So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

Is it cold in Wolverhampton?

It was -7 C when I left on Saturday morning. This was the scene nearby, the night before:

Home again, home again

Hello readers. How've you spent the weekend?

Emma, from her ever so slightly smug texts, has been surfing, rafting, lolling in a hammock and generally doing things unavailable to Wulfrunians in winter. She's in New Zealand, visiting her sister. She promises to update her blog from Down There.

I was in a posh boarding school in Somerset (within sight of Glastonbury Tor, hippies), managing the West Midlands team for the Cadet Winton fencing tournament. It was very, very cold (hurrah for Icebreaker woolly gear) and quite stressful, but we did well. Last year we were 9th: this year we came 4th, so thank you to all the fencers, particularly the women's epée team, who were undefeated the whole weekend. They all behaved, too…

In my absence, Neal and Dan entertained Cynical Ben and his long-suffering wife Jo, at my flat. Actually, while I slept in preparation for getting up at 5.00 a.m., they entertained Mark to drunken pizza the night before. I didn't hear a thing. Ben's Christmas present to me was a huge box of the most depressing literature you'll ever see, plus a Jeeves and Wooster compendium, a Gary Rhodes cookbook, a cheese-making book, and Stephen Fry's guide to classical music, inscribed with the words 'This book is shit, love Ben'. And guess what: he's right!

Ben has this to say about me over on his blog:

In a year when I gave up on the Guardian where can I turn when I want a left-leaning stance on world events? The answer is provided by the Vole who I agree with almost everything in general terms and almost nothing in the particular. His prolific blogging takes in the personal, the private, the political and the pant-wetting indie. I read his blog every time I am online and there is always something worth reading. He is a word machine. He also has an especial good humour and is wonderfully patient with my often incredibly rude and argumentative comments

The last comment is the accurate one. His visit to my flat was his first. I wasn't there. Ben's considered judgement was apparently 'it's not as bad as I expected', which is a beautifully weighted insult. However, he'll no doubt have a completely different opinion by next week. He always does, on every subject. Other than Muriel Spark, that is. He loves Muriel Spark.

Ewar: I have a beautifully wrapped parcel of books for you, courtesy of old Cynical. Call in for them next term.

Dan presented me with a Roy Hattersley book on the period in which I specialise, and a compilation CD, which starts with LFO and presumably gets weirder. Our own Christmas album will be available for your delectation very soon. Be afraid, be very, very afraid.

Intriguing

Neal's homemade present to me involves an (empty) tube from a popular brand of fake crisps. My mind boggles. Any ideas?

Man hands on misery to man…

Two things have happened today which encapsulate the extremes of the human condition.

The first is the theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ironwork sign spanning the entrance to Auschwitz. Some things are sacred: a camp preserved as a memorial to man's endless capability for cruelty to man is surely on of them (not that it's had much of a restraining effect). What might the motivation be? Plain theft? Surely not, unless the thieves are totally free of all morality and sense of proportion. Memorabilia collection? There is a market for Nazi items, and this must rank high on the list of desirable pieces, but even amongst those freaks, some sense of place must prevail.

The only motivation I can think of is that it's a fascist statement - to desecrate a place where millions died, and which represent the places where more millions died (Jews, communists, trade unionists, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and others identified as somehow not fitting into the pure society) is a shocking rejection of morality, history and, ultimately, humanity. The action makes light of what went on behind those gates.

Meanwhile, from the bottom of a mine in Minnesota amongst other places, dark matter appears to have been found. It's a testimony to our (sometimes grudging) commitment to purest research - something now under attack in my education system and country. Dark matter is the substance which makes up 75% of the universe. It's never been detected before, only theorised as filling the spaces in gravitational theories of the universe: from dark matter comes matter, which includes us. Additionally, dark matter may even hold the key to time itself. At this point my brain dribbles out of my lugholes, looking for the nearest pub.

Jazz satire

I'm not a huge jazz fan, but this song (posted over on Banquet of Consequences) has a catchy beat and a good line of snark. Mind you, fits me when I'm blogging…

En garde!

Hello children. How many of you are snowed in? Not me, dammit. It's cold but sunny I'm in the office, slowly doing administration for the fencing team I'm managing this weekend. I'm really not looking forward to my 5 a.m. start and long coach journey.

Still it should be a great weekend. It's the Cadet Winton, the junior version of the Winton Cup, an annual inter-regions event. Most of the fencers know each other from the individual circuit, so they get the chance to fight as a team (a strange experience for a largely individualistic sport), to support and be supported by their comrades, and often to make new friends.

For me, I'll be happy as long as we fence well, nobody gets hurt and nobody gets left behind/drunk/whatever.

It's held in a posh boarding school, which is a strange experience, having gone to a very non-posh boarding school for a period of my (chequered) school life. At least I won't be expecting warm, comfortable beds or decent food…

My Christmas message to you all

We all got a little bit heated last week, while discussing the role of bankers and politicians in destroying our economy.

I'd like to silence you (how I'd like to silence you) with a closing quotation from Thomas More's Utopia, from 1516. It's a complicated text: satirical, political, self-contradictory in places and morally complex.

But as this is a blog, I can ignore all that nuance stuff and just give you this, which I hope you agree applies to our current condition.

Hythlodaeus (who appears to represent one aspect of More's personality):

It appears to me that wherever you have private property and all men measure all things by cash values, there it is scarcely possible for a commonwealth to have justice or prosperity - unless you think justice exists where all the best things flow into the hands of the worst citizens or prosperity prevails where all is divided among very few.

When I consider and turn over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing anywhere today, so help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. 

Ball's

What with being ill and busy over the last few days, I haven't posted anything from my Dinner-Dance in aid of the North Staffordshire Special Adventure Playground. It's North Staffordshire's premier Special Adventure Playground, in fact. And only.

The glittering showbiz event was held in the director's banqueting chamber of Stoke City FC, so you can imagine that I was rather keen to go. Pictures of bygone heroes festooned the place. I could almost hear the ghostly rattle of broken bones, stricken crossbars and crowd violence (very much a thing of the past).

Feeling rough, I didn't dance much, but did escort The Well of Lost Blogs, and shared a table with her and the other staff, delightful company all. Unfortunately, I lost out in the auction for a signed Stoke City ball, a French villa holiday and a bottle of House of Commons whisky signed by Tony Blair* (I planned to trace the signature onto a full confession of his war crimes).

The distinguished gentleman is Stanley Matthews, one of Stoke and England's greatest players. A few more pictures are here.

*In an effort to avoid the taxman and hide his enormous income, Blair has set up 12 companies to funnel his cash through. The full, incredibly boring, details, are here. So much for upholding the public good even once out of office etc. etc.

Bye Donal. Don't go alone

Finally, a senior clergyman has resigned over the many, many, Irish sexual abuse cases. A recent report identified several named Bishops as involved in the cover-ups - moving abusive priests on to fresh new territory, refusing to investigate accusations and the like. Donal Murray, Bishop of Limerick was merely one of this cabal who decided that the strength of the Church outweighs the needs of raped children, their families and the community.

More need to go. Schools need to be handed over to the State (they're still run 'for' the State by religious institutions in Ireland, and the Pope needs to 'fess up. In his previous job, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith (it probably sounds cooler in Latin), he had responsibility for all this stuff. He knew, and said nothing.

Ireland used to be the hope of the Catholic Church. While other nations slipped away into atheism or (worse) Protestantism, or developed strands of Liberation Theology (the idea that Catholic priests should identify with the poor and the oppressed rather than bolster the ruling classes), Ireland's Catholics stayed obedient, reactionary and devoted. They handed their children over to the Church and received in return a ruling class that never lifted a finger without checking with Rome first. One image serves well: all of the government and senior oppostion, with the brave exception of Noel Browne (an all-round hero), waited outside the funeral service for the President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (owner of a splendid moustache), because the Catholic church forebade its members from attending Protestant services.

Catholicism's on my mind today. I certainly don't have any nostalgia for my days as an altar boy or choir boy, but it leaves its effects, positive and negative, even on we liberated atheists. I'm definitely a Catholic Atheist! In London the other day, Adam and I visited the National Gallery's The Sacred Made Real exhibition, a collection of paintings and statues from the 17th-century Spanish Counter-reformation. All the statues are hyper-real: John the Baptist's head is painted, and moving around the glass case reveals a neck complete with windpipe and bloody flesh. The Christs are all heavily scourged and wounded, the tears dripping from Mary's eyes are made of crystal.

It's the iconography of a church which feared and distrusted its congregation. Not for them the tales of liberation and joy available in the New Testament. Instead, the emphasis is on suffering and sacrifice: Jesus crucified and the gory martyrdoms of various saints, all dwelt upon with a dark kind of pleasure. The people, clearly, were urged to identify with the misery and pain of these events, rather than to consider the positive aspects of the religion. It's a very personal, inward-looking kind of belief, designed to encourage the faithful to resist the wider social and moral attractions of rival denominations. As art, the images are disturbingly beautiful. As theology, they're terrifying. This is what lies at the heart of the Irish scandal.

Lunchtime bulletin

Hello. Anyone still out there, or are you all doing your Christmas shopping?

I'm still deaf (thanks for the solidarity, Demented) and feeling grumpy, but the sun's shining so I'm slowly unfurling.

I went off to my department's Christmas dinner last night, at Don Salvo's. Good food, odd service, and good conversation. Well, I'm assuming it was good conversation. People's mouths were moving anyway.

Anyway, I'm here in the office, seeing the occasional student, doing some marking and moaning to colleagues. Maybe you should move along to Cynical Ben, where he's listing his albums of the decade, rather provocatively. At least he's included P J Harvey's White Chalk, certainly amongst my favourite two or three LPs of the decade. It's a stunning work - bleak, uncompromising but essential. It reminds me of Kate Roberts's novels and short stories: tales of a life made strong through hardship, effort, resilience and determination. Lives stripped down to their bare essentials yet never lacking dignity. The music echoes this - minimal instrumentation and effects. The album certainly isn't one to play over breakfast, but it swiftly becomes addictive.



This is 'The Devil'.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

It's going to snow, which I love very much indeed.

Oh. Except where I am. Boo hiss.

The good, the bad and the petty

MPs expenses are endlessly fascinating. Some are holier than thou, most are entirely reasonable, and some defy common sense or good manners. The small claims are often the most revealing

Take John Baron, MP for Billericay. He claimed £10 from the taxpayer… to cover the gardener's Christmas tip! Scrooge!

He is, unsurprisingly, a Tory, and one who particularly hates the NHS and Travellers (by which I suspect he means Roma).

Peter Bottomley (another Tory) clearly fancies himself. He charged us £5.51 for 'art insurance' and has taken out £25,000 of 'kidnap insurance', despite having no obvious personality which might provoke a snatch.

Leading Green campaigner David Cameron MP (who put a useless wind turbine on his London home as a publicity stunt) burns large amounts of oil to heat his Oxfordshire mansion. We pay his bills: I think we're entitled to insist that this multimillionaire installs solar and ground source heat pumps. Despite having £30m+ in the bank, we pay the interest on his mortgage, even though he could have bought his houses in cash. Most of the Tories seem to burn oil - perhaps just to annoy liberals.

Harry Cohen's shower gel costs £34 (something stinks). Derek Conway (very corrupt) had his toilet handle greased (better not to ask). Greedy Gerald Kaufman didn't see why he should pay for Sky Sports in his second home, and charged us. The fees office told him to sod off. He also demanded over £1000 for a posh chair.

Michael Meacher, multi-property-owning former environment minister couldn't pay his bills on time a few months ago. This didn't stop him harassing the fees office for the £1.49 they owned him! Loads of MPs seem to have problems paying council tax and the like on time. Anne Moffat tried (and failed) to claim for air bed insurance! Dan Norris bothered to claim £0.80 for a phone call! Meanwhile, Lembit Öpik called electricians to fix the lights in his London flat. From 418 miles away in his Welsh constituency!

George Osborne thinks he'll be Chancellor of the Exchequer next year, in charge of the country's finances. It's therefore not great news that he'd run out of expenses allowances. Hi colleague Andrew Selous charged £0.55 for a mug of Horlicks! Paddy Tipping (not a name, more of a sport) tried to make us pay for his dog-minding (rejected).

Actually, most of this is rather sweet, if petty.

Grouch

What a rotten day it's been. I'm tired, grouchy and deaf. I should have been sparkling before an invited audience of sixth-formers gathered for a conference, or at least acting as Zoot Horn's lovely assistant, but instead I sat in a walk-in health centre (yet again, three cheers for the NHS) and then spent the day frantically trying to organise things for the fencing competition I'm taking a team to at the weekend. If I'd been OK, I'd have been discussing James Joyce, Heaney, Betjeman, Langston Hughes, St. Vincent Millay and Armitage - all my favourites. I feel genuinely bad about not pulling my weight.

Do I go home and mark essays, or go to the English department Christmas dinner, even though I can't hear anything?

Meanwhile, Mark, Neal and others are having fun at this wonderful event, populated by all my favourite people:

Slash and burn

In the interest of lightening the tone, I was talking to someone about the misery of shaving (female readers, feel free to fill the comments section with childbirth-based objections) and thought I'd share this anecdote with you.

Knowing that I've always wanted to try the old-fashioned cut-throat blade wet shave experience, one of my friends organised a Luxury Shave Experience for my birthday, as part of a day trip to London.

Off we toddled to a boutique in fashionable Chelsea. My face was wrapped in hot towels, and I settled back into the bosom of a very glamorous young lady, fully expecting the experience of a lifetime. The towels came off and the facial massage started. I was so relaxed that I was almost asleep. Then the razor made its presence felt. Now, gentlemen, you'll all understand that the angle at which the blade meets the face is important. Would you have guessed: perpendicular? Nor me. But there it was: edge on to my skin, and the motion started - the motion of a psychotic windscreen wiper. Back and forth it went, harder and harder.

The pain was, naturally, immense. However, I thought 'perhaps I'm just a wimp. Maybe it's meant to be like that', and didn't utter a squeak. I noticed my companion, through the mirror, leave the room, but thought that she was going for a coffee.

Perhaps ten minutes later, perhaps an hour later, the pain had spread to most areas of my face. Seemingly at random, my torturer patted my face dry and announced that she'd finished. The promised 'aftercare, beauty tips' and various extras were not, clearly, going to materialise, but as a polite chap, I thanked her and left.

Outside, my benefactor was sitting under a tree in the sun. On approaching her, I noticed that she was crying (not unknown in my presence). I coughed to announce my presence and she turned, took one look at my face, and increased the flow of tears (again, not unknown in my experience). However, her tears were occasioned, it turns out, by the mask of blood I was wearing. She had fled the room when the old red stuff had started to flow, and it hadn't stopped for quite some time. Finding a car's side-mirror, I realised that my face was a patchwork of gaping wounds and clumps of beard (I'd not shaven for a week in advance of this spa heaven): the beautician, horrified by the damage she'd done but not caring to alert me, had bailed out halfway, throwing me onto the street without mentioning either the damage or the incomplete job!

And so we wandered the streets of London for the day, passers-by staring openly at my harvest-sun face, blood spattering my clothes, heat pulsing from my head. Later that evening, we attended the recording of a Radio 4 show, in company with a great many aged and respectable retired citizens… none of whom cared to sit next to us, whatever they thought we were.

I've had a major operation and several injuries. I'm deaf, right now. Nothing beats the enduring pain of that day. Still, we've all got some good anecdotes out of it, and I can see the funny side. Now. I've even been for another shave, and it was wonderful. Shame the place has recently gone bankrupt.

Ant'n'Dec: why?

Maybe I'm feeling a bit grumpy because I'm ill and temporarily deaf (Demented, if this is a tiny portion of what you're stuck with, my respect for you has risen even higher), but some things have really ground my gears recently.

Chief amongst them are Ant'n'Dec. Now, if you're not a UK-based reader, you may be asking yourself who or what AntnDec are.

They are Death. By this, I'm making an analogy with Western films, rather than the very dignified Death of Pratchett's Discworld, or the good sport of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. In Westerns, just before the final showdown, a little man with a tape measure runs up to the hero and the villains, measuring them up for coffin size. It's a moment of comic relief. The man is always a little cracked and fussy, and he momentarily relieves some of the tension associated with a violent, possibly unjust death.

AntnDec are similarly ubiquitous. They were poor child actors in a Geordie children's home drama called Byker Grove. Then they became poor quality pop stars as PJ and Duncan, on the basis of their cuteness and strong regional accents (a children's Robson and Jerome, perhaps). After that, it was off to the BBC to present The Ant and Dec Show, then to Channel 4 to do Ant and Dec Unzipped… Before long, they were presenting CD:UK and SM:TV, hugely popular ITV Saturday morning kids' shows. They've since spread like a rash, presenting Ant and Dec's Saturday Takeaway (during which, as executive producers, they shared responsibility for 'taking away' a large amount of money from viewers who rang into closed premium competition lines), Pop Idol, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Britain's Got Talent (it hasn't) and Ant and Dec's Gameshow Marathon.

They are, in essence, the face of a doomed and desperate TV channel. They have no skills, only accents. They pop up, grin inanely, utter something along the lines of 'why-ay' (a Newcastle greeting) and attempt to draw your consciousness away from the emptiness you are contemplating. They are that man, measuring you up for your coffin. It won't help.

There's a lot more. I was awake all last night, occupying my mind with this stuff, but it's all slipped away.

In my absence

In my absence, many things have appeared in my brain which would have occasioned a cyberrant.

Amongst them, of course, was Tony Blair's announcement that he'd have found some other excuse to invade Iraq if he'd definitively known that there weren't any WMDs (which he must have known anyway).

It's not, of course, a surprise that he'd have done this. There are two aspects of the interview which are classic Blair.

1. The 'I did what I thought was right according to my conscience' routine. It's evasive and unacceptable. I could punch my mum and claim that I was being true to myself. It's no defence. Ken Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, rightly called it a 'narcissist's defence', and he's right - the only validation, for Blair, is Blair. That's a total rejection of objective standards, law and democracy.

2. There's an inquiry into the Iraq war on (a bit of a whitewash, but at least it's on). Did Blair say these things to the inquiry? No, he bloody didn't. He did what he did right through his premiership: sat on a sofa in a TV studio, answering questions from unqualified light-entertainment presenters. He never hid his contempt for Parliament, and he never went on the serious news shows, like Today, Newsnight or Channel 4 News. Instead, he oiled his way onto shows like Richard and Judy. This time it was Fern Britton, most famous for hosting This Morning, Ready Steady Cook, Soapstar Superstar, Magic Moments, and Mr. and Mrs., alongside a host of other hard-hitting political shows.

Oops

Forgot the most exciting bit. I met The Krankies. They seemed cranky. And they read The Telegraph. Ugh.

Heeee's back! Sort of.

Hello again. I've so much to share with you, but it will all have to wait.

In the last few days I've:
put on a dinner suit and bow tie
visited the hallowed turf of Stoke City
seen more van Goghs, Holbeins and assorted other famous paintings
confirmed that Adam's girlfriend actually exists
lost all hearing in one ear.

Thanks to that last, I'm off to a health centre rather than help with the 6th form conference I should be teaching on.

Meanwhile, I just want to check on two people. Winter and Stupid Fat Hobbit: give me a sign of life.

More later, if I'm not having my ears amputated.

So, farewell then

It's the last official day of term. I've seen and been phoned by many students and there's an air of good will about the place. To ensure its continuance, you've earned a break from my humourless ranting. Apart from the habitual weekend break (this week enhanced by a charity ball), I'm off to visit my personal banker for Monday and Tuesday.

No, not as a one-man lynch mob: the gentleman in question is a distinguished friend, despite his possession of two model light sabres. Who'd have thought he works in the IT department?

I won't be back at work until Wednesday. As the proud possessor of an enhanced CRB form, I'm considered safe to present some poems with Zoot Horn, to an audience of literally several enraptured sixth-form students.

Have a good weekend.

Kneel before Steve Bell

As usual, Bell captures the horror of the Tories' hypocrisy perfectly. He's one of the justifications for The Guardian's existence.

We are overcome (repeat)

From the pen that brought you Hard Rain, Masters of War, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and many, many more…

Here's a track from Bob Dylan's Christmas album. Is it a) a former genius's descent into senility or b) a sly and sophisticated joke. Perhaps even c) Bob having a laugh.

I'm starting to think that our own LP is going to stand up quite well. We had another session last night - good backing tracks laid down, but technical errors precluded us from laying down vocals. Thankfully.

All about ancient Egypt

Despite being the butt of several of his jokes, The Guardian loves The Thick of It as much as I do. Here's their round up of highlights. If you don't like swearing, you're a f. u. … etc.

Want more: it's all here. It should tide you misanthropes over the festive period.

Tally-ho, chaps

Political floor-crossers are always suspect: rats joining a floating ship. Those moving from Tory to Labour are especially suspect, because the exemplify New Labour's obsession with suck up to the mega-rich. There was a sense that the party didn't examine their political beliefs at all, so keen were they to make political capital from the defection.

Amongst the most egregious of these turncoats were Shaun Woodward (multimillionaire, stately home, butler, MP for one of the poorest places in the country) and Quentin Davies, a brash multimillionaire, portly man who epitomised the Tory Squire tradition. Their reward: ministerial jobs, jumping the queue ahead of qualified, loyal Labour MPs with a history of commitment to the party's beliefs. In most cases, more commitment to the party's values than the leadership, but that's a whole other rant.

So anyway, you can take the men out of the Tories, but it's clear you can't take the Tory out of the men: Quentin Davies, we discover, has claimed from the taxpayer to pay some of the cost of repairing the bell tower on his stately home. At last, Labour has a pig to rival Sir John Viggers (you paid for a Georgian-style floating duck island) and Douglas Hogg (moat repairs, which was a wonderfully Norman touch). Perhaps Davies is a sleeper, a Tory secret agent who laid low until he could do maximum damage…

Laugh riot, Victorian style

Ms. E-mentor's Victorian Vision caption competition reminded me of one of my favourite cartoons, by JW Taylor and published in Punch, the famously unfunny British 'humorous' magazine, now happily defunct.

This is the only online version I can find - sorry it's so tiny, but click on it for a slightly larger version. I'll have to scan my larger one in.

'We like the plot, Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go'

Definitely Friday today

OK, now I know what day it is. I even know where my towel is (sorry, nerd in-joke there).

Here I am, in the office again before the start of the working day. I should be swimming, but there's a long and fascinating paper on the condition of post-communist Poland to proofread for a colleague.

How was the budget for you?

I'll be ever so slightly worse off, but not enough to make any difference.

In a move which will please Adam, bankers' bonuses aren't being taxed. The banks will be taxed 50% on their bonus pot. Hopefully the result will be that bankers are paid a regular salary which will be eligible for tax (bonuses aren't), leading to more responsible behaviour and more income for the government to spend on public services like, er… bailing out banks.

It wasn't much of a budget - the signals were more important than the economics, but there were some interesting bits, like funded internships for graduates without the money to do unpaid internships (which lots of rich kids do). That will certainly benefit some of my students.

Marvel at the arrogance!

Kevin Pietersen is an England cricketer, formerly captain of the team and well-known for his lack of self-deprecation, shall we say. He's almost as good as he thinks he is.

He was born in South Africa and switched allegiance because he didn't like that country's attempt to turn cricket from a whites-only sport to a mixed one by reserving places for black team members.

There's an argument to be had there, sure. However, if you were a white South African with some previous racial disagreement, would you pose for a doctored photograph reclining in Barack Obama's Oval Office chair? To advertise Brylcreem?

Mmm… racially sensitive.

Musical odyssey

I should probably update you on the process of the Meisterwerk. Dan and I got together in Neal's absence last Friday to lay down some tracks.

Serious violence was done to a certain unpleasant megacelebrity of advancing years. The result was, in the parlance of the youth, a CHOON!

We also wrote a track for Neal. It's jazzy, cheeky and cool. Just like him.

Thai delight

After all that excitement, lunch was a Thai meal with Kate, always a huge pleasure. We compared PhD hell, dysfunctional institutions, then talked books, music and friends. Oh to be of the regularly lunching classes.

Then back, slightly giddy with Singha beer to talk seriously about Shakespeare. Trying saying after a couple of pints! I am of course, deeply professional.

Morning! Slightly delayed

I started with a boring Friday and ended up having an interesting one. After the usual horrible swim, I went to buy… bedding. Very exciting. Then I bumped into a friend who required a little medical help. I am a Dr., but not that kind, so off we went.

I did get to see the air ambulance land (not for us), which was exciting. Strangely, one of the crew was filming the patient being hauled out of the 'copter. Is there a sign somewhere inside saying 'this life and death mercy dash will be filmed for training purposes'? Or do they film all trips in case ITV3 needs another cheap 'documentary'? It must be quite a moneyspinner. Major accidents must have competing crews from different TV stations trying to keep each  other out of shot ('John is filming for Britain's Twattiest Drivers. Will he get to the body before Neil, who collects flanges and dislikes mayonnaise, working for Crash Cops? Find out… after the break').

I wonder what constitutes informed consent when you're being airlifted in an emergency. Do they do make-up? 'More blood, now!'.

PS. Just to make the Americans jealous, emergency care and an ambulance call cost precisely £0. Good, isn't it?

PPS. This morning's excitement reminded me how kind and friendly the Great British Public are. All sorts of people of various ages, classes and subcultures stopped to help without a thought for where they should be or what they might be late for.

World's worst: an occasional series. 1: Kirstie Allsopp

Kirstie is a horrible Tory speculator who made a career on TV encouraging everyone to play the property market.

Last night, slipping in and out of consciousness, I dimly took in Kirstie's Homemade Christmas.

Her recipe: apparently, it's traditional to have a tree in your home at Christmas. Kitchens are popular places for people to congregate. Baubles go on Christmas trees (especially if you shop at Liberty or hand-blow your own glass. The rest of her tips were similarly either hugely patronisingly obvious, or astoshingly smug/expensive/impractical.

My perfect Christmas involves a fire, some real ales, and a wall of books cutting me off from humanity. Balls to Kirstie's glass balls.

Informative

What a comprehensive account of an institution's strengths and challenges. I take back everything I've said about Wikipedia.

Eat the rich!

Today's the big day when Alastair Darling announces his Pre-Budget Report, which is actually a mini-budget. It's a big job: claw money back from the fatcats, cut back public services and still persuade everyone to vote Labour in 5 months' time.

Follow the fun here.

Meanwhile over in Ireland, which is even more screwed through having 2 Tory parties vying to be the most capitalist, a second emergency budget is announced today (follow it here from 3.45 GMT). Just like the UK, ordinary workers are going to suffer because all the money's gone to bail out the banks which have bankrupted the country. Can anyone else see what's wrong with this picture?

No, Peter, of course it isn't.

Peter Mandelson, silky sinister unelected eminence grise of New Labour turned silky sinister unelected eminence grise of Labour, has announced that today's supertax on bankers' bonuses isn't a punishment for their greed, hypocrisy, destruction of the economy, arrogance and failure to acknowledge that we've saved their skins.

He's right in a way: it's also a cheap and easy way to make New Labour look like it's on the side of the people for a change (it was Mandelson who said that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes' in response to a question about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor - despite leaving massive gaps in the tax regulations and selling the Inland Revenue's offices to a company based in a tax haven!).

It's a cynical piece of electoral politics which won't make much of a dent in the national debt. I still support it though. Many of the banks are state-owned and almost all of them are propped up by state guarantees and asset swapped. The bankers need punishing. They mentally decoupled the real economy from the financial services sector. They've bankrupted their institutions and nearly bankrupted the country, evade tax, award themselves massive bonuses and are generally partying like it's 1928.

This 50% tax on bonuses is nothing: supertax on the very highest sums once reached somewhere in the 90%+ range in the late 70s, and Thatcher only gradually reduced it.

The bankers will no doubt redouble their efforts to get the Tories re-elected. Cameron will make tutting noises about bankers until he's elected (because the Daily Mail isn't happy with them either), then resume his position (kneeling before a pinstriped crotch, mouth open). Will some bankers leave the country? Maybe. Where will they go? Somewhere the banking system's in rude health, with no angry citizens protesting over their continued beggary at the hands of financial whizzkids.

Oh dear. There's no such place. Poor bankers.

A little of the old-time religion

As a hard left socialist, I've always seen the Labour Party as a bunch of class traitors, especially in the last twenty years, during which they've essentially packaged and sold the working class to the corporate masters: everything they do is inspired by Thatcher.

Now there are stirrings of class-based politics. Not because New Labour believe it: it's hard to sing The Red Flag from the wheel of your 4x4 on the trip to collect your kids from their selective boarding school, paid for by the fruits of banking or futures trading. No, it's because they've realised that the voters are angry.

So they've released this video, pointing out - justifiably - that Labour has done good things for the poor. Only to stop them revolting, of course, but it helps. Let's not mention Ramsay MacDonald, the acquisition of nuclear arms, betraying the miners and the unions, the Iraq war, reducing child benefit, refusing to extend workers' protection, taking a bribe from Formula 1, shutting down the BAE Systems weapons corruption case, instigating the biggest loss of civil liberties ever seen, and all the other grubby deals done along the way. These are real achievements.

Absolutely hilarious political Photoshop japery

OK, it's not subtle, but it makes a decent point: inexperienced, spoilt, arrogant idiots shouldn't win anything.

The fix is in

My love for Scandinavians teeters on the brink: in collusion with the UK and the US, the Danes have circulated a secret document amongst the rich nations to work from during the Copenhagen conference.

• Kyoto (the only legal agreement on climate change) to be dumped
• Poor nations to have much lower emissions allowances than rich ones (so the rich, polluting ones can carry on polluting
• Climate change to be managed via the World Bank (the rich nations' loan shark) rather than the UN
• Poor nations' environmental strategies to be dictated by the rich ones

We expect the US to resist real change: even with a centrist President, it's a country controlled by a corporate élite. The UK, outside its own borders, is well-known as a manipulative and arrogant state: ministers say cuddly things and their civil servants operate ruthlessly to benefit the UK, even at the expense of the most vulnerable. Denmark, on the other hand, has a reputation as a calm, thoughtful nation. Sure, it's not as relaxed as Sweden, but it should be on the side of the angels. Now it definitely isn't. It's lined up with the usual suspects as yet another group of rich white guys bossing the poorer and darker around.

Business as usual.

Order of the Vole: Ronan Tynan

Dermot Desmond, a businessman of the most revolting kind (tax exile, brash, selfish capitalist, asset-stripper, financial conjuror: exactly the breed who sunk Ireland's economy) has proposed a 'global university of the arts' to revive Ireland's fortunes.

All well and good you might think. However, The Kerrywoman has sent me a letter from the Irish Times which nails Desmond's twisting duplicity (and that of the political class which encouraged these chisellers) perfectly:

Madam, – Dermot Desmond, when making his proposal for “a global university of culture and the arts” suggests that the unique Irish spirit is “undefeatable”; and while I agree with the latter, I regret he did not add if we all put our shoulder to the wheel (Front page, December 5th).

In case Mr Desmond, as one of the country’s leading tax exiles, has not noticed, we already have a number of potentially world-class cultural institutions, and they all share one thing in common – they have sustained, and are about to sustain further brutal cutbacks in State funds because of the collapse in tax revenue. The best thing he could do at the moment if he wants Ireland to reach its full potential in this area is to start paying tax like the rest of us.

Indeed, what was even more depressing about his proposal is that it reminds us that we live in a country where paying tax for the super rich is optional, with the first of the 163 published names he wrote to being Bono and U2, who also, coincidentally, moved the core of their empire out of Ireland to reduce their tax bills.

But should anyone have the right to become an “exile” in their own country for tax purposes? More to the point, with our country virtually bankrupt, does any member of the super rich have a right to hold an Irish passport if their families are living here, and they are claiming to be “exiles” for tax purposes, when they are in the papers more frequently than their peers, who are paying tax?

Surely the culture that makes such anti-social behaviour possible has contributed massively to the horrendous financial mess we find ourselves in at the moment? In the budget, the Minister for Finance must address this scandal. – Yours, etc,

RONAN TYNAN,

Blackrock,

Co Dublin.

Ronan Tynan: you sir, are The Plashing Vole's Hero of the Week.

To Live and Die in LA

John Adams has written a new symphony, City Noir, based on Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s: the glamour but also the seedy, dangerous underbelly. Hear a clip of this edgy, tense, vibrant piece here - the US premiere is soon but the UK one isn't for ages, and a CD won't be available for ages after that. Very annoying: I' and others are still waiting for the release of Reich's Double Sextet (2011!), which is meant to be a massive return to form.

Here's the only bit of it in the public domain:

Mmmmeat

Emma, despite being a vegetarian, gave me a Christmas present of fine pate, cassoulet de canard and a fine saucisson de canard. Finer friends would be impossible to find. All hail Emma!

I shall have to find an appropriate gift in response. I'm currently considering a sack of potatoes. Any thoughts?

Thanks Unthanks

After a gruelling day's teaching, I toddled off to see The Unthanks last night, supported by Johnny Kearney and Lucy Farrell (who we missed because I was teaching so late). Props to the people who stole our reserved seats at the front, by the way. You just can't trust the old. They'll nick anything.

Turnout was low because the inhabitants of A Dark Place are brutish ingrates (all the other venues sold out), but it appeared to bother the band not a jot. There were ten of them on stage, all multi-instrumentalists. Singers nipped round to take over on drums, the pianist played lap steel, the cellist had a glockenspiel and banjo, a violinist also played trumpet and the viola player sometimes switched to trombone. The singers (the Rachel and Rebecca Unthank) even did some clog dancing.

My 17-year old self would have committed hara-kiri if he'd suspected that he'd one day end up watching clog dancing. That kid was a dick. The clog-dancing was utterly cool - especially as the band were all togged out in stylish cocktail dresses and the like. Except for the three men.

The Unthanks were so good that my vocabulary feels utterly inadequate to express the range of styles and emotions they covered. They'd segue from a bleak ballad to a heartbreaking shanty to a raunchy Tindersticksy/jazzy number, some of them covers of tracks I'll now have to track down, all interspersed with hilarious banter. I particularly liked 'Here's a song about wanting to kiss a boy. Don't worry though, we've made it sad to match all our other songs because we don't want to shock anyone'.

It was a great show, and the band chatted away happily to fanboys (thanks for the teasing, Emma) afterwards without any showiness - I guess that comes from the folk scene. So I came home with a signed poster and CDs.

Here are a couple of tracks: Frank Higgins' 'The Testimony of Patience Kershaw', based on teenage girl's life as a miner in the 1830s (how folk can you get), notable for the girl's words and the beautiful string arrangement (I love viola solos).

Daily Mail vs. the NHS: who will win?

Depressingly, it's probably that journalistic harlot the Daily Mail, but in the meantime, here's a constructive and considered response to Richard Littlejohn's inane, ideologically-dictated hatred of the NHS. An NHS worker makes the medical and social case for a state health service rather than the expensive and unequal medical treatment afforded to those who a) have insurance and b) somehow don't get trapped by said insurance's loopholes in the USA.

Remember: over here, whatever is wrong with you, you turn up at a surgery or hospital, get treated, then go home. At no point do you have to produce a credit card or prove that you have insurance.

I know the NHS is tired in places, and that this government's preference for the health of the private sector outweighs its concern for the health of the citizens, but it's a magnificent principle. The health of one affects the health of all, and a fair, efficient service is best provided through the collective will of the people embodied in the state.

Pushers

I have been accused of having a problem with book-buying. However, I realised this morning that those individuals who make such claims are those who take me to bookshops. The Well of Lost Blogs, Newton Heath 18 and The Kerrywoman are the guilty parties. They suggest or even invite me to visit bookshops, then look on, shaking their heads as I strip the shelves and erode my debit card.

This weekend was a case in point. Off I tripped to see The Kerrywoman, planning solely to drink mulled wine for hours. Which we did, but first we toured a fine ceramics museum (faintly surreal given the pantomime characters rushing around to get from one side of the stage to the other), ate a magnificent afternoon tea, visited a brilliant independent bookshop, then drank champagne and mulled wine for many, many hours. Books were discussed, crosswords were done, papers were read, soup was made and music was listened to. All in all, a perfect weekend.

With what books did I end up? Two borrowed Edith Wharton's, on The Kerrywoman's recommendation. Max Frei's The Stranger, which looks like odd Russian SF; Gelder's Popular Fiction: the Logics and Practices of a Literary Field; Christina Rosetti's Selected Poems, Lord Raingo by Arnold Bennett and Leonora by the same author. I'll have time to read them when I retire.

Unforgivable

I've said some terrible things about my dear students. I've thought some worse things. Nothing, however, is as awful as what I'm about to say.

I just met one of them. He's had a makeover. He has deliberately made himself look like Jedward, shame of a nation.

Dante would no doubt have his compass out, preparing a fresh circle of hell.

The Night We Kept for Seething Wells

I mourned, a while ago, the death of angry music journalist Swells, formerly known as Seething Wells the communist poet and officially known as Steven Wells. He hated every band I've ever loved, which made him compulsive reading.

A big tribute night was held in London at the weekend, and my friends The Nightingales (or most of them) were on the bill, alongside poets John Hegley, Little Brother (author of 'PC Gone Mad' - a poem about a policeman with mental health issues), David Quantick, various other indie luminaries and compered by my favourite communist punk poet, Attila the Stockbroker. The 'Gales played an Electric Eels number, a punked-up Mel and Kim track, their recent hit 'Little Lambs' and a thrash interpretation of The Internationale. A good time was apparently had by all.

In the bleak midwinter

… you obviously need to listen to modern British folk of the bleakest kind, such as The Unthanks, whom I'm seeing tonight, with Emma. Virtually every other gig they're doing is sold out, but A Dark Place doesn't have a very discerning public, so they've only sold 150 tickets: get down to the Wulfrun.

Actually, that's a little unfair. The wind howls round their new album less unforgivingly than the last. Here's proof:

Early morning moron

Hello campers. I'm looking forward to 12 hours in the office today. Why have I been here since 8 a.m.? Because this idiot took home the marked essays rather than the unmarked ones… so have to finish 16 rather involved scripts as well as teach. Aarrrghhhh.

Still, the day started with amusement: there's a fuss (in the stupid rightwing press) about a toy hamster which is meant to sing Jingle Bells, but apparently sings 'Paedophile'. Radio 4's flagship news show, Today, was so amused by this that it tracked down a recording. It doesn't sing 'paedophile', more like mmmmmmphile. Close enough for the kneejerkers.

What a very surreal start to the day.

In the world of proper journalism, the Guardian and 56 other newspapers have marked the start of the Copenhagen conference with a joint editorial setting out the case for serious and urgent action. I know we shouldn't need to rehearse it again, but the deliberate, irresponsible, selfish, short-sighted, greedy and cynical machinations of fossil-fuel pushers, Tories, repressive oil-dictatorships and other capitalists (shame on you, Canada and Australia amongst others, including us, but especially the USA) have muddied the waters so much that people are either disillusioned with, cynical about or bored by, the subject.

Let's be clear. In the short term, food prices are going to go up. Poor, black people are going to starve. Then the already destabilised weather systems will deteriorate further. More, poor, black people are going to die - drowned, displaced, starved, killed in wars over productive land and water. After that, amidst the mass extinctions, freak weather, heatwaves and rising tides, Western nations will spend their money on keeping poor, black people out of the temperate zones. It won't (and shouldn't) work.

After that, life will get immeasurably worse but I, mercifully, will be very much dead.

Copenhagen is already dubious - horsetrading for countries to justify keeping their emissions up as high as possible rather than taking a lead, but it's a start. We might manage to keep temperature rises to 2 degrees C - leading only to awful consequences rather than catastrophic.

Another class, career saved

My last formal poetry class of the year. Attendance is lowish, but they've all read the poems and are suitably horrified by some, touched by others. A good, opinionated debate ensues and I've been shown interesting ways to read lines I hadn't thought about before.

Urge to kill… falling… falling…

Haggis (ignore all the stuff about piping it in etc: that's Victorian BS invented for tourists and those Scots who gave away a country and then wanted to relocate the nation in something other than political power) for dinner tonight. Mmmm. Sarah was in Edinburgh for a meeting, and bought me a lovely MacSween's one - king of haggises (haggi?). Astonishingly, their vegetarian one is just as delicious, though how anything not containing 'heart, liver, lungs and spleen' can be delicious is a mystery I'll never solve.

Get out you timewasting bastards, bye bye bye

I like books, and have a tendency to be Irish and Eeyoreish. If I wasn't paid to talk about books, I'd have liked to run a bookshop.

So obviously, my bookshop would have been just like this one, from one of my favourite series of all time, Black Books. The link is to particularly good scenes: bloody Channel 4 have blocked embedding.

What fresh hell is this?

I'm never, ever going to utter a word of criticism about my subjects' students again. I've just aided a colleague marking presentations in a completely different area. I don't think I'll ever be able to excise some of the images and words I've just experienced.

Here's a dose of what I need after that:

What makes a good breakfast?

I don't usually bother. I'll have a fry-up with the Map Twats on Saturday mornings, or sometimes make myself a bowl of porridge (salted, of course).

I never start the day with a four-pack of Skol Super-Strength Lager, unlike two chaps I bumped into on the way to work at 9.00 a.m. Perhaps when I get the sack I'll have that kind of leisure…

I'm marking essays and presentations today, and running a poetry workshop. Neal's off to a stag weekend, involving paintballing. As one of the guests is a 'journalist' for The Sun, we've commissioned him to shoot the guy repeatedly at close range. Media Studies in action!

Attention Media Students

Chris Morris, as I may have mentioned before, is a certified genius. Check out the Brass Eye Paedo Special: he hates the cheapened, sensation-seeking, celeb-obsessed 'journalism' that masquerades as the Fourth Estate these days.

He's always hated them. His radio show, On The Hour, went directly for them. Here's a glorious example of how media work:

Bob's yer, well, not sure really

I took a seminar on Twelfth Night the other day, focussing on gender and performance: apart from the confusion of men playing women playing men and everybody falling in love with the 'wrong' person, the play's stuffed with reference to, well, plays.

Just to break the ice, and to get a conversation on gender confusion going, I showed this clip from Blackadder, which got a lot of laughs even now.

Weariness…

Well, we've just done the final Winter's Tale session: low turnout, very few people had read it, and we gave up halfway through, on the hour mark. How depressing.

On the good side, I've received another two books: Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, and Gammel's Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic. The notion of 'classic' is dubious, and the packaging makes it look very soft indeed, but I'll reserve judgement for now.

Back to the marking…

Three cheers for Nesh, and Neal

Nesh is an electrician. He came round to my house yesterday and changed the battery on a smoke detector.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be particularly heroic or even noteworthy. Even I can change the battery on these devices. However, this particular one was mounted in the middle of the ceiling miles away from any wall against which a ladder could be lodged. Not just any ceiling, but a 25ft high ceiling. Additionally, the damned object was beeping every thirty seconds, 24 hours per day. It was like living in Das Boot, with its sonar beep driving into my brain incessantly. But Nesh has solved it, despite his visible terror.

Neal's deserving of cheer too, for his cooking ideas. We did a Spanish stew last night, and it was utterly brilliant. Sweat garlic, onions and diced potatoes. Add a whole, large smoked chilli, lots of diced chorizo, big chunks of morcilla (or black pudding, it's the same thing), olive oil, canned tomatoes, herbs, and a load of Puy lentils, then serve with watercress salad and hunks of crusty bread. Hot, nourishing and delicious. I'm going to do a vegetarian version tonight, as the Map Twats are doing another recording session for the Christmas Album.

Back to marking…

Poetry? Please…

An article in today's Guardian discusses the use of poetry in adverts. Some poets say it's fine to write on commission for McDonald's, or for an insurance company. Other companies have used existing canonical texts.

In one sense, I'd like to think that a viewer might be surprised by a skilful or beautiful line in between being shouted at to buy more shit. However: as Bill Hicks says in relation to licensing your music for adverts - you're off the creative register for ever. Art is often, but shouldn't be, the creation of a desire for profit. The more beholden to trade it is, the worse the art - see Damien Hirst's 'art' if you don't believe me.

More to the point: most of the stuff masquerading as poetry in adverts isn't. It's verse, which isn't the same thing at all. Verse screams 'I'M ARTISTIC. THIS IS ART. LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM'. It's desperate for credibility and fails, if versifying is the only skill on display.

Poetry, rhyming or not, is unsettling. In it, meaning is ambiguous, or arrived at through an alchemical transformation of words and your own imagination. The 'meaning' is as emotional as it is rational, perhaps more.

I can't think of any poem which can be boiled down to 'buy our burgers'. Here's Bill's take on it:

Hate writing essays?

Don't despair: your teachers do too, as my colleague's latest post describes! Having gone back to do a Poetry MA at another place, her terror of the blank page is inducing sympathy for students.

I agree. I did a BA, an MA, a PhD and finally a PGC in HE, so writing large chunks of text is very familiar, but never pleasant: research is the fun bit, but shaping coherent thoughts for a superior reader is terrifying. Of course, I do it several times a week to provide lectures, but nobody marks them. I suppose that going back to this kind of discipline is useful - it reminds us of the difficulties and complexities of what we're doing to people…

Accordion Crimes

Sorry to any Proulx fans. This isn't a crime. I always thought the accordion was for drunks at village weddings. I think so no longer, having heard this Ukrainian chap playing Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor and making it sound like he had a church organ on his knee. (Via Alex Ross)

Yes, but what books?

I know, you're clamouring to discover. Well, the day before, I received Reimer's A Simple Little Tale, another anthology of Anne of Green Gables critical essays, as well as Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves and Much Obliged, Jeeves, because Roderick Spode (Oswald Mosley) appears in them.

Yesterday, I added too many. I gorged. My eyes are bigger than my brain. I added Opened Ground, a collection of Heaney poems, Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun and Pasquale's Angel, because I like intelligent hard SF and steampunk, Brian Aldiss's classic Non-Stop, Margaret Atwood's essays on debt, Payback, Heaney's translation of Henryson's medieval Scots classic The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, Tom Furniss's Reading Poetry, 4 maps of Wales and the Welsh/Shropshire border, and Spivak's translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology, because I've never read it in English.

Oh dear. I think I'm going to be sick. Greedy boy.

Here's Atwood talking to us about the recession:

The Black Country high life

Yesterday evening was one of the most expensive few hours of my life. This ball had better be good, now I've invested in a serious (and rather beautiful) dinner suit and all the accoutrements.

Suits are great. I don't often wear one, though I own several. They hide all imperfections.
Well, not quite all. One of my suits was tailor-made for me. Even that one, when I wear it, looks like it was borrowed from somebody slimmer, taller and more handsome. In a suit, I'm still a short, portly product of millennia of hauling pigs over Irish bogs, but it adds a little self-confidence.

The expensive evening didn't end there: Emma was cruel enough to point out that the (long-awaited and much unmourned) bankruptcy of Borders Books heralded a large sale. So off we trotted, she to buy sparkly pink things, allegedly for young relations, I to amass a stack of literary theory, science fiction and maps, lovely, lovely maps. After the shock of getting to the till, all we could do was hotfoot it to Café Rouge (the independent French bistro nearby was full) and stuff our faces, washed down with a fine Fleurie.

I could get used to this life actually. Must find a rich girl. One lacking in discrimination and self-esteem, obviously. I was so exhausted this morning that I skipped my swim, so I'll have to go tomorrow and Friday. Ugh.

Temporarily disguised as not a pumpkin

As I briefly mentioned yesterday, I am going to a charity ball, because that's the kind of upstanding pillar of the community I am. Ahem.

The charity in question is the North Staffordshire Special Adventure Playground, a magnificent organisation dedicated to providing excitement, adventure and really wild things for children and young adults with disabilities. And to providing some peace, quiet and solidarity for their parents.

My connection with the place is a brief period volunteering there before I became the embittered and lazy reader you see before you, and a long friendship with its key staff member, The Well of Lost Blogs.

If you live in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, give them your time. If you don't, give them your money. Or give it to me, and I'll pass most of it on. Consider the donation a payment in gratitude for not living in Stoke-on-Trent.

Immortal satire

Just before I dash off to buy new clothes (I am going to the ball), here's some fun.

I've just been to Alan's brilliant lecture on political satire and political communication (and then marked the best set of Pol Comms presentations of my decade here. This first clip from Yes Prime Minister was shown: it's still the best popular summary of the British newspaper landscape - with a killer zinger.



The second is still absolutely spot on about party political broadcasts. Now the economy's utterly fornicated, expect to see a lot of leather-bound books and hear a lot of Elgar.

The bad taste of Wolverhampton

I won't identify the particular takeaway food establishment this comes from, but I'm very happy that this delicacy is back on the menu:

Meanwhile, food packaging for dummies: check out the warning.

A taste of Wolverhampton

This was one of several 'party buses' which cruise the West Midlands, saving revellers the bother of having to wait for a drink until they get to the pub. These are from Hallowee'n

This is Neal, washing off the blood after another successful murder.

And this is how Neal and Emma ended the night:

  

Working life

I'll give you a break today - I'm teaching 9-4 with only an hour's break, which will be filled with essay administration with colleagues. I didn't get out of the building until 10 last night. I'm considering bringing a pillow in - there's a lovely dark cave under my desk which is good for sleeping, as long as I don't bang my head when I wake up… it's happened before.

Off to first year presentations now… joy.