else nearby?" they would plead. "Sorry," I would reply, "LIA own all the guesthouses around here, now."

And then the prostitutes moved in (not just hearsay, here is the Eastern Daily Press report). With rooms for rent for as little as twenty pounds a night and no staff it made a logical and hopefully a safe base for them. I doubt these were young businesswomen keen to take economic advantage of their bodies for a short time in order to fund a better life. There is a good chance where there is organised prostitution (according to the article a woman was arrested and cautioned for controlling prostitution for gain) that there is some amount of exploitation going on.

This all actually happened. It is not some convenient metaphor for Britain under the Conservatives. But the owner of the LIA group has plastered his hotels with Vote Conservative signs and I deplore what he has done to the local hotel economy in the name of profit. And I deplore the ideological choices the Conservatives and their Liberal partners have made in the name of deficit reduction. 

Who gains?



   

On democracy

Enthusiastic warmonger Winston Churchill famously said that "...democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." I assume he meant parliamentary democracy because elsewhere he blathers on about little men with little pencils making little crosses in little ballot boxes at which point he starts to sound like a Pete Seeger record. Sometimes he doesn't seem to keen on democracy at all: like when he said "the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter" or when he authorised the gassing of the Kurds way before Saddam Hussein thought of it. What a Statesman.

There is a general election taking place in the UK at the beginning of next month. I am a bit of an election junky. I wish that the Chartists had got their way and we had them every year. That way, anyone who broke their promises would be out on their ear. And I would get to stay up all night on a Thursday eating crisps and shouting at the telly.

My school held a Mock Election in 1997 - I didn't stand because I was a communist at the time and had no truck with parliamentary democracy. But I still went to all the debates because my mate Rollett was standing for the Labour party. A joke party who called themselves the Rebbel Alliance (sic) won by a landslide. I think of that whenever there is a call for suffrage to be extended to sixteen-year-olds.  

Obviously, I wish I lived in an anarcho-syndicalist utopia where people organised their own affairs. Or failing that, I wish I lived somewhere with a marginally functional democracy, a place where the people get together and tell their politicians what they expect to be done for them and replace them if they break their promises. Unfortunately, that would mean moving to Scotland. 

A selfie I took by the shores of Loch Ness on a democracy research trip

Haart Attack

Awakened yesterday to the sound of hammering. I gulped down half a pint of dusty ribena I had thoughtfully left beside my bed a few days ago and glanced out the window. Nothing to be seen. I thought back to the previous night. I had consumed a couple of glasses of whiskey to soothe the sore throat that was the remnant of the cold I had last week, but nothing in sufficient quantity to cause this hammering. The cause must be exogenous, I deduced, but not visible from the bedroom window.

I eased myself out of bed and into my jeans and strode barefoot into the living room. From this vantage point I could see a man nailing a sign to the side of our porch. (This isn't a porch in the sense that most people understand it - we live in a first floor flat that is so narrow that the front door on the ground level has to stick out a bit otherwise there wouldn't be room for the stairs only a ladder - I am calling this sticky-out-bit the porch for purposes of brevity).

Here is what the sign said (I have carefully cut the name of the estate agents in half so as not to identify the bloodsucking parasites who do nothing and charge a fortune for the privilege):

And that, in the modern age, is how your average tenant in private rented accommodation finds out that their home is once again subject to the vagaries of the housing market. We will be expected to open our doors whenever a prospective buyer expresses an interest. We can be forced to sign a new contract (we can't legally be forced, but they can serve notice if we refuse and kick us out). We can be charged for the preparation of that contract. The unnamed Estate Agent currently charges tenants a £100 fee to print out a standardised contract and post it to them - no stamped addressed envelope is included for the contract's return.

Our landlady has actually been pretty good in the 18 months we've been here. She has been quick to fix things and although initially reluctant to transition from a shorthold tenancy to a rolling contract she soon changed her mind when she realised that the Agency were going to charge her £100 as well! In fairness, she did text me to let us know the property was going to be put on the market. So the nailing up of the sign wasn't the first I knew of it this time: although that has happened to me before. 

I don't especially blame my landlady. She bought the property for £105,000 five years ago and the Agency are telling her she can get £140,000 for it now. Charlie and I (and the flat's pre-inhabitors) paid the mortgage repayments in that time and she gets to pocket the difference. I blame the system - generally the system of ownership and property (but Charlie gets cross if I go on about that too much) and specifically the bastards like the ones who nailed that sign to side of our home.