Satdy Neet

Conversation at Tesco, the woman on the till to the customer in front:

Customer: "Are you out tonight?"
Till: "No, I'm staying in and reading 50 Shades of Grey"

"Oh, are you?"
"Yes. I'm going to pour myself a gin and tonic and go straight to the bits with the rope and the masking tape. My daughter has circled all the best bits for me".

"You know, apparently, the writing is poor. All the way through, it's been written really badly".
"Oh, I'm not worried about that. It's typed!"

"And now, finally, son of Jor El....

Kneel before Zod...."

One of the most famous quotes in movie history of course. I've always loved that line.
It's utter helplessness. Utter humiliation. The ultimate challenge when the chips are not just down but out, and you just find out if you can locate the reserve to turn total failure over and over and over until it catches a chink of light.

But this is not the first time in the movie that this line appears. (General Zod is a bit of a broken record on the whole kneeling thing).
Perhaps even more touching is the line's first appearance in Superman 2.
This time it is the act of the helpless President of the United States who goes on to say....

"I'll kneel before you, if it will save lives"

(And for completeness sake... there follows from General Zod: "It will, starting with your own").

Perhaps you see an analogy with our Queen shaking hands today with the IRA terrorist who authorised the murder of her cousin, his only outstanding regret being that the IRA didn't kill more Royals.

I doff my hat to the wise media men who recorded the event only in pictures allowing Martin McGuinness's revolting comment of "thank you, and goodbye" to our Queen, to be blown away by the strength of her grace and power of forgiveness.
An example to us in her Jubilee year? I think so.

"I'll kneel before you, if it will save lives"
Or life, perhaps. One would be enough.
After all, it might be somebody you know. And those lives are much more important than those other ones, aren't they?

Some days you kneel. Some days you shake hands with the Devil.
Some days you lie, perhaps just to save a feeling.
Some days you'd kill, just to live.

Perhaps you think that forgiveness is power.
I am tempted to agree.


Zod save the Queen.

Brits Oot

Is a British tourist in a Hawaiian shirt such as sin?
Well, yes in the sense that the instant reaction is correctly "what an abortion".
But do we have so much that we can afford to turn some down?
Isn't it a little colour every now again slightly wonderful?

OK, it is sinister to see a 60-year-old guy in cutoff three-quarter length trousers.
It's like a clown's smile. Not right. Uneasy.
But what are they supposed to do, they're comfy, you racist!

Maybe a little loudness means you can still remember how to enjoy yourself.

But there is an icon of common in these supposedly trashy resorts.
The resorts are beautiful even if they might have one too many tribute bands. You can always switch over.
And how can you do a tribute to Chubby Brown without ripping it off his material? In exactly the same way he did. Oh, I get it now!

These places are knowing, populist and built to survive recession.
They're fun and it's an admirable model.

The critique that feeds the critics perhaps shouldn't be the people. Or the resort.
But there is one internationally recognized symbol of bargain-basement crud.
One cardinal signature of border-neutralising tat.
The purest diagnostic sign that seeps across the continents:

Red Coca-Cola chairs.
Let's melt them all down and make party balloons for the Foam Disco.

Laws of Attraction

What attracts you to somebody?
I reckon that there are three basic criteria.

1.Body.
2.Beauty (by which I think I mean simply facial appearance (we are obsessed with it, I suppose) and
3.Brain. (I'm using brain to cover personality, fire, originality and intelligence... but how many intelligent half wits are there? (I'll tell you, it is 1.476 billion to the third decimal place). Emotional intelligence is much more important and doesn't come with a degree. There is no shortage of stupid stunted people with degrees.

So, honestly now, supposing you agree with my supposition, how would you stack these virtues. What REALLY NOW is your priority?

You may think you're perfect partner must have all three but which of these would you do without?
At a squeeze ?
Which would you sacrifice?

Which would you prefer?
A plain brain with a knockout body?
A pretty plus-sized porker with a degree?
A candy floss model who won't go to the pub quiz unless there is a round on shoes?

Would you sacrifice two of the three criteria?
Would you not even sacrifice one?

Would you suffer your ongoing voyage like Odysseus forever looking for all three, perhaps even as your own three fail.

Perhaps you will stick too early, you'll settle and undersell yourself? Uuurgh, is there anything worse?
Perhaps you'll overreach. Can you hang on to him? Can you hang on to her?

Perhaps you're not all that yourself.
You gotta know when to hold them and know when to fold them.

These are the criteria.
This is the truth.
Have you worked it out?

Have you worked it out yet is this level of reduction is meaningless. The rules in isolation are reductionist.

Work out which of the three you would sacrifice. You really should know this by now.

Then you can start working out why the entire supposition is as wrong as it is right.

Top Trip Tips #3

When packing a wheeled case, to stop it careering around like a pissed up Sumo wrestler, put your heavy items (liquid toiletries, electricals) in the bottom next to the wheels.
If you have no heavy items, pack a brick.

Quotable Me - 4

We're living in sick times.
Forget about the financial meltdown for a second. I am talking about an age of sickening celebrity.

And it's not just Cheryl Cole, it might be any too-big business. This is a time of headline-grabbing managers who hide behind meetings and skulk behind rules that don't work.
Impatiently awaiting their merit awards and MBEs.

Their barricades of fake protocol (faux-tocol?...perhaps not...) are challenged, in their eyes, only by subversive troublemakers.
So, ahem... Hello readers!!

They're missing the point of course. Just as I am coming to it.

The challenge isn't to stand out.

It's to stand up.

Thought Dessert

At m-school, there was a day.

It was a day when we discussed the concepts of sympathy and empathy.
It was controversial.
Everybody argued for the rest of the day. They discussed it over lunch and they paraded their credentials.
They mentioned it over dinner.
And I reckon that that particular day, it was their pillow moment. It's been mine on hundreds of occasions.

Of course, like any good plot you have to know the good guys and the bad guys.
The guys that thought they were the good guys, including me, claimed empathy (although  many of them never struck me as the men in the white hats).
The bads guy merely had sympathy to offer.

Sympathy became slightly evil for me that day. They were the guys in the black hats.
Now, perhaps I think there were more human than they knew. And perhaps more honest, even underselling themselves.

Sympathy seemed to be a meagre offering to humanity. To the human in front of you.  So much worse than our best. Substandard.
It took me a while to realise that it also has its place.
In my case, that was quite a while. I still don't express it well. But I feel it and I try to act on that feeling. Isn't that the point?

I was focused on the good guy's role.

Empathy was the claim of every do-gooder. That cheapened it for me. Every doctor who wanted to go into paediatrics and psychiatry, everyone with counselling tendencies, and later on every other healthworker. Every bitch who didn't really care. Parading their home-made badges of empathy, and barely recognising the power of the concept.

I thought about this regularly for 20 years. I tossed it around, and  to be honest the thought didn't really develop or grow. There seemed to be nowhere for it to go.

But in the last two days it's occurred to me, these are just two stages of a three stage process.
Sympathy. Empathy........ Transference.

It's a broader canvas even than previously claimed.
It's increasingly poetic but increasingly dangerous.
It can eat minds.

I'm not going to offer you any answers. This is about understanding the rules.
If you haven't got it by now, this whole thing, everything, is about understanding the rules.
Understanding what's in place. Making, breaking, designing new constructs.
The rules.
Not somebody else's.
Yours.

I think as I thought 20 years ago, but for me in a slightly new way. I have the full picture now and the extremes are still invisible. Infrared, all the way to ultraviolet.

Sympathy. Empathy. Transference.

All I'm saying is, it might be nice to know in each given moment exactly where you are on the spectrum.

The Emperor's New Ankles

I don't believe in lymph.

I know most of the other more famous body fluids because I've met them, largely because I've had my hand at one point or another in most human places that you can put a hand.
And I ain't never seen no lymph.
For that matter I don't know anyone who has.

I've heard alternative prattitioners (no, that isn't a typo) wax lyrical about it, pretend to push it around, see it grow at times of increased sunspot activity and generally blame it on the lack of karma in the Universe.

But it's a construct. It's a fib.
And as humours go, it ain't no laughing matter.

There was a time when everybody believed in ectoplasm. Now it only turns up at Derek Acorah shows when he turns the lights out. And I can tell you for a fact, he just uses luminous Silly Putty.

Lymph is a concept, not a thing.
It can't be pushed, filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed or catalogued.
If it does exist at all, it is probably the closest thing to pure evil we will ever experience.

So I say, end the lymph conspiracy.
Be a lymph naysayer.

Say No to Lymph.

Alright, I'll have it anyway.

Top 3 things you don't want to hear from your Mum when you really want another beefburger:

3. "Your brother used the last of the sauce".

2. "You've had the last of the onions".

And for the second year in a row, straight in at number one,  it's....

1. "We've run out of buns. You'll have to have it in bread".

"Awww, Muuum".

Being Perfect

Technical excellence often strips emotional connection  - ask any surgeon, or rather anyone who has to work with them.
Opera is often guiltier of this than, well, say, pop for example. It's the impurites that make a diamond one than has been naturally mined rather than created artificially under huge external pressures.


Why else do a diminishing number of people tune into The Voice and yet millions tolerate Paul McCartney screeching and shouting pastiches of his own songs in a Jubilee special.


Because ........it's not the voice.
It's the connection. 
It's the history - the back catalogue of shared experience.


Ballet is another.
Those poor toes.

On Being Judgemental

When did you last hear somebody use the term 'judgemental'?
I bet it wasn't used about themselves but about somebody else. This is a pity because I think that inherently it's a virtue. It just needs rebranding.

Everybody thinks of themselves as being good at two things: driving, and being a good judge of character.
And yet they claim not to like "judgemental" people.
It's rubbish. If you hear the term come out of somebody's mouth, they are never referring to themselves. But that's the only person that they're giving you any new information about.
Otherwise, they'd hate every single comedian on the planet who makes a living out of that skill.

So it can't be the 'judging' they are objecting to. It must be the 'mental'.
We don't need the term.
Tolerance and intolerance will do.
And endless tolerance is a recipe for disaster as well.
Ask any domestically beaten househusband, or wife for that matter.
Sorry, partner. I'm so out of touch.

Life may have been easier when we were fed with a plastic debris-catching bib as a backdrop, got pushed around in a pram, and had unchallenged access to the Dorothy Perkins changing rooms.
But there comes a point in life where it's best to do that only at weekends or when you think nobody will catch you. (Particular if you don't happen to be female)

Life should be fully played out with a little honest performance.
After all, people wear make-up, buy shoes (that's women mainly), smile when they wouldn't choose to, develop table manners (sometimes), it's all part of the show.

Even some actors are sincere.
And eventually, we all become what we rehearse.
Let the audience judge.
But please, be gentle.