Crossing The Congo By Motorboat

The inland Land Tanganyika extends for more than four hundred miles in Africa where during the Great War it was dominated by the German Navy, mostly in the shape of the Graf Von Gotzen. There was no way the British could putt-putt-putt all the way up the river from the ocean as the said Von Gotzen was sat there all big and armed and probably captained by Gert Frobe beat-boxing the tuba like he did in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. So what would you do?

Well Lt. Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson considered the only feasible plan was to launch a surprise attack on Gert Frobe from landward, and by water. Taking a pair of motor gunboats the Mimi and the Toutou (French for miaow and woof-woof) – originally intended for the Greek Air Force, of course, because it has to be that odd – he shipped them to Cape Town. But that wasn’t especially convenient for Lake Tanganyika. So the boats were put on a train to the Belgian Congo, which was the easy bit. Sort of since they had to make the railway go a bit further, a hundred miles further. So with ships, oxen and hundreds of locals (oh, and two steam engines) they built over a hundred bridges and where mere bridges would do it and invented whole new crane and winch systems when they would not Which got them within 500 miles of the Lake. Whereupon it was mountainous jungle. So they humped the two gunboats the rest of the way. Or they humped the gunboats and then built a railway. Either way...

It’s a lovely sort of madness and it should be no surprise that, yes, Gert Frobe was indeed surprised. The expedition is that which inspired The African Queen, though that story was only mildly difficult compared to the real thing.

What sort of madman engaged on this expedition? Who was Spicer-Simson? As it happens the Royal Navy’s oldest Lt. Commander on account of any time he was ever given command of a ship he would collide it with another one. It’s generally bad for the promotion board when you do that with the odd destroyer or two. But he knew the land, or more than anyone else and though it was risky putting him in charge of two little gunboats (give that with that many his record showed he’d ram one with the other) the task was his. Spicer-Simson smoked only monogrammed cigarettes, wore a khaki kilt, and insisted on an Admiral’s colour being raised outside his tent each day. It’s recorded nowhere but I’m pretty sure he would have gone to battle to loud gramophone music whilst reciting A. A. Milne through a speaking trumpet.

I suppose it takes that sort of personality to look at a map of Africa and decide that to outflank the enemy Navy it is best to surprise them by crossing the Congo. Spicer-Simson saw out the Great War as the Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence.

They had proper spies back then.

And I’m making none of this up.     

G4S Failure

The Brownies. Britain's thirteenth line of defence

I’ve got to dig into my pocket to find a tenner for my daughter’s share of the minibus to London next week. Despite G4S being paid a million-billion pounds to provide security for the Olympics they’ve been forced to admit that they’ve come up 10,000 short when it comes to actually having anyone providing that security. They’ve offered eight quid an hour, nowhere to sleep in a city gone mad for rental rates, and a solid lack of anything approaching food on the job so they’re mystified as to why they can’t find enough qualified personnel to fulfil the role. So far they've got twelve bouncers from Blackpool - and they’re not letting anyone inside the stadium in trainers; so there’s every chance a lot of the athletes are going to fail the dress code anyway.

Faced with the shortfall the Government has had to step in. Initial reaction to use the army today has fallen foul of plans in place set to reduce it by 20% (that and everyone being off getting shot at elsewhere). The Navy having provided the latest destroyer to guard the Thames against terrorist frigates, and the RAF a number of controversial ground-to-air missile systems to shoot down any errant planes over Britain’s most crowded conurbation, it has fallen to the reserves to search bags and skive off to improvise beds on the Judo mats.

Which is where my daughter comes in.

She might only be eight but as a Brownie she swore an oath to god and country, and across that country an army of sprouts in brown and yellow are set to take up the slack. Used to camping and making food over small fires they have the skills for it sadly lacking in many fat blokes more used to standing at the doors of clubs and confiscating drugs off people for the management to sell.

My daughter doesn’t mind. She’ll get a specially commissioned ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’ badge to add to her growing collection. And she’s passed the G4S training with flying colours, already able to run off and call to her mummy when things get in any way difficult. Albeit in this instance her mummy will be the Police, who are themselves said to be ‘absolutely delighted’ to be working in concert with thousands of half-arsed Walty security personnel (though the announcement was greeted by the entire Met in unison rolling their eyes at the very thought).

The latest sponsors for the games Hello Kitty are said to be enthusiastic at the news.

But not half as much as my daughter, as like her great-gran she’s been put in charge of a searchlight battery..

I Am Not Worthy (6): Glenn Fabry

With storms and floods and the grey land running in dark shadowed patches under an angry sky it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry. Here in the bitter north the light makes longhouses of barns and the river coils pale and sullen down the valley. Crows were blown by my window yesterday evening, fighting the elements but come morning feasted on the dead and the would—be. It’s a Beowulf landscape, and not oddly animated but primal and sharply defined and therefore as I say, it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry.

You’ll perhaps know the work best from comic covers, and most probably Preacher, or Hellblazer. But for me it’s an older time when as a youth scribbling in pencil and picking out in ink in a world where colour was all, and I for that was impaired, Glenn Fabry was there and making Slaine in 2000AD something a lot more than it was before or after. It was fantastical and horrific, it had enough of the real to catch you and plenty of the other world to make you stay. Here was a man than knew his ink, and here was a man then that told me through his pictures that pen and ink is fine, better than fine – light and dark, intricacy and space. This is why I work in pen and ink. Not because I copied but because there it was, just what I saw, and how to show how others might see it too. Worlds that like all the best fantasy are horror.

You don’t need the words. Pieces that are a story all of their own.

And it’s dark, and the wind runs ragged over the mountains of Tolly Maw.

And it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry.

And I am not worthy.   

Chumbawamba End It

Thirty years and something like seventeen albums down Chumbawamba are winding it up. You can read their history all over the place - but this is my blog so it's them, and I, and what they mean to me.

So no more then soon to be, and it hurts a little. Agit-pop of the highest order one of the certainties of life was that there were the Chumbas, and it feels like I’ve heard a good friend who quietly having cancer is only now telling me there’re but a few months left to live. And so few bloody friends have been up here to visit that those who did I feel the more so when they no longer do. Because Chumbas did; they played the Kirkgate twice and at the last my eldest (as a wee sprout) bopped along on my lap, and that was where and when the live album of the time was recorded. A month or two later at Solfest I thanked Boff, and shook him by the hand, little knowing that it might be the last time.

I’ve seen Chumbas any number of times. Years back in Brixton when (unless the memory plays false) they were part of the line up at the Academy – one of those where you’d have Hawkwind, and Sensor, and Back To The Planet and indeed everyone you could want to be there for a day or two solid. I got there late but in time for Chumbas and whilst the bouncers kept everyone from the stage I and my mate Helle ran, jumped and kicked off the barrier to land square and proud amongst them right into the middle of Sometimes Plunder. Come the singalong lines asking the driver regarding a wee-wee – that was us, into the mic and then a clap on the shoulder before we were tossed back into the crowd. Another gig and at the Fridge my girlfriend-then came up behind me for two songs and nuzzled away – only it wasn’t my girlfriend, but a cute blonde punky girl (my girlfriend waving politely when I turned about). I was young you see and when I was young they were the soundtrack. More so even than Poppies, or Carter, even The Levellers and RDF. For me.

Later and the band dropped the electrics and the nun costumes, and were ready to ease me into middle age with acoustic and old English rebel songs. ‘It’s okay,’ they said, ‘You had a cracking time when young, you still can now you’re not; it’s okay to have dignity. It’s okay to still care. It mattered. It still does.’

They meant what they said. They had principles and they were our principles, and it was right to think, to reason. Even the hilarity of Tubthumping (the one song you’ll know) with rugby teams chanting the chorus for years afterwards – meant they did better pop than pop bands. And hey, it raised a lot of money for causes most rugby players would abhor.

They never sold out. They never somehow betrayed us. They never became a tribute band of themselves.  Most importantly of all, they were a cracking band and produced cracking albums.

As I say they were the soundtrack of my life, young and middle aged. Even when faced with lies, and nonsense, and petty minds they’ve given me the broad shoulders to laugh it all off. There are more important things. And it’s right for me to be honourable, to hold to my principles, to keep to my art, to care about what matters and don’t let what is not mire me down.

I’ve never posted links before. How can I not now, at least this once?

But who the fuck will help me now when I’m old?

And cheers, and thank you, all of you.

Now how do I soap a stamp for a letter that has no envelope?

So many questions. I’m going to hunt up Sssh and put it on for the answers. Or to remember that answers don’t matter - so much as making sure you ask the questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpT5M3qVpMs 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxfc7vvlQp0

Britain Needs More Boffins

I read regular calls for schools to direct kids more towards the sciences, for useful professions and contributions to society but without much said about how that might be made more fun. After all there’s only so far sniffing about it and muttering absolute received-truths will get you, when if kids aren’t interested – then they aren’t interested. And like anything (and especially at a given age) if it’s dull, then they’ll snooze through it all. I’m not saying every science class has to resemble the Christmas Lectures (but it’d help) but perhaps what we need is a little less alphabet maths and a little more of the boffin? Frankly I should have dozed through physics at school but I was blessed with a series of excellent teachers who were more about the practical than the theoretical, and if they’d worn more tweed and smoked more pipes then they would have been boffins; chaps that made discoveries in sheds. And let us not forget that most of Bletchley was just that, their sheds hastily fabricated affairs as the word spread out. Because of which work in so many ways here you are reading this.

But that’s all dire, important and earnest stuff. I like the madness. The strange ideas. I like Project Habakkuk for example. Whereby in the war (and needing larger aircraft carriers and with a shortage of steel) plans were proposed and tested to build the bloody things out of ice. Or rather pykrete, which is a woven combination of ice of wood pulp that could be machined like wood and cast like metal. Truly huge artificial icebergs with flat tops and hollowed out for engines and the inevitable cooling plants. Also and surprisingly bullet proof – as Mountbatten proved by shooting at an experimental prototype (probably whilst not with his wife indulging in numerous affairs with both sexes, you’ve just got to love the decadence of the upper classes in the 30s and 40s). So enormous, and we’re talking biggest ship ever, carriers made of water and mdf. Not only bullet but torpedo and 1000lb bomb proof, albeit pottering about at a stately six knots.

It never happened, though a lot of work was done on it and a smaller prototype took three years to melt to obsolesce. But it was mad, and it was brilliant, and I’d have been a lot more into the sciences at school had we been engaged in making soggy-raffia gunboats with the tensile strength of Guernsey.

Though even at Yateley Comprehensive they would probably have frowned upon the pipe.

Ten Minutes With Mrs Peel

For once a fine day and therefore...  mowing. With the better half at work, and with the sprouts under my care then nonetheless in between daily rain showers it was cutting of grass, and preparing sports days shirts, not to mention a good run up at the tax forms, and yet all done and before Q was home. Astonished I turned to a commission piece of art I’ve been playing with for ages but which, so tight is the brief, I’m simply not getting right to my satisfaction. So before the sun dips and a challenge, to break the intensity, a different sketch entirely and one I timed myself at. Ten minutes from pencil touching paper and no more. So ten minutes later and a very quick Emma Peel style 60s super-spy (for another project entirely).

But to be fair, what day isn’t a little less frustrating for an Emma Peel style 60s super-spy?

The ten minute challenge – give it a go.

Eric Sykes

“For me, there is a daffodil in every dustbin.”

              I’d gone out to the bridge yesterday in the hope of catching Eric as he went by. It happens quite a lot in Tolly Maw and those few moments of a last cheese sandwich with someone can be precious. But he didn’t go by, and it started to rain, so I ate the sandwich. A wet sandwich is enough of a symbol for me. I was delighted then to find this morning that rather than wandering off Eric Sykes was moving in. I didn’t ask about the whole being dead thing. It’s usually taken in the wrong way. He’s taken a house down on Sebastapol Terrace. I’m helping him move his baggage. There’s quite a lot.

              Eric Sykes was one of the mysterious figures for me. I used to read radio scripts as a boy. It was after Hancock and The Goons but I knew so many of them despite not hearing a one. And Eric Sykes was strongly involved in both. Many things indeed. In the 1950s he shared an office with Milligan, Galton and Simpson. It’s hard to imagine what that must have been like as a heart for British comedy then and since. Later and my parents liked Terry & June – I liked Sykes. Would I like it now? Does it matter either way?

              He was part of that Saturday afternoon delight, when there would be Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines on. That’s still true to a greater degree. One of those films you make damn sure you never own so that when it comes up on tele it’s still a nice little event. Eric Sykes also played Charlie Griffin  (the undertaker-hit man from John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes series) in the film adaptation of The Liquidator. I don’t recall a lot about the film, but it’s telling that though I’d read most of the novels before seeing the film, Eric Sykes was ever Charlie Griffin on reading them later.

              Eric Sykes was one of that stable of writers and performers that served as very young men in the war, and came out the other side dedicated to laughing at life (and perhaps because of it). I remember by great-uncle Charles was like that. As Lt. Back uncle Charles was captured and spent years in a Japanese POW camp and by the time I knew him he was this jolly, laughing, chap. Not because of his never spoken-of experiences, but perhaps despite them?

            Eric’s efforts, his achievements, everything he was involved in is a very long list indeed. A worthy list, a list to be rightly proud of. We stop to have a cup of tea and he lights up a cigar.  He looks out the window. “There’s a price to pay everything,” he says. “But I find that price is very, very reasonable.”

            Thank you Eric.