Oh Yeah

We got burgled.

This house is never empty. Usually both myself and Dave The Lodger are here. If I’m out, he’s at home. Vice versa. That actually pisses me off at times as it seems that I’m the only one who ever leaves the house and a lot of the time I leave the house purely to get away from the constant presence of Dave The Lodger, and that’s not the kind of feeling a man should have about his own home, but there it is.

Whatever: this one Sunday I had a great-niece’s birthday party to go to because I am a Great Uncle, and Dave was off out to see his mate who lives somewhere a bit north of here. So the house was empty. Dave left around half one. I left around half three. Doors and windows locked. Cat asleep on the upstairs landing.

I came home around eight. Noticed a light on upstairs, thought ‘Dave’s home, that’s his bedroom light’. Had a slight doubt in that the light was obviously coming from his open bedroom door, which is usually a closed bedroom door. But the general feel was that Dave was home.

I put my key in the lock and felt it slide round in the double-lock way rather than the slight resistance of the tumblers, and wondered how he’d managed to lock himself in. Walked through the door, thought it felt colder than it should; called up to say hello, no response: bingo. Through the living room, see the back door wide open. Oh fuck.

My first thought was “where’s the cat?”  Second thought: “where’s my laptop?” Dashed upstairs to where the laptop is kept when not being used, saw it still sitting in its place. On the way, took in fact that Dave’s bedroom door was open, the light was on, and things were strewn all over the place.

In my room, a couple of draws had been opened, a box that had been on top of the wardrobe was now on the carpet as were a couple of mugs that had been on a low shelf and full of loose change. That was all, as far as I could see, the lightbulb having chosen just that moment to go ping.

Called Dave, got him to cut short his afternoon out so he could see what was missing from his room. Called the police. Dave got there first, had a look around, couldn’t see anything missing. I sized up the damage to the back door: the lock had been crowbarred and the frame around it had been smashed, the strike plate lay bent on the floor. Just then the police arrived two officers, neither of them over thirteen years old -  did the police thing, gave a reference number and left.

So what had been taken? Sod all. My father’s pocket watch, which grieves me more than I can say. And a small black plastic briefcase with a Batman symbol on the side, which contained some of Dave’s old music demos from when he played bass in a few bands. Demos which were on old-fashioned tape cassettes.

Not touched: four laptops, some external hard drives, a bunch of cash, some jewellery.

Which makes me question the sanity of burglars round our way. They’re obviously kids or junkies looking for something to turn into cash on the quick, but a bunch of cassettes? That’s going to make it worthwhile, isn’t it?

I got the door fixed and a new lock fitted, at a cost low enough to make it not worth claiming on the insurance without it bumping up the premium so far that the whole thing costs more in the long run that the value of the items taken.

And, of course, the revenge plan has been put in place. My former brother-in-law, father of my sister’s children, was a bit of a bad lad in his younger days. Reformed now, but he’s done plenty of time and he’s still both pretty handy and in touch with some of his old spars. Word went round among his community within two hours of the break-in that anybody with even a sniff of a suspicion about them would regret their actions.

Not that they didn’t do the same thing to a house not a hundred yards away, a few days later.

And finally, this very morning, I got out of the bath and decided to trim my finger and toenails. Reached for the spot where there usually sits a small black leather-cased manicure set that I’ve had for about ten years. Gone.

So; a gang of idiots with a taste for bad 1980s poodle rock and immaculate fingernails. That’s our perps.

As Shaw Taylor used to say about oranges: keep ‘em peeled.

We Have No Problem

 So anyway, Whitney Houston died.

Whereas any man’s death diminishes me, is anybody really surprised? There hadn’t been a good news story about her since she married the wife-beater, and in the last fifteen years or so, which she’d obviously spent on the sauce or on the powder, the most memorable thing about her was that rumour about Bobby Brown having to manually excavate compacted faeces from her bowel.

It’s a shame, because at her height she was inarguably beautiful and in possession of a stunning voice. And it’s a shame because her stunning voice was wasted, not only on manufactured pop music – she would have been astonishing on an unadorned gospel album, say, and if you don’t believe me Google ‘Whitney Houston Isolated Vocal’ – but also on the ridiculous melismae, the inability to actually sing a note without running up and down the scale and stretching it out way beyond its artistic boundary, that afflicted her as badly as it does Mariah Carey (somebody else with the potential to be an astonishing singer if only she’d just, y’know, sing).

Still, look on the bright side. Houston’s biggest hit was “I Will Always Love You”, which was written by Dolly Parton, who recorded the original, simple, delicate and heartfelt version, and who will doubtless soon be in line for a nice little windfall in royalties.

And, keeping it closer to home, that song was on the soundtrack to the film ‘The Bodyguard’, which will no doubt sell  by the boatload in the next couple of months. Also on that soundtrack: a version by Curtis Stigers of ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love And Understanding?’, written by England’s Glory, Nick Lowe. Nick says that when the film was first released and the soundtrack started selling in giant heaps, somebody reversed a truckful of cash up to his house and told him there’d be another one tomorrow, and that’s what let him record the kind of albums he does, albums like ‘The Convincer’ and 'At My Age’ and ‘The Old Magic’, albums full of intimate, personal songs about ageing and failure and proper long-lasting love, songs full of genuine emotion in a world of Ndubz and Jedward.

There should be another truckload backing up to Nick’s house soon.

Cheers, Whitney. 

Sumptuous Tales Of Flagellation

The other night I had a dream. In the dream I was the chauffeur of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, driving her around in a dirty great black Bentley.

I wasn’t very good at it. For a start I kept looking over my shoulder and asking Her Majesty if she was doing alright in the back there, but she took that rather well, smiled, made a bit of conversation about the corgis. Then I lost my way around Hyde Park Corner and went down Oxford Street the wrong way, but that was okay because, well, I had The Queen in the back and a flag on my bonnet so really, I could go where I wanted, couldn’t I?

Then we ended up somewhere around Camden, can’t tell you where, got no idea, Gospel Oak probably. I was on a double decker that get lost around that way once, you ever seen a night bus full of pissheads come up against a low railway bridge and have to do a three-point turn in a sidestreet?

The Queen was alright about it, she got off her seat and came and sat right behind me, leant over the passenger seat and pointed the way she thought we should be heading, so that’s where we went, but we ended up in a cul-de-sac and it wasn’t wide enough to do a three-point, you’ve seen how big those Bentleys are that she rides around in and this one had all the armour-plating on it as well so it was a bugger to manoeuvre. I said to her, ‘Ma’am, I can’t turn her round in this space, I’m going to have to reverse her up and out. That alright with you?’ She said it was, but she was going to phone the Palace and get them to put Phil’s warm milk on.

So that’s how it ended up, me twisted round in the driver’s seat, reversing this big old Bentley, trying not to scrape the paintwork; The Queen looking out of the back window telling me when I was going off the straight.

When we got back to the Palace, she said “Well that was a laugh” and went in.

She had her own key and everything. 

...Then I'm a banana

Two stories caught my eye this week, both concerned with sentencing somebody found guilty of a crime. First, this: in which a psychology lecturer was sent to prison for three months for contempt of court. She’d been on jury duty, had looked up some details regarding the defendant on Google, and shared those with other jurors. Somebody told the judge, and she ended up in jail.

Fair enough: contempt is a serious business. The British legal system is flawed but it’s still the best available, and we have to cleave to the idea that the accused is tried solely on the evidence presented in court. Still, the severity of the sentence in this case leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth. There’s a feeling of examples being made, of a judge seeking a form of revenge for the disturbance caused to his court. It’s good law, but bad justice.

The second story came to my notice a little late, as it concerns a sentence passed a good few weeks ago on a defendant who was found guilty late last summer. The details – and they’re not pretty – are here (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but in its apoplexy it gave the most comprehensive account of the sentencing and the reasoning behind it).

This second story caused concern, not because of any defensive feelings towards children outside of the default concern that any human being with any morals or compassion should feel – I have no children and have no desire to do so, and outside of default compassion I frankly consider the majority of children to be unnecessary nuisances – but because it affected directly my own sensibilities.

I have no time for those who commit crimes of this nature, and am certainly not about to defend paedophilia. Nevertheless, the intense anger I felt on reading this story came as a surprise to me. I’ve always considered myself to be strongly liberal in matters of sentencing, always seeing a need to get to the root of a criminal’s psychopathy and work on the cause of their actions rather than just banging them up inside for life. I’ve studied the ‘three strikes’ law – though by no means deeply – and seen how it led to greatly increased crime everywhere it was enacted. I’m a Guardian reader who doesn’t read the Guardian.

The difference in this case is that it directly affected me. I know the man involved. Not in any personal capacity and certainly not in any way involved with his activities. He was a business acquaintance; I’d go so far as to say that although I knew his name, he probably wouldn’t have known mine as I was not the man he directly did business with. At best I’d be a nodding acquaintance within our common circle and an unknown outside of it.

He was known as a slightly strange man, even before the nature of his crime became public: he’d offer a can of beer, with the proviso that he opened it, from the bottom, and that you returned the empty can, undamaged, uncrushed. There was running joke in our business sector that if you needed to point him out to someone who’d not previously met him, you could just tell them to look for the guy in the light blue shirt, as that was what he always, invariably, wore. In fact, if you look at the photo in the report linked above, you’ll see that’s what he wore to court.

We know now that these quirks were the socially acceptable aspect of his terribly deep psychological problems, and again, while I don’t believe anybody could use those problems as a basis to condone or legitimise his actions, they do give us a form of insight into why he committed his crimes. I’d go so far as to say that given his psychology, he found it difficult to see a crime being committed. Bear in mind that although he was found with the country’s largest yet-known collection of pornographic images of children, and although he also made ‘pseudo-images’ of children, there is no evidence that he acted on or even felt any paedophilic impulses. His crime came about not as a result of his sexuality but as an extension of his compulsion to collect.

This is where the liberal side of me would say that we should seek to more fully understand the criminal act, and that prison would be a detrimental influence on any attempt at rehabilitation. The liberal side of me certainly would suggest some form of incarceration, but in an institution where he’d get the help he obviously needs rather than in a prison where he’d be ostracised at best.

But instead, I feel an unpleasant anger with him, a feeling that his sentence was trifling and insulting, that he should have been banged up and made to take his chances as a nonce, a kiddie-fiddler in a harsh environment where his kind would be the lowest of the low, subject to violence and abuse from other prisoners, serving a sentence brought upon him by a justice outside any known to you or I.

Why is this? As much as I dislike considering this, it’s become plain that I felt as angry with him as I did (and do) because he caused personal distress and inconvenience to me. Being informed that a person of your acquaintance is a criminal, especially of this sort, is not a pleasant thing to experience. There’s also the outrage felt that, given a slightly different slant on the reporting of the case, the industry I’m still a part of, which serves an artform that I still love, would have been tarred with the same brush.

There’s also a very strong feeling of betrayal, which I know I’m not alone in feeling; without trivialising the matter, it’s very much a third-act reveal where a trusted lieutenant steps out of the shadows and shows he’s been the leader of the bad guys all along. All of us who knew him, and happily chatted with him about whatever we’d chat about, are shocked at what’s been reported. We wonder if there was a darker aspect to the role he played for us, if his years of organising trade shows had always been a smokescreen or at best a way of facilitating his baser needs. We all stand at these shows and happily check out the female (or male) attendees; what if he was doing the same with the attendee’s children, or worse, the children who occasionally attended unaccompanied?

And lastly, the feeling that brings about the strongest sense of self-revulsion, is this: the initial reporting of this case was a major factor in the decision of the company with which I would attend these trade shows to stop doing so. As a direct result, I lost a small but nonetheless welcome portion of my income. So I am feeling this burning righteousness because of a crime, or because it’s cost me money? I wish I could give you a definite, honest answer. 

Unfortunately, I can’t. 

It's Been A Hard Day's Night

How long has it been?

Too long.

Christmas came, and with it - or just before it - came the worst flu I've known in my life. I just about got through the main meal, picking at the things I'd spent the last three days preparing, then made my excuses and cadged a lift home. Within the hour I was in bed, where I stayed for the next three days.

Since then, I've not felt any need to post here, or any need to do anything else except sit about feeling tired, so it's been in hibernation, on hiatus, until now.

Normal service may be resumed.

Don't hold your breath.

AND REPEAT...

It’s impossible for me to be entirely objective about The Rinse, as its artist is an old and valued friend. We’ve had a brief conversation about the book; now it’s time to take a proper look.

First things first: this is a very good-looking book. I’ll say again that it’s impossible to be entirely objective, but the visuals on the book are quite lovely. Marc Laming (the artist, about whom it’s etc etc) is inking his own pencils and while his previous work, inked by others, wasn’t what you’d call sloppy, it has an added depth here that can only be accounted for by the fact that what you’re seeing is what he wants you to see. There’s no intermediary artist/inker coming between you the reader and him the artist.

This is important in a book like The Rinse, with its cast of characters that could very easily become visually homogenised and lose their individual identities. That this doesn’t happen, even in sequences which are set in dimly-lit rooms, is a credit both to Laming[1] and to the colourist, Darrin Moore (whose parents were probably big fans of Bewitched, judging by his name’s spelling. This is a Good Thing, as the world can never have too many references to Elizabeth Montgomery).

So do I have a problem with this book at all? Yes I do, and that is that The Rinse is a comicbook that reads like a book, and moreover a book that was intended to be denser than the four-issue miniseries format allowed. Gary Phillips, the writer, is an established novelist, has written a graphic novel for Vertigo and, judging from The Rinse, has plenty of experience of plotting and characterisation, neither of which are a negative in this case. Characters have strong individual characteristics and the plot is good and tight.

But the book in its entirety, the story as an whole and the individual scenes between characters, seem to have a slightly uneven air, rushed in places, leisurely in others and at times just plain remiss. It’s fun, for instance, to see the bad guy has a phobia, but we have no idea why and it’s not really brought to our attention until it’s foregrounded in the last part of the story. We see that the two heavies who spent most of the four issues chasing the hero around have an air of Mr Wint and Mr Kidd about them, but given how their particular story ends, it would have been good to see some greater backstory or exploration of why they were working together in the first place, and of what kept them together.

The most obvious fault is that there are great chunks of exposition dropped into the story every so often, and that’s why the overall feel is of a narrative that would have been better serviced with more space to explore backstory, develop characters, and show rather than tell some of those details which are brought out via having a character stand and talk at another one.

Don’t get the wrong idea; this is a very good book indeed. It’s very much suited more to the trade paperback format than to pamphlets/floppies; Phillips has written a long-form story rather than a serial, so no recaps or any of the other standard ‘this-happened-last-issue’ comicbook tropes. In trade it’ll be easier to keep tabs on which character is doing what to which other character – somebody with a fleeting walk-on in issue one plays a major part in issue four, for example, and the casual reader in floppy format may not retain the knowledge of who and what that somebody is.

I’ll say again, as this review may well seem to be accentuating the negatives: I recommend The Rinse highly. I’d have done so without any prior knowledge of Laming. I do so with no prior knowledge of Phillips (though I do now intend to hunt down his novels). It’s a damn good comic, one of the many damn good comics that Boom! Studios are quietly slipping out these days (it stuns me that the two comics I’ve enjoyed most in the last few months have been this and Snarked! – a kids book!). If I was giving marks it’d get 7/10, borderline 8.

And for what it’s worth, I think it’d make a damn good film.

---

[1] It’s remarkably disquieting to refer to someone you know well by their surname. Reminds one of the Raj, don’tcha know. 

It's A Wonderful Life, Possibly

I’m standing at the cooker, watching butter slowly melting. The solids are separating, drifting off into a milky gold puddle in the bottom of the pan. On the worktop there are two white china bowls. One contains dark muscovado sugar, the other equal amounts of golden syrup and black treacle. There are a number of jars set beside them; ground ginger, cinnamon, ground cloves. Bicarbonate of soda, a carton of whole milk, a couple of eggs.

Soon, the butter will be liquid and the muscovado will be added, then the two will be stirred until they combine. Next, the syrup and the treacle, and the warmth from the low heat the pan is on will bring them together into a reflectionless dark pool. Looking down into the pan is like gazing into a well; I’m tempted to toss in a small stone and count the seconds until I hear the splash.

In go the spices, along with a few hillocked teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger, and the bicarb. The milk, with the eggs beaten in, lightens the darkness, bringing it down to a caramel duskiness. I stir it all into a bowl of flour, and scrape every last drop into the paper-lined, thickly-buttered cake tin.

Half an hour later, the kitchen begins to change. It’s warmer, more comforting. The smell of the cake is drifting up and around, filling the kitchen and gently moving out, exploring every room in the house.

It’s then that I realise this hasn’t simply been making a cake. This has been the beginning of Christmas. This is the moment when today stops being just another cold day and instead becomes full of soppy, sentimental tradition. It’s the moment I used to anticipate hopefully when I was young, the moment when the bite in the air isn’t just chill, but is suddenly loaded with the promise of winter; not just Christmas itself but the whole snowy, scarfy, wrapped-up-well and staying in by the fireside joy of this most beautiful of seasons. From today until sometime next March or April, the sky will be blue and breath will be white; the sound of your footsteps will for a time be crunchy and muffled by snow. Everything will be better, just that slight amount more exciting, simply because of the time of year.

I’ve missed this moment. It hasn’t been felt for too long, suffocated under everyday worries and the heavily worn cynicism of adulthood. Feeling it now, after a year filled with loss and confusion and sorrow, fills me with something that isn’t hope, isn’t the happiness that has been absent for most of this year, but is instead a sense of renewal and fresh beginnings. The harvest is late, but at last it’s coming.

Tomorrow I will begin planning and purchasing for the holiday weekend, talking to my family, deciding among ourselves who’ll be cooking what, where we’ll be on which day. The next few weeks will be as they usually are; stressful at times, joyous at others, probably culminating in a desperate hunt for a red cabbage on Christmas Eve.

But right now, as I take the tray of gingerbread from the oven, feeling the burst of heat against my legs, seeing the dark brown curvature of the cake, knowing that tomorrow it will have gained a shine and a stickiness and that each mouthful will glow slightly with ginger followed by the depth and darkness of treacle, I can only fall, slowly, willingly, into December’s soft, romantic embrace.