Et in Porncadia non ego

Commiserations, onanism fans (and judging by its backlog of content, I'm assuming you make up a large chunk of this blog's loyal readership); the days of an all-access, open prairie internet are numbered. No longer will every man or woman with a few bars of wi-fi signal be able to set out from the doorstep of the incognito search window and go tramping over the wilds of digitised adult content. For ever more, their right of passage will be policed by their internet service providers, who themselves shall be cowering under the kosh of the UK government. Yes, the porn-pastoral is dead; long live the age of internet feudalism. 

The testicle-faced puppeteer pulling the strings in this extended metaphor is our old friend David Cameron, who today outlined plans to block all access to internet pornography by UK household by default unless over-18 users choose to be allowed to see it. It forms part of a group of new laws relating to the regulation of internet use designed to prevent online pornography 'corrupting childhood'. Such measures are a way of combating the paedophilia epidemic that the conservative government seems to believe we're currently undergoing; a belief I was going to use this blog to caustically debunk, until I realised that the laws were unveiled on the very same day that the entire nation was breathlessly waiting for just one glimpse of a naked, gluey child to flash up on their screens. It seems we might have a problem after all. 

Outlining his plan at a press conference (where he was accompanied by a prominent NSPCC logo hovering in the background, in a display of moral symbolism so cloying it seemed to rival actual child pornography in the stockpile of sickening images), Cameron declared that the two major 'challenges' an open internet posed to the well-being of children were firstly 'criminal' - i.e. the availability of images depicting actual abuse - and secondly 'cultural' - i.e., children accessing 'damaging material at a very early age'. To his credit, Cameron did accept that the 'two challenges are very distinct and very different'. Basically they amount to the difference between actively seeking, producing or deseminating images of abuse, and simply ignoring the little parental guidance warning that pops up at the beginning of online porn videos. If you need further clarification, the former is a crime committed by a small number of disturbed individuals, and the latter a crime that your little brother has probably committed at least three times this very afternoon. 

Yet despite this, Cameron went on to argue that 'both these challenges have something in common. They are about how our collective lack of action has led to harmful and in some places truly dreadful consequences for children.' Now, I might be generalising, but I'd be willing to bet that even the most histrionic amongst you would agree that only one of these 'challenges' had led to objectively 'dreadful' consequences for children. Though its obvious that a large amount of legal adult material is somewhat morally questionable, its not really feasible for us to judge what effect such material has on the minds of those who view it whilst under the age-limit. Certainly it doesn't seem to have has a negative effect on me. Alright, perhaps that's a bad example.

Cameron argued that these measures single out the internet as a source of the corruption of childhood (whatever that might mean) since 'in no other market, and in no other industry, do we have such an extraordinarily light touch when it comes to protecting our children'; conveniently ignoring markets and industries such as those which produce children's toys and which, unlike pornographers, actively target children. Whilst, he continued, 'Children can’t go into the shops and the cinema to buy things meant for adults,' (sorry to burst your bubble of innocence, naive parents, but they can), they can access anything they chose if they bypass the relatively light strictures of the internet. 

(Now, at this point, I feel obliged to point out to any concerned parents or guardians who might be reading that it is entirely possible to put a filter on online pornography to prevent your child accessing it without the need to waste countless man-hours and money imposing a similar filter on a national scale, but seeing as you clearly possess enough intelligence to a) use a computer, b) read basic English and c) make it this far into the blog without once forgetting to breathe properly and passing out, I really, really hope that you knew this already. Similarly, I'd like to assume that you're in possession of enough subsequent intelligence to work out that installing such a filter is only going to lead to your child being forced to masturbate in the local library, or even over the family pet photograph album, and that as a result you may as well not bother. But I suppose this blog should cater to all types). 

Presumably it's out of Cameron's slightly skewed belief that it is impossible for a child to buy adult material in shops that he simultaneously refused to back a ban on topless images in the Sun newspaper. Never mind that the Sun is ostensibly a source of news and not of photographs of nude women possessing incongrously considered opinions on current events, and which has no age limit preventing minors from buying it; clearly redtube is the sole villain of the peace. Those who believe Cameron to far too pliant to the Murdoch whip can believe what they want, but its obvious to the rest of us that Moral-Indigancy Man, the UK's formost pink and polished superhero, has the best interests of the kiddies at heart. 

Seeing as the aforementioned adhesive baby has entered the world in the time that it's taken me to write this blog, it's entirely possible that my (hopefully) evident dismay at these regulations will be buried under a ream of my facebook friends's witty suggestions for the name, but if you have managed to read it, you can do your bit by signing this e-petition to get the measures revoked. In the mean time, I'm off to try and persuade my mother that my wanting us to opt-in to being allowed to access pornographic material is a form of political protest, and not just because I can't think of any other way to spend my Tuesday afternoons. And also that I'll start looking for jobs tomorrow.

The Lost Years

Let me tell you about Shakespeare. In 1585, Shakespeare is somewhat fucked. Not yet twenty one, he finds himself the husband of a woman eight years his senior and the father of three children, with little money and resources to speak of, seemingly destined to carry on in the family trade of glove-making and live out his days as yet another provincial tradesman and domestic provider. Which is not to say that such a life is a particularly tragic one; but, see, Shakespeare doesn't want to be a glove-maker. He wants to write plays. So the very fact that, in 1592, we find him living in London having established himself as a young playwright of some repute seems, in light of his situation seven years prior, something of a miracle.

How Shakespeare achieved this trick – how he managed to shrug off the strictures of a steady career and his obligations as head of a household to emerge, unencumbered, as a major player on London’s theatrical scene – is a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. It’s puzzling to me even now. How did he convince his wife and kids? Did he call a family meeting (possibly in one of those obscure Elizabethan rooms they don’t have any more, like the buttery or the dysentery closet) and declare his intention to abandon them?

“Well, err, so, I know the apprenticeship has been coming along nicely, and we’re just about able to make ends meet as it is, but, you see, I’ve been having a think about it, and I’ve decided the best thing for all of us is if I move down to London for a while and do my acting and writing and things. What do we all think?”

“Would we come too Dad?”

“Umm, well, no actually, I think it would be best if you all stayed up here in Stratford, and I went down and then sent you back money when I earned any. Of course, I can’t exactly say when that will be, so I suppose you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best in the meantime.”

“But Will dear, do you really think you’ll make enough to support the whole family?”

“Oh, I would imagine so. Besides, Hamnet’s clearly not going to last much longer, so we shan’t have to set aside much for him. Look at him. He’s all peaky.”

There are no extant documents from the period that account for Shakespeare’s situation or whereabouts in the years between 1585 and 1592, and thus these years are commonly referred to as ‘the lost years’. They have been the subject of considerable academic study and speculation, and are, at the moment, a major source of fascination for me personally since, being not yet twenty one and similarly living in the vain hope of moving to London and becoming a playwright, I’m desperate to know how the jammy bastard pulled it off.

True, Shakespeare was faced with several hurdles that I’m lucky enough to have avoided. I don’t have the wife and kids to worry about, and no matter how pessimistic you might chose to be about Britain’s transport system, it’s plainly much quicker and easier to make it down south via Virgin Pendolino that it is on the back of, say, a malnourished mare (even if the latter might offer you more legroom. Ho ho ho). Still, Shakespeare never had to endure twenty plus years of cultural conditioning in concepts such as ‘employability’ and ‘financial security’, and so the decision to up sticks and leave a steady job behind to try to make a living scribbling poetry was probably more tenable than it seems today. Put it this way; if getting stabbed to death in a tavern brawl or developing plague are realistic, day-to-day concerns, you probably don’t feel as much need to worry about whether you’ve got enough names on your CV for ‘Plan B’.

But as inconceivable as Shakespeare’s career trajectory seems to modern eyes, it gives me hope to think that, as he reached a position of some security, and from which the remainder of his progression through life seemed mapped and certain, he instead chose to become perhaps the least typical human being in British history. I find comfort in the notion that, as he stood at his workbench practising how to thread a welt through the seam of a fourchette, with the clamour of his wife and children ringing in his ears, his mind was not fixated on the burden of responsibility he shouldered, or on the many long identical years of labour he faced, but instead was bristling with ideas and poetic constructions; ‘a rose by any other name’, ‘to be or not to be’, all that jazz.

In this spirit, having left the prolonged gestation period more commonly known as higher education, I’ve decided to dub the forthcoming years of my existence ‘the lost years’. Partly to render any seeming setbacks or disappointments as somehow excusable, or even beneficial (‘Hey, it doesn’t matter that I’m twenty five and living in my parent’s basement, I’m in my lost years), and partly to convince/delude myself that, in all my aimlessness, I’m heading towards some eventual goal. Whatever it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to give the blog a bit of a reboot, and will hopefully be updating it much more frequently than it has been in the past few months. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing, keep an eye out.

And if you fancy supporting me in my lost years, you could do a lot worse than to come and see the Edinburgh fringe show I’ve written (https://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/gabe-day), on from the 2^nd to the 17^th of August, which promises to be, at the very least, charmingly shambolic. Failing that, a ticket to Euston on a Virgin Pendolino would suit me just fine. 

Ziggy Snowflake and the Glider from (A)Far

It's Christmas Eve, and since I've been neglecting you of late, and in lieu of a real gift or indeed anything of much actual substance to say, here's an anecdote about my day's listless internet surfing. Hey, notice how no one calls it 'surfing' anymore? It's probably because the sense of fun has worn off. Using the internet at the close of 2012 feels more like slowly drowning. By this point I can almost hear the rattle of water in my lungs.

But anyway, I'm here to talk about The Snowman, the classic Christmas family cartoon and staple of the late December TV schedule for the past thirty years. You might have heard that tonight a sequel is being shown on Channel 4, The Snowman and the Snowdog, which judging from the title promises to be an 'out-there' conceptual re-imagining of truly pedestrian proportions. I was reading one of those typically hand-wringing articles about it on the Guardian website when I discovered that The Snowman was once introduced in a short video opening by a peroxided David Bowie dressed in beige chinos and a pastel sweater. AND that the whole thing was available on YouTube. Christmas, for me at least, had clearly come early this year.

We see David pottering around a darkened attic, wistfully resting on an old rocking-horse and reminiscing about his childhood. He speaks about this using the pronoun 'we', suggesting either that a) he still lives with his parents, or b) he's suffering from some form of split personality disorder, both of which would go some way to explaining the beige chinos and paisley sweater. Then he pulls a Snowman-decorated scarf from a drawer and tells us he was given it by 'a real snowman', and we cut to the beginning of the cartoon. The implication is that the child in it grows up to be David Bowie, which is a brilliant idea. It lends what has previously seemed a simple tale about childish wonder and the loss of innocence a new and nutty layer of meaning; as he clutches the sodden scarf and hat of his deceased friend at the cartoon's close, is he already dreaming up the piano riff for Ashes to Ashes? Is Starman, his hymn to an elusive, mind-blowing celestial figure who refuses to visit him, simply a veiled reference to another magical 'man' he once knew?  It's a psychoanalytical goldmine.

What was even more satisfying than then video. however, was reading the YouTube comments (always a fertile breeding ground for genius insight) and stumbling across this one, by  user TheRealVeterans.

At first this struck me as an odd observation. Seeing as the Snowman never speaks, it seems difficult to determine what his attitudes might be - for all we know he could be mentally reciting his favourite passages of Mein Kampf or chuckling at the memory of old road safety videos in which toddlers are catapulted through windshields as he gallivants around in the snow. Thus the only clue we have to his attitudes come from his actions - which, as I don't need to remind you, mainly involve abducting a small child and flying him to Lapland in clothing patently unsuited to the freezing conditions. Indeed, at one point the Snowman flies showily low over a Mosque, as if to say 'Look at the broken state of the nation we're escaping', before whisking him off to a gathering attended exclusively by giant white men for a spot of ritualistic chanting and dancing. None of which is suggestive of a particularly tolerant, enlightened mind. 

And as a final marker of his sheer callousness, the child having developed an evident emotional attachment to him, the Snowman chooses to melt in his back garden, leaving the poor kid to wake up on Christmas morning to the sight of his watery corpse. Yes, I know that the coming daylight meant that he was doomed to die, but if we acknowledge that this same Snowman only moments before waving goodbye to the boy had the power to fucking fly, you'd think he'd have done the decent thing and nipped off to behind a bush before dissolving into a messy pile of coal and knitwear. It's the equivalent of an elderly relative who, upon sensing the end is near, chooses not to go quietly but curl up underneath the Christmas Tree so that the kids come down not to presents but to the sight of Grandma's dead, bloated face. It rather puts a crimp in the festive spirit.

The video opening only reveals the extent of the psychological damaged cause; the boy has grown up to be weird, lilting manchild, pottering around an attic, fondling childhood heirlooms and talking to no one. It only takes one night with the Snowman, the cartoon suggests, to turn you forever into a living Ken doll. I can't help thinking that more people possessing the Snowman's attitudes can only make for a more disturbing, pastel-shaded world.

But then I realised - this isn't any old freak in an attic and jumper, it's David Bowie; possibly the greatest and most innovative British solo artist in the history of popular music. Seen in this light, it all begins to make sense; it isn't hard to see how the attentions of a child-abducting, racist and sadomasochistic Snowman might lead to you wanting to wear make-up and write The Laughing Gnome, and my golly isn't the world better off for it. What with today's charts being as bland and mass-produced as they are, we could probably do with a couple more snowmen to liven things up. Just imagine how much more exciting Ed Sheeran might sound if he'd had to face a bit more dismembered slush as he was growing up. So hear hear, I say to the TheRealVeterans's diagnosis. Bring on the frozen kid-snatchers. The rebirth of pop starts here.

Bard Times

After a summer in which I became a patriot, didn't get a job, barely wrote anything and discovered that braiding the hair around my gooch and tugging it until my eyes water is a painful but surprisingly pleasant way to spend a Sunday, I've headed back to Uni. Which of course means facing all of the holiday reading I so merrily consigned to the bottom of a drawer in late June. This summer's serving was a decidedly hearty selection of the complete works of Shakespeare and the American author Philip Roth. My Uni has a endearing quirk of offering handy 3-hour 'tests' at the end of every holiday as a way of making sure you're been sacrificing your free time with the required aplomb, which means I'm facing a morning's grilling of my Bard knowledge at the end of this week.

Now, contrary to form, I actually did do a small bit of reading over the summer; yet faced with a choice between the works of the most revered and established writer in English history, and those known mostly for their portraits of desperate men wanking themselves to death, it may come as little surprise that my efforts skewed mostly towards the latter option. So, as a way of testing how hot I currently am on Stratford's greatest son, and finding out the areas I need to bone up on, whilst at the same time perhaps providing you readers with a little enlightenment along the way, I present to you everything I currently know about the 38 plays of Shakespeare. Or maybe it's 39. We're off to a cracking start.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Four young people - two lovers, a suitor, and a suitor of the suitor - run off into the forest. Elsewhere a bunch of amateur dramatists are rehearsing a play. Fairies turn up. Everyone keeps falling asleep. One of the actors gets his head turned into a donkey's and back again. All the painful unrequited longing is cured with magic fairy dust, and everyone returns home and watches the play. There's a bit of innuendo with a wall. It's quite good.

All's Well That End's Well

Helen miraculously cures a the King of France but her chosen husband runs away to war to avoid her. He attempts to court the virtuous, virginal Diana (named after the goddess of virginity; it's that subtle) but Helen swaps beds with her in the dark and he's forced to marry her. This isn't weird or awful at all. The title is a beautifully bleak ironic joke.

Anthony and Cleopatra

A roman general spends all his time shagging some Egyptian floozy. She turns out to be a terrible fighter and they both commit suicide. There's some more innuedo with a fig, because they totally look like ladybits when they're cut open. I know this because I've had intimate experience of both. The seeds are the tastiest bit.

As You Like It

Features cross-dressing, another forest, and a lion. As well as the 'All The World's A Stage' speech, which you'll find embossed on the pencil-cases of every Japanese tourist ever. (Aporogies).

Coriolanus

Long, apparently. Has a lot of war. They did a film recently with Voldemort and the bloke from 300, go see that.

Cymbeline

A mash-up of every Shakespeare plot device ever. Despite that, it isn't great, though my mate Sam reminded me it does have one character planning to shag a princess on top of her decapitated husband, so maybe it's worth a re-read.

Hamlet

One of the obscure ones. Lol jk, it's the greatest work ever written in the English Language. Hamlet has to avenge his father's death by killing his uncle. He decides to put this off by going a bit bonkers, taunting his mum, killing and old man and driving his girlfriend to commit suicide, which all seems a bit counter-productive. Generally I find RedTube a much better way to procrastinate. His wi-fi must have been down.

Henry IV Part 1 

Prince Harry and his mate Falstaff spend their time drinking and sleeping around London. The king meanwhile, faces a rebellion by Hotspur, some jacked up little white-bread squit. The King tells his son he's disappointed him; the Prince immediately reforms, kills Hotspur, and saves the day. Falstaff gets to galavant around being a sot in a seemingly entirely separate play. It's brilliant. There's even a bit where they make fun of the Welsh.

Henry IV Part 2

The King faces another rebellion. Prince Harry grows up some more. Falstaff does more whoring and weedling. The King dies and Harry is crowned. Ends on a rather sour note when the English make a fake truce with the rebelling lords then have them executed, and Falstaff is permanently exiled from the court and thrown in prison, so is one of the 'darker' sequels. A bit like The Empire Strikes Back. 

Henry V

Essentially a further sequel. King Henry fights the french. Lots of rousing speeches, no Falstaff. I've not read it yet, but I'm pretty sure there's no Ewoks.

King Henry VI Part 1

King Henry VI Part 2

King Henry VI Part 3

I've no clue. Supposedly the first things Shakespeare wrote. Universally acknowledged to be pretty dismal. I'll probably end up reading them just to score some brownie points with the tutors however, because I lick arsehole like nobody's business.

King Henry VIII

Given that this play's subject is a king who had two of his wives beheaded and needed a system of pulleys to get out of bed, you'd hope it was a nice juicy barnstormer. Apparently not; since King James was a relative, Shakespeare was duty bound to portray him in a reverently bland light. But maybe it was a bigger hit with Jacobean audiences; cannons fired at its first performance led to the Globe Theatre burning down, so you might say it really set the house on fire! I'll stop now.

Julius Caesar

Caesar is popular but undemocratic. He's killed by Brutus and Cassius, but the popular Mark Anthony rouses the public against the conspirators and they are eventually killed. I've not read this one either, and it's supposed to be one of the stone-cold classics. I refuse to listen to your theoretically mentally judging me. Lalalalala.

King John 

King John is king despite his nephew Arthur having a stronger claim. He's at war with France, and they are both vying for the loyalty of a town. They come to a truce, which then ends; the Pope gets involved; the King orders Arthur to be executed; he takes it back; Arthur falls off a wall to his death anyway; the King is deposed. Oh, and a character called Philip the Bastard gets all portentous about things. Famously rubbish, I struggled through it in August when I could have been off enjoying myself, and now find I can't remember any of it except Arthur's death and Philip thanking his mother for shagging King Richard behind her husbands back. Fuck. I'm really hacked off now.

King Lear

King Lear divides his kingdom to his daughters corresponding to their professions of love for him; instead of playing along Cordelia decides to make a sarky point and ends up losing her stake, driving the King mad, plunging Britain into civil war and getting herself killed. I maintain she's the real villain of the piece. Nobody likes a smart arse. (Also as lots of good bits where Lear yells at his daughters and wishes they were infertile. A good 'un).

Love's Labour's Lost

Three male academics swear off women to concentrate on work; women turn up, breezy comedy ensues. Again, I bloody read this one and can't remember it at all. Has a 'lost' sequel. I hope they don't find it.

Macbeth

Scotland! Witches! Murder! What more do you want? Read it in year 9. The Roman Polanski version features the most depressing collection of naked breasts you've ever seen; they look like empty, fleshy socks.

Measure for Measure

No clue. One of the lesser comedies. Coincidentally, Measure for Measure is the name of a Shakespearean drinking game I've just invented, whereby two players attempt to match their drinks 'measure for measure' whilst not reading any Shakespeare. I'm planning on playing it every night for the rest of the year.

Much Ado About Nothing

Beatrice and Benedick wittily insult each-other until they're tricked into realising their mutual love for one another. Meanwhile, Claudio is tricked by Don John into believing his fiance Hero is unfaithful, and humiliates her at the alter. A priest comes up with a plan to pretend she's died that no one thinks is weird; Claudio forgives her, and everyone gets married. Actually has some relatively enlightened sexual politics for a change. It's probably my favourite.

Othello

Iago, resenting his master the moor Othello, convinces him his wife is being unfaithful. Othello fumes for a while and then suffocates her. Finding out the truth, he kills himself. Proof that inter-racial marriages don't work sexual jealousy is a destructive force.

Pericles

Of contentious authorship. Uhh. I've got nothing else.

Richard II

A prequel to the Henry IV's and V. Richard II is a vain, manipulative king. He's challenged and killed by Henry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV. A bit sincere.

Richard III

Richard, Earl of Gloucester, resentful of his physical deformity and ugliness, sets about seizing the British crown through a process of seduction, manipulation and murder. He marries the wife of the bloke he killed and has the two Princes murdered in the Tower of London (depicted as intelligent and willful youths, they come across as such insufferably smug little gits you'll want to smother them to death yourself). Despised as king, he's rendered horseless and dead in the battle of Bosworth Field by the future King Henry VII. A very blackly comic play. Richard's a wonderfully irredeemable git.  But LONG.

Romeo and Juliet

Two star-cross'd lovers from warring families marry and consummate in secret, before familial in-fighting drives them to another hastily contrived Priest-sanctioned pretend death plot that ends up with them both committing suicide. It's pretty wonderful. Fun fact; I played Friar Lawrence in a school production of this play that had a 'mods and rockers' theme. I got to smoke shisha on stage. It was probably the peak of my entire life.

The Comedy of Errors

Two sets of identical twins are separated at birth by a storm and then spend the rest of the play being mistaken for one another. An early, trashy one, but pretty funny. Don't let the long fucking bit of exposition at the start put you off.

The Merchant of Venice

Bassanio wins a Portia's hand in marriage in a game of 16th century Venetian Deal or No Deal and the merchant Antonio rashly borrows money from the Jewish moneylender Shylock on the promise of a pound of flesh if he can't pay it back on time. He can't; the case goes to court; Antonio is defended by a mysterious lawyer delivering a speech on the quality of mercy and some linguistic wheedling; Shylock is treated very unmercifully at the end. A pretty miserable one, despite being a comedy. Little known fact; Woody Allen once played Shylock in his own re-written version of the play. His 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Are you kidding? The only thing a Jew doesn't have is full golf-club privileges' speech is a must see.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff's back! Turning up in present day England for some reason, he plans to marry two Mistress's, who find out and play tricks on him. Lacks the weighty sullenness of the Henry IV plays for Falstaff to play against, but fun enough.

The Taming of the Shrew

Kate is a tempetuous, ill-mannered, difficult (n.b. read 'opinionated') woman who's refusal to marry prevents her hotter sister from doing so. All those with the hots for the sister employ Petruchio as wingman, who starves and imprisons Kate until her will breaks and she can make a speech bidding women to be servile to their husbands. If you can look past the misogyny it's actually pretty funny. But of course some people maintain it's all supposed to be ironic since the main plot is actually being performed for a drunken, foolish tramp. Meta! And bollocks.

The Tempest

A storm washes a bunch of people up on an island where the magician Prospero and his daugher live. The son of the captain falls in love with the daugher; the captain searches for his son, and two fools plot with Caliban to overthrow Prospero. More magic ensues everything turns out well, and Prospero forgoes his magic. A very late Shakespeare play. Saw a very nice out-door production at the beginning of the summer. Hangs together very well.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Unread. Presumably two gentleman from Verona are involved somehow. It's a comedy, so there'll probably be some cross dressing at some point to keep you occupied.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Ditto. Presumably two...uhh...I literally can't be fucked. Lets move on.

The Winter's Tale

Ditto. Has a bit where the statue of the heroine, who is presumed dead, comes to life. You'd have more fun throwing your coppers at a living statue and watching him desperately grub around for them in the gutter. I know I would.

Timon of Athens

Ditto. Often performed in tandem with Pumba of Crete. I'm trying my best here.

Titus Andronicus

Ditto. Not to be confused with Titus Androgynous, which deals with the sexual identity crisis of an accomplished Sunderland defender. WHEN WILL THIS END?

Troilus and Cressida

Ditto. It's based off Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, which I read last year, so I should be fine, right guys?

Twelfth Night

Two twins wash up on an another fucking island after another fucking storm. One dresses up as a boy once a-fucking-gain and acts as go between between a duke and a widow. She falls for the former and is fallen for by the latter. Meanwhile the despised pen-pusher Malvolio is tricked into thinking his mistress loves him and should dress in yellow stockings. This sub-plot is better than the rest of it, which is fairly hum-drum. Stephen Fry's in it at the moment, go see it! Actually, go see QI instead. They put that on iPlayer.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand that's all folks! Apart from the poetry, which I'm ignoring 'cause poems are for gays. But otherwise I've not done too bad, thought clearly I need to bone up on the T's. Do a bit of a 'T-bone', you might say. Oh, leave me alone. I just summarised Shakespeare, motherfuckers. What did you do today? Read some tosspot's blog. Exactly.

Lie Back And Think Of England

Ladies and gentlemen, I come today before you a changed man. Just two weeks ago I was your average, bog-standard prematurely-jaded middle-class layabout literature student. The ensuing fortnight has seen me utterly transformed; broken down beyond all recognition and built up again, piece by piece, into the unfathomable. As I sit, naked save for a Union flag draped around my shoulders, Mo Farah's name carved into my chest with a dirty biro, typing with one hand and spanking myself off over a photo-shopped image of Churchill fucking a double-decker bus with the other, I can proudly declare myself as that which I have hitherto always denounced. I am a British patriot.

Speaking of wankers who dress in the Union flag, Morrissey was kind enough to offer his ever-trenchant views on all the trumpeting that has taken place during the games. Accusing the flag wavers of "blustering jingoism" and asserting that "the spirit of 1939 Germany now pervades throughout media-brand Britain", he further cemented his likely candidacy for the country's worst theoretical party guest ever. At once a shrill cod-revolutionary and a shuddering racist, the only possible people who'd endure him in an intimate setting would be hardcore Morrissey fans, meaning that you'd have to invite an extra quotient of insufferable people just so things would proceed smoothly. Plus he'd complain about the cocktail sausages. The dick.

But it did get me thinking. Whilst I hope I've never voiced anything nearly as insensitive or idiotic, i've certainly felt versions of it. There isn't anything inherently wrong with love for one's country, but it has always seemed to me to have something 'off' about it, a whiff of curdled something hidden under the guise of zeal and passion. Obviously it's been used for centuries to make people to horrible things, or to justify sending them to pointless deaths, but even low-level affection has previously seemed a little untenable. Patriotism seemed like owning a pair of incontinency pants; you might justify having them, but you'll always go around giving off a faint whiff of urine. 

I've written before about how the British don't do patriotism very well. That was during the Royal Wedding, when we banded together as a nation to sort-of celebrate the union of two well-meaning but rather bland privileged people. Around a year later we had a jubilee, about which I felt much the same. This was the greatness of our nation personified; a sour-faced old pensioner being leisurely pursued by bunch of 'zany' monarchists in boats. Even the BBC couldn't seem to muster much enthusiasm; placing responsibility for presenting this moment to the country in the hands of Fearne Cotton, who always puts me in mind of a victim of child sex abuse desperately corroding the memories from her brain by chanting happy, meaningless phrases like 'Wicked!' and 'Mental!'

From here on in, we only had less to crow about. We crashed out of the Euro's on penalties, and reduced a man to tears through our own misguided expectations of him at Wimbledon. Elsewhere, little was changing; we were still ruled over by uncaring toffs, whose only chance of defeat lay with an overgrown sixth-former who looks like he's never touched a breast in his life. Our banks were run by shits. Our newspapers were run by shits. And all of them went to shit parties and came up with ways to spray more shit on everything. Britain was a diseased shambling mess, suited only to quietly committing suicide by shooting itself in the Scotland. 

And then the Olympics came. And suddenly we were celebrating things we could actually be proud of. Not a genetically-deficient dynasty but actual people from proper places who'd actually done real tangible things to get them where they were. And who could do things better than anyone else on the planet. And the music was great, and the experts and spectators were great, and this time the BBC wheeled out Clare Balding, who's so robust she probably eats child sex offenders for breakfast. And in just two weeks, a nation found its feet, and its reason to be.

So I'll hope you'll join me in performing a final act of mental celebration as you sink down into your beery, post closing-ceremony slumbers this evening. Lie back and think of England.

19

Just over seven years ago, in our after lunch registration, our form teacher announced that London had won it's Olympic bid and would be hosting the games in the summer of 2012. I found the news only marginally less exciting that I found it up until my epiphanic viewing of Danny Boyle's opening ceremony (see previous) but what did fascinate me was thinking about the date itself. 2012? I'd be...two years into University (being a precocious little sod I'd already assumed University would be an inevitability). I'd be a hip and happening semi-adult, able to drink and drive and put my penis inside women with reckless abandon (though not, I reasoned, at the same time, even if the image of myself perishing in a car accident clutching a whiskey bottle with a screaming hooker on my lap did have a certain poetic appeal).

And now 2012 is here - and in only a few hours time, I'm turning twenty. Sitting in registration, dreaming up morbidly awesome car-crashes, I was twelve. The entirety of my teenage existence lies sandwiched somewhere between these moments - every drink I've had, every woman I've failed to cop off with, every stomach-full of half-digested gunk I've ejected into a friend's garden hedge is about to be filed away in the defunct 'teenaged' folder of my memory, consigned to the foggy ruins of time. A bit like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones film.

At these junctures, it's customary (for me at least) to look back, take stock and think 'did I get what I wanted? Did I succeed?' But it's hard to quantify what succeeding as a teenager might look like. At twelve, I'm sure I had no idea. Beyond a few treasured goals such as 'grow a moustache' and 'touch a breast' I had no wider scheme in mind, no sense of a bar I was reaching for. So I don't need to feel guilty about not achieving some standard I'd set myself.

Yet if there was something I'd thought I would have gained, it was a sense of having arrived. I felt sure that at some point during the next seven years I'd have worked out that special trick it takes to really 'do' life, and I wouldn't have to think about living; it would come naturally. But now I'm almost twenty, I can confidently attest that there has been no point in which I thought life was getting easier. It's fucking difficult, man. I still don't even know what trousers we're supposed to wear.

In Martin Amis's novel The Rachel Papers, the main character, Charles Highway, creates the narrative of his life on the eve of his twentieth birthday from diaries and journals. What he ends up with is a rather limp story of a past love affair, along with an awful lot of himself being a pretentious, filthy-minded little arse. But maybe this is the point. I can't say I've succeeded at anything in particular, but I've fulfilled a lot of the teenage stereotypes. I've stormed upstairs and slammed doors, worn the same pants for weeks at a time, lusted aimlessly, written tiresomely wank teenage poetry, and generally pratted about. Holden Caulfield would be proud of me. Maybe it's doing these things that point of the whole venture.

And If I may be permitted a pinch of earnestness on the edge of my innocence, maybe it's not about 'arriving' during your teenage years, but all the ways in which you don't. And please kill me now, because that is the most awful thing I've ever written. Dear God. I'm am sorry x x x

Daft Punk, Asterix and Croissants

After watching almost four hours of Olympic opening ceremony last night I've woken up with one abiding impression; fuck other nations. No, seriously, fuck them. What other nation on Earth can claim to come even vaguely close to the sheer ragtag madcap spangled brilliance of the British Isles? France? Fuck off. Go sit in the corner with an onion or something. No, don't get up til I say so. Don't even fucking look round. I'm not kidding.

I haven't written anything on the blog for an embarrassingly long while, and one of the reasons for this was apathy. Sure, I'd spent a good few dozen posts honing and establishing a serenely satirical, comedically ranting style. I had the Platt-blog framework down to pat. I'd take a topic, get a bit angry about it, make a few jokes, clangingly drop in a masturbation metaphor to please the hardcore fans, and the job was done. Except after a while, I ended up looking at things and thinking, you know, what's the point? Why bother?

Over the last few weeks I've tried desperately to think of something to say about the Olympics that's worth people taking a two minute detour from their Facebook feeds to read, and I just couldn't. Too corporate and shonkey to be praised, too earnest and genuinely heartfelt to be derided, there was no side to come down on. It was like anticipating a nativity performance involving an infant relative; it will no doubt be adorable, and he's put too much into it for you not be be proud of him, but he can't sing for shit and even under his shepherd's robe you can still see the gentle bulge of his budding man-tits. I had no angle to take.

And then I watched the ceremony. And it was amazing. It was inspiring. And it shook me to the core because it did what nothing about the preparation thus far has been able to do; remind us that, hey, wait a minute, we're fucking Britain.

Amongst all the run-up furore - the G4S debacle, the unsold stadium, the thousands of spare football tickets - and all the godawful marketing bollocks, it was hard to shake the infamously pessimistic self-image we've had of ourselves of late. Welcome to Britain, we seemed to be saying; our economy's shit, we're run by dickheads, and everything we do feels a bit second-rate, but don't be too mean about us and we'll promise to stop Phil Collins from emigrating again.

What I loved about the ceremony was that it started out predictably - a large spectacle show that illustrated a rather earnest aspect of our national history and ended up just being a series of raised fingers to the rest of the world. It's as if Danny Boyle did the whole countryside/industrial revolution transformation bit, looked around, saw the pleasant but not overtly astounded faces of the other nations and just wait; well, you know what, fuck it. We've got James Bond. James fucking Bond. And the Queen. In a helicopter. Parachuting. Yeah, fuck you. And you know what else? Free healthcare. That right, free motherfucking healthcare. And Voldemort. Fighting Mary Poppins. Fucking eat it, you bastards! And look! We've got Mr. Bean! And the Rolling Stones! And the Sex Pistols! And Alex Turner! And a Beatle! In the flesh! Are you watching France?!! Are you paying attention. Drink us in, you mothers! Drink, you inferior people of the world, you vermin, you slugs, drink in the might of this great nation! Kneel before us, maggots, kneel before us and DRINK!!!


What made it all the better was the knowledge that, had France been made the hosts in our place, they'd have fucked it up. They'd have got the Cirque de Soleil in, and some teenager with a piano, and a bunch of infants in wigs singing about diplomacy, and it would have been wank. You want to have a killer opening ceremony for the future, France. I've got your best bet right here. Daft Punk, Asterix and Croissants. On a motorcycle. In berets. You'd be set.