Hosepipe ban? Batten down the hatches...

Usually it rains just after I've washed the car.  All I have to do is creep up on the old Nissan with a foaming bucket and the neighbours groan and whip the garden furniture into the garage double-quick.  Every six months that car gets washed, whether it needs it or not.


But it wasn't me this time, honest.  After weeks of glorious weather, the local water board announced a hosepipe ban last week, since when it's been chucking it down, and I'm getting very suspicious about any outfit with 'United' in its name.


I was going to write one of those pieces that has my reader splitting his sides with mirth, but blow me!  I've been beaten to it.

http://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/jacqui-morley/Look-at-it-this-way.6411470.jp

I read it and uttered a hollow laugh.  We've got a garden like that, too.  It's so wet that all we can grow is rice.  From the plum trees at the very top of the garden, which you need a wet suit to reach in August and September when the fruit is ripe, to the house there's a fall of about two metres (more than six feet, grandad), and boy, does water move downhill or doesn't it?  

This was our local Victoria Plum Falls in September two years ago - rather more water coming downhill all at once than our 10cm main drain (4", pops) can cope with.  We wouldn't mind so much if it was the sea that had breached the sea wall, or the river that had burst its banks, but for heaven's sake, this was just rain.


Hosepipe ban?  Pshaw.  The next time it rains I'll ask United to get round here pretty sharpish with a portable reservoir.  Fill it no time, we could.

Scams and Very Honourable Companies Indeed

Gosh! We won £23,500 today!  Brill!  We can get the central heating fixed, repair the leaky roof in the sun-room, and pay someone to sort out the noisy valve in the cistern that wakes everybody in the street up at 5am and because of which we are now permanently constipated.


And it's all thanks to a nice man called Friedrich Müller, who runs his philanthropic enterprise from an accommodation address in Belgium, at the premises of AMA, an advertising company who specialise in the gentle art of giving away shed-loads of money. N't.


But if you too have received this wonderful promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, don't phone the plumber just yet.  Fill in the claim form by all means, to be sure of your £23,500, but don't be surprised when you receive a discount voucher for £1.50 which you can trade in with a company called Vital Beauty against a £32 bottle of cod-liver oil.  Just write them a letter pointing out their mistake.


Scammers are parasites.  They operate just within the law so that they can carry on conning people - usually elderly and vulnerable people - but we can't call successful scammers devious, cheating, rapacious crooks when they do operate within the law.  Just.  It would be libellous. And to call them evil, scheming scum who want to cheat your grannie out of her life savings would be very wrong indeed- because many of the companies that use game-show techniques to sell goods from little catalogues operate wholly and entirely within the law.  Just.  So I am sure that Vital Beauty is a bona-fide trading company, just the same as Swiss Home Shopping (a sister company) is, and the Office of Fair Trading is of like mind. They drew attention to some trivial little matter about the size of the wording in the bit about the promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, and Vital Beauty responded immediately (Google Vital Beauty and see that it is indeed a company with a considerable reputation.)


So I am convinced.  I shall return the forms and book that plumber. The cheque should be with me in a few days.


Less honourable companies may deserve to be made to run their businesses from a small room in Strangeways, but if the OFT say that Mr Mueller's empire is entirely above board, who am I, a mere OAP, to doubt it?


Cough up, Herr Mueller.  I am sure your £32 bottle of cod-liver oil is worth every penny. And with your kind promise of £23,500 I can now afford it.

Irresponsible journalism

You’re sitting there about to have your tea, and having survived the public self-humiliation of a load of brain-dead would-bes whipped on by a fantasy S/M madame, you keep the little telly on for the relative sanity of the informative 6 o’clock – news?  News it isn’t. Every night it is the same tired old formula. It is red-top tabloid telly at its worst - sex, crime, scandal, Europe-cut-off-by-fog xenophobia, celebs and bloody football.

In this household football is regarded as being just about as interesting as string, yet a fixed percentage of 6 o’clock programmes’ air-time just has to be devoted to it, whether or not anything has actually happened in this game for little boys with nothing better to do which telly has turned into a multinational industry, so we have to endure gobfuls of padding and gobbledygook from lounge lizards who haven’t shaved for three weeks and who obviously don’t own a tie between them.

And the troubles in Northern Ireland have erupted again, as they will continue to do while tribes think it is perfectly normal to taunt each other in provocative fancy dress parades.  Northern Ireland’s troubles have produced many wonderful, brave women, but it is still a mediaeval, male-dominated society where fathers give their little boys guns and tell them to go out to play and women are supposed to know their play-ass (and where even vowels get tortured to death.)

And that is about the only positive thing I can think of to justify the colossal social cost of football – that it ritualises tribalism, puts bromide in its tea, and acts as a safety valve.

..ooOOoo..

And don’t stop me in full rant, because another thing that is sickening is the air-time that these wretched programmes devote to sentimental stories about ‘our boys’ killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a brutal fact, but if your son or daughter joins the army there is a distinct possibility that they could be killed.  The risk of being killed is part of the job. If your offspring were not willing to take that risk they could have found themselves a nice,  safe job in a supermarket or a library or doorstep selling the stupor-inducing joys of Sky TV.  But they didn’t. They volunteered to do a job that they thought could make the world a better place.  The really sad thing about war is that so many altruistic genes never have a chance to reproduce because of an accidental bullet or an enveloping  wave of mustard gas. And what are we left with?

Losing a child is awful.  I do know.  What bereft parents need at times of great shock and grief is comfort from loving friends and family – an enfolding arm of genuine human compassion, not some minor telly celeb reading a script written by a semi-literate who has never heard of the subjunctive and wouldn’t recognise it if it bit them on their media studies PhD.

What bereaved parents and families do not need is the vicarious tears that these abject reporters – no, not reporters, ‘presenters’ of scripted current-affairs human-interest magazine shows – invite us to shed.  They are crocodile tears, and they do us all a disservice.  They invite us to be participants in the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that surrounded the death – in an all-too-ordinary tragic car accident – of somebody who was probably originally a normal, happy, even if rather privileged young woman until she got pushed into an unhappy marriage.  We allow our press to build Disney figures out of people so that we can rejoice when they don’t live up to cartoon perfection, and it is this same social cancer which throws up people – and, God help us, voters – who think that a psychopath like Raoul Moats is a folk hero.

It must have been blindingly obvious to the editors of these programmes from Day 1 that soldiers were going to be killed in the Middle East, just as they were killed in Northern Ireland, and just as they were killed in Ypres or on the Somme or the beaches of Dunquerque, and that by committing themselves to covering the first deaths in detail they had hung a millstone round their necks.  When does the air-time run out?  500 deaths? 1,000?  In the Battle of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers died in one day.  Difficult to fit the reely reely exciting football news in that day, hey?

..ooOOOoo..

Uncontrolled social networking and low standards of journalism encourage us to live in fantasy worlds. Older people may have the wisdom to resist it, but for a new generation of children this cartoon, Facebook world is more real than boring old school and boring old parents.  It isn’t only the pervert in the shabby raincoat at the school gates that parents should be worried about.  It is also the sort of brainwashing that children are being subjected to by forces that parents have no control over.  We live in a society in which ignorance and stupidity are regarded as virtues: a society in which newspaper editors can run campaigns against paedophiles and not care very much if their bumpkin readers bash up paediatricians by mistake. Well, it sells newspapers to people who never learned to think.

The next time you are tempted to lay a £2 bunch of flowers at the roadside where a life was extinguished ask yourself what you think you are doing.  It is a gesture as cheap as it is contemptible.  It says ‘O look how hearing about this death has affected me’.   It says: ‘O watch me beating my breast in woe.’  

The vicious me-ist ideology of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham led you to believe that you were the centre of the universe. But ask yourself how this little death of someone you'd never even met, let alone known, has really affected you.  Did it make you cry?  Oh poor you. 

It would be such a great comfort to the bereaved, knowing that.

A Bonfire of the Inanities - please!

Imagine the scene.  You arrive early to make sure of a parking space.  You go into the foyer, mingle, show your tickets, and buy a programme (for Sweeney Todd, actually.)  Then you enter the auditorium.  It is dimly lit.  It is full of theatrical smoke representing fog.  The curtains are open ready for the prologue, so the first set is ready, though on stage time is standing still, just waiting.  You are shown to your seats by somebody who appears to be in costume and in role, and you are momentarily confused - am I late?  Has the show started?

The idea of getting rid of the first big barrier between players and audience - the proscenium arch (itself a relatively modern invention) - goes back at least to the 1960s, when rival telly adopted the proscenium arch (which it still hasn't learned to let go of).  Apron stages, theatre-in-the-round became popular because they were theatrical devices to draw audiences into the drama, instead of  just spectating  it.  And the curtain - that big symbolic barrier - went at the same time.

Theatre is all about engaging an audience's attention, and preparing them for that suspension of disbelief which is at the centre of that magical world.

And directors are very good at their job.  They know that audiences have learned all the old tricks, so they find new ones, which is why the best of them rise to the eminence of theatres like The Swan in Stratford-on-Avon.  Michael Bogdanov's production of Howard Brenton's new translation of Faust in 1995 threw out the fixed, eye-level stage as the common factor in all theatre until then.  He used the space above the floor as well, so actors worked from platforms suspended from ropes. and even from trapezes, so that the idea of 'set'  itself was no longer a certainty to hold onto.

The production of Sweeney I went to wasn't at the Swan, however.  It was in our village hall.  But what it had in common with the Faust was the genius of a director who knows exactly what she or he is doing, has a very precise vision of what is going to take place on the night, and,  crucially,  knows how to achieve it.

If this sounds like a eulogy,  it is very far from it,  for the vision of directors has now been brought to nothing.  They can get rid of the proscenium, they can get rid of the curtain, but there's one thing they can't get rid of - silly, intrusive bureaucracy, and the 'ealth an' safety message that has to be read out to audiences before every show in case somebody in the theatre is totally illiterate or has just been smuggled into the country from Bolokistan and doesn't understand green or EXIT.

I had the job of introducing an evening of song by two choirs last week, and momentary madness took hold of me, and somehow the 'ealth an' safety announcement got sung (to an Anglican chant).  It seemed to go down rather well with an audience which by now has got rather piddled off having its intelligence insulted every time it goes into a Big Room.

And - I haven't been arrested yet!    So I am now working on a four-part version of the same announcement for unaccompanied choir, and a friend is setting it for female vocalist and small jazz combo.  Versions for comb-and-paper and full symphony orchestra will be available soon.  The 'ealth an' safety announcement is so important, to a bureaucrat,  that it really ought to be the star of the show.

But then,  as the Romans used to say: "ars longa - vita brevis" - fat arse, short life.

And quite right too.

PS  If you ever meet a bureaucrat, please give him or her a copy of Bleak House.  It has some rather long words in it which they will love, even though they won't know what they mean.

Music for the Papal Visit, 19 September 2010 - Archdiocese of Birmingham

The Archdiocese of Birmingham has now announced the music for the Mass that will be celebrated when Pope Benedict arrives at Coventry Airport on 19 September this year (actually it's been announced twice - the first time it was the grisly sentimental God-pop that topped the list.  The second announcement was more sensible.)


What is so noticeable about the line-up isn't there's so much pap, but so much that is worthy to be performed during the Mass.


Here's the list.  Dodgy stuff is italicised


Gathering in Prayer and as Pope Benedict vests for Mass

Hymn – Church of God, elect and glorious – Seddon

Motet – Cantate Domino – Monteverdi

Hymn – Christ be our light – Bernadette Farrell

Entrance Procession

Praise to the Holiest – John Henry Newman – R R Terry arr. Andrew Wright

Veneration of altar

Sacerdos et Pontifex – plainsong

Penitential Rite

  

Kyrie – Orbis Factor – plainsong

Glory to God – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Liturgy of the Word

Responsorial Psalm – Paul Wellicome/Gelineau

Gospel Acclamation – Salisbury Alleluia – Christopher Walker

The Creed – Credo III – plainsong

Liturgy of the Eucharist

Offertory Procession – Hymn – Firmly I believe – John Henry Newman

Motet – Beati quorum via – Stanford

The Eucharistic Prayer

Sanctus &  Mystery of Faith- Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion Rite

Agnus Dei – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion procession

Hymn – Blest are the pure in heart – Keble

Motet – O quam gloriosum – William Byrd

Hymn – Be still for the presence of the Lord – David Evans

Motet – Ave verum – Edward Elgar

Chant – Surrexit Christus – Jaques Berthier/Taizé

Distribution of earplugs (Damian Thompson's naughty interpolation, not mine!)

Hymn – Make me a channel of your peace – Sebastian Temple

Conclusion

Hymn – For all the saints – W Howe/Vaughan Williams

Te Deum in C – Franz Joseph Haydn.

Wanted - doorstep preference scheme

I am beginning to have some sympathy with my ancestors, who were wont to dissuade besiegers of their castle by the simple expedient of pouring vats of boiling oil over them (the Investment Preference Scheme, I believe it was known as.)


Ever since the invention of the electric telephone and the doorbell, not a mealtime goes by without the intrusion of some touting pedlar into the privacy and the sanctity of your stronghold.


And their colossal impertinence is only matched by their aggression when you do not meekly submit.


The latest invasion, heralded by clamour of doorbell and simultaneous hammering on the front door, enough to waken the dead, interrupted our evening meal yesterday.  A representative of Sky (a television company, I am told) offered to upgrade our installation and stuck his foot in to jam the door.


Well, we don't have Sky, thank you, and we don't want Sky, having no interest whatsoever in paying out a fortune for programmes that we would never watch, and after this we have vowed that Sky will enter this house over our dead bodies, but he couldn't believe it.  "Then who do you get your broadband and your telephone from?", he asked incredulously, as my dinner cooled upon the plate.


"That is absolutely none of your bloody business", I'm afraid I replied, with all the pent-up anger of one who has against his will been turned into a consumer by the economic philosophy of a grocer's daughter from Grantham.  He gave me a filthy look, as though my reluctance to hand over my wallet to him was all my fault.


It's a bit difficult in a bungalow, 'cos you haven't got the height, but I'm sure a few of us neighbours can get together and work something out.


So does anybody know where we can get, say, 100 gallons of crude or a ton of pitch at a knockdown price, a very large Baby Burco, and a second-hand trebuchet?

asthma

Today, according to news reports, five people who worked at a school in Stockport have been suspended in connection with the death of an 11-year-old schoolboy who suffered from asthma.


The inquest verdict this week was shocking enough, but do you know when this child died so tragically?  It was in December 2007, not, as you might have thought, last week.


And only now is the press sitting up and taking notice, and only now, and only because of the publicity, is the LEA doing something about it, and you could, if you wanted to, try to imagine what the boy's parents have suffered over the past two years.  


But the question that remains unanswered is this: why were people suspended within days of the inquest's verdict being announced and not within days of the boy's death over two years ago?