Another acute intervention from Mr. Uppal

The mediocre millionaire MP got his face on Prime Minister's Question Time today, the high point of any backbencher's career. Was it incisive and intellectual? It was not.

Paul Uppal, a Conservative, asks about multiculturalism. Does Cameron agree that Britons could learn from their Indian friends, who define themselves first by national identity, rather than religious identity.

Cameron says it is important to support national identity.

It wasn't even factual. This 'nationality-before-belief' India would be the same one which saw killed at Partition because Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs refused to share a country, would it? The one in which Hindus and Muslims regularly engage in orgies of violence against people and property? Amritsar, anyone? The India which clings on to Kashmir without regard to the tens of thousands of deaths required to keep it under control (Muslim state retained by India because the local Prince was Hindu)?

Yet again, it's the kind of meaningless pablum which goes down very well on local talk shows but doesn't bear any resemblance to the truth, which is that despite supposedly being all about peace, the main religions have been the cause of many millions of deaths. Uppal doesn't even mean it: he's very keen to use his Sikh background when it suits. For instance, an hour after he said this to Cameron, he was tweeting this:

Thrilled to be at the Sikh Council UK's launch in Parliament today.

Which doesn't look very consistent. Perhaps he's planning to tell the Sikh Council that it's time they shut up about their religion and concentrated on nationality. I wouldn't bet on it though!

Despite being opposed to religion, I can't see that proclaiming nationality as the foundation of identity is any better. Unless you're the victim of occupation and empire, then nationality is another way of excluding others and inculcating irrationality. You could just as easily dedicate yourself to your bridge club, street or colleagues without any loss of cohesion - indeed the basis of Marxism is that you have more in common with fellow members of your class across the world than you do with members of other classes in your country.

The Dark Place faces many problems: race and nationality thankfully aren't among them. Uppal could have alerted Cameron to the damage done by Tory economics, or raised some pressing issue. Instead, he chose to flap his gums with platitudes. That, my friends, is the measure of the man.

Yet more books…

It's getting out of hand. Today's post:
very rare copy of Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love (1931)
Ellen Wilkinson's crusading The Town That Was Murdered (Left Book Club: thanks David)
Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman (better get up to speed before the surgery)
Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital
and the new Bon Iver album.

Now I'm off round the bookshops with Cynical Ben.

Resisting the Cameronist-Cleggite Attacks

We're on strike again in a few days, objecting to our pension being reduced, our contributions increased and our working lives extended (I don't mind the latter, it's the combination that infuriates me).


So here's a little something from Test Dept. and the Striking South Wales Miners' Choir, a hurried collaboration between London punk/electronic troublemakers and the miners in 1984. Where has the political music gone?


The first one is classic Welsh Male Voice Choir





Then we have the Stalinist/Scottish 'Victory'



'"Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes And Is Constantly Perfected Under The Immaculate Guidance Of The Great, Honourable, Generous And Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is The Blue Sky In The Hearts Of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage And Bow In Deep Respect And Gratitude To Her. The Milk Of Human Kindness."





and finally the genuinely haunting 'Comrade Enver Hoxha'.

Grasping cripple bastards

Yes, Philip Davies MP has bravely proposed that the Minimum Wage (a princely £5.93 for over 21s) should be abolished for the disabled (and his Tory colleague Christopher Chope tried and failed to pass an 'Employment Opportunities Bill' which abolished it for everyone because it's interfering with the poor and disabled's economic autonomy.

But Davies has a point. We all know that disabled people in jobs are just there for charity. They don't do as much work as real employees. It's just to make companies feel caring and cuddly. Someone else has to do their work for them all over again anyway. And when you factor in all those adapted cars, wheelchairs, special toilets, keyboards, big screens, wider doors, note-takers and so on, it must lose the company more than the employee's worth. So if we cut them out of the minimum wage, we're just being honest. And disabled people eat less. It's a scientific fact. None of them have families - or shouldn't - so they don't need as much pay as everybody else. We're nice enough to them already. I hold doors open for them literally every month. What do these scroungers want? Blood?

Jesus. It's people like Hawking who are holding this country back. And I haven't even started on the mentals. *

*I am being sarcastic, by the way. Sorry to have to point this out but people often misunderstand. I'm channelling the voice of Messrs Davies and Chope.

We're all going on a summer holiday

Well, not quite, but I am taking the afternoon off: Ben and I are going on a cheese and book crawl in Stratford on Avon. Because that's what we both really need more of, books and cheese.

Hopefully the place won't be packed with Shakespeare fanboys: teaching the work every year has made me immune to the marketing and Bardolatry. I don't particularly care about the Shakespeare Myth/Conundrum/Mystery. The work's important, not what happened to the best bed.

However, in honour of Shakespeare…


and less wonderfully:

Birmingham's very wettest band?

This is Felt. They were very sensitive boys. I like them. They're gone now (though one did go on to found Denim, a group which heavily influenced David Wrench's sublime second album.

Down in the paper mines

Ah me, more books today and this weekend. Though I did read two novels as well as a newspaper each day: Rupert Thomson's dreamlike speculative fiction Divided Kingdom, and Chris Adrian's bonkers but spectacular San Francisco retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Great Night. Recommended. I've ordered and am looking forward to his The Children's Hospital.

So, the weekend's haul from the Oxford University Press Summer Sale (I looked only at the literature section to avoid temptation):
Neil Rhodes's Shakespeare and the Origins of English (the curriculum, not the language).
Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds (translation of a 12th-century monk's chronicle)
Yet another Arthurian translation, this time the French short version of Lancelot of the Lake from the 13th-century (I was already teaching bits of Arthurian literature, but Red Witch bears the blame for getting me back into this stuff in a big way).
Steven Clingman's The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary, which I'm going to pillage for my own work.
Waller's massive Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, which tells us about reading and publishing history, the book trade, reviewing, canons, popular fiction;
Thomas Bartlett's new Ireland: a History;
Graham Swift's Ever After (another campus novel);
Jane Austen's Selected Letters and a collection of her short works and juvenilia, Love and Friendship;
Michael Arlen's 1920s period piece, These Charming People;
and Neil Gaiman's Stardust (see the excellent film too)

That should be enough to get on with. Right now I'm reading Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?, prompted by the current BBC adaptation.

As for music: John Adams' Son of Chamber Music has come in, including his String Quartet (I'll never fathom the imaginative depth to which he goes for his titles), and I picked up 5 CDs for £10 too: the Long Blondes' Someone To Drive You Home, Mark Eitzel's 60 Watt Silver Lining, Julian Cope's Peggy Suicide and The Collection, and Shelleyan Orphan's We Have Everything We Need, which I now discover I had via iTunes. Ho hum.

Getting Stoned

Sorry to tease you: I merely visited the pretty town of Stone, Staffordshire yesterday. A wander along the canal, and a decent meal. A few pictures are here.

Stone is a grand town for puns. As well as this hair salon next to the canal (geddit), another barber's was called Set In Stone. Magnificent.

Never meet your heroes… Or The Loneliness of the Big Business Tory

Or, The Politician Who Didn't Want His Photograph Taken (or notes made of anything he said).

Now, I know you're all on tenterhooks, dying to know how my little confab with the local MP, Paul Uppal went. Well, I can assure you that it lived down to my expectations to the tiniest detail.

The occasion was a meeting of local residents in a solidly Conservative-voting suburb. It was called by Mr Uppal in a pub, to discuss a planning application for a 13-metre (45ft) mobile phone mast on the pavement outside the listed, elegant building. At least 40 people attended - all-white, 50+, Tory-voting, concerned citizens.

Now, on the substance of their anger, I'm neutral. They were convinced that a mobile phone mast would cause cancers and pointed out that there's a school and a hospice for the terminally ill close by (I wondered how many of them had mobile phones and where they thought the masts should go). They also felt that the mast would be a huge eyesore and (a few said afterwards), it would reduce property values by 15%. I'm in total agreement that the mast would be another disfiguring attack on pleasant suburbia, but I can't comment on the cancer claims, though my instinct (and this British Medical Journal paper) suggests that it's not a problem, but there's also plenty of research which at least hints at health risks.  I don't care about property prices either - they need to come down to a sane level - but these citizens have a perfect right to make their points and I respected their feeling that the council has been playing fast and loose with the planning process. They are good people and they're feeling aggrieved.

So that's the crowd: perhaps not fully informed but justifiably annoyed. Now to the star turn, Mr Paul Uppal MP. Did he have an informed view of the science? No, of course he didn't. With considerable political skill, he collected everybody's name and addresses (his little aide didn't like me declining to give mine), promised his support and offered to be a conduit as a good elected representative should. I toyed with asking whether there were any mobile phone masts erected on any of his buildings, and whether he'd helped non-Tory ward residents agitate against masts when it was a Tory council, but it wasn't my meeting. My sense is that Uppal doesn't personally give a damn, but he's intelligent enough to spot a cause and a group of solid Conservative voters when he meets one, and that's enough. Certainly he didn't object to speakers' suggestions that the Council is 'trying to make the Hospice worse', which is pretty cynical.

So that's the substance of the event. But what of our little romance? Well, I have to say that it remains a love-hate relationship. My first brush with the party machine was when I produced my camera and took a couple of innocuous shots of the illustrious Member. Over came a little painted doll who must still be in sixth-form, demanding to know who I was, why I was there, and why I was taking photographs, which were forbidden.

My friends, my tender heart was pained at the sight of the fair bloom of youth working for a Conservative. What pain, what suffering has to have been endured to turn a sweet child into the face of a party intent on attacking the poor, the sick, the young and the old? I declined her demand for my personal details unless she reciprocated, but my offer was refused, which is a shame because she certainly needed some missionary outreach to show her the error of her ways. Ah well, another soul lost to Satan.

Having failed in her quest, the pretty minion returned to her master with the sad tidings that some reptile was refusing to fall into line, and I received a personal audience with Mr. Paul Uppal, MP. Did he greet me as an old friend, or as a valued constituent, or even a potential voter? He did not. None of the famous charm was wasted on your correspondent. The principle tenor of our exchange was paranoia and aggression: by the end of it I was actually shaking and blushing. Brusquely, he demanded to know
whether I was from the press (clearly this public meeting was actually a secret meeting, though the residents had informed the local paper).

• Who was I? (I gave him my real name because I have nothing to hide). 
• Why did I want to take photographs? (At this point I suggested that most politicians were rather keen on publicity, and repeated my point about being a constituent). He seemed rather upset by this, and got more upset when I took notes of our conversation. 
• Why am I writing things down? 
• What's it for? 

I explained that people took notes at meetings, and that other people present would be doing the same thing, a suggestion that seemed to horrify the eminent representative. We goggled at each other angrily, then he retreated to start the meeting, which I've already summarised.

One interesting other aspect of the event was the behaviour of Wendy Thompson, a Tory councillor. She explained that, as she was on the planning committee which would eventually vote on the proposal if the professional officers felt it was controversial, 'the council's solicitor's wouldn't be happy that I'm even here', because she was legally forbidden to express an opinion. Despite this, she still managed to refer to rejection as the 'right' and 'appropriate' decision, and gave the residents a list of objections they should use: she and Uppal are fully aware that the health claims are weak, and encouraged everyone to 'sing from the same hymn sheet': Cllr Thompson's repeated use of 'we' and her warm messages of support from the other Tory ward councillors didn't make me confident of her neutrality in any way: I may just find time to draft a complaint…

So that was the meeting: a classic of grass-roots political operation - a multimillionaire cynically using local distress for political gain. It had one final sting: the sweet little aide trotted over with a new tactic. She informed me that she couldn't stop me taking photographs, but I'd have to have the permission of every person at the meeting. I pointed out to her that every crowd scene photograph and CCTV image would be automatically illegal if that were the case, but she didn't see my point. I could have snapped pics of everybody there, legally, but as it happened. I simply wanted a souvenir of my MP in action, and I got them. Feast your eyes on The Photos He Tried To Ban.

So was this meeting enough? Have I had my Uppal fill? In one sense, yes: my suspicions that he's a slippery, paranoiac Tory bastard were more than fulfilled. But in another sense, his paranoia has reinforced my desire to hold him to account, especially in the absence of any local journalism worthy of the name.

If you want to meet the great man, get down to the Civic Centre on Friday at 2, where he's on the panel to discuss Climate Change (cue platitudes hiding actual attacks on the environment). Sadly, I can't be there: I'm being interviewed to find me something to do at the Olympics, because I Am The Big Society.

Santa arrives yet again…

More fascinating books in the post today. Thanks to the generosity of David at World of Books, I've acquired three more Left Book Club volumes, and one from it's bastard evil twin, the Right Book Club.

Russell's Colour, Race and Empire (1944) is a good socialist discussion of how to hand over the Empire at the end of World War Two, and to end racism. Anti-fascist war-hero Andre Malraux's Days of Contempt is a translated novel of the 1930s underground German resistance to Hitler (translated by Haakon M. Chevalier: what a name), and Rats! is an insider's guide to the British war profiteers by 'The Pied Piper' (actually Joseph Mallalieu, a Labour politician).

The Right Book Club volume is environmentalist and canal revivalist L. T. C. Rolt's Narrow Boat, an account of a leisurely trip through the Midlands, including many places I grew up in or worked in, with illustrations. RBC books are rare because it wasn't a successful venture, specialising mainly in 'conversion' memoirs and scare stories about those evil socialists who were intent on sapping the national spirit by, er, founding the NHS and other evil statist institutions. Narrow Boat is interesting because it tries a subtler tack: evoking the romance of the canals and 'old England', then claiming that all these things are being subverted by those pesky Communists. Conservative undoubtedly, but an interesting read and not really deserving of being tarnished by association with the Right Book Club's ultra-reactionary stance.

The final book is Dai Smith's In The Frame: Memory in Society 1910-2010. It's also interesting as a 'personal history' of South Wales, and liable to be rather dubious. I say this with considerable reluctance: Smith is a hard-lefty like me, though one who has climbed several greasy poles in his time to become part of the Welsh establishment. However, in the course of my PhD I came to distrust his academic approach. For his own political reasons, he canonised Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live as simple propagandist Communist novels, when in fact they're much more slippery and complex than he admits. Then when the novels were republished in the Library of Wales recently, he silently amended characters' names to make them more Welsh: editorially and politically dishonest, as far as I'm concerned. Finally, despite being Gwyn Thomas's literary executor, he edited his Sorrow For Thy Sons massively to make it a simple story of proletarian deprivation and political enlightenment, but won't let anyone see the material he discarded: I know, because I wrote two unacknowledged letters to him.

Right, I'm off to beard Mr Uppal in his den. Full report on Monday.

Lying Tory bastard

Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary, held a PR stunt today to 'launch' the School Games:

The event was one of nine pilots taking place across the country this summer ahead of the launch of the new national School Games competition in September, which will aim to use London 2012 to inspire more young people to take up competitive sport.

Mr Hunt said: “The School Games will revive competitive sport in thousands of schools up and down the country, and will be a key part of the sporting legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.  And we are going to level the playing field for young disabled athletes by giving them more opportunities to play sport". 

I'm sorry to go on about this, but it makes me really angry. It's not a new event: it's a cut-price version of something which has been running for ages. We've had the UK School Games for 5 years (Coventry, Bath/Bristol, Cardiff/Newport, Newcastle/Gateshead and Sheffield this September). It's 10 competitive sports, and reproduces Olympic quality venues, organisation and so on. The whole point was to contribute to the Olympic 'legacy' and increase youth sport participation. This slightly rebranded event is actually smaller, with fewer sports than the UKSG.

I know, because I've been there as a volunteer since Bath/Bristol. Jeremy Hunt knows all this because he was there last year and made a speech. Perhaps that's where he got the idea from.

Here's a picture I took of him at the Opening Ceremony. If he turns up this year, he deserves to be roundly booed. It's got to the stage that the Tories can't acknowledge and support anything, however good, dreamed up by their predecessors. That's just spiteful and petty.

Why I am striking on June 30th

As a member of UCU, I'm taking strike action on June 30th. Here's why.

Listen to this morning's interview with Danny Alexander, Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary of the Treasury, in which he explains that, notwithstanding ongoing negotiations, our pensions are going to be reduced, our contributions are going to increase, and we're all going to work for longer to qualify for them.

I'm not opposed to working longer personally: I know that my miserable life will drag on for a few more years than my parents, and the vision of me sitting at home in my pants railing in  a senile fashion at Melanie Philips' satanic grandchild on Question Time 2040 doesn't appeal. But I don't see why working a few more years isn't enough to cover my pension: I'll be paying in for more years, rather than taking out.  

We are striking against Con-Dem plans to:

• cut public sector pensions by a third;
• to increase the public sector pension age to 68;

• and make public sector workers pay 50% more for it!

We are not striking because we are greedy. Our pensions are a vital part of our pay. We work in the public sector because we believe in decent public services for everyone, and taking strike action is never an easy decision. Academics tend to enter contribute to pensions several years after most people because we usually need years of extra study to qualify, and full-time employment often follows extended periods of hourly-paid teaching: I did a part-time MA and a part-time PhD while picking up bits of university teaching and school supply teaching. I didn't have a 'proper' job until well into my 30s. 

The next generation of academics will owe £27,000 in undergraduate fees alone, plus the cost of living for three years, before they even think about postgraduate degrees: higher contributions for a reduced eventual pension will hurt those who decide to enter our profession, while many people will decide not to become educators at all. We must strike on behalf of the next generation of academics. If I came out of a BA with £50,000 of debt already, perhaps thinking of a mortgage and raising a family, there's no way I'd spend the next few years doing more degrees then starting on £29,000 in my 30s. I'd go into something lucratively destructive like banking.

This attack on our old age is part of the Government’s attempts to roll-back public services. School budgets, libraries, the NHS, youth services, Citizens Advice Bureaus, Legal Aid, leisure centres, access to college and university and more services are being attacked as the Government attempts to undermine the notion of decent public services available to all. 

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine explains the process: any economic problem is to be used to institute hard-right free-market policies. The irony in this case is that hard-right free-market policies led to the recession now being used as an excuse to attack us. These changes are not a temporary response to an emergency: they are part of an ideological assault on this country's values.

Rightwing politicians and thinkers are claiming that we are 'feather-bedded' or over-privileged, and that we should be treated the same as private-sector workers. This is untrue and misleading: rather than reduce our conditions, why should those in the private sector not earn decent pensions and conditions (and as their directors and executives currently do)? Let's not race to the bottom to enrich the billionaires: let's work to get everybody's lifeboat floating higher. I vocally supported the BA strikers and every other industrial action in recent years - don't swallow the tabloid lies about fat-cat teachers and social workers.

In any case, public-sector workers aren't living a life of luxury: the average public sector pension is only £4000. In teaching, over 95% of pensions are less then £10,000. Unlike the millionaires in the boardrooms or those in our Cabinet, we will not get a ‘gold plated pension’.

Our action on June 30th will be the first major strike against the Con-Dem Government and we ask that you show your support for the public sector workers taking action to defend their pay and conditions and to defend our public services. Please sign petitions and send letters of support into your local school, college, university or Job Centre (for the attention of the NUT, ATL, UCU or PCS union representative).

Uppal to his old tricks

Apparently my hardworking, sensitive and caring MP, Paul Uppal, made a series of disgraceful statements about his consituents last night in the Express and Swastika, our local paper. Unfortunately, I don't buy hysterical racist Tory rags, and they don't have it on their website, so if anyone does have a copy, do send me the relevant quotes.

Now, I'm quite boring but I do pay attention to detail, so when I realised that this lovely man had blocked me from his Twitter feed, I had a poke round to see who he followed because it's significant. For instance, I follow a lot of news organisations, some science sites, some authors I like, some musicians, some personal friends, some key institutions which affect my life, some politicians and some people I don't like or trust. Paul, of course, is in the latter category. My choices reflect who I am and what I'm interested in. Of course, I follow people who in the main think along similar lines.

Who does Paul follow? Well, you'll be totally unsurprised to learn that it's a deeply narcissistic and closed circle. In essence, he follows Tory Central Office (so he knows what to believe about everything) and a lot of Tory MPs, plus a few Tory activists. He's not interested in: different ideas; culture; civil society… anything away from the narrowest of sectional interests.

Following 98 people (fewer than he has followers: there's a definition of narcissism for you):
Journalism: @danwainwright (E+S politics writer), The Economist, The Express and Star: unpleasant rightwing opinions all;
Politics: 91 Conservative Members of Parliament, the local council, 2 Conservative candidates; a member of his staff (@fishchipssalsa - Andrea Coker)
Other: Hootsuite - a Twitter dashboard.

So of the 98 people he follows, 94 are Conservative Party MPs or workers, 3 are rightwing publications or journalists, and 1 is a piece of software. This isn't healthy.

Denis Healey, former Labour Chancellor, said that it was essential that politicians had a 'hinterland': a set of passions outside politics which would keep them sane, and give them an even keel once they've left the mad world of the Westminster bubble. Alan Clark's hinterland was sex. Quite a lot of Tories (and Chris Mullin) wrote novels. Roy Hattersley became a historian.

Uppal has no hinterland. His life seems to consist of money and the distorting echo chamber of other Tory MPs. He has no perspective and seemingly no inner life, nothing to set his actions and beliefs into relief. I try my best, but when someone is as narcissistic as this, you have to worry about their intellectual and mental competence. That's why I keep writing about him. It doesn't really matter if you lot read what I write about him or not: as long as he does, because I worry that he never, ever hears any opinion differing from his own, and that way madness lies.

While I'm at it, let's have a look at Uppal's Tweets:
There are 16 in total.
That's 4 per month since he started.
1 is a reply to another user, which suggests that he doesn't understand social media at all.
5 are about his own speeches (that's basically a third)
6 are plugging his PR activities
3 are about Tory council candidates (none of them mention that Labour swept the board)
1 is about the royal wedding

There's a man who's engaged with his public and eager to debate the issues. What I don't know is how many other people he's blocked other than your humble correspondent.

Why subeditors are important

I watched the BBC News last night. They had the story about a US Congressman who resigned after texting women pictures of his penis. His name, by the way, is Anthony Weiner.

Now I'm not sure that a story like this is at all relevant to a UK audience other than to demonstrate where the global centre of power is, but its introduction made me choke on my chips:

This report contains flash photography.

You can watch the report here, where the warning is emblazoned across the video

Hello Tories

Now why would Conservative Central Office be Googling one of their own MPs?

Domain Name		chugai-pharm.co.uk ? (U.K.)
IP Address		194.203.158.# (Conservative Central Office)

Search Engine		google.co.uk
Search Words		paul uppal
Visit Entry Page		http://plashingvole....l-where-are-you.html
Visit Exit Page		http://plashingvole....l-where-are-you.html
Out Click		his Twitter feed http://twitter.com/#!/pauluppalmp

Thankfully, they found my website and presumably got themselves a bit of education. They know I'll be attending the meeting tomorrow - good job I'll be wearing this.

V for Vole!

A big hello to the monitoring department at The Hegemon too, for spending almost 2 hours scrutinising the humble Plashing Vole, specifically looking at references to this institution. I look forward to my invitation to a disciplinary hearing.

It's not just Bloom's Day

It was also the anniversary, a couple of days ago, of the Peasants' Revolt. They invaded London, camped at Blackheath (now an extremely rich area), trashed John of Gaunt's palace and raided the Tower of London, executed the Chancellor, who was also the Archbishop of Canterbury, and presented a very democratic set of demands - an end to feudalism, free movement, decent wages, cancellation of the Poll Tax. Then they were tricked by Richard II and savagely massacred.

I've just bought Rodney Hilton's Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 to mark the occasion. It was of course the last good thing to emerge from Essex.

Now we're going on strike again (June 30th), it's a good moment to muse on the possibilities inherent in mass action. Though I'm hoping George Osborne isn't in charge, because the Baronet will definitely initiate a massacre.

(Also in the post: New Woman novel Gallia of 1895, and Fred Inglis's History of Celebrity, for an MA module I'm running next year.

You can tell the mettle of a man by his response to adversity

I'm a very petty man, as friends, family and colleagues will attest. I truly believe that anyone who doesn't hold a grudge is simply lazy.

But I had to laugh: Paul Uppal MP has blocked me from his Twitter feed! Rather than actually respond to my reasoned opposition here on Plashing Vole, or on Twitter (not that he's ever responded to anyone because he doesn't understand Social Media), he's just blocked me so I don't know what he's up to!

Except that I do… and I'll be seeing him tomorrow! Now what do you want me to ask him?

Bloomin' Nora

It's Bloom's Day: when literate drunk Irish people (and that's all of them) celebrate James Joyce's Ulysses, which - as you all know because you've read it - follows Leopold Bloom round Dublin on June 16th.

Some choice quotations from that wonderful book:

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

...Yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes. 

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. 

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. 

 Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what is cheese? Corpse of milk 

I'm hungry now. Here's my favourite:

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.  

Not from Ulysses, but good anyway:

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. 

This is how to deal with the Prime Minister

I always wonder who has to give consent before some scumbag politician descends on your hospital bed for some cheap publicity. Imagine having Cameron's sausage face leaning over you while you're trying to come to terms with cancer…

This time, the doctor in charge is having none of it (and the bow tie implies he's a Doctor Who fan) and the Prime Minister is unceremoniously booted out:



And while we're in the mood, here's Michael Gove falling flat on his arse. It's a metaphor.

A new addiction

Everyone watching the lunar eclipse tonight?

Meanwhile, you may like this snarky, pedantic website, picking up Facebook spelling and grammatical errors. Not being in FB, I like it a lot.