The Fab Four (and the Catastrophe)

In the Miss. Π stories, or rather where she appears, the agent for The Garden never sullies her hands in the scrap and bustle (or at least not in those that I’ve read). In each she had near to hand a number of fashionably suited henchmen. Each is a rather clear pastiche of whatever pop band was riding high in the charts and the culture of the time. In Jennifer Lions (one of Holbourne’s few full-length novels) the ‘boys’ are clearly The Beatles.

Mop tops, smart clobber, and a mention of Liverpool - where they go the screaming youth are sure to be waiting for them. Albeit that in the post-catastrophe dying world of Holbourne here they are killers brought in to mop up whatever horror has been uncovered by Miss. Π. There’s nothing subtle about them. Chauffeured and grinning like feckless monkeys they dash from car to door whilst their fans faint from seeing them. In part of the shifting world of the end days described it is such devilishly fab killers that are the celebrities.

Really they aren’t central to anything. I don’t think they appear in their own story (though they might well, there’re a lot of them I’ve never even seen, let alone read – and doubtless some I’ve never even heard if) but rather form a cameo when Holbourne’s story is not about describing lengthy gun battles and two-fisted fury. It happens, it resolves, but off page as it were.

And when Miss. Π is the hand that has pulled back the veil, it is the popular hit men that cruise in to seal the fate of that week’s horror to the adoring wailing of hundreds.

A Birthday Again

 

Another year, and a birthday again

Efforts against as ever in vain

I’ll try not to mutter, to scowl, and complain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

A little more tummy, a little less brain

A little less fire, a little more pain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

When once again I will have to explain

That yes, I want cake, be it orange and plain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

With presents, toy soldiers, a small model plane

Perhaps a wee pint, dear god no champagne

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

I want to be awful, I want to profane

But instead I will shiver, and so will refrain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

And yet despite all I’m the same chap in the main!

But he’d laugh, and he’d scoff; he’d be so inhumane...

Another year and a birthday again



Chelsea & The Bomb (Pt. 9)

The cats have inherited the city. Hundreds, thousands, all day they’ve been with us but just now and they’ve gone. 

Warned long before the final trumpet of the old air-raid sirens the great and the not so good had already closed up their houses in Mayfair and Belgravia and decamped to the Grosvenor Hotel. They had remembered that longer war when luxuries such as lobsters and oysters had escaped rationing; when caviar had required no coupon. The grand hotels already built like fortresses the ballrooms and bars below ground had been so sound-proofed that in the Grosvenor a man had to be sent to announce the all-clear. Expecting some repeat and the occasional broken window I can only imagine what they must have made of the tomb that had been made by the single mushroom bomb that had fallen in Chelsea. Trapped like rats, Mme. Roux had opined that their very fine educations would have stood them in good stead. The weak had doubtless fed upon the strong. I can see them now from our perch, the strong that had at last emerged perhaps chortling and jolly, strong from their blue blood pudding.

Tower Bridge had still been standing. We had crossed the top and from there seen the stumps of London and Hungerford, both weakened and crumbled in the years now gone to leave pillars from shore to shore. London is very green now. The roads cracked and covered by weeds and grasses in a bed of fallen, broken glass. We heard a building collapse coming here but saw it only by the snowstorm of birds that had blown out of Catherine Street as we passed by Strand station. We sheltered in the empty skull of a tobacconists. Not for a minute did Mme. Roux or Cecil suggest we go below; the tube would be a mortuary of tangled bones and whatever it was that had grown to like it there. The image of the neat line of pipes in that shop eerily untouched by shockwave, time and nature bothered still me for some reason.     

I am still mystified as to why we came to London at all. No one I’ve met since the little war ever went to the cities. They had become savage places briefly before the old, eager plagues settled there with the inhabitants. It had become a habit and of course the capital having taken one for the team had been a hot spot where it mattered for long enough that perhaps by some unconscious folklore no one I’d met had ventured there long since the rain and time had put all that aside.

We’re on the roof of the Windmill Theatre. Below I can see what Mme. Roux tells me are the Chelsea Hunt. Given the crater there now it carries a number of meanings. The survivors of the great hotels, gas-masked and dusty in hunting pink and bowlers, prowling with knives and sabres, the mask’s respirator tubes are cut and perished. I don’t care to think what they hide.

I say, “Why have we come to this ghastly place?”

The former-Captain Cecil gives me a smile he’s hired by the minute; he was short changed.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Zombie Apocalypse

Triffid-Knacker

I was somewhat flattered today to find out that in the coming zombie apocalypse I am to get myself down to Devon with ‘whichever is your favourite child’ where I will see out the inevitable fights about the barricades in the River Cottage HQ.

Long preparing for the inevitable, hedge-wizard Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been laying up against the slight possibility of the world not being overtaken by zombies by cultivating Triffids. ‘Zombies by their nature only last so long,’ reads the blurb in the email, ‘but Triffs provide near limitless energy through their cultivated oil, acts a feedstock for cattle, and are the only free range salad that can reliably prosper in the wild’.

Fearnley-Whittingstall with his self-sustaining lifestyle, whole-food organic farm, and guns, has been since long before his rise to celebrity preparing for the worst. As one of the ‘Old Ones’ he has through the centuries been a wielder of the Light against the Dark, the latter which whilst almost always rising has in recent years reinvented itself as the Cool. Six talismans having been cast across the world only by assembling them can the Cool finally be defeated. Given that this will otherwise result in a zombie apocalypse I rather worry that Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recent mail suggests that he has been unsuccessful.

It comes to everyone I suppose. The old ones invite you round for tea, and the cool doesn’t want to know.

Cabinet Reshuffle

Today’s cabinet reshuffle has left certain parts of the Liberal Democrats sceptical about their role in the coalition government. Whilst Tory stalwarts Sir. Arthur Streeb-Greebling and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton have been moved to Fluffy Kittens and Nice Holidays respectively the current Lib Dem members of the cabinet have been rather forced into en masse into the new ‘super’ Ministry of Benefits, Pensions, Health and Taxation. Lib Dem MP (for Surbiton-Waitrose) Barbara Good has been outspoken in her wariness at her new brief which she claims mostly carries the responsibility for being booed at.

            A spokesman for the cabinet officer was quick to scotch rumours regarding the divide of new cabinet positions, especially that of the new Minister of State for Scotland Ria Parkinson (MP for Butterflies) who will have sweeping powers to be responsible for Scottish devolution. ‘Mrs. Parkinson’s bloody tedious ongoing experiences she subjected us all too in the late 70s to early 80s on BBC2 will stand her in good stead when it comes to the Tory heartland looking to blame someone for the break-up of the United Kingdom’ said Sir Humphrey Appleby today. Likewise one has to presume for fellow Liberal Democrat MP Penny From-Just-Good-Friends who has been moved to the new Looting, Rioting, and Vikings office currently being relocated to Lindisfarne Abbey.

            Former antiques dealer and Conservative MP for the extremely marginal Never-The-Twain seat Simon Peel has been moved to head up the newly formed Ministry of Football.

            Frankly, modern government is becoming more like some bloody awful sitcom every day.

Una Persson & Catherine Cornelius (1)

 

 

Almost the end of the summer hols and with most of a day tomorrow with Q not at work I can just about, almost, if I stretch, see a day when I can really get back to some actual graft again. It’s been all very wonderful of course, but we’re all looking forward to the start of term. So because I can do it whilst keeping a wary eye, the start of a sketch that will I think actually see some inky completion. Here and more Moorcock; Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius (and perhaps depending on room maybe even a Jerry peering from behind).

Oddly chopped off round the edges by the scanner.

Everything thinks it’s a critic.

The iShagged

 

People seem to be very excited by the new iShagged that’s come upon the market recently and I have to confess that like all new technology I don’t really understand it. A natural progression from the iPod where you can own a million albums you’ve never listened to, and the Kindle where people formerly not possessed of a book now possess a thousand-thousand novels they’ll never read the virtual world has arrived now with a bang.

Almost literally. Although being virtual, as in ‘not real’, then we’ll just for the moment (and in expectation of the wrath that follows) suggest that almost-literally means not-literally, or to be more precise figuratively.

Just as with books and albums the iShagged is a list of things you’ve had, and in this case people. Now you can download a list of people that you say you’ve slept with, although you haven’t, but which can bolster your self-esteem and provide fodder for those all important blathering at about the seventh pint down the pub. Since just as people already own a little box that says they own thousands of books and records, now a very similar box says they’ve been a lot more promiscuous that they really were. The top sellers seem to be ‘Girl I met on holiday’, ‘her from the office where I used to work’, ‘that one before she was famous’ and in a furious fight back ‘pirate’, ‘highwayman’, and oddly ‘Derek Nimmo’.

Since any non-virtual liaisons are effectively a product of memory anyway – and not normally widely witnessed (though you can download any number of those to rectify that) then the iShagged is if anything more real than mere curmudgeonly reality.

A more woman-friendly iShagged is due out later this month. It changes from the original only in that rather than adding virtual past lovers it serves to officially edit out real ones. Already the advance orders for ‘fucker who wasted a year of my life’ , ‘two-timing husband’ and ‘that in hindsight ill-advised second bottle of Cava’ are breaking current records.