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Thursday 31 August 2006

Lucy Ellman...




From Man or Mango?:

She was alone, the days of her period not noted, her successes and failures, her ailments, her longings, her leanings, her lists, her lethargy, her current *address*, the anniversary of her mother's death, likewise her father's, her birthdays, the years of her life passing unnoticed, unrecorded, life eddying by unseen. Everything that a man who loved her might have concerned himself with, *not noticed*.

This is what it's like to be an old woman. No wonder they give up the reproductive display.


I love Lucy Ellman. In fact, she is she only writer who has actually taken the time and trouble to respond to my fan letter - even sent me a passport sized photo that I'm ashamed to admit I must have thrown away.

Then again, hers is the only fan letter I've ever sent....


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Wednesday 30 August 2006

Stones Special...

Timely as ever (i.e. a week after they played a ('scuse the pun) stone's throw from our gaffe, the Stones themed Bobcast 15 is now up for your delectation...Their Satanic Majesties request etc. etc. etc.

Regarding the previous post, I have had a refinement (??)

Howzabout, now then now then, now then etc. etc. (get on with it, Saville-hating Ed.) you lovely people, what is listening, all you guys and gals (...he won't listen, will he? S-H Ed.) choosing a t-o-p-i-c (...Christ, he thinks he *is* Sir James of Saville, Professor...shet - now *I'm* at it an' all....) and yours truly here will try and pick what have you yes indeedy some discs on that -as it 'appens, can you believe it, urggh-eeeurggg-eee-urghhh self-same subject, thank you brothers and sisters, oh, my golly goodness , yes...



Maestro please...

(I give up. Ed.)


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Listeners' Survey...

I realise that, for one reason or another, not all of you who read this blog also listen to the Bobcasts (...disloyal bastards - it's been noted...) but I just wanted to run something past the three or four of you who do, so aplogies to anyone who finds this boring (...there are *other* blogs, you know Spinny....)

I'll be putting up a Rolling Stones special tonight in which I play a few of the backwaters of their extensive catalogue and I just wondered if there was a general interest in similar casts in the future. It's obviously quite a risk pinning all your hopes on favourite artists when it could well turn out that no bugger is *remotely* interested in your collection of Steeleye Span bootlegs, b-sides and rarities....(yes, it's strange I know, but some people have *no* taste....)

So in order to limit the damage that tonight's (soporific, I'm sure to anyone who can't stick the Stones) cast will do to my already dwindling audience (cheers Istvansky - no, *really* - thanks a million....) I thought I'd run the following list by you of ones I think I could do quite well and only risk boring the *real* completists among you of the artists in question's work:


Bowie

Tom Waits

Beach Boys

Elvis (Mad Mike, where are you??)

Eno

Phil Spector

Stax/Volt

Comedy/So bad they're good crap records assortment

erm, that's about it...



Feel free to add others, although I'll warn you now that my Frank Ferdinand collection is on the small side...Or if you think it's a shit idea, I'll knock it all on the head and leave the field clear for Croydon's answer to Simon Bates....



btw - Has he played my tune yet? I have a copy of Benny Hill's Ernie if you've had trouble tracking it down Ist...


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Tuesday 29 August 2006

Valerie, please...

From Alan Bennett's Writing Home:

As a boy, I sometimes went out on the bike delivering orders to customers, one of whom was a Mrs. Fletcher. Mrs. Fletcher had a daughter, Valerie, who went away to school then to London, where she got a job with a publishing firm. She did well in the firm, becoming assistant to one of the directors, whom, though he was much older than she was, she eventually married. The firm was Faber and Faber, and the director was T.S. Eliot....

A few years later, when my dad had sold the shop but we were still living in Leeds, my mother came in one day and said , "I ran into Mrs. Fletcher down the road. She wasn't with Mr. Fletcher; she was with another feller - tall, elderly, very refined looking. She introduced me, and we passed the the time of day." And it wasn't until some time later that I realised that , without it being one of the most momentous encounters in western literature, my mother had met T.S. Eliot. I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things.

"The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize."

"Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."

It never could work out....

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Old-style Bob Post...



BBC Breakfast News:

Age Concern reports that 9/10 NHS nurses don't have time to feed those among their drool and piss riddled elderly charges who have difficulty eating and digesting their food, so they are needlessly dying in large numbers. Several of these Larkinesque 'old fools' have, on having popped their clogs been dissected, revealing them to have empty bowels congruent with the new all caring and patient-centred NHS starvation diet ("your painless 1 step route to weight loss and slow, bowel shrivelling termination...") So, be warned Swipesters - come our day, only those of us still able to fork a soupcon of that Third World size portion of macrobiotic rice into our dry and muscleless cakeholes will stand any chance at all of making it past reception, never mind the ward sister. Still, as always there's a silver lining to every cloud. At least it does free up a bed for someone else to perish in.

A visibly shocked and Egyptian pendant dedecked Kate Silverton weighs into the hapless Health Minister. "Old tossers are QUITE LITERALLY dying without any SHIT inside them - it's a NATIONAL DISGRACE and nothing short of SCANDALOUS!!!

I miss the rest of the argument, staring entranced and lovelorn at Caroline Flint's scandalously gorgeous, ripe, untramelled boobies.

She's *far* too fit to be a politician....



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Monday 28 August 2006

Found Objects...

The currently AWOL (wha'pen there?) Ro-Mo had an excellent idea. We could set up a blog page where anyone who wants to could put up assorted writings, detritus, juvenilia etc. We'd call it Recovered Notebooks and it would be a hoot. Well, we set it up about 3 months ago and *still* neither of us has put anything up. So I thought I would, if only to chivvy the Mother of Rock into putting up a few photos of here from her Julie Christie/Juliette Greco-esque prime. It's only a little scrap to get the ball rolling, but what the heck, eh? It's here if anyone's interested...

Just to add extra incentive, I've put up a really scrummy* piccy of me trying to look like Transformer-era Lou Reed (only much better looking, obviously.)**

Anyone who's interested, contact Ro-Mo or me. We just need an email address to be able to assign membership to you via blogger.

email robertswipe@btinternet.com


Enjoy,


Bob

*That's typed with *heavy* irony, obviously...

**Parting monitor please note: *no* parting...


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Friday 25 August 2006

Bobcast13...

...is up now.

Special thanks to Ro-Mo & Molly.

Hope you all enjoy....


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*Absolutely* The Final Word on Girl With A One Track Mind!!!! (Slight Return)...

Seems The Spinster just can't let it go, so in a vain attempt to pilfer some of the traffic she's cunningly been waylaying by re-opening the GWAOTM debate, I just want to add this as my absolute last word on it.

I know I can be a very irrascible, thoughtless and insensitive Bob at times, but deep down, under the accumulated layers of cynicism and acerbic defensive-posture antagonism, I'm actually quite a kind, warm-hearted and (very occasionally) generous of spirit type and, much as I'd rather not ruin the image of this blog forever by admitting it in public, I have nothing but very deep affection that occasionally (and rather frighteningly) borders on outright platonic, touchy-feely-emo type lurve for my 12 or so readers. It must take an awful committment (and I really do mean awful) of time and effort on your part to wade through all the bilge that I put up in the vain hope that there might be something worth reading now and again. Obviously you will all know who you are and I probably don't need to say this at all, but I *really* cannot express how much your comments (good, bad or indifferent) and support through the difficult bits have meant and do mean to me and if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be typing this now. (So, you have only yourselves to blame).

I like to think that a careful re-reading of this blog would show a very pronounced modulation in tone from the anarchic "early funny ones" to some of last week's posts. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory or conceited, I am very proud of a few of the posts from this week and I'm not being disingenuous when I say that they would never have been written with the same degree of (hopefully it comes across as) sincerity and compassion as I have gained through knowing that there is an (if not loyal) then certainly patient readership out there to receive it.

I think that there's a wonderful contradiction at the heart of blogging. Its basis is the unmediated expression of an individual point of view or attitude. But what has turned this blog (I hope) from a lot of juvenile, vitriolic wanking off into something occasionally interesting that seems to have attracted a core readership of varied and talented readers (I prefer contributors, but hey - I'm only writing this bit - you can quibble with me later down below) is *you lot*. I think together we've made a really lively space here where pretty much anything goes and I like to think that though there are very pronounced "uber fans" who I hope feel very much at home here, we're not too cliquey as to preclude further additions to the party - which reminds me I *will* link to you Istvansky and Spraying the Rays, when I have time over the weekend...

I hope I'm right and that you dear, sweet, regular readers maybe understand the nature of what I'm trying (with your help) to create here. Something that sits on its own outside the noisy, bustling fray of opinion-shaping and petty pointscoring elsewhere. I hope some of our posts have got close to that intimacy that I'm trying to create. To open up as much of myself as I can in the hope that it sheds a little light on what we are all, ultimately, tied up in. If not, I'll just have to keep trying.

So, that's why I don't want this lovely, indefinable thing we're making to be swallowed up by something that puts the making of money above what we can occasionally generate here. Not even a six-figure sum could match what I get from you guys. Thanks for that.

End of lecture.

[Now....how am I gonna match those early 'funny' ones...????]




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*Absolutely* The Final Word on Girl With A One Track Mind!!!!...

Seems The Spinster just can't let it go, so in a vain attempt to pilfer some of the traffic she's cunningly been waylaying by re-opening the GWAOTM debate, I just want to add this as my absolute last word on it.

I know I can be a very irrascible, thoughtless and insensitive Bob at times, but deep down, under the accumulated layers of cynicism and acerbic defensive-posture antagonism, I'm actually quite a kind, warm-hearted and (very occasionally) generous of spirit type and, much as I'd rather not ruin the image of this blog forever by admitting it in public, I have nothing but very deep affection that occasionally (and rather frighteningly) borders on outright platonic, touchy-feely-emo type lurve for my 12 or so readers. It must take an awful committment (and I really do mean awful) of time and effort on your part to wade through all the bilge that I put up in the vain hope that there might be something worth reading now and again. Obviously you will all know who you are and I probably don't need to say this at all, but I *really* cannot express how much your comments (good, bad or indifferent) and support through the difficult bits have meant and do mean to me and if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be typing this now. (So, you have only yourselves to blame).

I like to think that a careful re-reading of this blog would show a very pronounced modulation in tone from the anarchic "early funny ones" to some of last week's posts. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory or conceited, I am very proud of a few of the posts from this week and I'm not being disingenuous when I say that they would never have been written with the same degree of (hopefully it comes across as) sincerity and compassion as I have gained through knowing that there is an (if not loyal) then certainly patient readership out there to receive it.

I think that there's a wonderful contradiction at the heart of blogging. Its basis is the unmediated expression of an individual point of view or attitude. But what has turned this blog (I hope) from a lot of juvenile, vitriolic wanking off into something occasionally interesting that seems to have attracted a core readership of varied and talented readers (I prefer contributors, but hey - I'm only writing this bit - you can quibble with me later down below) is *you lot*. I think together we've made a really lively space here where pretty much anything goes and I like to think that though there are very pronounced "uber fans" who I hope feel very much at home here, we're not too cliquey as to preclude further additions to the party - which reminds me I *will* link to you Istvansky and Spraying the Rays, when I have time over the weekend...

I hope I'm right and that you dear, sweet, regular readers maybe understand the nature of what I'm trying (with your help) to create here. Something that sits on its own outside the noisy, bustling fray of opinion-shaping and petty pointscoring elsewhere. I hope some of our posts have got close to that intimacy that I'm trying to create. To open up as much of myself as I can in the hope that it sheds a little light on what we are all, ultimately, tied up in. If not, I'll just have to keep trying.

So, that's why I don't want this lovely, indefinable thing we're making to be swallowed up by something that puts the making of money above what we can occasionally generate here. Not even a six-figure sum could match what I get from you guys. Thanks for that.

End of lecture.

[Now....how am I gonna match those early 'funny' ones...????]




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Thursday 24 August 2006

The One After The One With The Photo...

I feel very low. Very down. Lots of reasons.

This week has been the best I can do and it doesn't seem to me to be enough. That's a pisser.

Blogs are shit, aren't they??

They make everything seem possibile. When the hits and the comments come, you can walk on water. Butwhje they don't...

But nothing changes, regardless of the nunber-crunching. And when you are read, all you get is new things you can't have. New relationships that aren't really relationships - couldn't feasibly occur because *this isn't real life*. And the "choices" you think you're being given aren't *really* choices at all. They're just invitations to wreck your life in no discernably good cause. And yet, there's always that glimmer thing...

This is the first ever post I put up, August 2004:


Marca
Another day wasted. 7 hours Shuttling between the website of Spanish daily and Real Madrid mouthpiece, La Marca and the Grauniad Ulnimited's Football talk forum for an end to the Vieira nonsense. Just about worth it for the pitiful automated translations, I suppose:

"33 million euros are the price that finally is going to cost the crossing of Patrick Saw Real Madrid. The agreement seems total and only lack that the advice of administration of the Arsenal gives o.k. to the agreement at which the leaders have arrived from both clubs after the conversations maintained in the last weeks. Altogether, nine million less than what the Arsenal requested and three more than what offered Madrid. The presentation can be carried out east Friday or at the beginning of the next week."

Please let it be over by 'east Friday'.

Still, more intelligible than the Grauniad posters. (Half expect someone to butt in with "shoulders on that" Swipey). Something peculiarly sexy about the whole thing though - chat rooms, that is, not the Vieira business. For some reason, I have developed a virtual crush on Helen6613. I don't know if it's the matronly tone, the husky drawl I've attributed to her words or the the foul-mouthed smutty innuendo and graphic sexual propositioning of her postings - but there's definitely something there. I've always been prone to witty, intelligent women - or, at least I've always assumed that's what has attracted me to Princess Michael of Kent for all these years. Maybe the blog/forum/chatroom format encourages this. Helen may well also be a delectabe siren with the body of Elle MacPherson and the boots of Naomi Cleaver - but it doesn't matter. Can't you see it's your mind I've fallen for, 6613??? It's always the same people on every thread though, isn't it? On everything from 'Should Sven be sacked' to 'Can they still knit in Darfur' it's the usual suspects: Paranoidman, Pintoo, Swalsh, CodeViolation, FlunkySoulBrother - I feel like I know them all. I'm not sure if I'm more astounded by the breadth of their interests - yachting, Glyndebourne, taxidermy, Greco-Roman sculpture, goats etc. - or by the fact that there are other people in the world other than me who seem to do nothing but read what BenSawBridge has to say about Arsene Wenger's transfer options in a potential Vieira-less future. Or whether Dame Kiri has the gravitas to tackle Tosca. Or something about goats. And here is where I go all Carrie Bradshaw on y'all - "Is work the new unemployment?" ... "Is Vieira the new Galctico?"..."Is knitting catching on in the Sudan?"...... Discuss!


Love on y'all,


Robert


Clunk, clunk, clunk...utter shit.

Seems as good a place to end as any?

But I've still got something to say ... haven't I?



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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man...



- (well, I thought I'd jump before I was pushed. That GWAOTM was bound to blab sooner or later)*



Well, *would* you?







* p.124, if any one's remotely interested. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Well, apart from the Angel fish....




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Kindergarten Bob...

It all came about when my former work colleague Val's son, Calvin, became a Junior Gunner. Poor Calvin, blighted as his life is by a Tottenham supporting Pa and Man U, worshipping Ma, was in the bitter sweet position of having easy access to match tickets, but no one prepared to take him to see his beloved Arsenal. Step in 'Uncle' Bob.

I offered to go with Calvin, in loco parentis. Well, for a start, the chaperone tickets in the family enclosure are about a tenner cheaper than I usually pay and it had been a rather lonely - if ultimately transcendental - experience going to the Bergkamp Testimonial game alone (see Bobcast 1) So far, so good. But as with most things, there's often a catch.

I'm about to order the tickets for last night's Dinamo Zagreb game online at work when Val hands me a wadge of Junior Gunner membership cards. Do I mind if a couple of his mates tag along? So, in a trice, novice child minder Bob has become novice playground attendant Bob. OK, there are only three of them, but when you're as goood with kids as the Arsenal backline is at defending set pieces*, this spells triple trouble. Still, I figure it might be quite interesting (and gives me something to blog!) and what - short of one of the kids dying in a freak left-unattended-for 90-minutes-by-an-otherwise-distracted-football-fanatic-with-no-pastoral-ability-style incident - can possibly go wrong?

I head to Val's straight form work, rehearsing my uneasy exchanges with Spurs fancier Jm:

Bob: "I hope you don't mind me leading your son astray like this...."

Jim: "(...)"

Bob: No, I mean by taking him up the Arse..."


and wonder if it will be possible for me to say anything at all that doesn't mark me out as his worst nightmare - an Arsenal paedophile..

I arrive to be met by Jim, Val and my charges for the night. Jim's great - down to earth, engaging and indulgent of my well-meant jibes about the 1961 era Tottenham replica shirt Calvin tells me his Dad has just bought. "Last time they won anything, wasn't it?? etc... The boys are great. Calvin (Pootergeek, aged 8), Zaahib (an Asian Pete Doherty, aged 7) and Arjan (an Asian Tiger Woods with even more impeccable manners, aged 9). I'm immediately impressed by their burgeoning football anorak-ness - they rate Rosicky, say if we can't beat Villa, what hope is there? And generally sound like Arsenal fans 5 times their age. In short, they sound uncannily like me.

The getting there is all a bit of a rush. Although they are very well behaved, I see enough examples of errant journeying off alone and irrational sprints to nowhere in prticular from the lads just on the train to Vauxhall to realise that I'm going to have to be pretty switched on tonight.

Running late after a prolonged amble through the Arsenal World of Sport shop (Zaahib buys a brand new nike Arsenal ball - £18.00 - Arjan buys last year's for £3...) that does nothing for my increasing PMT**, we fall in behind a group of Zagreb supporters. They are wearing t-shirts saying things like "we are the bad boys in blue". There are only half a dozen of them but they are making quite a racket, bullishly "giving it all that" as they sing their guttaral slavic songs and do their "We Will, We Will Rock You" hand claps and saluting. I've never seen a flicker of testosterone-fuelled aggro all the times I've come up here, but you can't help but see it all through younger eyes when you are taking kids along. I see in Arj's face the slightly uneasy wonderment at it all that I remember feeling when I first joined this coarse, adult throng at around the same age.

We're in the children's enclosure which is a whole length of the ground away (quite a walk, believe me) from where I sat for the Bergkamp game. So, the six of us trot alongside the Close Encounters of the Third Kind spaceship that is the Emirates Stadium at night. Finally reaching turnstile R, we dig out our deck of membership cards and bid farewell to the apostate Val and Jim (you can only enter the ground with your oyster-style membership card now and the new system is taking a while to bed in, I think). It takes a few goes for all of us, but finally I headcount three young gooners and relax a little now we are in the confines of the stadium.

Walking to our block, little Zaahib (he seems about a foot tall to my 6 plus) reaches up a hand and grabs mine as we move through the crowds coming towards us. It's done so instinctively and trustingly that I feel a little pang at the absence of things like that in my life. This must be a bit like what it feels like to be a parent, and it seems to come naturally - the all-else-obliterating concern, the multiple threat sensing eyes in the back of the head and so on. It's almost as if one has been switched into some innate "parent" mode in which the normal compliment of limbs and sensors has been quadrupled. And is still not sufficient.

I'm annoyed because there don't seem to be any programme vendors (there were millions inside the ground for the Bergkamp game) and I'd promised the boys I'd treat them to one each. But any disappointment they or I may have evaporates as we take our seats and drink in the grandeur of the stadium's arc and the glowing, shimmering floodlit green stage laid out before us. I glance over at Arjan, his face transported into a dumb, all-my-dreams-have-just-come-true grin, and recall the same look on Dad's face when we took our seats at the old Wembley for an Arsenal Champions League game a few years back. That same feeling too that I had then - a closeness shared that couldn't have been achieved any other way.

I note with calm approval the way all three of my Junior Gunners pick up the rhythm and flow of the various chants. Hearing them as they tag behind the 58,000 taunting the by now shirtless Zagreb mentalists with "you're not singing anymore" when we equalise, is akin to watching fluffy ducklings frantically paddling behind their mother. By the end of the game they are all three Jerry Springer Show-style downward pointing like seasoned campaigners. Arjan's face, like mine, visibly entralled by each peice of van Persie magic, or the sight of Thierry Henry jogging over to our corner as he warms up to come on, clapping his hands above his head and kicking against his butt cheeks with his heels as he runs in a supremely insouciant demonstration of just how supple and agile he is*** It cheers my heart to see his face lit up like that - "youth undiminished" and all that...

I feel very privileged to have spent an evening with these vivacious, polite and charming youngsters. I'd half expected a nightmare, but in the end, I think I was the one who had been given a treat. They were a mirror on a younger me, I suppose, and gave me an insight into my own past - one that soothed the heart. There must be many moments like that when you have kids of your own, I suppose...****




*really not very good at all.

** Pre-Match Tension

*** Spinny - you *well* would, believe me...

**** I'm in no hurry to find out mind, ladies - so don't be *too* concerned....


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Tuesday 22 August 2006

Delete Blog Option...

As we celebrate a welcome new addition to the firmament of blog, it may seem a strange time to be contemplating the virtual extiction alluded to in the title of this post. But I'm sure many of us have felt the strange frisson, akin to swaying over a precipice, that comes when you tentatively hover the cursor over the 'Delete blog' button in the knowledge that you are one synapse strain away from consigning "yourself" into its, in my case, rich Prussian blue oblivion.

I mention this because I had a - to use an awful term, but one that seems appropriate in this context - 'meat space' email from 'the late' Brian Damage. Without going into too much detail, I finished reading it feeling relived that poor Brian had only taken his blog into his own hands. It is easier than going one step further after all, it would seem. Suicide, even the virtual one that Brian committed a while back, can be viewed, depending on where you stand on the sanctity of life bit, as (among other things) perhaps brave or maybe foolhardy (or possibly both??) From my own experience of how much is put into these blogs when you really get into them (and how much they can take out of you and those around you) I know enough of Bri's predicament to realise that his "extinction" was not taken lightly and, however much I might selfishly feel that he has been foolhardy in destroying that wonderful Watts Tower of the imagination he lovingly assembled for us, I have nothing but respect for his decision to 'end it all' and only admiration for anyone who so evidently loved blogging yet still had the cojones to take that one, last decisive click. (Although, with those cojones, just wearing tights is worthy of respect...)

Thoughts turn inevitably to my friend Alison. I worked with Ali for the best part of 10 years and during that time she was one of the few beacons of sanity and uproarious hilarity and joy in a job that both of us clearly found wasted our talents. We would laugh ourselves speechless and shared a love of music and the arts that bound us, over time, into very good friends in and outside the workplace. Around the same time that I started my part time degree course, Alison embarked on a similar course with the OU and there followed a blossoming of her latent academic brilliance that had previously lain dormant within Ali that was quite remarkable to behold. We both got a lot out of our studies and both did about as well as you could do in terms of results, but comparing what I knew of her incredible workload and stringent marking criteria in comparison to my chavvy third rate would-be uni award, it rather felt to me that she had gained her first through climbing a mountain rather than gallumphing over a hillock.

Enthused by her academic success, Ali began to look at the options of furthering her studies. Or writing for herself. In short, she had the bug. I don't know if the contrast between her new found joy at the life of the mind and the drudgery of our job had something to do with this, but around this time Ali started to become more moody than usual. Always highly strung (and, believe me, she would have been the *first* to chime in here with the obligatory "and so I should be" gag) she was signed off work for a lengthy period with, it transpired, depression. As I wasn't aware of any prior history of depression (just a tendency to OCD and wild mood swings that she gave the impression of being caused solely by her monstrous, St. John's wort tempered PMT) I assumed that she had just had enough of the job and was using the time off to sort out an escape. Besides, my abiding memory is of someone tucked up in a ball of laughter.

It seemed I was right. Alison handed in her notice a few months later. She and her partner Julie were moving back to Ali's native Cambridgeshire. Julie would commute in and Alison would write - possibly get a job at a local animal rescue centre she'd fallen in love with. All seemed well. I spoke to Alison a couple of times on the phone and we still exchanged Christmas cards. Then my own personal life went through the aggers and torters described elsewhere on these pages and we just seemed to lose touch. I kept meaning to call but...you know how hard it seems sometimes do the simplest things.

About six months ago we got a call at work. Ailson was dead. The initial stories were confused - she'd just collapsed in the kitchen ... had not been herself for a while. As the truth came out, it became clear that the previous illness had not been a one-off or a ruse. She had persistently struggled with her depression until there seemed in her poor, fragile, frightened mind just one option left: the delete life one.

Amis says something in Einstein's Monsters with regard to the idea of nuclear extinction along the lines of with each day that passes we've accrued more to lose - the stakes get higher as the aggregation of human knowledge and wisdom in each of us that we stand to throw away increases. This is the idiocy of the suicide of civilization. But does it work like that for us as individuals? In many ways, yes, it does. But I think there's a difference.

If we're here for anything as noble-sounding as a purpose, then surely that purpose is to explore and understand our unique consciousness (and its limits) and as far as we can to *understand* ourselves and our predicament as humans, floating in our currently benign quarter of the universe. If that *is* the case, then surely that understanding has to encompass the possibility that - having concluded where we're all going, utimately - there's something liberating and fearless in deciding to hurry along that inevitability. I really don't know. It's easy to believe that just because everything will ultimately be lost, our own absence will count for nothing. But at the risk of sounding too Frank Capra cornball about it, we *do* leave a lot behind. Even when we hit that key, there are those footfalls echoing in the hall of the memories of those who had to stay behind. Brian, back to camera, that wonderful mane of hair waterfalling down his back. Alison singing 'Ten Green Bottles' in German before collapsing, convulsed with the laughter of lightness.

I miss you both.


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Points Of View...

Well, after appearing to upset The Spinster yesterday, I think I'll take a back seat today. (I can't afford to lose any more readers, can I??) And I evidently know nothing about blogs *or* blogging. So instead of the usual guff, I'll just invite *you* all to tell *me* why you blog and why you enjoy it. (Well, the comments are always the best bits, aren't they? So we might as well make a virtue of it...)

And while you're at it, we might as well go the whole Barry Took hog and use this opportunity to allow all of you to tell me what you do or don't like about what *I* do. Come on, be as honest as you like - I'm not saying I'll change tack but if you - as A. Radiographer said he did - prefer the early, funny ones, then let's have it out in the open....I can take it on the chin - I won't flounce off in a steaming ab dab or anything...


.....Mwwweeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!!!!!

************UPDATE!!!!!***********


Bobcast 12 is now up in which I lose it completely. Well, someone pinched me sausages.....



.....(......I bought them from Fyne Fayre...


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Monday 21 August 2006

Why Do We *Care* About Spinny???...

I couldn't give you the definitive answer, but I'll try...

It's an odd post from The Spinster, fresh back from her weekend at the Green Man Festival. On the surface, it's no more and no less than you'd expect from The Finest Writer Currently Working in Blog (© Bob Swipe, 2006) - the latest, much-heralded installment of the Spinster's Festivals of Britain odyssey turning out to be all rain and no parade. She didn't lose her bag in Newport Pagnell, it would seem - she forgot to pack it in the first place. You could be forgiven for thinking that the First Mistress of the Aimless Personal Narrative had possibly lost her touch - where are the cadaverous young would-be buckeroonies for her to swoon over from afar, as safe as we all are in the knowledge that whatever mutual desire there might be generated in the three or four paragraphs she will need to recount the not-very-much-at-all-happening, but-one-day-it-might story of her life, it will all come to nought in the end. As, indeed, this installment does - a sleepless and "very weird right now" Spinster seemingly as perplexed as the rest of us as to why she bothered to post it up in the first place. I mean, we can *all* **do** nothing much is happening right now...

But this is The Spinster so, naturally, different rules apply. Because, if previous posts are anything to go by, this is but a teaser, a Best-like feint, a pretence at falling over, before the slender legged pride of Ulster would nimbly sidestep the Ron 'Chopper' Harris-like lunge and go on to bend a beaut into the top right hand corner. We *know* that tomorrow's (or even tonight's) post will shed more light on what *really* went on, there among the damp fields of (wherever it was). But until then, we're left with a rather enigmatic scrawl - a knowingly inscrutable, intentionally impenetrable "can you see what it is yet" style close up of the work-in-progress that only the artist herself truly can know the playing out of.

This is the beauty of the brilliant blog. It's like literature. Only it has something that *bona fide* literature can never have. We have the same insatiable desire to know *what happened next* that we would expect from quality fiction and it will, we know, be gratified - tomorrow, the day after, in a month or so....whenever....

But there's also the suspicion that there *really is*, out there somewhere, possibly even in Bristol, a young curly-haired Ulsterwoman, with a mind seared by the regrets of the drunkenly done - someone for whom the reality of what we perceive as quasi-fiction is in all actuality pressing in like a hot coal on bare flesh.

*That's* why we care about Spinny.

So don't let anyone tell you shouldn't.


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Crap Things Bob Used to Do In The Days When You Had To Make Your Own Entertainment...



...an occasional series.

#1: The Crap 1972 Olympics Board Game...

This was designed and built after the young Bob was impressed by the exploits of the Russian Sprinter Valeri Borzov (especially remarkable as he had such an obviously girly name) and followed in the wake of the infamous White Singlet With Blue and Red Hoops Daubed on it in Crayon that would invariably accompany such fleeting enthusiasms. It was constructed from cardboard in the customary extended oval of the modern running track, with the sprint section exended one of the long straights so as to be level with the apex of the curve, in the familiar fashion. The track was then painstakingly divided into 1 cm. cubes all the way round (obviously there was a degree of stagger involved in the bends which would give the races an element of deceptiveness much as in the real life equivalent, until it "unwound" in the straights.

It was a marvellous sight to behold and took a major investment of time and patience on the part of the young Robert. (although it still took less time to complete than the new Wembley Stadium, obviously) Then came the athletes themselves - tricky. There was Borzov, of course. And the rest were all Americans. So who would fly the flag for Blighty? I settled on Welsh 110 metre hurdler Lynn Davies, as this was before the days of Alan Wells and Amercan boycotts etc. These "athletes" were represented by 1 cm. cubes reflecting the flags of the nations the runners came from. The more eagle-eyed and laterally thinking among you will presumably have already guessed the basics of the boardgame already, but just to be on the safe side, I'll elaborate.

The idea was to throw a dice for each athlete, moving from lane 1 up through to 8 and obviously, the runner who threw the highest scores the quickest would reach the tape first and "win" the race. The plan was to go through the whole roster of Olympic Track & Field events, but eager to test out the the workings of my painstakingly constructed diversion, I began with the sprint. A good job I did. When several hours later, plucky "Lynn Davies" staggered over the line, in (what was, to be fair) a new European record time with regard to this fledgling board at any rate, any enthusiasm I might have had for recreating the entire festival of athleticism had completely evaporated. It just took so bloody long to go through the rigmarole of edging each square forward. Then a gust of wind would blow a Cuban hopeful off the inside lane and you'd have to start all over again.

Children: don't let anyone tell you that the old days were better, before we had computers and mobile phones. It was rubbish.

Next week: Bob & the Cornflake Box and Sellotape John Lennon NHS glasses...


******UPDATE********

Speaking of making your own entertainment...(for want of a better word...) Bobcast 11 is now up. I'll put 12 up tomorrow as I'm "going up the Arse" on Wednesday (fnar fnar...)

Also, please check out Billy's excellent cast here - apologies for the delay in plugging it, but the last couple of posts were a bit heavy. Apologies for that too.


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Saturday 19 August 2006

The Pleasure & The Pain....

Walk up to Waitrose. On a whim, I pop into the British Heart Foundation shop at the junction - they have some really nice hardbacks there (that's where I picked up the still unfinished De Lillo - there's a great post. The best book you've never finished.....) Browsing through the - miraculously - orderly paperbacks, I go through the favourites alphabetical ritual....Amis, Barnes, Coe, De Lillo [long jump] Joyce, Larkin, O. Henry (well, you never know....)....what's this? Pelecanos?? Hard Revolution. Hardback. First Edition. £2.50 stamped twice on the price tag by an over-enthusiastic BHF volunteer. Excellent. I only have a fiver and a tenner on me, so in order to expedite an efficient transaction that maximises the contribution of the tax-deductable volunteer's (wo)manpower, I really need to spend a little more in order not to waste the angel-with-invisible-wings' time counting out loose change that could be going into the pay packet of some mouse-butchering researcher who will(presumably) ultimately conclude (as I have) that a sudden, fatal heart attack-induced demise is perhaps the best we can hope for when it comes to the old meeting-the-maker stakes.

Somehow, when scanning the (also alphabetised) ranks of hardbacks, I'd missed the spine that reads Martin Amis - Time's Arrow. Also a first edition - identical, in fact, to the pristine library copy I read all those years ago....£2.00..."I've only rung in the £2.50 once...." quips the kindly, teutonic matriarch with extensive colouration on her arms, like a spasmodically applied fek tan. We laugh, and I leave the BFH filled with a tremendous sense of the boundless benificence of life, the universe and everything.

Leaving Waitrose, having realised that in visiting the BHF shop I've neglected to procure sufficient funds for the day's food shop (necessitating the return to the shelves of a six pack of vine tomatoes and a carton of cup mushrooms - Christ, how *hatefully* middle class that sounds...) I bump into poor Lily. Lily & Tom were respectively Landlady and Landlord of The Gun, my father's beloved old boozer, for about twenty years. Tom passed on two or three weeks ago (cancer - a mercifully swift final downturn after having lived with it kept in check for a decade or so...) and what with the move and everything, neither of us had been able to get in touch with Lily and at least send the sort of statutory sympathy card that was abundant from Tom, Lily - and pretty much all of their sometime cliental over the years - when Dad died. I get a sudden and powerful sense of what an incredibly selfish tosser I am, but I resist the initial urge to flee the situation and instead find that my maternally inherited being-quite-good-with-people-when-I-want-to-be skills are kicking in and, following on from my I'm-lost-at-sea-please-rescue-me strength wave, I am soon hugging her, pecking her on the cheek and sincerely expressing my sympathy. Poor Tom. I bumped into him not long before he went and he said, with a gazing-like-a-caught-fish, oh-so-brave honesty that made (and makes) me shudder, "it's in the bones. Won't be long now."

Poor Lily. She looks as if someone has taken a straw to her and sucked the best part out of her, leaving a skin with hardly anything worth containing. How *do* we carry on?

But somehow we do.

Time's Arrow.



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Outside The Whale...

On a hunch, I re-read the first part of Orwell's essay Inside the Whale. The hunch is good. He *so* would have blogged. In fact, at times it's like reading one of the better ones. (Well, I had to get a plug in somehwere...)

On Cyril Connolly and all the other shallowly 'socialist' ex-public school lot:

'Cultured' middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public school education - five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery - can actually be looked upon as an eventful period...It is the same pattern all the time; public-school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour - hardly even words.

*Hardly even words*!

Or the Paris of the twenties:

The populace had grown so used to gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance...

Or does this sound familiar?:

And you have this feeling because somebody has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the real politik of the inner mind into the open.

Or on Joyce:

The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper.

*Elephantine pedant*! But get the "kind of" as well. My point in quoting these is to emphasise the directness - almost conversational, at times - of the prose. I could quote at much greater length if time allowed, but it's first thing in the morning and I'm sure a quick skim over the first 7 or 8 pages of the essay by your good selves will reveal all the other observations I was going to highlight but which, through the gnawing of my hungover head, have evaporated into the ether.

I was hoping that a re-reading of Orwell would justify my inversion of his famous aphorism, coined in defence of Henry Miller's acceptance, to use Orwell's term, of what was for him "the modern age". For Orwell, this meant accepting "Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provovateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders". Substitute Bush, Blair and Bin Laden for Hitler and Stalin and bingo! - Plus ca change. Apart from the secret prisons, obviously. Guantanamo has, after all, been a fairly well documented "secret".

And I think it does. Justify the inversion, that is. Everywhere he is obsessed with the idea of the "ordinary man", whose day to days struggles - the hunger, hardship, solitude, and so on - inform their humanity and contrast so vividly with the concerns of the privileged literary elite. I think that on matters of popular culture, Orwell often seems very prescient and I think that this largely fearless and often embracing attitude of Orwell's toward the mundanities of ordinary (if not working class) life, gave him an "in" that others of his era lacked.

There's been an ongoing debate in the 'sphere and the Me-Jah Proper about the healthiness or otherwise of the blogging fraternity. I think you could argue the case that the best of us that I've come across - Mollster, The Spinster and others - are Henry Millers to the massed ranks of McEwans and Dejevskys and everyone with a vested interest in perpetuating the myth that *they* know better than the 2 million people who protested the Iraqi war and why we should just (b)log off and listen to what *proper* journos have to say. My personal view is that there is a great, seething sea of humanity out there, many members of which are taking the opportunity that technology is allowing them to discover and express their thoughts and feelings and, if you can get your head outside the overpowering drill noise of the organised Me-Jah, there is a real wealth of beauty, wisdom and kindness out there that you just won't find in the "legitimate" forums. After all, we're all Henry Millers - humans trying to (re)gain or retain our happiness and that sense of delight at being alive, regardless of the "affaires grandes" raging around us - trying to stay cosy in the belly of the whale. Only the McEwans, Dejevskys and Straight-Poor-Tarrs and The MeJah Proper represent another whale. Only theirs is one we can step out of at any time.

Well, imagine being inside *that*...




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Friday 18 August 2006

Bobcast10

Is now up.

You know the drill...

Have a great weekend folks,

xxx

Bobster.

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Opportunity Knocks...

It was all quite surreal, really - as you can probably imagine. The phone rings in the middle of last night's re-run of Extras - right at the point where Ricky's doing his brilliant Oliver Hardy impression while Stephen Merchant does that wonderfully observed tosser-clicking-the-mouse-like-an-abstracted-retard bit. It's Yentob. "Oh, hi Al. How's things? Great. Yeah, good thanks....listen, I'm a bit....a pitch? [Pause, to check out the lovely Ashley Jensen's legs. She looks lovely as a Third Reich fraulein, doesn't she?] ......OK, Al - shoot, but can you make it.... Mm hmm. Yes, I was wondering when someone would realise that I'd make the perfect foil for Kaplinsky. A game show, huh? All in the title.....yes, so what's the title. Yes, I am sat down. No, I promise, I won't...look, can we er....You *are* joking, Al...Kaplinsky, Ker-plunksky!!?? What the...yes, yeah, I can fill in the gaps Al...Kaplinsky in a little black number, tottering about on her heels, coo-ing at them and I come behind the good looking ones and try to jab them with a ker-plunk stick...Set in Moscow? Why the....Oh, course - the *Russian* thing....Yes, American market...can't leave anything to chance.....Well, yes, the nudity would certainly make it a more interesting proposition but...listen, Al, can I just ask, *was* that you in the silver BMW in St. Ives in June? Oh, right. It is a real beard though, I take...ah ha. Yes, I think that's wise, Al. Listen, can we crack on because... yes, I see. And what time's it airing? Is that *before* the Z-List Charity Goat-Slaying? Yes, it should make us look good....it would make *anything* look good, assuming there's anyone left watching who hasn't got their head halfway down the toilet bowl, Al...What do I *think*? Well, Al....can I be *honest* with you?? I do have somewhat of a reputation to maintain - you know, feisty, callipered, underworld eminence grise of blog and all that...but Kaplinsky specifically asked for me, you say? How's that marriage of hers working out, do you happen to....well, yes, that would certainly help the ratings Al, but I can't run too fast with this thing on and he does look quite useful....well, if you're going to put me on the spot, Al, I'd have to say we're looking more favourably disposed to the nyet option...Why? Well, I've made some great friends on the blog. Plenty of enemies too, but - no, don't cry Al, it's nothing personal...Al.....do you know how *undignified* that last offer sounded....Besides, I have a thing about whipped cream ever since the UHT incident with Nastasia Kinski...Just because it's *cheaper*...doesn't mean....OK, Al - yes, I am listening...Look, Al - I'm gonna have to pass on the ker-plunksky-Kaplinsky thing. How can I put this? I just couldn't bear to give this up. I mean, there's no one to answer to, for a start. Sure, the pay is lousy - and the hours are long and it's *bound* to put strains on your personal relationship when you spend *that* long on a PC looking at Goth Girls splattered in fek blood...I mean, researching each day's provocative new post... Listen, I'm gonna hang up Al - no, I won't shift on this. In fact, lemme tell *you* something La-di-da Gunner Alan Yentob - you can *stuff* yer stupid nudey celebrity novelty 70s boardgame-based game show format up yer feckin' arse and fry it. I'm stayin' *right here* in the unmediated world of blog and pillocks to Natashia Blinkin' Kaplinsky...."


And then I woke up.

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Thursday 17 August 2006

Elvis Night...

After yesterday's fun and games in the comments box, time for what Bettster would call "a bit old school diary-style blogging". I'll be OK as long as I don't sign for any flowers, I'm told...

Well, it's probably the greatest example of a talent wasted, isn't it? The youthful tyro slowly degenerating into a bloated, drug and booze addled wreck, the musical brilliance of those early years thrown away and in their place the painful stumbling wastrel, a shadow of his former greatness rambling incoherently through the supper club novelty act his once brilliant ouevre has been reduced to. But why dwell on My Failed Musial Career when there's an Elvis Nite [sic] at the PoW to blog about?

It started promisingly enough. I get a call from H. asking if it's still going ahead as he's heard that they have cancelled it because there's an England friendly on (two words to strike fear into the hearts of any true football supporter there - England and friendly..) But a quick dash round to the Prisoner of War (you thought Elvis was tacky? Wait til you hear about the Tenko theme evenings...) and a word to the wise from landlord Mike (who as will soon become clear is hereafter referred to as "Mad Mike") establishes that Elvis has eminently *not* left the building and we have permission to rock (with even the outside chance of a little roll) c. 20.30 hours. "Is A. Radiographer coming?" "Mad Mike" (Eddie Large with a black crew cut) asks as I'm leaving. I knew it was a roughhouse, but I didn't think it was going to be *that* bad. Should he bring his scanner then, I ask...

So, 8.30 comes and H. and I arrive to be confronted by a virtually empty boozer - two lads watching McLaren's men trouncing the hapless Champions of Europe, a blowsy mutton-dressed-as-lamb type in touchingly period stilettos propping up the bar (I hope he doesn't wear them on his post round....[boom boom]) and a sprinkling of just-popped-out-for-a-quiet-pint-before-the-racket-starts types. Encouraging. We chat through the rest of the second half and then I set my gee-tar and little fender champ amp up (did I not mention that I'd brought my gee-tar and amp with me...?) and sit beside Mad Michael's customised digital wheels of steel-type disco set up. I'm just tuning up (this, as anyone who has followed My Failed Musical Career will know) can take hours...days, even...) when I am introduced and the audience is told that I will be playing along with Mad Mike's medley of Elvis tunes.... Great gig - drunkenly playing along to Scotty Moore*

I last about ten minutes - botching the incredibly tortuous guitar solo on "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down & Cry Over You" that Mike has kindly chosen to open with. After a few minutes plonking away tunelessly, I sit back down with H. and Wor Geoff and Wor Graham and listen to the splendidly chosen selection of Elvis toons Mike has sequenced. I am surprised to know that I can remember all the words to almost every song he plays - even (hangs head in shame) execrable stuff like "G.I. Blues". [If you think *that's* obsessive - read on...)

Then A. Radiographer turns up, svelte and humblingly slender looking, suitably attired in his trademark Jailhouse Rock outfit. He's even gone to the trouble of chalking "Number 47" above his lapel and spends the rest of the evening drifting around disconsolately in vain pursuit of Ann Off-duty Nurse wearing the Number three to whom he can say "I sure would be delighted with your company..." We reminisce about the old days in The Urinals (catchphrase: "It's that Twickenham Sound!!!" No, it *still* doesn't work, does it?) Until the beer kicks in and I leap back "onstage" and start vamping the "Mystery Train" riff (it sounds *exactly* like Scotty Moore playing the "Mystery Train" riff when he's pissed out of his knackers, btw) "Mad Mike" joins in and we get through a couple of the Sun Sessions numbers sounding almost barely competent. Then things deteriorate as I foolishly attempt the riff and solo from "Too Much" without the safety net of having someone who knows what they're doing playing behind me while I mime to it. As the last few punters who don't know me have almost filtered out into the aural safety of the night, Mike does his party piece - miming to an a capella version of the song "Let Me", a completely disposable piece of country ho-down piffle from the film Love Me Tender - the idea being that he will lip-synch so effectively that his audience will actually be duped into thinking Mike really *is* Elvis. I know. But the truly mad part is that, if you think about it, to achieve this level of verisimilitude (the effect is quite frighteningly realistic...), he presumably has to practice. A lot. With a *mirror*.

But that's not why he's called "Mad Mike". No, that's because I have a pretty strong feeling that he does not listen to music by *any* artist other than Elvis Presley. When we are left alone together (yes, it does actually sound scary when put like that, I can see that now...) Mike proceeds to show me the contents of the steel container that houses (I'm assuming this is merely a small part) of his stupendous Elvis CD collection. (There is also a vinyl collection and, I'm guessing a tape one too, but these - mercifully - are in Ireland.) He has *everything* - even bizarre self-made CDs of the movie soundtracks (yes, that's right *The Movie Soundtracks*) that he's dubbed off the original movie soundtracks and put on CD. He has an alternate takes version of the L.P. "Girls, Girls, Girls" (that's right - there is a different version of "Song of the Shrimp" out there, Elv. completists...and Mike *has* it). To cut a long story short, I don't get home until 1.30 a.m.

"If you want to be single, it can easily be arranged", S. says coldly from beneath the duvet.

Well, do I?




*The greatest guitar player who has ever lived...


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Wednesday 16 August 2006

Absolutely The *Last* Word On Girl With A One Track Mind...

OK, I know we're all getting bored with this but as I'm starting to come up near the top of the search lists on shit like this one on Technorati [new addition] and this one on Ice Rocket.com (must be because we've bust through the 40,000 hits glass ceiling, I suppose) [and frankly, we need the traffic - recently installed corporate marketing and PR guru ed.] I felt it incumbent upon me to blab on about it a bit more. Well, there's nothing else to do here until the removals guys pick me, chair, table and PC up and physically haul me to Uxbridge...

Right. There's already been some (alarmingly) sensible debate about the whole Abby Wotsit business here in our comments patch. I'd just add that speaking as someone just outside The Spinster's catchment area (32-40, for the information of all you young bucks out there) and whose life experience encompasses the loss of both parents, one in sudden and the other in horrifically prolonged fashion, I find the whole thing about someone having money shovelled at them by publishers for stuff they are ashamed to tell their folks about a bit weird, to be honest. About the only pleasant thing about being left (as it were) to stand on one's own two feet is the - to use an Amis word - adamantine quality one acquires. In a very tangible way, there is suddenly no one there to pick you up on things or ask you to moderate your language etc. In short - you are stranded with being *you* and not someone else's son/daughter. I think it would be dishonest to say that once you get over the obvious grief and trauma of the loss(es) there's not also a sense that in some cliched circle-of-life way, one has in a funny way been necessarily liberated - freed to become oneself, without the sort of p & q minding that Abby Wotsit seems to be going through. So that's where I 'm coming from on this.

So this - I think - begs a couple of questions of GWAOTM. Firstly - if this is stuff that she really doesn't want her parents to see, shouldn't the decision to keep it under wraps have been made a little earlier in the process - namely, before the agents and publishers decended on her cyber diary with the intention of thrusting it under the noses of as many people as possible? You know - if you decide to dive into a tankful of sharks for a fish, you kind of run the risk of being bitten by sharks...

Secondly, doesn't it get a bit repetitive (and aren't there any vaguely feminist people left out there to get hot under the collar about) the fact that if you're a female blogger, they only way you'll get on is by (and I'm speaking figuratively here, obviously) dropping them? I think Abby Wotsit can be excused her callowness - she's a young lass whose life so far probably hasn't given her any conception of the horrors that time will ultimately unfold before her - and rightly so (youth being wasted on the young is a load of tommyrot. It's precisely the innocence of it all that one can't get back and misses). Good on her for getting a 'screw' out of all the other sort of screwing. But isn't that same callowness (or rather the preying on it) a bit worrying in publishers? You know - we have this whole end of days scenario playing out and they want us to be reading about GWAOTM's carnal carnival. Nothing wrong with that - but why isn't there the same interest in - and I choose a name at random here - The Spinster, for instance?

She writes beautifully, is witty, insightful and I think even if it's all a persona and she's really bathing in bacardi with Chipperfields models every evening, she's The Real Deal. I think she offers an insight into the realities of femininity that I for one have found riveting, instructive and consistently amusing. But it's an *awkward* femininity for the publishers, isn't it? Because the reality is harder to *market*... So instead of getting The Spinster's Morrissey, we get GWAOTM's Gwen Steffani. (Who, incidentally, I *would*)

So, let's draw a line under it. I was going to blab on about the use of personas in blogging - which I obviously wrote the book on, so I would be hypocritical not to allow GWAOTM a veil of her own. But, at the end of the day, in the unlikely event of the Me-Jah unceremoniously removing the mask of Bob to reveal dull and boring old Johnny, then - so what? What's to be ashamed of? And if - ultimately - you can't stand by it. Don't post it. Besides, it's much more fun on here, being unmediated in blogspace - isn't it? Just tell the publishers where to go.

There endeth the lesson.


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Walking Back To Happiness - The View From The Other Side...

So that fat slob who looks like Mickey Rourke in Barfly ten binge drunk years on is Robert Swipe, is he? I thought he worked in the sewage farm. Certainly smells like he does. We passed yesterday. Pervy bugger, commenting on my appearance like that. Sheryl Crow, indeed! I'll dress down tomorrow - probably go for the red wrap around top, jeans and tote. Well, it's a better bet than yesterday's black sweater and just-above-the-knee-skirt number with clumpy brown just-below-the-knee brown boots. Why *does* he wear women's clothes to work, I wonder?

Gina McKee, indeed!

Still, you *would*, wouldn't you.



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Tuesday 15 August 2006

Bobcast 9...

....is now up. Not quite as good as Listen with Rock Mother 2. But what do you want?? Blood?????

(Well, fek blood, actually...)


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That Girl With A One Track Mind "Bully Wank" Search Exclusive We Promised You...

For some reason, this came up on my site meter.

To save your wrists, this is the bit that made me splutter cocoa all over the laptop:


Last 20 Searchengine Queries Unique Visitors

15 Aug, Tue, 15:42:48 Google: girlwithaonetrackmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:42:56 Google: a girl with a one track mind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:43:20 Google: girlwithaonetrackmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:43:54 Google: girl with a one track mind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:44:00 Google: GIRLWITHAONETRACKmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:45:16 Yahoo: girl with one track mind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:45:54 Google: girlwithaonetrackmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:45:56 Google: weblog abby lee
15 Aug, Tue, 15:47:08 Google: my vulva
15 Aug, Tue, 15:47:09 Google: +"girl with a one-track mind"
15 Aug, Tue, 15:48:13 Google: girlwithaonetrackmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:48:22 Google: girl with a one track mind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:50:24 Google: Girl with a one-track mind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:51:38 Google: abby lee +blog
15 Aug, Tue, 15:51:47 Google: girlwithaonetrackmind
15 Aug, Tue, 15:51:59 Google: slow fuck
15 Aug, Tue, 15:52:00 Google: "girl with a one track mind"
15 Aug, Tue, 15:52:10 Google: bully wank
15 Aug, Tue, 15:52:14 Google: sex terms and dp
15 Aug, Tue, 15:52:32 Google: arse sex


Nice to see that literary blogs are *finally* getting the exposure they deserve, isn't it?

btw: any one know what "arse sex" is....


.....Spinny????


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40,000 Swipe Fans Can't Be Wrong...



(.....well, I'll probably be dead by the time it reaches 50,000,000.)

I've had this ready for three weeks now, watching every day as it hovered on 39,999, just waiting to be able to nab the poor...sorry lucky bastard who's won our specially engraved "Congratulations! You Are Our 40,000th Visitor" Robert Swipe Memorial miniaturised Calliper and 'Buie Respirator facsimile. There was also an Emily Bell voodoo doll I was planning to throw in but the charred remains of it are of too great a sentimental value for me to hand it over to just anyone*

So, Congratulations 66.161.225.# of Cincinnati, Ohio. Hope you enjoyed your 0 seconds and one page view. I'm surprised you lasted that long. And have great fun with your specially engraved "Congratulations! You Are Our 40,000th Visitor" Robert Swipe Memorial Miniaturised Calliper and 'Buie Respirator Facsimile - it's tippex from the same bottle I used to daub "I [heart symbol] Spinny" on the real one. Enjoy it**.


Domain Name ovf.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address 66.161.225.# (Fuse Internet Access)
ISP Fuse Internet Access
Location Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
State : Ohio
City : Cincinnati
Lat/Long : 39.1097, -84.5046 (Map)

Language English (United States)
en-us
Operating System Microsoft Win2000
Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461)
Javascript version 1.3
Monitor Resolution : 800 x 600
Color Depth : 16 bits

Time of Visit Aug 15 2006 9:22:35 am
Last Page View Aug 15 2006 9:22:35 am
Visit Length 0 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL http://images.google...&prev=/images%3Fq%3D
Visit Entry Page http://rswipe.blogsp..._rswipe_archive.html
Visit Exit Page http://rswipe.blogsp..._rswipe_archive.html
Out Click
Time Zone UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time Aug 15 2006 9:22:35 am
Visit Number 40,000



Anyroad, Bobcast style slinky link here.

It's Elvis night at the PoW tomorrow. That's (al)right, we'll be jiving away in our Blue Suede Shoes at the Prisoner of War (I know - weird name for a pub, but the Tenko theme nights are absolutely top draw...) So Don't step on them or you'll be looking for Trouble. I Forgot to Remember to Forget to post this up...(enough with the Elvis song titles already - you want to wait another 5 years for your next 40,000 hits??) There might even be an appearance by Singing Bob during the King's Karaoke section.....


"Yooooo-Wayner-nuthin'-budder-how-dorg.....crikin-aw-thatie....

The King is Dead - Long Live the King!!

*Besides, it's been up my arse.

** You undeserving bastard.



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Walking Back To Happiness...

Walked to work listening to Ro-Mo again. The second cast this time. (Yes, I know it's boring, but if you want excitement and shagging, feck off to GWAOTM...or Stephen Berlin Johnson...) She's a natural. I saw J. Geils Band supporting the Stones at Wembley. And Black Uhuru. 'Shine i- girl'. Went with The Boy With The Hole in the Heart and two of his Raasay mates, one of whom kept lighting his farts on the train from Willesdon Junction. The busiest place he'd ever been was Skye (pop. - I dunno? 2,000 max??) There he was in the middle of 80,000 people all straining to see Mick 'n' Keef. I bumped into a guy called Zack from Richmond College who always wore a black leather jacket and had one of those crooked James Bond smiles. Wonder what he's doing now? I missed who was singing with Willie Dixon as I crossed the Chertsey Road and the traffic obliterated poor old Ro-Mo's dulcet tones. I couldn't rewind it because it's all on one track. I'll have to listen to it again now.....Nice of The Mo of Ro to stir it up with The Spinster and The Heathster (PHWOAR!!). It would be 'Dirty Love' an' all, what with my...condition.

Didn't pass the Laura Veirs/Alannis Morrisette woman today. I saw her yesterday, in a nice black sweater and just-above-the-knee-skirt number with clumpy brown just-below-the-knee brown boots. No idea what she was wearing. She now looks like Gina McKee as painted by Modigliani trying to look all soft and floaty like Sheryl Crow on that cover of hers where she looks all summery and is playing a Gibson JS200 acoustic guitar. Only without the guitar, obviously. She might have had a tote bag...I find myself wondering if she's a blogger and, if so, would she recognise herself if she ever read this? Probably not. Can anyone see themselves as others do? I've only got three days on this route and then we'll probably never pass one another again. Hope I see her before then. Just for old times sake, like.

Walking through the sewage works, I see the same female blackbird with the broken wing, still hopping about, darting through a gap in the wire fence resembling one of those swing-wing military aircraft. Perhaps the Universe is kind after all. Or is it just prolonging the agony?

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40,000 Swipe Fans Can't Be Wrong...



.....well, I'll probably be dead by the time I reach 50,000.



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Monday 14 August 2006

Bob's 115th Rant...

Christ this is boring, isn't it? Is it as bad for you lot out there as it is for me? I don't know why I do it you know - I'm sure you've often asked the self-same question and I honestly couldn't tell you. Beats me how any one bothers to read it at all - not that *that* many of you do. Not that I'm complaining or anything. Well, I *am*, actually but that's not what this is about. I just wonder sometimes why we do it? Boredom, mainly, I suppose. Or ego. That awful, competitive thing of not wanting to be left out of anything. I don't bloody know! And some hard to pin down aching in the chest that only disappears when you're immersed in something that requires full on concentration (in my case, typing is in itself a majorly absorbing and astounding technical accomplishment. Especially when I'm on the sauce. As I increasingly am, it seems. I hope you realise the effort that goes into all this and the things (usually the c-word) that have been yelled at fumbling fingers/keyboards/that bloody stupid little mousepad thing on the laptop that I always forget to click when I've moved back up the text so I end up posting a link in the middle of a c***ing sentence...) It's not a desire for fame either - not really. Not fame in an Abbie Titmuss coin-it-while-you-can, drop 'em and run off with the loot to hide behind your armour of post-modern, clever-clever, the-joke-was-all-on-you-ness. No, it's not even about money anymore, is it? Not since we sold the vomily home and got security of sorts that way. Be nice to get paid for what I do all day rather than taking money for supposedly doing something I'm not doing because I'm doing this. But I can *live* without getting my wedge from this. I can *afford* to do it for fun. So, there *shouldn't* really be any justification for me to be hacked off with it really, should there? But there is. I am hacked off with it. I feel frustrated that it isn't more widely liked, if I'm honest. There *is* a desire for - I don't know - not fame, but certainly recognition or something. I suppose there is that, if I'm truthful. There's a sense of being unfulfilled, certainly. The need to know that you've made your mark in some slightly interesting way - more interesting than starting a war or doing some shite voice over because it pays more than doing a really stimulating play like all those actor wankers do. I suppose it's a matter of trying to use the fact that there are other people (I can hear you sniggering as I type this next bit - I'm gagging myself, if truth be told...) who appear to be interested in reading whatever tosh you might have to say to start a conversation, or a debate or just have a bit of a hootenanny with it - if that makes sense. And I suppose one hopes to be appreciated for being (dare I say) slightly generous of spirit in that one is doing (and enjoying doing) this for its own sake and not to pay the bills or because one has any particular agenda to push or there's some media career or money-making scheme or other one is trying to further. I mean, I know I plug the Bobcasts and spend hours soliciting scantily-clad goth girls spattered in fek blood to visit the blog and so on, but it really is only in the hope that they'll like what's up here - I'm not trying to scam anyone. You know and the Grauni-cunting-ad gets all high and mighty about me "spamming" them and they're trying to make out they're some great moral institution when they've stood shoulder to shoulder with Blair - the biggest fucking cunt we've *ever* had as PM - and I'm the one who should be ashamed of myself. Shove it up yer bollocks! Better half the wanky bullshit I've posted up on here than that sanctimonious bunch of middle class tossers. The only positive thought is how the legions of little Jeremys and Jemimas they've spawned will rail against their hypocritical parents when they find they're standing on a six by four bit of tarmac with the Atlantic Ocean washing around their ankles and all they could do was compare bijou second homes in Brittany and ask Roland Rivron 20 poxy questions. Cunts.

I don't know, it's just really fucked me off today for some reason.


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At Last - Some Good News!!...

Sorry about all the posts today - the medication hasn't kicked in yet. Plus, in a few days time I won't be able to do this as much as I have been, [sighs of relief the world over] so make the most of 'em...


It's not often you see some truly heartwarming news, is it?

You can just imagine the guy in charge of his crew...

"*That's* for 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?'....*That's* for 'Karma Chameleon'...

Shame they're not flogging him....



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The Capstons Monkeys...

Now *there's* a name for a band!!

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For Once - Something Worthwhile On The Grauniad Ulnitimed...

I think The Spinster and The Mollster should both have a look here.

You should both be published by now instead of dreck like GWAOTM...

Let me know how you get on...


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Proper Blog (Slight Return)...



There's a removals lorry outside the Library and it has one of those fork-lift type things on the back that make it easier to load. Everytime this fork-lift type thing goes up or down it makes a noise like Eno's synth at the beginning of Ladytron.

What bliss!

(And Eno would love the idea of it.)


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Proper Blog...

Bit of a cunty Sunday, really. Started off OK - nice veggie brunch sitting at Our Nice New Table. Then I walked up to Waitrose with the sublime Listen With Rock Mother on the iPod. Passing Sanders' Funeral Directors by Twickenham Green I just happened to glance at the advert for their services in the window and noticed that the guy eyeing up the quite-saucy-in-a-Jenny-Agutter-as-she-is-now-sort-of-way Undertaker was the dead spit of Richard Lewis - Larry's stand up comedian mate in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Visions of Larry hopping around at someone's cremation yelling "You cunt" after some improbable confluence of unlikely events. S. can do the voice to a tee. Our poor bloody neighbours. Being a man of means, I was able to reject the 29 p reduced single cream (I mean it was reduced in price - they hadn't done something awfully clever with it by simmering it...) in favour of one in date and things looked pretty well set.

Then the cunty bit began. Eyeing the Observer Music Mag (you see, I am a good liberal with a small l really after last week's dalliance with the Murdoch machine) I was delighted to see Keith Richards on the cover. But then, disaster. Stood next to him? Russell Cunting Brand. I'm sorry, I like a joke with the best of them, but what is *that* all about. He's somehow wangled himself a gig interviewing The Walking Laboratory and he doesn't even *like* music. He'd rather have been meeting Peter Cook, apparently*. I mean - what's going on? Is he Jo Brand's son, or something? He's certainly got the hair...

So that was cunty. And then I spent the rest of the afternoon setting up my hi-fi gear in the spare bedroom/office when I'd hoped to do another podcast. That was OK too, I suppose - it needed to be done - and I managed to get online eventually and leave firm rebuttals to all the prurient gossips on The Spinster's blog trying to fix us up together**. But then I kicked over my virtually full glass of Beck's and ruined the carpet - cleaning it up (in between bouts of shouting *CUNT*, *SHITTY CUNTING FUCKER* etc. Our poor bloody neighbours...) while S. sat at her Nice New Table getting increasingly irate. I ate my cold lasagne while she sat there with an empty plate, glowering. Then I fell asleep during Father Ted. Silly Cunt.

So, all in all, a nice conventional Middle Class Sunday really...

*You'll have to dig him up first, Russ.

**I told them I loved her - but that our love could never be. Well, what with my cockrot and her hairy hands....

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Saturday 12 August 2006

Bobcast8...

...is now up. Featuring music by and about people called Johnny and Fuzzy Brown. That's right - Fuzzy Brown...


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Friday 11 August 2006

Listen With Rock Mother...

Yep, you thought the Bobcasts were good? (Come on, humour me here...) Wait 'til you hear the legendary Mother of Rock's new podcasts!! We were granted a sneak preview yesterday and we must say we were really knocked out (...it is actually the best way to listen to them - completely unconscious... The 'buie breezers helped, of course...) But seriously, the ......how can we put it....melange of classy rock 'n' roll, knitting patterns, (possibly bomb laden?) low flying aircraft and the humourous interludes (yes, those really are Rock Mother's own children being tortured in the background!) conspire to make an aural feast of bona fide radiophonic (...come on Bob, how much is she paying you here? Financial ed.)

So, as the demure lady herself would no doubt say - "come on you shitters!". Get in there and Listen with Rock Mother.....at least you know you won't have to put up with me singing.....(or will you????? He added enigmatically in a misguided attempt to sabotage Ro-Mo's cast even more than he had already by plugging it in the first place...)

For those about to R-Mo....


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