London 2012 Alan Games

My coercion into participation in the nearly-here nearly-here Olympics has already been documented but after a dig down the back on the easy chair today I’ve just found out that a throwaway comment following it has had serious repercussions. Involved as I am I’ve been getting the round-robin tweets being used to develop ideas and solve any problems in less than 140 characters, and this morning I learned that we were exactly £3.12 short. I rather mockingly offered to cover that, only to be electronically jumped upon for an immediate payment! Not only a payment, but one made in cash. I found it, handed it over to the courier already suspiciously revving up outside the window and thought nothing of it other than to fire back an answer jokingly demanding that the whole event now had to be renamed in my honour.

So sorry, but welcome to the London 2012 Alan Games.

I should have thought that one through, eh?

I’ve never been too sure about the name ‘Alan’. If you type a bit too fast and loose it becomes ‘Aslan’, but even without the implication of lionhood it remains the sort of name that comes with a pipe and a cardigan proud of its leather buttons. Now Morgan I’ve got no problem with. Morgan is a straight up sort of name. It’s a name with a decent jaw and in Berlin makes one sound like a noir detective or one half of a fallen angel. Captain Morgan might never come home, but Major Morgan could put out a good tune. You’ll rarely find a character called Morgan being anything other than upright and competent. Alan is at best a mythological winged serpent in Tinguian folklore (but more famously one half ending with ‘Partridge’). It doesn’t even shorten well, being either the sort of lane where bad things happen or the sound you make when hitting your thumb with a hammer.

If you think that’s being too flippant then firstly – you’re on the wrong site, but more importantly it’s a name you’ll soon grow sick of. Because as I say, welcome to the London 2012 Alan Games. And to make sure it sticks it’s being retro-fitted to myth and history, to the original Alan Games held in honour of the gods at Mount Alan. No longer will there be Olympians, but a series of dedicated sports women and men who will hereafter be Alans. The plural, not the possessive. The sister ship to the ill-fated Titanic will have been the RMS Alan. The 1950s do-wop band will always have been The Alans. Maplin's Holiday Camp will boast of its Alan-size swimming pool. You will go and see exhibitions at the Kensington (Alan).  

Sadly for me this means I no longer actually own the name. And not wanting to pay for the privilege of using a moniker (or cheekily taking instead ‘Monica’) that I never really liked all that much anyway it’s been decided that I have to adopt whatever I’m more commonly called instead. Which is ‘Daddy’, which is a bit creepy on thinking about it. It’s worse for others than I, and to whom I hereby apologise. Especially to Canadian songstress and advocate of the term ironic, the now Is Morrisette.

So, I hope you’re all looking forward to formal opening of Alan?     

Tilda Swinton, Lady Gaga, And Goldfish

Tilda Swinton is picking at the corpse of this year’s parade.

They have one every year here. The village is old, and the traditions follow, where by ancient folklore most of the village breakfast wetly in the Supreme Being & Templar to sit till lunch in modern pantomime finery laughing and shouting and throwing stones at crows. Tractors and drays pull carts whose wheels drop half the local farm in clods along the road, taking the children to the green to the sound of Lady Gaga. Three men without any sense of irony are blacked-up. One has lost his trousers. A woman left outside the pub cackles, crouched, knickers about her shoes, heels in a puddle of her own piss. Someone is a Spice Girl, he doesn’t seem sure as to which. And where a Rover drove into Michael Praed’s wall the engine is still turning whilst Tilda Swinton picks at a brain that just won’t be missed. There’s ignorance and anger all sticky about her chin.

It’s dreadful, awful, embarrassing and it will only get worse because those floats that have made the green are a part of the fair whose travelling stalls and too-bright lights won’t be missed. People throw wonky darts for prizes they don’t want. The lucky dip isn’t; everyone a winner and every winning a Meercat dolly given out free with online insurance, knocked off, nibbled at, but with a catchphrase. The head of Leslie Philips is pecked at by goldfish. Terry Thomas bloody but exhilarated sneers at the body; there can be only one.

There’ll be candyfloss and tasteless doughy buns for tea, the last hiding a single tinned frankfurter, both wet.

I’m locking the doors and closing the curtains.

Because today Tilda Swinton is picking at the corpse of this year’s parade.   

The Kids Are All Right

Yeah, we were cool. Melvyn Hayes cool...

The first day of the summer holidays and the clouds clearly part of the same education system have packed in too for six weeks. They’re sitting there resting about the mountains to our south and with the kids out the sprouts too have been playing. Because that’s what sprouts do.

On a popular social network site this week I saw the same message a number of times as people I know shared it over from other friends I know, and again, and so forth. It mocked the current culture for children not taking risks and never playing outside. One of those that shared it with me then blathered on about his Xbox. Because in our day we crossed bomb sites and navigated the Limpopo, fought albino crododiles, and solved devilish mysteries before enjoying a slap up feed. Or at least we played outside a lot, and contrary to received wisdom so too do kids today. Kids are still kids. They still get muddy and don’t carry Tec9s. They have imagination, and verve, and believe me – far too much courage. Teenage girls still hang around bus stops and if teenage boys spend all day in their rooms with the curtains drawn they’re only telling you that they’re playing console games. There are doubtless still tearaways hoiking cars, but then so too did my late brother.

If we put down the young then we become our parents. And we’re not. My parents were bang on the right age to have seen Zeppelin, a lot, in their twenties – they didn’t. They went to cheese and wine dances and watched the news, and shouted at me to turn the bloody music down.

Grumpy old people now were probably grumpy middle-aged people then.

So don’t belittle the young, who have a lot of fun – just like we did. And don’t sneer at teenagers for being a bunch of wankers; because (without the comforting cotton wool of selective memory) so were we.

I’m being called. The sprouts want the jelly they made earlier in the tent they put up in the garden. Which is also a space ship, and a tunnel, and there are dinosaurs.

And it’s the summer holidays.

Lucky, lucky bastards.

By Jiminy!

And my axe!

I have to applaud the MCC today as they announce new rules to be imposed ahead of the next test series. It’s frankly a bit embarrassing to be an England supporter what with all this winning we’re doing in the cricket, no matter who we field. What (with at last count) just short of a thousand bowlers capable of winning matches and just about anyone to bat all day, the years of nodding gamely and showing what a good sport I am by applauding the better team seem all but over.

Cricket is the only sport I even half follow, and admittedly the internationals. I get too distracted when it’s on the radio and generally internationals are all that are shown on the highlights. I like spending the day just plain chilling right the hell down to cricket, I even like the stats and the history. But when they can cram a day into fifty odd minutes it’s actually rather exciting. Or rather, I find it so – and feel free to disagree because I’m not making you watch it.

But of late we’re winning all the time, in every form of the game. And I can’t remember much of a solid winning streak since dim memories as a youth (and that couched in the dust of memory that rarely recalls the bad bits of anything). And England are doing it... rather easily. It’s not right, it’s showing off, it’s not... it’s not cricket damn it!

Now of course I’m happy. It’s jolly nice to see the team win, please don’t get me wrong. But it’s not even close. Even in the short form of the game it feels like we’re not taking quite every wicket out of a sense of fair play whilst in return our batsmen go out and gamely knock up the runs whilst taking turns to be the one, possibly two men out. I feel like I ought to say sorry to someone because other teams come such a long way to play. It feels cruel that Strauss, Cook or Broad (because we of course have plenty of capable captains too) just saunter out there and taking hold of the other teams wrist slap them about the chops saying ‘why are you hitting yourself, why are you hitting yourself’. I’m not convinced the England team needs the other team’s dinner money, but Australia had to pay by cheque.

So new rules are coming into play. For the next six months every England team has to include at least three mythical characters and, in time for the Olympics, W. G. Grace with his yard wide bat. We have to bowl ten overs a day underhand, and the one-bounce one-catch rule is being brought in for the benefit of the visitors. Oh, and England have to bowl with a tennis ball.

And England will still win. Sort of squirming, and apologising, and being a bit ashamed about stealing their rival’s trousers (so they’ll have to play in their pants).

Typing With Dinosaurs

Alf found my old typewriter this lunchtime.

He’d been digging about amongst the boxes, clutter and cobwebs that hide in terrified corners of my little house hoping for a rope-lighter and some plum jam he swore he’d put away for better days (and presumably for the next time he happened to find me livinh somewhere near Ypres). Alf found it very funny, because Alf is always very modern; albeit very modern in 1976. At best.

The stained little Olivetti portable still had the same ribbon so many times wound back and with me grabbing no more than a heel of bread and a pot of worried humus for lunch he tried to read back what had been written on it all those years ago. I learned to type on my dad’s big old typewriter and later a little Olivetti. I typed because thirty years ago there were fanzines and postal games, and turn reports to write – and how little then things have changed. The original laptop whose keys I’d pound, and probably because of which the keyboard I use now infuriates my family because almost all the keys are blank from constant use. Back then we’d sort of have the internet – letter columns in fanzines so a reply to a discussion would come every few months and the simple things we take for granted now, formatting and stuff-looking-nice would have been high science-fiction indeed. The very idea of this, this blog for example, would have been thought something that might be around with hover cars and skin-suits. Hell, they didn’t have anything like this in Logan’s Run or The Stainless Steel Rat so it would have been pretty alien technology at best.

But we forget how long ago that was. Thirty years. Thirty years before that and rock and roll was a devilish new invention. Thirty years ago when typing was something girls did in school (when girls learned how to be secretaries), and we sent things by post. But my, that was exciting! I used to bundle back from school at lunchtime to see if my turn report had turned up. Or if Jerry and others had written to plot and gossip, or to arrange meeting up – and which we still do to this day. Just more quickly, but somehow with more faff. The post was exciting. And of course it’s better now, obviously, but in some ways it’s a little too easy?

I learned to type on a manual typewriter and all my bad habits come from that.

And it’s a right bugger scraping the Tippex off my monitor every night.            

Simon 'Pepper' Mint

Another quick sketch, it’s quite the testing challenge (and again from the same source).

G. D. Holbourne’s Simon ‘Pepper’ Mint is a curious fellow. The tropes that would then and later become the very mockery of the genre (the smart threads, the alcoholism, the middle-aged hero seducing much younger women) were in Holbourne’s stories played absolutely straight. Indeed, in common with almost all his protagonists Pepper Mint is rather a damaged character. The drink and the womanising is rarely fulfilling (and never rewarding) though Pepper is not some maudlin creature, and perhaps it is through his appearances that much of the attitude of those that work, are conned, or just are sent by the mysterious ‘Garden’ into horror and peril are most honestly presented. More of the milieu is hinted at through the Pepper stories than elsewhere – in Marking Time For Master where a girl (Miss. Tix) lives each second stolen from another we see the clearest indication of the otherwise unspoken-of catastrophe that is eating up the world. And more so, where that battle fought and lost decades before there is no victory to be had, where Pepper fights its manifestation not for some eventual victory, but simply for the joy of it perhaps?

From his first appearance in One More Dance; ‘A rake and a scoundrel, he dressed well in that way a man of younger years could not imitate (and so rejected). Everything was an accessory to everything else. Here was a man that dressed with care but without vanity; it was all a mask. The smile, the heavy moustaches and the hair Bohemian to the collar still there was that badly broken nose. He had the eyes of a suicide with too much to live for.’     



Martin 'Fucking' Luther

Another ten-minute challenge, that in this case took nearer to fifteen.

One of G. D. Holbourne’s less palatable protagonists Martin Fucking Luther was nonetheless arguably his most popular. First appearing in the short story Why, If Not Now and in a number of pieces that followed it was in The Wild Flowers that chronologically he first appears as a somewhat younger man. 60s magician and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work Martin Fucking Luther nonetheless still fought (such as that might be said) against the always-nameless horror that had already been victorious some thirty years previous to the story’s publication.

And I quote from The Wild Flowers: ‘He did not look down, as did those others stood about the memorial. Like they one of the curiosities, a boy-girl, and not more than seventeen in blouse and leather britches, in a jacket marked with Angel rockers and trophies. It was apt; with his halo of hair and petulant stance it was not difficult to imagine him, having been cast down from somewhere quite divine, to have interrupted his journey here in Abney Park.'